The Sheik Who Loved Me Page 15

  He gripped her buttocks and thrust his full length into her as he pulled her down onto himself. He was hot, hard against her softness. She could feel her own heat pooling between her thighs, around him. He groaned and he thrust deeper. The movement drew cool water into her molten fire. She gasped. The contrast in temperatures inside her heightened every sensation, awakened every nerve. Her body screamed in delirious and silent delight.

  She could hardly breathe. Each movement, each stroke sent her higher, made waves of watery resistance surge between them, their coupling creating a turbulence that fanned out in concentric phosphorescent ripples over the black waters of the lagoon.

  Jayde felt as if she would burst. A desperate need to scream into the night air rose in her throat as he drove her higher and higher. She could feel the thick length of him inside her grow hotter. She could feel it quiver and she knew he was near.

  That knowledge itself pushed her over the tip. Her vision blurred and she was blinded as scarlet waves slammed into her head and colored her mind. She swallowed her cry as the blinding sensation took hold of her. Her body rippled around him in wave after wave of hard contractions. And then he came, bucking, releasing into her with a final violent shudder.

  They held each other, spent, bobbing gently in the water, silently in the swells, breaths coming light and fast.

  He brushed his lips over her forehead. “Mmm…that was sublime,” he murmured against her skin. “A fantasy.”

  Jayde began to feel the chill of the water against her skin as her body cooled. Cognizance crept back with the cold. With it came the sharp bite of reality. He was right. It was a fantasy. Only, he didn’t know the half of it. And she felt suddenly sick. She was deceiving him. She couldn’t do this.

  But before she could begin to pull away, David reached up and ran his rough palm over her breast. “Shall we try to make it to the yacht this time?” His voice was dark with fresh promise.

  Jayde was shocked by the bolt of new heat that shot to her belly. A pang of guilt touched her heart, but her desire pushed it away. “Yes,” she whispered in his ear.

  Tomorrow could wait.

  Tonight she was stealing time. Tonight she was stealing lost years.

  They made love through the night. And as dawn glowed peach on the horizon, Jayde wished in her heart she never had to leave Shendi Island. Or David. They were made for each other.

  No, she corrected herself. Sahar and David were made for each other.

  Jayde Ashton had been trained to be something very, very different. Only, it didn’t seem to fit anymore. A part of her had actually become someone else, a woman with emotion and lightness and love in her soul.

  She’d been rent in two. And she knew she could never become whole again. Not in the way she truly wanted. Not with David Rashid. Because when he found out who she was, he would never forgive her. He’d said it himself at dinner. There was nothing he abhorred more in life than a liar. And she believed he’d truly meant it.

  Surely a man who abhorred lies could not be covertly shipping uranium to Libya and Korea? On the surface, Libya was dismantling its nuclear weapons program, but at the same time the Libyan leader was secretly backing the Falal, a radical extremist group charged with taking the country’s weapons program underground—and using Rashid uranium to do it. Jayde was one of the few people in the world who knew about it.

  She lay on her back on the large double bed in the cabin of David’s luxurious yacht, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the slap of water against the hull, the chink of metal against the mast, the comforting sounds of David making coffee in the galley. And she drank in the heavenly scents of a domestic morning.

  No. She could not believe he was involved. And she could not continue lying to him. She would not. She had to find a way to get hold of Lancaster.

  She closed her eyes. God, she wished she didn’t have to do this.

  “Morning, gorgeous.”

  Her eyes flared open. He stood, dark and totally naked, a Zeus, holding two mugs of steaming coffee, a sinful grin across his ruggedly handsome face.

  She smiled in spite of herself, allowing her gaze to roam brazenly, appreciatively over his exquisite body, taking in the broad, dark-skinned chest, the whorl of dark hair that ran down the center of his washboard stomach and flared out to cover his godlike maleness.

  “Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “You look at me like that and you’re gonna have trouble.”

  She laughed. “I can see trouble stirring already.”

  He pulled a face, set the coffee mugs down and grabbed a kikoi. He wound the brightly colored strip of African cotton around his waist, hiding his swelling interest.

  Jayde made a mock moue. “What a shame.”

  He wiggled a brow. “We could fix that.”

  Heat spurted to her groin. He sat down on the bed, leaned over her. She pulled his kikoi free…

  But the sound of an engine coming at full throttle over the bay made them both pull back.

  Someone was speeding toward the yacht.

  David jerked to his feet, grabbed his kikoi, wrapped it around his waist. But before he’d even made it up on deck, Jayde felt the bump of a small craft pulling up alongside the yacht. Then she heard Tariq’s voice barking over the sputter of the motor. “I must talk to you, David. Now.”

  “What is it?” Undisguised irritation laced David’s voice as he clambered up to the deck.

  “Not here. In private. There is something you must see. It cannot wait.”

  Jayde heard David coming back down to the cabin.

  “What does Tariq want?” she asked, nerves skittering through her chest. Had Tariq found something out about her?

  He took her face in both his hands, kissed her full on the mouth. “Business. Wait for me. There’s food in the galley. Help yourself.”

  “David—” she called after him in desperation.

  He blew her a kiss. “I’ll be right back.”

  Jayde’s heart sank like a stone. She listened to the roar of the engine as Tariq took David away from her. A heavy sense of doom descended on her as the splutter of the engine faded into the distant sound of waves.

  She just knew David would not be back.

  Not in the way she wanted him back.

  It was over.

  David stared at the item Tariq had placed on his desk as if it were a poisonous snake from the pit of hell. “Where did you find that?”

  “On one of the small outer islands. We did a search early this morning, found some boat wreckage, clothing, life jackets, diving gear—” Tariq jutted his chin in the direction of the package “—and that.”

  “Why did you search?” he snapped.

  “I’m trying to help you, David. No one has claimed the woman. I was looking for some clues to her identity.”

  David picked up the waterproof document pouch and yanked open the ziplock closure. He tipped it upside down. The contents spilled out over his desk. Two diving passes. Airline tickets from London. Two British passports. A boat rental agreement…

  And a gold wedding band.

  His heart drummed in his chest. His throat went dry. He reached out, picked up the passports, flipped one open. The photo was Sahar.

  Except it wasn’t Sahar.

  It was Melanie Wilson. He flipped the other document open. It belonged to Simon Wilson.

  A lump swelled hard in his throat. He reached for the diving passes. Simon and Melanie Wilson. He grabbed the rental contract. It was made out to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson.

  His heart shriveled in on itself. He struggled to breathe. Slowly he reached for the wedding band. It was cold in his hand. Smooth. A woman’s size. He turned it over in his fingers, read the engraving.

  “Simon and Melanie forever.”

  David sank bonelessly into his office chair, the gold ring clutched tightly in his fist.

  Mrs. Melanie Wilson. He felt as if every bit of life had been sucked from his marrow. She was married. And, inside, a part of him died.


  Tariq was watching him silently. David looked up at him, forced himself to ask. “Was there any sign of…of her husband?”

  “No.”

  “Any sign of anyone else?”

  “Nothing.”

  David closed his eyes, rested his head against the back of his chair. He tried to steady his breathing. He hated himself with a passion for even beginning to think what he was thinking—that if her husband had drowned there was still a chance for him.

  His eyes flared open. He slammed the ring onto his desk, glared at Tariq. “Why has Mr. Wilson not come looking for his wife, then?” he demanded. “What man doesn’t look for his wife!”

  “David—”

  “No.” He held his palm up. “Don’t talk to me. Just phone that damn diving operation and find out why no one is looking for Mrs. Wilson. Find out why no one is looking for that boat! Find out what in hell has happened to Mr. Wilson! And find out why the goddamn British Embassy doesn’t know these British subjects are missing!”

  He jerked to his feet. Nothing added up. But he had to go to Sahar. He had to tell her they had an ID on her.

  No, he corrected himself, not Sahar. She wasn’t Sahar. Not anymore. That fantasy was over. She was Mrs. Melanie Wilson.

  And as David made his way back down to the bay, he caught sight of his yacht gleaming white on the water. He stopped and stared at it. She was on that yacht. Waiting for him.

  His whole body began to vibrate against the tension in his muscles. Because now he couldn’t have her. She belonged to another man. And that meant he had to keep his hands off her. Just the idea of not touching her again made him feel like a bomb ready to blow its casing. He knew it would take every ounce of control to hold himself in check. Both emotionally and physically.

  He didn’t know if he could do it.

  Chapter 11

  She had to think fast. There was a chance Tariq had simply wanted David for some other urgent business. And if Tariq had nothing on her, she had two choices. Continue to deceive David. Or come clean and tell him who she was.

  She could do neither. Deceiving him now was out of the question. She was just not capable of consciously hurting him and Kamilah in that way.

  And telling him? That would jeopardize an international sting operation. And it could endanger lives. It was not feasible.

  There was one other option. She could abort the mission.

  That’s what she would do. She had to find a way to reach Lancaster, tell him she’d been compromised, that she needed to be brought in. ASAP.

  Jayde glanced at the antique clock on the cabin wall. David still wasn’t back. He’d been gone for over an hour.

  It was nothing, she told herself. He was a busy man. He and Tariq had business. And she could get herself back to shore with the inflatable if she really wanted, or she could swim.

  But in spite of her reasoning, she had a sinking sensation something had gone horribly wrong.

  She anxiously fingered her ring finger. Then it hit her. It was missing. The engraved wedding band she’d been handed as part of her cover with all the other “pocket litter” was gone.

  She’d taken the ring off on the boat because wearing jewelry on her hands irritated her. She’d slipped it into the document pouch with the other papers she and Gibbs had been given.

  Some people routinely took their rings off to wash their hands and do other things. So technically, it wasn’t a mistake, she told herself. She’d been behaving as a normal married woman might have. But in this case, it had turned out to be a critical error. On a deeply personal level. Because maybe if she’d kept the ring on, maybe if she’d been able to read the inscription on the wedding band, she just might have remembered sooner who she was…and why she was anywhere near Shendi Island. Maybe she’d never have found herself this far down the road with David Rashid.

  Jayde sat on the bed and sank her fingers into her mass of hair. How could this have happened to her? Why had she lost time again so many years later?

  She closed her eyes.

  It was the storm. The boating accident. It had to be. It must have shocked her right back to that terrible ordeal off the coast of Cornwall when she was only six…Kamilah’s age. That’s why she’d felt such a visceral connection to the child.

  Jayde got up, made her way toward the bathroom. She leaned over the basin and stared into the mirror. She touched the clear amber stone that hung at the hollow of her throat.

  Amber. The name of her twin sister. She covered the stone with her hand and closed her eyes. For a second last night she’d thought David had been on to her. But he’d only been talking about the stone. Not about the sister she’d watched drown with her father in that awful boating accident when she was six.

  Jayde and Amber. Her parents had given the twins the names of precious stones. She and Amber had been inseparable. She choked down the balloon of pain in her throat, stumbled back to the stateroom and sank down onto the bed. Her body began to shake. Her breathing became labored. She began to relive the horrific memories her mind had tried once again to blot out.

  They’d been on holiday, visiting her grandfather in Cornwall. She and Amber had gone out on a boat with her dad. A terrible storm had risen out of nowhere blacking out the sun and sky. They’d tried to outrun it, but it was impossible. Monstrous waves had swamped the boat. They’d ended up in the viciously churning and frigid sea. Her father had saved her first, shoving her into the heaving lifeboat as he choked and coughed out the salt water in his lungs

  Hold tight baby, I’ll be right back. Her father’s words echoed in her skull. She clutched her arms tight about her waist and swayed.

  He never came back.

  He went after Amber. But he was tired, too tired to fight the raging sea. He was injured, bleeding. The waves were too big. The water too cold.

  She never saw her father or sister again.

  For two days she’d lain curled up in the bobbing lifeboat, adrift in the sea, shrouded in thick gray mist. When they’d finally rescued her she was unconscious. The newspapers had said it was a miracle she’d survived at all.

  Her mother hadn’t been on the boat that day—she’d gone to see a movie with an old school friend. The guilt at not having been there to help had eaten at her like a cancer. And it had eventually killed her like a cancer, when she swallowed a bottle of pills and bottle of whiskey to hide from the pain. She never came back.

  Jayde was eight years old when that had happened. She’d found her mother when she’d woken up in the morning. Her mother’s skin had been ice-cold, a photograph clutched in her stiff fingers, the one where they were all together and smiling under the Christmas tree.

  Jayde had called for help on the phone. Then she had waited by her mother’s body until the police arrived. But it was no use. No one had been able to wake her mother up.

  And when the police took Jayde away, she lost herself for the first time. She went into a dissociative fugue, as the doctors had called it. She simply forgot her name and how she fitted into the pain of her world. And it had taken her a full two years to come out it. Two lost years. Two years of hiding from the agony of her own memories.

  Doctors had told her later in her life that the chances of re-experiencing a similar amnesiac state were much higher after it had happened once before.

  Jayde scrubbed her hands brutally over her face trying to make it all go away again. That’s what must have happened. When the storm hit off Shendi Island, when the boat she and Agent Gibbs were on started to go under, she must have regressed, started to relive those terrible memories as she was once again sucked under the waves. And her old coping mechanism had snapped in. She’d simply shut it all out again.

  And now it was back. Every lurid detail. Just like that.

  She scrunched her eyes tight. They burned, but tears wouldn’t come. Because she was Jayde Ashton, agent for the British secret service. And everyone in the business knew Jayde Ashton never cried. They knew nothing touched her. Ever. Because she would ne
ver let anything get close enough, and that had made her one of the best in the business.

  But now? Now she’d been compromised. Now she would have to tell MI-6 about the mental weakness she’d kept hidden from them. She had never dreamed it could one day damage her or her colleagues. She had to assume that Lancaster and O’Reilly knew she was here, on Shendi. Did they know she had amnesia? Or did they think she might be role-playing? Whatever they thought, they were probably waiting for her to make contact. She had to find a way to reach them. But before she could figure out how to do it, she heard the roar of an engine cutting across the lagoon.

  David was coming back!

  Her heart twisted into an excruciating knot. Panic skittered through her blood. She took a deep, shuddering breath, tried to quell the shaking in her limbs.

  She felt the Zodiac knock up against the yacht, heard him thud onto the deck. She held her breath.

  David loomed into the doorway, strangling the light in the cabin. Under his coffee-brown skin his face was ashen. A muscle pulsed at his jaw. His neck was corded with tension, his mouth a flat, hard line.

  And in his piercing blue eyes Jayde saw a look she’d seen only once before in her life—in the eyes of soldiers faced with an impossible mission, one they knew they would not return from. It was a look of emotional distance combined with fierce determination. A look of the haunted and damned. And seeing that look in him terrified her in a way she didn’t think possible.

  What had happened? What had Tariq shown him? Had he found out she was a traitor?

  A hatchet of fear hacked into her heart. “David?” her voice came out hoarse.

  He said nothing. He took something out of his pocket and held it out to her. She stared at it. She knew exactly what it was. A passport. A British passport.