by Olivia Gates
“I—I committed all the crimes I was convicted for. I hacked into accounts I found out about when Ghada once let me fix her computer. She was just a good friend, and I made up the whole thing about us to give you a story you’d believe and sympathize with. I embezzled millions, sold dozens of vital secrets. I did far more than what they found out. But I couldn’t admit it to you. It was part shame, part needing you to stand by me, to help me get out of this nightmare. I feared that if you knew I deserved what I got and worse, even with loving me, your sense of honor would stop you from trying. But I no longer care. I’ll go back so you can stop paying the price for the freedom I don’t deserve. I only hope you can one day forgive me.”
She stared at him. This was too much.
It was all a lie.
The two men she loved more than life had both used her and exploited her unconditional love for them.
She tore herself away from Todd’s pleading hands.
He sobbed as she staggered away. Before she stumbled into her room, to hide from the world and never exit again, she turned numbly. “Just don’t get yourself in trouble again. I don’t have any more in me to pay. And what I paid is for ever gone.”
The heart, the soul, the faith, the will to live.
All gone.
Seemed she was more resilient than she thought.
At the crack of dawn she was up, crackling with an unstoppable need. To confront Harres.
She’d thought she’d die rather than do it. But when she’d slept, her dreams had crowded with faithful replays of their time together. The contradiction between what she’d lived firsthand and the words she’d heard him say was so staggering, she knew something didn’t add up. She hadn’t been in any condition to realize that yesterday, too worn-out in every way, too shocked, too ready for bad news, too insecure, too you-name-it, that her mind hadn’t functioned properly.
Now she was back to her scientific, logical, gotta-have-answers-that-fit self. More or less. And she would settle this, would ask the question she’d been too raw to ask before.
Why had he said those things?
She’d take any chance that he’d have a perfect explanation and remain the man she loved with all her soul, the memory of whom would enrich her life even if she could never see him again. Far better than believing he had no reason but the obvious one, and was the monster she couldn’t bear living believing he was.
So she called him. For six hours straight. His phone was turned off.
Going crazy with frustration, she went back to work. Might as well do something with all this energy that others would benefit from.
She headed to the doctors’ room, running on auto. But as she approached, she felt…something.
She shook her head. Stop daydreaming, T.J. What would that “something” be doing here?
She squared her shoulders, readying herself for the storm of interrogation over her sudden month-long leave of absence when she’d never missed a day of work.
The…premonition expanded with every step. The pull became irresistible. She knew she’d feel like the stupidest person in the galaxy in seconds when it turned out to be all in her mind, but she didn’t care. She ran.
She burst into the room.
And there he was.
Harres.
She hadn’t been imagining it. She had felt him.
Which meant she had an infallible sense where he was concerned.
Which meant she might have the man she loved back after all.
He’d been leaning against the table that acted as the doctors’ meeting/dining/sleeping surface, pushing his tailored jacket out of the way to dip his hands deep into the pockets of molded-on-him pants, his feet crossed in deceptive relaxation at the ankles.
He’d always looked incredible. But here, among mundane surroundings and everyday people, he looked unequivocally godly. The potency of the ancient pride and the birthright of power emanating from him swept over her.
He waited until she entered and got a load of him dominating the place, being gaped at by all present, before he pushed to his feet, oh, so slowly, his eyes lashing out solar flares.
She imagined herself breaking into a sprint, charging him, pushing him flat on that table and losing her mind all over him. A mind that flooded with images and sensations, of tearing his clothes off as his magical hands rid her of hers, before raising her as she straddled him, then lowering her on his…
She swayed with the power of the fantasy. She felt as if he was transmitting it directly into her brain, generating it, sharing it.
But it was his eyes that snared her in a chokehold. A tiger’s. Crackling with scorching…rage? Pain? Both?
One thing was unmistakable. Searing challenge.
He straightened fully, cocked his head at her. “You called?”
“Saw my missed calls, huh?” She turned to her colleagues, who were watching her and Harres like they would their favorite soap. She wouldn’t be surprised if someone ran out for popcorn. She twisted her lips at their audacious interest, poked sarcasm at all present, starting with herself. “I accumulated over two hundred. Must be why Prince Harres found a transatlantic visit to be the only suitable way to see what the hell was so pressing.”
Taking her cue, showing her that he was embarrassment-proof, he walked up to her with seeming indolence. When he was within arm’s length, he lashed out like a cobra, caught her to him, his gaze snaring hers in a fiercer grip.
“So, Dr. T. J. Burke…are you congratulating yourself how I, who could always smell the slightest trace of fraud, ate up your lies and am still back for more?”
She stood in his grip, her heart quivering with unfurling hope. “I never lied. In fact, like you once said, I can’t lie. Just ask those guys.” Grunts of corroboration issued from everyone around who’d been singed by her inability to hide the truth of her feelings. Suddenly, the pain she’d experienced yesterday welled up inside her. And she pinched him, in the sensitive underside of both arms. Hard. “But you lie like a bird can fly.”
His frown cracked on a twitch of surprise at her unexpected action, at its sting, on a jerk of humor at her rhyme, before resuming full force. “I never, ever lied to you. And if you never did to me, as I would have staked my life on till yesterday, why did you say what you said? Or did you really think you needed to seduce me to get me to help Todd? If you did, didn’t you know I would have helped the very devil to make you happy? That you didn’t need to say you felt anything for me, because it’s enough for me that I feel everything for you?”
His words washed over her in healing waves, wiping away all the pain and doubt in swell after swell.
Then she remembered Todd’s staggering confession, and her heart compressed. Harres had probably done a host of illegal things to get him off the hook. All for her.
She soothed the flesh she’d abused, her heart brimming with sorrow and remorse. “I was just lashing out in shock and misery.”
“Why?” He had the look of a man who was watching his sanity ebbing before his eyes.
She pinched him again, harder this time, dragging a growl from his depths, a mixture of pain and aggravation and arousal. “Because I heard you. Saying you don’t care if I live or die. So you were lying, to someone. That’s why I called you. To ask you who you were lying to, and why.” She pushed out of his arms, stuck her fists in her waist. “So?”
Harres felt the mountain that had been crushing him since yesterday lifting. This explained everything.
She’d heard him.
“Ya Ullah. It’s a wonder you didn’t kill me and ask questions later.” He laughed, with all the discharge of his confusion and agony. “So, the reason I said those things—which, by the way, made me so sick that I haven’t been able to put a thing in my mouth since—is I got a phone call, someone telling me they know who you are, what you mean to me, and if I don’t back off, they’ll harm you. I had to say you meant nothing to me, to make you invalid as a target.
“After I said what I did to
my extortionist, I had to keep playing it cool with you since I knew we had traitors in the palace, and your room was probably bugged. I would have explained things to you the moment we were outside monitoring range, but you hit me with that delightful surprise about never feeling anything for me. I couldn’t believe it, but you seemed so distant, so different, until I began to lose my mind thinking it might be true. I wouldn’t have let you go if Amjad hadn’t called at that moment. As it was I sent a dozen men as your security detail just in case.”
“So that explains all those GQ specimens suddenly hanging around outside my house. Way to go picking guys only I in my condition couldn’t see for the elite secret-service agents they are.” A smile, sheepish and adoring, trembled on her lips, still echoing pain. He wanted to devour them, soothe away the remainder of her agitation. She bit them, making him feel her teeth had sunk into his own flesh. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am for…Todd. I should have suspected something, but I guess I am too stupid when it comes to him.”
“I’m not sorry. In fact, I owe your misbehaving brother a debt I can never repay. Your misplaced belief in his innocence drove you to Zohayd and into my life. Amjad and Shaheen pulled some major strings, but I personally paid back with interest everyone he defrauded, and it feels like such a tiny price for having you.”
Then she was in his arms, burrowing deep into his chest and deeper into his being and bawling her eyes out.
He filled his aching arms with his every reason for life, every source of happiness. When he’d thought he’d lost her, had never had her… He shuddered. He couldn’t even think of those soul-gnawing hours. And he had to tell her something else.
“I’m not here because you called, ya talyeti. I was on my way here. That’s why you amassed those missed calls. But I am ecstatic that you didn’t give up on me, even after hearing the horrors I was forced to utter about you, that you still called, still gave me the benefit of the doubt.”
She looked up from the depths of his embrace, her heavenly eyes brimming with love. “How could I not, when I sobered up and remembered what we shared?” She told him about her own phone call, and they both realized at the same moment. She articulated the realization. “My informant masterminded everything. Threatening my safety to you, forcing you to say what you did and forcing me to hear it.”
“But that’s where he went wrong.” He gathered her to him more securely, feeling his heart stagger with the blessing of having her belief, so deep it had withstood that brutal test. And he had no doubt, would stand a lifetime of tests, come what may. As would his. “He didn’t count on you being too ethical to lash out by doing his dirty work for him, and loving me so much that you’d give me a chance to exonerate myself.”
The adoration in her eyes enveloped him, made him feel invincible. “And he didn’t count on you being unable to believe I could use you that way, that you’d come after me, and that we’d talk, get past the doubts and hurt and find each other again.”
He suddenly swung her in the air around and around. Her unfettered laughter echoed his overwhelming relief and elation, fell all over him like pearls tinkling off crystal.
He finally put her down, cupped her beloved face in his hands. “And now we have. And with your brother free and no doubt planning to atone, and with us being on the final leg of aborting the conspiracy now that all the pieces are in place, and now that I’m certain the threat against you was just a ploy to get you to hear me and lash out, all our obstacles have been removed.” He kneeled in front of her. “I have nothing to give you while I make this offer but everything I am. So will you now take me, ya talyeti, ya ghalyeti, ya noor donyeti, all of me? Will you marry me and make me whole?”
Talia would have fallen if Harres hadn’t caught her by the hips.
She stared down at him as he kneeled before her, shock and overwhelming joy twisting her tongue as she choked out, “Y-you’re not—not promised to some m-marriage of state?
He smiled up at her, that annihilating smile that vaporized her mental functions at a hundred paces. “I’m not. I am free to marry the wife my heart chooses. And my heart, and everything in me, chooses you.”
And she threw herself all over him, sobbing her love and relief. “Considering I’m yours forever, too, it’s wise of you to make use of the fact.”
From somewhere far away, she heard clapping and hooting.
Her infernal colleagues. They were still here?
Well, doctors in the E.R. didn’t have much of a private life. She’d seen most of their revealing and embarrassing moments. They’d witnessed many of hers, too. Let them now share her most incredible one.
As she lost herself in Harres’s fate-sealing kiss, one of her male colleagues said, “There’s a very nice-size supply cabinet just around the corner, dude.”
They both turned on him with a simultaneous, “Oh, shut up.”
Then, exchanging a conspiratorial look with Harres, she grabbed his hand and they rushed out of the room.
On their way out, a female colleague asked, “What if the Chief sees you signed in but nowhere around?”
“Tell him I have a gunshot victim to tend to,” she said.
“Yes,” Harres added. “Someone who’s so impressed by her uncanny medical skills, he’s going to donate any number of millions she sees fit to your department in gratitude.”
They left the room to an explosion of excitement.
Once they reached that supply cabinet, he dragged her inside, pushed her against the wall. “And to this golden virago who owns my heart by awakening it, my life by saving it, my faith by inspiring it, what would you see fit I donate?”
She dragged him down to her, begged in his mouth. “Just your love. Just you.”
And he pledged to her as he made her whole, “You have it, and me, always. Forever.”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-8473-3
TO TEMPT A SHEIKH
Copyright © 2011 by Olivia Gates
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*Throne of Judar
†The Castaldini Crown
**Pride of Zohayd
