Taken by the Sheikh

Up ahead of him, in the dust of the roadside, Drax could see the lone figure of a young woman walking and dragging her suitcase behind her. She looked weary—forlorn, almost.

What was it Amar has said about her? That she was modest, the kind of young woman he would be happy to see his son marry. Drax remembered the passport he had picked up. By rights he should have handed it over to the al Sawars, becau

se the girl would surely return there to look for it once she realised she had lost it.

She certainly wasn’t greedy, he acknowledged. He had seen that with his own eyes. And she had to be naïve if she’d let herself be persuaded into working for Monika.

‘Drax? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, I’m still here, Vere. As to your bride—well, that’s where you are wrong, my brother. It just so happens that I may have found you the perfect temporary wife.’

Drax switched off his phone before Vere could say anything, and then started to cut the speed of his car.

Sadie could hear the now familiar tell-tale sound of a car braking to a crawl just behind her, but she refused to look round. However, this car didn’t pull away as quickly as the others had when she did not respond. Instead it continued to keep pace with her, casting a long shadow in front of her. She tried to walk a little bit faster, wishing she could move away from the side of the road, but the land beyond was too rough for her to wheel her case over it.

There was no need for her to panic, she assured herself. It was broad daylight and, even if he was being more persistent than the others, surely whoever it was would soon get bored when she didn’t respond, soon put his foot down to race past her in a cloud of sandy dust.

Only he didn’t. And out of the corner of her eye she could see a long black bonnet edging just ahead of her, then keeping pace with her.

She couldn’t walk any faster; she was panting slightly already, her skin soaked with perspiration caused not just by the heat now but by her anxiety as well.

‘Ms Murray?’

Hearing her name spoken in crisp accent-free English gave her such a shock that she froze. Just as he had estimated she would, she reflected bitterly several seconds later, when the car stopped, the driver’s door opened and the driver himself stepped out in front of her, trapping her between his body and his car.

‘You!’

Why had she said that? It had sounded so personal and so betraying somehow—as though she were deliberately creating an intimacy between them. And that hadn’t been her intention. She was just so shocked to see the man she had last seen standing in the Al Sawars’ courtyard with her employer’s husband standing in front of her.

Unlike her, he wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and something about the look she could see in his eyes made her feel like some poor creature of the desert caught in the predatory searching stare of a falcon.

‘If Madame Al Sawar asked you to come after me…’ she began uncertainly.

Before she could finish what she was saying Drax silenced her with a swift frown.

‘I can acquit you because you do not know me well enough to know that I do not act as an errand boy for others,’ he told her arrogantly. ‘But do you really know Monika so little that you think she’d show that kind of remorse?’

Sadie looked away from him. He was right, of course. Monika was not the type to suffer from second thoughts, much less guilt over what she had done.

‘I came after you because there is something I want to discuss with you. The Professor speaks very highly of you. He considers you to be a young woman of good morals and intelligence.’ Drax was not going to tell her that the Professor had also confirmed his own assessment that she was more inclined to think the best of others than the worst, and that this made her vulnerable to the selfish machinations of the unscrupulous.

Sadie could feel a pink flush heating her face as she listened to this praise.

‘You are fully qualified to work in the financial services industry, so I understand?’

His question startled Sadie. ‘I have a degree and an MBA,’ she acknowledged. She could see Drax nodding his head, as though her words had confirmed what he already knew.

‘It could be that I can offer you a job to replace the one you have just lost.’

Now he could see uncertainty and suspicion in her eyes, along with the kind of female wariness that made Drax congratulate himself again on his own intuition. She would be perfect for the plan he had outlined to his twin.

Sadie looked at him with a challenging expression. She wasn’t so naïve that she wasn’t aware that there was a certain type of Arab male who looked to western women to satisfy his sexual needs via a series of brief sex-only liaisons.

‘Thank you, but my plan has always been to return to the UK to work.’

‘But not without the money to pay your fare or your passport?’ Drax suggested.

Her passport? Sadie looked at him, and then looked down at her bag. But there was no need for her to look inside it, because Drax was already holding her passport in his hand.