Ransomed for the Sheikh_A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel Read online

  21

  What will you do, Imraan, came the thought as the Sheikh felt the arousal almost take over while he looked down through the clear waters at her round buttocks spread before him. There was a sense of power in the moment that was intoxicating, almost overwhelming. He was king, was he not? He could take what he wanted, do what he wanted, finish what he started. He could show her who he was, show himself who he was!

  She was taunting him, teasing him, daring him. He had no choice but to do it, yes? Hold her down, push himself forward, and finish it. No choice.

  Imraan looked down at himself, his manhood stretched long and hard beneath the surface of the water, Maddy bent forward and spread before him, gasping for air. What choice was he making here? What choices were they both making? Destiny? Genetics? The son of the father? The daughter of the mother?

  No, he suddenly thought as he watched her turn her head and taunt him again, her eyes filled with tears. I have to make the choice for both of us. It is my responsibility to fix what my father broke. It is the only way to free us both. It is my choice, and mine alone. I am a king, and I choose my destiny.

  And then he grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her up as she spat water and took deep gulps of air. He spun her around to face him, smiling as those fists of hers came around with her and got him square on the cheek. He would have a black eye in an hour, but it did not matter. He had chosen his destiny, and she was it.

  “Maddy,” he shouted, taking one more blow from her flying fists and then grabbing her wrists before she broke his nose. “I am sorry. Maddy, listen. I am sorry. I am sorry!”

  He lifted her out of the water as she began to sob, cradling her in his arms like the broken child she was in that moment. Just in that moment though, because the Sheikh understood that just like she’d never had the chance to be a child, she’d never truly been broken. Damaged but not broken.

  He carried her out of the pool as the sun shone down on them. Water rolled off their naked bodies in beads, blood oozed from the Sheikh’s cuts and wounds, tears flowed from Maddy’s eyes. It was like their bodies were expelling their pasts, clearing the way for something new, something fresh, something clean.

  The Sheikh kissed her forehead as he laid her down under the shade of a desert palm, her body cradled against his. They stayed there in silence, the warm desert breeze drying their bodies as the hot sun shone in splinters through the deep green palm leaves. He stroked her hair, kissed her face, held her close like he knew she needed, like he knew he needed. Slowly he could feel the warmth of the desert elements take root in them, and he realized she was no longer crying, he was no longer bleeding, and they were both smiling.

  Then she glanced up at him with those big brown eyes, the eyes of a woman reborn. “So I was just wondering,” she whispered, and in those eyes he could see a strange mix of light along with that old darkness, like there was a balance coming into play, a balance that would perhaps sustain them for the rest of their lives. “How do I taste now?”

  22

  He tasted her again and again as she came for him, and their laughter filled the air like birdsong as they rolled around beneath the swaying palm trees. Their bodies were covered in fine golden sand, their hair matted and twisted, their skin glowing with perspiration.

  After he made her come for the third time with his mouth, the Sheikh took her back to that gurgling pool, washing the sand off her face and body as she stroked him to a hardness that almost made him choke. Then he held her upright and took her, slowly and carefully, pushing himself up into her with long, powerful strokes as she spread for him beneath the desert waters.

  They came together, brother and sister, their cries of ecstasy merging with the sound of flowing water. And when they were done Maddy looked into Imraan’s eyes and kissed his lips and sighed.

  “This is only the beginning, isn’t it?” she whispered.

  “I certainly hope so,” he replied. “I certainly hope so.”

  23

  “Back to the beginning, Morris,” snarled the Sheikh, taking slow steps around the old man tied to a chair. “I want the full story. All of it. Every last detail, no matter how twisted.”

  Morris took a long breath as he glanced at his bound wrists, tested the bonds on his ankles. He was old but strong, and the Sheikh knew better than to underestimate a man who’d survived in the American underworld for thirty years.

  “You think I’m scared of this bullshit act you’re putting on?” Morris replied coolly. “What the fuck are you going to do to me? I’m already broke, wiped out. You’ve taken my daughter. What else is left? My life? Go ahead and take it. In fact, hand me a gun and I’ll pull the trigger myself. Who gives a shit.”

  “I give a shit,” came her voice from the left, and Morris turned and blinked in the dim light of the windowless store-room beneath the kitchens of the Royal Palace.

  “Maddy?” he said. “You’re . . .” He glanced at the Sheikh and then back at his daughter, a tight smile showing on his lips before his expression went stoic again.

  “Alive? Did you think I was going to kill her?” the Sheikh asked, frowning as he tried to read the old man’s expression. “I gave you my word, did I not?”

  Morris closed his eyes, that tight smile coming back for a moment before disappearing again. “I have nothing to say to either of you. What’s done is done. The past should stay in the past. Trust me, there’s nothing to be gained by going back to what happened twenty years ago.”

  “We will decide what’s to be gained,” said the Sheikh, taking a step closer as he felt his blood rise. His memories of this man were still hazy, and he could sense something rippling beneath the surface. Why in Allah’s name couldn’t he remember clearly? He was old enough at the time. What had they done to him?

  “You don’t remember, do you, boy?” said Morris almost like he could read the Sheikh’s thoughts, and Imraan blinked as the old man opened his eyes and glanced up. “Of course not. They did a number on you. On both of you. Military-grade hypnosis.” He laughed and shook his head. “Hell, I wish they’d done it on all of us. It would have made things so much easier! We could have forgotten all that shit instead of carrying it with us for two decades.” He snorted, glancing at Maddy and then looking down. “Though perhaps that was why he didn’t mess with all our memories. He wanted the rest of us to remember. That self-righteous piece of shit.”

  Imraan blinked rapidly, his eyelids fluttering as a fleeting image of that other man—the young American in a black suit—came back and then disappeared. “Who? Speak, Morris. Do not underestimate me. I will make you talk, one way or the other.” The Sheikh glanced over at Maddy and then back at Morris. “One way or the other.”

  Panic flashed across the old man’s face when he looked at his daughter, saw her swollen lip, the bruises on her upper arms. He looked back at Imraan, frowning as if he was trying to figure out whether the Sheikh was bluffing. After all, Maddy was standing free in the center of the room, not in shackles in the corner.

  “You’re bluffing,” Morris finally said, his jaw tightening as he looked away from his daughter and into the Sheikh’s eyes. “You don’t have it in you. You didn’t then, and you don’t now.”

  The Sheikh took a long breath, filling his lungs as he felt an anger rise up in him like the tide coming in. Slow and steady, but unstoppable in its power. He turned and nodded, glancing at Maddy and narrowing his eyes at her. Then with two long strides he closed the distance between them and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her down to her knees as she screamed in real shock.

  She tried to turn and swing at him, but Imraan pushed her face-down onto the floor, driving his knee into her back and holding her down. Then he reached behind his back and pulled out the curved dagger with the jeweled hilt that had been part of a set—the second of which was missing. He held the edge of the blade to Maddy’s left ear, glancing up at her father and
holding the eye contact without so much as a single blink.

  “I do not have it in me? You know whose son I am. You know whose blood runs in my veins. So now decide, old man. Talk, or I make you talk.”

  The Sheikh could feel Maddy’s panic as she tightened beneath his weight. He could tell that even she wasn’t certain if he was bluffing or not. But the worst of it, the part that scared him the most, the part that made his blood run cold was that Imraan himself wasn’t sure if he was bluffing. He could feel that internal wall coming down again, and suddenly those moments he’d shared with Maddy seemed like a childish dream, something that was part of another person’s life, something that wasn’t real, was too far away to be real.

  “Imraan,” Maddy gasped as the blade touched the back of her ear. “You’re insane. He doesn’t give a shit about me. He’ll let you cut me up into a hundred pieces before he breaks.”

  Imraan ignored her, staring down Morris as he watched the old man’s eyebrows twitch. “You are the only thing this man cares about,” he said quietly. “He handed over the spoils from a life of crime, went down on his knees to beg me for a loan, and agreed to my every demand just to save you from whoever kidnapped you to begin with. Which means he knows who kidnapped you in the first place, and he knows that whatever I might do to you would pale in comparison to what they would have done. So talk, old man. I know you give a damn about her, and I know she is the only thing keeping that light going in your eyes.”

  Morris glanced at his daughter, and back at the Sheikh. Then he shook his head, smiled, and finally nodded. “You give a damn about her too, Imraan. But you aren’t bluffing, are you?”

  “No,” said the Sheikh, that feeling of horror at what he was prepared to do coming in so strong his hand began to shake. “I am not. I promised you I would not kill her, but that is all I promised you.”

  “All right, you goddamn madman!” Morris said, his eyes finally going wide as he strained against his bonds. “Put that dagger down. I’ll tell you what I know.” He took a breath and closed his eyes, his head shaking as he exhaled. When he opened his eyes there were tears. “But I should warn you, once you hear it all, there’s no unhearing it. No going back.”

  24

  Maddy spun away from Imraan the moment he released her, and it took all her willpower to not descend on him with everything she had. He was going to cut her fucking ear off? He was a goddamn psycho!

  But her father had started talking, and she gathered herself and listened, glancing over at Imraan one last time before deciding that she needed to be done with this family once and for all. Both of them. There was only one way out, and that meant only one person was going to be leaving this room when all was said and done.

  She glanced at that dagger hanging loose in the Sheikh’s hand, the blood chilling in her veins when she realized what she was thinking. In three steps she could get there, snatch that blade from his hands, slash his throat with a swift upward strike. She wouldn’t even need to do anything to her father. She could just leave him there. There’d been no attendants down here as far as she knew. The Sheikh had brought her father down to this windowless room on his own. He was old and weak. How long would he last? He wouldn’t even starve to death: he’d run out of oxygen in about a day in this closed box!

  Maddy almost staggered, and she took a deep breath when she realized she’d been holding her breath as these sickening thoughts took root in her mind. As she exhaled she heard her father’s voice, and she finally tuned in and listened.

  “I met Gaurina at a club in London,” he said. “She was young, exotic, and mesmerizing. I couldn’t get enough. Hell, she certainly couldn’t get enough.”

  Maddy watched as Imraan’s body tightened, but she said nothing. Neither did the Sheikh.

  “I had no idea who she was. If I’d known, I’d have stayed the hell away.” Morris shook his head and looked down. “Begum Gaurina. The second wife of the Sheikh of Wahaad. A man with a reputation for brutality. A man who’d reinstated punishments like stoning to death, amputation, and public beheadings. A man who’d decreed that the legal age for marriage was thirteen.” He snorted and glanced up at Imraan. “Your father.”

  Imraan took a breath, his green eyes narrowed and focused. “I know,” he said. “Go on.”

  “We spent six weeks together in Europe, and she was pregnant by the end of it. I wanted to marry her, bring her back to America. I told her she’d love Atlanta—after all, the weather would suit her, I used to joke.” Morris smiled and shook her head. “And then she told me who she was, told me she was already married, told me that she was taking my baby back to Wahaad and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.”

  “Why? Why would she want to do that?” Imraan asked, looking at Maddy and then back at Morris. “It would have been suicide to show up at my father’s door with another man’s child.”

  “Obviously it wasn’t,” Morris said, his eyes narrowing now too as he met the Sheikh’s gaze. “And you know why.”

  Maddy watched as the Sheikh took a breath, and she could feel her head spin as those memories assaulted her like bullets in the darkness of the room. Memories of her own mother holding her down that first time, smiling like a witch as the old Sheikh descended on her like an angry god.

  “Tell me why,” Imraan said, and Maddy could see his rage. Suddenly she was reminded of that moment when he swore he’d protect her, that it was his responsibility to protect her when no one else would. What part of him could she believe? What part of him was real? Both parts? “Tell me why!” he said again, taking a step closer to Morris, his grip on that knife tightening.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Maddy blurted out as tears rolled down her face—tears not of sadness but of emotion that couldn’t be controlled. “Because I was a gift. An offering. A testament to the king’s power. I was nothing more than a symbol of my mother’s submission to your father. The ultimate symbol, and the ultimate submission. A mother handing over her child to please the angry god. Some twisted version of Abraham offering his child to God, the oldest story in both the Old Testament and the Quran.” She turned to her father, facing him in a way she hadn’t in all the years she’d known him. “Isn’t that right, dad? Father? Papa? A gift to save your life? You traded my life for yours, didn’t you? I was a just a ransom so you could save your own ass!”

  “I saved us both!” Morris shouted, pulling at the ropes that held him to the chair. His neck was straining, his eyes bulging, a vein throbbing on the side of his head. “If I’d tried to do something ridiculous like sue for custody or claim in public that you were my child, what do you think the Sheikh would have done? Smiled and said sure, you fucked my royal wife and knocked her up? No problem. Here’s your child. No harm done.” He snorted and shook his head. “We’d all be dead now, Maddy. You, me, and your goddamn mother, the psycho who started all of this.”

  Maddy shook her head as she glanced at that knife again in her peripheral vision. “You left me to a fate worse than death, you cowardly bastard. Your own daughter!”

  Morris blinked, a frown crossing his face even as the blood rushed out of it until he was a ghostly white. “You . . . you remember?” His frown deepened, and he shook his head rapidly, almost like he was having a small seizure. But his old eyes were focused and alert, and when he glanced back at Maddy she could see the pain in it. Pain, anger, and confusion. He looked at the Sheikh and then back at his daughter, his body finally relaxing as he exhaled like he was giving up. “Oh, God, Maddy. They told me you wouldn’t remember a thing. Neither of you would.” He looked at the Sheikh again. “It seemed to work on you. And it seemed to work on her for years. Why isn’t it working anymore?”

  “What? Spit it out, Morris,” said Imraan. “What are you talking about? Some kind of brainwashing? You mentioned hypnosis before. Hypnosis? You had us hypnotized so we wouldn’t remember?”

  Morris clenched his jaw, his ey
es glossy with tears. “Oh, God, Maddy. I didn’t know what that madwoman would do, what she’d allow him to do to you! And the moment I found out, I did what I could to get you back! To make you forget! Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Maddy.”

  Maddy didn’t say a word. She just looked at her father, then glanced at her stepbrother. She felt cold inside, a strange calmness drifting through her like a lazy breeze. Did he really think for all these years that she had no memory of what had been done to her? No, the memories weren’t available to her, but they were there in primal form, fueling the fire that had sustained her this long. She’d never spoken of it; but then again, they’d never really had many father-daughter chats at the breakfast table, had they. They’d always talked business, and Maddy had never asked him about the snippets of her past that sometimes came to her in nightmares. Why the fuck not? It wasn’t like she was afraid of confrontation. Why hadn’t she brought it up?

  And then it hit her: if she and Imraan had really been hypnotized, maybe the hypnotism worked differently on her. While he’d blocked out the memories completely, the memories had stayed available to her, but locked behind a psychic wall of sorts, creating a split in her mind. So for her it was like those things happened to someone else, even though she knew they’d happened to her. Was that possible? Could it have played out that way?

  So what had brought down that wall, brought the memories back into focus, made them her memories again? Made them real. Perhaps made her real.

  A spark of heat cut through the chill that was taking over, and she glanced over at Imraan. The Sheikh stood tall in the center of the room, his face hard, his jaw tight, his green eyes focused like daggers on her father. But then he turned to her as if he could sense what she was thinking, and in that moment she wanted to go to him, tell him she believed him, that she trusted him to protect her, that although she knew he was as damaged and broken as she was, a loose cannon just like she was, she still trusted him with her life, her sanity, her body . . . everything.