The Sheik Who Loved Me (14 page)

He didn’t know if he could do it.

Chapter 11

S
he had to think fast. There was a chance Tariq had simply wanted David for some other urgent business. And if Tariq had nothing on her, she had two choices. Continue to deceive David. Or come clean and tell him who she was.

She could do neither. Deceiving him now was out of the question. She was just not capable of consciously hurting him and Kamilah in that way.

And telling him? That would jeopardize an international sting operation. And it could endanger lives. It was not feasible.

There was one other option. She could abort the mission.

That’s what she would do. She had to find a way to reach Lancaster, tell him she’d been compromised, that she needed to be brought in. ASAP.

Jayde glanced at the antique clock on the cabin wall. David still wasn’t back. He’d been gone for over an hour.

It was nothing, she told herself. He was a busy man. He and Tariq had business. And she could get herself back to shore with the inflatable if she really wanted, or she could swim.

But in spite of her reasoning, she had a sinking sensation something had gone horribly wrong.

She anxiously fingered her ring finger. Then it hit her.
It was missing.
The engraved wedding band she’d been handed as part of her cover with all the other “pocket litter” was gone.

She’d taken the ring off on the boat because wearing jewelry on her hands irritated her. She’d slipped it into the document pouch with the other papers she and Gibbs had been given.

Some people routinely took their rings off to wash their hands and do other things. So technically, it wasn’t a mistake, she told herself. She’d been behaving as a normal married woman might have. But in this case, it had turned out to be a critical error. On a deeply personal level. Because maybe if she’d kept the ring on, maybe if she’d been able to read the inscription on the wedding band, she just might have remembered sooner who she was…and why she was anywhere near Shendi Island. Maybe she’d never have found herself this far down the road with David Rashid.

Jayde sat on the bed and sank her fingers into her mass of hair. How could this have happened to her? Why had she lost time again so many years later?

She closed her eyes.

It was the storm. The boating accident. It had to be. It must have shocked her right back to that terrible ordeal off the coast of Cornwall when she was only six…Kamilah’s age. That’s why she’d felt such a visceral connection to the child.

Jayde got up, made her way toward the bathroom. She leaned over the basin and stared into the mirror. She touched the clear amber stone that hung at the hollow of her throat.

Amber. The name of her twin sister. She covered the stone with her hand and closed her eyes. For a second last night she’d thought David had been on to her. But he’d only been talking about the stone. Not about the sister she’d watched drown with her father in that awful boating accident when she was six.

Jayde and Amber. Her parents had given the twins the names of precious stones. She and Amber had been inseparable. She choked down the balloon of pain in her throat, stumbled back to the stateroom and sank down onto the bed. Her body began to shake. Her breathing became labored. She began to relive the horrific memories her mind had tried once again to blot out.

They’d been on holiday, visiting her grandfather in Cornwall. She and Amber had gone out on a boat with her dad. A terrible storm had risen out of nowhere blacking out the sun and sky. They’d tried to outrun it, but it was impossible. Monstrous waves had swamped the boat. They’d ended up in the viciously churning and frigid sea. Her father had saved her first, shoving her into the heaving lifeboat as he choked and coughed out the salt water in his lungs

Hold tight baby, I’ll be right back.
Her father’s words echoed in her skull. She clutched her arms tight about her waist and swayed.

He never came back.

He went after Amber. But he was tired, too tired to fight the raging sea. He was injured, bleeding. The waves were too big. The water too cold.

She never saw her father or sister again.

For two days she’d lain curled up in the bobbing lifeboat, adrift in the sea, shrouded in thick gray mist. When they’d finally rescued her she was unconscious. The newspapers had said it was a miracle she’d survived at all.

Her mother hadn’t been on the boat that day—she’d gone to see a movie with an old school friend. The guilt at not having been there to help had eaten at her like a cancer. And it had eventually killed her like a cancer, when she swallowed a bottle of pills and bottle of whiskey to hide from the pain. She never came back.

Jayde was eight years old when that had happened. She’d found her mother when she’d woken up in the morning. Her mother’s skin had been ice-cold, a photograph clutched in her stiff fingers, the one where they were all together and smiling under the Christmas tree.

Jayde had called for help on the phone. Then she had waited by her mother’s body until the police arrived. But it was no use. No one had been able to wake her mother up.

And when the police took Jayde away, she lost herself for the first time. She went into a dissociative fugue, as the doctors had called it. She simply forgot her name and how she fitted into the pain of her world. And it had taken her a full two years to come out it. Two lost years. Two years of hiding from the agony of her own memories.

Doctors had told her later in her life that the chances of re-experiencing a similar amnesiac state were much higher after it had happened once before.

Jayde scrubbed her hands brutally over her face trying to make it all go away again. That’s what must have happened. When the storm hit off Shendi Island, when the boat she and Agent Gibbs were on started to go under, she must have regressed, started to relive those terrible memories as she was once again sucked under the waves. And her old coping mechanism had snapped in. She’d simply shut it all out again.

And now it was back. Every lurid detail. Just like that.

She scrunched her eyes tight. They burned, but tears wouldn’t come. Because she was Jayde Ashton, agent for the British secret service. And everyone in the business knew Jayde Ashton never cried. They knew nothing touched her. Ever. Because she would never let anything get close enough, and that had made her one of the best in the business.

But now? Now she’d been compromised. Now she would have to tell MI-6 about the mental weakness she’d kept hidden from them. She had never dreamed it could one day damage her or her colleagues. She had to assume that Lancaster and O’Reilly knew she was here, on Shendi. Did they know she had amnesia? Or did they think she might be role-playing? Whatever they thought, they were probably waiting for her to make contact. She had to find a way to reach them. But before she could figure out how to do it, she heard the roar of an engine cutting across the lagoon.

David was coming back!

Her heart twisted into an excruciating knot. Panic skittered through her blood. She took a deep, shuddering breath, tried to quell the shaking in her limbs.

She felt the Zodiac knock up against the yacht, heard him thud onto the deck. She held her breath.

David loomed into the doorway, strangling the light in the cabin. Under his coffee-brown skin his face was ashen. A muscle pulsed at his jaw. His neck was corded with tension, his mouth a flat, hard line.

And in his piercing blue eyes Jayde saw a look she’d seen only once before in her life—in the eyes of soldiers faced with an impossible mission, one they knew they would not return from. It was a look of emotional distance combined with fierce determination. A look of the haunted and damned. And seeing that look in him terrified her in a way she didn’t think possible.

What had happened? What had Tariq shown him? Had he found out she was a traitor?

A hatchet of fear hacked into her heart. “David?” her voice came out hoarse.

He said nothing. He took something out of his pocket and held it out to her. She stared at it. She knew exactly what it was. A passport. A British passport.

Then he took something else out of his pocket. The wedding band. Her eyes flashed up to his in horror.

“You’re married,” he said, his voice hollow, his mouth twisting in an effort to hide his pain. “Your name is
Mrs.
Melanie Wilson. You belong to another man.”

He didn’t know she was MI-6!
Of course he didn’t. He’d found only her cover information. Relief plunged through her. Then it flipped straight over and reared up into a horrible black realization. David was devastated not by the fact she was a spy, but by the fact she was
married.
And the agony that echoed through the hollowness of his voice ripped the very soul from her body.

David, the potent desert warrior, was destroyed by the fact she belonged to another man, another world. That she wasn’t his.

She choked on the emotion that boiled up into her throat.
It’s not true! I’m not married! I don’t belong to anyone!
She wanted to scream the words, wipe away his pain. Her pain. She wanted him. Like she’d never before wanted a man in her life.

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t have him. She couldn’t tell him the wedding ring in his hand was a lie. A lie devised to snare him.

More than anything she wanted to tell him the truth. But the truth could cost lives. And the truth was worse. Because then he’d know she was a liar. And in his own words, he was a man who abhorred liars. What would he do when he discovered the extent of her lie, her deception?

Her face dropped into her hands. And agent Jayde Ashton cried. Her whole body shook. For the first time in her life since she was eight years old, Jayde Ashton
felt.
And it was overwhelming her.

David wanted desperately to go to her, to hold her tight in his arms. He ached with the need. But he couldn’t move. His limbs were numb, his brain thick. It was all he could do to clear his throat and say, “Tariq is making some more calls now that we have your details.”

Her big green eyes lifted slowly to meet his. And in them he saw an echo of his own devastating pain. He watched as she fingered the amber stone around her neck.

They stared at each other in silence. There were no words that could possibly ease the tension or the hurt. There were simply no platitudes that could fill the void of space and time that yawned between them.

A few minutes ago they’d been so close. Now it seemed as though an ocean separated them. He’d known a moment like this would come. But he’d underestimated the raw power of it. He was an absolute fool for having entertained the notion that things might somehow work out. He deserved this pain. But
she
didn’t. She was innocent in this. He should have protected her, not taken advantage of her. This was his fault.

She broke the silence, swiping the tears from her face. “David, I’m so sorry. I…I don’t know what to say.” She stood up, took a hesitant step toward him, reached out her hand as if to touch him.

He tensed, moved away from her. A small part of him took satisfaction in the fact she didn’t seem happy with the discovery of her identity. And that meant she cared for him deeply enough to be sorry to lose him…and Kamilah. But if he allowed her to touch him now, he knew he’d be powerless to stop himself from grabbing her into his arms, holding on to her forever. “I’ll take you back to shore,” he said, his voice rough, thick. “Hopefully we’ll get more details soon.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

He hesitated. “Now that you know…now that you know your name, does it help you remember anything else?”

Uncertainty flickered through her eyes. Then she nodded. “Yes. I…I think it’s coming back, bit by bit. I…I believe I was on a diving holiday.”

He felt his fists clench, but he had to say it. “With your husband, Simon?”

She looked away from him. “Yes,” she said softly.

His stomach bottomed out so fast he felt ill. “I see,” he said. “I hope he’s all right.”

She nodded, but she was shaking like a leaf.

“Do you remember if there was anyone else on the boat?”

“N-no, there wasn’t. It was just us, the two of us.”

He nodded. “Come, I’ll take you back to my office. We’ll see if Tariq is making any headway. Do you remember now where you and your husband launched your trip from? The boat rental papers say Port Sudan. Is that right?” His voice strained against the effort to sound normal. All he wanted was to smash his fists into the wall.

“Yes. We launched from Port Sudan,” she said, refusing to look him in the eye.

He frowned. “Why do you think no one reported the boat—or you—missing?

“I…I have no idea.”

“Did you register with the embassy in Khartoum when you arrived in Sudan?”

She shook her head. “I know it’s recommended but we didn’t bother. We wanted to get out on the water as soon as possible.”

“And you remember
all
this now?” A strange cold shadow of doubt crossed his heart. This didn’t seem right.

She was still shaking, clutching her arms into her waist as if she was going to throw up. “I…I guess I blocked everything out…because of the accident. Do you…do you mind if I make the calls myself? I need to do it…to find out if my…my husband is missing.”

“Of course.” And with that, David knew it really was final. She was looking for her husband.

There could be nothing more between them.

David showed her into his office. There was no sign of Tariq, and that relieved Jayde immensely. She couldn’t face the man’s accusing eyes right now. And she needed to do this in private. She needed to contact Lancaster and tell him to bring her in. She looked up into David’s eyes. “Do you…do you mind if I do this alone?”

He hesitated. “You sure you don’t need me?”

“Yes,” she said.

Hurt rippled through his features. “Of course,” he said and left the room.

Jayde swallowed her remorse, picked up the receiver on David’s desk…and paused. Calling her handler from this phone was a risk. But she had to take it. It was the only way to make contact. She quickly punched in his number.