poured the contents of three into the pot. She shook the sand out of her skirt and jacket, and did spot cleaning on them first, getting the bloodstains out as best she could. When she was done, she soaked her shirt and his in the bucket. The murky water turned instantly red.
His blood. It was a miracle that he was still standing.
“How badly does your arm hurt?”
“It’ll be fine by morning.” He showed no concern for his injury, no sign of weakness.
She still found his intensity unnerving, but his obvious strength was a source of comfort.
“Let those soak for a while. We’ll rinse them later. It shouldn’t take long to dry them by the fire.” He nodded toward the “laundry.”
He was right, but she needed the distraction, wasn’t ready to return to the blanket, to him.
“You should rest,” she said. They would need all their strength and then some come morning, if the trucks they’d heard were the smugglers. “We’ll take turns keeping watch.”
His eyebrows slid upward as he gave her an amused smile. And she pressed her lips together, realizing what she had said and the way she’d said it. He was a sheik. He probably wasn’t used to being told what to do. But to her surprise, he didn’t object.
“Come here.” His voice was low and dangerous.
Against her better judgment, she obeyed.
“You first,” he said, when she reached the blanket.
And since he was sitting on the far corner of it, she felt safe enough to lie down on the very edge with her back to him, careful to keep her covering tight around her. His nearness generated plenty of heat between them, but the temperature was dropping outside. The desert cooled rapidly at night, and their fire wasn’t nearly substantial enough to heat a building as large as the villa. Goose bumps rose on her skin.
He must have been watching her closely, because the next moment he was by her side, running a hand down her arm.
“You’re cold.” He didn’t wait for confirmation, but lay behind her and took her into his arms.
It seemed too fast by half, and way too forward. They barely knew each other. And yet they had looked death in the eye together and had survived, which had formed an undeniable bond. Then there was the irrefutable attraction, deeper and fiercer than she had ever experienced before, bewildering in its intensity.
The muscles of his chest felt solid against her back, his skin warm.
She needed to think of something, to start a conversation that would take her mind off that fact.
“Do your brothers and sisters work in the family business like you?” he asked, before she had a chance to speak.
Had he been searching for a distraction, as well?
“I’m an only child.” To her father’s great regret. He had wanted a large family to build a legacy. Toward the end, he had hoped that she would give him that, that the marriage with Jeff would result in a bushel of children who would grow the family business into a great success eventually. The superstores that had sprung up around the country were his inspiration.
She had stayed with Jeff longer than she should have because of her father’s dream.
“Jeff was supposed to help you run the business,” Tariq said, as if he could read her thoughts.
“I don’t need help running it,” she replied with more heat than she’d meant to. The subject was a hot button for her.
She had worked in the business since she’d been a teenager, was one of the best in her class at college and throughout earning her MBA. She had fought for and landed a highly competitive internship, and had proved herself with flying colors. And yet her father had worried what would become of her and the company when he was no longer around.
He had been so relieved when she’d met Jeff and he’d expressed an interest in the company. She wondered now if she’d unconsciously tuned out the warning voices in her head and glided over some issues with Jeff. She had so desperately wanted to make the man who had raised her happy. They had dreamed big dreams together. She was going to make them come true.
She turned to Tariq. “I’m proud of what we achieved so far. And I can handle the company on my own.” She wanted him to have no doubt about that.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t.” He watched her thoughtfully for a few seconds. “What happened with the wedding plans? Without meaning to speak ill of the dead … Jeff Myers was never strong enough of a man for you.”
Tariq was right, and it annoyed her that what he’d been able to see at a glimpse had taken her so long to grasp. “Enough time passed for me to realize that we didn’t really mesh outside the office.”
While her father had been alive, Jeff had deferred to him, but after his death, he took it for granted that he would assume full leadership of the business that Sara had helped build from the ground up.
“We didn’t have the same goals.” Jeff had thought they should go after profits more ruthlessly. Sara wanted to keep in line with the original mission statement, which declared support for non-fuel uses of oil, and education of the public about them.
“What are your goals?” Tariq asked.
“I want the company to stay the way my father and I dreamed it. I want it to make a difference. I want it to be something I can be proud of, something my grandchildren can be proud of.”
He didn’t respond, and she wondered in the ensuing silence whether he was pondering his own, much larger conglomerate. “What do you want out of MMPOIL?” she asked.
“I want to provide security to my people, and to preserve the Bedu code of honor while doing it. We need the oil, but I won’t sell off our lands. I won’t let oil extraction, or development, kill the desert, where we came from. I won’t sell out to foreign investors.”
It occurred to her as she listened what an enormous weight that must be on his shoulders—the well-being of his people. The hundred or so employees whose livelihood depended on her own company didn’t come close in comparison.
“You should go to sleep,” Tariq said. “You’ll need your strength in the morning.”
He was right. She turned away from him. Sleep would be good, just so she could forget about his nearness for a while. It couldn’t be smart for the two of them to be lying like this, pressed together.
“What if you fall asleep, too?” she asked, dismayed at how throaty her voice sounded.
“Unlikely,” he murmured, so close his hot breath fanned her neck.
He wrapped a strand of her hair around one long finger.
Okay—sharing body heat she could write down to doing whatever they could for the sake of survival. This she could not. And yet she couldn’t pull away. Her body refused to.
“Look, I’m not the affair-on-every-business-trip type,” she said, not daring to turn around.
