Rachel blanched. “No! You can’t—”
“Certainly I can,” he said calmly. “I have one of the best legal firms in the United States on retainer. Six full partners. Endless associates from the nation’s top law schools. Paralegals. Clerks. Offices on both coasts. And who will represent you? A fresh-out-of-law-school kid from Legal Aid? A lawyer with a closet for an office?” Another cool smile touched his lips. “The contest should prove interesting.”
It was a direct hit.
Karim knew it; the proof was in the sudden tremor of Rachel Donnelly’s mouth, the glitter of unshed tears in her eyes.
He wanted to feel triumphant.
But he didn’t.
She was an easy opponent and he’d never been a man who enjoyed easy victories. The power was all his; she had nothing but possession of Rami’s son—because, without question, this was Rami’s son.
Why wouldn’t she admit it?
She had everything to gain. She had to know he’d pay whatever price she set for the child.
Unless the child really mattered to her.
He supposed that was possible. Not likely, in his experience. His mother, whenever she’d been around, had shown more affection for her poodles than for him or Rami; he had female employees, executives on the fast track, whose kids were virtually being raised by nannies.
Nothing wrong with that.
It did children good to grow up with a sense of independence.
Wasn’t he living proof of that?
Still, he knew there were other kinds of mothers.
He saw them on weekends when he ran in Central Park, playing and laughing with their children
Maybe Rachel had that kind of thing in her.
Maybe not.
Maybe it was all an act.
Either way, he didn’t give a damn.
Whatever her reason for making this so complicated, he would be the victor. How much she gained from the battle—six figures, seven, the right to visit with the boy from time to time if she wished—depended on how many obstacles she put in his way.
He really didn’t want a court fight.
He knew damned well it would end up splashed in the tabloids, on the cable talk shows, on internet blogs. And both he and Alcantar were better off without that kind of publicity.
Rachel would acquiesce before things went public. He was certain of it. And this, her silence, was the first proof.
So he waited, watching her without saying a word, until at last she blinked back those unshed tears.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
Her voice was whisper-thin. It almost made him feel guilty—until he thought about his duty to his brother.
“This isn’t about you,” he said, not unkindly. “It’s about Rami.”
Rachel shook her head. “I don’t believe that.”
Karim narrowed his eyes.
“No one calls me a liar.”
“Not even when you lie to yourself?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about too little, too late.” Her voice took on strength; she folded her arms in what was fast-becoming a familiar indication of defiance. “Because, Your Highness, if you’d really cared about your brother you’d have been there for him. You’d have made him see that he couldn’t go on drinking and gambling and living the kind of life people like you live, neck-deep in self-indulgence and money and to hell with decency and honor and—”
She gasped as he reached for her, ignoring the pull of his seat belt and hers, digging his hands into her shoulders as he pulled her toward him.
“You don’t know a damned thing about what you call ‘people like me,’ and you sure as hell don’t know anything about my brother except what he showed you when he took you to bed.”
“I know that you’re heartless. To do what you’re doing to Ethan and me and, yes, even to your brother’s memory—”
“I’m doing this for his memory. For the honor of our people—an honor he never understood.”
His hands bit into her shoulders. Then he said something under his breath in a language that sounded as hard and unyielding as he was, and flung her from him.
“Agree to the testing or find yourself a way to fight me in court,” he growled as he started the car. “Those are your choices. The flight east is a long one. I suggest you use the time to come to a decision.”
They stopped at the security gate. Karim produced his ID; the guard waved them through. Rachel waited until he’d parked. Then she turned toward him.
“I just want to get one thing straight.” Her voice shook; she cleared her throat, sat straighter, reminded herself that her enemy would surely make the most of any sign of weakness. “You remember that—that moment in the bathroom when—when I seemed to stop fighting you?”
“No,” he said coldly, “not in any detail. Did you think I would?”
She felt her face heat but she’d gone too far to back off now.
“You’d have remembered my knee where it would have done the most good if you hadn’t let go of me.”
“So that was … What shall I call it? Misdirection?”
“It was doing whatever I had to do to get you off me!”
He nodded, his expression suddenly grave. “I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”
“Believe me, Your Highness, there won’t be a next time.”
He gave her a long, steady look. Was he laughing at her? Did he think this was a joke?
Rachel didn’t wait to find out.
Instead, she undid her seat belt, got out of the car and took Ethan from the baby seat. Karim reached past her, grabbed her suitcase and the diaper bag, then clasped her elbow with his free hand and began walking toward a silver jet with the emblem of a falcon on its fuselage.
Steps led up to the open cabin door where two men and a woman, all in dark gray suits, stood watching them.
“My crew,” Karim said.
His crew.
His plane.
His life.
The sudden reality of what was happening hit Rachel with breath-stealing force. She stumbled; Karim dropped the bags and swept his arm around her waist.
“Dammit,” he growled.
The woman rushed down the steps and hurried toward them. She reached for the suitcase and diaper bag but Karim shook his head.
“Take the child.”
Rachel pulled back. The woman smiled reassuringly.
“He’ll be fine with me, ma’am. I’ll take him to the galley. I have diapers ready, food, a little carrier … His Highness saw to everything.”
Rachel blinked. “He did?”
“He did,” Karim said briskly. “Go on. Give the baby to Moira, or would you rather run the risk of dropping him?”
Rachel handed Ethan over. Then she stared at the Sheikh.
“When did you order all those things?”
“I had plenty of time to make phone calls while you were packing. There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t take forever to pack.”
“I didn’t take forever. And are you always so sure of how things will work out? That I was packing at all? Just because you want something doesn’t mean it—” She gasped as he swung her up in his arms. “I can walk!”
“Yes. So you just demonstrated.”
He strode to the steps and climbed them. The two men—his pilots, she assumed—snapped to attention.
Rachel could feel her face burning. Maybe the Sheikh’s crew was accustomed to seeing their lord and master board his plane with a woman in his arms but this kind of dramatic entrance was new to her.
“I’ll see to those bags, sir,” one of the men said.
The Sheikh nodded.
“Fine. I want to get airborne ASAP.”
“Yes sir.”
One man went for the bags. The other made his way to the cockpit. Karim carried Rachel through what might easily have passed as someone’s handsome living room.
“Don’t they click their heels?
” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
She pulled back as far as she could in his hard, encircling arms.
“I said, don’t they click their heels?”
“They do,” he said, “but only on state occasions.”
Her eyes went to his. Okay. It was a joke; she could tell by the look on his face. At least there was something human about him.
“You can put me down now.”
“Can I?”
“Put-me-down!”
His mouth twitched. “I heard you.”
“Then, dammit, put me—”
“That isn’t a very ladylike way of speaking.”
“I’m not a very ladylike lady. And I want you to—”
His arms tightened around her as the plane lifted into the sky.
“I know what you want,” he said gruffly, and he bent his head and kissed her.
She made a little sound of protest and he asked himself what in hell he was doing.
And then she made another little sound that had nothing to do with protest.
Karim traced the outline of her lips with the tip of his tongue. He sank onto a leather loveseat, Rachel still in his arms. One hand swept into her hair; the other found the sweet swell of her breast. Her taut nipple pressed into his palm through her cotton T-shirt, and he shuddered.
“Rachel,” he whispered.
She moaned and her lips parted, giving him access to the honeyed sweetness of her mouth.
He drew her closer. Swept his hand under her shirt. Cupped her breast.
She put her arms around his neck.
He brought his hand to her face, cupped her jaw, rested his thumb in the delicate hollow of her throat. Her pulse leaped under his touch.
What in hell was he doing?
It was wrong. It was madness. And yet he wanted this, wanted her—
The plane hit an air pocket. It jumped, and so did Rachel. She jerked back in his arms, face pale, eyes wide and blurred. He blinked and let go of her.
She sprang to her feet.
“Do not,” she breathed, “do not ever touch me again you—you vile, arrogant, heartless, manipulative bastard! Do you always ignore the truth of what other people feel?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. A good thing, he thought as she stumbled to a seat far from his, because he didn’t have one.
Was she right?
Had he ignored what might have been Rami’s unspoken cries for help? Could he have saved him from his path of self-destruction? Could he have somehow turned his brother’s wasted life around?
And this.
What he’d just done.
Kissing Rachel. Forcing his kisses on her. An ugly way to describe it, but wasn’t that what he’d done? Kissed her until she’d kissed him back, until her sighs, the sweetness of her mouth were proof that she was in danger of succumbing to the same hot darkness that threatened him?
Only one thing was certain.
It was too late to do anything about Rami.
But he could do something about the child. Raise him to be the man Rami might have been.
And he could do something about Rami’s woman.
He could never touch her again.
Never, Karim told himself, and he turned his face to the window as the plane gained speed and altitude until, at last, the glittering lights far below were no more substantial than a mirage.
CHAPTER SIX
RACHEL was shaking with anger.
Bad enough the Sheikh had walked into her life and seized control of it.
Ordering her around. Making assumptions.
And this. Man-handling her as if—as if she existed for his pleasure.
She knew what he thought of her.
Rami had treated Suki like a slave. Bring me this, hand me that, don’t argue when I say something …
He’d tried that with her, too, but it hadn’t worked.
“Maybe that’s how men deal with women where you come from,” she’d told him, “but this is America.”
America. Where a woman like her wore a costume that made her look like a whore because management said she had to. Where a man judged her by the damned costume, or maybe by the belief that she’d been his brother’s mistress.
She’d told him she hadn’t been Rami’s mistress. He hadn’t believed her. Now she wanted to tell him she hadn’t been his lover, either.
She wanted to say, I’d sooner have lived on the streets than have slept with your horrible brother.
But she couldn’t say it. She had to play out this charade because all that mattered was Ethan.
Okay. She had to calm down. Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Take another …
“Goddammit,” she said.
How could she calm down? How?
“You gotta go with the flow,” Mama had always said.
Mama hadn’t just gone with the flow, she’d ridden it like a surfer on a wave.
Rachel snorted.
Mama used to say a lot of things. Folksy crap. Stupid nonsense.
Not so stupid anymore.
Go with the flow. And that other old bromide.
“First impressions count.”
That had always made Rachel cringe, because Mama had probably said it a hundred times, always in a cheery voice, always as she stood in front of a mirror primping for her first date with the latest jowly, sweaty-faced fool who’d come sniffing at her heels.
Turned out Mama had been right about that, too. First impressions did count. The Sheikh had judged her on how she’d looked. And she’d hadn’t helped the situation, letting him bark out commands—
Letting him kiss her in the bathroom and kiss her again, here on his plane. Sure, she’d fought back, but then—but then—
Come on, Rachel. Be honest, at least with yourself.
She’d fought about as hard as a poker player fought against ending up with a Royal Flush.
He’d kissed her.
And after a token kind of resistance she’d kissed him back.
That was the awful truth.
He was every miserable thing a man could be. Too rich, too good-looking, too egotistical to tolerate. Dammit, he was a man, and that was enough.
Until he’d kissed her and her brain had turned to mush.
How could such a thing have happened?
Yes, he was good-looking. Hell, what he was, was sexy.
But she wasn’t into sexy.
She wasn’t into sex.
She wasn’t into anything that might interfere with the life she wanted, the life she’d been planning ever since she woke up in a lumpy bed in a cheap room in Pocatello, Idaho, the morning of her seventeenth birthday. Sixteen-year-old Suki had been asleep next to her, mouth hanging open, each exhalation stinking of beer.
“Mama?” Rachel remembered saying, with a kind of awful premonition.
She’d sat up, pushed away the thin blanket—and had seen the birthday card propped on the table near the bed. A big, garish thing with purple and yellow balloons drawn all over it.
Happy Birthday! it said.
Inside were two crisp twenty dollar bills. And a note.
Gone for a little vacation with Lou! You girls be good until I send for you!
Luv you!
Lou had been Mama’s latest “beau.” That was what she always called her men-friends. She’d gone on “little vacations” before. A weekend. A few days. One scary time, when Rachel was ten and Suki was nine, she’d gone off for an entire week.
That morning in Pocatello Rachel had told herself that Mama would be back.
It never happened.
After three weeks she’d found a night job at Walmart but it hadn’t been enough to pay for their miserable room and put food in their bellies.
So she’d quit school.
One more year until she’d have had her diploma. It had killed her to walk away, but what choice had there been? She’d had to work to support herself and her sister.
“You stay in school, Suk
i,” she’d told her. “You hear me? One of us in going to graduate!”
In August, Rachel had moved the two of them to a bigger furnished room in a safer neighborhood. She’d used her Walmart discount for Suki’s school supplies and bought their clothes at Goodwill.
Suki wouldn’t wear them.
“Holy crap, how can you wear somebody’s old stuff?” she’d demanded. “And you’re wasting your money, buying me school stuff. I’m not going to go no more.”
When the first snow fell they got a card from Mama. She was in Hollywood. She knew someone who knew someone who was making a movie. She was going to get a part in it.
And then I’ll send for my girls!
More exclamation marks. More lies. They’d never heard from her again.
Or maybe they had. There was no way to know because by January Idaho was nothing but a memory.
Suki had taken off. No goodbyes, no explanations. Just a note.
See you, it said.
Just like Mama, except Mama had left those twenties. Suki had emptied the sugar bowl of the fifty bucks Rachel had kept in it.
Rachel moved to Bismarck, North Dakota. Took a job as a waitress. Moved to Minneapolis. Took another job wait-ressing. A couple more stops and she’d ended up in a Little Rock, Arkansas, diner.
Bad food, grungy customers, lousy tips.
“There’s got to be somewhere better than this,” she’d muttered one night, after a guy walked out without paying his bill, much less leaving a tip.
“Dallas is lots better,” the other girl working the night shift had said.
Right, Rachel thought now, swallowing a bitter laugh. And after Dallas came Albuquerque, and after that Phoenix.
Rachel had seen more than her share of the West.
Then Suki had called. Told her about Las Vegas.
In some ways Vegas had been an improvement. When customers were happy because they’d won at the slots they left decent tips. And once she’d swallowed her pride and taken the job she had now the tips had got even better.
She’d started taking classes at the university, planned a better life for herself, and then for herself and Ethan …
What time was it, anyway?
She wasn’t sure what time they’d left Las Vegas. Ten, eleven o’clock—something around there. They were moving fast but there was no feeling of motion, no sense that they were miles above the earth, going from one time zone to another.
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