The Sheikh Surgeon's Proposal

“Pressure within normal limits,” she gasped.

He let out a long exhalation. Relief made audible.

“Your turn,” he murmured.

She jumped in, making sure she didn’t leave one bleeding artery uncauterized.

“That’s perfect, Janaan. Now feel for distal pulses.”

She felt for the pulse in Aabed’s foot as Malek felt for the femoral and popliteal, bracing herself. A flutter tickled her fingertips. She moaned. “Oh, God.”

He came around her, felt where she had then dragged off his mask. “Pack the wound open, Janaan, and apply a bulky dressing.”

“You mean.”

He turned heavy, full eyes on her. “Yes. This is a supreme case of guddur w’luttuf. God decreed adversity but was merciful with it.” He turned his eyes to Aabed’s leg and her eyes gushed with their loss, with fear he’d resume his distance, her deprivation. She blinked tears away, got to work.

“He’ll be returned to OR for debridement until no necrotic tissue is left before we close the wound. But I believe he’ll walk again.” He looked at Rafeeq. “Great job, Rafeeq. Bring him round. Take him to IC then prepare for the next procedure.”

Management and surgeries continued non-stop for the next fifteen hours. Four patients were beyond help, five were still critical, but the remaining would survive with minor or no handicap. All would have died without intervention. Saving twenty-five should have felt good. It didn’t.

Malek had remained within those three feet of her, his eyes on her every second he didn’t have them on his job, seething with so much that distressed her, that she couldn’t fathom.

It was noon by the time they returned to their convoy. Their team was exhausted, physically and spiritually, as they made their way to their trailers. Malek walked her in silence to hers, seemed about to say something when Hessuh caught up with them and climbed inside before Jay.

After a long moment of hesitation, he only rasped, “Get some rest.” Then he turned away.

She stumbled inside, found Hessuh in bed, fully clothed, eyes closed. Jay fell face down on her own bed, the last flicker in her receding mind an image of Malek as he’d left her.

Janaan moaned and burrowed into a wonderful feeling.

Hot, male, encompassing. Malek.

Only he made her feel this protected and cherished. This hungry, this incredible, and this miserable!

She opened her eyes, expecting the echoes of their night together to dissipate, leaving her cold and empty and alone—alone forever. And he was there. Then he didn’t vanish.

Malek. He was really there. Stretched out beside her. Like that night in her hotel, drenching her in caresses. Disoriented, she blinked, at him, around the trailer.

“I asked Hessuh to leave us alone,” he answered her unspoken question, the richness of his voice twisting in her heart, in her loins, the spike of sensation so severe her teeth rattled with its force. The drugged tinge to his gaze suddenly lifted, a dull bleakness replacing it. Then he was leaving her!

He staggered up to his feet, seemed to sway before he stood up straight. Or maybe it was her world that was churning, would never right itself again.

“Habibati, samheeni—forgive me, I saw you sleeping and I couldn’t—couldn’t … Ya Ullah-hada w’Ullahi tholm.”

Tholm. Injustice.

What was? That he was, that he made her feel all this?

She shakily swung trembling legs over the side of her bed, sat staring up at him with her hands helpless and cold in her lap, sick electricity flooding her body as he drove his hands in his hair like a man about to lose his mind.

Oh, God—was something wrong with him?

Then he suddenly growled, the sound of a man at the end of his tether, “My name is Malek ben Muraad ben Amjad ben Munsoor Aal Hamdaan.”

She stared at him. Why was he telling her his.? Oh.

Oh God.

No. No. He couldn’t mean …

From a long distance she heard a wavering rasp.

“Muraadben … He’s—he’s …” She stopped, stared at Malek.

“Damhoor’s king, yes. My father.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

DAMHOOR’S KING. Damhoor’S king. Yes. My father. My father.

The words ricocheted inside Jay’s skull, building up to a cacophony that almost burst it apart.

It was all just too—too.

And she suddenly howled with laughter, hysterical, agonizing, bone-rattling laughter.

She laughed until her lungs shut down, until her eyes were wrung dry, until her insides twisted together in a knotted mess.

He watched her all through it, his eyes heavy, grim.

At long last the first enormity of shock and realization abated. It left her trembling, limp.

She finally rasped, “And to think you called me Janaan of the ceaseless surprises. First you’re a sheikh, then a surgeon, then the Health Minister. Now you’re a prince.”

He made a frightening sound in his throat. Then he almost spat out, “I’m not a prince. I’m the prince. The crown prince.”

Silence crashed down again.

Numb now, Jay finally gave a short, stunned giggle. “It just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?” Then a distant memory struck her like a lightning bolt. “But … over a year ago, when my father started saying he’d get me a job here, get my mother a home, I researched Damhoor, and the crown prince’s name was—was …”

“Majd,” he muttered. “The Glory of Aal Hamdaan, as he truly was. My elder brother. He died of a ruptured brain aneurysm ten months ago.”

His loss. This was it. The loss behind the hot empathy that had permeated her when she’d related her loss of her mother the day they’d first met, seemingly many lifetimes ago.

He suddenly closed his eyes, inhaled. He opened them a moment later, but she’d seen it. The spasm of anguish that had contorted his very being.

“We were just walking out of a squash court after a grueling match where he’d trounced me. And he just collapsed at my feet. I forgot everything, seeing him there—there was not a single medical shred left in my mind. For a whole minute. Then it was a blur of trying to keep him alive till I got him to the OR. He died before I got him into an ambulance.”

She kept watching him, breathless.

He inhaled another breath. “I ordered the autopsy, attended it. My father begged me not to do it. I disregarded him. I knew a massive subarachnoid hemorrhage was the cause of death, but I had to ascertain exactly how and why—that there was no suspicion of foul play. I think it hit my father harder that I cut Majd open than that he’d died. He grew old and infirm in front of my eyes those hellish days. Then he accused me of causing Majd’s death.”