Sold To The Sheikh: His Indecent Proposal (An Interracial Sheikh Romance Novel)

Sold To The
Sheikh

His Indecent Proposal

By Holly Rayner

Copyright 2015 by Holly Rayner

All rights reserved. Except for use in any
review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in
part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including
xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit
written permission of the author.

All characters depicted in this fictional
work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any
resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses,
events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.

Table Of Contents:

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ONE

“Mom. Mom, I’m driving, so
I need to call you back,” Mia said, looking around as she navigated
the right turn out of the high school parking lot.

“You should have said
something,” her mother said, before erupting in a spasm of
coughs.

“I know,” Mia said, trying
to keep her voice level and patient. “I’ll call you as soon as I
get back home, Mama.” She took a deep breath and waited while her
mother said goodbye before ending the call. Mia set her phone down
on the seat next to her and turned the stereo up. She could feel
fatigue in every muscle of her body. “I wouldn’t be surprised if
there was some kind of time anomaly that only exists at that damn
school,” she said to herself, coming to a stop at a red light. It
seemed like every day was just a little bit longer, every weekend
just a little bit shorter.

Mia yawned, blinking her
eyes a few times rapidly to clear the slight blur at the edges of
her vision. It seemed as though there was always something that she
had to do next; if she wasn’t rushing to get papers graded during
her lunch break, she was hurrying to the store to pick something up
for her mom, or to the pharmacy, or just dropping by the old house
to make sure everything was okay there. She barely even spent time
in the apartment she was paying through the teeth for.

“Just a few more hours,”
Mia said to herself with a sigh. She needed to get home, get
laundry in the washer, and call her mom back. Then she would park
herself on the couch, unload the papers she had stuffed into her
backpack to grade, and catch up on the series she was following. If
she was lucky, she might be able to make it into bed by midnight.
Mia yawned, longing for the coffee she had left behind at her
desk.

As she slipped into the
routine drive home, Mia’s mind started to wander; she paid enough
attention to the world around her to make sure she wasn’t going to
run into anyone, but she couldn’t help going over the list of
things she had to get done that week—especially those she had to do
over the weekend. Three years before, when she had graduated
college, Mia had thought that the best possible use of her talent
would be to work at an underprivileged school; there was a program
that would allow her to have her student loans forgiven if she
taught for five years at a school that was registered on the
program, and at the time she had been convinced that it would be
the best way for her to put her degree to use.

At first, her decision
seemed vindicated. The students responded to her, and she had won
an award at the end of her first year for bringing up the test
scores for her classes over the course of the school term. Her
mother had come to the ceremony, and Mia had believed—truly
believed—that she was doing good work. Knowing that in four more
years her student loans would be paid off, Mia had enjoyed her
summer and had taken her continuing development classes
happily.

But as she started into
her second year, Mia’s responsibilities had piled up. She had moved
out of her mother’s house over the summer, and found that her
paychecks never seemed to go quite as far as she needed them to;
there was always some surcharge, or some extra cost on her bills.
No matter how she tried to save on her electricity, it went up
inexorably. Mia had taken refuge in her work, but had quickly
discovered that anyone who had performed well in their first year
as a teacher was invariably asked and pressured into doing as much
as possible.

She started spending longer
days at school, taking part in committees, finding herself being
volunteered for this or that task, this or that group. Her students
in her second year were not as easy as her first; so many of them
had no interest at all in learning the material, and Mia had had to
keep a sharp eye on the papers they turned in—more than half of the
first-week papers had been completely plagiarized.
If they’re going to copy-paste an essay about how
they spent their summer, what on earth are they going to do when it
comes to writing about the books they’re supposed to be
reading?

Late in the year, her
mother had fallen ill. At first, it had just been flu-like
symptoms. She had been tired all the time, with headaches that came
and went with little rhyme or reason. One appointment after another
with one doctor after another resulted in nothing; and Mia had
found herself sucked into her mother’s problems, spending almost as
much time at her parents’ old home as she did in her own apartment.
Mia had barely managed to keep up with her work as the spring
semester dragged on; instead of taking her break, she had been with
her mother, going to the doctors’ offices, taking care of her,
cooking for her.

Finally, as summer break
had started, Mia’s mother had gotten a diagnosis. The disease
wasn’t in and of itself deadly, but it was progressing unusually
fast, and Mia’s mother was coping with it poorly. More than once,
Mia had wished—more fervently than she had wished anything else
before in her life—that her dad could somehow still be around,
still be alive for her mom. If her dad were there, the burden
wouldn’t be so much on Mia—and she thought that if Dad were around,
Mom might be able to bear her deteriorating health
better.

Now in her third year of
teaching, Mia had begun to feel hopeless. She felt as though she
was always rushing, as if her work consumed more and more of her
time; but her pay wasn’t slated to increase until after her
five-year anniversary had come. For two more years she would have
to keep at it. The job that had seemed so worthy, and such a
solution to the problem of her debt was actually—as strange as it
had seemed when she first realized it—sending her into greater
debt; because she couldn’t quite afford to keep herself afloat, Mia
found herself charging things more and more onto her credit card,
and making smaller and smaller payments on it. As the balance
increased, the finance charges were getting larger—sending the
balance higher and higher.

Mia shook her thoughts
aside as she realized she was coming to an intersection. The car in
front of her sped up so as to make it through the yellow light and
onto the other side. Mia, jittery and exhausted, slowed down and
came to a stop, just as the light changed. “Come on, Mia, you can
do this. In a few more hours you’ll go to bed and get some
sleep.”
Only to do it all again
tomorrow.
She took a deep breath and
exhaled slowly. It had to all come to an end eventually, didn’t
it?

The light changed to green
and Mia moved her foot from the brake to the accelerator,
apparently not quickly enough for the person behind her, whose horn
cut through the air in a loud blast. Gritting her teeth, she
stifled the urge to flip the rude driver off and instead moved
smoothly through the intersection, keeping her eyes on her mirrors.
The car behind her waited until it had cleared the light and then
swerved around her, blaring the horn again; in the corner of her
eye, Mia thought she saw the driver make an obscene gesture in her
direction as he or she passed her and jerked into the lane ahead of
her, but she wasn’t completely sure. “Asshole,” she muttered under
her breath, taking another breath to steady her frazzled nerves
again.

Her mind began to wander
again as the normal flow of traffic around Mia soothed her. Her
mother’s diagnosis had been only the tip of the iceberg; more
recently, thanks to the immune-suppressing drugs that helped to
keep the worst of the symptoms under control, her mother had fallen
ill with what had initially been nothing worse than a bout of flu.
What started out as a nasty bug blew up almost overnight, and Mia
had found herself in the hospital with her mother in the middle of
the night, waiting to be seen by a doctor while her mother
struggled to breathe with the fluids building up in her lungs. It
had taken days of medication, IVs, a tube in her mother’s lungs to
drain them, and dozens of other costly procedures before the
hospital was able to discharge the older woman. And Mia had seen
the bill they had given her mother; she knew that Amie would never,
ever be able to pay it on her own.

Mia took one hand off of
the wheel to smooth her hair back away from her face, sighing at
the memory of all of the bills that had come before even the most
recent one. Her mother would never be able to deal with
everything—never again. Mia cringed, remembering the capable,
determined woman her mother had been before the illness had started
creeping up on her, sapping her of strength and making everything
harder and harder.
It’s not fair!
Mia’s mind parroted the refrain at least once a
day, and each time she told herself firmly what she had learned
long ago: life wasn’t fair, and focusing on how unfair it all was
wouldn’t fix anything. Work—that was what fixed things. But how
could she fix her mother’s situation, when the woman was suffering
with a chronic disease?

Mia felt a little tingle
of relief when she realized she was almost home. The turnoff for
her neighborhood was less than a mile up ahead, and after that it
would only be another few blocks until she came to the little house
she had rented. The neighborhood wasn’t the best, but she had
managed to get a deal from the homeowner in exchange for agreeing
to oversee some improvements to help him leave town faster. The
house was tiny—one bedroom, one-and-a-half bathrooms, sparsely
furnished with the secondhand items from the local charity thrift
store—but it was her home, a little piece of refuge.

Mia made the turn,
beginning to smile to herself. Catching her reflection in the
mirror, she began to give herself a little pep talk. “You’re not
doing as bad as you think,” she said, her voice barely louder than
the stereo playing in the car. “You’re still holding onto your job,
your last performance review was pretty good, and you’ll qualify
for a pay increase in a couple of years. Not too bad at all!” She
looked through the windshield and spotted the stop sign where the
cops usually hid out on the main street of the suburban
development; Mia was always careful to make sure she came to a
complete stop at that one—she couldn’t afford to deal with a ticket
on top of everything else.

She slowed down and
pressed the brake, grimacing a little at the slight squeal she
heard from the back of her car; the old sedan was gradually getting
to the point when it would take more money than the car was
actually worth to keep fixing it, and the sometimes noisy brakes
meant another expense that she couldn’t really afford. Mia was
grateful when the car obediently came to a stop right at the line,
and told herself that the brakes would probably last at least
another couple of months before she absolutely had to replace them
or risk getting into an accident.