Mistress Of The Sheikh

It was the week before finals of their freshman year. Dawn was going to a frat party. She’d tried to convince Amanda to go, too, but Amanda had an exam in Renaissance design the next morning so she begged off, stayed in the dorm room they shared while Dawn partied.

Unfortunately, Dawn had one beer too many. She ended up sneaking into the bell tower at two in the morning along with half a dozen of the frat brothers, and they’d all decided it would be cool to play the carillon.

The campus police didn’t agree. They brought Dawn and the boys down, hustled them into the security office and phoned their respective families.

Amanda was blissfully unaware of any of it. She’d crawled into bed, pulled the blanket over her head and fallen into exhausted sleep just past midnight.

A few hours later, she awoke to the pounding of a fist on the door of her dorm room. She sprang up in bed, heart pounding as hard as the fist, switched on the bedside lamp and pushed the hair out of her eyes.

“Who’s there?”

“Open this door,” a male voice demanded.

Visions conjured up from every horror movie she’d ever seen raced through her head. Her eyes flashed to the door, and her heartbeat went from fast to supersonic. She hadn’t locked it, not with Dawn out—

“Open the door!”

Amanda scrambled from the bed, prayed her quaking knees would hold up long enough for her to fly across the room and throw the bolt—

The door burst open.

A thin, high shriek burst from her throat. A man dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt stood in the doorway, filling the space with his size, his rage, his very presence.

“I am Nicholas al Rashid,” he roared. “Where is my sister?”

It took a few seconds for the name to register. This broad-shouldered man in jeans, this guy with the silver eyes and the stubbled jaw, was Dawn’s brother?

She started to smile. He wasn’t a mad killer after all…but he might as well have been.

The sheikh strode across the room, grabbed her by the front of her oversize D is For Design T-shirt and hauled her toward him. “I asked you a question, woman,” Nicholas al Rashid said. “Where is my sister?”

To this day, it bothered Amanda that fear had nearly paralyzed her. She’d only been able to cower and stammer instead of bunching up her fist and slugging the bastard. A good right to the midsection was exactly what the tyrannical fool deserved.

But she was just eighteen, a girl who’d grown up in the sheltered world of exclusive boarding schools and summer camps. And the man standing over her was big, furious and terrifying.

So she’d swallowed a couple of times, trying to work up enough saliva so she could talk, and then she’d said that she didn’t know where Dawn was.

Obviously, that wasn’t the answer the sheikh wanted.

“You don’t know,” he said, his voice mocking hers. His hand tightened on her shirt and he hauled her even closer, close enough so she was nose to chest with him. “You don’t know?”

“Dawn is—she’s out.”

“She’s out,” he repeated with that same cold sarcasm that was meant, she knew, to reduce her to something with about as much size and power as a mouse.

It got to her then. That he’d broken into her room. That he was on her turf, not his. That he was behaving as if this little piece of America was, instead, his own desert kingdom.

“Yes,” she’d answered, lifting her chin as best she could, considering that his fist was wrapped in her shirt, forcing herself to meet his narrowed, silver eyes. “Yes, she’s out, and even if I knew where she was, I wouldn’t tell you, you—you two-bit dictator!”

She knew instantly she’d made a mistake. His face paled; a muscle knotted in his jaw and his mouth twisted in a way that made her blood run cold.

“What did you call me?” His voice was soft with the promise of malice.

“A two-bit dictator,” she said again, and waited for the world to end. When, instead, a thin smile curved his mouth, she went from angry to furious. “Does that amuse you, Mr. Rashid?”

“You will address me as Lord Rashid.” His smile tilted, so she could see the cruelty behind it. “And what amuses me is the realization that if we were in my country, I would have your tongue cut out for such insolence.”

A drop of sweat beaded on Amanda’s forehead. She had no doubt that he meant it but by then, she was beyond worrying about saying, or doing, the right thing. Never, not in all her life, had she despised anyone as she despised Nicholas al Rashid.

“This isn’t your country. It’s America. And I am an American citizen.”

“And you are a typical American female. You have no morals.”

“Oh, and you’d certainly know all about American females and morals, wouldn’t you?”

His eyes narrowed. “I take it that’s supposed to have some deep meaning.”

“Just let go of me,” Amanda said, grunting as she twisted against the hand still clutching her shirt. “Dammit, let go!”

He did. His fist opened, so quickly and unexpectedly that she stumbled backward. She stood staring at the man who’d invaded her room, her breasts heaving under the thin cotton shirt.

For the first time, he looked at her. Really looked at her. She could almost feel the touch of those silver eyes as they swept her from head to toe. He took in her sleep-tousled hair, her cotton shirt, the long length of her naked legs…

Amanda felt her face, then her body, start to burn under that arrogant scrutiny. She wanted to cover herself, put her arms over her breasts, but she sensed that to do so would give him even more of an advantage than he already had.

“Get out of my room,” she said, her voice trembling.

Instead, his eyes moved over her again, this time with almost agonizing slowness. “Just look at you,” he said very softly.

The words were coated with derision—derision, and something else. Amanda could hear it in his voice. She could read it in the way his eyes darkened. There was more to the message than the disparagement of American women and their morality. Despite her lack of experience, she knew that what he’d left unspoken was a statement of want and desire, raw and primitive and male.

It was three in the morning. She was alone in her room with a man twice her size, a man who wore his anger like a second skin…

A man more beautiful, and overwhelmingly masculine, than any she’d ever imagined or known in her entire life.

To her horror, she’d felt her body begin to quicken. A slow heat coiled low in her belly; her breasts lifted and her nipples began to harden so that she almost gasped at the feel of them thrusting against the thin cotton of her T-shirt.

He saw it, too.

His eyes went to her breasts, lingered, then lifted to her face. Amanda felt her heart leap into her throat as he took a step forward.

“Sire.”

He moved toward her, his eyes never leaving hers. The heat in her belly swept into her blood.

“Sire!”

Amanda blinked. A little man in a shiny black suit had come into the room. He scuttled toward the sheikh, laid his hand on the sheikh’s muscled forearm.