could never touch her again.
Never, Karim told himself, and he turned his face to the window as the plane gained speed and altitude until, at last, the glittering lights far below were no more substantial than a mirage.
CHAPTER SIX
RACHEL was shaking with anger.
Bad enough the Sheikh had walked into her life and seized control of it.
Ordering her around. Making assumptions.
And this. Man-handling her as if—as if she existed for his pleasure.
She knew what he thought of her.
Rami had treated Suki like a slave. Bring me this, hand me that, don’t argue when I say something …
He’d tried that with her, too, but it hadn’t worked.
“Maybe that’s how men deal with women where you come from,” she’d told him, “but this is America.”
America. Where a woman like her wore a costume that made her look like a whore because management said she had to. Where a man judged her by the damned costume, or maybe by the belief that she’d been his brother’s mistress.
She’d told him she hadn’t been Rami’s mistress. He hadn’t believed her. Now she wanted to tell him she hadn’t been his lover, either.
She wanted to say, I’d sooner have lived on the streets than have slept with your horrible brother.
But she couldn’t say it. She had to play out this charade because all that mattered was Ethan.
Okay. She had to calm down. Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Take another …
“Goddammit,” she said.
How could she calm down? How?
“You gotta go with the flow,” Mama had always said.
Mama hadn’t just gone with the flow, she’d ridden it like a surfer on a wave.
Rachel snorted.
Mama used to say a lot of things. Folksy crap. Stupid nonsense.
Not so stupid anymore.
Go with the flow. And that other old bromide.
“First impressions count.”
That had always made Rachel cringe, because Mama had probably said it a hundred times, always in a cheery voice, always as she stood in front of a mirror primping for her first date with the latest jowly, sweaty-faced fool who’d come sniffing at her heels.
Turned out Mama had been right about that, too. First impressions did count. The Sheikh had judged her on how she’d looked. And she’d hadn’t helped the situation, letting him bark out commands—
Letting him kiss her in the bathroom and kiss her again, here on his plane. Sure, she’d fought back, but then—but then—
Come on, Rachel. Be honest, at least with yourself.
She’d fought about as hard as a poker player fought against ending up with a Royal Flush.
He’d kissed her.
And after a token kind of resistance she’d kissed him back.
That was the awful truth.
He was every miserable thing a man could be. Too rich, too good-looking, too egotistical to tolerate. Dammit, he was a man, and that was enough.
Until he’d kissed her and her brain had turned to mush.
How could such a thing have happened?
Yes, he was good-looking. Hell, what he was, was sexy.
But she wasn’t into sexy.
She wasn’t into sex.
She wasn’t into anything that might interfere with the life she wanted, the life she’d been planning ever since she woke up in a lumpy bed in a cheap room in Pocatello, Idaho, the morning of her seventeenth birthday. Sixteen-year-old Suki had been asleep next to her, mouth hanging open, each exhalation stinking of beer.
“Mama?” Rachel remembered saying, with a kind of awful premonition.
She’d sat up, pushed away the thin blanket—and had seen the birthday card propped on the table near the bed. A big, garish thing with purple and yellow balloons drawn all over it.
Happy Birthday! it said.
Inside were two crisp twenty dollar bills. And a note.
Gone for a little vacation with Lou! You girls be good until I send for you!
Luv you!
Lou had been Mama’s latest “beau.” That was what she always called her men-friends. She’d gone on “little vacations” before. A weekend. A few days. One scary time, when Rachel was ten and Suki was nine, she’d gone off for an entire week.
That morning in Pocatello Rachel had told herself that Mama would be back.
It never happened.
After three weeks she’d found a night job at Walmart but it hadn’t been enough to pay for their miserable room and put food in their bellies.
So she’d quit school.
One more year until she’d have had her diploma. It had killed her to walk away, but what choice had there been? She’d had to work to support herself and her sister.
“You stay in school, Suki,” she’d told her. “You hear me? One of us in going to graduate!”
In August, Rachel had moved the two of them to a bigger furnished room in a safer neighborhood. She’d used her Walmart discount for Suki’s school supplies and bought their clothes at Goodwill.
Suki wouldn’t wear them.
“Holy crap, how can you wear somebody’s old stuff?” she’d demanded. “And you’re wasting your money, buying me school stuff. I’m not going to go no more.”
When the first snow fell they got a card from Mama. She was in Hollywood. She knew someone who knew someone who was making a movie. She was going to get a part in it.
And then I’ll send for my girls!
More exclamation marks. More lies. They’d never heard from her again.
Or maybe they had. There was no way to know because by January Idaho was nothing but a memory.
Suki had taken off. No goodbyes, no explanations. Just a note.
See
