“Dawn. I am not going to discuss this with you.”
“You don’t have to. I know the reason. You have this silly idea that because Deanna has her own money and an old family name, she’s—what’s the right word—trustworthy.”
Nick sighed. “Sweetheart,” he said gently, “I appreciate your concern. But—”
“But you want me to mind my own business.”
“Something like that, yes.”
His sister rolled her eyes at the blond woman who stood with her back against the terrace wall. “Men can be clueless,” she hissed.
Amanda Benning did her best to smile. “Have you told him yet?”
“No. No, not—”
“Dawn?” Nick’s voice came through the phone. “Who are you talking to?”
Dawn made a face at Amanda. “One of the caterer’s assistants,” she said briskly. “She wanted to know where to put the cold hors d’oeuvres. And speaking of knowing, aren’t you curious about what I got you for your birthday?”
“Sure. But if you told me, it wouldn’t be a surprise. And birthday presents are supposed to be surprises.”
“Ah. Well, I already know what my gift is.”
“You do?”
“Uh-huh.” Dawn grinned. “That shiny new Jaguar in the garage downstairs.”
Nick groaned. “There’s no keeping anything from you.”
“Nope, there isn’t. Now, you want to take a stab at what I’m giving you?”
“Well, there was that time you gave me a doll,” Nick said dryly, “the one you wanted for yourself.”
“I was seven!” Dawn grinned at Amanda. “Definitely clueless,” she whispered.
“What?”
“I said, you’re clueless, Nicky. About how to decorate this mansion of yours.”
“It’s not a mansion. It’s an apartment. And I told you, I don’t have time for such things. That’s why I bought the place furnished.”
“Furnished?” Dawn made a face at Amanda, who smiled. “How somebody could take a ten-million-dollar penthouse and make it look like a high-priced bordello is beyond me.”
“If you have any idea what a bordello looks like, high-priced or low, I’ll definitely send you home,” Nick said, trying to sound affronted but not succeeding.
“You don’t, either, dearest brother, or you’d never have the time or energy to bed all the females the tabloids link you with.”
“Dawn—”
“I know, I know. You’re not going to discuss such things with me.” Dawn plucked a bit of lint from her skirt. “You know, Nicky, I’m not the baby you think I am.”
“Maybe not. But it won’t hurt if you let me go on living with an illusion.”
His sister laughed. “When you see what I’ve bought you, that illusion will be shattered forever.”
“We’ll see about that.” Nick’s voice hummed with amusement.
Dawn grinned, covered the mouthpiece of the phone and looked at Amanda. “My brother doesn’t believe you’re going to shatter his illusions.”
Amanda thumbed a strand of pale golden hair behind her ear. “Well, I’ll just have to prove him wrong,” she said, and told herself it was just plain ridiculous for an intelligent, well-educated, twenty-five-year-old woman to stand there with her knees knocking together at the prospect of being the birthday gift for a sheikh.
CHAPTER TWO
AMANDA swallowed nervously as Dawn put down the phone.
“Well,” Dawn said, “that’s that.” She smiled. “I’ve laid the groundwork.”
“Uh-huh.” Amanda smiled, too, although her lips felt as if they were sticking to her teeth. “For disaster.”
“Don’t be silly. Oh, Nicky will probably balk when he realizes I’ve asked you to redo the penthouse. He’ll growl a little, threaten murder and mayhem…” Dawn’s brows lifted when she saw the expression on Amanda’s face. “I’m joking!”
“Yeah, well, I’m not so sure about that.” Amanda clasped her arms and shivered despite the heat of the midsummer afternoon. “I’ve gone toe-to-toe with your brother before, remember?”
Dawn made a face. “That was completely different. You were, what, nineteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Well.”
“Well, what?”
“Well, that’s my point,” Dawn said impatiently. “You didn’t go toe-to-toe with him. He had the advantage from the start. You were just a kid.”
“I was your college roommate.” Amanda caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Otherwise known as The American Female With No Morals.”
Dawn grinned. “Did he really call you that?”
“It may sound funny now, but if you’d been there—”
“I know how you must have felt,” Dawn said, her smile fading. “After he hauled me out of the Dean’s office, I thought he was going to have me shipped home and locked in the women’s quarters for the rest of my life.”
“If your brother remembers me from that night—”
“If he does, I’ll tell him he’s wrong. Oh, stop worrying. He won’t remember. It was the middle of the night. You didn’t have a drop of makeup on, your hair was long then and probably hanging in your face. Look, if it all goes bad and Nicky gets angry at anybody for this, it’ll be me.”
“I know. But still…”
Still, Amanda thought uneasily, she’d never forgotten her first, her only, meeting with Nicholas al Rashid.
Dawn had talked about him. And Amanda had read about him. The tabloids loved the sheikh: his incredible looks, his money, his power…his women.
Back then, Amanda didn’t usually read that kind of thing. Her literary aspirations were just that. Literary. She’d been an English major, writing and reading poetry nobody but other English majors understood, although she’d been starting to think about changing her major to architectural design.
Whichever, the tabloids were too smarmy to catch her interest. And yet she found herself reaching for those awful newspapers at the supermarket checkout whenever she saw a photo of Dawn’s brother on the front page.
Well, why wouldn’t she? The man was obviously full of himself. It was like driving past an automobile accident; you didn’t want to look but you just couldn’t keep from doing it.
Dawn thought he was wonderful. “Nicky’s a sweetheart,” she always said. “I can’t wait until you meet him.”
And, without warning, Amanda did.
It was the week before finals of their freshman year. Dawn was going to a frat party. She’d tried to convince Amanda to go, too, but Amanda had an exam in Renaissance design the next morning so she begged off, stayed in the dorm room they shared while Dawn partied.
Unfortunately, Dawn had one beer too many. She ended up sneaking into the bell tower at two in the morning along with half a dozen of the frat brothers, and they’d all decided it would be cool to play the carillon.
The campus police didn’t agree. They brought Dawn and the boys down, hustled them into the security office and phoned their respective families.
Amanda was blissfully unaware of any of it. She’d crawled into bed, pulled the blanket over her head and fallen into exhausted sleep just past midnight.
A few hours later, she awoke to the pounding of a fist on the door of her dorm room. She sprang up in bed, heart pounding as hard as the fist, switched on the bedside lamp and pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“Who’s there?”
“Open this door,” a male voice demanded.
Visions conjured up from every horror movie she’d ever seen raced through her head. Her eyes flashed to the door, and her heartbeat went from fast to supersonic. She hadn’t locked it, not with Dawn out—
“Open the door!”
Amanda scrambled from the bed, prayed her quaking knees would hold up long enough for her to fly across the room and throw the bolt—
The door burst open.
A thin, high shriek burst from her throat. A man dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt stood in the doorway, filling the space
with his size, his rage, his very presence.
“I am Nicholas al Rashid,” he roared. “Where is my sister?”
It took a few seconds for the name to register. This broad-shouldered man in jeans, this guy with the silver eyes and the stubbled jaw, was Dawn’s brother?
She started to smile. He wasn’t a mad killer after all…but he might as well have been.
The sheikh strode across the room, grabbed her by the front of her oversize D is For Design T-shirt and hauled her toward him. “I asked you a question, woman,” Nicholas al Rashid said. “Where is my sister?”
To this day, it bothered Amanda that fear had nearly paralyzed her. She’d only been able to cower and stammer instead of bunching up her fist and slugging the bastard. A good right to the midsection was exactly what the tyrannical fool deserved.
But she was just eighteen, a girl who’d grown up in the sheltered world of exclusive boarding schools and summer camps. And the man standing over her was big, furious and terrifying.
So she’d swallowed a couple of times, trying to work up enough saliva so she could talk, and then she’d said that she didn’t know where Dawn was.
Obviously, that wasn’t the answer the sheikh wanted.
“You don’t know,” he said, his voice mocking hers. His hand tightened on her shirt and he hauled her even closer, close enough so she was nose to chest with him. “You don’t know?”
“Dawn is—she’s out.”
“She’s out,” he repeated with that same cold sarcasm that was meant, she knew, to reduce her to something with about as much size and power as a mouse.
It got to her then. That he’d broken into her room. That he was on her turf, not his. That he was behaving as if this little piece of America was, instead, his own desert kingdom.
“Yes,” she’d answered, lifting her chin as best she could, considering that his fist was wrapped in her shirt, forcing herself to meet his narrowed, silver eyes. “Yes, she’s out, and even if I knew where she was, I wouldn’t tell you, you—you two-bit dictator!”
She knew instantly she’d made a mistake. His face paled; a muscle knotted in his jaw and his mouth twisted in a way that made her blood run cold.
“What did you call me?” His voice was soft with the promise of malice.
“A two-bit dictator,” she said again, and waited for the world to end. When, instead, a thin smile curved his mouth, she went from angry to furious. “Does that amuse you, Mr. Rashid?”
“You will address me as Lord Rashid.” His smile tilted, so she could see the cruelty behind it. “And what amuses me is the realization that if we were in my country, I would have your tongue cut out for such insolence.”
A drop of sweat beaded on Amanda’s forehead. She had no doubt that he meant it but by then, she was beyond worrying about saying, or doing, the right thing. Never, not in all her life, had she despised anyone as she despised Nicholas al Rashid.
“This isn’t your country. It’s America. And I am an American citizen.”
“And you are a typical American female. You have no morals.”
“Oh, and you’d certainly know all about American females and morals, wouldn’t you?”
His eyes narrowed. “I take it that’s supposed to have some deep meaning.”
“Just let go of me,” Amanda said, grunting as she twisted against the hand still clutching her shirt. “Dammit, let go!”
He did. His fist opened, so quickly and unexpectedly that she stumbled backward. She stood staring at the man who’d invaded her room, her breasts heaving under the thin cotton shirt.
For the first time, he looked at her. Really looked at her. She could almost feel the touch of those silver eyes as they swept her from head to toe. He took in her sleep-tousled hair, her cotton shirt, the long length of her naked legs…
Amanda felt her face, then her body, start to burn under that arrogant scrutiny. She wanted to cover herself, put her arms over her breasts, but she sensed that to do so would give him even more of an advantage than he already had.
“Get out of my room,” she said, her voice trembling.
Instead, his eyes moved over her again, this time with almost agonizing slowness. “Just look at you,” he said very softly.
The words were coated with derision—derision, and something else. Amanda could hear it in his voice. She could read it in the way his eyes darkened. There was more to the message than the disparagement of American women and their morality. Despite her lack of experience, she knew that what he’d left unspoken was a statement of want and desire, raw and primitive and male.
It was three in the morning. She was alone in her room with a man twice her size, a man who wore his anger like a second skin…
A man more beautiful, and overwhelmingly masculine, than any she’d ever imagined or known in her entire life.
To her horror, she’d felt her body begin to quicken. A slow heat coiled low in her belly; her breasts lifted and her nipples began to harden so that she almost gasped at the feel of them thrusting against the thin cotton of her T-shirt.
He saw it, too.
His eyes went to her breasts, lingered, then lifted to her face. Amanda felt her heart leap into her throat as he took a step forward.
“Sire.”
He moved toward her, his eyes never leaving hers. The heat in her belly swept into her blood.
“Sire!”
Amanda blinked. A little man in a shiny black suit had come into the room. He scuttled toward the sheikh, laid his hand on the sheikh’s muscled forearm.
“My lord, I have located your sister.”
The sheikh turned to the man. “Where is she?”
The little man looked at his hand, lying against the sheikh’s tanned skin, and snatched it back. “Forgive me, sire. I did not mean to touch—”
“I asked you a question.”
Abdul dropped to his knees and lowered his head until his brow almost touched the floor. “She awaits your will, Lord Rashid, in the office of the Dean of Students.”
That had done it. The sight of the old man, kneeling in obeisance to a surly tyrant, the thought of Dawn, awaiting the bully’s will…
Amanda’s vision cleared.
“Get out,” she’d said fiercely, “before I have you thrown out. You’re nothing but a—a savage. And I pity Dawn, or any woman, who has anything to do with you.”
The sheikh’s mouth had twisted, the hard, handsome face taking on the look of a predator about to claim its prey.
“Sire,” the little man had whispered, and without another word, Nicholas al Rashid had spun on his heel and walked out of the room.
Amanda had never seen him again.
He’d taken Dawn out of school, enrolled her in a small women’s college. But the two of them had remained friends through Amanda’s change of careers, through her marriage and divorce.
Over the years, her encounter with the sheikh had faded from her memory.
Almost.
There were still times she awoke in the night with the feel of his eyes on her, the scent of him in her nostrils—
“Mandy,” Dawn said, “your face is like an open book.”
Amanda jerked her head up. Dawn grinned.
“You’re still mortified, thinking about how Nicky stormed into our room all those years ago, when he was trying to find me.”
Amanda cleared her throat. “Yes. Yes, I am. And you know, the more I think about this, the more convinced I am it’s not going to work.”
“What’s not going to work? I told you, he won’t remember you. And even if he does—”
“Dawn,” Amanda said, reaching for the purse she’d dropped on one of the glass-topped tables on the enormous terrace, “I appreciate what you’ve tried to do for me. Honestly, I do. But—”
“But you don’t need this job.”
“Of course I need it. But—”
“You don’t,” Dawn said, striking a pose, “because you’re going to make your name in New York by waving a magic
wand. ‘Hocus-pocus, I now pronounce me the decorator of the decade.’”
“Come on, Dawn,” Amanda said with a little smile.
“Not that it matters, because you’ve found a way to pay your rent without working.”
Amanda laughed.
“Well, what, then? Have you changed your mind about taking money from your mother?”
“Taking it from my stepfather, you mean.” Amanda grimaced. “I don’t want Jonas Baron’s money. It comes with too many strings attached.”
“Taking alimony from that ex of yours, then.”
“Even more strings,” Amanda said, and sighed. This was not a good idea. She could feel it in her bones—but only an idiot would walk away from an opportunity like this. “Okay,” she said before she could talk herself out of it again, “I’ll try.”
“Good girl.” Dawn looped her arm through Amanda’s. The women walked slowly from the terrace into the living room. “Mandy, you know this makes sense. Doing the interior design for Sheikh Nicholas al Rashid’s Fifth Avenue penthouse will splash your name everywhere it counts.”
“Still, even if your brother agrees—”
“He has to. You’re my birthday gift to him, remember?”
“Won’t he care that he’ll be my first client?”
“Your first New York client.”
“Well, yeah. But I didn’t really work when I lived in Dallas. You know how Paul felt about my having a career.”
“Once I tell Nick you designed for Jonas Baron, and for Tyler and Caitlin Kincaid, he’ll be sold.”
Amanda came to a dead stop. “Are you nuts? Me, decorate my stepfather’s house? Jonas would probably shoot anybody who tried to move a chair!”
“You did your mother’s sitting room, didn’t you?”
“Sure. But that was different. It was one room—”
“The room’s in the Baron house, right?”
“Dawn, come on. That’s hardly—”
“Well, what about the Kincaids?”
“All I did was rip out some of the froufrou, replace it with pieces Tyler had in his house in Atlanta and suggest a couple of new things. That’s hardly the same as redoing a fourteen-room penthouse.”
Dawn slapped her hands on her hips. “For heaven’s sake, Mandy, will you let me handle this? What do you want me to say? ‘Nick, this is Amanda. Remember her? The last time you met, you chewed her out for being a bad influence on me. Now she’s going to spend a big chunk of your money doing something you really don’t want done, and by the way, you’re her very first real client.”’
Mistress of the Sheikh Page 2
