The Sheikh's Destiny

Still…”I can’t let you bear the burden of this mess.”

Those daunting shoulders barely moved in dismissal. “In comparison to the messes I deal with daily, this is a breeze.”

She’d bet. Rashid had created his IT development empire from scratch in record time. He must have dealt with endless obstacles and adversaries to remain at the top of such a cutthroat field. And it would be a mess for her, sabotaging the peaceful life and low profile she’d struggled to create since she’d left Zohayd.

“Okay.” The tension gripping the night eased, until she added, “But only if you let me drive you to the E.R.”

“You think I won’t keep my word?”

“I think you’d keep your word even if it meant your life.”

Another long, empty stare greeted her statement, which she now realized signified surprise. “Why this stipulation, then? You think I can’t drive myself?”

It was her turn to shrug. “I’m taking no chances.”

His grimness deepened until she was certain he’d say no.

Suddenly, he handed her the bloody scarf. She fumbled with it as if with a hot coal as he fished inside his coat for a pen and a notebook. He scribbled a few lines, tore the paper out, bent and tucked it onto a thug. A calling card on gifts for the police?

The thug stirred as Rashid whispered in his ear before slamming him into the ground, snuffing his consciousness again.

Calmly rising, he retrieved the scarf from her limp fingers, turned on his heels and crossed the street to his car.

He was leaving?

She watched him go, at a loss for what to do.

Instead of taking the wheel, he walked around to the passenger’s side. Then, leaning over the car’s top, he looked across the distance at her. “Coming?”

Her heart gave a thunderclap of relief as she stumbled into a run, her four-inch stilettos a staccato of eagerness on the asphalt.

In seconds she was inside the posh car, heard faint sirens in the distance as the door closed behind her with a muted thud.

Trembling with the urge to throw herself at him and hug him, she turned to him. “Thank you.”

He ignored that. “Are we waiting for them after all?”

“Oh, no.” She fumbled for the ignition, discovered that the car was running, the motor so smooth it didn’t produce sound or vibration. The car was such a dream to handle that even in her state, she drove to the nearest E.R. without incident.

As she parked, he turned to her. “Now drive home. I’ll have the car and a driver at your disposal from now on.”

He was almost out of the car before she flung herself after him. “I’m coming in with you.”

His stare was even more spectacular in close quarters. “The deal was to drive me here, not escort me inside.”

She clutched his arm tighter. “New deal, then.”

“You have nothing to thank me for.”

Now he answered her earlier thank you.

“I wasn’t thanking you for saving my life, since I figured you’d have an allergic reaction to that. I was thanking you for letting me bargain with my safety for yours. Don’t revert to being an aggravating superhero and insist on walking into the night alone.”

After yet another long stare, he turned and exited the car.

Her heart constricted with disappointment and anxiety. If she persisted now, she’d be imposing on him.

Well, tough. That big, bad warrior would just have to use his endless stamina to put up with her concern.

The moment she was out of the car, her heart gave that boom that only he provoked. He was standing at the E.R. entrance, his pose worthy of the superhero she’d likened him to, one hand braced on his lean hips, the other still gripping her bloody scarf.

He was waiting for her.

She ran toward him, her heartbeat overtaking her feet.

Before she reached him, those cruelly sensuous lips twitched. Was that a smile? She wouldn’t know. She’d never seen him smile.

Before she could make sure, he turned and strode inside.

He had her running to keep up with him, demonstrating that her concern was needless. And that he wouldn’t make it easy for her to see her purpose through.

Once she knew he’d be okay, she’d show him exactly how much she’d put up with to be with him. That, if he let her, she would follow him to the ends of the earth.

Two

All through the admission process, Rashid felt Laylah’s presence a breath away.

He couldn’t take one without it mixing with the scent and heat of her body and her worry.

He found himself barely breathing so both wouldn’t deluge him further. But rationing that involuntary act turned out to be easier than stopping another supposedly voluntary one. In spite of his intention to demonstrate that her presence was unnecessary as well as unimportant, his gaze kept going back to her like iron filings to a magnet. When no one, certainly never a woman, had ever commanded his unwilling response.

But Laylah Aal Shalaan wasn’t anyone. There was no one else in the world that he remembered from the day of their birth.

He’d just turned eight when she was born, the first female offspring in the Aal Shalaan family in forty years. It had only been a week after he’d met her maternal and paternal cousins, Haidar and Jalal, and begun a friendship that had lasted for the next two decades.

She’d grown up under his gaze, always in his orbit, glowing brighter every day with a radiance that had progressively dismayed him. He’d thought it so unfair, for her to be so matchlessly beautiful on the outside, when she could possess no beauty at all on the inside. Not when she was the daughter of a house of serpents.

Now that she’d matured, the injustice had been exacerbated.

His gaze returned to her again and again, documenting her every nuance. Hair and eyes the color of the richest chocolate and brushed with sunlight, skin of honeyed velvet and warm sunsets, a body of lush vitality and femininity and a face of a peculiar brand of splendor and harmony. But it was what those most unusual features radiated that perplexed him.

How could they transmit such… sweetness? Such… genuineness? The woman was descended from ruthless bitches and hardened criminals. There was no way any of that could be real.

Yet he was forced to believe one thing was real. Her concern for him. Its purity and intensity singed him.

But that could be explained away. By gratitude. To her lifeline in this harrowing experience. Once fright and shock drained away, so would her simulation of humanity and good nature.

Then he’d be free to resume thinking the worst of her. And treating her accordingly without the least remorse.

For now, he had to get out of her range. He needed to get his act together. To plan his next step.

“I’m coming with you.”

At her blurted-out declaration, Rashid turned at the door of the treatment room. That eloquent eyebrow of his made her feel like an illogical species in the presence of a Vulcan.

He’d so far let her accompany him through the admission procedure. When the police had arrived, he’d fielded doubts about her being involved in the attack, lying with spectacular smoothness when they’d asked about her bruise.

According to him, it had been a basketball to the face during a one-on-two match with Mira—whom he’d always seen with her in the times she’d only sensed him—who’d back up anything she’d say. Just like the thugs would back up anything he said.

Not that those policemen would investigate any further. She had a feeling they realized the truth but seemed to appreciate his motivation for adjusting it wholeheartedly. They’d behaved as if they realized they were in the presence of a superior force who’d taken the pursuit of justice far beyond their level. The bare bones of his background had left them—and her—awed. They’d left the E.R. shaking his hand for what he’d done to those repeat offenders and slapping his back for how ruthlessly he’d done it.

It was the female E.R. doctor who answered her. “Only family members can accompany patients.” She turned her awed eyes to Rashid. “Or if the patient specifically asks for your presence.”

And you’d rather he didn’t ask, Laylah almost retorted.

She tried cajoling, something she was abysmal at. “You’ve come this far. Might as well let me go all the way.”

His eyes confirmed that she had failed to learn that survival mechanism as an endangered estrogen-based species in her family’s testosterone jungle. Then he presented her with that unyielding back as he preceded the woman into the treatment room.

By the time thirty minutes had passed and more and more doctors had rushed into the room, she was certain they’d discovered his injury was catastrophic, and they’d been trying to contain the situation—and failing…

“I can’t believe your luck, lady.”

Laylah started, her nerves jangling. It was the E.R. nurse who’d first met them. She was exiting the treatment room.

Nurse Norma McGregor smiled widely at her. “Not that you were almost kidnapped, but that this god happened by and swooped in to save you.”

She barely remembered Rashid’s version in time. “Uh… that isn’t what happened…”

“Oh, I know what he said happened, but I’ve seen the men he ripped apart. That had to be to punish what he’d consider a far more serious crime than attacking him. Attacking you. I also don’t buy that story about your bruise. You two don’t feel like you know each other enough for basketball. But don’t worry. The boys in blue will swear on his version, so we can discuss the truth.”

Laylah released the air trapped in her lungs. “You’re uncanny at reading people.”

Nurse McGregor tinkled a laugh. “Comes with the territory.”

“I didn’t want him to give the police a false statement…”

“But he insisted,” Nurse McGregor put in. “And it makes him even more of a god. Shouldering this for you will save you no end of aggravation.”

“Yeah. And he’d already saved me from far worse. If not for him, I would have been somewhere in the underbelly of Chicago by now, wondering if I’d survive. Instead, it was he who… who…” She had to stop as the tears finally began to flow.

Nurse McGregor frowned. “Hey, easy, girl. This is going to hit you hard when you process what happened and what could have happened. So don’t fight it. Seek help.”

Laylah wiped away her tears. “This isn’t about my reaction. It’s his wound…”

“Seeing that much blood disturbed you, huh?”

She shook her head. “I was a volunteer paramedic in my country. I’ve dealt with all kinds of injuries. But to see him hurt because he came to my defense…”

Comprehension dawned in the woman’s blue eyes. “So it’s because he’s your knight in darkest armor that his superficial injury is making you so upset!”

“What superficial injury takes this long to take care of?” Laylah cried.

The woman waved. “Oh, his wound is long taken care of.”

Laylah frowned. “So why are doctors rushing in there and not coming out?”

Nurse McGregor grinned. “That has nothing to do with how he is and everything to do with who he is.”

“Huh?”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t notice the women fighting to take his case?”

She hadn’t. With Rashid around, everything else in the world became inconsequential, almost invisible.

Nurse McGregor chuckled. “Well, they did, when normally they wouldn’t be caught dead with such ‘first-year-intern’ injuries. Then Doctor Vergas threw her weight around as E.R. director and snapped him up.” Laylah had noticed that. “Boy, did he give us a hard time, ordering us to get him sutures, saying he had more experience suturing wounds than all of us combined. But Doc Vergas convinced him to let her do it using the one thing she figured would get through to him.”

“And that was?”

“You, of course.”

“Huh?”

“She said if he didn’t let her suture him, she’d have you come in to talk sense into him. He allowed her to sew him up without further resistance.”

Oh.

He’d conceded only when threatened with the prospect of seeing her?

Was that good, bad or terrible?

Nurse McGregor sighed dramatically. “Even when he caved, he wouldn’t take his sweater off, just raised it. But the inches we saw of him were… whoa.” A hand frantically fanned her face. “Maybe we wouldn’t have survived seeing the whole package, after all.”

TMI, Laylah almost blurted out. TMDI. Too much distressing info. She could do without more stimulation of her fantasies starring Rashid. Coupling concepts like “‘all the way”‘ and “‘the whole package”‘ with him wasn’t good for her psychological health.

The woman went on. “Man, it’s like he isn’t human. First that body, and then he didn’t make a sound as we stitched him up when he’d refused local anesthesia or painkillers afterward. Then there’s that presence, even when he didn’t look at us or say a word.”

Layla was intimate with Rashid’s influence from lifelong experience. But…”All E.R. personnel have come out, including you. So who are those people who keep pouring into the room? What’s going on?”

“That’s what I meant when I said it’s all about who he is. After we were done, he said he’d make a donation to the department. Then he mentioned a number. That’s when we E.R personnel stampeded out, to spread the word and investigate him on the internet And we found out exactly who we have in there.”

That must have been a shock. Rashid was worth a few dozen billions. Men of his caliber had entire hospitals at their beck and call and health insurance that would airlift them anywhere in the world if they sprained their ankle. It was actually odd that he’d consented to go to a regular E.R., even for a “glorified paper cut.”

Nurse McGregor flicked her head toward the room. “So those illustrious figures you saw storming in there? They’re department heads, each trying to sell him on a project that needs funding.”

He was in there talking business? Leaving her out here going out of her mind?

With a smile that must be as brittle as her nerves, she said, “Thanks for the recap and everything else, Nurse McGregor.”

Then she marched into that till-now off-limits room.

Sure enough, Rashid was swarmed.

Not that he appeared concerned. Even surrounded by people like a rock star by groupies, he towered a head over everyone, that vast energy he emitted engulfing the scene. He was wearing only his bloody slate-gray sweater. His coat was hooked carelessly from a finger over his back.

She’d thought that coat had made him more imposing. But stripped of its obscuring folds, the symmetry and strength that infused his every line, the power and perfection that filled and strained against the cashmere, ruined as it was, were…

What had the nurse said? Yeah. Whoa.

No wonder god had been the only word the woman had found to describe him. He did look the part, presiding over his worshippers with all the contained might and forbearance of one.

He saw her the second she entered. In fact, his gaze had been pinned on the door.

Had he been expecting her to disobey hospital rules? But that wasn’t what had kept her out. It had been his unspoken, and this time non-negotiable, demand. So had he been expecting her to disregard his wishes? And had he been watching the door so intently because he’d been worried she would? Or only as his means of escape from those who would devour him whole?

There was no way to read the answer on that heart-wrenchingly gorgeous face he wore like a mask. But she let him read her own thoughts in the gaze that clashed with his.

His response was to raise that eyebrow in a calm, Still here?

She folded her arms over her chest, letting him know he could spend the night holed up in here, wheeling and dealing, and she’d stand right here and wait for him to be done.

A glint in his fathomless eyes acknowledged he was aware of her intention.

Then he turned his gaze to the man standing closest to him. “Mr. Hendrix, please send your proposal to my corporation’s email with E.R. in the subject line. I’ll get back to you within two weeks.” Voices rose, trying to get the same offer. He cut them all short. “Give Mr. Hendrix your proposals. I’ll do what I can.”

Without one further look at anyone, he walked away. She could see they wanted to cling to him, but there was no way anyone could stand in Rashid’s way once he’d made up his mind. They parted for him like the Red Sea for Moses.

He didn’t slow down as he reached her, only inclined his head at her as he exited the room, his earlier silent inquiry now a statement. “You didn’t leave.”

She hurried after him, stumbling on legs that felt mismatched as his scent, even over the overpowering hospital smells, filled her lungs. “You thought I would?”

He spared her a sideways glance from his prodigious height. “You should have.”

“Yeah, right.” Her gaze flitted to the pristine white bandage peeking below what now looked like viscous ink on his sweater. She felt nauseated that his flesh had been torn, again, this time for her.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Her breathlessness had nothing to do with almost running to match his endless strides.

He gave her a look that pointed out that she was the one having trouble keeping up. “I don’t look it?”

You look more than all right. You look divine.

She barely bit back the words. “Looks can be deceiving. Especially yours.”

Both eyebrows rose this time. “I wish I’d known I had chameleonlike powers before. That would have come in handy during my black ops days.”

So after being a war hero he’d veered into ultimate warrior territory. A natural progression, really. Only the most formidable soldiers made it and survived in that utmost-skill, maximum-peril world.

Had that been what had shaped him into this force of darkness? He’d always been complex, but his current depths must have been forged in experiences she couldn’t even imagine. The brutal demands and dangers of a black ops life fit the bill.

She cleared her tightening throat. “I meant your skin. It’s so…” Polished and bronzed and tough, so touchable… so lickable… She clamped down on the overheating thoughts. “Tanned. Anyone less… opaque would be pale as a ghost from blood loss by now.”

His eyes moved dismissively away. “It’s clear you’ve never seen what blood loss looks like.”

She quickened her steps to capture his fixed-ahead gaze. “I do now. I was a volunteer paramedic through college in Zohayd.”

Had she managed to stun him again? That she could decipher a flicker in his eyes meant that she had. And then some.

Did it surprise him that much that she’d volunteered, and in such an occupation? Was he surprised to discover she wasn’t what her mother had tried so hard to make her—a pampered pawn?

“Then you must know all this blood only looks dramatic. I’ve got liters still circulating about, doing its job, and the loss is merely an incentive for my body to produce a replacement, something I’ve always found revitalizing.”

Her jaw dropped. “You find blood loss revitalizing?”

“It does jog my body out of a rut. Before you wonder, I don’t have proclivities for inflicting it on myself for kicks, but when it does happen, I look at the bright side.”

She and Nurse McGregor had been right. There was something more than human about him.

“You’re still not convinced, even when your paramedical experience is telling you I’m right.”

He was. But…”I—I just can’t stop thinking how much worse it could have been…”

“But it wasn’t. You can stop guilt-tripping.”

He was wrong about that. It wasn’t guilt. It was this… fear for him, even when she knew that danger had been averted.

He sighed. “What will convince you that I won’t keel over? I assure you I don’t intend to for roughly the next fifty years.”

The out-of-nowhere flashes of his dry-as-tinder sense of humor amazed her.

Her lips quivered. “I’ll hold you to that.”

Another sideways glance, longer this time, and even more unsettling. But he said nothing more as he navigated out of the hospital and into the freezing night.

She fought the urge to take his hand as they crossed the road. Driving him here and escorting him inside were two things he’d grudgingly consented to. Literally holding his hand was another level of infringement altogether. And she’d rather not be exposed to more eyebrow action.

But she was, in response to her rushing to take the wheel.

He reinforced that eyebrow’s censure by remaining outside, his bulk blocking the passenger-side window.

A button wound it down. “Get in already.”

He only stood there, uncaring of the icy wind as his coat flowed around him like a magician’s cape. “You’d rather drive yourself home instead of giving me directions?”

She thought of saying yes, just so he’d get in from the cold. But even if she didn’t suffer from advanced candor, she wouldn’t bargain with him with anything less than the full truth.

She looked up at him with her unequivocal intention. “I’m driving you home.”

Widening his stance, he shoved his hands in his pants’ pockets, evidently having no problem with haggling over this all night. “Our deal wasn’t open-ended. It ended when you heard with your own ears that my injury was trivial.”

“So the injury wasn’t as bad as you’re used to, and the blood loss turned out to be a kick. But the stitches must be hurting like hell, especially since you went all Rambo and refused anesthesia and painkillers. Even if you have an inhuman pain threshold and feel nothing, bottom line is, I’m still driving. And I won’t just drop you home and leave. I’m coming in with you.”

That silenced him. For at least thirty seconds.

Then he leaned down, looked straight into her eyes, the night of his own eyes deep enough to engulf her whole.

Slowly, distinctly, he said, “I’ve been in three wars, princess. I forget how many other lesser scale, if sometimes even more vicious, armed conflicts. Not to mention all those missions I undertook with one-way tickets because coming back at all, let alone in one piece, was a one in a hundred shot at best. I’ve seen and done and had done to me some of the absolute worst things imaginable. Two-dozen stitches actually feels nostalgic now that I’ve left the battlefield behind for the boardroom. I assure you, I can tuck myself into bed.”

That image filled her with heat. How many women had fought for that privilege, had had that pleasure…?

She bit her lip at the disconcerting projections. “I’m sure you can also lug the whole world on your back, Sheikh Atlas. But that doesn’t mean that you have to, or that you have to do it alone. No matter what, you’re not alone tonight. You got those stitches in my defense, so that makes them mine, too, and I have an equal right in deciding how to view them. You think they’re negligible or nostalgic, I think they’re premium grounds for fussing. You evidently find being fussed over an alien concept, but you’ll have to suck it up, since fuss over you I will. So you might as well give in, get in and let me take you home.”

Judging by the infinitesimal widening of his eyes, she’d definitely flabbergasted him. She’d bet no one had ever dared talk to him like that.

When he finally spoke, his voice was an octave deeper, if that was possible, “I really don’t need—”

“I know you need nothing from anyone.” Now that she had him miraculously off-balance, she had to strike the red-hot iron of his indecision and get the obdurate man in from the cold. “It’s a given you can take care of yourself at the absolute worst of times, having done so all your life. But you won’t tonight. Tonight, I take care of you.”