The Sheik Who Loved Me (9 page)

Shocked, he pulled away.

As much as he wanted to take her into his arms, to believe in her, to make this journey with her, he couldn’t.

He took another step back, sucked in air. He couldn’t do this. She was going to leave. Anyday. Any second. Watson may have information on her right this instant. There might be a message waiting in his office that would take her away before nightfall.

“Sahar, just keep out of it. I don’t need your help.”

Hurt flashed through her eyes. She bit her bottom lip. He could see why. It was beginning to tremble. She was trying to stop it.

His heart twisted. She had her own pain. “Sahar—”

She looked abruptly away. But not fast enough to hide a fat tear that slid down her cheek trailing fine dust after it.

Great! Now she’d switched tables on him! What was a guy to do? “Sahar?” He stepped forward.

She wouldn’t look at him. She held up her hand, shook her head as if warning him to back off.

He’d done it again. He’d pushed her too far. There was something so innately resilient about her that it kept surprising him when he hit her sensitive spot. She seemed too outwardly strong to hurt. But inside she was lost. And instead of offering comfort, he was doing his damnedest to chase her away. He was lashing out at her because of the way she clouded his mind. Because of what she did to his body. And if he was truthful, it scared the hell out of him. He was used to being in control at all times. He was
not
used to
this.

“Sahar—” he took her elbow firmly “—come sit in the shade.”

She acquiesced, allowed him to lead her to the stone bench under the fruit-laden tree. She seemed suddenly spent. The energy that had quivered around her was gone, and that threw him. He felt like a cad for having done this to her. She was probably exhausted, drained. She’d been through a terrible accident. And on top of that, she’d been physically going at it all morning, running, swimming, riding, playing tag with Kamilah and now jabbing a trowel into the earth under the fierce heat of the North African summer sun.

She slumped onto the bench in the shade. He sat down beside her. They both remained silent. As if afraid to take the next step in the bizarre game they seemed to have been thrust into.

“That came out all wrong,” he said finally. “I’m sorry.”

She swiped at a tear, leaving a smudge of dirt across her face. “It’s okay, I…I totally understand.”

How could she possibly understand?

She took Watson’s battered old hat off, exposing the bruised look in her eyes. She swiped her damp brow with the tail of her shirt. It only streaked the dirt from one place to another.

“I should be the one apologizing, David. I can see I’m making you unhappy. It’s not my intention to hurt you or Kamilah. I only wanted to help. I
needed
to help. I can’t explain it.” She smudged another tear across her cheek. “I’ll go. I’ll leave Shendi. I’m an uninvited guest and you’ve been good to me, and I thank you for that. But I’ll leave in the morning. Dr. Watson left me his mobile number. I’ll call him and ask him to help me find a place…somewhere…maybe Khartoum…while I try and figure out who I am.”

Oh, boy. He felt like camel dung now. She hadn’t asked to be washed up onto his beach unconscious. She hadn’t asked to be placed in this predicament. Hell knew what she’d been through in that storm, what she may yet have to face when the nature of her accident began to reveal itself.

And Kamilah? She’d be devastated if she found Sahar gone in the morning. Damn, this was a double bind. This was precisely what he’d been trying to avoid in the first place. Hurting Kamilah. Allowing himself to
feel
something for this stranger.

Because suddenly she wasn’t a stranger anymore.

She was Sahar. She was digging up carrots in his vegetable garden, riding with him on his stallion, telling him how to be a father, stirring feelings in him that were fit for sin.

When exactly had this started to happen? He blew out a breath.

This woman didn’t play fair.

She didn’t play by the rules.

He placed his hand on her knee. “Sahar, I want you to stay.”

Her eyes slanted up to meet his. More tears pooled in her lower lids. Her hand fidgeted at her side.

“I want you to be my guest. Consider this an official invitation.” He did his best to smile warmly, but inside he was a mess of conflicting, uncertain emotion.

“David—”

“No.” He placed two fingers against her lips. “Enough. I apologize. I’ve been an abominable host. I want you to stay on Shendi. But I also want you to remember one thing. When you leave, Kamilah will be devastated. I just want you to consider that, when you interact with her. I guess that’s all I was really trying to say.”

She took his hand from her lips, held it in her own. “I know she will be sad. She told me. But I was hoping we’d have managed to work through the mermaid thing by the time I left, that she’d be ready for me to leave. But maybe you’re right, David. I shouldn’t have interfered. In her life or yours. But I couldn’t
not
help. Maybe it is best if I do go now.”

His stomach swooped out from under him and his pulse quickened. “No, Sahar. I can’t let you go.” It was too late. As much as he wanted her to leave, it was beyond him to actually let her go. He just couldn’t. And even if he could, what kind of man would that make him? Sahar had amnesia. She was helpless. She had absolutely nowhere to go and not a possession to her name. “Give me a chance to be a better host, Sahar.” He attempted a laugh. It came out a little hollow, a little desperate. “I haven’t even shown you around my home.” He cupped her jaw, tilted her face to his. “What do you say, Sahar? Will you stay? Be my guest? For as long as you need?”

Sahar hesitated, snared by the intensity in David’s eyes. But more than anything it was the deep sincerity, the honesty and integrity in his voice that held her. This was a man struggling to do what was right. And she could only respect him for that.

Besides, she had nowhere to go. The thought of being nameless and alone in a place like Khartoum terrified her.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I’ll stay. Thank you, David.”

David exhaled, ran his hands through his hair. “Good. That’s settled then.
Now
can I give you a tour of my home?”

A shaky smile tugged at her mouth. “Yes.” She said, swiping at the last of her tears, trying to pull herself together. “I’d be delighted.”

He stood, thrust his shoulders back in mock gallantry, grinned like a pirate and held his hand out to her, palm up, steady as a rock. “Come, then.”

She reached out, placed her hand in his. He closed his fingers around hers. And inside she felt as if she’d found a bridge, steady and dependable, one that would somehow get her to the other side.

Wherever that was.

Chapter 8

“M
y father bought this place when I was a child,” David explained as he took Sahar’s arm and led her into the enormous main hall.

She stared up in awe at the stained glass dome high in the centre of the curved ceiling. The midday African sun streamed though it, picking up hues of oranges, ochres and greens, imbuing the vast room with a cathedral-like quality. Except the architecture couldn’t be further from the cathedrals she knew. “It looks Moorish in design,” she said.

“You’re right. Moroccan inspired,” he explained, pushing open thick double doors at the far end of the room. “Shendi Palace was built by an eccentric French general in the early 1800s. He’d served for years in Algiers, Morocco and Mauritania before the jinns got him.”

“Jinns?”

David grinned, a sharp twinkle lighting his eyes. “The evil spirits of the desert.” He tapped his finger against his temple. “The heat, the thirst, endlessness of the Sahara, it can drive a man crazy. The locals say that’s when the jinns come and get you.”

“So the general went a little loopy?”

“That’s the story. He took early retirement and moved out here onto Shendi. He bought the island because of the unusual springs of fresh water. He dug the wells that feed these gardens, and in designing the palace, he copied the Moorish architecture from the areas he’d come to love, combining it with whatever other North African influence inspired him.”

“It’s absolutely stunning…eclectic,” she said, studying the mosaic work in one of the recessed alcoves.

“Eclectic is the word. In some ways Shendi Palace is symbolic of North Africa itself. So much of this part of the world is a fascinating and often uneasy blend of past cultures, Arabian, African, colonial, each one trying to erase traces of the previous one, going all the way back to the Kingdom of Sheba and beyond.”

The sudden deepening of his voice, the guttural catch in the honeyed gravel tones, forced her to look up.

He was staring at her. His face had changed. A sharp and fervent energy had shifted into the granite of his dark features. His eyes flashed dangerously.

Sahar swallowed. A tingle of foreboding trickled down her spine at the mood in his eyes. North Africa and the Sahara was something David Rashid obviously cared passionately about. The palace, the Africa he described, they were like the man himself, she thought. He too exuded a timelessness, as if the spirit of ancient warrior tribes, the wild and exotic spice of desert leaders, still shaped his thoughts. Yet his barely leashed and feral energy was veneered with the fine cultural sensibilities of British aristocracy.

David Rashid was a mystery in more ways than one. It made her curious about his personal history…and more than curious about why she was feeling this shiver of portent down the back of her neck.

She cleared her throat, trying hard not to shy away from the hooded intensity of his indigo eyes. “Kamilah said your father was a sheik.”

“Kamilah
said
that?”

“Yes.”

His jaw hardened. He turned away from her, grabbed a brass ring and flung open a heavy wooden door to another room. He strode ahead of her into the vast chamber.

She caught up with him. “Does that make
you
a sheik then?”

He stopped, swung around to face her, the lines bracketing his mouth hard. “I am Sheik David bin Omar bin Zafir Rashid. I am the oldest son of my father. According the customs of my father’s people, I now bear his title.”

He paused, his eyes boring into hers. “But it means nothing.” He swept his arm out in an expansive movement, dismissing the subject. “This is the hall where the French general used to host his famous balls.”

Sahar was more interested in studying the face and architecture of David Rashid than the room. “Why do you say it means nothing?” she pressed.

His eyes probed hers, as if he were weighing her up, deciding her worthy of the information. “It would take time to explain. Come.” He took her arm, urged her through enormous double doors to another enclosed courtyard, this one with a long, black marble pool sunk into the center. The pool was flanked by columns and surrounded by arched walkways fragrant with exotic blooms. Elaborately carved fountains splashed water into the pool causing ripples along the shimmering black surface. The pool looked darkly cool under the white-hot sky. Sahar could not see below the surface. She looked from the pool up into David’s eyes. The reflection of the water rippled like wet ink through them. She couldn’t see below the dark surface of this man either. But she wanted to. She
needed
to.

“I have plenty of time,” she said, forcing a soft laugh. “More time than I know what to do with right now.”

He stilled. “You really are interested?”

She looked up into his smouldering eyes. She was interested all right. She was drawn to him by every cell in her body. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

He pursed his exquisite lips in thought, his eyes never leaving hers. “All right.” He took her hand, drew her to a bench in the shade of the arches facing the pool. He seated himself beside her, eyes focused on the dark water.

“My father, Sheik Omar bin Zafir Rashid, was descended from a tribe of desert warriors that migrated from Arabia and down through Egypt into the Sahara hundreds of years ago,” he explained. “The Bedu of Azar. A fiercely proud people. They lived as nomads and hunters, and their lives were ruled by the stars and the seasons. They killed oryx for meat and they traveled from oasis to oasis with their camels and goats. They lived by an ancient code of ethics and were both revered and feared.”

He stopped talking, his eyes distant, staring into the waters of the swimming pool as if he could see through them to a distant desert oasis. “They were a noble people, Sahar. But they are no more. I am the lineal leader of a tribe that no longer exists.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “The world changed. My people and their ways didn’t. The desert is dying, and with it an ancient way of life. After years of relentless drought, traditional watering holes have dried up. The oryx are gone. Famine has taken its toll. Camels and goats died. And the Bedu were forced to abandon their way of life, the very existence that made them proud and free. In desperation they were forced toward towns and settlements, and they began to eke out an existence living in shacks on the outskirts of civilization.”

David turned to look at her, his eyes glittering. “A once-noble people have lost their culture, the bonds that held their tribes together. They are now scattered, directionless and impoverished, subsisting mainly on supplies of American grain and other foreign aid.”

The ferocity in his voice caught her by the throat.

“That is why I say the title means nothing.” His jaw steeled, flint sharpened his gaze. “But I will give pride back to my people, Sahar. I will make them whole again. It was my father’s dream. And it is now mine.”

Sahar stared at him. So this is what drove the man. His raw passion for his people, for the desert, moved her profoundly. “How would you do that?” she asked. “How would give pride back to the Bedu?”

He smiled in a way she had not seen him smile. A smile so powerful it reached right to her heart, took hold of it and squeezed so that she could barely breathe.

“I told you, it is a long story.”

“I want to hear it, David.” She needed to. It gave her unique insight into the man, to what fired his soul. He possessed a depth, an integrity she had only guessed at.

He took her hand, and his thumb absently stroked the inside of her palm as he stared into the black water. Her insides went shivery, but she could not bring herself to pull her hand away. This man held an enigmatic power over her, something that defied her control. Did he even realize what he was doing to her?

“I spent half my life in the Sahara,” he said, speaking into the distance, to a place way beyond the pool, a place that lived in his mind. “My father wanted me to see it, to experience the old ways firsthand. He wanted me to taste the ancient lifestyle of a desert warrior before it disappeared from the face of this earth forever.” His fingers laced through hers, tightened. Her heart beat faster.

“My father realized when he was still young that the old ways were going. And he knew the only way to save his people would be to bring the ancient ways of the desert in line with the new world, to give the nomads economic control over their destiny.” He paused. “My father made it his goal to be accepted at Oxford. He’d heard the Bedu legends about the black gold, the oil, that lay beneath the sands of northern Azar. And he wanted to learn how to find it. He came back a geologist, armed with both science and knowledge of the ancient ways of the desert.” David drew in a deep breath. “He found that black gold, Sahar. After many years, he found it.”

For a while they sat silent, her hand still held in his. Sahar looked up into his face. “And?” she prompted softly.

He turned to look down at her, his gaze meshing intimately with hers. “He brought something else back from England,” he said. “A British wife…and a son.”

“You? And your mother?”

“Some saw it as a sign of my father’s betrayal.”

“Because she was British?”

“Yes.” A bitterness clipped his word. “A foreigner.”

“What happened…to your mother?”

“She didn’t take easily to the ways of the desert. She was the daughter of British privilege, and to her the desert was simply an adventure that grew tiresome. To my father it was life. My mother began to pine for her home, and my father loved her too much to trap her in a place she couldn’t live. He in turn could not leave his beloved desert for a full-time life in England. Their relationship was doomed from the start.”

“How awfully tragic.”

He drew breath sharply in through his nose. “In the end my mother got ill. She decided to return to her homeland, her people. But she wouldn’t leave me behind. I was four. I had been born for the ways of the desert but she took me to England.”

Sahar looked up into his eyes. Below the surface of those dark-blue irises, somewhere deep inside this man, lurked a boy, a boy who had been torn between two parents. Two countries. Two cultures. A boy who had shaped this potent man of the present.

He squeezed her hand, gave her a wry smile. “Ever since, I’ve been divided. For six months of each year I lived in the desert. For the other half of the year I studied in England.”

“What happened to your father after your mother left?” she asked.

“He eventually remarried…took an Azarian bride. He had another son eight years after my birth, my half brother, Tariq. Some felt Tariq should have inherited my father’s title because he was the
pure
one.” David dismissed it with a shrug. “Either way, like I said, it is a title that means nothing.”

“Do you get on with your brother?”

His eyes flashed to hers and pierced her with a sudden laser sharpness, with suspicion. He withdrew his hand. “Why are you interested in this? It’s Rashid business.”

She stumbled mentally at the turnabout. This man had low flashpoints. “Because…” She felt warmth infuse her cheeks. “Because…I…care. About you. About Kamilah.”

A muscle pulsed along his jawline. But he said nothing. He waited, watching her face, his eyes unreadable.

“I have nothing else to care about, David. I’m…I’m all alone. Until I find out where I belong.”

His eyes softened slightly. He lifted his hand and briefly caressed the side of her cheek. “My brother and I did not get on until about two years ago.”

“Why?”

“Tariq felt I was not one of them. Not pure.” An anger glittered briefly in his eyes, then was gone.

“He thought he should have been sheik?”

“He thought I should have been dead.”

“What?”

David snorted. “Tariq grew up resenting everything about me, Sahar, including my father’s affection. You see, my half brother didn’t agree with our vision for bringing Azar into the global economy. And because of his radical views, he was cut from my father’s will. But that was then. Tariq is older now. Wiser. He is beginning to see beyond his narrow idealist window. He has finally come to accept my views. We share the same goal now, to build the wealth of our people, to marry the ancient ways with the new, using the resources of Rashid International, the company started by our father, the company designed to feed our father’s dream.”

“What finally turned Tariq around?” she asked.

“A promise.” David absently fingered the hilt of the dagger at his waist. “I vowed on my father’s deathbed to do everything within my power to heal the rift between myself and Tariq. And I vowed to continue his work to heal his people, the Bedu of Azar. He died with those dreams on his lips.”

Sahar noted he said “his” people. Not “my” people. Even in his own mind, he wasn’t wholly one of them. David’s dichotomy was cleft deep into his soul. And she had a sense that healing Azar, bridging the divide between the ancient ways and the new, would in a sense make this man whole himself. It would make him feel worthy of his title. It would heal the scars of the four-year-old buried deep within the man.

“How did you manage to sway Tariq, David? I mean, a fundamentalist ideology is not something one gives up easily.”

His eyes shot to hers. “You’re right. But blood can be stronger than ideology. And I never gave up.” His exquisite fingers moved absently over the ornate handle of his
jambiya
as he spoke.

He caught her looking. “My father’s,” he explained, curling his fingers tight around the hilt. “A gift from his deathbed. The symbol of my promise. I wear it always.”

She swallowed at the sudden dark and possessive edge in his voice, the way he held his weapon as if he were about to yank it from its sheath. His eyes glittered sharply. She’d hit another of his flashpoints. It made her jittery. Anxiety began to swamp her again for some reason she couldn’t identify. She had no doubt that the raw passion housed within the powerful man that was Sheik David bin Omar bin Zafir Rashid gave him the capacity to kill.

What would he do to her if he found
her
to be disloyal? What would
she
do if he turned out to be her enemy? She swallowed, tried to keep her voice light. “So…is…is Azar prospering now?”