Ann Voss Peterson - Seized By The Sheik

Efraim staggered. He dropped to one knee. The darkness around him blurred. The pain in his side grew and spread until it swallowed all of him. He lay Fahad on the ground and let a shudder take him. Another followed and another. “It’s my fault,” he managed to choke out.

“No.” Callie brought her hand to his cheek. She wiped his face, then turned him to face her.

He knew she wanted to say something, but he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to feel. At least not what he was feeling now.

She looked so soft, so beautiful, so caring. Even in the darkness, her eyes sparkled like the clearest water. Her hair draped over her shoulders like a veil.

He pulled her to him, cupped his hand around the nape of her neck, brought his lips to hers. She tasted sweet, yet salty, her tears mixing with his own. Tears shed for him, he knew. And for Fahad, whom she’d hardly even met.

He knew he shouldn’t be kissing her. And yet he needed this. At this moment, he felt like he couldn’t do without it.

She was something, this woman. Strong and determined, yet with a tender heart. What he wouldn’t give to stay in her arms, to make her his. To wake every day to a woman like this. To let her be his reason for living.

An impossible dream.

Efraim ended the kiss and looked down. He knew he should feel ashamed. How could he kiss a woman over his cousin’s dead body? How could he claim warm feelings for himself when his actions had sentenced Fahad to his death? Yet although he accepted the blame for Fahad following him to the badlands, he couldn’t manage to regret kissing Callie. That he kept for himself.

She took his hands in hers. “Don’t blame yourself.”

He looked up at the sound of her voice and found her watching him. It was all he could do to keep from kissing her again. “How can I not?”

“It was his job to protect you.”

“And I made him follow me because I refused to listen. I never thought, never considered I was risking others’ lives, not just my own.”

“You had your reasons for riding to Rattlesnake Badlands. Reasons that weren’t selfish. And Fahad did his job. He tried to make sure you were safe. The man who shot him, he deserves the blame.”

He nodded and gave her fingers a squeeze. Fahad had fulfilled his responsibility to Efraim. It was now Efraim’s turn. “You are right.”

“We’ll tie him on Sasha. We’ll take him to my family’s ranch and call the sheriff. He will find whoever did this and make him pay.”

“No.”

She lowered her brows and tilted her head, as if she wasn’t following.

“Fahad is my family, my blood, not the sheriff’s.”

She frowned, a crease digging between her eyebrows. “You have to leave this to the law, Efraim.”

He let out a derisive laugh he could feel shoot down his side. “The law can’t avenge Fahad. I can.”

“That’s not the way things work here.”

“As far as I can see, things don’t work here very well. Otherwise Amir would not be gone. Stefan would not have been attacked. Fahad would not be dead.”

“You’re upset. You just lost your cousin. It’s understandable. But we are a nation of laws and the law works. It does.” She nodded as if she could will him to agree. “Sheriff Wolf is a good man, an honest man. He’ll give Fahad justice.”

He wasn’t upset. He wasn’t angry. He merely felt cold. Resolute. He looked away from her, not wanting to see what was in her eyes, not wanting to have his resolve shaken. It would be so easy to be tempted to selfishly forget Fahad, forget what he owed his security man, his cousin, his blood, and instead lose himself in the woman in front of him.

The spark of a light caught his eye.

He climbed to his feet, Callie rising beside him. The light moved in their direction. In the stillness, he could hear horses’ hooves clatter across rocky terrain, buckles jingling, leather creaking. “Give me the Glock.” He held out his hand.

“It’s my family. They’re looking for me.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

He wasn’t sure he was prepared to trust she was right. “Give it to me anyway.”

Her eyebrows dipped low. She shook her head.

He wasn’t sure if she thought he was going to take his measure of justice from her family or what. After all he’d said, he guessed he couldn’t blame her. “They’ll help?”

“Of course they’ll help. We’ll go to the ranch. We can call the sheriff from there.”

He still wasn’t convinced he trusted her plan, but he probably didn’t need to point that out to Callie again. “Fine.”

The sounds drew closer. The light wound along the creek toward them. It focused upward, pinning them in its beam. Efraim couldn’t see a thing except blinding white light. Hoofbeats spread in a circle around them.

Efraim squinted against the glare. Blue splotches bloomed wherever he looked, like twenty spotlights bearing down. One man held the light. The others were merely dark. Efraim focused on the ground, trying to see the men around him in his peripheral vision. There were three, no, four mounted men. He glanced at Callie.

“Put your hands up where I can see them.” The voice boomed from behind the spotlight, the accent no-nonsense Wyoming rancher.

Efraim raised his hands.

“Now on your knees.”

Efraim shook his head. Had Callie been wrong? Was this her family, or some kind of vigilante mob like the one Stefan said had been protesting in Dumont? “I’m Efraim Aziz. I—”

Rounds slid into rifle chambers. “I said on your knees.”

CALLIE COULDN’T believe it. She glanced around the circle of shadows on horseback. Never in a million years would she imagine her family drawing down on her. She’d told Efraim all these pie-in-the-sky things about justice in America, and here her own family seemed to be taking the law into their own hands. She wanted to hang her head in shame. “Daddy, put the gun down. Brent? Russ? Timmy?” she said, taking a guess at which brothers had accompanied her father.

“Move behind us, Callie.”

“Behind you?” Now she was getting angry. “What are you? Thick? Efraim and I, we’re together.”

One of her brothers sputtered out a cough.

“Callie, you don’t understand what’s going on here,” her father said in a gruff voice. “Move behind your brothers.”

Callie didn’t move from Efraim’s side. “I understand perfectly what’s going on. My family is causing an international incident. That’s what’s going on.”

The light her father was shining on Efraim flicked down to the ground, highlighting Fahad’s still body. “Who is that man?”

“Fahad Bahir,” Efraim said. “My head security man. My cousin.”

“He dead?”

“Shot,” Efraim said. “Murdered.”

Callie’s stomach tightened at the dark tone in his voice. His words about vengeance scuttled through the back of her mind. Between Efraim’s anger and her family’s obvious defensiveness, this situation could get bad fast. She couldn’t let things spin out of control. “He was wounded. We were trying to get him back to the ranch, but he died on the way. We have to call the sheriff.”

“How’d he get shot?”

“A sniper in Rattlesnake Badlands.”

“The question is, why did he get shot? What was he doing?” Brent’s voice.

Already tight, Callie’s stomach dropped. Her oldest brother had done four tours in Afghanistan until a head injury ended his military career. Since then he’d had a hard time of it. Seizures. Paranoia. Trying to get used to returning to life on the ranch, a life he hadn’t much cared for.

Callie felt bad for him. She would feel worse, except that every horror he’d seen and every hardship he lived through, he blamed squarely on any person of Middle Eastern descent who crossed his path. Luckily in Wyoming, there weren’t a lot of people on which to focus his anger over what had happened to him.