Surgeon Sheik's Rescue

“Amelie Chenard,” he said, lifting his chin slightly and clasping his own hands behind his back. He made no move toward her. She dropped her hand back to her side, feeling awkward, and wondered if he was hiding his maimed hand this way. What did it take for a man once so devastatingly good-looking, so talented a neurosurgeon, to deal with this change in his body, his life?

“You work for Estelle Dubois,” he said. “You’re here to do research for a novel.” He paused, watching her intently. “Or so I am told.”

“Yes,” she said simply, waiting to see where he was going to take this.

“This would be your debut novel.” It wasn’t a question.

She smiled, warmly. Or so she hoped. “So, you’ve looked me up?”

He said nothing.

Apprehension rose in her.

Before she’d left the States, Hurley and Scoob had managed to create a basic internet presence for “Amelie Chenard,” but it was superficial. Anyone digging deeper would soon see that. Bella had been lucky to secure her job with Estelle Dubois only two days after her arrival on Ile-en-Mer, and she’d managed to do it without applying for permits of any sort. She also hadn’t used her passport or any ID since arriving in France via the Chunnel, and so far she hadn’t touched the credit cards hidden in her room alongside her passport and driver’s license.

“Yes, it will be my first, at least under my own name, should it be published.” She tried to hold her smile. “If you did look up my website you’ll have seen that I’ve worked as a ghost writer to date, but contracts have bound me to confidentiality as to whom I’ve written for.”

His gaze bored into her, hot, intense. She tried not to blink, to look away. But her skin heated.

Still, he remained silent, waiting.

She cleared her throat. “I grew tired of being in the shadows all the time,” she said. “I want to step out, do something for myself, make my own name. Hence the new website, and now, my own book.” Bella hoped this would explain the apparent lack of internet litter around her alias. “It’s why I came to France, to this island. For the research. And I thought it might be good to stay awhile, absorb the local culture, the rhythms of the people.”

His butler appeared like a ghost, startling Bella—she hadn’t even heard the door open. He set Madame’s hamper on a table near the fire, then left. The sheik didn’t even glance at his servant, or the hamper.

Silently Bella thanked Madame again—clearly she was going to need a diversion, something to break the fortress of ice this man had built around himself. She glanced at the hamper, wondering what was inside.

“Your French is good,” he said abruptly.

“Thank you. I minored in French and philosophy.”

“Where?”

Perspiration suddenly prickled over her body. “Seattle,” she lied. It was the first place that came to mind that was not Chicago or D.C., and she’d visited the university there so she knew something about it.

“What was your major?”

“Literature,” she lied again, then forced a light laugh. “You’re making me feel as though I pushed my bike all the way up here simply to be interrogated.”

His features remained implacable. “You’ve been following me, Amelie. I want to know why.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” she said quietly, her smile dying on her lips. “I was hoping for a tour of the abbey, and I wanted to ask you about the ghost, the history of the place.” Silence hung between them. The fire crackled and popped, giving a slight hiss.

“Is Seattle your home, Amelie?”

She swallowed the panic ballooning in her throat. “Yes.”

“You were born there?”

“Portland, Oregon.” She cursed herself even as the words came out of her mouth. She was just digging a deeper hole for herself. She had to open up real channels of communication before he dug further into her background and discovered she was a fake.

“And you decided to come live in France while you researched this idea for a novel?”

“You manage to make that sound condescending.”

“I’m sorry.”

He didn’t sound it.

“It was more than just the research,” she said, cutting closer to the truth now. “I had some personal issues, a recent breakup with a man I thought I loved, and I needed to get away for a while.”

Damn, why was she even going there? She spoke too much when she was nervous.

Something crossed his features, then was gone—she’d gotten through to him, briefly.

“I don’t appreciate being followed, Amelie,” he said finally, more gently.

“I really did try a more conventional approach—I rang the bell at the gate twice, but there was no answer. I asked around the village if anyone had a phone number for the abbey. Then Madame Dubois said you liked to walk along the cliffs in the afternoon, so I followed you on the heath.” She paused. “I confess, after seeing you standing at the edge of the cliffs, I became curious beyond the book research. I wanted to meet you.”

“To see firsthand the beast who lives in a haunted stone monastery on the cliffs—to see his scars? Is that why you took photographs of me, inspiration for your gothic novel?”

The bitterness—the rawness in his voice—was a shock, a punch to her gut. “That’s not—”

“Not what the villagers think of me—the scarred monster in the haunted abbey?”

Bella inhaled deeply. “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.” She pointed her arm in the direction of the village. “Those locals have nothing but respect for you and your privacy. They treat you like a revered guest on this island—”

“Because I have money.”

She dropped her hand, stared.

“Think about it, Amelie. The trappings of wealth are all I have left. They buy me a measure of dignity. They allow me privacy.”

She heard the subtext—he could no longer work as a surgeon, no longer play his cello, win his polo matches...he’d lost the love of his life, the desire to help run his country. He needed to be alone.

“And so you hide,” she said quietly, “behind your wealth, in a remote abbey because you don’t want people to see your face, because you think you’re somehow damaged?”

He studied her, his presence seeming to glower with a dark, angry, yet magnetic power.

“How did it happen, Tahar?”

Something tore sharp and fast across the one side of his face, a ghost of an emotion, there, then gone, as if she might have imagined it. The other side of his face remained immobile, stiff. It was as if his psyche was split in two—a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde.

Her heart hammered. Perhaps she’d stepped over the line. But Bella told herself it was a normal question from someone who had nothing to hide. And he was the one who’d broached the subject by referring to himself as a “scarred beast of a man.”

But his gaze, his energy, was so intense, crackling, dark, she felt her cheeks go hot and she looked away. “I’m sorry. That was forward. I don’t need to know. I only wanted to—”

“It was a car accident,” he said abruptly. “I was in a coma for a while afterward.”