The Sheikh's Destiny (Harlequin Romance) Read Free

precious essential oils, and covered the wound with the cleaned hair and make-up. Then she rolled the man off the sheet, bundled it up and tossed it in the roaring fire. She put the clean shirt on him—he’d been through several operations for those burns, by the patches of grafted skin over the worst of it—buttoned up the shirt, and checked her watch. Four minutes thirty-eight. Not bad, really. She checked over the hut for any signs of wound treatment.
    Nothing, thank God. Hana dragged in a deep sigh of relief, and finally allowed herself a moment to look at her patient’s face.
    â€˜No, no,’ she whispered, horrified.
    She’d known as she ran to save this man’s life that he’d pulled off the impossible today—but the feat suddenly didn’t seem quite so impossible, if he was who she thought he was.
    Please, God, just make it a freak physical resemblance …because if it was him, then by his mere presence he’d brought far more danger to the village than by any supplies he’d brought.
    Even Sh’ellah’s followers would know him. Most men loved fast sports and money, and this man combined both. Just put a helmet on him and it was the former face of the world’s most expensive racing-car team. He’d won the World Championship twice—and brought both riches and research to a once-struggling nation. He’d found oil and natural gas reserves in a place few had thought to look, with his chemical background and analytical racing driver’s mind.
    â€˜La!’ he muttered, in either fever or concussed confusion. ‘La, la, akh! Fadi, la!’
    No, no, brother! Fadi, no!
    In dread, Hana heard the words in the Arabic native to her childhood home country, begging his beloved brother Fadi to live. It broke her heart—she knew how it felt to lose those she loved—and then she listened in horror as he relived the drive to the village in graphic detail, including the complex mixture of chemicals he’d used to blind Sh’ellah’s men.
    The fine-chiselled, handsome face—the faint scars of burns on his cheek, the horrific wounds on his body…even his miraculous escape today made perfect sense. He’d obviously had extensive training in the creation of compounds, and how much of each to add to make something new—such as a flare that could blind the men chasing him.
    â€˜This is all I need,’ she muttered in frustration to the delirious face of Alim El-Kanar, the missing sheikh of Abbas al-Din. ‘Why couldn’t you be anywhere but here?’
    The former racing-car champion kept muttering, describing the flare-bomb he’d made.
    At the worst possible moment, the sound of a dozen all-terrain vehicles bumping hard and fast over the non-existent road reached her. Sh’ellah’s men all spoke Arabic similar to that of the man lying in front of her. They’d identify him in moments, take him for enormous ransom…and destroy any evidence of their abduction. Within ten minutes she and all her friends would be blown to bits: another statistic to a world so inured to violence that they’d be lucky to make it to page twenty of a newspaper, or on the TV behind some Hollywood star’s latest drunken tantrum.
    â€˜Fadi—Fadi, please, stay with me, brother! Stay!’
    She had to do it. With a silent apology to the hero of her village, she heated a wet cloth over the fire and shoved it overhis famous features to accelerate the fever already beginning to burn under his skin; she rubbed him down with a dry towel to make the temperature of his arms and legs rise. Her only chance lay with scaring the men into staying away from him…
    And by shutting him up. She put her fingers to his throat and pushed down on his carotid artery, counting a slow, agonising one to twenty, until he collapsed into unconsciousness.
    Â 
    He had to be dreaming, but it was the sweetest dream of angel eyes.
    Alim felt