SHELTER FOR THE SHEIKH
ANNABELLE WINTERS
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BY ANNABELLE WINTERS
THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (USA)
Curves for the Sheikh
Flames for the Sheikh
Hostage for the Sheikh
Single for the Sheikh
Stockings for the Sheikh
Untouched for the Sheikh
Surrogate for the Sheikh
Stars for the Sheikh
THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (UK)
Curves for the Sheikh (UK)
Flames for the Sheikh (UK)
Hostage for the Sheikh (UK)
Single for the Sheikh (UK)
Stockings for the Sheikh (UK)
Untouched for the Sheikh (UK)
Surrogate for the Sheikh (UK)
Stars for the Sheikh (UK)
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AMAZON AUTHOR PAGE (UK)
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright © 2017 by Annabelle Winters
All Rights Reserved by Author
www.annabellewinters.com
If you'd like to copy, reproduce, sell, or distribute any part of this text, please obtain the explicit, written permission of the author first. Note that you should feel free to tell your spouse, lovers, friends, and coworkers how happy this book made you.
Cover Design by S. Lee
SHELTER FOR THE SHEIKH
ANNABELLE WINTERS
1
Irene Inman watched the white rental Prius wind its way down the bumpy driveway of her ranch, thirty miles outside of Cody, Wyoming. Didn’t government agents always rent black Ford Crown Vics, she absentmindedly wondered as she stood there on her porch, watching the little car get smaller and smaller until finally it disappeared into the dark yellow hills.
John Benson, head of the CIA’s Dubai station, had stayed for only nine minutes, and he’d said maybe three sentences to her. Funny thing was, Irene could barely remember the few words he’d spoken in that calm, matter-of-fact tone. All she could think was that her husband, her first love, her Dan, was now just a nameless star on a wall in Langley, Virginia, and Irene was now a widow.
She’d always known Dan worked for the CIA, of course. And she’d always accepted that he couldn’t talk about a lot of what he did. Still, Irene had always told herself he didn't do anything that could get him . . . oh, God, Dan was dead! Ohgod, ohgod, ohgod!
Now the tears came, and Irene broke, all of Benson’s words coming back to her like a hail of bullets, shattering the thin veneer of frontier-woman courage that she’d held onto just like she’d held onto this family ranch in the middle of freakin’ nowhere!
“My Dan,” she whimpered as she stumbled through the open front door and back into the house, slamming the door shut so the horses wouldn’t hear. I need to be strong for the horses, came the thought—the inexplicably nonsensical thought that confirmed she had indeed broken, was indeed shattered, crushed, defeated . . . widowed.
She cried for an hour. She knew it was an hour because the cornbread had burned to brown crust. She knew how long it took to burn the cornbread. She’d done it a hundred times before. Why the hell was she baking cornbread anyway? She’d been off carbs for three weeks now, trying to take off the extra layer of “winter fat” she’d put on before Dan got back. The sex had cooled off for them over the past year, with Dan seeming mostly disinterested. She’d asked him if it was her weight, and he’d said . . . oh, God, what did it matter now?! Dan wasn’t coming back! He was gone!
“He’s gone,” she said out loud, smiling at the cornbread as she nodded like a duck. “He’s gone, Cornbread! Did you hear? Dan’s gone.” The cornbread said nothing.
She tossed the burnt remains into the stainless-steel trash can beneath the sink, trying not to think about what Benson had said. But trying not to think about something only makes you think about it, and his words came ripping through again:
“He was cremated overseas,” Benson had said. “I’ll make sure the ashes get to you, but I wanted to come here myself to let you know.”
“Won’t you have some tea?” she’d said with that crisp, stoic smile that had been handed down to her along with the ranch and the stables. She told herself not to ask why the hell the U.S. government didn’t ship his body home so he could be buried on American soil. Why had they burned him?! “And I’ve got cornbread baking, so if you’ll . . .”
Irene had trailed off, and Benson had almost smiled, showing a flash of emotion that was subtle but still deep enough that she nearly broke in front of him. But she didn’t break in front of him, and as she held it all back she saw a look that was part pity, part admiration in his gray eyes, like he respected how she wouldn’t break down in front of a stranger.
“I’m not even supposed to be here, Mrs. Inman,” he’d said quietly, shifting on his feet and turning halfway toward the door. “It’s just that I knew Dan, and I knew how much . . .” He’d trailed off, almost hesitating, and Irene was glad he didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need anyone telling her how much he . . . whatever.
“How did he die?” she’d asked when Benson turned to leave without telling her much of anything besides the bullshit of how everyone in the CIA takes those goddamn stars on the wall so seriously. “I have a right to know.”
Benson almost winced as he met her gaze. “I . . . I . . . Ma’am, the details are classified, and I’m already overstepping my—”
“No,” she’d snapped. “I don’t want to know whether Dan was shot or stabbed or beheaded or blown up. The fact that you chose to cremate him tells me enough. I just want to know how he died. Like how was he when he died? I mean . . . was he in great pain? Was he scared? Was he . . . alone? Did he die alone somewhere out there, in some god-forsaken . . . oh, God!”
“No,” Benson said, looking at her straight on, his eyes swearing that he spoke the truth. “Dan didn’t die alone. He was with a man he knew well. A man of great honor and character, a close friend of both mine and Dan’s. I can’t tell you much more, Mrs. Inman. I’m sorry.”
“Who is he? I want to speak with him!” she’d said to Benson, though she already knew he wouldn’t tell her, that he couldn’t tell her. “Please! I need to meet him. Who is he?”
2
FOUR DAYS EARLIER
“Did they recognize you?”
Dan Inman rubbed his white-tinged beard and glanced over at his much-taller colleague, Bilaal Al-Khiyani—Sheikh Bilaal Al-Khiyani—who was scanning the snow-capped mountain peaks on the horizon before them, his green eyes fierce and focused, brown skin gleaming in the sun, thick, lustrous black hair blowing in the cold mountain breeze. They’d been in the foothills of the Karakoram Mountains for a week, on a fruitless mission to rendezvous with an Afghani informant who insisted on meeting in a small village somewhere in the no-man’s-land between Pakistan and India. The man was a no-show—either he’d changed his mind or someone else had changed his mind for him. It wasn’t too unusual—informants chickened out or were found out and executed all the time. Of course, sometimes these “informants” were just bait, an attempt to lure American or Allied agents into a trap.
They’d taken t
he right precautions: Three days of drone surveillance of the village to catch any sign of militants; detailed validation of the initial information handed over by the informant to prove himself. And with Dan’s deep tan and beard to go with the Sheikh’s natural bronze, they’d assigned agents with the right skin-tone to make the trek to the small village where a white man would stand out like the goddamn abominable snowman. The unforeseen problem was that one of the agents was somewhat famous in the closed circles of the Islamic world.
“I could have sworn one of those teenagers in the village said the word Sheikh,” Inman said after waiting a moment for Bilaal to answer his previous question. “And I think it’s safe to say you’re the only Sheikh within three hundred miles of this mountainside.”
Sheikh Bilaal smiled grimly, finally looking at Inman. “I heard it,” he said quietly, his tone controlled but serious, his Middle-Eastern accent more pronounced as it always got when the man was amongst Arabic or Urdu-speaking locals. Bilaal was a good partner, Inman thought. A good man, a good agent, and a damn good friend.
Perhaps the only real friend, Inman thought. Nobody else knows me like he does—not even Irene. Especially not Irene.
“Yes, I heard it,” Bilaal said again. “But they cannot be certain of who I am, so it is of no consequence. And even if they did recognize me, it is nothing more than a curiosity. Nobody—not even my closest family in the Kingdom of Khiyani know that I am more than just a pretty face on a golden throne.”
Inman laughed heartily. “You’re still a pretty face, great Sheikh—a pretty brown face on a white mountain.” He shook his head, reminding himself how strange it was for a billionaire Sheikh to serve on the front lines of the global war against terror, getting his hands dirty, getting his feet wet, getting things done. Indeed, Inman had been skeptical when he’d first been assigned to a job with Bilaal—a small but dangerous operation in Somalia a few years earlier. What the hell is an Arab king doing in the goddamn CIA anyway, he’d protested. Have we lost our minds?
“Technically he’s not in the CIA,” John Benson had said when Inman stormed into his Dubai office after first getting the assignment. “He’s with the Khiyani Intelligence Bureau. The CIA aren’t the only ones fighting the war on terror. We’ve got agents and officers from forty different countries joining forces on missions across the globe. The Khiyani Intelligence Bureau is small, but they train with Israeli Mossad and they’re the real goddamn deal. This guy is legit, Dan.”
“Khiyani Intelligence Bureau? The word bureau says it all. He’s a goddamn bureaucrat,” Inman had snapped. “Some macho billionaire who reads the Economist and does too many pushups now wants to experience the thrill of a real-world secret mission. Hooah. Are we selling experience-vacations to rich assholes now?”
Benson took a breath and smiled. “He is rich. And he can in fact be an asshole. That’s why I think you guys will get along just fine. You have so much in common.”
“You know I ain’t rich,” Inman had said, finally cracking a smile. Benson was solid, and he wouldn’t saddle Inman with someone who was a liability. “Which means you just called me an asshole.”
“One of those kids had a cell phone,” Inman said, grinning away the memory of that conversation as he pulled on the collar of his blue parka. “Didn’t look like a satellite phone, so I doubt it gets any service up here, but you never know. Like you said, it would be a curiosity to have the Sheikh of Khiyani hiking along the Pakistan-India border, and if the right—or wrong—people heard about it, they might get very, very curious.”
“Regardless,” Bilaal said, turning and glancing at their footprints in the fresh powdered snow that had dusted the mountains overnight. “Though it could compromise my future ability to do covert work in the region, it does not put us in any current danger. In three hours we will be at the pickup point.”
Inman nodded, glancing at their tracks and then back up at the tall, supremely confident Sheikh Bilaal. Inman was no slouch, but this man had a way of carrying himself that conveyed royalty, oozed aristocracy. Perhaps that’s why Dan liked being around him so much: The Sheikh added a touch of grace to the mostly unglamorous, sometimes horrific work they did out here in the shadows. By God, if Irene had any idea what he’d done with the very same hands he ran along her naked curves . . . hah, she’d never let him touch her again! Not that it would that bad, he thought for a moment. After all, Irene’s curves had been getting a bit too pronounced for his taste these days, he reminded himself as his jaw tightened.
Yes, Irene had always been a full-figured woman, but after the two failed pregnancies, she’d let herself go a bit, it seemed to him. It made him angry, more than anything. Here he was risking his life for the good of mankind, and she couldn’t stay tight for him? Hell, it was her duty, wasn’t it? And if she wouldn’t stay true to her duties as a wife, didn’t that relieve him of his duties as a husband? Sure. Made sense. At least that’s what Dan told himself two days ago when he visited that Pakistani brothel in Islamabad, choosing a skinny brown lass with perky little breasts, a flat stomach, and slim buttocks that were nice and tight. That was one perk of working in the shadows, Dan thought as he glanced over at the Sheikh, who kept Dan’s secrets even though he did not hesitate to voice his disapproval. Indeed, for a man who came from a culture famous for harems, polygamy, and the buying and selling of women like cattle, the Sheikh was remarkably puritan in his tastes. Dan had never seen the man indulge—even though as far as he knew, Bilaal didn’t have a woman back in his kingdom, let alone a harem of them.
“They’ll think you’re a faggot if you refuse,” Dan had sneered at Bilaal on that first mission together, when they’d finished with the bloody business of putting down a Somali warlord like the dog he was and were then offered a taste of the warlord’s private collection of concubines, young East African beauties stolen from their villages and put into service. Bilaal had ignored the comment—just like he ignored the women offered by the second-in-command who had betrayed his warlord-boss to the CIA. “Oh, I get it,” Dan had continued after emerging from the filthy tent towards the back of the camp, buttoning up his pants and tossing a used condom into the red dirt as the Sheikh stood stoically at the edge of the camp like some chaste knight of old. “The great Sheikh doesn’t slum it with these African village girls, yeah? You got your pick of Arabian whores in the opium dens of Khiyani? Not to mention the revolving door of European supermodels that wouldn’t give a Yankee cowboy like me a second look. Good for you, buddy. But I gotta take what I can get, you know? The old lady back home just ain’t cutting it for this working-class American hero.”
“It is best to consider that before one takes the vow of marriage,” the Sheikh had said as the two of them walked away from the camp. “There are challenges to keeping sex exciting and fresh in a marriage, but once you commit to a woman, you will find that the possibilities are endless.”
“I prefer the endless possibilities of this shadowy world we’re forced to deal with,” Dan had grunted, shaking his head as he glanced at the smog of Mogadishu in the distance. “And what the hell do you know about marriage?” He'd paused after saying it, almost kicking himself when he remembered that the Sheikh had been married once, a long time ago.
But the Sheikh seemed unaffected. “I know enough to not do it unless I am ready to commit to the woman body and soul, completely and absolutely, always and forever,” he had replied after the smallest of hesitations.
“Are you seriously giving me a lecture about morality after you stabbed a man in the goddamn eye?” Dan had barked.
The Sheikh had shrugged, looking towards their helicopter as it approached. “The eyeball is the quickest way to the brain. That is why when birds fight, they go for the eyes.”
“You’re a goddamn weirdo,” Dan had muttered. “Billionaire king who stabs people in the eyeballs and believes in the fairy-tale of a perfect marriage.”
Images of his not-so-perf
ect marriage came pushing through as Inman turned back to the treacherous mountain path ahead. He’d never thought of himself as the marriage type. Hell, he wouldn’t even be married if Irene hadn’t gotten herself knocked up three years ago! He’d done the honorable thing and put a ring on her—hell, he figured he could always get pussy on the job, and he liked her well enough even if she was a bit heavy for his taste. Irene was tough, in that frontier sort of way. She was loyal. She was . . . normal, yeah? And fuck, it was nice to have something mundane and “normal” to come home to after killing bearded Taliban warlords and humping skinny Pakistani whores strung out on Afghani heroin. And a kid wouldn’t be so bad, he had told himself back then when he thought she was pregnant. Irene would take care of the critter, and it might be kinda fun.
But then she’d miscarried, and shit had gone downhill. Irene wouldn’t stop talking about having a goddamn kid. It was like she’d suddenly gone baby-crazy. Maybe she’d always been baby-crazy—who the hell knew! He considered just walking away from the marriage. It would’ve been pretty clean. No kids, and he had no assets on the books that a divorce lawyer could track down. All that dirty money he’d stashed away had come before Irene, anyway. Before Irene, and before the Sheikh.
Dan would’ve laughed out loud if it weren’t for a gust of freezing wind that made his teeth chatter. It’s gotta be the sickest joke that nobody’ll ever hear: a man like me sandwiched between a wife like Irene and a partner like Bilaal. Hell, if there’s any good in me, it almost certainly came from one of those two!
And now he missed her. Now he wanted her warmth. Now he remembered that he hadn’t left her when it would have been so easy, that he’d held her close after the miscarriage, promised her they’d try again when she was ready. God, maybe there was a part of him that loved her, yeah? Didn’t want to fuck her so much anymore, but one out of two wasn’t bad, eh?
Shelter for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 9) Page 1
