Surgeon Sheik's Rescue. Лорет Энн Уайт

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СКАЧАТЬ up the oil heater, she powered her laptop, connected her camera and began to download the photos she’d taken. Edgy with adrenaline, she paced her small room as she waited for the high-resolution images to load. The wind grew stronger outside, rattling at her windows, seeking its way in through ancient cracks. Rain began to tick against the panes.

      Bella drew her sweater closer, rubbing her arms as she willed the heater to warm faster. Before her termination with the Washington Daily, the two key stories she’d been following were Senator Sam Etherington’s bid for his party nomination for president, and the terrorist bombing of the Al Arif royal jet at JFK.

      Etherington had since won his party’s endorsement and was now considered to be a shoo-in for president, unless he badly misstepped between now and November. The Al Arif bombing story Bella had scored by default.

      She’d been with her then-boyfriend, Derek, on a separate assignment at JFK when the blast occurred. They’d seized the moment, covering the event from an eyewitness perspective, and the Daily had let Bella run with the story as it continued to unfold over the following days, weeks, months.

      She’d done good work—demonstrating a talent not only for political reporting but showing her capability as a passionate features writer, digging deep into the characters and issues behind the tragedy.

      Derek in turn had shot what was now an iconic image of the injured and bloodied Dr. Tariq Al Arif racing from the burning jet with his fiancée, Julie Belard, hanging limp in his arms.

      Seconds after Derek had taken that famous photo, the prince had dropped to his knees and tried to resuscitate Julie, but a second blast caused by escaping jet fuel had sent chunks of shrapnel flying into the back of his head and left side of his body, severely wounding and concussing him. In the ambulance the sheik lapsed into coma. Days later he was flown home by his family where he was cared for in a private clinic. Seven weeks after the bombing, the palace press office put out a terse statement announcing Dr. Al Arif’s death.

      There were still no arrests, and there’d been no public memorial service—only a small private affair in Al Na’Jar attended by Tariq’s immediate family. None of Julie Belard’s family attended, which Bella had found strange.

      The story seemed to end there, as had her job with the Daily.

      But Bella had trouble letting go of both her job and the prince.

      During the months of covering his story, she’d become obsessed with Tariq—the aggressively good-looking surgeon prince with a brilliant mind was also an accomplished cellist and fierce polo player. Horsemanship, she’d learned, was a talent Tariq had acquired as a young boy in his desert kingdom under the tutelage of his father. Music was a gift he’d inherited from his mother’s side. But he’d also been a healer at heart, and this passion had led him into neurosurgery, and to the United States.

      Bella had come to see Tariq as a man with one foot in an ancient and exotic past, the other firmly planted in a new world, and when she’d heard of his “death,” something inside her had grieved.

      Many a lonely night she’d spent staring at the photo of Tariq fleeing that jet, thinking of the anguish in his features, the desperate passion with which he’d tried to revive his fiancée. She realized, on some level, she’d fallen in love with the idea of the prince. This was why she was so unwilling to let go of him, or his story. It also felt unfinished.

      And so it had started.

      Desperate for a way to keep her hand in the political news scene, to finish what she’d started, Bella had taken a hotel housekeeping job and gone over to the “dark side” to join Watchdog. The site was run by Hurley Barnes, an old friend of Bella’s from her college days, along with his techie girlfriend, Agnes, and their ex-CIA hacker buddy, Scoob.

      It was ironically fitting, she supposed, for Bella DiCaprio, an orphan—a reject who’d been abandoned as a two-day-old baby in a bassinet at a Chicago hospital facility for unwed mothers—to go live along the cyber fringes of society, writing with a bunch of wack-job-genius nerds, always struggling to be accepted by the mainstream but never quite managing to hang in, or pull it off.

      Still, it grated—it went against everything she’d fought for her whole life—to be accepted. And her goal remained to get back, get even, prove that Bella DiCaprio was not done.

      Not without a fight.

      Bella’s first order of blogging business for Watchdog had been to phone Julie Belard’s father—Pierre Belard—France’s ex-ambassador to the U.S. She’d wanted to interview him about the death of his daughter and her fiancé. The ambassador had explained that Tariq’s funeral had been kept small for security reasons, and the Belards had understood the Al Arifs’ need for privacy at this time. This was why they’d not attended.

      When she asked the ambassador more about Julie as a person, he told Bella his daughter used to love to holiday with the extended Belard family on Ile-en-Mer off the Brittany coast, and as a child she’d been fascinated by stories of the ghost in the abbey on the far side of the island. He’d also said that for the past three years Julie had returned to Ile-en-Mer with Tariq to attend the opera festival held each summer on the island, and that the couple had gotten engaged there.

      Bella had done more digging and discovered that a large financial donation had been made to the Ile-en-Mer opera fund in Julie’s memory. After deeper cyber investigation with the help of her techie friend Scoob, Bella learned the donation had been made by a shell company owned by the Al Arif Corporation—the same company that had quietly purchased the Abbaye Mont Noir itself two years ago. Bella found it strange the donation had been made only in Julie’s name.

      Then, when she’d called an island travel agent inquiring about the Abbaye Mont Noir and its ghost, the agent told her the new owner himself had recently moved in, and the abbey grounds had been closed off to the public. On probing further, Bella was told the owner was a mysterious and reclusive foreigner who’d been badly scarred down his left side. She’d become convinced it was Tariq living in that abbey, that the palace had lied about his death.

      Her laptop beeped suddenly, jolting her back to the present—her download was complete.

      Reseating herself at her computer, she hurriedly scanned the thumbnails for the shot where “Tahar” had turned his face to her. She clicked on it.

      His mist-framed features mushroomed onto her screen, and Bella’s heart started to pound. The intensity in his damaged features—the anguish, the pain, the rage—she’d captured it all in this haunting, ghostly image. And with his hood back off his head, his hair wet, she’d caught him somehow naked, stripped in the face of the elements. As raw and vulnerable as he once was powerful.

      A strange energy curled through Bella.

      She touched the screen with her fingertips, traced the lines of his face.

      Why are you hiding?

      What would it mean to you to be exposed?

      She knew what it would mean to her.

      It would be her way back into a real job, especially if she found out how this story linked to an anonymous tip she’d received alleging that Senator Sam Etherington had been behind an attempt to assassinate Tariq’s youngest brother, Omair, in Algiers last summer.

      The tip had been sent to Bella’s Watchdog account after the Maghreb Moors—or MagMo—a terrorist group led by a mysterious СКАЧАТЬ