If she’d ever had any concept of beauty, it had been before she’d seen this—this … man?
Was he a man? Or a being right out of fable?
This would explain that face—a face befitting a higher being. And so was that body. Even an obscuring black suit and shirt did nothing to disguise the daunting breadth and hardness of chest and shoulders, the spareness of waist and hips, the virile power of thighs and the endlessness of legs. Then came that presence that could bend the masses to his merest whim.
And she was being ridiculously fanciful here!
That was, she thought so until her eyes were dragged back to his and she knew they’d been commanded to.
His gaze was even more hard-hitting the second time around, with what she now realized was sleepiness, which he seemed to be having trouble shedding. The sight of the contradictory vulnerability intensified his effect by a factor of a thousand.
But it was the wonder in those eyes that enervated her. The explicit confession that her sight was having an equal impact on him. That the jolt of attraction was mutual.
“Ya Ullah—aish entee?”
His groan reverberated in her bones. God, what are you?
And, oh, why wasn’t his voice the one thing to shatter the perfection? Like it usually did with beautiful men? It, and what he did with it, was by far his most potent asset. And that was saying way too much.
But what it did shatter was the surreal feeling of being with him in a bubble where time and the rest of the world didn’t exist. And her fury rose as if it had never abated.
“What I am,” she seethed, “is a very annoyed guest in your country, sir, and I demand that you live up to the legendary chivalry that you advertise as your most prominent quality. The man you drove off the road is suffocating on his blood back in that taxi while you keep me here playing the power games you Damhoorian men seem to revel in!”
Every word lashing out of her mouth wiped the bemusement from his expression, shook off his disorientation. Suddenly clear eyes released hers and he turned away, opened the door and leapt out of the car.
She jumped out of the car right after him. And his men detained her. Frustration exploded out of her in another tirade.
“Sayebooha!” The lash of the man’s imperious order made them let her go at once. She hurried after him, found him already examining her unconscious driver.
She leaned over him. “Now you’ve seen how gravely injured this man is, if you’ll please provide me with your first-aid kit …”
His only response was a fierce look over her head, a terse command she didn’t get which seemed to magically produce a suitcase-sized emergency bag. Then he took her elbow and moved her away as more abrupt words had his men converging. She understood he’d ordered them to get the driver out of the car.
“No! He has a possible neck injury. You can’t move him—not before I stabilize his cervical spine.”
Her frantic words died. The man had opened the bag and was producing a semi-rigid cervical collar. Before she made a grab for it, he turned to her slumped driver, removed her improvised collar and in seconds, and with perfect technique, had his fitted around the man’s neck. Then under his continuous orders, his men got the driver out. Specialized EMS personnel wouldn’t have done a better job. There was no doubt it was their boss’s guidance that made them achieve this result.
Just who was this man?
But no matter who he was, or that he seemed versed in the basics of managing a car accident casualty, he couldn’t be as experienced as her. She had to take over.
She stood back until the men, still following the constant flow of their boss’s precise orders, spread blankets on the hood of one of their limos and placed their casualty there. He had them maneuver the other limo to make its hood a surface for the emergency bag then came to stand at the driver’s head.
She rushed to his side then. “Sir, I appreciate your desire to help this man, but if you’ll just let me take it from here? I’m a doctor …”
Those eyes, now blazing amber in the sun came up to hers.
“So am I. You’re welcome to assist me.”
So he was a doctor. That figured. And he spoke perfect English. With a deeply cultured, highly educated British accent to boot. Shouldn’t be a surprise. Most well-to-do Damhoorians were educated in the best institutions in the world and England, with its deep ties in the region from its colonial days, was a favorite destination for them. It was still startling to hear that flawless, fathomless drawl flowing out of those spectacular lips. As startling as finding out he was a doctor.
He produced the parts of a hand-held suction machine and expertly snapped them together. She made use of his move, extended her driver’s neck gently backwards and performed a jaw thrust. It was the best technique to provide airway patency with the suspicion of neck injury, and the best position to suction his throat. Those amber eyes acknowledged her actions with a glance of approval then resumed his position at the driver’s head, inserted the disposable catheter into his throat and turned the machine on.
As soon as blood and secretions shot up into the attached cylinder, her eyes snapped to the bag. Everything was labeled in Arabic and she wasn’t that far into her learning process that she could actually read what the labels said.
As if reading her mind, the man murmured, “The blue bag is the airway kit.”
For answer, she swooped down on the indicated bag. In under a minute she had the laryngoscope assembled, the cuffed endotracheal tube, the 10-ml syringe and introducer all ready.
He finished aspirating the driver’s throat, took in her measures with another marrow-melting glance of appreciation.
“We won’t need rapid sequence anesthesia,” he said in that confidential tone colleagues in resuscitation shared. “His gag reflex is absent. We can go ahead with intubation.”
She nodded and tossed him a pair of gloves, falling into the synergy of sharing the responsibility for another human being’s life with someone who possessed resuscitation experience as extensive as hers. He caught the gloves without batting an eyelid and snapped them on before she’d managed to snap hers on.
Then it started.
And it was as if they’d been managing critical patients in the field together for years, collaborating with the merest of looks and partial murmurs, delineating their needs and obtaining the other’s support. In under two minutes they had an endotracheal tube inserted and connected to a self-expanding bag-valve-mask and their patient ventilated with 100 percent oxygen.
Then they turned to handling circulation.
She measured blood pressure as he took the man’s pulse. Then they exchanged findings.
He exhaled. “Not good. He’s going into shock.”
She only nodded, reached for two 18-gauge over-the-needle catheters. “I’ll go for bilateral IV access for quickest fluid replacement.”
In answer, he applied tourniquets, prepared two bags of Ringer’s as she slipped one catheter after another into the driver’s cephalic veins, each on the first try. She withdrew the needles and he snapped off the tourniquets, attached the tubing to the giving sets and set the drips to maximum.
His eyes moved from watching the uninterrupted flow of fluid into the driver’s veins, stilled on her. Then he finally shook his head, as if to clear it. “All right. That’s A, B and C. On to D.”
His murmur snapped her out of the fugue state she seemed to fall into each time his eyes fell on her.
She scrambled to join in assessing the driver’s neurological status using the Glasgow coma score.
With a GCS of fifteen as fully conscious and three as deeply comatose, the driver’s nine wasn’t good, but it still boded well for no irreversible neurological damage. E—or exposure—revealed no other gross injuries. So they turned to the patient’s major one. He cut off her improvised, and now soaked and leaking, pressure bandage and the scalp wound spurted again. She jumped in with another bandage.
He sighed. “You didn’t sacrifice
your jacket for nothing. At this rate, he would have gone into shock in minutes without your pressure bandage. This uncontrollable bleeding indicates a serious bleeding-clotting disorder.”
She thought so too. Even with the scalp being one of the areas best supplied with blood vessels in the body, leading to alarming and not easily controlled bleeding, this was in a different league from any scalp injury she’d ever handled.
“What I’d give for cautery right now,” she said.
He simply unzipped another bag and produced a cautery probe.
Her mouth fell open. “What else do you have in there? A full OR?”
His lips twitched as he turned on the machine and handed it to her. She jumped on the offending bleeders, zapped them closed as he blotted blood for her. When she’d gotten them all, she turned it off and cleaned it as he applied meticulous pressure once more, concluding their resuscitation efforts.
The man exhaled, stretching up to what she now realized was a truly daunting height. He was about a foot taller than her five feet six. “He’s stable for now,” he said. “And once he has the benefit of definitive investigations and management, I think he’ll be as good as new in a few days.”
She believed so too. Thanks to his intervention and preparedness. If no thanks to his carelessness and recklessness that had caused the accident in the first place. The reminder brought her outrage bubbling to the surface once more.
“It’s all well and good that you helped stabilize him. Now will you make one of your cars lead the way to the nearest hospital, where this man can get definitive management?”
He blinked, her renewed resentment clearly taking him by surprise. Then he only extended his hand to her.
With no conscious decision to do so, she gave him the hand he’d demanded. He barely held it as he escorted her back to his car, seated her with every care and courtesy then walked around the car and sat down beside her.
She stared at him, wondering what had just happened, feeling her hand sizzling from that contact with his.
He got out his cellphone, dialed one number after another and let rip in Arabic. This time she didn’t get one word of the deeply colloquial torrent.
Just a second before she exploded, he terminated his last call and turned to her, his lips spreading, his teeth a stunning flash.
Everything inside her jangled with that blast of charisma. This man shouldn’t be allowed to smile in inhabited areas.
“Everything has been taken care of,” he said.
Really? Just like that, huh?
And she let him have it. “So your reckless driving causes someone’s near-death and you just make a few phone calls and you wipe the record clean, huh? How wonderful it must be to possess enough power to walk all over people, rewrite history and come up smelling like roses!”
His bone-liquefying smile teetered. But just for seconds. Then it was widening, his incredible eyes narrowing, heating up. It enraged her more, made her even more fluent in her abuse.
“So how have you reconstructed the accident?” she plowed on. “That you stopped of your own accord and rushed to help the poor driver? What have you decided made him crash? Speeding under the influence of alcohol or …?”
He placed one finger over her lips. And she went mute.
The feel of the smooth, tough skin on hers, the masculinity and power and that scent that was all him inundating her, almost making her pass out with the pressure of sensations … Too much!
Just get out of here. Get away from him.
“Look, as long as you take care of my driver, I guess you can do whatever you please—as I’m sure you will anyway. So I’ll just go now.” She cursed herself for the wobble in her voice. “You’ve already made me an hour late for my appointment.”
All lightness seeped from his gaze, something single-minded flaring there. “You don’t need to worry about that. About anything.” Then he lowered the barrier between them and his driver and ordered, “Seeda.”
The powerful car shot forward instantly, soundlessly, eating up the asphalt, taking her who knew where.
A minute later she finally found her voice. “Can you, please, order your driver to stop? I’ll take another taxi.”
“Do you see an abundance of taxis around here?”
“That’s my problem.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Listen, I have the number of the company that sent me the first taxi. I’ll call them. So thanks for the thought, but if you just let me get down here, I’ll get out of your hair and—”
“Now, that’s a lovely image—you in my hair.” He looked sideways at her as he sprawled beside her like a lion settling down to a nap. “Why would I want you out of it?”
“You’re not letting me go?”
He just smiled. And she cried, “Are you kidnapping me?”
He laughed. A sound of such beauty and impact it was cruel. “Now there’s an idea. And who would blame me? When a dream pursues a man, he lets himself get caught, captures her back.”
A dream? So he’d progressed from toying with her to mocking her!
“I—I didn’t pursue you,” she muttered. “I just had to make you stop and take responsibility for your callous behavior.”
“What callous behavior? I wasn’t driving. And my drivers swear they didn’t notice the accident they had caused.” Before she flayed him with more sarcasm, he talked across her intended rebuke. “But I do assume responsibility for their haste. I was rushing to an appointment, told them of my wish to conclude it in record time so I’d finally get to bed. It seems they were blind to anything but fulfilling my wishes.”
Though he had shown such care to the injured driver, his explanations left a lot to be desired. She opened her mouth to flay him again and he went on talking, obliterating the last of her irritation, vaporizing any retorts and thoughts.
“I don’t consider this an apology,” he murmured. “Or that one is enough to make up for the accident I indirectly caused and which I can only thank God wasn’t any worse and that you weren’t injured. Your driver is being airlifted to the best hospital in Halwan, he will get comprehensive treatment, follow-up and compensation, and his car will be replaced. As for my failure to intervene, you must excuse me. I was sleeping until my head guard woke me up, saying that a foreign woman had intercepted us and they believed she was mad, if not armed.” He huffed a laugh, all dismissal and irony. “Which shows how clueless they are.” His gaze swept her in one hot, total body caress that singed her down to the bone. “You are more than armed. You are lethal.”
Her nerves fired an all-out alarm. Her heart was racing itself to a standstill.
What was happening to her? She’d never reacted to a man, to anything, like that. That runaway reaction, suffocating in intensity, transporting in headiness.
Feeling so out of her depth made her angrier.
“And you are … forward,” she choked. “But what do I expect from a man who’s rushing to bed—now? In the aftermath of a night of excess, no doubt.”
He took her jeering with another enervating smile, the smile of a man who was certain he’d never be less than the ultimate in any woman’s eyes.
Then he finally spoke, deep and devastating. “I hope by the time I take you to your appointment you’ll think more kindly of me. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He flipped open his cellphone. “I’ll just arrange a postponement of mine.”
He took his eyes off her only long enough to punch in a number. And at that exact moment her phone rang.
She fumbled it out, groaning inwardly. That Ministry of Interior hotshot must be fuming by now. She wondered if he’d believe she’d had an accident or if he’d think she was just incapable of being punctual. It was all she needed, starting off on the wrong foot with the man who could send her packing!
She punched the answer button, croaked a wavering “Hello?”
An endless moment of silence met her tentative greeting.
Then she finally heard an answering, “Hello.”
The problem was, she heard that same hello in stereo.
Out of her cellphone, and out of her companion’s lips.
CHAPTER TWO
MALEK HEARD THE melodic “hello” pouring into his ear from his phone and simultaneously washing over him from his companion’s full, flushed lips.
He stared at her, shared a suspended moment of incomprehension.
Then he burst out in guffaws.
She was the doctor he’d been rushing to meet.
This was unbelievable. He couldn’t have dreamed anything like this would happen when he’d taken over the chore of approving the latest addition to GAO’s personnel in Damhoor.
He only had because he didn’t trust Shaaker from Interior to perform the interview with the necessary finesse. He also had to meet this doctor, make sure he—or, as it turned out, she—understood what working in the region entailed. Most people came there thinking that working in Damhoor, one of the richest kingdoms in the world, would be a luxury, and those false expectations had caused many setbacks. He wanted to stem potential trouble in advance.
Since he hadn’t known when he could slot this interview into his hectic schedule, he’d decided to do it the second he had a couple of hours of freedom. This would have left him around three hours to sleep before his next chore, but after weeks of fractions of an hour of exhausting oblivion, three hours still felt like a luxury.
On his way to this interview, he’d drifted into another fitful episode of unconsciousness the moment he’d hit his seat and had jolted awake to this—this vision.
There was no other word to describe her. And that’s when his tastes had always gravitated towards dark beauty. Or so he’d thought until he’d seen this incandescent creature.
There was no doubt what his preference was now, or would remain. It had formed the moment he’d seen her. It was now hair with every gradation of the colors of the dunes of his kingdom, eyes that reflected the azure of its skies and the translucence of its seas, complexion of its richest cream and rarest honey and features and a body caressed into being by God. It was her.
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