Sheik's Revenge

by Loreth Anne White

  Once her world stopped spinning, she padded barefoot to the door and stepped out onto a yacht deck. The light outside was gold from late-afternoon sun, and as far as her eye could see, wine-dark sea heaved with white-ribbed swells. Deep water, she thought. Land was far away. Bits of memory stabbed back. Omair fighting with her. The helicopter. Feeling sick, very hot, unable to breathe.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She spun around, glanced up.

  He was coming down the stairs from the bridge, his smile devilish, teeth starkly white against his dusky olive complexion. The gold sun painted him bronze and the sea breeze ruffled his dark hair. He was shirtless—loose white cotton drawstring pants hung low on his hips. The muscles of his torso rippled as he moved.

  The prince of Al Na’Jar. Handsome as the devil himself.

  Faith felt as though she’d slipped through Alice’s looking glass into an alternate clean, calm, safe world. Surrounded by sparkling water, lapping waves on a hull, instead of a sea of sand and relentless heat… She could almost forget her stark reality.

  “You gave us quite a scare,” Omair said, coming up to her. “But the medic said you’re going to be fine. I trust him; he’s one of the best. He flies often with Zakir.”

  “I don’t remember…what…” Her hand went to her head.

  “Heat exhaustion,” he explained. “And you were under severe stress, which didn’t help. It could have been a lot worse if we hadn’t managed to evacuate you right away.” His gaze held hers, shimmering, intense. “You would have died out there, Faith.” Then he smiled. “Assassins have nine lives, I think.” He took both her hands in his.

  “Your pregnancy made you additionally vulnerable. I don’t know how to say I’m sorry, Faith. I wish I had known—I would never have taken you out there.”

  She remembered suddenly—she was pregnant. And he knew.

  Her hand went to her stomach and she was reminded she had nothing on under the white robe.

  “My clothes?”

  His smile deepened. “They needed a wash. There’s a closet full of women’s clothes in one of the cabins. You can take your pick whenever you’re ready.”

  Her gaze went to the next deck. Above it was a small helipad and higher yet were large white satellite hubs. The lower deck held a row of deep sea fishing rods crafted from what looked like bamboo, wood, cork. There was scuba gear, two Jet Skis, two dive propulsion vehicles, and a Windsurfer strapped to the side—this was a clearly a big money pleasure craft.

  “It was my brother Da’ud’s yacht,” he reminded her, following her gaze. “He liked to entertain and to make his guests comfortable, especially the female ones. Da’ud was playing the field, but really, he was looking for a woman who could be his queen.” His eyes turned serious. “He never got that chance to marry, to inherit the throne from my father. He was assassinated off the coast of Barcelona, on this yacht, as he slept, while at the same time my parents were killed in the palace at Al Na’Jar. An attempt was also made on Zakir’s life that same night, but he was not in his bed, and this saved him.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, and the word seemed trite in the face of his tragedies. Somehow being on his dead brother’s yacht made Omair’s family and his battle feel so much more real, so personal. A pang of guilt stabbed through Faith. What she knew could help him and his country. But it would also seal her and her child’s fate.

  “Are you hungry?” Omair held his arm out toward a table under an awning. It was laid with fruit, pitchers of juice, ice water. Olives, feta cheese, fish.

  “Are we alone on the boat?” she asked quietly, staring at the table, wondering if he’d prepared the food, or if there was staff on board the yacht.

  “Absolutely alone.” He took her elbow, his touch gentle yet purposeful as he led her to the table. “The doctor did stay with you for a while, monitoring your status. I wanted him to be sure you and the baby were going to be okay. We remained in the Mediterranean until we were certain, then we had him airlifted out. Only the doctor, the pilot, the evac team, and my brother know we’re on the yacht, and by now, no one knows our location.”

  “Where are we?”

  He motioned for her to take a seat at the table. “We’re in the Atlantic. We sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar early this morning. You can take a look on the navigation systems later if you want to see our exact coordinates.”

  Faith sat, feeling surreal. “How long was I out?”

  He smiled again, warmly, his eyes liquid. She hadn’t seen him like this—in a truly relaxed mode, in quiet luxury. He seemed the prince he was.

  And he was formidable. All power, yet with grace.

  It came slamming back suddenly, how she’d lied to him about the baby—what he said he’d do if it was his. Her heart began to race all over again.

  “You slept for almost two days.” Omair poured ice water into a frosted glass as he spoke, adding a fresh sprig of mint before handing the glass to her. “Your system needed it. Intravenous fluids and electrolytes helped replenish you.”

  Faith drank deeply, never so grateful for an abundance of water and ice. She closed her eyes, the sheer passage of their recent journey, the weight of it, sinking in, the fact she was going to be a mom. The fact she could never go home. Nerves began to whisper again—what was she going to do now?

  “Don’t you want to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  He opened his mouth to protest but she spoke first. “And don’t go saying I need to eat for two.”

  A smile toyed with the corners of his beautiful mouth, a genuine warmth in his black eyes.

  Guilt burrowed deeper into Faith as another memory came back to her suddenly—the look of sharp disappointment on his face when she’d told him the baby was someone else’s, the disapproval in his eyes when he thought she’d slept with him while carrying another man’s child.

  Conflict swirled through her chest.

  “Shall I show you around the yacht, then?”

  “You’re not going to start pressing me for details on who I work for?”

  “That’s not why I brought you here, Faith.”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, Omair,” she said quietly. “Maybe you think you’ll get more from me via a soft approach.”

  He rammed his water glass down on the table, anger flickering into his dark eyes. Then he held still a moment, visibly tempering the passion that seemed to be simmering just under his skin.

  “Yes, Faith, I want the information,” he said very quietly. “It might save my family and my country. If you want to withhold that information for fear it will bring danger to you and your baby—I fully appreciate that. But I can protect you, Faith. I can make your enemy go away if you only tell me who it is.”

  “How?”

  “Go after him, and get rid of him.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  “That simple.”

  He had no idea.

  “And then?”

  “And then you will be free to go home, and be with the father of your child—become a family, should you so choose.”

  Faith reeled.

  She turned away sharply, and glared pointedly at the ocean, wishing she could make all the bad stuff vanish and just be with him on this yacht forever in some kind of suspended reality. The warmth, the passion, the admiration she felt for this man was overwhelming. And the guilt was deep.

  Omair should know that the U.S. was in collusion with MagMo to destroy him. The knowledge would help him protect his country. But once she’d told him, once the truth about a top-secret U.S. assassin squad came out, it was going to be much harder for her to hide, if not impossible, to disappear.

  STRIKE—hell, the entire U.S. military and intelligence machine—was going to come after her in ways he couldn’t even begin to imagine, and he alone would not be able to stop them.

  She had no guarantee either that Zakir’s regime wouldn’t use her as a political pawn, putting her right in the crosshairs. />
  “Why would you do this, Omair?” she said, still staring out at the ocean. “Why would you go to great risk to eliminate my enemies, keep me safe, just so I could be with another man?”

  He inhaled deeply.

  “I watched you sleeping in that bed, Faith, the same bed in which Da’ud was killed. I thought about the life growing inside you, and it struck me how short a human life really is, and I thought about what makes that life special—family, babies. Love. And while my mission has always been about family—my brothers, sister, vengeance for the assassination of my parents—something you said in the desert got to me. You said I was running from my own fear of commitments, and it struck me that maybe I did want a better balance, that maybe I could have more. And if I can’t have it with you, I want to at least give you the chance to have it with the baby’s father. I want to give you time to think things through before you make a choice from which you can’t return.”

  Faith got up and walked to the railing, gripping it tight. Wind, soft and rounded and filled with salt, washed over her face. She tried to breathe, tried to stop the shaking inside her.

  He came up behind her, placed his hand on her shoulder.

  Raw emotion tore through her at the sensation of his touch and she fought the urge to lean into him.

  “Faith—look at me.”

  She wouldn’t, couldn’t. She clenched the railing tighter, staring out to sea. “Don’t do this. Please don’t lie to me like this. I have information and you want it and…” She wavered, struggling to keep her emotions in check. “I don’t deserve this, Omair.”

  “If it were my child,” he said quietly, “even if you didn’t want it, I would raise it on my own. And if you wanted to be with me, we could raise it together. I’d be there for you every step of the way.”

  She knew what he was doing. He was opening hypothetical doors, because he still believed it just might be his. And Faith ached to trust him—to lean into his words, to lean into his arms, to feel safe, to go through one of those doors and tell him.

  “You’d really give up your life, your mission, to hunt down the Moor, to care for a wife and baby?” She snorted gently. “It goes against everything you’ve said, and are.”

  “No, I would not give up my mission. You’d become a part of it. You’d become my life, my family. You’d be part of what I was defending.”

  “Why?” she said hoarsely.

  He turned her to face him, compassion liquid in his dark Persian eyes, a soft ferocity of purpose in his features, a gentle strength in his hands.

  “Because, Faith, I think I’m falling in love with you. I believe you could come to love me, too.”

  Tears flooded down her face, no holding back the tide now.

  “No one has ever said that to me,” she whispered, wiping her face. “Apart from my mother.”

  “Said what?”

  “They love me.”

  He took her face in his hands, kissed her so powerfully yet tenderly, it made her heart break. She pushed him back, looked up into his eyes.

  “You don’t even know me, Omair,” she said softly against his mouth.

  “Then let me.”

  And he kissed her again, deeper, holding her tight on the deck as the sun sank in a golden ball to the silent swells.

  Faith pulled away from him suddenly, dragging her hands through her hair, tormented with the weight of the situation she was in. She’d known the drill when she’d signed on as a government assassin. She understood the sticky issues around “retirement” from the unit.

  She was a soldier and loyal to a fault. Political and military decisions were not hers to make—her job was to follow orders. Still, she could not fathom why STRIKE would work hand in hand with a known terrorist group like MagMo.

  Where had that decision come from—the Pentagon? CIA? Or could it be that STRIKE as an organization had gone rogue itself—its very secrecy making it vulnerable to exploitation. If that was the case it should be exposed.

  The U.S. electorate should know their military was working with the same terrorist organization that had just tried to launch an unprecedented biological suicide attack on their country. She swore to herself. No matter what she did, if she spoke, she would die.

  Even disappearing with a new ID was not a fail-safe.

  But maybe Omair could help hide her, at least until she had their baby. Then her child wouldn’t have to die with her. At least their child would have a father if STRIKE got her.

  Bottom line—she could no longer lie to this man.

  Nine to ten months. That was all she needed. If she could make him promise not to use—or go public—with the information she was about to give him for nine to ten months minimum, she could save their child.

  She inhaled deeply and turned to him. “I’m a soldier, Omair. I have a deep loyalty to my country and what I’m about to tell you is going to betray that loyalty. But… ” She wavered. “I…I owe it to you, too, to tell you.”

  His body went taut and his eyes narrowed sharply.

  “I’m a government assassin with a black ops hit unit called STRIKE.”

  A muscle at his jaw began to pulse. His neck was tight.

  “What government?”

  “The United States.”

  He reeled visibly, but remained silent.

  “We’re the ultimate NOCs—screw up and you’re cut loose. Become a loose end, they send a cleaner. I screwed up in Tagua, Omair. The hit on Escudero was supposed to be a surgical strike, no collateral damage. The weapons were supposed to continue with the North Africans to the Sahara, and the CIA was to track them to the buyers. But you took my note and blew my job apart. After eight weeks in debriefing, however, they told me I was cleared.”

  She paused, the thunderous intensity on his face unnerving her.

  “Maybe I was actually in the clear for a while—I don’t know. But you told me that four weeks ago a contact of yours in the States tried matching my DNA profile in government systems. That would have sent a computer alarm directly to STRIKE, showing someone was onto one of their operatives, and I’d have been immediately targeted to be scrubbed.” She snorted softly. “Basically I was toast from the moment I met you. You…you have no idea what a role you’ve played in changing my life since I made the biggest mistake of all—sleeping with you. If I hadn’t—”

  “Do you understand what this means?” A dark electrical energy quivered off him in waves. “It means the U.S. sanctioned my murder.”

  “Or the unit has gone rogue.”

  He spun around, then swung back to face her. “And they’re working with MagMo, the same organization trying to overthrow my country?” He cursed. “And there we thought the country was an ally? What does the U.S. want—our oil? Will they back a MagMo government in Al Na’Jar?”

  “I have no idea what’s behind the MagMo–U.S. alliance, Omair. I just follow orders and I don’t know how the decisions come down. Our unit is highly compartmentalized for security reasons. I don’t even know who the other operatives are unless I am assigned to work with one. My instructions come from my handler, and him alone. I have no idea who he answers to, and when I go into debrief, it’s nameless military and psych personnel I deal with, and never see again.” She felt exhausted suddenly.

  “I was a good soldier, Omair. I was a good assassin, but you made it personal. You gave me a conscience. I can’t keep this from you anymore, no matter the consequences.”

  He clamped his large hands over the deck railing, his arm muscles pumped, his jaw tight. “So your handler gave a direct order to kill me—he was the one who said I was Faroud bin Ali.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Omair, you can’t—”

  “What is his name!”

  She took another deep breath—this was it. This was the line in the sand and she was crossing it.

  “Travis Johnson. I called him from the wadi, that’s when the chopper came after me.”

  “How did he k
now I was meeting with the Russian in Algiers?”

  “Hell knows—I was told the man was CIA, not Russian.”

  “If STRIKE is colluding with MagMo, this Travis Johnson could have been tipped off by the Algerian MagMo cell that I’d be in that courtyard. The Russian could have looked into my background and leaked the information to them.” He swore bitterly. “But why would the Moor use the U.S. to hit me?” He turned to her, took her hands in his.

  “Faith, thank you for telling me. I need to contact Zakir at once.” He started to move toward the bridge.

  “Omair, wait!”

  He swung back to face her and saw the light in her amber eyes was gone, a look of resigned acceptance on her face. And Omair kicked himself—he’d made her a promise, to keep her safe. And he saw now the scope of what she’d been struggling with, the reason she’d wanted to disappear.

  She’d just betrayed her country. For him.

  He came up to her, every molecule in his body humming fiercely with a passion for this incredible woman. He grabbed her and kissed her hard. Then holding her at arm’s length he said, “I see why you were worried, Faith. But whatever Zakir does with this new position on the U.S., he will keep you out of it. You will not become a pawn. I promise you that.”

  “Omair…” Her voice was strange. “You can’t keep me safe for long. Irrespective of what I’ve just told you, they’re going to keep looking for me. Travis knows I’m onto him. There was no safe house, no evacuation plan. I was meant to die after I shot you. I ask just one thing.” She met his gaze.

  “I beg of you, please, do not go public with this information until I’ve given birth to our child.”

  Chapter 13

  Omair heard the words.

  Our child.

  They were like a bolt of powerful electricity straight to his chest, and a dark and dangerous passion swelled so fiercely in him that he felt twenty times his size. He struggled to stay calm.