The Sheikh's Destiny (3 page)

So be it. She’d never be able to give him anything of equal value to what he’d given her tonight, so she’d at least give him the truth. He could do with it as he wished.

It appeared he was at a loss what to do with it. Her confession had clearly stunned him.

His response, when it finally came, was to pretend he hadn’t heard it and to pursue his previous point. “Back my statement, that they attacked me and not you, and I will go to the E.R.”

He was trying to spare her the postattack ordeal, from the investigations through to the trial.

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

A
ll 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.
TM
D
I
.
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.”