by Olivia Gates
His murmur snapped her out of the fugue state she seemed to fall into each time his eyes fell on her.
She scrambled to join in assessing the driver’s neurological status using the Glasgow coma score.
With a GCS of fifteen as fully conscious and three as deeply comatose, the driver’s nine wasn’t good, but it still boded well for no irreversible neurological damage. E—or exposure—revealed no other gross injuries. So they turned to the patient’s major one. He cut off her improvised, and now soaked and leaking, pressure bandage and the scalp wound spurted again. She jumped in with another bandage.
He sighed. “You didn’t sacrifice your jacket for nothing. At this rate, he would have gone into shock in minutes without your pressure bandage. This uncontrollable bleeding indicates a serious bleeding-clotting disorder.”
She thought so too. Even with the scalp being one of the areas best supplied with blood vessels in the body, leading to alarming and not easily controlled bleeding, this was in a different league from any scalp injury she’d ever handled.
“What I’d give for cautery right now,” she said.
He simply unzipped another bag and produced a cautery probe.
Her mouth fell open. “What else do you have in there? A full OR?”
His lips twitched as he turned on the machine and handed it to her. She jumped on the offending bleeders, zapped them closed as he blotted blood for her. When she’d gotten them all, she turned it off and cleaned it as he applied meticulous pressure once more, concluding their resuscitation efforts.
The man exhaled, stretching up to what she now realized was a truly daunting height. He was about a foot taller than her five feet six. “He’s stable for now,” he said. “And once he has the benefit of definitive investigations and management, I think he’ll be as good as new in a few days.”
She believed so too. Thanks to his intervention and preparedness. If no thanks to his carelessness and recklessness that had caused the accident in the first place. The reminder brought her outrage bubbling to the surface once more.
“It’s all well and good that you helped stabilize him. Now will you make one of your cars lead the way to the nearest hospital, where this man can get definitive management?”
He blinked, her renewed resentment clearly taking him by surprise. Then he only extended his hand to her.
With no conscious decision to do so, she gave him the hand he’d demanded. He barely held it as he escorted her back to his car, seated her with every care and courtesy then walked around the car and sat down beside her.
She stared at him, wondering what had just happened, feeling her hand sizzling from that contact with his.
He got out his cellphone, dialed one number after another and let rip in Arabic. This time she didn’t get one word of the deeply colloquial torrent.
Just a second before she exploded, he terminated his last call and turned to her, his lips spreading, his teeth a stunning flash.
Everything inside her jangled with that blast of charisma. This man shouldn’t be allowed to smile in inhabited areas.
“Everything has been taken care of,” he said.
Really? Just like that, huh?
And she let him have it. “So your reckless driving causes someone’s near-death and you just make a few phone calls and you wipe the record clean, huh? How wonderful it must be to possess enough power to walk all over people, rewrite history and come up smelling like roses!”
His bone-liquefying smile teetered. But just for seconds. Then it was widening, his incredible eyes narrowing, heating up. It enraged her more, made her even more fluent in her abuse.
“So how have you reconstructed the accident?” she plowed on. “That you stopped of your own accord and rushed to help the poor driver? What have you decided made him crash? Speeding under the influence of alcohol or …?”
He placed one finger over her lips. And she went mute.
The feel of the smooth, tough skin on hers, the masculinity and power and that scent that was all him inundating her, almost making her pass out with the pressure of sensations … Too much!
Just get out of here. Get away from him.
“Look, as long as you take care of my driver, I guess you can do whatever you please—as I’m sure you will anyway. So I’ll just go now.” She cursed herself for the wobble in her voice. “You’ve already made me an hour late for my appointment.”
All lightness seeped from his gaze, something single-minded flaring there. “You don’t need to worry about that. About anything.” Then he lowered the barrier between them and his driver and ordered, “Seeda.”
The powerful car shot forward instantly, soundlessly, eating up the asphalt, taking her who knew where.
A minute later she finally found her voice. “Can you, please, order your driver to stop? I’ll take another taxi.”
“Do you see an abundance of taxis around here?”
“That’s my problem.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Listen, I have the number of the company that sent me the first taxi. I’ll call them. So thanks for the thought, but if you just let me get down here, I’ll get out of your hair and—”
“Now, that’s a lovely image—you in my hair.” He looked sideways at her as he sprawled beside her like a lion settling down to a nap. “Why would I want you out of it?”
“You’re not letting me go?”
He just smiled. And she cried, “Are you kidnapping me?”
He laughed. A sound of such beauty and impact it was cruel. “Now there’s an idea. And who would blame me? When a dream pursues a man, he lets himself get caught, captures her back.”
A dream? So he’d progressed from toying with her to mocking her!
“I—I didn’t pursue you,” she muttered. “I just had to make you stop and take responsibility for your callous behavior.”
“What callous behavior? I wasn’t driving. And my drivers swear they didn’t notice the accident they had caused.” Before she flayed him with more sarcasm, he talked across her intended rebuke. “But I do assume responsibility for their haste. I was rushing to an appointment, told them of my wish to conclude it in record time so I’d finally get to bed. It seems they were blind to anything but fulfilling my wishes.”
Though he had shown such care to the injured driver, his explanations left a lot to be desired. She opened her mouth to flay him again and he went on talking, obliterating the last of her irritation, vaporizing any retorts and thoughts.
“I don’t consider this an apology,” he murmured. “Or that one is enough to make up for the accident I indirectly caused and which I can only thank God wasn’t any worse and that you weren’t injured. Your driver is being airlifted to the best hospital in Halwan, he will get comprehensive treatment, follow-up and compensation, and his car will be replaced. As for my failure to intervene, you must excuse me. I was sleeping until my head guard woke me up, saying that a foreign woman had intercepted us and they believed she was mad, if not armed.” He huffed a laugh, all dismissal and irony. “Which shows how clueless they are.” His gaze swept her in one hot, total body caress that singed her down to the bone. “You are more than armed. You are lethal.”
Her nerves fired an all-out alarm. Her heart was racing itself to a standstill.
What was happening to her? She’d never reacted to a man, to anything, like that. That runaway reaction, suffocating in intensity, transporting in headiness.
Feeling so out of her depth made her angrier.
“And you are … forward,” she choked. “But what do I expect from a man who’s rushing to bed—now? In the aftermath of a night of excess, no doubt.”
He took her jeering with another enervating smile, the smile of a man who was certain he’d never be less than the ultimate in any woman’s eyes.
Then he finally spoke, deep and devastating. “I hope by the time I take you to your appointment you’ll think more kindly of me. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He flipped open his cellphone. �
��I’ll just arrange a postponement of mine.”
He took his eyes off her only long enough to punch in a number. And at that exact moment her phone rang.
She fumbled it out, groaning inwardly. That Ministry of Interior hotshot must be fuming by now. She wondered if he’d believe she’d had an accident or if he’d think she was just incapable of being punctual. It was all she needed, starting off on the wrong foot with the man who could send her packing!
She punched the answer button, croaked a wavering “Hello?”
An endless moment of silence met her tentative greeting.
Then she finally heard an answering, “Hello.”
The problem was, she heard that same hello in stereo.
Out of her cellphone, and out of her companion’s lips.
CHAPTER TWO
MALEK HEARD THE melodic “hello” pouring into his ear from his phone and simultaneously washing over him from his companion’s full, flushed lips.
He stared at her, shared a suspended moment of incomprehension.
Then he burst out in guffaws.
She was the doctor he’d been rushing to meet.
This was unbelievable. He couldn’t have dreamed anything like this would happen when he’d taken over the chore of approving the latest addition to GAO’s personnel in Damhoor.
He only had because he didn’t trust Shaaker from Interior to perform the interview with the necessary finesse. He also had to meet this doctor, make sure he—or, as it turned out, she—understood what working in the region entailed. Most people came there thinking that working in Damhoor, one of the richest kingdoms in the world, would be a luxury, and those false expectations had caused many setbacks. He wanted to stem potential trouble in advance.
Since he hadn’t known when he could slot this interview into his hectic schedule, he’d decided to do it the second he had a couple of hours of freedom. This would have left him around three hours to sleep before his next chore, but after weeks of fractions of an hour of exhausting oblivion, three hours still felt like a luxury.
On his way to this interview, he’d drifted into another fitful episode of unconsciousness the moment he’d hit his seat and had jolted awake to this—this vision.
There was no other word to describe her. And that’s when his tastes had always gravitated towards dark beauty. Or so he’d thought until he’d seen this incandescent creature.
There was no doubt what his preference was now, or would remain. It had formed the moment he’d seen her. It was now hair with every gradation of the colors of the dunes of his kingdom, eyes that reflected the azure of its skies and the translucence of its seas, complexion of its richest cream and rarest honey and features and a body caressed into being by God. It was her.
He’d never known such attraction, so much so he’d at first wondered if his exhausted mind had been playing tricks on him. But not any more. Not after that incredible experience of tending her injured driver with her, and everything that had come before and after it. Every word lashing him, every glance penetrating him, every breath singeing him. It was real. More than real. It was overwhelming him into breaking a code he’d lived by since he’d turned seventeen. A code he’d thought unbreakable.
He never made the first move towards a woman. Or the second, or the last. It had been he who had received advances, and had shunned them mostly. That had still left many, maybe even too many he’d decided to accept. But he had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, always making sure these women were totally free to make such advances, were looking for similar transient entertainment and understood in advance the details of what to expect from him. Utmost courtesy, thorough gratification—and whatever he saw fit to bestow on them besides that—and an amicable, swift and final parting of the ways.
But none of that applied here. His code, his rules were nowhere to be found. And that when she’d certainly made no advances, in any form, just the opposite. While he was certainly making them. And though indignant, and resistant, she, too, was at the mercy of this incredible affinity. He was certain of it.
He now held those eyes that had so far reflected such an entrancing mixture of steel and softness, resourcefulness and guile-lessness. They were now twin displays of total shock.
Then he spoke into his phone. “And here I thought the Jay Latimer I was on my way to meet was a man. This has to be the misunderstanding of a lifetime.”
And he was now certain why Shaaker had tried his best to dissuade him from taking over this meeting. The sly desert jackal hadn’t wanted to give the opportunity up.
Malek chuckled at how things had turned out, at the way she kept the phone glued to her ear, her stare widening.
“I guess I don’t need to tell you what kept me from our appointment,” he murmured again, still into the phone. “Or beg your forgiveness for having to be even later.”
She snatched her phone from her ear as if it had burned her, looked from it and back to him in what he could only describe as horror. And he couldn’t believe how her distress disturbed him.
He snapped his phone shut and turned fully to her, anxious to dispel it, and the change in his position brought his thigh against hers, only managing to deepen her—and his—agitation.
He readjusted his pose, severed the contact. Even when it was the last thing he wanted to do. He just had to soothe her.
“If not for the accident,” he began, keeping his voice tranquil, as if gentling a skittish mare, “and for my and my men’s role in it, I’d say this is a very happy occasion. For us to meet before the arranged time, over a matter of life and death. There’s no introduction to beat coming together to fight for another’s life. You must agree this just has to be fate.”
And Jay agreed. A cruel one.
He was the one who’d evaluate her eligibility? That big shot from Damhoor’s Ministry of Interior or rather, with him being a doctor, from the Ministry of Health?
And she’d insulted him in every way she could think of!
That was, she had between the episodes when she’d stared at him open-mouthed and glassy-eyed betraying her helpless reaction to him. Still, she was sure he was used to such a reaction. He no doubt waded in women who threw themselves at his feet and pursued him to any lengths. And while she’d never do either, just that he must have read her reactions made this situation untenable.
Even if he hadn’t noticed her almost swooning, just sitting near him, he’d noticed her heaping disdain on him without pausing to ask who he was. Not the level-headed professional image she’d hoped to project …
“So is Jay your real name, or is it an initial?” His question severed her hectic contemplations, the intimacy permeating his awesome voice fizzing in her blood.
It took seconds to process his question, to force herself out of her trance to choke an answer. “It’s—it’s an initial.”
“Standing for …?” he pressed moments later when she didn’t elaborate.
“Janaan,” she croaked.
“Janaan?” His hushed tone attested to his astonishment far more than a shout would have. A long moment passed when only the smooth whir of the engine permeated the silence, then he inclined his head at her, his eyes probing, tinged with wonder. “That’s an Arabic name.”
Oh, yes, she knew that. All too well.
“And not any Arabic name. But Janaan” He said her name as if he were tasting it, made it sound lush and unique, almost magical, a name she’d always been uncomfortable with, had never used in full. “Will your surprises never cease?”
He waited, as if he expected her to answer. When she just stared back at him mutely, he exhaled, sat forward, extended his hand to her. And this time, when she once more gave him hers without volition, his grip was neither feathery nor ephemeral.
“Well, Janaan Latimer of the ceaseless surprises, we’ve met under difficult circumstances. Let’s start again, shall we?” He gave her hand a tiny squeeze. “It was a great honor to work with you, and as great a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Dr.
Malek Aal Hamdaan, at your service.”
Every word he uttered was like an electric current jolting through her heart. She felt she was suffocating on it as she groped for something to say, something to stop his advance through her barriers. “I prefer Jay—or—or Dr. Latimer …”
He waved this hand of his, the epitome of strength and elegance, the very expression of power and entitlement. “You’ll have to forgive me for defying your wishes, but now I know your name, I can never call you anything but Janaan.”
She opened her mouth to contest his presumption, to insist on keeping the distance of formality—and realization knocked her mouth shut on the semi-formed protest.
He was an Aal Hamdaan. That was the name of the royal family of Damhoor. He was one of them!
Of course he was, moron.
Hadn’t she known she was on her way to meet some sheikh who had his position by having been born a royal? And though she’d had a ridiculously inaccurate mental image of him, that Malek was that sheikh should have been the first thing she’d realized the moment she’d heard his voice mocking her on the other end of the line.
But that was assuming she had any mental faculties left functional. She was sinking deeper into shock. And it only made her angrier that even now his effect on her was deepening.
“I may not be able to stop you from calling me whatever you want,” she quavered. “But don’t blame anyone but yourself if I refuse to answer to anything but the names I specified.”
He went totally still. He didn’t even give off any vibes. She couldn’t tell what his reaction to her impertinence was. Or maybe that stillness was answer enough.
Then he moved closer, and drawled, “Can you be this cruel? Depriving me of the pleasure of calling you by this name that so suits you?”
“Since it’s a stupid name, I now know what you think of me.” But he’d be right. She was being stupid. Big time.
She’d always held her tongue, never voiced her ready, blunt opinions. But now, when she should be exercising her lifelong restraint most, here she was doing her best to offend and alienate this man who must have oodles of power, who was the one who had the say in whether she’d stay in Damhoor. Where she so desperately wanted to stay.
