Undercover Sheik

He pressed his lips to hers one more time, ignoring the sand between them, and pushed air into her.

And then she coughed, al hamdu lillah! Praise God.

“Sadie?” He called her name, shook out his kaffiyeh and used it to wipe her eyes, then pulled the flask off his belt and poured some water on her face. Drop after sandy drop rolled off her eyelashes, her cheeks, her lips.

Her eyelids fluttered and she raised a sand-covered hand on reflex to rub them. He held her down and used more water instead to keep her from rubbing in sand.

She was coughing in earnest now, a terrible, choking sound, but a sound of life nevertheless that filled him with relief.

He helped her sit. “Sadie?”

She drew wheezing gulps of air and looked dazed and lost. “What happened?” She could barely get the words out, but her face was turning a healthier color.

“You walked into quicksand.”

Her expression changed as she remembered. Her hand clamped on to his arm and wouldn’t let go.

He’d seen Dara like that with his brother, Saeed, when something was wrong with one of the children. Bedu women comforted each other. Western women seemed to require this also from men.

He considered putting his arm around her, but it didn’t seem honorable to touch a woman like that who was neither his sister nor his wife.

She solved his dilemma by having another coughing fit and collapsing against him.

His back stiffened in surprise, but he found himself reluctant to pull away. He tapped her slim back a couple of times, gently, awkwardly, giving thanks to Allah when her coughing quieted.

She didn’t have much of a body under the long, ample dress. He hadn’t realized that, her fragility. She had stood up to every hardship she’d encountered since he’d met her, endured whatever Umman and his men had thrown her way.

She pulled away after a few seconds—too soon. She wasn’t nearly steady. He hadn’t minded offering her comfort. The contact seemed to calm him, too. Having her that close, touching, was a good reminder that she hadn’t been lost. He had gotten to her in time.

He would never forget the sight as he rode over the last dune and saw her head break free from under the sand ahead, her last breath used to call his name.

He cleared his throat. “Rest. We have time.”

She rubbed the sand off her hands then did her best to clean it out of her neck, her hair.

“In a few days,” he said to reassure her, “I will see you safe. You can’t walk through the desert alone.”

“I think I figured that one out.” She coughed briefly, looking at him fully in the face again, for the first time since their short initial talk in his tent.

A long minute of silence passed, then another.

“Why did you save me?” she asked.

He looked back at the round indentation just a few feet away, the patch of ground that could have taken the both of them.

“My father was swallowed by quicksand,” he surprised himself by saying instead of trying to find an answer to her question.

She seemed to pale, although it could have been a trick of the moonlight. “I’m sorry. That’s— It must have been terrible.”

He untied the rope from his ankle at last, ignoring the burn on his skin, and stood. He unhooked the other end from Ronu’s saddle and rolled the rope up, put it away. He brought back more water for her, picked up his rifle from the sand and swung it over his shoulder, then stuck his handgun into his sash while she drank. He sat cross-legged in front of her, at a respectable distance.

“Can you not tell me who you are?” she asked between gulps.

“I’m not a bandit,” he said, and hoped she would believe him this time.

“THEN WHAT ARE YOU DOING with them?” Sadie shot back. “How do I know you’re not going to sell me for my kidney to some rich oilman on dialysis?”

She wasn’t entirely joking. She had treated just such a patient at the field hospital the day before she’d been taken by the bandits. The young man, not yet eighteen, had been kidnapped from the streets of his village, taken to a private clinic where one of his kidneys had been removed for an illegal transplant.

He was treated until recovery, then dropped back off at the same spot, his pockets stuffed with money.

Not that this kind of thing happened every day, but the point was, it did happen. Then there was the sex slave industry and other lovely possibilities she didn’t care to find out about up-close and personal.

“I’m Sheik Nasir ibn Ahmad ibn Salim ben Zayed.”

“Sheik? As in king?” Whatever she’d speculated about him over the past weeks, she wouldn’t have guessed that.

“No, no. Sheik of my tribe,” he said modestly.

His olive skin seemed darker in the moonlight, his black eyelashes speckled with sand. How far under had he gone into the quicksand to get her?

“My brother is the king,” he added.

She gaped. “King of what?”

“Beharrain.”

That explained a few things. Nasir’s excellent English for example. Beharrain’s queen was an American woman. Dara somebody. She would be Nasir’s sister-in-law.

“Are we in Beharrain?” The possibility occurred to her suddenly. Had the bandits crossed the border with her to the small kingdom to the north?

“As a Beharrainian, I would say yes. If you ask a Yemeni, they would say we’re in Yemen. If you ask a Saudi, they’d tell you we are most certainly in their country.”

Oh. They were in the desert where Beharrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen met, a vast area where borders were sometimes fluid, sometimes nonexistent. To indicate this, they were drawn tentatively with dotted lines on the map.

“We’re in no man’s land—no army, no police—a haven for bandits, smugglers and the odd terrorist training camp,” he confirmed her thoughts.

She pressed her knuckles against her eyelids for a long moment. In hindsight, she might have been a tad optimistic thinking that she was just going to walk out of the place. She shook her head and muttered, “I suppose I’ve been embarrassingly naive.”

“Courage is never worthy of embarrassment.”

“How about foolishness?” She looked at him.

“You’re safest with me.” He held her gaze.

And she wondered if it might not be best to try to believe him. “So what are you doing with the bandits?”

“I’m looking for someone. It’s personal.” His face hardened into his fierce warrior look.

“And when you find him, you’ll kill him?” she asked, then added in a more subdued voice, “I’d prefer the truth, even if it makes me uncomfortable.”

“Yes.” He said the single word without looking away.

“You can’t leave him to the law?”

“The law had him. He escaped from prison.”

“What did he do to you?”

He took a slow breath. “He killed my father.”

Confused, she tilted her head. “I thought you said he was swallowed by quicksand.”

“He was shot. His horse, with him still in the saddle, was forced into quicksand to cover it up. Then my enemy stole the country and murdered my people,” he went on.

Was he talking about the previous king? She remembered something vaguely from the media. “Wasn’t he made to stand trial?”

“Once my brother took power, yes. But he escaped from prison and now he is gathering followers, planning on assassinating the rest of my family and taking back the throne.”

“So your brother sent you after him?”

His lips stretched into what might or might not have been a reluctant smile. “Saeed has infinite faith in the laws he restored, in the system, in his army. He still does not fully realize how far Majid will go to regain power. My brother thinks I’m on vacation in Paris.”

“Paris?” She blinked.

With his headdress and tattered black robe, a rifle slung over his back and a handgun tucked into the sash at his waist, he didn’t look like the typical sightseer around the Eiffel Tower.

He caught her glance skipping over him and tipped his head, the expression on his face, the look in his sable eyes hardening. “All Arabs are not thieves and murderers. We are like any other people. Sometimes, we even go on vacation.”

“I didn’t mean to imply—” Had she offended him? She forgot whatever she was going to say and came up with another question. “Why are you looking for the old king here?”

He watched her for a moment before answering. “Majid is using the area to recruit. I followed his trail. He has some connection to Umman. A smuggler’s convoy is coming in any day now. They will bring guns Majid is sending. I’m going to talk to the men on the convoy and find out where he is now. Then I’ll go to him. I will take you to safety on my way.”

“Thank you,” she said and shook the last of the sand from her hair, then realized her headdress wasn’t anywhere around.

The quicksand had swallowed it. A shiver ran down her spine as she glanced at the spot. “And thank you for coming after me, for saving my life again.” When she turned back to Nasir, she found him watching her.

“We should go,” he said.

She stood at once and went for her pack a few yards away while he called to his camel. Ronu, she remembered his name. He was sleek and beautiful, different from the camels Umman kept that were twice as tall and several times as bulky.

She petted the animal’s neck before Nasir talked him into lowering himself to the ground. She got on without trouble. She’d never had any fear of animals. In her experience, men were far more dangerous.

“Well done,” Nasir said when he was up behind her and Ronu was standing. He sounded surprised.

“I used to ride horses,” she explained.

“He usually spits at strangers who come near him.”

“Is he bad tempered?” She leaned forward so she could pet the animal’s neck again. “He seems nice to me.”

Nasir’s response was a single grunt as he nudged the camel to walking. After a few minutes, once she got used to the swaying caused by Ronu’s uneven gait, she settled into her spot and enjoyed the ride.

“He looks different from the others,” she said.

“A different breed. Umman’s camels have been bred for smuggling.”

“That’s why they look like tanks?”

“They can carry extreme loads over long distances.”

“What was this one bred for?”

“Racing.”

She could picture Nasir flying across the desert like some angel of vengeance, his dark robe billowing behind him. The sight would be fit for a movie screen. “How fast can he go?” She half turned in the saddle.

He looked at her with a dangerous glint in his sable eyes. “Would you like to see?”

She nodded, trusting him to know what he was doing.

He’d saved her from execution, from rape and from quicksand. Knowing who he was—the Beharrainian king’s brother and not a bandit—set her at ease. And that he spoke her language helped, too.

She was alive. The thought hit her out of nowhere and a sense of giddiness came with it. How many times had she faced death in the last twenty-four hours? She didn’t want to think of it. She was alive!

As Ronu gathered speed, she bobbed perilously, until she stopped fighting it and let her body slide against Nasir’s. His solid bulk behind her had a steadying effect. Many Arab men she’d seen so far had a slight build. Nasir didn’t. He was strong and tall, wide-shouldered. And he was on her side.

She was going to make it out of here. A few days, he had said. That was all his business would take. This time next week she would be home.

Chapter Three

“It’s amazing,” she shouted over the pounding of hooves.

He had thought she would be scared once they got up to full speed, but she seemed thrilled. By the ride, or simply happy to be alive. He had never ridden with a woman before and with a man only when he was a child. Camel saddles didn’t accommodate two people well. She was practically sitting on his lap. Nasir kept his eyes on the horizon.

“Do you ride horses?” she shouted back the question.

“Sometimes.”

His tribe bred some of the finest horses in the country. But there was a thrill in a good old-fashioned camel race that those who participated in found addictive.

The animals could take on long-distance races that lasted several days across the desert, arid terrains no horse could have handled. Not every contestant made it to the finish line, nor every animal. These races tried a man. There was something primal, uncivilized about them, and often made him imagine his grandfather racing madly on a raid.

And that image brought to mind the bandit camp and Umman, even though they were a far cry from the honest raiders of the past.

“Your people did not pay your ransom,” he said. “Why?”

“Policy. If one kidnapper got money, everybody would start hunting for Americans.”

He could see the truth in that. If someone close to him got kidnapped he wouldn’t pay, either. He would hunt down the kidnappers and kill them, take back what was his. “Your people are looking for you?”

“I’m sure they are, but Umman moved the camp after they took me. I kept hoping somebody would find me…”

“I found you,” he said. “You’ll be fine.” He would see to it.

Her body was covered in her black abayah, her head wrapped in his plain white kaffiyeh against the rising sun. When she half turned, he caught a glimpse of golden hair escaping at her temple. “Why are you helping me?” she asked.

He owed as much to his sister-in-law. Sadie was from the same country as Dara. “You are a woman in need, alone. In our culture, every man owes his protection to such a woman.” Both of those reasons were true, and yet even together they didn’t explain the protective urge he felt for her.

“Could have fooled me,” she muttered.

“Umman and his men are criminals.” He did not want her to think ill of the country and culture he was so proud of. He could explain, he supposed, about the honor of the Bedu, but he wasn’t sure she would care. “You do not have enough sick people in your own country?” he asked. “Why did you come to Yemen?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Dangerous.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I underestimated that. I thought I knew the risks and that the probability that anything would happen was slim enough to be acceptable.”

“And your family?”

“No time for one. I don’t need a man to be happy,” she said.

Happiness was beside the point. “You need one to be safe,” he explained.

“Not in my country.”

That might have been the case, but she certainly needed one in this part of the world. He wasn’t married, but he had sisters. He knew what kind of responsibility that brought to a man. Sadie had no one in this country. “I will protect you while you are here.”

He should be able to do that—see her safe at a friend’s house while he hunted Majid. Then when he was done, he would come for her and take her back to the palace with him where she would be truly safe until her return to her own country. Dara would be happy to receive her, he was sure.

She stayed quiet for a long time before she said, “Thank you.”

He took a deep breath, satisfied in the knowledge that he was doing the right thing. For the next few weeks, Sadie Kauffman would be like a sister to him.

He fixed that thought in his brain and ignored the way her lithe body felt as she rode in the circle of his arms.

SADIE WATCHED THE CAMP and forced herself to stay on the camel that was taking her closer. Now that the tents were near, her euphoria of having been saved from sure death was wearing off quickly. Coming back went against all her instincts. She’d escaped. For a few hours, she’d been free.

And she would be dead by now if not for Nasir, she reminded herself. She had to trust him.

“We’ve got visitors,” he said and slowed Ronu to a walk.

A few seconds passed before she, too, spotted the beat-up Jeep that she hadn’t seen before. Once they were close enough, she could even make out the license plate—Yemeni.

She scanned the camp for strangers, but couldn’t spot any among the men who were out and about. One of them yelled over to Nasir.

She felt him stiffen in the saddle behind her. “What did he say?”

“The convoy is arriving today. A messenger rode ahead.”

The sudden hardness in his voice made her turn to him. He was looking toward Umman’s tent, the fierce intensity back on his face, darkness shadowing his eyes, tension tightening his mouth.

For a man who’d waited over a month for this very opportunity to gain information he needed, he didn’t look happy. Sadie, on the other hand, felt full of hope all of a sudden. As soon as he had his information, they could get the hell out of here. “You think we’ll be able to leave soon?”

“As soon as I can get my cousin’s whereabouts out of them.” Nasir made the camel lie down and slid off his back then helped her to the sand.

She stood aside, giving him room to unsaddle the animal. “How big do you think the convoy is?”

“I don’t expect more than a dozen men.”

She didn’t look forward to having more scary-looking, battle-hardened bandits and smugglers in camp. “Will they stay long?”

“A few days, probably. Long enough to rest for the return journey. It would be best if you stayed in my tent as much as possible while they are here.”

“No problem.” She wasn’t going to argue with that.

“Stay behind me,” he said, his voice laced with annoyance all of a sudden.

She soon saw the reason. Ahmed was strutting toward Nasir’s tent, derision on his face as he waited for them.

He said something in a hissing, hateful tone.

Nasir responded coolly and passed by him as if he weren’t even there.

“What was that about?” she asked once they were inside and Ahmed had strode off.

“Envy.” Nasir shrugged. “Because I have you and he can’t.”

She watched him in the dim light—his dark shape that dominated the tent, his noble features—and for a moment she wondered what it would be like to truly belong to a man like him. And then it occurred to her that there might be some woman somewhere who did belong to him.

“Do you have a family? Wife and children? Wives?” She corrected herself when she realized he might have more than one. The thought boggled her mind.

“I’m alone,” he said, and something in his voice made her think the statement went beyond his marital status.

“You have your sisters and your brother,” she said. At one point during the ride back, she’d asked him about the royal family.

“I have taken the path of revenge.” He tucked the saddle in the corner of the tent. “My brother will not understand it. He’s grown up with your western ideals, went to school in England. Forgiveness and reconciliation are his best friends, leaving the law to deal with the lawless.” He didn’t sound bitter as much as resigned.

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