Dana Marton - Undercover Sheik

He pulled away and pressed his ear to her chest. A second passed then another. He breathed for her again then swore as he waited for signs of life.

You should have come after her sooner.

He would have, but he had run into Ahmed, who’d been lurking around her old shack, and they’d had words. He had to make sure Ahmed was settled before he could ride off into the desert.

He pressed his lips to hers one more time, ignoring the sand between them, and pushed air into her.

And then she coughed, al hamdu lillah! Praise God.

“Sadie?” He called her name, shook out his kaffiyeh and used it to wipe her eyes, then pulled the flask off his belt and poured some water on her face. Drop after sandy drop rolled off her eyelashes, her cheeks, her lips.

Her eyelids fluttered and she raised a sand-covered hand on reflex to rub them. He held her down and used more water instead to keep her from rubbing in sand.

She was coughing in earnest now, a terrible, choking sound, but a sound of life nevertheless that filled him with relief.

He helped her sit. “Sadie?”

She drew wheezing gulps of air and looked dazed and lost. “What happened?” She could barely get the words out, but her face was turning a healthier color.

“You walked into quicksand.”

Her expression changed as she remembered. Her hand clamped on to his arm and wouldn’t let go.

He’d seen Dara like that with his brother, Saeed, when something was wrong with one of the children. Bedu women comforted each other. Western women seemed to require this also from men.

He considered putting his arm around her, but it didn’t seem honorable to touch a woman like that who was neither his sister nor his wife.

She solved his dilemma by having another coughing fit and collapsing against him.

His back stiffened in surprise, but he found himself reluctant to pull away. He tapped her slim back a couple of times, gently, awkwardly, giving thanks to Allah when her coughing quieted.

She didn’t have much of a body under the long, ample dress. He hadn’t realized that, her fragility. She had stood up to every hardship she’d encountered since he’d met her, endured whatever Umman and his men had thrown her way.

She pulled away after a few seconds—too soon. She wasn’t nearly steady. He hadn’t minded offering her comfort. The contact seemed to calm him, too. Having her that close, touching, was a good reminder that she hadn’t been lost. He had gotten to her in time.

He would never forget the sight as he rode over the last dune and saw her head break free from under the sand ahead, her last breath used to call his name.

He cleared his throat. “Rest. We have time.”

She rubbed the sand off her hands then did her best to clean it out of her neck, her hair.

“In a few days,” he said to reassure her, “I will see you safe. You can’t walk through the desert alone.”

“I think I figured that one out.” She coughed briefly, looking at him fully in the face again, for the first time since their short initial talk in his tent.

A long minute of silence passed, then another.

“Why did you save me?” she asked.

He looked back at the round indentation just a few feet away, the patch of ground that could have taken the both of them.

“My father was swallowed by quicksand,” he surprised himself by saying instead of trying to find an answer to her question.

She seemed to pale, although it could have been a trick of the moonlight. “I’m sorry. That’s— It must have been terrible.”

He untied the rope from his ankle at last, ignoring the burn on his skin, and stood. He unhooked the other end from Ronu’s saddle and rolled the rope up, put it away. He brought back more water for her, picked up his rifle from the sand and swung it over his shoulder, then stuck his handgun into his sash while she drank. He sat cross-legged in front of her, at a respectable distance.

“Can you not tell me who you are?” she asked between gulps.

“I’m not a bandit,” he said, and hoped she would believe him this time.

“THEN WHAT ARE YOU DOING with them?” Sadie shot back. “How do I know you’re not going to sell me for my kidney to some rich oilman on dialysis?”

She wasn’t entirely joking. She had treated just such a patient at the field hospital the day before she’d been taken by the bandits. The young man, not yet eighteen, had been kidnapped from the streets of his village, taken to a private clinic where one of his kidneys had been removed for an illegal transplant.

He was treated until recovery, then dropped back off at the same spot, his pockets stuffed with money.

Not that this kind of thing happened every day, but the point was, it did happen. Then there was the sex slave industry and other lovely possibilities she didn’t care to find out about up-close and personal.

“I’m Sheik Nasir ibn Ahmad ibn Salim ben Zayed.”

“Sheik? As in king?” Whatever she’d speculated about him over the past weeks, she wouldn’t have guessed that.

“No, no. Sheik of my tribe,” he said modestly.

His olive skin seemed darker in the moonlight, his black eyelashes speckled with sand. How far under had he gone into the quicksand to get her?

“My brother is the king,” he added.

She gaped. “King of what?”

“Beharrain.”

That explained a few things. Nasir’s excellent English for example. Beharrain’s queen was an American woman. Dara somebody. She would be Nasir’s sister-in-law.

“Are we in Beharrain?” The possibility occurred to her suddenly. Had the bandits crossed the border with her to the small kingdom to the north?

“As a Beharrainian, I would say yes. If you ask a Yemeni, they would say we’re in Yemen. If you ask a Saudi, they’d tell you we are most certainly in their country.”

Oh. They were in the desert where Beharrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen met, a vast area where borders were sometimes fluid, sometimes nonexistent. To indicate this, they were drawn tentatively with dotted lines on the map.

“We’re in no man’s land—no army, no police—a haven for bandits, smugglers and the odd terrorist training camp,” he confirmed her thoughts.

She pressed her knuckles against her eyelids for a long moment. In hindsight, she might have been a tad optimistic thinking that she was just going to walk out of the place. She shook her head and muttered, “I suppose I’ve been embarrassingly naive.”

“Courage is never worthy of embarrassment.”

“How about foolishness?” She looked at him.

“You’re safest with me.” He held her gaze.

And she wondered if it might not be best to try to believe him. “So what are you doing with the bandits?”

“I’m looking for someone. It’s personal.” His face hardened into his fierce warrior look.

“And when you find him, you’ll kill him?” she asked, then added in a more subdued voice, “I’d prefer the truth, even if it makes me uncomfortable.”

“Yes.” He said the single word without looking away.

“You can’t leave him to the law?”

“The law had him. He escaped from prison.”

“What did he do to you?”

He took a slow breath. “He killed my father.”

Confused, she tilted her head. “I thought you said he was swallowed by quicksand.”

“He was shot. His horse, with him still in the saddle, was forced into quicksand to cover it up. Then my enemy stole the country and murdered my people,” he went on.

Was he talking about the previous king? She remembered something vaguely from the media. “Wasn’t he made to stand trial?”

“Once my brother took power, yes. But he escaped from prison and now he is gathering followers, planning on assassinating the rest of my family and taking back the throne.”