Shackled To The Sheikh

He hadn’t been in a rush to get up—he might have agreed to go to Qajaran and take the child with him, but he was in no desperate hurry to meet her. He was glad he’d hung back in his chair now, glad of the time to let incredulity settle into cold, indisputable truth.

Because it was her.

The woman who’d stolen away from his bed like a thief in the night.

The woman he’d never expected to see again.

She looked almost the same as she had last night in the bar, in a beige short-sleeved shirt and hair that he now knew fell heavy like a curtain of silk when pulled out of that damned abomination of a bun, but with black trousers this time, covering legs he could still feel knotted around his back as he drove into her.

She looked almost the same in that bland mouse-like uniform she wore that he knew hid a firebrand underneath.

And it seemed that twenty-four hours of being blindsided didn’t show any signs of letting up yet.

‘Rashid?’ the lawyer prompted. ‘Don’t you want to meet your sister?’

Not particularly, he thought, and least of all now when she was being cradled in the arms of a woman he hadn’t begun to forget, though he supposed he should look interested enough to take a look.

He rose to his feet. Was it his imagination or did the woman appear to shift backwards? No, he realised, it wasn’t his imagination. There was fear in her eyes even though the angle of her chin remained defiant. She was scared of him and trying not to show it. Scared because he knew what the nanny got up to in the night time.

She should be worried.

In spite of himself, he got closer. Close enough that the scent of the woman he’d spent the last night with curled into his senses, threatening to undo the control he was so desperately trying to hang onto. Didn’t he have enough to contend with right now—a father who’d removed himself from Rashid’s life, only to leave him this tiny legacy, a country that was floundering where he was expected to take up the reins—without a woman who had the power to short his senses and make him forget? He needed his wits about him now, more than ever, not this siren whose body even now seemed to call to him.

He shifted his head back out of range, and concentrated instead on the squirming bundle in her arms. Black hair and chubby arms and a screwed-up face. Definitely a baby. He didn’t know a lot about babies, but then he’d never expected to need to.

‘Would you like to hold her?’ the woman he knew as Tora ventured, her voice tight, as if she was having trouble getting the words out.

It was his turn to take a step back. ‘No.’

‘She won’t break.’

‘I said no.’ And neither, when he thought about it, did he want this woman holding her, let alone accompanying them to Qajaran. Not that he was about to take the child himself. He turned to the lawyer. ‘Is there no one else you could have found for this role?’

The woman blinked up at him, her brown eyes as cold as marble. Too bad. Did she expect him to greet her like a long-lost friend? Not likely.

‘Excuse me?’ the lawyer asked.

‘Someone more suitable to take care of Atiyah. Couldn’t you find someone better to take care of my sister?’

‘Ms Burgess comes to us highly qualified. She has an exemplary record with Flight Nanny. Would you like to see her credentials?’

‘That’s not necessary.’ He’d already seen her credentials, in glorious satin-skinned detail, and they qualified her for a different type of position entirely from the one she was required for now.

‘If you have some kind of problem—’ she started.

‘Yes, I have “some kind of problem”, Ms Burgess. Perhaps we should discuss this in private and I’ll spell it out for you?’

The lawyer looked at them nervously. ‘If you excuse me, a moment, I’ll see how Kareem is going,’ and he too was gone.

Rashid took a deep breath as he strode back towards the wall of windows.

‘What are you doing here? How did you find me?’

‘What? I didn’t find you. I was asked by my boss to take this job on. I didn’t know you had anything to do with Atiyah.’

‘You expect me to believe it’s some kind of coincidence?’

‘You can believe what you like. I was retained to care for Atiyah on her journey to wherever it is that she is going. Frankly, I’d forgotten all about you already.’

His teeth ground together. Forgotten about him already? In his world, women had always been temporary, but he’d been the one to decide when he’d had enough. He’d been the one to forget, and it grated...

‘So you’re a qualified child-care worker?’

‘That’s my primary qualification, yes, though I have diplomas in school-aged education and childhood health care along with some language skills as well.’

‘You are forgetting about your other skills,’ he growled, his lip curling as he looked out of the window, still resentful at a world going on about its business while his life didn’t resemble a train that had merely changed direction, his life was on a train that had jumped tracks, and he wasn’t sure he liked where it was headed.

‘They’re hardly relevant,’ she said behind him, and around and between her words he could hear the sounds of the baby, staccato bursts of cackles and cries, and then a zipper being undone.

He spun around, angry that she seemed oblivious to the impossibility of the situation, to see her sitting down, the baby in her lap as she dripped milk from a small bottle onto her upturned wrist before putting the bottle to the baby’s mouth, looking every part the quintessential mother with child.

That was a laugh. She was no Madonna. It didn’t matter what she was wearing or what she was doing, he could still see her naked. He could still remember the way she’d bucked beneath him as she’d come apart in his arms.

‘Impossible!’ he said, and even the baby was startled, her big eyes open wide, her little hands jerking upwards, fingers splayed. ‘This cannot work.’

‘Hold it down,’ she said, rocking the child in her arms. ‘Do you think I like the situation any more than you do?’

‘I want another carer.’

‘Why?’

Because I don’t trust myself with you. ‘Because a woman like you is not fit to look after an innocent child.’

She laughed. ‘A woman like me? What kind of woman is that, exactly?’

‘A woman who goes whoring in the night—picking up men in bars and sleeping with them.’

She smiled up at him and he felt his ire rise. ‘But a man who goes whoring in the night—picking up women and inviting them back to his hotel room—he is perfectly qualified to be that child’s guardian. Is that what you are saying?’

‘This is not about me.’

‘Clearly not, or there might be a double standard at work, don’t you think?’

Frustration tangled in his gut. He hated that she had seen through his arguments but he could hardly tell her the real reason—that he needed more than ever right now to be able to think clearly, without his brain being distracted with replays of last night every time he looked at her. Why couldn’t she see that he didn’t want her—that this would not work? ‘I want somebody else to care for Atiyah!’

‘There is nobody else. All Flight Nanny’s employees are busy on other assignments.’

‘I don’t want you coming with us.’