Читать книгу Seized By The Sheik - Ann Voss Peterson - Страница 12

Efraim didn’t want to believe Callie’s words, but some how he knew they were true. He stumbled forward, reaching the horse’s side.

“His pulse, I checked. The first time, it felt weak. But this last time…I couldn’t find it at all.”

Fahad was slumped to the side, Callie gripping the fork of the saddle, stretching her arm like a gate to keep him from falling off. Efraim had to wonder how long she’d been riding like that.

“Do you want to check? I mean, to make sure?”

He glanced around. Sagebrush dotted the ground around them, darker hulks in a dark world. The gunman could be anywhere. Twenty feet away, and they might not be able to see him. “We need to get out of here. Can you hold Fahad upright a little longer?”

“I think so.”

He had a feeling she would, no matter how numb her arm became, no matter how slick the saddle leather felt under her fingers. He had to hurry.

Again he scanned the darkness. The fight had thrown off his sense of direction. With the clouds low and no sign of the sun’s glow behind the mountains, he couldn’t get his bearings. “Which way?”

“To your right.”

He turned the way she’d suggested.

“See the big sage and Russian olive? That’s the creek that runs through my family’s ranch. We can follow it right to the Seven M.”

He took the palomino mare’s reins and started leading her toward the larger shadows. He pulled in short breaths, pain shooting through his side. He struggled to listen, to hear the rustle of human boots moving through the sparse vegetation. But the only sounds that reached him were the four-beat rhythm of the horse’s walk and the faint creak of the broken-in saddle. After a while, he added the gurgle of the creek to his list. In the distance, a dog barked.

“You hear that?” Callie asked. “The dog. That’s my dad’s border collie.”

So they were getting close. Not that it mattered for Fahad. But at least Callie would be safe.

Fahad. Dead.

He still couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept it. “Try to find his pulse again.”

Callie shifted in the saddle and the horse stopped. She brought her hand to Fahad’s neck. Seconds passed. She met Efraim’s gaze and shook her head. “You check.”

He reached up. Callie took his hand and guided it to Fahad’s throat. As soon as Efraim touched his skin, he knew. It felt cool, much cooler than it should. He didn’t have to search for a pulse, but he did anyway.

A weight bore down on his chest. His throat thickened as if filled with sand. He’d thought the pain of a broken rib was bad. This was much worse. He tried to swallow, to take a breath, but he couldn’t.

Fahad had told him leaving the ranch was dangerous. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t cared about the danger to himself. It had never occurred to him the danger would be to Fahad. And now to Callie McGuire, as well.

Efraim wasn’t a devout Muslim, but he wished he were more devout now. Maybe then he’d know what prayers to offer for his cousin’s soul. Maybe then he could breathe. Maybe then he’d know how to feel.

He looked up at Callie, bravely holding on, cradling Fahad’s body, even though she had known for quite some time that he was dead. She’d done it for him, Efraim knew. To give them time to get closer to the ranch and away from the gunman. But even more, to give him time to accept that his cousin was, indeed, gone. “Release your grip.”

Even in the dark, he could sense her searching his eyes. “Are you sure?” she asked.

He nodded. “You’ve done enough. I will take him.”

She let go. Fahad slumped to the side and into Efraim’s arms. He held his cousin’s body while Callie slid to the ground, shaking the blood back into her arm. He was heavy, but Efraim could only half feel the weight. The knowledge that he wouldn’t have died if not for Efraim’s actions weighed far heavier.

His legs faltered.

Suddenly Callie was beside him, her hand on his arm, her voice in his ear. “Put him down.”

Efraim staggered. He dropped to one knee. The darkness around him blurred. The pain in his side grew and spread until it swallowed all of him. He lay Fahad on the ground and let a shudder take him. Another followed and another. “It’s my fault,” he managed to choke out.

“No.” Callie brought her hand to his cheek. She wiped his face, then turned him to face her.

He knew she wanted to say something, but he didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to feel. At least not what he was feeling now.

She looked so soft, so beautiful, so caring. Even in the darkness, her eyes sparkled like the clearest water. Her hair draped over her shoulders like a veil.

He pulled her to him, cupped his hand around the nape of her neck, brought his lips to hers. She tasted sweet, yet salty, her tears mixing with his own. Tears shed for him, he knew. And for Fahad, whom she’d hardly even met.

He knew he shouldn’t be kissing her. And yet he needed this. At this moment, he felt like he couldn’t do without it.

She was something, this woman. Strong and determined, yet with a tender heart. What he wouldn’t give to stay in her arms, to make her his. To wake every day to a woman like this. To let her be his reason for living.

An impossible dream.

Efraim ended the kiss and looked down. He knew he should feel ashamed. How could he kiss a woman over his cousin’s dead body? How could he claim warm feelings for himself when his actions had sentenced Fahad to his death? Yet although he accepted the blame for Fahad following him to the badlands, he couldn’t manage to regret kissing Callie. That he kept for himself.

She took his hands in hers. “Don’t blame yourself.”

He looked up at the sound of her voice and found her watching him. It was all he could do to keep from kissing her again. “How can I not?”

“It was his job to protect you.”

“And I made him follow me because I refused to listen. I never thought, never considered I was risking others’ lives, not just my own.”

“You had your reasons for riding to Rattlesnake Badlands. Reasons that weren’t selfish. And Fahad did his job. He tried to make sure you were safe. The man who shot him, he deserves the blame.”

He nodded and gave her fingers a squeeze. Fahad had fulfilled his responsibility to Efraim. It was now Efraim’s turn. “You are right.”

“We’ll tie him on Sasha. We’ll take him to my family’s ranch and call the sheriff. He will find whoever did this and make him pay.”

“No.”

She lowered her brows and tilted her head, as if she wasn’t following.

“Fahad is my family, my blood, not the sheriff’s.”

She frowned, a crease digging between her eyebrows. “You have to leave this to the law, Efraim.”

He let out a derisive laugh he could feel shoot down his side. “The law can’t avenge Fahad. I can.”

“That’s not the way things work here.”

“As far as I can see, things don’t work here very well. Otherwise Amir would not be gone. Stefan would not have been attacked. Fahad would not be dead.”

“You’re upset. You just lost your cousin. It’s understandable. But we are a nation of laws and the law works. It does.” She nodded as if she could will him to agree. “Sheriff Wolf is a good man, an honest man. He’ll give Fahad justice.”

He wasn’t upset. He wasn’t angry. He merely felt cold. Resolute. He looked away from her, not wanting to see what was in her eyes, not wanting to have his resolve shaken. It would be so easy to be tempted to selfishly forget Fahad, forget what he owed his security man, his cousin, his blood, and instead lose himself in the woman in front of him.

The spark of a light caught his eye.

He climbed to his feet, Callie rising beside him. The light moved in their direction. In the stillness, he could hear horses’ hooves clatter across rocky terrain, buckles jingling, leather creaking. “Give me the Glock.” He held out his hand.

“It’s my family. They’re looking for me.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

He wasn’t sure he was prepared to trust she was right. “Give it to me anyway.”

Her eyebrows dipped low. She shook her head.

He wasn’t sure if she thought he was going to take his measure of justice from her family or what. After all he’d said, he guessed he couldn’t blame her. “They’ll help?”

“Of course they’ll help. We’ll go to the ranch. We can call the sheriff from there.”

He still wasn’t convinced he trusted her plan, but he probably didn’t need to point that out to Callie again. “Fine.”

The sounds drew closer. The light wound along the creek toward them. It focused upward, pinning them in its beam. Efraim couldn’t see a thing except blinding white light. Hoofbeats spread in a circle around them.

Efraim squinted against the glare. Blue splotches bloomed wherever he looked, like twenty spotlights bearing down. One man held the light. The others were merely dark. Efraim focused on the ground, trying to see the men around him in his peripheral vision. There were three, no, four mounted men. He glanced at Callie.

“Put your hands up where I can see them.” The voice boomed from behind the spotlight, the accent no-nonsense Wyoming rancher.

Efraim raised his hands.

“Now on your knees.”

Efraim shook his head. Had Callie been wrong? Was this her family, or some kind of vigilante mob like the one Stefan said had been protesting in Dumont? “I’m Efraim Aziz. I—”

Rounds slid into rifle chambers. “I said on your knees.”

CALLIE COULDN’T believe it. She glanced around the circle of shadows on horseback. Never in a million years would she imagine her family drawing down on her. She’d told Efraim all these pie-in-the-sky things about justice in America, and here her own family seemed to be taking the law into their own hands. She wanted to hang her head in shame. “Daddy, put the gun down. Brent? Russ? Timmy?” she said, taking a guess at which brothers had accompanied her father.

“Move behind us, Callie.”

“Behind you?” Now she was getting angry. “What are you? Thick? Efraim and I, we’re together.”

One of her brothers sputtered out a cough.

“Callie, you don’t understand what’s going on here,” her father said in a gruff voice. “Move behind your brothers.”

Callie didn’t move from Efraim’s side. “I understand perfectly what’s going on. My family is causing an international incident. That’s what’s going on.”

The light her father was shining on Efraim flicked down to the ground, highlighting Fahad’s still body. “Who is that man?”

“Fahad Bahir,” Efraim said. “My head security man. My cousin.”

“He dead?”

“Shot,” Efraim said. “Murdered.”

Callie’s stomach tightened at the dark tone in his voice. His words about vengeance scuttled through the back of her mind. Between Efraim’s anger and her family’s obvious defensiveness, this situation could get bad fast. She couldn’t let things spin out of control. “He was wounded. We were trying to get him back to the ranch, but he died on the way. We have to call the sheriff.”

“How’d he get shot?”

“A sniper in Rattlesnake Badlands.”

“The question is, why did he get shot? What was he doing?” Brent’s voice.

Already tight, Callie’s stomach dropped. Her oldest brother had done four tours in Afghanistan until a head injury ended his military career. Since then he’d had a hard time of it. Seizures. Paranoia. Trying to get used to returning to life on the ranch, a life he hadn’t much cared for.

Callie felt bad for him. She would feel worse, except that every horror he’d seen and every hardship he lived through, he blamed squarely on any person of Middle Eastern descent who crossed his path. Luckily in Wyoming, there weren’t a lot of people on which to focus his anger over what had happened to him.

Until now.

“Mr. Bahir was protecting Sheik Efraim.”

“Protecting him from what?”

Efraim had to hear the sneer in her brother’s voice. Callie just prayed he didn’t lash back.

“There are people who want me and my people dead.” Efraim’s voice was steady.

Callie gave him a grateful look she hoped he could read despite the glaring light.

“I’ll bet there are lots of people who want you and yours dead. And I’ll bet you’ve done a few things to them to cause it.”

Callie swung a much less charitable glare on her brother. “Brent, stop it.”

“One of these people shot Fahad. He followed us from the badlands and attacked me.”

“And what were you doing wandering around those badlands?”

“Searching for a friend.”

“On foot? How did you get out there?”

“My horse ran. He was afraid of gunfire.”

“That horse—” Joe’s voice. At least one of her sane brothers was on this trip. A schoolteacher, husband and new father, Joe helped out on the ranch in the summer and some weekends. Apparently he’d stopped by today after Callie had ridden out.

“We need to get to the ranch, Dad,” Callie repeated, feeling a bit bolstered by Joe’s presence and Efraim’s continued calm. “We need to call the sheriff.”

“How do we know he isn’t going to try to pull something?” Russ’s voice. Second to youngest in age, Russ idolized Brent, even planning to go into military service himself after he got his degree and could enter as an officer. His plans had changed after Brent’s injury.

Unlike his big brother, Russ had always taken to ranch work. Callie’s father called Russ his natural cowboy. Unfortunately his unshakable hero worship of Brent caused him to absorb everything his oldest brother said like a sponge. He tended to follow Brent’s lead in all things, unless Callie could get to him first.

Unfortunately her job had her traveling all over the world, and she hadn’t been able to spend much time on the ranch the last couple of years. She had the feeling that this time she might be too late to influence Russ. “He’s with me, Russ.”

“That better not mean what I think it means,” Brent grumbled.

Callie’s cheeks heated as the sensations of her kiss with Efraim flitted through the back of her mind.

“Callie is working with me through her office.”

Efraim again. He’d just lost his cousin, one of the closest men in his administration, not to mention his friend going missing, and yet he was steadier and calmer than the men in her family. Men who before this, she would have sworn were steady and calm.

“Her office, yeah. Foreign Affairs,” Russ drawled out, putting emphasis on the word affairs.

“Grow up, Russell,” she snapped. For a boy almost out of college, he was more immature than their high school–aged youngest brother.

“What do you mean, grow up? I’m not the one messing around with a damn Arab. Hell, he’s probably a terrorist.”

She blew a frustrated stream of air through tight lips and focused on her father. She wished she could peer past the light and see his eyes. Better yet, she wished her father would stop shining the damn thing on Efraim like he was a subject in some kind of interrogation. “Efraim is one of the good guys. The leader of a country.”

“A country that is an enemy of the United States?”

Brent again. It seemed like she’d spent most of her life smoothing things over between her big brother and the rest of the world. Callie wanted to belt him. “Efraim is not an enemy. He’s not a terrorist. Get it? He’s the leader of a country named Nadar, and he’s here to negotiate a contract brokered by the United States.” Her voice shook with the effort to keep it even when she really wanted to scream.

They answered her with silence. The spotlight still glared in Efraim’s eyes.

“Please, Daddy. Why would I tell you something that’s not true?”

Her father didn’t answer, but Russ did. “Because you’re hot for him. Don’t lie, sis. You’re pretty obvious.”

She closed her eyes. Of course, Russ was closer than she wanted to admit. At least she should be grateful the spotlight’s beam prevented Efraim from seeing her blush.

“Admit it,” Russ continued, clearly encouraged by hitting on the truth. “You’re covering for him.”

“I don’t need to cover for him. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Her father flashed the light back down to the ground for a second. “Someone killed this man.”

“Fahad is my blood. My head security man. I didn’t kill him.”

“The person who did tried to kill Efraim, too,” Callie added quickly. “That someone is still out there. We need to get to the ranch. We need to make sure Efraim’s safe.”

“I’m more concerned about you.”

Of course he was. He was her dad after all. And maybe she could use that fact to break this stalemate. “Then get me to the ranch. And call the sheriff.”

“You,” he said, bobbing the light to indicate Efraim. “Pick up that body. Throw him on the horse we caught.”

“The horse you caught?” Callie hadn’t noticed the horse behind Russ, but as her brother led it into the spotlight, she recognized Efraim’s gelding.

“You found him.”

“Him?” Russ tilted his head.

“The horse. It’s Efraim’s.” She’d told Efraim the horse would find his way to safety. She was relieved to be proven right.

Efraim lifted Fahad. Joe dismounted and helped Efraim slump the dead man over the saddle. Using his lariat, Joe tied him securely.

“Good to go,” Brent said to his father, and Joe swung back on his horse.

“You,” her father barked, obviously meaning Efraim. “Walk ahead. And remember we got rifles pointed at your back.”

“Daddy—”

He held up a hand, blocking her complaint. “I’m doing the rest of what you asked, Callie. I trust you, honey, but that doesn’t mean I trust this boy.”

Efraim glanced back at her. “It’s all right.”

It wasn’t all right. Her family was behaving horribly. She’d told him they would help, and technically, she supposed, they were. But she didn’t know if Efraim would see it that way. She felt she needed to apologize.

She just hoped that after all this, he’d give her the chance.

Her father nodded, as if it was settled, and motioned to Brent and Joe. “The two of you keep looking. Russ and I will see Callie and the sheik here back to the ranch.”

“Looking?” A frisson of fear fanned over Callie’s skin. The thought of her brothers out on the dark BLM searching for a murderer scared the breath out of her. “Don’t be ridiculous. We need to call the sheriff. He can look for the man who shot Fahad. It’s his job. Not yours.”

“We’re not looking for some terrorist killer,” Brent said. “We’re looking for Timmy’s ATV.”

“Timmy’s ATV?” Callie had been so wrapped up in defending Efraim, she hadn’t thought there might be a reason her fourth brother, the youngest in the family at only seventeen, wasn’t riding with them. “Why? What happened? Where’s Timmy?”

“Timmy’s home. He crashed his ATV.”

“Is he okay?” The thought of her baby brother hurt… She wanted to race Sasha home as fast as she could.

“He’s banged up. A little worse for wear,” Joe said. “But you know Timmy. He’ll be okay.”

“What happened to his ATV?”

“He flipped the damn thing.” Her dad lowered the light enough for her to see him shaking his head. Then he brought the beam back to Efraim’s face. “Wasn’t Tim’s fault, though. He said someone shot out a tire.”