by Olivia Gates
www.millsandboon.co.uk
THE SHEIKH
SURGEON’S PROPOSAL
Olivia Gates
About the Author
OLIVIA GATES has followed many dreams in her life. But there has been only one she was able to pursue single-mindedly, even though it seemed the most impossible of them all: to write romance novels. The fairytale realisation of her dreams came—after years of constantly learning, writing and submitting her manuscripts—when Harlequin Mills & Boon bought her first Medical™ romance. It was a dream come true, combining her passion—writing—with her vocation—medicine—in one magnificent whole. Now, living with her husband and daughter and their cat, she knows dreams are impish little things. They let you catch them only if you pursue them long and hard enough … Please visit Olivia at her website: www.oliviagates.com
CHAPTER ONE
JAY LATIMER EXHALED in frustration for the hundredth odd time in the last hour. She muttered something incoherent even to herself, leaned her head on her taxi’s window and forced her gaze to take in the vista zooming by, the slice of heaven on earth that was the sprawling pavements and central divider of the most spectacular highway she’d seen in Damhoor so far.
It didn’t work. Not even the breathtaking sights of man-engineered beauty of parades of lush palms, immaculate lawns and explosions of flowers and the nature-endowed magic of azure skies and golden sand-seas meeting at the horizon could ameliorate her irritation at having to succumb to this abuse of power.
Just what the hell did Damhoor’s Ministry of the Interior think they were doing, ordering her to this interview? Making it sound as if they were profiling a foreigner of questionable nature and intentions? Why didn’t they just check her credentials and history and be done with it? If half the things she’d heard about their limitless reach and power were true, they probably had dossiers on her from the first moment she’d wailed her indignation at coming into this life. They were reputed to have those on everyone who set foot on their land. So why inconvenience as well as insult her by decreeing this interview?
And that was exactly what they’d done. Decree it. She’d received an honest to goodness summons, at six am no less, specifying the time of said interview only two hours later, and on the far side of Halwan, Damhoor’s capital, when they must know it would take her at least two hours to get there. They didn’t deem her worthy of even an offer of transportation.
All that when she was here volunteering her services.
She hadn’t dreamed anything like this would happen when her application two days ago to Global Aid Organization to join the mission that would tour Damhoor’s fringe communities and impoverished neighbors had been approved in two minutes flat. She was GAO’s dream aid worker after all, packing years of emergency medicine experience and promising them open-ended dedication.
Then in had stepped the Ministry of the Interior, over GAO’s officials, decreeing it was they who’d decide if volunteers to the mission Damhoor was subsidizing were up to standard, conveniently forgetting that they’d begged for GAO’s presence in their region, counting on their experience and logistical clout in humanitarian services to achieve what the kingdom’s endless money and resources hadn’t been able to.
And here she was, scampering to have some pampered sheikh interrogate her as if she were a suspicious character, to decide if she, her skills and motivations would pass the test of his oblivious, patronizing, over-privileged-from-birth standards!
She exhaled again, trying to bring her temperature under control.
This would be over in no time, she tried to convince herself. This was just a show. Of bravado. Looking a gift horse in the mouth was their way of showing GAO that they didn’t really need such gift … Argh.
Her rationalizations only made her angrier. Of all the imperious rubbish.
But what did she expect of a land where every higher official belonged to the extensive royal family?
On every level, it seemed her long-held dream of coming to Damhoor was turning into a huge letdown. She’d had nothing but difficulties and rejection since she’d set foot …
She slammed against the window.
The driver had made a sharp swerve. Her heart zoomed into full panic mode as the car careened sideways then crashed into the high sidewalk, coming to a deafening, bone-jarring halt.
In the stillness that consumed the next seconds, she forced herself to breathe, consulted her body. It transmitted one all-important message. No injuries.
Her next thought was for her driver. Her eyes sought him and her heart surged in dismay. He was unconscious, his face covered in blood. Oh, God …
Her shaking hands tore her seat belt off and her door open. It was then she saw it, receding in the distance. The reason for their accident. A convoy of three limousines, tearing along the almost deserted highway. Her driver must have lost control over the car while making way for them …
No time for fury. See to him.
She snatched his door open and examined him with eyes and hands. Her searching fingers located the source of his profuse bleeding, a five-inch gash that ran vertically from his scalp, down his forehead and alongside his nose, which was clearly broken. He must have rammed his head on the steering-wheel.
She snatched off her long-sleeved cotton jacket, rummaged in the back for her handbag, grabbed scissors then cut bandages from the jacket. She stemmed his hemorrhage, considering what to do next. With him unconscious and bleeding retronasally, his airway was in imminent danger. He needed to be intubated and ventilated, ASAP.
She had no idea when a highway patrol would pass, what the number for the emergency services was or where the nearest hospital was. And none of the few drivers at this early hour was even slowing down to offer help, beginning with the bastards who’d driven them off the road. If she wanted help, it seemed she’d have to find it herself.
She improvised a cervical collar out of the rest of her jacket then struggled to transfer the man to the passenger seat, taking every care not to exacerbate any spinal injuries.
With her lungs burning and muscles protesting, she took the wheel, started the engine. Yes. It was still working.
She floored the gas pedal. She’d make those unfeeling idiots offer the help they hadn’t thought they’d owed.
As she hit a hundred miles an hour, she almost slowed down, fearing she’d cause another, this time fatal accident. Only the man who could be choking to death beside her made her maintain her speed. She was about to catch up with the convoy anyway.
It was only when she started overtaking them and waving frantically that they slowed down. About time!
But it was only the lead and rear car that slowed down while the middle one shot forward. Then the cars that had slowed down encroached on her, forcing her to the side of the road. She came to a full stop, her heart hammering as eight huge men dressed in black suits came pouring from the two cars trapping her taxi.
Before she could move, her door was snatched open and she found guns waved in her face and barked orders crashing down on her. They all mostly consisted of “En’zeli”. Get down.
Get down? As in get down on the ground, like an apprehended criminal, hands above her head? Then she realized. In Arabic you got down from a car, not out of it. She guessed that Arabic couldn’t always be literally translated into English.
This was one of the hurdles she’d had to leap over before she’d made headway in learning it. The biggest hurdle remained the huge difference between the formal and colloquial forms, the latter being the one being barked in her face right now.
She stepped out of the car, her anger bubbling over.
“Had fun waving your guns at an unarmed woman and an unconscious man?�
�� she snarled. “Now, I demand that you get back in your cars and lead the way to the nearest hospital. And before you do, I need your first-aid kits. I’m sure limos like yours have comprehensive ones!”
Eight pairs of astonished dark eyes stared at her, then at each other. She saw the imperceptible nods they exchanged, then two of them advanced on her and subjected her to a thorough frisking, to her spluttering chagrin.
When they were satisfied she wasn’t carrying anything untoward, the one who looked like the leader murmured something into his walkie-talkie. The middle car, which had stopped two hundred feet away, reversed. The guy with the walkie-talkie rushed towards it, and with a great show of deference he opened the passenger door and bowed down to confer with whomever was inside. He straightened with another deep bow and rushed back to her.
“Ta’ee ma’ee,” he ordered.
This she also understood. Come with me.
“I’m going nowhere with you, and I again demand—”
The man latched onto her arm, cutting her tirade short. She knew her own resistance would make his grip inflict bruises, yet she still struggled and sputtered her indignation all the way to the car. He opened the passenger door, tried to manhandle her in. She snatched herself away, only managing to plop in an unceremonious heap inside. Into what felt like another dimension.
The transition from Damhoor’s glaring morning sun into what felt like one of its moonless nights blinded her. And after the intense heat, landing on cool leather had a jolt of goose-bumps storming over her skin. The next thing she noticed was that scent. Pervasive, potent. Pleasurable … It was on account of all those stimuli assaulting her senses that she shook. She was too outraged for alarm to register just yet.
Still blind, she snarled her displeasure. “Is this how you feel like men around here? By ganging up on women after you drive them off the road? But if you think you can get away with anything, I’m telling you I’m—”
Her tirade came to a choking halt. For there they were, materializing out of the blindness. A foot away from her. Eyes, the color of gold and the translucency of pure honey.
They captured hers, forbade her to see or sense anything else, even the person they belonged to. It was only when they finally released her in a sweep of thick black lashes to pour confusion over her that she was freed to take in everything about this man in one unmanageable gulp.
In her haste, she got glimpses of hair the deep gloss of a raven’s wing and the relaxed waves of a tranquil sea, skin of polished bronze, slashes and planes and hollows that were all assembled in a composition of—of … Wow.
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.”