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But she blanched at his last words, before pulling herself together with visible effort. Her gaze, which she’d carefully kept on his face until now, dipped lower. “Do you want me to look at your wound?”
He wasn’t concerned about his injury. And the two of them in close proximity didn’t seem like the smartest idea. But she was moving toward him already, and despite his better judgment, he nodded.
“The bullet went through.” He’d checked after the attack, right after making sure she was all right.
She knelt next to him, close enough so he could smell the scent of her skin.
“You need some serious disinfectants and stitching,” she said.
He looked at her. “You have medical training?”
She gave him an embarrassed half grin that made it impossible to look away from her mouth. “No, but we have a lot of medical TV shows in the States.”
He grinned back. “I remember.”
She lifted a hand to his arm, but held back at the last second, leaving her fingers hovering over his skin.
Heat swirled between them. Intensified. He held her gaze as the smiles slid off both their faces. Neither could deny the elemental force that had leaped to life.
Insane.
He had known her for a day.
But none of that mattered, no logic, no reasoning.
He leaned forward and watched her eyes go wide. But something from the outside penetrated the fog in his mind, and he paused, registering a lull in the storm. There was another noise, however, the rattle of engines. Trucks. At least two. He closed his eyes, and tried to judge their distance by the sound.
“WHAT IS IT?” Sara asked, reeling from the sudden heat and sexual tension between them.
Tariq had almost kissed her.
She had almost let him!
She drew back and pulled the blanket tighter around herself. What had she been thinking? This was completely unlike her. She wasn’t the type to be carried away with passion. She thought too much, analyzed too much, and according to Jeff, she was too cold and measured.
Who was this woman, half-naked and contemplating heavy-duty lip-locking with a sheik? He did have amazing lips. Her gaze fell on them.
“Somebody is coming,” he said.
That sobered her fast. “Help?”
He was a picture of alertness as he listened, his muscles taut, his body poised for fight already. Firelight glinted off his wide chest and flat abdomen. “I wouldn’t count on it.”
“The bandits?” Fear swept everything else from her mind.
Tariq shrugged.
She got up and hurried for her clothes, knowing they offered only the flimsiest protection, but wanting them still. The wind picked up again and howled as it rushed between the buildings.
“We should be okay until the storm is over,” he said. “They can’t see us. They can’t see anything.”
She slowed. He was probably right. The one time she’d looked out through a gap in the blankets, there had been zero visibility. “How did they find the place? Chance?”
“GPS.”
She picked up her blood-soaked shirt with disgust, glanced at the dozen or so bottles of water they had. “Mind if I use some of that?”
“Go ahead. We can fill up after the storm.”
She poured the contents of three into the pot. She shook the sand out of her skirt and jacket, and did spot cleaning on them first, getting the bloodstains out as best she could. When she was done, she soaked her shirt and his in the bucket. The murky water turned instantly red.
His blood. It was a miracle that he was still standing.
“How badly does your arm hurt?”
“It’ll be fine by morning.” He showed no concern for his injury, no sign of weakness.
She still found his intensity unnerving, but his obvious strength was a source of comfort.
“Let those soak for a while. We’ll rinse them later. It shouldn’t take long to dry them by the fire.” He nodded toward the “laundry.”
He was right, but she needed the distraction, wasn’t ready to return to the blanket, to him.
“You should rest,” she said. They would need all their strength and then some come morning, if the trucks they’d heard were the smugglers. “We’ll take turns keeping watch.”
His eyebrows slid upward as he gave her an amused smile. And she pressed her lips together, realizing what she had said and the way she’d said it. He was a sheik. He probably wasn’t used to being told what to do. But to her surprise, he didn’t object.
“Come here.” His voice was low and dangerous.
Against her better judgment, she obeyed.
“You first,” he said, when she reached the blanket.
And since he was sitting on the far corner of it, she felt safe enough to lie down on the very edge with her back to him, careful to keep her covering tight around her. His nearness generated plenty of heat between them, but the temperature was dropping outside. The desert cooled rapidly at night, and their fire wasn’t nearly substantial enough to heat a building as large as the villa. Goose bumps rose on her skin.
He must have been watching her closely, because the next moment he was by her side, running a hand down her arm.
“You’re cold.” He didn’t wait for confirmation, but lay behind her and took her into his arms.
It seemed too fast by half, and way too forward. They barely knew each other. And yet they had looked death in the eye together and had survived, which had formed an undeniable bond. Then there was the irrefutable attraction, deeper and fiercer than she had ever experienced before, bewildering in its intensity.
The muscles of his chest felt solid against her back, his skin warm.
She needed to think of something, to start a conversation that would take her mind off that fact.
“Do your brothers and sisters work in the family business like you?” he asked, before she had a chance to speak.
Had he been searching for a distraction, as well?
“I’m an only child.” To her father’s great regret. He had wanted a large family to build a legacy. Toward the end, he had hoped that she would give him that, that the marriage with Jeff would result in a bushel of children who would grow the family business into a great success eventually. The superstores that had sprung up around the country were his inspiration.
She had stayed with Jeff longer than she should have because of her father’s dream.
“Jeff was supposed to help you run the business,” Tariq said, as if he could read her thoughts.
“I don’t need help running it,” she replied with more heat than she’d meant to. The subject was a hot button for her.
She had worked in the business since she’d been a teenager, was one of the best in her class at college and throughout earning her MBA. She had fought for and landed a highly competitive internship, and had proved herself with flying colors. And yet her father had worried what would become of her and the company when he was no longer around.
He had been so relieved when she’d met Jeff and he’d expressed an interest in the company. She wondered now if she’d unconsciously tuned out the warning voices in her head and glided over some issues with Jeff. She had so desperately wanted to make the man who had raised her happy. They had dreamed big dreams together. She was going to make them come true.
She turned to Tariq. “I’m proud of what we achieved so far. And I can handle the company on my own.” She wanted him to have no doubt about that.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t.” He watched her thoughtfully for a few seconds. “What happened with the wedding plans? Without meaning to speak ill of the dead … Jeff Myers was never strong enough of a man for you.”
Tariq was right, and it annoyed her that what he’d been able to see at a glimpse had taken her so long to grasp. “Enough time passed for me to realize that we didn’t really mesh outside the office.”
While her father had been alive, Jeff had deferred to him, but after his death, he took it for granted that he would assume full leadership of the business that Sara had helped build from the ground up.
“We didn’t have the same goals.” Jeff had thought they should go after profits more ruthlessly. Sara wanted to keep in line with the original mission statement, which declared support for non-fuel uses of oil, and education of the public about them.
“What are your goals?” Tariq asked.
“I want the company to stay the way my father and I dreamed it. I want it to make a difference. I want it to be something I can be proud of, something my grandchildren can be proud of.”
He didn’t respond, and she wondered in the ensuing silence whether he was pondering his own, much larger conglomerate. “What do you want out of MMPOIL?” she asked.
“I want to provide security to my people, and to preserve the Bedu code of honor while doing it. We need the oil, but I won’t sell off our lands. I won’t let oil extraction, or development, kill the desert, where we came from. I won’t sell out to foreign investors.”
It occurred to her as she listened what an enormous weight that must be on his shoulders—the well-being of his people. The hundred or so employees whose livelihood depended on her own company didn’t come close in comparison.
“You should go to sleep,” Tariq said. “You’ll need your strength in the morning.”
He was right. She turned away from him. Sleep would be good, just so she could forget about his nearness for a while. It couldn’t be smart for the two of them to be lying like this, pressed together.
“What if you fall asleep, too?” she asked, dismayed at how throaty her voice sounded.
“Unlikely,” he murmured, so close his hot breath fanned her neck.
He wrapped a strand of her hair around one long finger.
Okay—sharing body heat she could write down to doing whatever they could for the sake of survival. This she could not. And yet she couldn’t pull away. Her body refused to.
“Look, I’m not the affair-on-every-business-trip type,” she said, not daring to turn around.
“I’d hope not. But you feel this.” It wasn’t a question.
“We’ve both been traumatized. We’re tired,” she said, unwilling to acknowledge the attraction out loud.
“You think it’s too fast.”
“Yes.”
He thought on that for a second. “Among my people, a bride might see her groom only once before the wedding.”
“And you think that’s normal?”
“No. Yes. For some people. I didn’t grow up here.”
“You said you lived in the U.S.”
“From age five to thirty-five.”
Which explained his flawless English. “So you’re practically an American.” She turned to look at him, curious about his life, about what had taken him from his country at such an early age, and what had brought him back.
She wasn’t sure she could live here. But she was a woman, and their circumstances were vastly different. He was a sheik. She drew a slow breath, still not used to that thought.
“Don’t let the civilized veneer fool you. America might have rubbed off on me. But it’s nothing more than frosting on one of those cupcakes that are so popular over there. Beneath that, I’m Bedu.”
Looking into his dark, glittering eyes, she had no trouble believing that. But the image … She bit back a smile.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I do. I just wouldn’t compare you to a cupcake.” She grinned, then grew serious as her gaze fell to his chiseled chest and the shadows dancing on his tanned skin. He was a businessman, as cultured and competent as any she had met. But she’d seen him fight. Under his tailor-made suit he was a warrior.
“Then what am I?” He arched an eyebrow and watched her soberly.
She thought for a moment. “A mountain lion.”
He seemed to be pleased with that. “And you?”
Right now, under his intense gaze, she felt like a deer caught in headlights. She couldn’t tell him that.
“You’re a lioness. We are the same,” he said, when she took too long to answer.
And then he leaned forward and kissed her.
His lips were warm and firm and imbued with some magical power that wiped her mind clean. The passion between them was palpable, the kind that up until now she hadn’t been sure existed outside of her favorite books. Though they were practically strangers, the chemistry they shared had a force of its own that made the raging sandstorm seem puny by comparison. She felt picked up and swept away, drowning in sensations that were impossible to resist, impossible to turn away from.
This was no tentative good-night kiss that might come at the end of a first date. This kiss was meant to brand a woman’s soul. Tariq possessed her, instantly and completely. Heat pooled between her thighs when his tongue touched hers, even as she tried to resist his pull.
His long fingers caressed her hair, her face, her neck, dipping to the blanket and loosening it. Then his hand closed over her breast. Pleasure skittered through her, a thousand points of light.
She was so not going to do this. She had to stop. Now.
She kept kissing him and arched her back, pressing her distended nipple into the heat of his palm. He dragged his thumb over the sensitized tip, and she felt the shock down to her toes.
The deep, hungry growl that escaped his throat should have sobered her. She did pull away a little and look into his dark eyes, which gleamed with endless passion and heat. She could not glance away; she could not move back another inch. He held her enthralled.
