Captured By A Sheikh

“He knows I love him.” Holly cradled the baby in her arms.

The man watched them, his expression unreadable. “I, too, love him.”

“How can you, when you don’t even know him?”

“And you think you do?” The man unfolded himself from the bed and began to pace, his restless energy filling the room. “What do you know of this boy’s history? Of his heritage or his future? To you, he is a tiny baby, but someday he will be a great man!”

“He’ll be whatever he wants to be. You can’t force a child to meet someone else’s expectations.” Holly held Ben close. There no longer seemed to be any point in safeguarding her wedding dress, which was thoroughly rumpled and flecked with blood from Sharif’s injuries.

“Your sister understood my son’s importance, according to the clinic’s director,” said her companion.

“The clinic,” she repeated. “This is so unlike Jazz.”

“Jazz?”

“My sister. It’s short for Hannah Jasmine,” she said. “We’ve called her that since she was a kid. She hated going to the doctor. And she wasn’t even close to what you might call maternal.”

Outside, something thwacked against a window. Holly’s heart skittered into her throat.

Moving quickly and silently, her captor switched off the lamp. As its circular glow faded, scarlet fire-light crept eerily across the walls.

“Lie down!” the man whispered as he edged toward the window.

Holly obeyed, shielding Ben with her body. Had the people who’d fired at their car found the cabin as well? Or could it be the police?

The scraping noise returned, following by a pattering on the roof. Her captor lifted a slat of blinds and peered into the night.

Finally, he turned the lamp back on. “It was a branch in the wind. The rain has started, as you can hear. It should be quite a storm.”

Holly swallowed her disappointment. She had hoped it was the police coming to rescue her and Ben. But at least it wasn’t armed assailants, either.

“Who shot at us earlier?” she asked. “And who are you? I don’t even know your name.”

The man drew himself up proudly. Somehow his confident air made his robe and headdress appear less outlandish. In fact, Holly could have sworn they suited him better than the jeans and sweatshirt he’d worn that afternoon.

“I am Sheikh Sharif Al-Khalil of Alqedar.” He delivered this bizarre information without a trace of self-consciousness. “That is a small nation in south-central Arabia, in case you do not know. Although my son has been born in America, I have every right to take him home.”

The words “sheikh” and “Arabia” seemed like phrases from a fairy tale. “Who are you really?”

An eyebrow lifted, and then he laughed. “You do not believe me? I’m not surprised. But it is true.”

She tried a different tack. “Ben was born here. That makes him a U.S. citizen. You can’t just whisk him off, not if his mother opposes it.”

The man shrugged. “It seems that his mother has found better ways to occupy her time.”

“I’m his next closest relative!”

“And you would have married yourself a lawyer to defend your so-called rights,” he observed with a trace of sarcasm. “How very American of you.”

Although the implication infuriated Holly, she wouldn’t stoop to debate it. “What’s between Trevor and me is none of your business. And even if you are a sheikh and Ben really is your son, nothing gives you the right to hold me prisoner!”

“You chose to jump in the car with us. That was your decision.” The man regarded her with what might have been sympathy, or merely irony. “I am afraid I cannot let you go yet, Ms. Rivers, even though it was to be your wedding night. Perhaps I can make it up to you.”

Her throat tightened.

He regarded her with amusement. “I did not mean that literally, but it could be arranged.”

He was a sheikh, but more importantly, he was a leader from a foreign country. If he possessed diplomatic immunity, Holly thought in a burst of fear, he could do anything he wanted, and get away with it.

Chapter Three

Sharif did not understand why, after all these years, he was suddenly seized with the desire to possess a woman. Why at this perilous time, when he needed to stay alert, and why this defiant woman?

From the moment he’d held her in the car, Holly had aroused a response like no woman since Yona. And now, in the rise and fall of her breasts as she stared at him, he read a rising passion that matched his own.

She was fighting her desire in vain. He knew from his younger days what it took to seduce a woman, and this one lay within his power. All it would take was the touch of his lips against her face and throat, and the hard commanding movements of his body, and he could bring them both to ecstasy.

Holly’s eyes widened. With fear or longing, or both? “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please.”

She was, the sheikh reminded himself sharply, another man’s bride. She was also a threat to his ability to take his son back to Alqedar.

Stiffly, he drew back. “You have nothing to fear. I told you, I am not an abuser of women.”

“And you really don’t know what’s happened to my sister?” Even at this tense moment, Holly Rivers was more concerned for the missing woman than for herself, he saw with reluctant admiration.

“I wish I did.” Sharif bent and ran one finger along his son’s cheek. “It would be easier to straighten out this mess if she were here. Unless she intended, as I feared, to seek custody.”

“I don’t know what she intended.” The young woman brushed back a wave of red hair that had fallen across her temple. “I haven’t seen her in three months, since before Ben was born.”

“Then how did you get him?”

“A friend of hers brought him, a musician named Griff Goldbar. He said she would come back in a few days. That was over a month ago.”

About that time, the clinic owner had stopped taking Zahad’s calls. Such a coincidence must be meaningful. “Do you know a woman named Noreen Wheaton?”

“No, why?”

“She’s the head of the clinic that hired your sister,” he said. “If you’ve been searching for Jasmine, surely you found some record of the surrogacy arrangement.”

Holly’s expression grew troubled. “Jazz must have taken her contract with her. I cleaned out her room, but there weren’t any papers from a clinic.” The baby began to squirm. “I think he’s hungry.”

“I’ll get the formula.” Sharif went to fetch the bag that Aunt Selima had packed.

As he crossed the cabin, he wondered why the clinic director had been reluctant to talk to Zahad. Had there been threats against the clinic and, if so, from whom? With the police after him, Sharif could hardly contact Mrs. Wheaton to ask her directly.

Or perhaps he was looking in the wrong direction. The woman, Jasmine, might have enemies of her own. Her disappearance might bear no relationship to Sharif or to the clinic.

On his way back to the alcove, he tuned the television set to an all-news station, grateful that, in California, even remote cabins came equipped with TV service. At the moment, however, the report concerned local politics.