The Sheikh's Destiny Read Free Page B

know. She’d never seen him smile.
    Before she could make sure, he turned and strode inside.
    He had her running to keep up with him, demonstrating that her concern was needless. And that he wouldn’t make it easy for her to see her purpose through.
    Once she knew he’d be okay, she’d show him exactly how much she’d put up with to be with him. That, if he let her, she would follow him to the ends of the earth.

Two
    A ll through the admission process, Rashid felt Laylah’s presence a breath away.
    He couldn’t take one without it mixing with the scent and heat of her body and her worry.
    He found himself barely breathing so both wouldn’t deluge him further. But rationing that involuntary act turned out to be easier than stopping another supposedly voluntary one. In spite of his intention to demonstrate that her presence was unnecessary as well as unimportant, his gaze kept going back to her like iron filings to a magnet. When no one, certainly never a woman, had ever commanded his unwilling response.
    But Laylah Aal Shalaan wasn’t anyone. There was no one else in the world that he remembered from the day of their birth.
    He’d just turned eight when she was born, the first female offspring in the Aal Shalaan family in forty years. It had only been a week after he’d met her maternal and paternal cousins, Haidar and Jalal, and begun a friendship that had lasted for the next two decades.
    She’d grown up under his gaze, always in his orbit, glowing brighter every day with a radiance that had progressively dismayed him. He’d thought it so unfair, for her to be so matchlessly beautiful on the outside, when she could possess no beauty at all on the inside. Not when she was the daughter of a house of serpents.
    Now that she’d matured, the injustice had been exacerbated.
    His gaze returned to her again and again, documenting her every nuance. Hair and eyes the color of the richest chocolate and brushed with sunlight, skin of honeyed velvet and warm sunsets, a body of lush vitality and femininity and a face of a peculiar brand of splendor and harmony. But it was what those most unusual features radiated that perplexed him.
    How could they transmit such...sweetness? Such...genuineness? The woman was descended from ruthless bitches and hardened criminals. There was no way any of that could be real.
    Yet he was forced to believe one thing was real. Her concern for him. Its purity and intensity singed him.
    But that could be explained away. By gratitude. To her lifeline in this harrowing experience. Once fright and shock drained away, so would her simulation of humanity and good nature.
    Then he’d be free to resume thinking the worst of her. And treating her accordingly without the least remorse.
    For now, he had to get out of her range. He needed to get his act together. To plan his next step.
    * * *
    “I’m coming with you.”
    At her blurted-out declaration, Rashid turned at the door of the treatment room. That eloquent eyebrow of his made her feel like an illogical species in the presence of a Vulcan.
    He’d so far let her accompany him through the admission procedure. When the police had arrived, he’d fielded doubts about her being involved in the attack, lying with spectacular smoothness when they’d asked about her bruise.
    According to him, it had been a basketball to the face during a one-on-two match with Mira—whom he’d always seen with her in the times she’d only sensed him—who’d back up anything she’d say. Just like the thugs would back up anything he said.
    Not that those policemen would investigate any further. She had a feeling they realized the truth but seemed to appreciate his motivation for adjusting it wholeheartedly. They’d behaved as if they realized they were in the presence of a superior force who’d taken the pursuit of justice far beyond their level. The bare bones of his background had left them—and her—awed. They’d left the E.R. shaking his hand for what he’d