they let me go, just like that?’
He didn’t deign to do more than angle his head slightly back as he answered. He certainly didn’t stop or even slow. ‘They had little option when the ruling Sheikh vouched for you.’
Her feet stumbled to a halt. ‘You’re a sheikh?’
His laugh ricocheted off the polished walls of the corridor. ‘Do I look like a sheikh?’
How would she know? Maybe they were all neat-bearded, square-jawed types. ‘Then how—?’
‘Sheikh Bakhsh Shakoor is my employer. I therefore spoke on his behalf.’
Oh, everything was starting to make more sense now. ‘And why exactly does Sheikh Whatsit care what happens to me?’
Or even know about it, come to think of it? It all happened so quickly. One minute she was happily arriving, the next she was unhappily interned.
‘You are a long-stay guest in his most prestigious resort. He would not be pleased to hear you had been detained on a technicality.’
A criminal charge wasn’t exactly nothing. That was why she’d declared it on her immigration form. Transparency and accountability and all that. But she was spending a fortune on her month at the Sheikh’s desert resort and being booted out of his country bound in red tape would obviously be an expensive outcome for the resort. And since he probably also owned the airport...
‘He has no idea what you just did, does he?’ she guessed.
‘The Sheikh does not have time for trivialities.’
Way to make a girl feel special... ‘So, you just got creative?’
His lips pressed closer together as he lifted her suitcase as though it were empty of designer contents and pushed it ahead of them through the official exit into the Umm Khoreem side of the airport.
To freedom.
Kind of.
‘I gave them a few assurances,’ he went on. ‘Nothing that should put a crimp in your sunbaking plans.’
Yep, he probably did think she’d come to bask under Umm Khoreem’s toasty winter sun. Rather than for the sanctuary—from life and from her least favourite time of year.
‘What kind of assurances?’
The pace he set across the polished stone of the airport terminal was almost hard to match, though it was fantastic to be moving her limbs again after nine hours on a crowded plane. She hurried after him as he wove in and out of the thick stream of passengers like a rally pro.
‘While you are within the fenced bounds of Al Saqr resort, you are a guest of the Sheikh,’ he said, back to her, ‘and his protection extends to you. Under those conditions they were happy to overlook your recent...crime...and grant you entry into Umm Khoreem.’
‘You make it sound like I was caught robbing a bank,’ she huffed.
‘You’d be surprised how much I know about you, Ms Blaise.’
She glanced up at him and tried to guess how serious he was about that. There wasn’t much to know. Her criminal record was empty of anything but a shiny new conviction for trespass. For defending those who could not defend themselves.
On balance, that was a pretty good trade-off.
‘Wow. Someone is a little judgey...’
It was all there in the frost in his tone and the grind of his jaw, but getting into a fight was not how she’d imagined starting her month-long exile. Then again, neither was being detained, and—once again—she reminded herself how foreign this culture was from her own.
‘The resort’s boundaries are massive,’ he said. ‘As long as you remain within them, you’ll be fine.’
Being managed irked her as much as it always did. ‘And what is to stop me from just taking my bag and disappearing into the glass and chrome of Kafr Falaj?’
She could see the tallest of the capital’s buildings from here.
His locomotive surge across the terminal came to an abrupt halt, and she almost crashed into him. Impenetrable black glass swung her way.
‘I am.’
Even without being able to see his eyes, she believed him. Her long legs might get her some distance in the short term but his hard build said he would easily best her on endurance. Plus she’d never been any good at running in sand.
‘I gave them my own word, too,’ he went on.
‘So, now I’m beholden to the Sheikh’s chauffeur as much as the Sheikh himself?’ she tested.
Coral lips thinned between the neatly trimmed beard and moustache. ‘I am not a chauffeur, Ms Blaise. I’m part of the royal protection detail.’
Was she supposed to be impressed that his title had the word ‘royal’ in it? Well, snap, buddy, she was celebrity royalty, and it had never done her any particular favours. Quite the opposite, really.
‘Which makes me your protection detail for the next month,’ he added blandly.
Immediately she regretted everything about the past fifteen minutes. It wasn’t this guy’s fault that she’d been dumb enough to be taken in by people she’d thought she could trust—a man she’d wanted to trust—or that it had all happened right before Christmas, a season she struggled with at the best of times. A forty-minute drive was one thing; the thought of spending the next four weeks butting heads with someone over baggage that wasn’t rightfully his did not appeal. She’d come out here to lie low—and to do the right thing by her father—not to stir up the locals.
But she was more proficient in nurturing chasms than bridging them.
‘Gosh, you drew the short straw,’ she joked. ‘Babysitting me for an entire month.’
She’d meant that to be self-deprecating, but she saw the word ‘babysit’ hit him as surely as the word ‘chauffeur’ had. His jaw clamped that tiny bit harder.
‘On the contrary,’ he gritted. ‘I drew anything but a short straw. You’ll understand when you see where I get to spend the next four weeks.’
She might be known for her questionable decision-making now and again but even she knew to back away from the edge, sometimes. And the stiff way that this man held his body told her that this was definitely one of those times. But retreating didn’t mean she had to scramble, so she took her time setting off as he headed for the airport’s exit and she swanned after him with as much grace as she could muster, even as the glass doors slid wide and the warm desert air slapped her full in the face.
* * *
Outside the window of Al Saqr’s luxury SUV the region’s capital, Kafr Falaj, whizzed past in all its expensive glory—a spectacular city that had sprung up out of the sand in just a couple of decades. A testament to man’s supremacy over nature.
Except
