To Touch a Sheikh (8 page)

And for the first time he understood. What temptation meant.

It stood before him, made flesh and wit and intellect and desire, making its simple offer of everything, unstoppable and consuming for all its unconditional generosity.

And it shamed him. That even with his past and present convictions, he still considered risking annihilation by grabbing for this land mine.

Aching with the force it took not to, come what may, he said, “So what you have in mind is a no-strings, flagrant affair?”

She rolled down her sleeves, depriving him of her gaze. “If by no-strings you mean no present or future demands to turn it ‘official,' then yes. If by flagrant you mean splashed publicly for the gossip machine and media to take apart, then no. What we have together is no one else's business.”

“Clandestine, then.”

“Not that either. Just…private. As I believe any intimate relationship should remain.”

“So all you
ever
wanted was an affair?”

“I don't appreciate the word
affair
either. I don't have a name for what I want us to have. I want to be with you, be there for you, and vice versa, in every way. I want us to expand on what we've been sharing, to take our synergy to all areas of our lives,
while being free to indulge in all forms of intimacy and passion without restraints of social interference or conformities.”

He gritted his teeth against the visions, beyond any heaven he'd ever heard of. “So you stand by your assertion that you never and would never want to marry me?”

She grinned at him. “Put a summer melon in your tummy.”

The colloquial expression, the ultimate form of “never worry on that account,” spoken as if unequivocally meant, spread the ink of disappointment through him again. Why, when she was offering him all that a man could dream of from a woman, minus the hassle of formalities and responsibilities, he couldn't even begin to analyze. It made him madder at her, at himself.

It made him snarl, “Weird, when your father offered you to me in marriage, at any price. Not once, but repeatedly. Before he gave up on me and went after Haidar.”

 

Maram gaped at Amjad.

His beauty smoldered, as if his resident demon had been roused to full manifestation, his words falling on her like a one-two combo to the head and gut.

Before she let the blows register, she slowed everything down. This was Amjad. The ultimate intimacy-phobe. She'd just told him she wanted all of him in ultimate intimacies. She should expect his struggle against her, against his own need, which she no longer doubted, to become vicious.

Problem was, Amjad was feared for being agonizingly truthful. All his harsh statements were based on fact. Even his view of her as a life-leeching entity was backed up by the general public's view of her, an image she'd never contested. It had kept at bay those who'd wanted her as a trophy or a sponsor, as he'd said.

Did she scare him so much that he was using falsehoods to push her away, to keep himself from reaching for her?

“We're still in the land of you-have-to-have-the-last-word, right?” The smile that was her natural state around him wobbled. “I didn't think you'd resort to fabrications to get it.”

The fierceness setting his beauty ablaze spiked. “I didn't think you'd resort to denial when you're caught fabricating.”

“I never resort to untruths in personal relationships. And I never hid what I thought or felt from you.”

His body tightened as if in preparation for attack, his emerald eyes radiating the intent. “So that's your new story? That your father did it without your knowledge?”

“Okay. Time-out.” She made the gesture, foreboding invading her heart. “You're still practicing your favorite sport of taking my father's character and actions apart, right?”

“No.”

The word fell on her like a giant hammer. That, and what she considered her first sighting of true contempt in his eyes.

Air congealed in her lungs, beats in her heart.

He was telling the truth!

She'd thought she'd been working against his general wariness and cynicism. But this was a specific blow to Amjad's ability to believe in her. It did look plausible that she was in on her father's machinations.

“When did he do that?” She heard her uneven question.

“As if you don't know.” He sounded as scary as a predator growling in aggravation.

“I don't.”

His gaze flayed her with disbelief. She held her ground with sincerity.

He blinked first, exhaled in disgust. “Let's play this game as if you don't, then. His first approach was after he foisted you on me at that conference.”

“Can we stick to facts, please? Without dramatic license? He
introduced
us.”

Amjad's lips twisted at her admonition. “
Aih.
Then, after I got a dose of you, he offered you to me. I thought he'd gone out of his nonexistent mind, being the only father to offer his daughter at the altar of my madness. After I walked away, thinking it wasn't worth the oxygen it would take to slam his offer with the ridicule it deserved, you hunted me down and worked me
over. And I realized your father wasn't so insight-free. He knew exactly what a weapon of mass destruction he wielded in you.”

Her heart fluttered at the scorn that transmitted his loath confession of her equal effect on him. “Nice to know I got to you as much as you got to me.”

He didn't contest her statement, his eyes eloquent with a more ferocious admission. “I went back to him, told him to keep you away from me, if he knew what was good for both of you. But he gambled on your power to the point that he defied my warning, shoved you under my nose at every opportunity. Every so often, he dared renew his offer, each time adding more incentives to…sweeten the deal.”

“Incentives?” she echoed, her voice as hollow as the heart draining further of blood.

His laugh felt like acid against her nerves. “At least what
he
thought were incentives. Two hundred acres with a mile of beachfront in Ossaylan for my latest development project. Thirty percent stock in your national cell-phone company. Controlling shares of the emirate's opera house. His latest offer was adding forty of his most-prized thoroughbreds to your…package.”

She'd already believed him. But knowing the specifics…

His eyes narrowed on her face, which had to be bloodless with the shock expanding inside her. “But come to think of it, the offer was so…lame, it doesn't suit a mind of your caliber. It smacks of a juvenile, fatally misinformed one at Yusuf's level.”

She wiped a hand across blurry eyes. “So you think I wasn't involved only because I would have made an unerringly irresistible offer? You take damning by faint praise to new levels, Amjad.”

“I'm just observing, from what I now know about you, that you wouldn't have been so…banal. So, I'm revising my long-held belief. You had nothing to do with his offers.” Before relief could register, he went on. “But the last time I chewed him out, I must have scared him so much that he stopped offering. Just as I thought that it was over, he transferred his sights to Haidar.”

Before she could cry out in disbelief, Amjad's eyebrows snapped together as a new suspicion ignited his eyes. “But maybe
this
is his new plan. He realized that not even you could change my stance on marriage, so he sent you to secure me as a lover,
then
obtain Haidar as a husband, collecting the power we pack, clandestine and official, in both your hands.”

Her jaw dropped. “Tell me that
now
you're being extra obnoxious.”

He shrugged. “Yusuf
is
going all out to turn himself from a minor prince into a major king. He has…other venues planned, but even if those work, I—and Haidar—would be bigger assets to him than any throne as long as you were in control.”

She let out a ragged exhalation. “Are you done? Can I have my say now?”

He gestured for her to go ahead, parked his lean hips against the countertop, crossed his endless legs at the ankles, his eyes telling her she'd have to make this exceptional. And it probably wouldn't make a difference anyway.

She inhaled. “Father never hinted about approaching you with me as a bargaining chip in
another
bid for more power…oh,
God!
” Her knees buckled as the extent of her father's manipulations hit her.

Amjad closed the distance between them urgently, reached out a supporting hand to her elbow. She raised her eyes, afraid to meet his. But it wasn't contempt seething there, but what looked like solicitude.

Her throat closed tighter. “I can now see how he's been manipulating things to push us together. I did seek out any way to be with you, but I now realize that when I succeeded, it was his doing. I am guilty of not questioning it, though. This time, although he didn't look like he was in danger of a relapse, I didn't even wonder why he said he was. I just grabbed the chance to be with you again.”

She closed her eyes as all the times her father had looked her in the eye and plotted behind her back spooled through her mind.

She opened her eyes. “But even though I want to strangle him for interfering in my life and peddling me to you this way…I can't feel really betrayed. I think I understand why he did what he did. He must have sensed our compatibility, was in his own misguided way trying to secure for me the only man he thought would suit me.”

Green-cold ice formed in Amjad's eyes, almost giving her frostbite. “Sure. And now he has another ‘only man' for you, and no doubt, a long list of ‘only men' as backup.”

She shook her head. “You must be wrong about Haidar. I never made it a secret that I didn't see anyone but you. And even if
he
gave up on you, he knows neither Haidar nor I would ever think of each other as anything more than best buddies. Unless…” The suspicion suddenly provided a new terrible possibility. “Unless he was only pretending to target Haidar. He might believe all you need to overcome your aversion to commitment is the idea of losing me to your own brother. And if that is his plan, then he's a total snake and someone I don't know at all!”

As she talked, the coldness in Amjad's eyes had been evaporating under a blast of…realization? Of temptation?

He finally shook his head. “You confound the devil on a regular basis, don't you? Too bad I'm a bit more discerning than the old boy.”

She smiled shakily, the need to smooth back the silky hair his headshake had spilled to his slashed cheekbones becoming a pain in her gut. “I used to think you had discernment sandblasted out of your gorgeous head where I am concerned. But now that I know your paranoia was cultivated by my father's loving help, I fully excuse you.”

“I
so
appreciate your sanctioning my well-founded paranoia.”

Her heart fired at his savage mockery. She suddenly realized it could mean she might have never had a chance with him.

She swallowed the emotion rising in her throat. “I believed you recognized me as I recognized you from the start, knew we'd share these…flowing channels of communication and
appreciation—if you let us. I thought it was only a matter of time until you did. I would have kept trying forever if I thought you one day would. But if you never will, I need to know, Amjad. If you think
I
don't feel exactly as I say I do, if you have the least suspicion still, I won't come near you until this situation is over. Afterward, you'll never see or hear from me again. It's now all up to you.”

His eyes went supernova.

Before her heart could explode in answer, he stalked out of sight toward the door. She gaped as she heard him yank it open. Seconds later, it slammed behind him.

He—he'd gone out in the sandstorm. Without protection!

A
mjad might be mad and bad, but he was anything but a fool.

He had to come right back. He would.

He didn't.

Interminable minutes passed as she waited for him to burst back in, before she rushed to the window a few feet from the door. She could see nothing but the now rust-colored limbo that seemed to have replaced the world outside.

She stood trembling, her mind burning circuits as reason braked the hurtling of fright.

He had to have made a dash for Dahabeyah's stable. It had to be near. Even so, without the goggles and face coverings, he must have inhaled and been blasted with enough sand that he'd feel sorry for his rash action for days.

He'd known that, yet had risked it to get away from her.

She understood. He must be reeling as much as she was from the revelations. But she had it easy. She'd already come to terms with her father's manipulations. But Amjad had been secure in thinking her an accomplice in the biddings that had so revolted him and fanned the ready flames of suspicion about people's motives toward him. She was surprised his contempt hadn't been
more lethal, if her father had made him think he—and she—would substitute Haidar for him.

In retrospect, knowing that the tainting effect of her father's interference had been in full force all along made what they'd shared mean that much more. For they
had
connected, had come close. Closer than her wildest dreams. Even with his attempting to keep her—and himself—at bay. He'd slipped so many times into ease with her, into showing the man beneath the cold camouflage. She didn't just admire and desire him; she could also talk to him, laugh with him, say anything to him and have him understand. He got her. And she got him. But would she
really
get him?

She was no longer confident she would.

And that might be her fault.

Before he could process her “version of the truth,” deal with how it radically changed his long-held beliefs of her, she'd pushed for him to decide if he would or would never trust her.

No wonder he'd walked away.

If he believed her, he would have no more reason to fight their desire for each other. And while that was what she most coveted, to Amjad, it was what he most feared.

Her blood ran cold at the thought that he'd come back, announce that he didn't believe her and hold her to her promise.

She cursed herself for making it. What had she been thinking, asking for his total trust or else? It was too soon. She had to think of some way out of this without looking like some wheedling grandstander whose word endured for as long as it took to exit her mouth. And she had to think fast, before he came back.

But he didn't.

Every minute he was gone wound her up tighter. She tried to stay busy and stop obsessing as an hour passed. He
had
been gone longer than that in Dahabeyah's stable before. Then another hour passed, still in the range of the acceptable, if he was giving the horse a full grooming. Or was sulking. But waiting for him in the safety and comfort of this cabin was far worse than when she'd been out there being buffeted by nature's punishment.
She hadn't been scared then. She'd been with him. Now fear suffocated her. For him.

Suddenly, nothing sufficed to explain his absence. Images of him, lying out there, injured, being buried by the sand, reached inside her and ripped her heart out.

She flew to the first aid kit, grabbed their goggles, put hers on and tore out of the cabin.

The storm tore back at her, almost knocked her down. Her face and neck felt bombarded by millions of pins. The only thing keeping her from being blown off her feet was their sinking in the deep sand that had accumulated from the storm. The only reason the cabin hadn't been buried was because it was on top of a cliff dune. Even so, the steps she'd seen Amjad climb on their arrival had been obliterated.

She didn't know where to go except in the direction she'd previously seen him heading on his way to the stable before he'd disappeared in zero visibility.

She could barely see two feet ahead, had already lost sight of the cabin. Her nostrils and lungs began to blister. She took off her shirt and wrapped it around her face. She could look for him while being flayed, as long as she could breathe.

After what felt like forever in a fast-forwarding stream of pain, she found the stable, stumbled inside. She wrestled with the pummeling winds to close the door behind her. The moment she did, she tore the goggles and shirt off her face, staggered around looking for him. Dahabeyah started kicking and whinnying as she burst into her stall, the last place she could search.

He wasn't there!

He was out
there,
probably unconscious and injured. He might already be…be…

Dread and desperation burst out of her as she ran out of the stable.
“Amjad!”

The merciless maelstrom dissipated her screams. She screamed more and more, begging for him to hear, to have enough strength to shout back, for her to hear him, to find him…

“
B'haggej' jaheem!
What in
hell's
name are you doing here?”

Amjad.

His voice. Drowning out the tumult of wind-propelled agony.

He was safe.
Safe.

His presence electrified her, enclosed her, vacuumed away all else. Everything fell away as her legs disappeared from beneath her.

It didn't matter. She was in his arms. And he was in hers. Nothing would ever matter to her but that.

Then he was carrying her over their cabin's threshold again. She had no idea how he found the way back.

Inside, he put her back on feet that no longer felt like hers and zoomed away. She shakily took off her goggles, blinked after him, eyes watering. He streaked back carrying a water-filled plastic basin and towels, went to the kitchen and collected containers and bottles. He put his burden down on the coffee table, glowered up and down her nearly exposed half, his skin taut and glistening with inflammation over his masterpiece bone structure.

“And again I ask,” he growled, his voice hoarse, “what the
hell
did you think you were doing?”

“Déjà vu much?” she croaked, lips trembling on reminiscence.

He'd asked her the same thing long ago, a few months after she'd come back to the region. At the now-infamous conference he'd been sponsoring. During the opening reception, a bomb scare had exploded.

As everyone stampeded out, a man had overturned a table on her and almost trampled her.

She'd struggled to push the table off her, panicking, for Amjad as much as herself. Then, as if her worry had summoned him, he'd materialized over her, hauled the table off her as if it were made of cardboard, swept her up in his arms and to the nearest exit, shouted for her to run as far away from the building as possible. Then he'd turned back.

After a flabbergasted moment, she'd catapulted after him, tried to drag him back.

He'd ordered her away, just as he had his guards, assuring
them he wouldn't hold it against them if they ran for their lives. Then, in total disregard for his own safety, he'd gone back to help those who'd been trampled. Needless to say, none of his guards had left. To his fury, neither had she. She'd worked with him until everyone had been evacuated and Zohayd's elite bomb squad arrived.

The bomb had been a hoax. But the damage the panic had caused had been real. As real as his anger after he'd dragged her to be examined by his physicians before taking her to his offices and blasting her.

He'd made the same delicious sight he did now, majestic in his wrath. She'd believed that while he'd risked his life for others on principle, his concern for her had been personal. His aggression, like it was now, had been relived fright laced with what-if scenarios he found insupportable.

She'd soothed him, asked why he found it strange she'd do what he had for her and for others?

For a magical moment, she'd felt her sincerity tearing down some barrier inside him, about to let her in.

Then the moment had been lost.

She'd never hated the sound of anything more than his phone's imperative one-note ring, which had called him away to deal with the incident's repercussions.

To her dismay, she'd found his barricades in place the next time they'd met, and she'd never been able to resurrect that sublime moment of closeness again. Until now.

Not that he looked close to her
right
now. He looked incensed.

“Very funny, Maram,” he hissed. “Last time you were playing the hero to impress me. What was it this time? You couldn't wait to have the answer to your ultimatum?”

Suddenly anger injected her bloodstream with a dose of resentment over the echoes of fright and despair.

She glared up at him. “I thought you were at best lying in Dahabeyah's stall facedown, after she kicked you senseless. As you deserved to be for scaring me this way.”

“Scaring you how? Did you think I left you behind? Is that why you rushed out without protection?”

“It would never cross my mind that you'd leave me behind. You didn't leave me behind when you thought a bomb could detonate and blow you apart, or bring the whole building down on you.” The fury and exasperation in his eyes wavered, just like it had that time years ago. “Just like I wouldn't leave you to your fate even if it was one you so stubbornly and recklessly chose. But once I was convinced you were out there injured, maybe critically, every second counted. I couldn't barricade myself in cloth that would have slowed me down or crippled me when I found you.”

She could feel him resisting, even when logic and the evidence of experience corroborated her words.

He still sounded nothing like his ridiculing self when he finally said, “
Aih,
of course. It was all for me.”

“So what are you proposing? That I was afraid for you only because I need you to survive? Hate to break it to you, but I don't. If you were injured or…worse—” she swallowed the pain that choked her even from imagining it “—I'd still be safe in here for months if need be. After the sandstorm was over, a self-serving person would look for you only to get your phone and GPS and get help for herself.”

“Flaunting self-preservation could be on account of unreasonable, self-defeating fear for one's own…”

He stopped. Distress the likes of which she'd never thought to see in his eyes seethed there, as if it was far more hazardous for him to believe her than to risk nature's wrath or a bomb's explosion.

She reached out with everything inside her, gentling his worry, transmitting her certainty.

Belief in him provided her with safety and stability, warded off the world's betrayals and dangers. Belief in her would be his haven, as he was hers.

He snatched his gaze away seconds before his eyes admitted
his capitulation. She almost whimpered from the fracture of the psychic and emotional meld.

His eyes were back to blazing concern as he took in the evidence of her ordeal, before his gaze seemed to snag on her right hand.

Her hand was white-knuckled, still gripping the handle of the first aid kit. She no longer felt like she was holding it.

He groaned as if in pain as he extricated the kit from her spastic fingers, led her to the settee, his hands gentle and unsteady as he pushed her down. He knelt in front of her, so tall that his eyes were level with hers.

His eyes flared and subsided as his gaze swept down her face and body, his own seeming to curve as if he would contain her. For a moment she thought he'd place his parted lips to her aching flesh. She silently begged him to make that connection, to show her he felt as shaken by her peril as she'd been at his.

He seemed to resist their needs with an effort that had him sweating. Before she could lean in and sweep the moisture from his forehead, lick it from his upper lip, he began washing her.

She moaned as her nerve endings welcomed the towel's softness, the water's coolness, soaked up his caring.

He suddenly hissed, “
B'Ellahi,
you were scraped raw, and that was the best-case scenario. If I hadn't heard you, you could have been roaming the desert, waiting for the storm to finish you.”

And like his distress had been real, so was the anguish in his voice, emanating from his every pore. She couldn't bear it, had to defuse it. Only one thing would make him forget anything.

Her lips quirked. “What else could I have done when you flounced out to mope in a lethal sandstorm, without any protection, too, I might add, and didn't seem to be coming back?”

He grimaced as he mixed the containers' contents, added oils that smelled of almond and lime, whipped it all into a homogenous cream. Then he started to paint her skin with it, massaging downward from her face with feather-light strokes.

She almost cried out. Not because it hurt. Because it impaled
her to the heart to have his flesh on hers without barriers, to feel his solicitude seeping into her.

She moaned instead as the cool, floral/citrus-scented mixture soothed relief into her pores. She could swear it healed her skin on the spot. She spread her arms, arched, offering him full access, helping him apply that magical balm.

He was spreading it down her back, and she'd long disintegrated, when he rumbled, “I wasn't moping. I was coming back when you went on your rescue mission. And even if I hadn't, you shouldn't have worried because I certainly am not suicidal.”

“Accidents—” she mumbled around the coal of longing burning in her throat “—especially in these conditions…happen.”

“I wouldn't be so remiss that I'd have an accident and leave you here alone.” His voice cascaded down her back, spreading a different and far more distressing fire. “Not even if I was certain that you'd simply pick useful articles off my useless carcass afterward.”