Challenging The Doctor Sheikh. Amalie Berlin

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СКАЧАТЬ I?” The shock in his voice couldn’t be anything but an act, but it still made her smile. “I’ll have to do something about that, then. You can get to know me over dinner, and tomorrow you won’t have that argument. And then you can tell me why you want to wear the scarf when you’re at home.”

      With their rocky start, she’d assumed that same general tension would permeate all their interactions, but his mood had drastically improved today. He might even be flirting with her—how weird would that be?

      “Call me Dakan because we’re friends now, at least in private. Right?”

      Setting the colorful silk and clips on the side table, she smoothed her hands over her hair to make sure it wasn’t sticking up absurdly.

      He smiled then, flashing that dastardly little dimple pitting his left cheek—undoubtedly designed to make her heart stutter.

      Good grief, the man was still beautiful, and she’d spent a large part of the last two days trying to convince herself she’d just been fooled by her memory—it was pretty much all she’d been able to talk to herself about. And she’d been terribly convincing. Up to ten minutes ago she’d have sworn he’d only been that handsome in hindsight, and maybe through some kind of Cinderella story memory filter. But here he was, in the flesh, making her insides quiver...

      And judging by the twinkle in his eye as he smiled, he was used to knocking women’s feet out from under them.

      Well, her feet could just get back under her, charming, beautiful man or not. Her goals still mattered, and one of them was not to go to a foreign country and have an ill-advised romance. Those always ended badly, or, if she listened to Mum, sometimes worse than that.

      He summoned Tahira, ordered dinner to be prepared, and then turned back to her drawings.

      For the next hour they went over the different layouts she’d come up with—high-rises versus sprawling facilities with clusters of smaller buildings and parking structures. And finally settled on a layout that combined the best of both.

      “Did you bring the examples you talked about?” she asked, after shuffling off the printouts that had been rejected and leaving his choices on the drafting table. “I’d like to look at them and get started.”

      “After dinner.”

      “Or during. We could have a working dinner, look at what you’ve brought.” She looked around him, expecting to see a bundle of prints somewhere. “Where are they?”

      Dakan fished a DVD out of his jacket pocket, bumped the button on her laptop and loaded it into the tray. “I don’t want a working dinner. But I’ll set this up...” His words dried up as he caught sight of the framed photo beside her computer.

      Attractive couple. Fair, freckled woman with red hair. Man with dark hair and tanned skin.

      He picked it up to examine the photo more closely, and found himself looking at the frame, which was constructed of tiny gray bricks and mortar.

      It was very well made, and obviously done by hand—there were just enough irregularities in the bricks to see small fingers had formed and smoothed them. The architect had spent hours constructing it to fit the photo—the one personal item on her desk.

      “Are these your parents?” he asked, looking back at her as he did so.

      There was wariness in her gaze again, like that he’d seen in her the other day when they’d spoken of her father.

      The father she’d claimed to not know.

      “I thought you didn’t know who your father was?”

      “I don’t. Not his name or where he’s from—aside from a Middle Eastern country. All I have is this one picture.”

      She carefully extracted the photo from his hand as if he might break it. Or like she’d saved that photo from being destroyed in the past...and now protected it with tiny bricks she’d made herself.

      “He looks...” Familiar.

      Familiar but grainy—the photo was old enough that he couldn’t be certain.

      How likely was it for him to know her father anyway? Millions of people lived in “a Middle Eastern country...”

       CHAPTER THREE

      “HAPPY,” DAKAN SAID INSTEAD. “They both look happy. I’m guessing things went downhill after that picture if your mother isn’t giving you other information.”

      “That’s my guess as well.”

      His Big Emotion warning system started to become more insistent. She wouldn’t carry around her unidentified father’s picture for no reason, but continuing to poke at this situation—when he already knew nothing he could say would make it better for her—was a bad idea.

      But the familiarity of the man bugged him.

      “Do you know where that was taken?”

      “No. She never told me what country she was in. I assume it was his country, but I really don’t know. Maybe he was living abroad.”

      “So she came here somewhere, had a fling, got pregnant, and went home?”

      “I guess.”

      She grew stiffer the longer they spoke about it, no trace evident of the smile she’d returned earlier when he’d found himself flirting. Instead, her shoulders stretched this way and that as she spoke, trying to dispel tension.

      “I’d like to tell you more, but I really don’t know anything.” She placed the photo back on the desk, though a little further back this time. “I used to ask her all the time, but she’d never answer. And she always shut down any attempts I made to learn about that aspect of my heritage when I was growing up. Burned a book or two, even! One was from the library...”

      The housekeeper informed them dinner was ready, and Nira gestured to the guest bathroom. “Would you like to meet in the dining room?” She darted off like someone wanting to escape.

      He really shouldn’t pry into her background. He liked people. He was good with people. But big, sticky emotions weren’t really his thing. Definitely Zahir’s territory. He’d know what to say to her to make her feel better—good leaders were like that—but he just didn’t.

      There was one thing he could do very well, which he was pretty sure would make her feel better. Kissing her had been in his mind since he’d dragged her out of the market and marched her back home. Which was weird, and probably some kind of side-effect of being stuck where he usually avoided showing interest in women out of fear his father would start beating the marriage drum again. She might be British, but she looked like those princesses he and Zahir had been threatened with for years. So, exactly opposite from his type.

      Dakan went for pretty much anything he could only really get abroad—blond or red hair, pale skin, pale eyes...

      She had the eyes. Green and gorgeous, they stood out—not that she wouldn’t have otherwise. One thing the scarf always did wonderfully was focus СКАЧАТЬ