Sold to the Sheikh (10 page)

They had left the city and the comforting orange glow of the streetlights a while ago, and were now driving through the black of some remote suburb. The darkness gave Stella an ounce of bravery, and she reached out to grab the Sheikh’s hand. There was an awful moment when his hand lay still and she thought he might pull away, but then he squeezed her fingers in his own, and they sat like that, in silence, until the car turned into a nondescript drive.

Stella tried to get her bearings, but she couldn’t see much out of the tinted windows. There was a security gate, but they were waved right through, and the car drove back into blackness before turning into a brightly lit carport.

Stella gaped. She recognized this kind of driveway; even from inside the car, she could tell there was an ambulance bay. But this didn’t look like a hospital. It looked like an old, ivy-covered Georgian mansion.

The car rolled to a halt, and she felt Sheikh Bashir retreat back into himself again. He released her hand, and got out of the car.

“Stay here,” was all he said, and then the door closed with a firm, final crunch.

Stella watched his tall, broad frame walk purposefully toward the wide bay doors, saw that there was someone there to meet him.

Someone in a white coat.

Whatever it was, Sheikh Bashir was obviously upset. He hadn’t retreated in anger; it had felt like the way a person retreats when they’re hurt, when they need to hide away and tend to their wounds. Like an animal, in a way. It was something that was oh-so-familiar to Stella, having perfected it herself during the past few months, though now, looking at it from the other side, it seemed somehow obviously wrong-headed. Hiding away didn’t accomplish anything when there was someone there who wanted to help.

And she wanted to help him, the way he had helped her, even if he didn’t know that he had. After all, in just the way he had pushed her to something she didn’t know she needed, maybe he needed her to show that she wanted to be there for him.

Stella debated only a second longer, and then she opened the door and tumbled out of the car in a rush. She nearly ran to the doors the Sheikh had entered, afraid she wouldn’t have the guts to keep going if she lost any momentum at all.

A heavy mist had condensed into a light drizzle, and Stella could feel her hair begin to frizz by the time she entered the stately looking building. She did her best to smooth it, and then remembered that she was wearing a likely ruined designer dress and heels, and no amount of hair-smoothing would make her look appropriate for the setting.

Which was exactly what she had thought it might be: some sort of expensive medical facility. There was no one at the reception desk, perhaps because they’d been called away for whatever it was Sheikh Bashir was dealing with. The lighting was different than it normally was in the hospitals Stella frequented for her volunteer work: softer, somehow more human. Soothing. The walls were a calming, happy shade of yellow, and the carpet under her feet was soft, yet firm, the kind that would absorb distressing sounds but remain easy to clean.

Stella was beginning to think she knew what kind of facility this was. It was the moneyed version of the sorts of places she’d volunteered in for most of her life.

She moved into the center of the foyer and looked down the hall to her right. It was a large building, probably easy to get lost in, but there was only one open door at the very end of the hall, streaming light into the dark corridor like a beacon. Stella walked toward it.

She heard Sheikh Bashir’s voice as she approached, rumbling in a low, gentle murmur. It sounded like he was trying to soothe someone. Stella was stung by momentary regret: she was intruding on something private; there was no doubt about it. Yet, somehow, she felt it would betray everything she’d experienced so far with Sheikh Bashir if she were to turn away.

Slowly, quietly, she peeked around the edge of the doorframe.

Sheikh Bashir sat on a stool, hunched over a bed, speaking softly to an old, frightened woman. The woman’s expression swung back and forth between confusion, fear, and recognition, even in the space of a few moments. The stress must have been incredible. She looked back at Sheikh Bashir as though she were about to cry.

“You don’t talk to me that way!” she said, her thin voice shaking with fury. “Who are you?”

“I’m Bashir, Ms. Kincaid,” he said, taking her hand in his. “I’m a friend of Mark’s. I’m here to help you.”

The old woman snatched her hand away as though it had been burned, and slapped the Sheikh full in the face.

“I know
you
,” she hissed at Sheikh Bashir. “You’re no friend of Mark’s. How could you do that to the boy? How could you?”

Holy crap
, Stella thought.
What was that about?

The Sheikh barely reacted, his voice never rising above that calm, soothing murmur. He was perfectly controlled, except for a hint of sadness in his eyes.

Or guilt
.

But Stella didn’t have time to ponder. The old woman pointed a crooked finger directly at her, and said, “Who is
she
?”

Slowly, Sheikh Bashir turned his head, as though he knew what he would see, and wanted to delay the inevitable as long as possible. His face, when he finally showed it, was twisted in fury. No, an attempt to conceal his fury. And betrayal. Shock. His face made it perfectly clear that this was much more of a violation than Stella knew. This was something she was never supposed to see.

Oh God
, Stella thought. This was not what she wanted. She wanted to help; she
knew
, specifically, in this situation, that she could help. She wanted to help both Ms. Kincaid and Sheikh Bashir. She wanted him to be happy to see her.

And now she wanted to know what he had done. What the man she felt she had grown to know, somehow, was capable of doing. What the man who had just been so deeply inside her could do to a person.

“What are you doing here?” he said, his voice cold. He was only keeping calm for the benefit of Ms. Kincaid—Stella was sure of it.

“I came to help,” Stella said firmly.

Stella had never walked away from a frightened, hurting person in her entire life, and she wasn’t going to start now. She’d do her best to help this poor woman, because that was what she did. After that, Sheikh Bashir could do whatever he wanted to her.

~  ~  ~

“Who are you?” Grandma Kincaid sounded desperate. Bashir had never stopped thinking of her that way, even if he’d learned to stop addressing her as ‘Grandma Kincaid’ because it upset her so. It pained him now to see her look back and forth between Stella and himself with such obvious fear in her watery blue eyes. She cried, “Where am I? Why can’t I talk to Mark?”

Bashir never knew how to answer that particular question. “Mark’s dead” would be unspeakably cruel, but he found lying to Grandma Kincaid impossible. He never felt as inadequate, as helpless, as he did in the face of Grandma Kincaid’s illness. All the money in the world at his disposal, and it did nothing to help him comfort this poor woman when she needed it most.

But apparently Stella Spencer knew what to do.

“Mark’s wonderful, isn’t he?” she said brightly, and picked up an afghan from the foot of the bed. She was so confident that Bashir himself almost believed that she had known his friend. He could only watch as Stella sat by Grandma Kincaid’s side and wrapped her snugly in the afghan, holding the old woman close as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Even more incredibly, it seemed to work. Grandma Kincaid began to relax into Stella’s arms, swaddled tightly in the blanket.

“You’re a friend of Mark’s?” the old woman said hopefully, turning her face up to Stella’s.

“Best looking boy at Cambridge,” Stella smiled back at her, gently rubbing her back.

It’s not a lie
, Sheikh Bashir realized. But already Grandma Kincaid looked happier, as though she were relieved to find that she was among friends. Not knowing where you were or how you’d gotten there would be slightly less terrifying if you trusted the people you were with. Bashir himself knew that almost anything was tolerable if you had people you could trust.

It tore at his heart now to wonder if he could trust Stella. He had told her to stay in the car. It had obviously been a private matter, a serious matter, and then he’d looked up to find her spying on him.

Well, perhaps not spying. Perhaps that was a premature judgment. But no matter the outcome, Bashir had to face the fact that he
wanted
to be able to trust Stella Spencer, when, as a rule, he trusted no one.

And was that in any way a reasonable expectation, even for someone who was not in his position? To trust a woman he’d only just met, and under the most unorthodox of circumstances? Yet it was undeniably what his heart wanted. And now, watching Stella tend to someone she didn’t know at all, watching her care for another human being in distress, simply because she could, Bashir felt comforted, too, just to know that Stella existed. Just to know that people like her truly, truly existed in this otherwise calculating, selfish, deceptive world.

If she were being truthful with him, that is. If this was who she truly was. It would break his heart, he realized, to discover that Stella Spencer had any other kind of motive.

Bashir recoiled from the hospital bed, clenching his fists with the effort to maintain control.
It would break my heart
. The phrase had entered his mind unbidden, because it was fundamentally, undeniably true.

This was a disaster.

Luckily—or not, depending upon how you looked at it—Bashir had spent a number of years learning how to tell when a woman was lying to him. He’d vowed it would never happen again, not after what it had cost him the last time.

He would have to rely on those skills now more than ever.

“Don’t let him get fresh with you,” Grandma Kincaid was saying to Stella in confidence. “He does have a way with the ladies.”

“Who, Sheikh Bashir?”

Grandma Kincaid frowned. “No, dear. You stay away from
him
altogether.”

Bashir grimaced, and then gritted his teeth when Stella looked up and saw his expression. He was supposed to be observing
her
, reading the micro expressions on her face, divining her intentions and desires, not the other way around. Even so, in the space of just a few minutes, he was sure Stella Spencer had learned more about him than any woman in his recent memory.

And Grandma Kincaid, as much as Bashir was ever devoted to her, was not helping.

Still, he had his responsibilities. This was clearly going to be one of those nights when his presence caused more harm for the old woman than good. He would do what he could for her elsewhere. Bashir bowed his head slightly and went in search of a doctor.

C
HAPTER 12

Stella didn’t know what to say. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d been left speechless in the twenty-nine years she’d lived prior to meeting Sheikh Bashir, and yet, in the two days that she’d known him, she’d lost count of how often she’d been totally flummoxed.

They sat together again in the back of the Sheikh’s car—driving, she presumed, back to the hotel—only now, the distance between them felt immense. Insurmountable. She hadn’t thought of it until now, but this was the first time they’d sat close enough to touch and…didn’t.

Stella knew now that the boundary she’d crossed by poking her stupid nose into that hospital room had been much starker, much more inviolate, than she’d thought. And it wasn’t hard to guess why, either: Sheikh Bashir had done something wrong. He’d hurt people he supposedly cared about.

Maybe that’s what he didn’t want her to know about. That wasn’t such a terrible thing, Stella knew. It was only human. But that didn’t make her feel any better about knowing there was
something
, while not knowing exactly how bad that something was.

But the very worst part was that she cared at all.

You lunatic,
she thought, turning to glare out of the rain-splattered window.
He hasn’t promised you anything beyond sex.
Stella cringed.
And money.

She had completely and totally forgotten about the money. How powerful did her attraction to Sheikh Bashir have to be to make her forget about fifty thousand freaking dollars? No wonder he didn’t trust her. He was
paying
her.

And yet she’d seen his face, watching her with Ms. Kincaid. That hadn’t been the face of a man who regarded her with detachment. It hadn’t been the face of someone who expected to say goodbye to her in just a few days’ time.

Just thinking of it made her desire for him flare, igniting the memory of his touch on her body.
In
her body. She squirmed in her seat, wanting to feel her soreness, wanting to put pressure back on the beating pulse she felt between her legs.

Stella tried to figure out what to say the entire ride back to the hotel. She noted the growing height of the buildings outside with a kind of dread, knowing it meant they were closer to their destination, knowing, with some sort of gut certainty, that when they were no longer trapped in the small private world of the car, she would lose her chance to speak. She’d lose her chance to ask questions, to understand, to turn Sheikh Bashir back into the kind of man she wanted to be with.

Oh, hell, Stella
.
What does it matter if you want to be with him?

The fact was her head was swimming. Her vagina still throbbed with the feeling of him inside her, with the way he’d nearly turned her inside out and showed her a new side to herself, and now her mind was abuzz with anxiety and uncertainty about what kind of man he really was. And by the time she’d worked up the courage to open her mouth, the car had slowed to a halt.