The Sheik Who Loved Me

by Loreth Anne White

  As the sun burst into the sky and rippled the sand with orange color, a wave of heat descended on them that was so oppressive Jayde thought it might just end up killing them by midday.

  Even the wind had stopped, making the air thick and gelatinous. It sapped her energy and it slowed the camels. Jayde began to feel tense, edgy, delirious as they waded through the heat and sand. She tried to shake it off. But in each distant ridge of rock she saw monsters lurk. She couldn’t tell north from south anymore. She felt alarmed at the hostile vastness of landscape. She tried to tell herself it was the jinns playing tricks with her mind again.

  But this time she could see David was edgy, too. He kept peering at the horizon to the right of their little caravan, as if expecting something.

  Then she saw what he was looking for, what he must have been sensing all along. A clot of angry red cumulous clouds began to boil up high over the distant horizon. She caught her breath as it changed before her eyes into a terrifying monstrous black claw of sand and wind. She watched in horror as it roared toward them, covering miles in seconds. She glanced around in panic. There was nowhere to hide.

  David moved fast.

  He yanked her down from her camel, thrust the animal’s head rope into her hand. He yelled above the screaming sound as the wall of sand advanced. “Hang on to this no matter what! Pull that cloth over your face! Lean into wind!”

  She couldn’t move. She was held prisoner, awed by the sheer scope the advancing, twisting, spiraling whorl of blackness.

  David worked quickly to secure the camels. “There should be a deep wadi up ahead,” he yelled. “If we can find it in the storm, we’ll have shelter.”

  The sound slammed into her head the same instant light was blotted from the sky. It was a sound so awful it seemed to emanate from the very bowels of the earth itself, screaming up from the core into the sky, sparking a primal terror deep within her.

  Then the sand hit, instantly choking her nose, her throat, her lungs. She reeled back, then forced herself forward into the teeth of it.

  It cut into her skin like a billion needles. She couldn’t see a thing. She staggered blindly forward, clutching onto the head rope knowing her life depended on it.

  David steered them into the raging blackness. As they inched forward, the wind and sand filled her head with whispering voices, senseless moaning, screaming, in a thousand unidentifiable tongues.

  She had no idea how long they battled against the storm. She moved like a dulled automaton, foot before foot. She no longer felt the pain. Then she felt his hands on her, pulling her, guiding her, forcing her down into a crevice of rock. She felt his solid body tuck in next to her. He pulled a blanket over their heads, held her into him, shielding her from the worst of the storm.

  They huddled like that, breathing in each other’s hot air as the sound and sand tore at their senses for what seemed like hours.

  Then as suddenly as it had come upon them, it was gone. An eerie silence filled the desert. David threw back the blanket, shaking out layers of fine sand. Jayde coughed and spluttered as she tried to wipe the grit of sand from her eyes and mouth.

  She looked up at David. He stared at her. They’d made it. They were alive. Behind him Jayde could count all three camels present. And beyond the camels, she could see water, life-giving water gleaming in a depression in the dry riverbed.

  Her body shuddered with a crazy sob. She felt as if she’d been stripped of everything in that sand, like she’d stared into the black maw of death. But they’d survived. And she was staring at a pool of water in a depression of snow-white sand fringed by a handful of straggling date palms.

  She began to cry. And laugh. Crazily. Hysterically.

  David grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her into him, held tight. And she could feel the force of fierce life flowing through his hands, his arms, his entire body. The same force seared wildly through her.

  She laughed and sobbed into his neck until tears ran in muddied rivers down her cheeks, until every last bit of tension had been drained from her body.

  She pulled back, stared up at him, and began to laugh all over again. “Oh, my God, don’t tell me I look anything like you do.”

  He grinned, and his eyes twinkled fierce blue through the sand that caked his face.

  He studied her. And he began to laugh, too, a sound that came from deep in his belly and burbled up through his chest. He laughed so hard it brought moisture to his eyes and it ran in streaky trickles down the sides of his face.

  He took her hand and they ran down to the water like abandoned spirits under the dome of empty blue sky. They furiously shed their clothes, tossed them onto the white sand of the riverbed and plunged into water that embraced their hot and burned and raw bodies like cool silk.

  Jayde sank under the water and rinsed the sand from her hair. She surfaced. “This is heaven. This has got to be heaven. I have died and gone to heaven.”

  A strange look filled David’s eyes.

  She went silent at the darkness she saw in them.

  Then he grabbed her, yanked her into him and kissed her brutally on the mouth. She kissed him back, hard. Tongues slipping, fighting, mating, teeth clashing. Breathless, Jayde pulled back. And in his eyes she saw the pure rawness of primal male hunger. It was as if the winds of sand had unleashed something savage in both of them. It scared her. “We…we should move on,” she whispered.

  “Yes.” The muscle in his jaw pulsed hard. “We must water the camels,” he said, his voice thick.

  “Yes.”

  They stared at each other in silence.

  He broke it. “Come,” he said, his voice rough. “If we don’t feed the poor beasts they’ll never get us to Al Abèche.”

  The chores of living were paramount out in a place like this. Jayde could see that now. Wrapped in a kikoi, her hair drying in the sun, she worked alongside David to water the beasts that had brought them this far. Then she sat on a blanket spread under the shade of the straggling palms and watched as he spread a tarp on the sand. His kikoi was wound around his waist, and his chest was bare and strong and dark with hair that ran in a thick black whorl to his waist. She couldn’t take her eyes from the way his muscles moved under his slick skin as he poured piles of grain on top of the tarp. Then he stood back as the camels began to splutter and hiss and bite at each other, serpentine necks fighting for the food so that it scattered and spilled off the tarp and onto the sand.

  David chuckled. “That’ll teach ’em not to share.” He came and sat beside her, his body touching hers. The electricity was inescapable, and what happened next was as unavoidable as the passage of the sun over these heavens.

  He reached over and tugged her kikoi loose from her chest so that it spilled off her. She sat as naked as the day she was born. His eyes ran over her, sending a spurt of liquid heat through her body. He reached up and grazed his rough palm over her breast. Her nipples hardened instantly. “You have the most beautiful breasts,” he whispered, looking into her eyes.

  The warm, dulcet tones of his voice seeped into her blood and pooled in the base of her belly.

  He ran his roughened hand down the length of her leg and slowly, very slowly, up along the inside of her thigh. Her breath caught in her throat and she instinctively relaxed her thighs, letting her legs fall open to him. Heat spilled to her groin as his hand moved up to the apex of her thighs, his roughened fingers searching her wet folds. He leaned over her, his lips finding hers as he slid a finger up into her heat. She groaned, opened wider, moved against his finger. He plunged it deeper into her, stroking her as he deepened the thrust of his tongue in her mouth. The movement of his hand brought her to an almost unbearable pitch of pleasure.

  He straddled his leg over hers, used his knee to force her thighs even farther apart, and as he did, his kikoi fell loose. He was solid with need. She moaned, arched toward him.

  David couldn’t hold off a second longer. He leaned her back onto the blanket, mounted her and thrust himself deep in
to her slick heat. She moaned, bucked under him, and it drove him nearly wild. Naked under the skies with camels crunching grain quietly over to the side, they joined their bodies in a fierce obsession that knew no shame. They tangled their limbs in feral abandon. And for David there was no past and no future. Just the present. And the woman under him was not Jayde. Not Sahar. Nor a mysterious mermaid. He didn’t know her by a tag. But he knew her nevertheless. In a most intimate way. He’d come to know her when she didn’t have a sense of self. And he’d discovered the pure, giving soul that existed at her very core.

  He’d come to know this woman in a way he’d never dreamed he could know any woman. And at this moment, he was not David Rashid, British aristocrat. He was not Sheik David bin Omar bin Zafir Rashid, descended from a line of fierce and noble nomad warriors. He simply existed. An Adam in the desert united with his Eve under the sky, only a raw and primal honesty between them.

  He cried out in wild release as she shuddered under him.

  And in this instant he knew in his heart that this was the only woman for him. Spent, he sank back and lay on the blanket beside her. In silence they stared at the sky through the dried fronds of the palm as the heavens turned livid orange and violet. He laced his fingers through hers, squeezed her hand. She squeezed back in response. He wanted to keep her by his side forever. But he couldn’t allow himself to think of forever until he’d saved his child. He could offer nothing to the world or to any person in it until he rescued his daughter.

  Jayde sat up, traced her fingers along the side of his jaw and over his lips. She smiled at him, a smile that reached right into her eyes and made them dance with pale-green life.

  She opened her mouth to say something but a sound jerked them both back to reality.

  It was the sat-phone. Ringing in the saddle bag. They exchanged a stunned glance. It could only mean one thing.

  David grabbed his kikoi, wound it around him as he strode over to their pile of supplies and pulled out the phone.

  “Rashid.”

  “It’s Moriati, David, we’ve got bad news.”

  The muscles across his chest snapped tight like a steel band. “What news?” he barked. He was vaguely aware at how Jayde jumped at his tone, grabbed her kikoi, came over to his side.

  “Sauvage and his team have been captured in Egypt.”

  His brain spun. “How?”

  “Egyptian authorities were tipped off. It was Farouk, David. He’s been working on the inside for Tariq. I’ve dealt with him.”

  “He confessed?”

  “Yeah. He got word to Tariq and Falal about our plans to attack the fortress from the north using Egypt as a launch. The Falal then fed a line to the Egyptian authorities telling them Sauvage and his team were planning trouble in Egypt. It’s tied them up in bureaucratic tape, David. They’ve got them behind bars. It will take weeks for Sauvage and his men to get out of this.”

  “We’ll get another team together.”

  Moriati was quiet on the other end of the line.

  “Moriati, what is it? What are you not telling me?” he barked.

  “Tariq has lost patience. He demands to have all Force du Sable troops out of Azar by midnight tomorrow or he will harm Kamilah.”

  “Talk him out of it.”

  “David…there is no negotiating with this man.”

  “Buy time, dammit!”

  “Can’t. He’s cut off all communication. This is his endgame, David. We have no choice but to give him what he wants. And—” Moriati paused “—I have to be brutally honest with you, even if we do deliver, I’m not sure he’ll uphold his end of the bargain and give us Kamilah.”

  David’s throat constricted, shutting off his air passages. His heart jackhammered in his chest. Adrenaline balled every muscle in his body. “Give him what he wants! Give the order, Moriati. Pull the troops out of Azar. And in the meantime, I’m going in myself. I’m going to get my daughter.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “So be it. If my daughter dies, I die, too.” He clicked the phone off. His limbs shook.

  “What was that, David?” Jayde asked. But she could already guess.

  “Sauvage and his team have been captured in Egypt. Farouk tipped Tariq off, and the Falal in turn tipped the Egyptians off. Now Tariq has brought his deadline forward to tomorrow midnight. I’ve given the order to move the troops out but I’m going in get my daughter.”

  Jayde studied his face, his eyes. He was serious. Deadly so. “They will kill you, David.”

  “They will kill Kamilah if I don’t.”

  She knew he was right. She’d believed it all along. Only an extraction would save the little girl. Not negotiation.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “No. No way in hell.”

  “Yes way. I’m in this all the way, David.” Her eyes flashed to her bag. “I can help. You need me. I’ve been trained in covert operations. You haven’t.”

  “I can’t let you do this, Jayde. I can’t ask you to endanger your life this way.”

  “No, you can’t. But I can. And I’m not letting you do this alone.”

  “You said it yourself they will kill.”

  She reached up, grabbed his shoulders, her eyes lanced his. “Then we will fight, David. Then we will fight back.”

  Moisture filled his eyes as he stared down into hers. “Do you realize what you are doing, Jayde? Do you realize what you are saying?”

  “I do.”

  Emotion spilled out from his eyes. He grabbed her face in his hands, kissed her hard on her mouth, held her tight in his arms. “I can’t…I can’t let you do this.”

  She pulled away. Her eyes bored into his. “I’ve never been more determined about anything in my life. Give me that phone,” she demanded. “What’s Moriati’s number?”

  He handed it to her and watched her punch in the number.

  “Gio,” she said with crisp efficiency as she crouched down into the sand and picked up a small sharp piece of rock. “I need the satellite specs of the Falal compound. I need to know the layout of the fort. I want to know where you figure they’re holding her, how many guards.” She began to draw in the sand with her rock as she listened. David watched as the shape of the fort emerged in the sand. She marked Xs for guards and soldiers. This was her job. This is what she did for a living. This was what he had hated her for. And now he saw what good she could do with it. And respect for her swelled inside him.

  She clicked off the phone, slanted her eyes up to him.

  “See,” she said pointing her finger at her map in the sand. “This is where Gio reckons they’re holding Kamilah. Satellite heat-imaging shows a small and fairly stationary figure here in this room on the ground level. This—” she pointed her finger at an X in the sand “—is probably a guard. There’s only one outside the door. And there are surprisingly few people in the fortress. Moriati reckons they might feel safe with Sauvage’s rescue attempt thwarted and they might be mobilizing for the anticipated coup attempt once the Force du Sable troops are out by midnight tomorrow.”

  “We stand a chance, then,” he said, hope blossoming in his heart.

  “Maybe,” she grinned up at him. “But only if you follow my orders.”

  He pulled a face. “I’ve never taken orders from a woman.”

  She stood up, bussed him on the mouth. “First time’s the hardest, Rashid. Get used to it. Because I plan on being around for a while.”

  Incredulous, he watched her march over to the camels and start loading their gear. She’d sown the seed of a promise in his heart. I plan on being around for a while. He let her words sink in, feed the promise.

  She spun around “Hey, you gonna help or not? If we move now we can be in Al Abèche by nightfall. We can dump our stuff, regroup and be at the fort sometime after midnight. That will give us a few hours of new-moon darkness before dawn,” she yelled as she hefted a bag onto her red camel.

  In spite of the gravity of the situation he felt a delinquent sm
ile tug at his mouth. “Yeah,” he whispered. He was going to make damn sure she stayed around. He wasn’t going to let this woman go. Not now. Not after she’d been through all this with him. Not after what they’d shared in the desert.

  And suddenly saving his daughter became something even bigger in his mind. It became a need to kill the cancers of the past to ensure a future. It became a driving need to make all three of them whole…him, Kamilah and Jayde. A family.

  Because all of sudden he could see with incredible clarity that the very thing that had been driving them apart is what ultimately bound them together—love.

  With new fire searing through his blood, he set about loading the camels. And he began to plot. He knew people in Al Abèche. Loyal villagers. Men who would stand by them to fight the Falal. But they had to hurry.

  The clock was ticking.

  Chapter 15

  A moonless night brought them invisibility. With fresh camels, eleven additional men from the village of Al Abèche, and a small cache of black-market weapons, including the stash Jayde had brought, they’d crossed into the Libyan desert undetected just after midnight.

  They were all dressed in black. Jayde and David had extra clothes in their saddle bags for their return journey. Jayde had borrowed a chador from a Muslim woman in Al Abèche. The plan was to hide Kamilah under it and for her and David to pose as a simple Bedouin man and wife if they encountered any rebels as they fled. She and David would go one way. The villagers, who were to create a distraction to the north of the fort, would flee in another direction. They would all meet up in Al Abèche…if all went according to plan.

  It was almost three in the morning. They didn’t have much time until first light. Jayde and David lay flat on their stomachs against the warm sand of a dune that provided them cover. The village volunteers, all experienced guerrilla fighters who’d fought Azarian rebels for Sauvage and his team, had stolen around the west end of the fort and made their way into the rocks of the northern ridge armed with grenades, explosives, AK-47s, jambiyas and scimitars.

  David scanned the fort with night-vision binoculars while Jayde rolled onto her side, carefully attached the grenade launcher to her rifle and inserted a small e-bomb canister, making sure she had another ready to go as soon as she’d fired this one. She checked her watch. “Two minutes,” she whispered.