came from Layla. Rose was dead, killed while breaking into Azzam’s chambers armed with a knife, clearly out of her head with grief, planning to murder the new ruler of Sorajhee. Layla warned Randy to hide the children, for they were still in danger from her husband, who was now bent on destroying everyone who could be linked to his dead brother.
Randy had already made sure the boys were both legal and hidden as his wards in Boston, using the names on their passports while gaining them the American citizenship that was their right due to their mother. But it wasn’t enough. The press would soon be hounding him, he knew it. Worse, Layla knew where he was, and Layla was with Azzam.
Clearly he needed to do something to make Rose’s sons disappear.
At Layla’s suggestion, Randy returned the three rings to Azzam, telling the man that his nephews were lost in a boating accident off the coast of Cape Cod. There were no bodies to return to Sorajhee to lie with their mother and father. Azzam accepted Randy’s word and returned the rings to him. Randy put the three rings away until the boys were older, to give to them when they could truly understand their heritage and their loss.
As far as the world knew, and the press was avid in following the fate of the martyred Ibrahim’s widow and children, Rose and her children had retired from public life and wanted nothing more than their privacy. Azzam had declared it, therefore it was so. Sorajhee sighed and accepted the word of a Jeved, as it always had, and Azzam closed the borders, declaring that the Fates had spoken. Sorajhee would not ally itself with Balahar.
Randy moved to a ranch near Austin, Texas, just outside a small town called Bridle. Alex, Cade and Mac Coleman moved with him, as did Jabbar, already growing toward the champion Ibrahim had declared he would someday be. Alim and Kadar and Makin were no more.
With his new wife, Vivian, by his side, acting as surrogate mother to the three boys, and with the birth of their own daughter, Jessica, Randy Coleman’s ranch, The Desert Rose, grew to be one of the finest Arabian horse farms in Texas.
Randy brought a partner into the family’s Boston-founded business with him, to help conceal the Coleman name, and Texan Jared Grayson ran the extensive family businesses while Randy and his nephews worked the Arabians. The three boys grew into manhood as Americans, barely remembering their roots in Sorajhee.
But they never forgot Rose, or her promise to return to them….
Chapter One
“Damn it!” Alex Coleman hastily wiped his hands on a towel, then threw it to the ground as he went racing out of the stall and toward the phone hanging on the wall at the far end of the stable. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”
This couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t. He hadn’t been expecting the birth this soon, or even considered the possibility of complications.
Hell, he hadn’t expected the pregnancy. Jabbar hadn’t been put to stud in years, having earned his retirement from both the stud and the showring, where he’d been a perennial champion. It was Jabbar who had made The Desert Rose a top breeding farm for world-class Arabians, and his offspring numbered a multitude.
Plus one, if Alex could get Dr. Clark to the ranch in time.
Why had he put his new breeding mare in the pasture with Jabbar? He had thought Khalahari would be safe, be slowly introduced to the ranch, and that Jabbar, in his old age, would ignore the retired showring horse whose injury had taken her from the ring. Alex had bought the mare for almost nothing, but she had such good lines that he hoped one day to breed her. Just not now, and not with Jabbar.
“Somebody must have slipped the old boy some Viagra or something,” his brother Mac had joked when Alex confirmed that Khalahari was unexpectedly carrying Jabbar’s foal.
Consternation had changed to excitement as Alex decided that this could be a fantastic union, producing a true champion to take Jabbar’s place in the ring, in the stud. He didn’t know precisely why he felt that way, but it seemed as if fate, and Jabbar, had decreed it.
Now Khalahari was in trouble, the foal twisted inside her, and Alex knew he could lose them both.
“Come on, come on,” he chanted as he listened to the phone ring, willing Dr. Clark to answer, to be there, to come do his magic as he had done in the past.
“Hello? Dr. Clark’s office.”
Alex began speaking even before the woman had finished her greeting. “This is Alex Coleman out at The Desert Rose. I need the doctor, now.”
“I’ll be right there,” the woman answered.
“What?” Alex held the phone away from his ear for a moment, then realized what was going on. It wasn’t old Doc Clark. He was speaking with the daughter. Hannah? Yeah, Hannah. And fresh from veterinary school. “Not you, woman—your father. I’ve got a prize mare down, foaling, and she’s in big trouble.”
“I understand, Mr. Coleman,” Hannah answered, and he could hear her moving around, probably on a portable phone, gathering supplies or keys or whatever. “My father isn’t available, but I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“Look, sweetheart, I don’t think I’m getting through to you. This is an important foal. Get your hands-on experience somewhere else. With kittens, or something. But get me your dad, now.”
“He’s in Dallas attending a conference, Mr. Coleman, and won’t be home until very late tonight. I don’t think your mare can wait for him. As I said, I’ll be right there. Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr. Coleman. I’m a vet. You need a vet. Now we’re wasting time, aren’t we?”
“But—but I don’t—”
He was talking to the dial tone.
HANNAH MADE IT in fifteen minutes, pushing her four-wheel drive all the way, skidding to a halt in the stable yard as Alex Coleman ran into the yard, waving his arms at her.
Hopping out of the driver’s seat, her bag already in her hand, she got caught in the seat belt and landed on all fours in the stable yard. She quickly got up, brushed herself off, then followed him into the stable at a trot. “Where?” she said, as the man obviously wasn’t going to waste time saying hello.
“The big stall, down at the end, if you can get there without falling on your face again,” Alex told her, leading the way. “It’s a breech. Her first foal, and probably her last.”
“Gee, that pumped me right up, makes me all chock-full of confidence,” Hannah grumbled under her breath as she turned into the stall, tripping over a towel lying on the straw. Some entrance she’d made, pratfalls all the way. But she couldn’t think about that now. Not with the mare lying there, her single visible eye wide and wild with pain.
Hannah’s well-known klutziness, a symptom of her lifelong shyness and her father’s belief that she could never really please him, disappeared in a blink of the mare’s eye, and Hannah became all business.
“Grab her head, and hold it firm while I take a look, see where we are,” she ordered Alex. She was already throwing her fleece-lined jacket into a corner of the stall and rolling up her flannel sleeves. It was early March, and cold as hell outside, and the weatherman had actually promised there’d be an ice storm by nightfall, not that the weatherman was ever right. “Talk to her, let her know everything’s going to be all right.”
“Is
