To Tempt a Sheikh Read Free Page A

new plan would be effective. Land in the oasis, take care of any injuries and contact his people. Mission accomplished.
    Next minute, he almost kicked himself.
    Of all times to count his missions….
    The leaking fuel wasn’t their only problem. In fact it was their slighter one. The damage to the navigation system had taken this long to reveal itself. The chopper was losing altitude fast. And there was nothing he could do to right its course.
    He had to land now. Here. Or crash.
    He turned to Burke urgently. “Are you buckled in?”
    The man nodded frantically, his eyes widening with realization. Harres had no time to reassure him.
    For the next few minutes he tried every trick he’d learned from his stint as a test pilot to land the helicopter and not have it be the last thing he did in his life.
    As it was, they ended up crash-landing.
    After the violent chain reaction of bone-powdering, steel-tearing impacts came to an end, he let out a shuddering breath acknowledging that they had survived being pulverized.
    He leaned back in his seat, watching the interior of the cockpit fade in and out of focus. Had he lost too much blood or were the cockpit’s lights fluctuating? He had no doubt the chopper itself was a goner.
    He’d deal with his own concerns later. After he saw to his passenger.
    He unbuckled his belt, flicked the cockpit lights on to maximum, turned to Burke. The man had his head turned against his seat, his eyes wide with an amalgam of panic and relief. Their gazes meshed.
    And there was no mistaking what happened then.
    Harres hardened. Fully.
    He shuddered. What was this? What was going on? Was his body going haywire from the stress?
    Enough of this idiocy. Check him for injuries.
    He reached for him. The man flinched at his touch, as if Harres had electrified him. He knew how he felt. The same charge had forked through him. This had crossed from idiotic to insane.
    He forced in an inhalation, determined to erase those anomalous reactions, drew Burke by the shoulders into the overhead light. The man struggled.
    â€œStop squirming. I need to check you for injuries.”
    â€œI’m fine.”
    The husky voice skewered through him even though he could barely hear it with the din of the still-moving rotors.
    And a conviction slammed into him.
    He would have thought he was beginning to hallucinate from blood loss. But he’d been feeling these inexplicable things long before he’d been hit. So he was through listening to his mind, and what it thought it knew, and heeding his body. It had been yelling at him from the first moment, just as his every instinct had been. He always listened to them.
    Right now they were telling him that, even in these nightmarish conditions, they wanted T. J. Burke.
    And knowing himself, that could only mean one thing.
    He stabbed his fingers into the unruly gold silk on top of T. J. Burke’s head, his body hardening more at the escaping gasp that flayed his cheek.
    He traced the dewy lips with his thumb, as if to catch the sound and the chagrined shock at what he sensed was an equally uncontrollable response.
    He smiled his satisfaction. “So, tell me, why are you pretending to be T. J. Burke, bearded investigative reporter, when a modern-day bejeweled Mata Hari would suit you far better?”

Two
    T. J. Burke wrenched away from the cloaked, force-of-nature-in-man-form’s hold, panted, voice gruff and low, a tremor of panic traversing it. “Did you hit your head in the crash?”
    The man bore down again without seeming to move, making the spacious cockpit of the high-end military helicopter shrink. The smile in those golden eyes that seemed to snare the dimmest rays and emit them magnified, took on a dangerous edge. The danger was more spine-shivering for being unthreatening, more…distressing, with the response it elicited.
    Then the colossus drawled in that deeper-than-the-desert-night baritone. “The only hit to the