Sheikh's Unlikely Desire Read online

  She could see the defeat well up in Scholl's face, and along with it came an ugly anger.

  “Why you little...”

  She could take it. She had heard worse. She didn't even have to brace herself for whatever abuse he wanted to spew, because he knew he had lost.

  However, even if Leah was used to a certain amount of abuse from her enemies, apparently Zayn was not.

  In a flash, he was in front of her, and he had closed Scholl's arm in a tight fist. Leah could see that no matter how Scholl pulled, he was being held as still as if he were an errant schoolboy.

  “No,” Zayn said, his tone iron. “This woman has done as I have asked her to do. She has represented me fairly, and she has spoken to you with far more courtesy than I see that you deserve. You are going to apologize to her, and then we are going to walk out of here. Do you understand?”

  Scholl started to say something, but it obviously did not sound enough like an apology to Zayn. He gave the man's arm a vicious shake, making him cry out in shock. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Yes! I'm sorry, all right? I'm sorry.”

  It took Leah a moment to realize that she should respond to it.

  “Apology accepted,” she said, trying to ignore what was going on in front of her. “If you continue to take this course of action, we will have no choice but to move forward with more dire means of stopping you. And believe me, you will be stopped.”

  Zayn nodded, dropping Scholl easily, and turning to her. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes.”

  As she turned, however, she caught a look on Scholl's face that made her shiver. Before she had merely thwarted him. Right now, however, he looked absolutely murderous. That was a kind of hate that could have repercussions.

  Once they were out of Ice Fields' building, she waited until she made it to her car to turn to Zayn. She didn't trust herself to speak for a moment, but then she found her center of calm.

  “Where's Azim and the rest of your men?” she asked, leaning against her car.

  Zayn shrugged, a slight smile on his face. “They are around, though perhaps they are being a little subtler than they need to be. They were worried about me, but not so worried that they would storm that place without my permission.”

  “And how about you?” she asked. “What kind of permission did you need?”

  She was gratified to see that Zayn looked a little startled at her tone.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had that handled,” Leah replied hotly. “I had a plan going in, and then here you come, strutting up as if you own the world and everything in it.”

  Zayn looked shocked, but she felt too angry to let up.

  “Do you know how nasty that could have been?” she demanded. “What if he had decided to press charges on you for assault? What if he had found a way to piss you off enough that you did something that you regret?”

  “I do not regret anything that I did in there,” Zayn responded coldly. When he wished to, he could look as foreboding as a granite cliff face.

  “Really? Because seriously, what you did in there could be termed assault.”

  “He was going to threaten you. He might have only done it with his words, but he might also have decided to do it with his fists. I decided that I wasn't going to take that risk.”

  “I was willing to!” Leah cried, exasperated. “Do you think this is my first job? Do you think that clients have never gotten angry at me before?”

  Zayn looked stunned. “Someone would try to strike you simply for doing your job?”

  She bared her teeth at him in something that perhaps wanted to be a smile. “You have no idea what my job is like,” she said heatedly. “You have no idea what I do for my clients or what it takes to make some of these assholes see reason. I can defend myself, Zayn.”

  “And do you do it by simply allowing them to strike you?” he demanded. “Is that your plan?”

  He was standing very close to her. If she had been just a hair less angry or if he had been standing just another few feet away, she likely wouldn't have done what she did next. Hell, she might not have done it if she had another few moments to think about it.

  Leah wasn't very large, but she made up for it with quickness. As fast as a striking serpent, she lashed out and wrapped her fingers firmly around Zayn's wrist. She kept her right foot planted and she swung her left foot low, crashing into Zayn's knees. Her grip on his wrist prevented him from moving with her kick, and as a result, his legs were neatly swept out from underneath him.

  Zayn made a strangled sound as he hit the ground. A part of her that stood apart from the rest approved of the way he landed. Obviously, he’d had some training when it came to defending himself. He wasn't entirely reliant on Azim and the other men in black. She glanced around them. To her surprise, Azim stood unobtrusively a few hundred yards away. She tensed to be knocked down herself or at least held, but to her surprise, the older man simply grinned, giving her a very American thumbs-up.

  Zayn flowed to his feet, more graceful than a man his size had any right to be. He was a little flushed with surprise, but a great deal of the anger and stress had drained from his face.

  “That's my plan,” she said as evenly as she could. “I keep telling you that I am far from helpless, Zayn. When are you going to believe me?”

  “Not before I've been dumped on my ass apparently,” he said with a wry smile. “Do you truly expect me to stand by while you are threatened, however? No matter how good you are at taking care of yourself?”

  She should have had something tart and cutting to say, but what came out instead surprised her.

  “Why should you care? I'm your lawyer. That doesn't mean I'm under your protection or that I'm... I'm...”

  Someone important to you. The words were right there, but she choked them back. To her relief, Zayn stepped in, and she didn't have to flounder with that particular humiliation.

  “After what we did last night, I cannot think of you just as some hired gun from LA who's helping me. Surely you felt it, too. I know what you felt like when we were together. I remember the look in your eyes and the way you smiled. Perhaps here in the west you are separated from what you want and what you need, but I was raised differently. I know truth and desire and more when I see it.”

  Something in Leah opened to those simple words, as if some starved part of her had been waiting to hear them her entire life. She had yearned to hear words like that, and now they were coming out of the mouth of the least likely, least suitable man in the world.

  “You're mistaken,” she forced herself to say. “Things are very different here. I'm nothing more than your lawyer, the person representing you in this very personal, very important matter. You are important to me, and your case is one that I am not going to lose. However, that is all we are to each other.”

  Zayn's green eyes sharpened. “I think that you're lying to yourself, and even worse, I think that you know it.”

  Leah couldn't take any more. She really couldn't. She lurched backward and when Zayn reached for her again, she tore her arm away from him with a sound that was nearly a snarl.

  “Damn you, can't you see?” she nearly shouted. “I'm not going to be your goddamn concubine!”

  The words made Zayn rear back. She could see the shock and hurt and confusion on his face, but the important thing was that he pulled away from her. She hurriedly got into the car, closing the door behind her and shoving the key into the ignition. She caught a glimpse of Zayn standing beside the car still, and she peeled away from the curb.

  She knew she could close this case. She hadn't lied to him. All she had to do was to keep her heart from doing something stupid. She had to lock it away.

  Leah glanced into the rearview mirror. Zayn was standing right where she had left him, gazing after her car. She shook her head hard.

  She had to stay on top. She couldn't falter.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Things were fairly quiet for a few days. She followe
d up on all of the paperwork that would make sure that Ice Fields couldn't begin doing anything without her hearing about it, and she worked to make sure that she was entirely conversant with the local statutes on libel and defamation.

  Grant had been a lawyer for decades, and his contacts, spread all over the city, were turning up plenty of information for her. Ice Fields had a library of films that were supposedly 'true' but instead went on to defame all of the people involved in the worst possible way. They had been stopped before, but it was only after they had been made to stop.

  On Friday, after spending her time going over volumes of information, she looked up from her work to see Grant in the doorway of her tiny office.

  “All right, you're done,” he said. “I'm taking you out to dinner, because I know for a fact that you've not eaten all day.”

  Leah scowled at him. “Are you seriously telling me that I don't work hard enough? Weren't you the one telling me stories about working twenty hours straight when you were a junior partner?”

  Grant laughed. “Yeah, but at this point, you're playing a waiting game. Ideally, Ice Fields will move on to some other poor asshole who can't afford people like us to make them stop, and your work will be done. I wanted to say nice work, too, when you talked with Scholl. He's an asshole, from what I've been told.”

  Leah shrugged. “Well, he isn't nice, but I don't need him to be. I don't know, Grant, I have all of this to get through...”

  “And it will keep until tomorrow morning or even Monday if it needs to,” he said firmly. “Come on. I'm the senior partner, and what I say goes. Get it together and meet me at Dovo in thirty minutes. That's an order.”

  Leah looked around at her work and sighed. In her heart, she knew he was right. Scholl had been quiet, and given what they knew of Ice Fields, he might have been frightened off simply by having his prey unexpectedly fight back.

  The only issue was that if she relaxed and took the time that she needed to take, she would simply have to sit and deal with Zayn. The sheik had been mostly silent since their charged altercation after her confrontation with Scholl. He had given her the documents that she needed, he had been polite when she called to touch base about the proceedings, and yet...

  There was a charged unease between them. She couldn't tell if she were doing it to herself or whether there was something coming from him as well. It felt as if her life was somehow suspended as she waited for whatever happened next to happen.

  She couldn't disagree with Grant, though. Whatever happened next, it wasn't something that she could control. She was simply terrible at waiting. She looked at the paperwork, shook her head, and walked out, locking her office behind her.

  Dovo wasn't really a place that she would have gone to on her own. It was exclusive, expensive enough that she would have confined herself to drinks and perhaps an appetizer if she were on her own. Instead, she was with Grant, who waved away her attempts to be practical, and insisted on treating her to a full meal.

  Over her excellent lobster, she talked about the case, her impressions of Scholl and the measures she was taking to make sure he was never a problem again.

  Grant listened, chimed in where appropriate, and finally stopped her. “All right, can you hear yourself?”

  “Why, what am I saying?” Leah asked warily. She had been talking for almost twenty-five minutes about the case and what it meant, but she had never forgotten that she was talking to one of the senior partners of her firm. Grant was treating her well, but she had seen him chew out junior partners plenty of times.

  “You've got this,” he said earnestly. “You've got everything in hand, Sheik al-Fasi is as protected as we can make him in this regard.

  “Sheik Zayn,” she said automatically. “The first name goes with the title in Almira, apparently.”

  Grant grinned. “Good. One of the reasons why I thought you'd be a good match for this project is that you're so eager to learn and to meet others. You can bend and move in ways that I and Hiller just can't.”

  Leah smiled wanly. She knew that it was high praise indeed from a notoriously demanding task master, but she couldn't bring herself to feel it.

  Grant, picking up on her mood, nodded. “You're tired. Take the night for yourself. Do something you actually want to do, not something you're afraid of, all right? Dinner's on me.”

  As she walked back to her car after bidding Grant goodnight, she thought about what he meant. He wanted her to act out of desire and not fear, and in many ways, that was a new concept. She had always been the best. She had always been someone who was bent on being at the top. What kept her from failing was a fear of failure.

  She shook her head. What did she even want? The thought of Zayn, his smile, his strength and his scent, drifted through her mind. She realized that she had been preventing herself from thinking about him all week, but it hadn't lessened his pull on her.

  She got in her car, and she was just getting ready to start it when some movement in the parking lot caught her eye.

  There was a young drunk woman dressed in red surrounded by a group of men dressed in black. Leah tensed, wondering if she would have to call the police, but abruptly she recognized the men. It was Zayn and his honor guard, and before she could stop herself, she was out of the car and striding toward the group, her heels making a decisive click on the pavement.

  “What's going on here?” she asked briskly.

  Zayn looked startled to see her, but he also looked relieved. That relief shifted over to warmth a little more readily than Leah was comfortable with, but she made herself focus.

  “I thought we were going to a party,” the girl pouted. “I thought he liked me!”

  “Are you all right?” Leah asked the young woman, never taking her eyes off of Zayn.

  “Yeah, but I thought we were going to a party.”

  “What did she have?” she asked, looking at Zayn. The young woman didn't look as if she were in any shape to be answering questions.

  He shrugged. “She met us in this parking lot as we were going to enter. I cannot tell if she actually knows me or if she simply thinks we would be fine friends.”

  Leah scowled instinctively, but she turned back to the girl.

  “Okay, honey, talk to me, okay? What did you have? Just alcohol, or something else?”

  The young woman rolled her eyes. “Jus' vodka. I'm fine, I wanna have a good time. I want to go to a party...”

  Leah bit her lip. Regardless of what she wanted, the woman was obviously out of her head. She didn't want to put her in a cab with no way to tell if the driver was on the up and up, and she couldn't just leave her here.

  She was getting ready to haul her back to her own car and take her home herself when another two women came up.

  The woman in red perked up, waving. “Hey Shelly! Hi, Amber!”

  One of the women shook her head. “Goddamn it, Brooke, you're a menace. Come on, we should have gone home an hour ago...”

  “You know her?” asked Leah.

  “Yeah, we're her roommates.”

  “Okay, can I see some ID real quick? I don't want to be a hard ass, but she's not doing so hot.”

  Confirming that all three women lived at the same address, Leah gratefully handed Brooke over to her friends. “Keep her out of trouble,” she called, and turned to see Zayn watching her with amusement.

  “You didn't have to do all of that,” he observed.

  Leah smiled a little. “There's a lot of trouble a drunk girl can get into if she's not careful. What would you have done?”

  He shrugged. “Had Azim or one of his men take her home, if she could tell us where it is. Still, thank you. That was something that I was not looking forward to handling.”

  Leah wasn't sure what made her grin at that. “Oh? Beautiful girl in red who wants to go to a party? I thought that might be fun.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I prefer my company able to stand upright, thank you.”

  Leah started to answer, but she realized that
Azim and his men had fallen back. Some were keeping an eye out; others had picked up their phones to play with. She and Zayn were effectively on their own in the parking lot.

  “I also like my company to be small, sweet, utterly ferocious, perfectly passionate, and lovely...”

  Leah felt a hot blush come up to her cheeks. She knew that she should put a stop to this. She should simply respond lightly and brush him off. He was still a client. Even more than that, he was someone who could grow to be a friend. She knew she should brush it off.

  Instead, she sighed, reaching her hand out to him blindly.

  As if they had been together for years, he took her hand in his, bringing it up to his lips. She felt the dry brush of his lips over her knuckles, making her shiver a little in the Los Angeles heat. There was nothing greedy about that exchange. There was no lust, just a beautiful sweetness that made her shiver.

  “What do you want, Leah?” he asked softly. “If you do not tell me, I cannot give it to you. And please believe me when I say that I very, very much want to give it to you...”

  She moaned a little at his soft words. The sound was needy, startling her, but perfectly describing how she felt for him, the strange emotions he woke in her.

  Do what you want, not what you fear.

  Leah took a deep breath, summoning up more courage than she thought she had. She had never been this vulnerable with another person before. She had never felt so open or so full of anticipation.

  “Come home with me,” she whispered. “Be with me tonight.”

  Zayn's eyes darkened, terribly conflicted, but when he reached over to touch the curve of her cheek, that doubt was gone. “I will. Of course I will.”

  He spoke with Azim for a moment, and then he went with her to her car. It reminded her of the first ride they had taken together just a week ago, what they had spoken about and how that day had ended. She drove in silence, but she was aware of his presence by her side as if he were solid granite, an immovable thing that could outlast any silence in the world.