The Sheik Who Loved Me
Page 23
She lifted her face to his. “It wasn’t. It was me. It was me talking from my heart, me stripped of every damn defence I’d ever built up around myself. In those dunes I pleaded with you to never leave me. I also told you I intended to stick around.” She smiled. Her eyes shimmered. “I meant it, David. All of it…if you’ll have me, that is.”
Tears filled his eyes. He grasped her face with both hands and kissed her hard. Then he stopped, backed off. “What about MI-6?”
A wicked twinkle lit her eyes. Her hair billowed softly out behind her in the jasmine-scented breeze. “I have a new job.”
“What?”
“I work for Sauvage now,”
“I don’t understand.”
“He wants me for the North African intelligence and research team he’s putting together. It’s part of a new service he will be offering his clients. The mercenary business is shifting more and more into this field. He says I can do the bulk of my work out here, as long as I make myself available for client briefings and meetings in London and at the Force du Sable base on Sao Diogo.”
His face was priceless. She’d rendered him speechless. She loved him right now more than anything in this world. This powerful man who’d become her one weakness was the very person who had made her whole again. He’d put the feeling back into her soul. He’d given her life. Real life. In all its messy guts and glory.
“How long have you and Sauvage been in cahoots?”
She chuckled. “A lady has to have some secrets, no?”
He took her face in his hands. “Damn, I love you, woman. You truly were a gift from the sea,” he said. “Marry me, Jayde. Be my happy-ever-after.”
Her heart clenched. “You mean Kamilah gets her fairy-tale ending?”
“We all do. She gets her voice back…I get the mermaid.”
“And I get the prince.” Tears pooled in her eyes. She kissed him. “Yes, David. Yes, I will marry you.”
And for the first time in Jayde Ashton’s life, she believed fairy tales really could come true.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7118-4
THE SHEIK WHO LOVED ME
Copyright © 2005 by Loreth Beswetherick
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