Her heart stalled. Time warped into slow motion. Jayde Ashton now knew exactly who she was, where she had come from and why she was on Shendi Island in the middle of the Red Sea.
It was true. David was her enemy. Her jaw began to tremble at the sheer power and emotion of it all. But she couldn’t cry. Not here. Not now. Not ever. Because Agent Jayde Ashton, M1-6, never cried.
He stood, came toward her, hand held out.
She clamped her jaw shut, pulled her shoulders back.
The light of the candles glittered in his eyes. His smile was a wolfish slash of white against the darkness of his skin. He took her arm firmly in his hand. There was a proprietary quality in his behavior toward her tonight. His eyes prowled down the length of her body, a predator sizing its prey. She could feel the electrical tingle his heated gaze left in its wake. She held her breath, repressed a shiver.
“You look ravishing.” His words growled through her resolve.
“Thank you,” she said, trying to swallow fresh, hot panic.
He held her at arm’s length, tilted his head to one side, raised a dark brow. “Jade…” he said.
Blood drained instantly from her head. She gaped at him. Oh God. Oh God, Lord Almighty. He knew her name!
“…it’s a beautiful color on you. It suits you even better than I thought it would.”
Her heart jackhammered. Her mouth went dry.
He reached up, touched his fingers to the stone at her neck. “And amber…” He smiled darkly, a twinkle rippling like ink through his eyes.
Her breath congealed in her throat. Oh God! Amber! Was he toying with her? He couldn’t possibly know she’d had a twin sister named Amber. What else did he know? That she was a spy?
“…the colors in the stone complement your hair,” he said.
Relief swept through her. He didn’t know. Unless he was teasing, testing her with loaded words…just to gauge her reaction. She had to change the subject, act normal, buy time, think. “Is…is Kamilah not here?” she asked, anxiety skittering through her belly.
“She’s in bed.” David spontaneously kissed her on the cheek. “She asked me to kiss you goodnight.”
“She asked you?”
“Yes, of course.” His eyes glistened with mischievous happiness. “I took your advice. We played before dinner. I hugged her a lot. And it’s working. She is talking. To me.”
Emotion choked her throat. How could this man be bad? How could he possibly be evil. She couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t. But…
He sneaked his arm around her waist. “Come. Meet my brother.” He led her to the table. “This is Tariq. He’s here for two days on business. Tariq, this is Sahar.” A wickedness danced in his eyes. “Kamilah’s mermaid, the one I was telling you about.”
Tariq stood, inclined his head slightly in greeting before seating himself again. He didn’t deign to smile at David’s mermaid reference. He remained aloof, distant. Sahar immediately sensed deep mistrust. The intensity of it only served to deepen her apprehension.
David pulled out a high-backed chair. He motioned for her to sit. She just stared blankly at him, trying to digest everything that had just slithered into her consciousness. Had Gibbs survived the storm? What had happened to him?
“Sahar?” Concern shifted into his eyes. “Are you sure you’re all right? You still look a little pale.”
She mentally shook herself. “Yes…yes of course. I’m fine.” She smiled brightly, falsely, and sat in the chair he was offering her.
He bent to push in her seat and as he did, he whispered darkly into her ear. “I see I judged your size just right.” His voice chased a quiver down her bare neck, raised the fine hairs along her nape.
She swallowed. “Really, David, you…you shouldn’t have. And all the way from Cairo?”
He shrugged. “I fly things in daily. It’s nothing. My dressmaker would have taken weeks to make you a full wardrobe.” He brought his mouth even closer to her ear. She could feel the warmth of his lips against her lobe. “Besides,” he whispered. “Watson’s clothes were beginning to look a little tired, don’t you think?”
She shivered at the heat of his words against the nape of her neck. She turned her head and looked up, deep into his eyes, searching. For a sign. Any sign that would tell her if he knew who she really was. A sign that would prove to her that he really was dealing in weapons of mass destruction. But in his expression she could see nothing but a dark and visceral hunger…and something else, something that went beyond concern, something that spoke of friendship, happiness. It was a look of…of love. Her heart twisted sharply inside.
“I…I can’t thank you enough, David. And you chose so well, I—”
“Shh.” He pressed two fingers to her lips, silencing her. “Besides, I had an excellent muse. Now don’t say another thing. Consider the clothes a gift in exchange for the life you’ve brought back to Shendi, to me.”
The dinner was lavish and the wine excellent. But Jayde could barely touch it. Her stomach was a ball of knots. It took all her effort to pretend nothing was wrong.
And that in itself was eating her. Because although the forced smiles and hollow platitudes drained her energy, as the evening wore on the deceit began to fit, to feel natural. And that horrified her. Was this who she really was? Was this what it felt like to be Jayde Ashton? A hollow, fake persona?
And all through the dinner, Jayde had felt Tariq watching her from under his thick black lashes. There was something hidden in his hooded eyes. But whenever she’d sensed those eyes on her, she’d looked up and he’d looked abruptly away. It made her uneasy. And when he did hold her gaze, there was a dark male appetite in his eyes that bordered on threatening and disrespectful.
Although his words said otherwise, Tariq made her feel like she was an intruder in David’s castle. And he kept mentioning Aisha as if somehow warning Jayde to step back from his brother’s overt attentiveness.
After dinner Farouk brought out coffee, and again Jayde felt the heat of Tariq’s gaze. Her eyes flashed up. She was sick of this. She stared at him in challenge.
This time he didn’t avert his eyes. He held her gaze and he addressed her. “Your amnesia,” he said, “I find it strange.”
She kept her eyes locked onto Tariq’s. “Why?”
“I placed a call,” he said bluntly as he lifted the small espresso cup to his lips. “I have a colleague who is a neurological specialist in Egypt.” He sipped, waiting for her reaction, as if trying to catch her out.
Her stomach turned over itself but she refused to show any outward sign of discomfort. “And?”
“According to him, your symptoms are psychological. Or they are…faked.”
She reeled, her eyes flashed to David.
David said nothing. He was studying her. She suddenly felt betrayed, hurt…in spite of the fact she was the betrayer in this equation. “You knew this?” she demanded of him.
David nodded, placed his hand gently over hers. “Yes. Watson suspected as much.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“We weren’t sure, Sahar. We decided to try and locate your relatives and take it from there. Since there was no immediate medical emergency, we thought it best you seek psychiatric treatment close to home…once we found out where that was.”
She clenched her jaw, pulled her hand out from under his. She reached up, felt the line of stitches under her hairline. She’d thought her memory loss was from the gash to her head. Could it be… No! It couldn’t. Her throat closed in on itself. Could it possibly have happened to her…again? After all these years?
“Sahar.” David reached for her hand. “Come on, it changes nothing.”
“It changes everything,” she snapped, pulling away. And it frightened the hell out of her to think her memories, her very sense of self, the core of who she was, had been locked away by her. And that she alone had held the key to her prison.
Why had she done this to herself again? A mad kind of terror gripped her heart. And
why had Tariq even bothered to check up on her? He had to suspect something.
Tariq’s eyes continued to bore into hers.
She felt heat rising in her cheeks. She turned on him. “But you, you don’t think it’s psychological, do you? You think I’m faking. Is that why you checked up on me?”
Tariq simply shrugged. “Your situation is strange. No one has reported you missing. There is no record of a boating accident. You came out of the sea—” he snapped his fingers in the air “—just like that. And quite frankly, I find that suspicious. So I placed a call—”
“Tariq!” David warned.
Tariq’s eyes flashed to David. “I have your interests at heart, David.” He turned back to Jayde, leaned forward, his black eyes unwavering, his voice lowering in threat. “Many a gold digger has tried to insinuate herself into his life since Aisha’s death.”
Jayde jerked up from the chair. “Damn you!” For whatever reason fate had thrown her up out of the sea unconscious and onto the beach of Shendi Island, this was not it. She did not have to stand for this.
David bolted up, restrained her. “Sahar, relax—”
She pulled out from his grasp. “No, I will not. How could you keep this from me? Is that what you think, too, that…that I’m after your money?”
Tariq smiled slyly. Jayde realized she was trembling.
David’s eyes pierced hers. The muscle at his jaw pulsed. “I’ll tell you one thing about myself, Sahar.” His voice was low, fierce. “I don’t lie. Ever. And I do not tolerate liars. I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t entered my head, but—”
She didn’t want to hear the rest. She spun around and stormed from the room, not out of the door that led back toward the bedroom wing, but out onto the patio. She needed air, open sky, freedom. The palace was suddenly claustrophobic, a structural maze of a prison that resembled her mental state. And she needed out. She needed right out of this convoluted mess she’d found herself in.
He came after her. “Sahar!”
She ignored him, made her way to edge of the stone terrace, slipped off her shoes and ran down the grass path toward the lagoon beach.
“Sahar!” She heard David call behind her.
She ran faster.
He started after her. But Tariq came swiftly up behind him, grabbed his arm. “Let her go, David. I need to talk to you.”
David seethed, whirled around to face his brother. “How dare you!”
“How dare I check up on her?”
“You had no right.”
“I have every right. We both have a huge amount at stake at the moment. And that woman—” he pointed to where Sahar had disappeared into the dark “—could be more than a gold digger, David, have you considered that?”
“What, exactly, are you trying to say?”
“I don’t trust her. She could be working for someone.”
He felt his jaw drop. “What in hell do you mean? You think Sahar is some kind of spy?”
“Even if she’s not, look how easily she got onto your island, into your home.” He jabbed his finger at David. “She got right into you, brother. You need to be more careful. And you need better security.”
Rage boiled up through David’s blood. It took every ounce of control to keep his voice level. “I have adequate security. And if you think Sahar is some kind of spy, you’ve lost your mind. What in hell’s gotten into you Tariq?”
“You’re a powerful man with enormous influence, David. And that means you have enemies. There are people, corporations, superpowers, who want to tear you down, take control of the oil fields, the uranium, rob you of your influence in this part of the world. You know it and I know it. And that woman could be faking, working for any one of them. Everything you…everything we have worked for could be at stake.”
David heard the depth of sincerity in his brother’s words. And he felt himself hesitate. That in itself infuriated him. Because he knew as sure as his heart pumped blood through his veins that Sahar was genuine.
He may have doubted her at first, simply because of the weirdness of her situation, because he was a man for whom trust did not come easy. But not now. He didn’t doubt her now. Not after he’d seen her with Kamilah. Not after he’d spent time with her, not after he’d gotten a glimpse into her soul. He would not let Tariq’s paranoia get to him.
“Sahar was injured, Tariq, washed up in a storm. I was there. I saw her. I saw the gash in her head, the cuts and bruises on her body. She was unconscious. No one fakes stuff like that.”
Tariq shrugged. “You said it yourself, it had entered your head.”
“Of course it entered my head. But that was before—”
“Before what?” His eyes dipped briefly down David’s body. “Before you started thinking with…your third leg?”
David cursed viciously in Arabic. He stepped aggressively close to Tariq and lowered his voice to a snarl. “I may not know who Sahar really is but I have seen the person inside. And that person is true. I know it here.” He struck his fist to his heart. “And from this point on you will stay out of my personal affairs.”
Tariq smiled slowly, teeth glinting in the pale moonlight. “You’ve already slept with her, haven’t you? Is she really that good, brother?”
David’s anger spiked clean off the Richter scale. His fists balled, the muscles across his neck snapped tight. His hands shook against the force of control it took not to hit his brother square in the face, breaking his nose, just as he had done once when they were boys.
“No,” he said through a clenched jaw. “I have not slept with her…yet.”
He pivoted and stormed off down the stairs to the grass path and into the dark after Sahar, intending to do just that.
David knew it was an irrational fire that seared through him. But burn it did. Tariq’s challenge had only solidified whatever he had been feeling for Sahar. Now it was clear as crystal in his head. He wanted her. More than anything in this world right now, he wanted to make her his, to stake his claim, to prove he had every belief that she was genuine and that she had his and Kamilah’s interests at heart.
“Watch your back, David,” he heard Tariq call after him into the night.
David’s heart blipped at the reminder. It was the same thing Watson had said.
“Her name isn’t even Sahar, it’s simply a name you conjured from your head! You have no idea who she is.” Tariq’s voice taunted him in the dark.
And David realized in that instant how much he wanted her to be just that. His Sahar. The Sahar that belonged to him and to Kamilah and to Shendi Island. Not to another world lost to her memory.
And as it hit him, part of him realized he was a fool, a man made powerless by a bewitching woman with no name, a man wanting desperately to believe in a fairy tale cooked up by his daughter.
He cursed again.
And then he saw her.
She stood on the far edge of the stone pier that stretched out into the lagoon, a siren staring out over the dark water, the moonlight catching the shimmer in her dress.
He halted, caught his breath, stared at her statuesque silhouette.
He had a sense that if he went to her, if he walked out onto that pier, he would be crossing a final line. And if he took so much as one step over that invisible threshold tonight, there could be no turning back. Because this thing simmering between them was too powerful.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and studied the feminine form on the end of the pier, watched the way her hair lifted in the slight salt breeze. She looked so alone out there.
As he watched her, he became acutely aware of the soft susurration of tiny waves that licked and sucked at the white sands of the lagoon shore and he could her the rhythmic chink, chink, chink of the halyard against the mast of his yacht anchored off the pier, the soft slap of the incoming tide against its hull.
And he realized he could no more turn back the ocean’s tide, the natural pull of the moon on the waters, than he could deny the natural force this woma
n exerted over his body and his mind.
He sucked the night air deep into his lungs. He had no choice. He had to go to her. He could no more deny his need than a sailor of old could refuse the ancient call of the mythical siren.
He took the first step over that invisible line and made his way down the pier.
Tariq watched David disappear down the path into the dark. He took a sleek silver box from his pocket, opened it, extracted a long cigarillo. He lit it, the flame flaring hot and orange into the dark. He blew out a stream of smoke and swore under his breath. He was troubled—gravely so.
David might have nothing to hide, but he did. David could afford to trust. But he couldn’t. The woman was a professional. He’d stake his life on it. He knew her type. And she knew just how to get to his brother. She’d made him blind. She only had to look at them with those big green eyes and he went soft—not the David he knew. He’d never seen his brother like this, not even with Aisha.
This was different, and it worried him. Innocent or not, a woman like that could change things. Either way, to Tariq she was an enemy. An obstacle. And either way, she had to go. He had two options. Get rid of the woman. Or find proof that she’d been sent to betray David. He had to move fast.
And if she was some kind of spy, how had it been set up? That part puzzled him. Had she been dropped on the beach in the storm? David had said there was boating debris found with her. Had that been planted? Or had there really been an accident? Could there be more debris out there, possibly some clue that might tie her to a foreign government?
Tariq stubbed his cigarillo out in the flower pot. He’d call his men tonight, get them to scour the remote outer islands at first light, see if they could find anything he could use.
David walked slowly, deliberately along the pier toward Sahar, each step swelling the thrilling sense of anticipation that surged through his blood.
As he got closer to her he could see the soft night breeze toying with the loose tendrils of her fiery hair and ruffling the hem of her silk gown about her ankles. His loins tightened instantly in response.
The Sheik Who Loved Me Page 13
