Surgeon Sheik's Rescue

by Loreth Anne White

  Bella’s job, her success, defined her. And her sudden unemployment cut to the heart of her insecurities and self-esteem that came with having been abandoned as a baby. It was something she’d never been able to shake.

  Oh, she’d hunted for new work, but the tide had turned on print media. Papers were hurting. And there was a glut of journalists, just like her, pounding on doors.

  In desperation Bella had resorted to writing a blog for a website called Watchdog—theoretically an internet news portal, but one that had been scathingly referred to as “that conspiracy theorist site.” And because the blog gig was unpaid, she’d been forced to take housekeeping jobs to support her political writing “hobby.” It was about as low as a political sciences and journalism graduate could go.

  Derek, of course, had kept his photography job at the Washington Daily, courtesy of the boss’s daughter. He’d informed Bella of his infidelity the same day as her layoff. Bella didn’t know which had hit her harder.

  She’d show them, she thought as she watched her target through her lens, fingers going numb from cold, her teeth starting to chatter. This man was going to be her route back.

  But she had to be careful. She still didn’t know who had tried to kill her back home, or why. Or how this man from the abbey—the subject of her investigation—might be linked to Senator Sam Etherington, the man likely to be voted next U.S. president come the November election.

  Bella willed him to turn around now, show his face. Instead, he began to move farther along the cliff, making his way toward a narrow, black headland that jutted out into the sea. Bella left her bicycle lying in the heather and followed him on foot, at a distance. The mist grew thicker, the light dimmer, the air even cooler.

  Right at the very tip of the headland, he stopped again. A ship’s horn boomed out at sea and through the mist came the faint, periodic pulse of a lighthouse unable to penetrate the thickening darkness and fog.

  She snapped a few more frames, then stilled as he moved even closer to the edge. He stood there, as if daring gravity to take him over, suck him down into the crashing sea. She was reminded suddenly of a similar cliff, Beachy Head in England, where the suicide rate was surpassed only by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and where the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team conducted regular patrols in an attempt to spot—and stop—potential jumpers. This was a similar cliff. No patrols. Just her observing him in the darkening gloom. A chill chased over Bella’s skin. She lowered her camera, half poised to run, stop him, help him. But he remained still as a statue, coat billowing out behind him, his hair now slick with rain.

  Slowly she raised her camera back to her eye, the shutter click, click, clicking as she struggled to tamp down a mounting rush of apprehension. Bella readjusted her telephoto lens, zooming in as close as she could go. But as she was about to press the button, he turned suddenly to face her.

  She sucked in her breath.

  For a nanosecond she was unable to move, think.

  He stared at her with his good eye, black as coal. An eye patch covered his left eye and the left side of his face was marred by a violent scar that hooked from temple to jaw, drawing the left side of his mouth down into a permanent, sinister scowl. But the hawkish, arresting features, the aquiline nose, the arched brows—they were burned into her memory after staring at so many photos of him before the explosion.

  It was him.

  Sheik Tariq Al Arif, the famed neurosurgeon, next in line to the throne of Al Na’Jar—supposedly dead from injuries sustained by a terrorist bomb blast at JFK Airport in New York last June—was alive. And she’d found him. Living in a cold, haunted abbey in France.

  Emotion flooded her chest as she clicked off a rapid succession of shots of his face. She had her story. It was right here. At least part of it. This was the beginning, the tip of the iceberg that could sink Sam Etherington’s bid for the White House—if she could just understand the rest.

  He glared at her as she shot off her frames, utterly still, his face wet with rain, everything in his posture warning her not to dare take a step toward him. And suddenly, as her pulse calmed a little, Bella saw not only hostility in his features, but pain.

  Slowly she lowered her camera, ashamed of her own hunger to expose him.

  Fog thickened around him, turning him to a shadowy phantom and she realized with a start it would be fully dark any minute. She needed to find the path through the heather, back to her bike, make her way back down the cliff before nightfall. But she hesitated—what about him?

  Did he walk back to that monastery, alone, in pitch blackness, so close to the treacherous cliff edge? Worry sparked through her.

  Then, almost imperceptibly, he seemed to move toward her. At first Bella thought it was a trick of the mist, then a spark of fear shot through her—how far would he actually go to keep his secret?

  How far would his powerful family go?

  The memory of her attack curled through her mind, and fear fisted in her chest.

  She was all alone here. If her body was found smashed and broken in waves below the cliff, it would be deemed an accident, blamed on the weather, a foolish young American caught by fog and nightfall too close to the edge.

  Bella started backing away, then she turned and hurried along the path to where her bicycle lay on its side in the heather.

  Picking up her bike, the chrome wet and icy in her hands, she glanced back over her shoulder, but he was gone—a ghost dissolved into mist.

  *

  Tariq stormed into the hall of his abbey, wind swirling in behind him as the great wooden doors swung shut. Fat white candles flickered in sconces along the stone wall and a dark, hot energy rolled through him.

  “That woman from the village—” he barked loudly to his men in Arabic “—the one poking around the gates, taking photos of the abbey. I want to know who she is, where she comes from, what she wants with me, and then I want her gone!”

  He shrugged out of his drenched cape, slung it over a high-backed chair and strode through the dark halls to his library where a fire crackled in the stone hearth, shutting the door behind him.

  His library was the one room in this stone monstrosity that he preferred to inhabit. A smaller office with his desk and papers lay off it. The rest of abbey remained unlit and cold, some of it still partially in ruin, wind whistling through cracks and moaning up in the turrets like the ghost of the abbess herself. Haunted suited him fine—he was a mere ghost of himself anyway, a broken shadow, not living, not dead.

  Irritably, Tariq plucked a leather-bound copy of a book by Algerian-French writer and absurdist philosopher Albert Camus from the shelves. He settled into his chair by the fire, flipped it open.

  But he couldn’t concentrate.

  He put on Mischa Maisky’s rendition of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1. It always soothed him. It reminded him of Julie. Of life, of power, of beautiful times.

  He leaned his head back in his chair, arms flopping loosely over the armrests. The first notes of the cello washed over him. And as the music rose in crescendo, Tariq closed his eye, imagining his own fingers moving on the strings, the Pernambuco bow in his hand, the solid shape of the finely carved instrument between his knees. Whenever he’d played this piece, his whole world seemed to drop away, leaving only the moment as the harmony filled him, breathed into him, became part of him. He let his chest rise and fall to the rhythm….

  But then he saw her eyes, bright like spring crocuses, staring at him through the misted boulangerie window, her dark curls tousled about her pale, heart-shaped face like some untamed thing. Tariq cursed, shutting out the image. Another flowed into his mind as the music rose—the sight of her on the heath, like a mythical Red Riding Hood, drifting in and out of curtains of fog as she followed him with her camera. He tried to block her out again.

  She was too bright.

  It was like shutting your eyes after staring at a lamp—the afterimage burned on your retinas.

  Tariq lurched to his fe
et, strode to where his cello rested in a stand against the wall. With the fingertips of his right hand he caressed the sleek curves of finely grained Balkan maple, a wood of resilience and excellent tone. A cold heaviness pressed into his heart. Never again would he play this exquisitely crafted instrument. Never again would he operate. His left hand was his dominant one, and it was his left side that had been forever crippled in the series of blasts that had killed his fiancée. It had been an attack on his country, on him.

  He should have been the one to die. Not her.

  This war was against his family, not Julie. Falling in love with her, bringing her into the Al Arif enclave, had made her a target. And he, a doctor—a surgeon—had been unable to save her at the critical moment.

  Julie’s death was his fault.

  The Moor, the as yet faceless archenemy of the Al Arif dynasty, had stolen everything that mattered to Tariq, everything that had defined him, everything that made life worth living, leaving him nothing but a coarse lump of a man, an empty, cold shell who’d failed the only woman he’d ever loved. Self-hatred fisted in Tariq’s chest. His gaze was slowly, inexorably, pulled toward the floor-to-ceiling gilt mirror on the wall.

  He was sickened by what he saw in that mirror. Sickened by what he’d become, inside and out. Crippled, broken. Bitter. Twisted.

  That prying young woman in the red coat had pierced through the numb rhythm of his life on the island. She’d reawakened his pain. She’d gone and reminded him a world lurked out there beyond these cold stone walls—a world inhabited by a dangerous enemy who could still hurt his family and the people of his desert kingdom.

  She’d made him look into that mirror—and he hated her for it.

  With his right hand, Tariq snatched a bronze paperweight off the side table and hurled it across the room with all his might. It crashed into the mirror, shattering glass outward in a starburst. Shards tinkled softly to the Persian rug along with the dull thud of the paperweight.

  Anger coiled in his stomach as Tariq stared at the broken glass, shimmering with light from the flames. All he had left was his privacy, the numbness of grief.

  Whatever she wanted, he was not going to allow her to take that from him. Tariq was going to get his men to find out who she was, what she wanted, then he’d take action to ensure she stayed the hell away from him and his abbey.

  Chapter 2

  Bella yanked off her muddy gum boots, flicked on the lamp, closed the drapes. She shrugged out of her wet coat and hat, shook out her hair and pulled on her favorite thick, soft sweater.

  Turning up the oil heater, she powered her laptop, connected her camera and began to download the photos she’d taken. Edgy with adrenaline, she paced her small room as she waited for the high-resolution images to load. The wind grew stronger outside, rattling at her windows, seeking its way in through ancient cracks. Rain began to tick against the panes.

  Bella drew her sweater closer, rubbing her arms as she willed the heater to warm faster. Before her termination with the Washington Daily, the two key stories she’d been following were Senator Sam Etherington’s bid for his party nomination for president, and the terrorist bombing of the Al Arif royal jet at JFK.

  Etherington had since won his party’s endorsement and was now considered to be a shoo-in for president, unless he badly misstepped between now and November. The Al Arif bombing story Bella had scored by default.

  She’d been with her then-boyfriend, Derek, on a separate assignment at JFK when the blast occurred. They’d seized the moment, covering the event from an eyewitness perspective, and the Daily had let Bella run with the story as it continued to unfold over the following days, weeks, months.

  She’d done good work—demonstrating a talent not only for political reporting but showing her capability as a passionate features writer, digging deep into the characters and issues behind the tragedy.

  Derek in turn had shot what was now an iconic image of the injured and bloodied Dr. Tariq Al Arif racing from the burning jet with his fiancée, Julie Belard, hanging limp in his arms.

  Seconds after Derek had taken that famous photo, the prince had dropped to his knees and tried to resuscitate Julie, but a second blast caused by escaping jet fuel had sent chunks of shrapnel flying into the back of his head and left side of his body, severely wounding and concussing him. In the ambulance the sheik lapsed into coma. Days later he was flown home by his family where he was cared for in a private clinic. Seven weeks after the bombing, the palace press office put out a terse statement announcing Dr. Al Arif’s death.

  There were still no arrests, and there’d been no public memorial service—only a small private affair in Al Na’Jar attended by Tariq’s immediate family. None of Julie Belard’s family attended, which Bella had found strange.

  The story seemed to end there, as had her job with the Daily.

  But Bella had trouble letting go of both her job and the prince.

  During the months of covering his story, she’d become obsessed with Tariq—the aggressively good-looking surgeon prince with a brilliant mind was also an accomplished cellist and fierce polo player. Horsemanship, she’d learned, was a talent Tariq had acquired as a young boy in his desert kingdom under the tutelage of his father. Music was a gift he’d inherited from his mother’s side. But he’d also been a healer at heart, and this passion had led him into neurosurgery, and to the United States.

  Bella had come to see Tariq as a man with one foot in an ancient and exotic past, the other firmly planted in a new world, and when she’d heard of his “death,” something inside her had grieved.

  Many a lonely night she’d spent staring at the photo of Tariq fleeing that jet, thinking of the anguish in his features, the desperate passion with which he’d tried to revive his fiancée. She realized, on some level, she’d fallen in love with the idea of the prince. This was why she was so unwilling to let go of him, or his story. It also felt unfinished.

  And so it had started.

  Desperate for a way to keep her hand in the political news scene, to finish what she’d started, Bella had taken a hotel housekeeping job and gone over to the “dark side” to join Watchdog. The site was run by Hurley Barnes, an old friend of Bella’s from her college days, along with his techie girlfriend, Agnes, and their ex-CIA hacker buddy, Scoob.

  It was ironically fitting, she supposed, for Bella DiCaprio, an orphan—a reject who’d been abandoned as a two-day-old baby in a bassinet at a Chicago hospital facility for unwed mothers—to go live along the cyber fringes of society, writing with a bunch of wack-job-genius nerds, always struggling to be accepted by the mainstream but never quite managing to hang in, or pull it off.

  Still, it grated—it went against everything she’d fought for her whole life—to be accepted. And her goal remained to get back, get even, prove that Bella DiCaprio was not done.

  Not without a fight.

  Bella’s first order of blogging business for Watchdog had been to phone Julie Belard’s father—Pierre Belard—France’s ex-ambassador to the U.S. She’d wanted to interview him about the death of his daughter and her fiancé. The ambassador had explained that Tariq’s funeral had been kept small for security reasons, and the Belards had understood the Al Arifs’ need for privacy at this time. This was why they’d not attended.

  When she asked the ambassador more about Julie as a person, he told Bella his daughter used to love to holiday with the extended Belard family on Ile-en-Mer off the Brittany coast, and as a child she’d been fascinated by stories of the ghost in the abbey on the far side of the island. He’d also said that for the past three years Julie had returned to Ile-en-Mer with Tariq to attend the opera festival held each summer on the island, and that the couple had gotten engaged there.

  Bella had done more digging and discovered that a large financial donation had been made to the Ile-en-Mer opera fund in Julie’s memory. After deeper cyber investigation with the help of her techie friend Scoob, Bella learned the donation had been made by a shell company o
wned by the Al Arif Corporation—the same company that had quietly purchased the Abbaye Mont Noir itself two years ago. Bella found it strange the donation had been made only in Julie’s name.

  Then, when she’d called an island travel agent inquiring about the Abbaye Mont Noir and its ghost, the agent told her the new owner himself had recently moved in, and the abbey grounds had been closed off to the public. On probing further, Bella was told the owner was a mysterious and reclusive foreigner who’d been badly scarred down his left side. She’d become convinced it was Tariq living in that abbey, that the palace had lied about his death.

  Her laptop beeped suddenly, jolting her back to the present—her download was complete.

  Reseating herself at her computer, she hurriedly scanned the thumbnails for the shot where “Tahar” had turned his face to her. She clicked on it.

  His mist-framed features mushroomed onto her screen, and Bella’s heart started to pound. The intensity in his damaged features—the anguish, the pain, the rage—she’d captured it all in this haunting, ghostly image. And with his hood back off his head, his hair wet, she’d caught him somehow naked, stripped in the face of the elements. As raw and vulnerable as he once was powerful.

  A strange energy curled through Bella.

  She touched the screen with her fingertips, traced the lines of his face.

  Why are you hiding?

  What would it mean to you to be exposed?

  She knew what it would mean to her.

  It would be her way back into a real job, especially if she found out how this story linked to an anonymous tip she’d received alleging that Senator Sam Etherington had been behind an attempt to assassinate Tariq’s youngest brother, Omair, in Algiers last summer.