The Black Sheep Sheik (10 page)

“I’m sure.”

Isabelle woke with a start. Her cheeks felt hot; her thoughts were jumbled. A long second passed before she fully transitioned from her erotic dream to stark reality.

Amir was coming up from the dugout under the shack. “I found a couple of these.” He had brought an empty bottle with him. “Are you well?” He stopped as he took her in. “Does anything hurt?”

“Fell asleep for a minute.”

“I thought so. You were mumbling.”

Her heart nearly stopped. “Anything interesting?” she asked nonchalantly.

“If it was, it was in another language.” He grinned. “What do you think of this?”

She eyed the bottle doubtfully at first, then realized it could come in handy for hitting someone over the head. This had obviously been Amir’s intention, since he was testing the balance of the bottle in his hand now, holding it like a baseball bat.

She was a doctor. Her first thought was to heal and not to harm. She held a hand out now as she stood. “You keep the screwdriver. I’ll take that.”
And stop thinking about that dream. Now. Pronto. Immediately.
Their current situation needed her full attention. “So a screwdriver and a bottle.”

Amir’s friends were on the way. If the guy outside had any nasty ideas before help came, at last they had a way now to defend themselves. With both of them armed and the element of surprise on their side, who knew what could happen? They might even make it.

Amir strode to the window and peered through the gap the nasty blanket didn’t cover. Then he moved to the bed and grabbed the mattress, laid it against the front wall of the shed. “When the rescue team gets here, we need to take cover. There’ll be too many bullets flying out there.” He grinned suddenly. “Sorry. I know you don’t want to be protected. I don’t think I can stop trying. It is not a bad thing.”

She took a couple of slow breaths and made a concentrated effort to clear the last remnants of her dream from her brain.
Okay. Gone.

“It’s fine. It’s teamwork. I get it.” She wished there was more light to see the smile that bloomed on his face.

“You know what else is all about teamwork? Marriage.” His smile transformed into a wicked grin.

“Quit while you’re ahead,” she warned him. The rest of a smart-alecky response was on the tip of her tongue, but a cramp started low in her belly just then, distracting her.

She put her hand on the spot and tried to massage the cramp away.

“What is it?” Amir was by her side in a split second, placing his hands on hers. He had strong hands with long, aristocratic fingers. Exactly as she remembered in her dream.

She could see those hands wrapped around the steering wheel of some superexpensive sports car, or reining in a wild camel. Or holding their baby. An emotion she didn’t want to acknowledge welled up inside her chest. She looked away from their joined hands. “More Braxton Hicks.”

“I don’t like these practice contractions. If they make you wince, then what about the real thing? I don’t want you to be in pain.”

“I’ll deal with it.” She fully planned on getting an epidural. She was a doctor, very comfortable around drugs. In all the years she’d worked at the hospital, she hadn’t heard of a single adverse reaction to the new family of painkillers they now used during childbirth.

“It would be better if my heir was born in Jamala. But either way, I’ll be there to hold your hand.”

She looked up, surprised. “No, you won’t.” That wasn’t at all how she had planned it.

His face turned stony. “He is my son.”

“But you’re hardly my soul mate and best friend. We barely know each other. Giving birth is a personal, intimate thing.”

His facial muscles tightened even more. “I’m the father.”

She pulled away from him. “I can’t relax around you, okay?”

He blinked as he watched her. “I make you nervous? But all I want is whatever is best for you.”

Not exactly nervous, but out of sorts, unsure of herself, sometimes dazed, sometimes tingly. She didn’t like it.

“I will see my son born. A husband’s place is at his wife’s side at such a time.”

“We’re not getting married.”

“The right thing…” He paused, probably remembering that this was the argument that hadn’t gotten him anywhere so far. He drew a slow breath and changed tactics. “You cannot tell me that when I kiss you—”

“Stop.” Okay. He had something there. Possibly the root of their communication problem. She kept letting him kiss her. How could he understand that she meant business when she said no, if she kept giving in to his amazing kisses? “We’re not kissing anymore,” she informed him, not without regret.

“The hell we aren’t.” He backed her right up against the wall.

He braced his hands on each side of her, lowering his head slowly, holding her gaze. A slow thrumming started in her blood. But when his lips were an inch from hers, he stopped. His warm breath fanned her face, his nearness wreaking havoc on her senses. Heat burned in his eyes, emanated from his powerful body.

She didn’t want to want him, but she did.

He, on the other hand, didn’t bother to hide his desire for her, at all. “We
will
be together,” he told her with a voice of smooth, hot velvet.

Knees, don’t fail me now.
She drew a slow, shallow breath. His lips were so distractingly close. She felt her eyelids drift closed of their own volition.
No. Not going to happen.
But she couldn’t have moved to save her life as his mouth came closer and closer to hers.

A soft brush of his lips was all she got, which left her ravenously hungry.

But he was already pulling away. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

Now he is going to start sounding reasonable?

She could have cried with frustration, but before she could as much as yell at him for putting her in this state, the sound of an arriving car interrupted them. They went to the window together.

A black SUV rolled into view, men jumping out even before the engine was cut.

“Darek. We’ll be fine now,” Amir said next to her, relief in his voice. “I don’t see the others, but they must be around, out of sight. It’s about to begin. Get down behind the mattress.”

But the new arrivals didn’t look like they were preparing for a fight. In fact, the man who had brought them here walked right up to Darek. They looked pretty friendly.

Amir muttered a couple of heated words in his own language.

“What happened?” She turned to him, bewildered.

His face might as well have been carved of stone. “We’ve been betrayed.”

And as he turned, she saw a dark spot on his shoulder, reached out a hand and found some wetness. “What’s this?”

“The bullet hole. It’s not that bad.”

He must have aggravated the wound while exploring the hidden room below the shack. “You can’t lose blood. Stop moving. Lie down on the bed.”

He shook his head. “If things don’t go well in the next five minutes, I’m not going to live long enough to bleed out,” he said, as if that was supposed to relax her.

Amir stepped in front of Isabelle to protect her as much as possible. He tucked the screwdriver into his waistband at his back. “Don’t let them see that bottle.”

“Why?” She sounded ready to fight.

His mind was still trying to catch up with the fact that Darek was the enemy. Darek wouldn’t have told Stephan and the others about the phone call. His true friends still had no idea where he was.

“Don’t want to force their hand when we’re at a disadvantage. We are outnumbered and they’re better armed. If we can hold on until darkness, our chances of breaking out will be much better. At least some of them might be sleeping. And they won’t be able to see as well.”

“Plus you might break through to the tunnel by then,” she added and shoved the bottle under her armpit under the shirt, holding it there with her arm, out of sight, but close enough to grab if a fight was forced on them.

He turned to the door, standing with legs slightly apart, square in the middle of the room, keeping his face impassive as the door opened.
Keep calm. Control the situation.

But the blood boiled in his veins. He couldn’t help one small comment as Darek appeared. “I should have known. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“So it doesn’t,” the black-hearted prince of Saruk agreed easily, not appearing to be struggling with a crisis of conscience.

“You’d betray your friends?”

“Friends are friends, but I’ll always do what’s best for my own people. You’d do the same.” As usual, he was dressed like a movie star, a superior grin on his face. “History remembers winners. It doesn’t care by what method they win.”

He brushed lint off his double-breasted suit jacket, able to notice a small detail like that at a moment like this. He always placed great importance on his appearance. He was known to fly in a full new wardrobe from London several times a year, through good times and bad, even in times of famine.

Not that his country had seen famine for some time now. In fact, they had been doing rather well lately.

“Saruk is a big country. You already have everything you need.” Amir watched the man’s eyes instead of the weapon in his hands. He’d been in enough fights in his younger years to know that it was the eyes where everything was decided.

“Big country, big headache. More administrative costs, more everything.” Darek shrugged.

And Amir realized that he had probably been planning the attack for a while now, had had plenty of time to justify it in his twisted brain. It would be a waste of time to try to appeal to his conscience. He was like his father, after all, and didn’t have any.

“We’re going to need those underwater oil rights, I’m afraid,” the traitor was saying.

Of course.
“It’s not up to me. Those rights are governed by COIN.” He had created the Coalition of Island Nations with his friends for that specific purpose. To manage those oil rights together and to facilitate other economically favorable treaties, including those designed to boost tourism and industry.

Darek raised his gun. “Not to worry. I’m planning on calling a meeting in the morning. Why don’t you hand over that phone you called me from? We wouldn’t want you to be ruining my big surprise, now, would we?”

Everything in Amir screamed to fight, even if it meant certain death. But he kept coming back to the same thing over and over again. Once he was dead, who would protect Isabelle and his son? Teeth grinding, he tossed the phone to Darek, pushing redial. His last call had been to Efraim’s suite. If Efraim picked up, he would hear what was going on here.

But Darek must have caught the small move and turned off the phone, tossed it down and ground it under his heel until the slim unit came apart and lay broken, in pieces. “There comes a time when every man must accept his fate,” he lectured in a tone of superiority.

“You’re not going to get away with this.” He would get the bastard. And if he couldn’t because he was dead, his friends would avenge him. Betrayal on this scale would not be forgiven.

But Darek’s arrogant smile only widened. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that, I’m afraid.” Then he looked Isabelle over from head to toe, taking his time, openly leering. “Pretty. And resourceful, from what I hear. Then again, you always had good taste in women. She’ll be a shame to waste.”

His gaze hesitated on Isabelle’s breasts, which were swollen with pregnancy. “Still, in this case I don’t think her beauty will save her.” He sounded almost regretful. “She carries your bastard. I’m afraid, I can’t allow that.”

He turned back to Amir and continued. “You must die without an heir, so when I annex Jamala, there will be nothing more natural than for me to become her ruler. I shall save an orphaned nation. A hundred years from now, history books will be calling me the
Savior Prince.
” He gave a dark, nefarious smile that would have fit a silver-screen villain perfectly.

Anger pushed Amir forward a step. But Darek had already moved back and the door slammed closed in his face. The padlock clicked shut. They were trapped again.

He slammed his fist against the rough-hewn wood, ignoring the slivers that dug under his skin, reminding himself that a prince didn’t swear in front of a lady under any circumstances.

“I swear to my ancestors that I will see you dead for this,” he called through the door.

But Darek was already on the phone, ordering a helicopter to a nearby field for the following morning.

Probably the faster to escape after the bastard killed them.

I
SABELLE PEERED INTO
the hidden, nearly pitch-dark space below the floorboards. She could barely make out Amir.

“Why didn’t he kill us right here and now?”

“You don’t take the bait out of the trap until you’ve trapped whatever you are hunting. His plan could still go wrong. But as long as he has us, he knows my friends will come to him eventually.”

Glass shattered as he broke a bottle against a wall. “I’ll see if I can loosen a few rocks. There might be a tunnel behind this wall.”

“I wish I could help.”

“Rest.”

The air coming up from the hole was chilly and musty. She could hear a mouse or some other rodent scurry across the packed-dirt floor down there.

“Is it working?” She tried to see better.

“Not fast enough.” He grunted with effort.

“How about the screwdriver?” She bent with effort and extended the tool down into the hole. The tips of her fingers touched Amir’s as he reached up. Heat suffused her body. She snatched her hand away. “Do you think this will work?”

He moved back to the wall where he’d been working. “Darek said he’s calling a meeting for the morning. We have the rest of the day and all night. There’s either a tunnel behind this wall or there isn’t. We have to at least try. It’s the best chance we have.”

“Don’t hurt your shoulder.”

“Is that doctor’s orders?” he teased, injecting a moment of humor into the tense situation.