The Sheik Who Loved Me (12 page)

This was different, and it worried him. Innocent or not, a woman like that could change things. Either way, to Tariq she was an enemy. An obstacle. And either way, she had to go. He had two options. Get rid of the woman. Or find proof that she’d been sent to betray David. He had to move fast.

And if she was some kind of spy, how had it been set up? That part puzzled him. Had she been dropped on the beach in the storm? David had said there was boating debris found with her. Had that been planted? Or had there really been an accident? Could there be more debris out there, possibly some clue that might tie her to a foreign government?

Tariq stubbed his cigarillo out in the flower pot. He’d call his men tonight, get them to scour the remote outer islands at first light, see if they could find anything he could use.

David walked slowly, deliberately along the pier toward Sahar, each step swelling the thrilling sense of anticipation that surged through his blood.

As he got closer to her he could see the soft night breeze toying with the loose tendrils of her fiery hair and ruffling the hem of her silk gown about her ankles. His loins tightened instantly in response.

He swallowed. He was already pumped from his argument with Tariq. Anger had heightened every sense in his body, heated his blood to feverish pitch. He moistened his lips, tasted the salt in the air.

And then he took that final step. “Sahar.”

Chapter 10

H
is hand touched her shoulder, and a crack of heat jolted clear through her spine. She clutched her arms tightly against her stomach, against the sensation.

She didn’t want him to see her face, to see that he possessed the power to melt her from the inside out, to see that he’d once again managed to push her up to the brink of emotional collapse.

But she wasn’t crying, not this time. She was close. But she would not cry. Crying wasn’t part of Jayde Ashton’s makeup. Tears were a sign of weakness. She was not weak. Just stupid. A naive idiot for allowing herself to fall for David Rashid. For allowing her brain to do this to itself again after all these years.

Doctors had always said it could happen again. That she could slip more easily into a fugue-like state of dissociation a second time around. But in all those years, she had never believed it would happen. She thought she’d made herself too strong for it.

Now she knew different. She had an incurable fissure in her foundation. She had no control over it. And that terrified her.

But what horrified her even more than having slipped into that state again was the way her amnesia had lowered her defences against emotion, how it had torn down the protective walls she’d been building around herself since she was eight years old.

How could that simple blank gap in her mind have allowed David Rashid in like that, allowed her to
feel
so deeply when feeling was a just not part of who Jayde Ashton had become?

And why in heaven was she actually feeling rejected and betrayed by David—her target, the man she was being paid to betray?

What was that about? Where in hell had that come from? He didn’t owe her a damn thing. He had every right to be all-out suspicious of her story. Hell, it was barely making sense to her. One minute she’d been setting up a surveillance system, posing as Gibbs’s wife on a diving expedition off the coast of Shendi Island. Then the storm…then next thing she knew she was lying in David Rashid’s bed with not a scrap of clothing and not a clue how she got there.

Even though she’d been sent to spy on David Rashid, her amnesia was genuine. And the desire, the care that had grown out of it was genuine. Frightening as all hell, but genuine. She’d never meant to get into his and Kamilah’s life like this. She would never consciously have done it. And she didn’t know what the hell to do about it now. Jayde Ashton just didn’t have a clue about this feeling. Period.

“Sahar?” The thick rasp of passion in his voice kicked her heart into a light stutter. His hand pressed down on her shoulder. “Sahar, I’m sorry, for my behavior, for Tariq—”

More than anything in this world she wanted to turn around, to bury herself in his arms. She wanted to
be
Sahar. Right now, right at this very instant, it was all she wanted from life—to be Sahar. With no past to worry about. No handlers waiting in Khartoum for her to hand over the man she had come to care for. No worrying about whether or not David Rashid was helping a corrupt government secretly build nuclear weapons of mass destruction…

“Sahar, talk to me.”

She drew in a shuddering breath. She still wouldn’t look at him. She continued to stare out over the black water as she spoke. “You have nothing to apologize for, David.” She tried to hide the tremor in her voice. “You have every right to doubt me. Don’t you think
I
didn’t wonder why no one came looking for me? And now you tell me there is no physical evidence of my amnesia, that my subconscious cooked it up all by itself. You’re right. Tariq is right. It all sounds bizarre. How could I expect you to even begin to understand?”

“Look at me, Sahar.” He grasped her shoulders, turned her body to face him.

She looked slowly, warily, up into his eyes. They were dark with a mad and feral kind of hunger. A thick visceral energy emanated from him in slow, heavy waves. He reminded her of a wild jaguar, one that crouched in the night shadow of a jungle, watching his prey, restraining every muscle, controlling every sinew in his body as he waited for precisely the right time to leap, make his kill.

It excited a reciprocal primal appetite deep within her and it wiped her mind clean of rational thought.

“I want you to know something, Sahar.” His voice had lowered in tone and it curled through her body like dark-blue mist through a morning ravine.

“No matter what happens, I will be there for you. Do you understand that?” He traced his fingers slowly along her collarbone, awakening sleeping nerves, leaving them raw and tingling in the salt air. Her breath caught in her throat at the sensation. He cupped his hand firmly around the back of her neck, drew her closer to him. “When your memory comes back, you won’t be alone. Watson said it could be tough, that it could all come back at once. But I’ll be there for you. I want you to know that.”

She choked back a lump of tears. “Why, David? Why would you want to be there for me? You don’t have a clue who I am…who I might be.”

He moved the rough pad of his thumb firmly along her jawbone, tilting her face up to his. She felt the latent power, the absolute control in his hand. He could snap her neck in an instant if he wanted to.

What would he do when he found out who she really was?

“I don’t need to know your name to know
you,
Sahar.” He scored her bottom lip with his thumb. She shuddered under his touch.

“I don’t need a government identity document to reach in and touch the person inside.” Her body responded to the dark meaning wrapped in his words by sending a surge of molten warmth down to her belly. With it came an instinctive desire to open up to him, fully, to allow him to touch her inside, to feel the full, hot, maleness of him deep within in her core.

His mouth moved closer to hers. So close. She felt her knees go weak, felt her whole body go boneless at the anticipation of his lips taking hers. But he didn’t. He just whispered hotly against them. “I want you, Sahar. I want you so badly I ache.”

Her vision narrowed. She opened her mouth to speak, couldn’t. His lips almost touched hers. She could almost taste him, his warmth, his maleness, his heat…his tongue.

He pulled back. “No. I can’t do this, Sahar.” His voice came out thick as molasses. “I can’t do this to you.”

Yes, you can!
Every molecule in her body screamed. She needed him. It was as if he embodied the power of life itself. She needed to tap into that force, that hot energy, with a desperation that defied all logic.

She leaned into him, pressing the curves of her body against the hard length of his. And her world shrank to just this instant. Just this sensation of his solid strength, his maleness hard up against the silk of her dress. Absolutely nothing else mattered now. Nothing could. She pressed her pelvis against the thick muscle of his thigh, lifted a leg, driven by an aching and potent primal force, a mad hunger to feel him against her.

He caught her knee with one hand, held it against his hip and moaned as she moved against him, the sound guttural, animal. His other hand cupped her buttocks, yanked her hard up against himself. She gasped at the heat that seared through her.

“Sahar.” His
R
s rolled in his throat, his Arabic accent swallowing the refined British as his smooth veneer fell away to reveal the rough warrior underneath. “You could regret this. There…there may be someone else your life….”

“No,” she whispered, reaching up, brushing her lips along the exquisitely firm and sculpted line of his. “There…there is no one.”

He stilled suddenly, grasped her jaw in a vicelike grip and pulled back. He held her face steady, forcing her to look up at him as his eyes bored down into hers, dangerously dark. “Are you
sure?
”

“I’m sure.” She was dead sure. She’d never been consumed by this kind of fire before. She’d never felt this kind of emotional longing for a man. Jayde Ashton had never allowed herself to feel deeply for anyone…not since she was eight years old.

“How would you know?”

“I…I just know. I can feel it in my heart.” She whispered. There
could
be no one else.

It was an answer that satisfied him. A slash of white teeth glinted in the moonlight as he smiled. A devilish glitter lit his eyes. And her adrenaline spiked at the wicked intent she saw there.

Then he kissed her. Hard. Fast. His tongue probing, stroking, his teeth scoring. She felt his hand move down her thigh. She felt him bunching up her silk gown.

Then she felt his fingers. Rough. Warm. Callused. She felt those beautifully tapered fingers searching, tearing her panties aside.

She lifted her knee higher, widening access. And his finger plunged roughly into her slickness.

A low moan escaped her throat. Her knees gave in and she sank down, melting onto the length of his finger, his hand.

He deepened his kiss, moving his tongue, his finger, inserting another, twisting them inside her. He moved his hand deeper and she felt his palm rub against the sensitive nub between her legs. She could hardly breathe. She moved against the palm of his hand, desperate, hungry, wild. Blind to anything but the instant.

“My yacht,” he whispered thickly into her hair.

“It’s…it’s in the middle of the lagoon,” she countered, her voice breathy, her heart hammering as though it would split free from her chest.

“We’ll take the Zodiac.” He scooped her up, carried her effortlessly in his arms to the small rigid-hull inflatable tethered to the pier. David reached the craft, set her down, leaped onto the boat and held his hand out to her over the water, beckoning her like the desert prince he was.

She reached for his grasp, but as she did a soft lagoon swell surged suddenly with the incoming tide, rolling the boat sharply away from her as she stepped forward.

It happened so fast. David felt her hand slipping from his grasp. He heard her sharp intake of breath. Then the splash. He sucked in his breath. “Sahar!”

There was silence. Darkness. He could see nothing but flecks of gold moonlight glinting on black ripples of water and white foam where she went under.

Oh God, Sahar.

And in that instant David Rashid knew he never, ever wanted to lose this woman. He would do what it took to make her his, no matter who she was. No matter who waited for her. He was going to keep her. On his island. For himself and Kamilah.

“Sahar!” he barked, frantically stripping off his dinner shirt, kicking off his shoes, ready to dive in. Then he heard her laugh.

Dizzying relief ripped through him. He spun around.
Where was she?

And she laughed again, the sound of a clear brook running through his senses, floating over the swells.

A crazy bubble of happiness erupted low in his stomach and pushed up to his throat. But anxiety kept it locked down.
Where the hell was she?

Then he heard her again. He spun to his left. And there she was. On the other side of the inflatable, sculling out into the black bay.

The moonlight glinted off the waves, off the slickness of her wet hair and off voluminous silk billows as her gown lifted and flowed around her with the swells. His initial alarm was replaced with a sense of bemused wonder.

She looked like a mermaid!
His
mermaid. She must have dived under the Zodiac and swum up to the other side—just to scare him.

“Sahar!” He said half in anger, half in relief, bewilderment muddling his brain.

She giggled at his shock. It shot a spurt of fuel into the strange cocktail of hot energy and warring emotions within him. She was challenging him. Toying with him. Playing. The way he’d seen her play in the waves. The way he’d seen her play with his child.

That odd, painful ball of happiness and delight spiced with shock exploded through the tension in his throat, erupting into mad laughter. Laughter that boiled from the base of his belly, reverberated up through his torso and out through his chest in glorious release. He threw back his head and just laughed into the night sky like he hadn’t since he was a kid. And by Allah it felt fine.

She was laughing, too, sculling farther out into the shallow lagoon, toward the depths where his yacht was moored.

He stilled suddenly, heat stirring his loins once more as he watched her, floating, tantalizing, beckoning. Billows of wet silk fanning out about her.

She was luring him, a man of hot sun and dry sand, into her element. Water. Into depths he’d been trying for years to avoid. He’d known the instant he’d first looked into her emerald eyes that he would succumb and drown in their depths.

“You coming?” she called darkly out over the swells.

And he couldn’t resist her siren call. Like an adventurer of old, he left the security of his craft and plunged into the sea, powerless to defy the song of her seduction.

But as he swam toward her, she kept moving just out of his reach, her rippling laughter taunting him, pulling him along like threads of moonlight.

She lured him over a sandbank. The water was now chest high. His feet found the sea bed, and he began to wade aggressively toward her. But still she kept infuriatingly just beyond reach, floating in her sea of silk, toying with him, tempting him until he thought he would burst with his desire for her.

In sheer desperation he lunged at her. But she ducked under, leaving only a ring of empty ripples and glittering phosphorescence in her wake.

He looked to his left, to his right. Nothing. Then he gasped as she grabbed hold of his legs underwater and pulled herself up along the length of his body to the surface. Surprise swirled with a titillating pleasure as she surfaced against him. The thick wet silk of her gown enveloped him as the ocean surged and fell, the folds of it tangling erotically about his legs.

Her hair was slick as a seal’s, and water ran creamy over skin made luminescent by moonlight. Her eyes were dark and mysterious. Magic eyes.
Mermaid’s eyes.
The eyes of a mythical creature with no name, no place, no memory. He stared into those eyes as the water lifted them slightly. Up, then down. A basic rhythm of the earth. The ocean responding to the moon. Gravity. Essential. Natural. Undeniable.