Sayeed Ali was the one thing that stood between her and certain death at the hands of those other men.
But for how long would he keep her alive?
And if this was a weird case of mistaken identity—maybe they still wouldn’t let her walk away after she’d witnessed them murdering her guards?
Fear, anxiety surged afresh through Kathleen, making her stomach churn. She concentrated on not throwing up, on staying lucid, but she grew dizzy again, once more fading into blessed unconsciousness.
The rocking motion of Sayeed’s horse made Kathleen’s buttocks move suggestively against his groin, her near-naked legs rubbing warmly against his inner thighs. He was a red-blooded male, and he had no control over what this physical massaging was doing to him. Not only that, the inherent vulnerability of his captive made him want to keep her safe, which fuelled his anger at her.
Kathleen Flaherty’s mere presence in the Sahara had put Sayeed in a no-win situation and forced him to screw up big time.
He should have let Qasim kill her.
It would have cemented his cover with Bakkar.
But even though his CIA and FBI superiors would have deemed Kathleen Flaherty necessary collateral damage, Sayeed had not even been able to come close to allowing it.
Now, trying to keep Kathleen Flaherty alive could blow his alias and sink a multimillion-dollar, international, joint-agency operation. And that could cost the lives of thousands of Americans and other innocent civilians around the globe.
He swore to himself—he’d been sunk from the first instant he’d laid eyes on the woman. And that moment of initial indecision plus the subsequent chain of events had led to this—him taking his injured and vulnerable captive into the very dangerous heart of a Maghreb Moors’ training compound. And the closer he brought Kathleen to Bakkar’s lair, the more difficult it would be for them both to find a way out of this bloody mess alive.
Sayeed watched the dark forms of the other men as he rode. They flanked him, shadows in the night, but kept their distance. He could hear the chinks from harnesses, see the odd gleam of moonlight reflecting off metal.
Hyenas, he thought, waiting for first sign of weakness, deciding whom to back and where their own fortunes might lie.
Sayeed might have defeated Qasim in a leadership tussle, but the damage was done—he could feel his authority slipping.
He could also feel his captive slipping from life in his arms. She’d lost a lot of blood, and dehydration was a serious concern. He needed to stop soon, give her water, assess her injuries. Anxiety tightened in him. He dropped back a little from the rest of the posse. Once he was he out of earshot and immediate view of the other men, he unhooked his lambskin water pouch from his saddle.
“Kathleen?” he whispered, trying to offer her water. But although upright in his arms, she was totally unresponsive. “Stay with me, Kathleen,” he murmured against her ear, the scent of her long hair, the feel of her skin against his cheek doing insane things to him. Deep things. Things that reminded Sayeed of who he really was—Rashid Al Barrah, an FBI agent under contract to the CIA, a man not used to the deep cover work he’d been doing for close to three years in this desert. He’d been forced to think of himself as Sayeed Ali, a dangerous man, a dark man, and in the process of living undercover in a terrorist camp, he’d begun to lose something of himself.
He’d been focused, numb, and that’s just the way he wanted it.
Now she was stirring sensations, firing a protective instinct in him, and his alias was blurring. He resented her all the more for it. He reminded himself he was Sayeed. He had to stay Sayeed. Think of himself as Sayeed. Until this was over.
“Kathleen?” he whispered more urgently.
She remained silent, slumping from side to side as he rode. Urgency mounted in him. And as they came to a dry wadi bed, moonlight revealing a small grove of palms, he galloped up to the front of the posse.
“Halt!” he commanded, reining in his own horse. “We camp here for one hour.”
The men came into a semicircle around him. Qasim reluctantly hung back at the periphery of the group, the tail of his black stallion flicking, the horse’s coat gleaming with sweat in the moonlight.
“We should press on,” argued Qasim. “Dawn is almost here”
“The horses need to rest,” said Sayeed. “We stay.”
“You’re doing this for the girl. I say let her die.”
“If she dies, we get no answers.” Sayeed dismounted. He could feel them watching, waiting to see what he did with their injured captive. He took her down from the horse and carried her like a limp rag doll to the small grove of palm trees. The other men eventually moved a short distance away and made camp.
Returning to his horse, Sayeed removed the first aid kit he kept in his saddlebag. He carried it back to the palms, listening to the chatter coming from around the fire as the men boiled tea. Qasim’s voice rose, strident above the others. “Sayeed talks nonsense—we should kill her now! Bakkar will see red if we arrive at camp with our target alive.”
Sayeed took bandages out of the kit, along with disinfectant wipes and butterfly sutures. He rolled up a saddle cloth and gently rested Kathleen’s head on it. But the movement caused her nightgown—split down the back from Qasim’s sword—to slide off her shoulder and expose her breast. Sayeed stalled, bewitched by her sheer, female beauty. Her smooth, milky-white skin was haunting in the silver moonlight, the nipple dusky in contrast. He swallowed, quickly removing his turban and using the cloth to cover her. But his body had already reacted against his will again, and blood pulsed warm in his groin.
Sayeed was no different from the other men who lived at the compound. He had not seen the naked skin of a woman since he’d arrived at the Maghreb Moors’ training camp over twenty-four months ago, nor had he been in contact with a woman for the nine months prior as he worked to infiltrate the cell and earn Sheik Bakkar Al Barrah’s trust.
Gently, he moved hair matted with blood off her brow. “God knows why you came to this desert alone, Kathleen,” he whispered, more to himself than her. “You are either very stupid or very damn brave.”
She stirred slightly and moaned. Relief, tenderness washed through him. And he moved with more haste.
Thankful for the bit of moonlight, Sayeed tore open a disinfectant pad and began to clean away the blood around the gash on her brow. But his hand stilled as voices around the fire grew louder.
“Sayeed might be right,” said one of the men. “That woman had to have told someone where she was going. And if she did, it’s better we know who and when. We can then anticipate them or change plans.”
“It’s too late to change plans. The deadline is set, the airline tickets bought. The volunteers are preparing. Nothing can be altered now.”
“Which is why we need to know if someone will come looking.”
“If it’s so goddamn important,” countered Qasim, “let him interrogate her right here, right now! She could die on her way to the compound, and we’d be in exactly the same position as if we’d killed her back at the campsite.”
“She’s passed out. She can’t talk now.”
Qasim swore, lurched to his feet and flicked the last remnants of tea from his mug into the fire. Flames fizzled softly.
Sayeed had treated Qasim with kid gloves from day one. The man was violent, smart as a whip, an unpredictable and power-hungry sociopath. And although Sayeed had won Bakkar and Marwan’s trust, Qasim remained leery of him.
But it was more than mistrust. Qasim had made it clear that his father, Marwan, should have given him more authority in the cell, not some outsider like Sayeed. And jealousy was making him dangerous.
Little did Qasim know Sayeed was in fact his cousin, the long-banished son of Bakkar Al Barrah. Bitterness filled Sayeed’s mouth at the notion that he and Qasim shared common blood, that their temperaments perhaps resonated, that he himself could have become a Qasim had he not escaped his father’s clutches all those years ago.
>
He opened the butterfly sutures and used them to carefully pull the edges of Kathleen’s head wound together.
One man laughed suddenly, wicked, raw. “Ah, but Qasim, even if your Uncle Bakkar is angry, your father will be very pleased if we bring this woman to the camp, alive and kicking.”
His was joined by even more raucous laughter. “Yes,” said another, slapping his knee. “Marwan would bed a goat. This will be a grand prize for him—you will curry favor, Qasim, if you allow him to think it was your idea.” The man snorted at his own joke. “Maybe he’ll even put you in charge of our next raid.”
The sound of a sword being drawn caused the men to fall silent
Sayeed tensed. He was suddenly conscious of where his own weapons lay.
An argument, yelling, broke out. Then came a grunt, a sick sound of a man dying. Followed by dead, heavy silence.
Sayeed’s pulse quickened. He worked faster, knowing all the while the dead man was right, Marwan would become a problem when he saw Kathleen. Maybe he should have let her die under Qasim’s sword—maybe death was better than possibly being brutally raped and sadistically tortured by the sadistic Marwan.
Memories of what had happened to his mother surged hotly into Sayeed’s brain.
Crap.
Not only was Kathleen threatening his cover and the lives of thousands of innocent civilians around the world, she was making him vividly relive the most painful memories of his life.
She was reminding him of the real, underlying reason he’d accepted this mission—to kill Bakkar and Marwan, to regain his honor and his mother’s by delivering justice, ancient-clan style. He planned to do it just after he initiated the special ops raid on the compound.
Was Kathleen going to cost him that, too?
Her eyes suddenly fluttered open. She gasped when she saw his face and tried to sit up.
“Easy,” he said, restraining her by the shoulders. “If you get up too fast you’ll faint. Here, you need water.” He cupped the back of her head, gently lifting her so she could drink. He wiped the water that spilled down her chin. Her gaze held his as she drank, and even in this light, he could read the confusion, the fear, in her eyes. She was seeing his face for the first time since he’d removed his head scarf to cover her. And Sayeed knew his features were not exactly avuncular—his aggressive bone structure, his dark eyes were more fearsome than friendly, especially in the silver monotones and shadows of the haunting moonlight.
“Who are you people?” her voice came out hoarse, a whisper.
“I told you, I am Sayeed Ali—”
“No, who are the other men, what do you all want with me?”
But before he could answer, a man began to approach over sand, the burden of bad news evident in his posture. He was coming to tell Sayeed one of their own had been murdered for slighting Sheik Marwan Al Barrah.
“Stay quiet, Kathleen,” he whispered. “It’s best they think you’re unresponsive for a while yet. I’ve cleaned your wounds as well as I can for now. I’ll look at them again later, at the camp.”
“I don’t want to go to the camp,” she said.
“You have three options. Either you come with me to camp, or these men kill you, or the desert kills you. Take your pick.”
Chapter 3
Dawn broke in a violent streak of orange, rippling color across the sand. The heat was instant, hitting Kathleen like a blast from a furnace. Thirst tightened her throat, and her brain felt thick.
Her captor had given her his turban and a scarf he’d found in his saddlebag. The turban cloth was now wrapped around her shoulders, covering the slash in her nightgown. He’d instructed her to drape the scarf over her head and cover most of her face as protection from sunburn. It was hot underneath the rough fabric, the wound on her temple throbbed and the cuts under her feet stung. Kathleen tried to ignore the discomfort by focusing on her surroundings. They were moving north, judging by where the sun had come up, and the terrain was gradually changing as they progressed—soft dunes rising in a series of steppes, the ground gradually turning hard and flinty.
Then, as if shimmering out of a mirage, the hazy outline of a cliff appeared in the distance.
Swaying in the saddle, trying to hold on, Kathleen wondered if it was real or a trick of the desert. Or if she was going delusional from blood loss, heat, shock, exhaustion. She allowed Sayeed’s strong embrace to hold her steady. She had no other option. Without his support she’d lose her grip and fall.
The other men rode ahead, gaining distance. Kathleen realized Sayeed must have been intentionally dropping back because as the men crested a dune, momentarily dipping out of sight, he quickly reined in his horse, pulled the cork out of his water pouch and offered it to her. There wasn’t much water left, and she drank deeply before he took the pouch from her hands.
“We must save what’s left,” he said, replacing the cork. “Just in case.”
Kathleen noted he took no water himself. Without his turban, the sun burned fierce on his blue-black hair and his dusky skin gleamed. She couldn’t help staring at him for a moment.
His features were assertive, aristocratic. He was beautiful in a harsh and smoldering way. His eyes were liquid obsidian, hooded, his brows arched high, his lips firmly sculpted, his skin smooth and the color of rich mocha. He was the stuff of Kathleen’s desert fantasies—tall, dark, decidedly dangerous and utterly sensual—the kind of hero that populated her beloved tales of Arabian knights and desert conquests.
The effect was mesmerizing.
Disconcerting.
But more than anything, it was the naked directness of his gaze that met her curiosity in return. “You look surprised, Kathleen?”
“I…” She swallowed, thinking she must definitely be delusional to be thinking her abductor was handsome. “Sayeed, please, just tell me what you want with me—why did you attack my camp?” Why did Qasim say a man called Bakkar had ordered me dead when you didn’t even know my name?
He glanced away, at the horizon where the men had momentarily dipped out their sight line. His jaw tightened and his neck tensed.
“If this really has nothing to do with my sister, I think you’ve kidnapped the wrong person.”
His eyes flickered, then narrowed sharply. “Cover your face properly,” he ordered. “Your skin will burn. And you must stay covered at all times when we get to camp.”
“I’m not going to camp,” she snapped. “Not until you tell me why you kidnapped me.”
He laughed bitterly, darkly in her face. “Go on, then,” he said. “Jump down from the horse and run away. If those men over the ridge don’t find and kill you first, the Sahara most certainly will. And believe me, I’ll be happier to be rid of you.”
She glared at him, resentment twisting into her fear. She was at his mercy. She needed him to survive and he knew it.
“If you’d be so happy, then why didn’t you let them kill me back at the camp?”
“Bakkar, our leader, wants some questions answered first.”
“Seems like the other men disagree with you.” She paused, watching his eyes. “And you have an American accent. You learned English in the States, didn’t you? Most people who learn English on this continent tend to learn it with a British accent. Or they speak French like in the Congo or German as in Namibia, Tanzania or Togo. Or Portuguese like in Mozambique or Angola, depending on what colonial power—”
“What in hell are you, some kind of encyclopedia?”
“I read a lot.”
“Yeah, well, I travel a lot. That’s how I picked up English.”
“So you traveled to the States.”
Irritability spiked with the rising heat in Sayeed. “It’s none of your business.”
“Who are those other men?”
“Criminals,” he said quietly. “A band of desert thugs.”
“Why do they want to kill me?”
“Because that’s what they do, Kathleen, rob and kill people. And believe me, they could do a lot
worse than simply kill you.”
“Is that what you do, too, Sayeed Ali, kill people? Rob people, terrorize people?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him, long and hard, her eyes like aquamarine pools, pure and clear, and in them Sayeed could read disbelief. For an insane moment, he was thankful. This woman didn’t think he was all bad, and for some buried reason, he needed this right now. And that scared him.
He kicked the horse into action, and she grabbed wildly for the saddle horn to steady herself.
As they neared the shimmering cliff, the sun climbed higher and burned down hotter. Sweat pearled and trickled between Kathleen’s breasts. She shaded her eyes, squinting at a strange formation becoming visible along the top of the cliff. “What are those ruins up there?”
“Just some old place,” he said.
The plateau they were traversing began to funnel into a gully, the red stone cliff rising high on their right and another similar, crumbling wall of stone to their left. And as the valley narrowed, Kathleen felt a change in the body of her captor—a tighter tension in his thighs, a stiffness in the way he rode the horse. The gelding, too, appeared edgy, as if the animal knew it was nearing home—or danger.
Kathleen studied the men ahead. She thought she saw a shift in their postures, as well. The valley grew narrower, cutting off sunlight in places, rocky overhangs throwing sand into dark shadow.
Craning her neck, she squinted up at the ruins again. The structure looked like part of an ancient castle, constructed with red rock hewn from the cliff face itself. A small switchback trail lead precariously from the valley floor all the way to the top. “It looks like the remains of an old castle,” she said. “Maybe even First Crusade.”
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