A Surprise for the Sheikh Read online

  “You say that like you’re surprised,” she teased, a wide smile on her face.

  “I would not have guessed that my mysterious, beautiful V could rope and ride half so good as you do.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to stop worrying about me riding a horse?”

  “I shall certainly worry less,” he promised. “But no, I do not think I can stop worrying about you.”

  She seemed to consider this. “Will you be able to come to the appointment with me? It’s in twelve days. I think I’ll be able to hear a heartbeat.”

  “I would not miss such a chance. But,” he added as they began to climb a low rise, “we must consider beyond that.”

  Even in the rosy evening light, he saw the color drain from her face. “I don’t even know where to begin. Can we wait? Until after the appointment? I just feel like if I have a doctor’s seal of approval and everything’s okay, it’ll be easier to decide what to do next.”

  “We can wait,” he promised her. It was a sincere promise because Rafe had no desire to upset her. But it also played into his scheme nicely. The longer Violet withheld this secret from Mac, the more the betrayal would sting when Violet accompanied Rafe to Al Qunfudhah.

  But as soon as he had that thought, a sense of discomfort overtook Rafe. After spending the afternoon working and riding with Violet on her well-trained horses, he was having a great deal of difficulty picturing her ensconced in his royal home in Al Qunfudhah, with miles of sand surrounding her instead of a sea of waving grass. She seemed as much a part of this land as the grass and sky. It felt wrong, somehow, to take her away from her home. It would be like caging a wild horse and breaking its spirit.

  Could he really do that to her? It went against his every urge to protect her and their child.

  What muddled his thinking was that she genuinely appeared to care for him in a way that no one else ever had. What if he never found another woman who felt this way about him? What if, by breaking Violet’s spirit, he destroyed his last—his only—chance for happiness?

  He shook those thoughts from his head. He was not destined for happiness. The past few days with Violet had been nothing but a...a diversion. A pleasant one, to be sure, but a diversion nonetheless. The only wrong he had to concern himself with here was avenging the wrongs done to his family honor. That was all that mattered.

  “Here,” she said, breaking him out of his reverie as they crested the hill. She reined her mount to a halt. “That,” she said, sweeping her hand out over the vista before them, “is the Wild Aces.”

  Rafe had, of course, seen a few pictures of it. But the beauty of the land, bathed in the glow of the sunset, took his breath away. He could see how the land differed from the Double M—the trees were larger and more grouped and the grasses were a deeper green, especially around the springs that dotted the land. “It is lovely,” he said.

  “Down there,” she said, pointing south, “those are our tanks. And then there? To the north? That’s the house.”

  Rafe looked in the direction she was pointing and saw a grand old home standing in a grove of tall trees. Clusters of yellow rosebushes crowded around the building’s foundation; even at this distance, Rafe could see the blooms. A long drive led away from the house and that, too, had trees planted along it. The home seemed as much a part of the land as everything else.

  “I love this place,” Violet said with a satisfied sigh. “The house needs to be updated, though. Lulu—that’s the current owner—has lived there for close to forty years and she’s getting on in age. Renovations haven’t exactly been on her radar. Plus, she smokes—a lot—so I’d want the whole house cleaned inside and out before I raise a kid there.”

  A twinge of an unfamiliar emotion took hold of Rafe so suddenly that he had to rub at a spot in his chest that began physically aching. He needed the Wild Aces to complete his revenge on Mac but...

  It would not just hurt Mac, what he was doing. It would hurt Violet, too.

  Nonsense, he tried to tell himself. First off, Violet would be joining him in Al Qunfudhah—that was the plan, and he would not allow his sentimental feelings for her to change that plan.

  The necklace had merely been the first of such gifts. The day after tomorrow, he would bring her a bracelet of diamonds and rubies and then, a ring—diamond, as required by American tradition. If he were still at home, he would not wait a day to bring her jewels, but Violet had shown enough hesitation over their plan that Rafe did not want to rush her too much. More than he had to, anyway.

  And besides, once Rafe had the Wild Aces and had broken Mac, well—Rafe would still have the Wild Aces. And he would also have the Double M. There was nothing that prevented him from keeping the land for Violet, just so long as Mac did not benefit from the arrangement.

  This realization made the pain in his chest ease. One way or the other, the Wild Aces would be Violet’s. Then she would no longer have to rely on her brother’s permission to do anything.

  “It will be perfect,” he told her in all sincerity. And it would be.

  All it required was a little more patience.

  * * *

  Patience was, at this exact moment, something Rafe had in perilously short supply. The last thing he wanted to be doing right now was attending some meeting at some club under false pretenses of perhaps joining the club at some point in the undefined future. He had no intention of settling down in Royal, Texas.

  Or at least, he hadn’t until two days ago.

  He wanted to be back with Violet, and the strength of this feeling was worrisome. He had spent two nights in Violet’s arms, in her bed—sharing her body and her dreams. That he had been forced to give that up only because Mac returned from his business trip did not improve Rafe’s mood.

  Violet was pregnant with his child. He felt reasonably certain of that, as certain as a man could feel without blood tests. She had agreed that, at the doctor’s appointment, they would get the test that confirmed what they already knew—for Fareed and for Mac.

  It bothered Rafe that they both needed to operate in such a manner to prove to their older brothers beyond a shadow of a doubt that the child was theirs. Rafe had vowed to never again be in a position where Mac held sway over him, and yet now Rafe was sitting next to Mac, pretending as if this situation did not bother him in the least.

  The Realtor had been in contact today. She would be making an offer on the Wild Aces in the morning. It was the last piece of the puzzle Rafe had been slowly assembling over the past six months, and he was eager to have it in place.

  Violet wanted the ranch not only for land or water but because that was where she wanted to make her home. That was where she wanted to raise their child.

  With him?

  He was still unclear on that. He had foolhardily mentioned marriage while his head had still been clouded with passion on their second night together—and what a mistake that had been. For a man who was actively trying to convince her to choose him over her brother, it was clear that telling Violet what to do would always be a mistake.

  No, if he wanted Violet to abandon Mac, he had to convince her that was what she wanted. And to do that...

  Rafe had not often awoken with a woman in his arms. But that was exactly the position he had found himself in the previous two mornings when sleep had left him. He had been on his back and Violet had been curled on her side against him.

  It should have felt wrong. Or odd, at the very least. But with Violet exhaling her warm breath against his chest, her breasts pressed against his side, Rafe had felt an unexpected calm. It was almost as if she belonged there.

  That feeling had only gotten stronger as he had awoken her with a kiss. With more than one kiss, in fact. He had lost count.

  It felt as if a sandstorm had been unleashed upon him and he had no way to protect himself. The facts as he knew them spun fa
ster and faster around his mind until he was dizzy and raw.

  “...Started admitting women a couple of years ago,” Mac was saying as they drove toward the dim lights of Royal. “It’s not the same club my father joined, but I don’t have a problem with that.”

  “Is Violet a member?” Rafe asked. What he needed right now was additional information. He wanted to be absolutely certain that Violet was exactly as she said she was. He could not bear the thought that somehow, the McCallum siblings were working together against him.

  The trick was to extract the information without arousing Mac’s suspicions. It was possible, however. One of the more applicable lessons his father had taught him was to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And if your enemy still thought of himself as a friend, well, it made things that much easier.

  Right now, all Rafe knew of Violet was a collection of disparate facts that did not necessarily add up. Violet was Mac’s baby sister, the one he had worried about, the young girl who’d gotten into all sorts of scrapes and hijinks, forever driving their parents to distraction.

  She was a cowgirl who trained horses for cutting and roped cattle and pined for a place of her own.

  But Violet was also his V, beautiful and passionate, the rare woman who had made Rafe break his long stretch of celibacy. She was the woman who had haunted the edge of his dreams for months now. The woman who had made him consider breaking his promise of one night, no strings, and having Nolan, his lawyer, look into finding her.

  And she was the woman, soft and tousled with sleep but still capable of bringing him the greatest of pleasure, who had cried out his name in the morning. She was the woman whose rounded belly contained his child growing within.

  The thought of Nolan was a source of pain and Rafe welcomed it. Anything to break his thoughts from Violet. He had come so far, he could not let this...this infatuation with her destroy his scheme.

  Nolan had been his friend, his trusted second here in America as Rafe set the wheels of his plan into motion. But Nolan had turned on Rafe just as Mac had all those years ago—Nolan had found a woman and decided that love was more important.

  Not that what Mac and Nasira had had was love. Even Rafe understood how lust could drive a man to do things far outside his normal character. But Nasira...

  Rafe struggled to remember what his sister had said to him at the time, in hidden whispers on the long trip back to Al Qunfudhah. She had not wanted to marry the man their father had chosen for her—a much older man, a tribal warlord with a reputation for cruelty who had children nearly as old as Nasira herself. She had not wanted to be forced into a marriage. She had wanted to choose. And she was sorry—deeply sorry—that Rafe had been hurt, but his friend had been a better choice than the warlord.

  Which brought Rafe’s whirling sandstorm of thoughts right back to Violet. Was what she wanted so very different from what Nasira had gone to great lengths to get? The right to choose her husband?

  This thought troubled him. It troubled him greatly.

  “She hasn’t really been interested in joining,” Mac was saying. “And truthfully, I haven’t really encouraged her. I know what some of those guys are like. They’re fine for kicking back and having a beer with in the evening, but I don’t want them around my baby sister. They’re not good enough for her, you know?”

  “You are very protective of her,” Rafe said.

  “I just don’t want anything bad to happen to her, you know? After our parents...” Mac cleared his throat.

  Rafe would not allow himself to think fondly of Violet. He would absolutely not allow his baser instincts to override everything else. Instead, he would focus on his reason for being here—avenging his family honor. Nasira. Oh, yes. Rafe was going to make this man pay and pay dearly. How could he sit there and wax poetic about protecting his own flesh and blood after having so callously used Rafe’s sister?

  “So she does not date among the men from your club?” Mac looked at him sideways and Rafe knew he was treading on dangerous ground. “You did ask me to keep an eye on her. If she is dating someone of whom you approve, I would not want to interfere in that relationship. That is not how things work in my country.”

  He let the words “in my country” hang in the air. Once, he had tried to explain his culture in general and his family structure in particular to his American friends but it was more difficult than bridging the language divide.

  Compared to many other Middle Eastern countries, Al Qunfudhah had an extremely liberal view of women’s rights. Women could drive and hold jobs and they had the right to refuse a suitor—well, commoners did, anyway. That had not been true of Nasira or any of the sheikh’s children—at least, not under Hassad bin Saleed. His brother Fareed was changing those rules, as well.

  But the cultural requirement that a man ask permission of a woman’s father or brother before a date in all circumstances did not sit well with most Americans. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Rafe and Mac had been such good friends so quickly—Mac, better than anyone else Rafe had met at Harvard, had understood the impulse to protect sisters.

  If Mac believed that Rafe’s questions were about Mac’s approval or disapproval of his sister’s dating, not an effort to ascertain whether or not she engaged with many gentlemen friends, well, that only made Rafe look better. He was supporting his friend’s right to rule his family as he saw fit.

  “No, no—she doesn’t date much. I haven’t met the man worthy of her, frankly, and I don’t want her wasting her time on losers who are only after one thing.”

  Well. That certainly lent credence to Violet’s claim that in the last year she had only been with Rafe.

  This what she was hiding from, the night they spent together. Rafe remembered asking why she was just V—was it family or lovers? And she had not answered the question.

  He knew now. She was hiding from family. From the very man Rafe was honor bound to destroy.

  This certainly put an interesting twist on things.

  Rafe never would have guessed when he made this trip to America that he would be eager to attend a doctor’s appointment. His father had never stooped so low as to concern himself with the health of the mother of his children. But Rafe was not his father, thank heavens.

  Eleven more days until the appointment, where he hoped to hear his child’s heartbeat, felt a very long time off.

  “Here we are,” Mac said, pulling up outside a long, low building with immaculate landscaping. “The Texas Cattleman’s Club—it missed the worst of the tornado we had last year.”

  “Mac!” Rafe spun to see a cowboy waving at Mac through the open doors of the clubhouse. “Good to see you, man.”

  “Hey, Chance. Chance, this is an old friend of mine, Rafe bin Saleed. Rafe, Chance McDaniel.”

  Rafe shook hands and the two men talked about Chance’s new daughter. Rafe looked at pictures of a small, wrinkly baby with rather more interest than he might have otherwise. Was this in his future, a baby like this? “What age?” he asked Chance. He had no experience with babies or even children, for that matter. When his siblings had been younger, they had had nannies and nurses and Rafe had only seen them briefly in the evening, when all the children were brought together and presented for their father’s inspection.

  “Four months. God, Gabriella’s just a natural. I didn’t think I could love her more,” he said, his gaze fastened on the next picture, which was of a beautiful dark-haired woman holding the baby, who was now wearing a frilly pink dress. “You have any kids, Rafe?”

  “Ah, no.” He swallowed, uncharacteristically nervous. Until several days ago, there had been no possibility of him having children.

  Chance snorted in a good-natured way. “They change everything, kids.” He clapped Mac on the back. “I keep telling this guy to settle down, but he’s too busy!”

  For the first time
, the possibility of being a father—outside of wedlock, no less—hit Rafe as a real thing and not just a countermove in his scheme. What would his family think if they found out that Rafe had impregnated Violet? He honestly did not know. His father would have done horrible things in the name of the family honor. Being forced to marry Violet would have been a blessing, compared to what Hassad bin Saleed might have done. But Fareed was a different man and a different ruler.

  Still, if Rafe did not marry Violet, he would bring dishonor onto the family, and Fareed would not let that stand.

  “Rafe here’s thinking about relocating to Royal,” Mac said after they had looked at the many pictures of the little girl. “I invited him to a meeting—if he buys some land, he’d be a good member.”

  “Great,” Chance said. Rafe noticed that other men and a few women were all moving back into a larger room. “Oh, shoot—we’re late. Come on.”

  They joined the rest of the group. Mac introduced Rafe around and Rafe shook many hands. Normally, he would be collecting information on each member, examining their connections to Mac. He did recognize several names as people from whom his front corporation, Samson Oil, had purchased land.

  But he had trouble focusing because his mind kept returning back to the questions he had yet to answer.

  “Case Baxter,” a man said, giving Rafe’s hand a vigorous shake. “I’ll be running the meeting tonight, so if you have any questions, just let me know, okay?”

  Rafe nodded and made polite noises of agreement, but his thoughts turned right back to Violet. How could he get her to leave this place with him without breaking her spirit? That was quite a problem—one for which he did not yet have an answer.

  “This is my friend Rafiq bin Saleed, a sheikh from Al Qunfudhah,” Mac said to the group. Rafe snapped to attention at the mention of his name. “He’s looking to get into the energy business and he might relocate here to Royal. I think it’d be great if we could welcome him into the club!”

  There were murmurs, some of approval and some of disapproval. Rafe remembered his American manners and nodded and smiled as warmly as he could while the sandstorm of his mind continued to whirl around winning Violet McCallum.