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He wouldn’t answer his cell phone—his fiancée Marty was running interference—but still, her brother wasn’t talking to her. Marty assured her daily that she would get to tear a strip off his hide in person, and each day, he was a no-show.
“Relax for a while, Paige…”
“Khalid will call soon…”
“You’ll have explanations when Khalid arrives…” Even her parents refused to tell her what she needed to know, what she demanded each time they called to see how she was doing.
She was fed up with it. She was twenty-five years old; she wasn’t a teenager. She was Khalid’s sister, not some damned prisoner he could control. She was easy to work with, and she considered herself a very understanding person. But her patience had begun wearing thin a week ago.
Belting the robe furiously as she turned on her heel, Paige stalked across the bedroom and eased open the door before stepping into the hall. Moving to the stairs she stopped and waited, listening carefully.
She wasn’t about to let him think that she was still awake and waiting on him. He’d been slipping into the house after he was certain she was asleep, doing whatever he did, then slipping back out before she awoke.
The damned coward.
Abdul, or Abbie as she called him, his Saudi manservant, was always abjectly apologetic that he hadn’t awakened her before Khalid left, as she had asked him to do. He had a million excuses, but she knew the truth. Khalid was his boss, and Khalid wasn’t about to face her until she simply left him no choice.
They were working together—Abbie, Marty, Khalid’s security team, and even Khalid himself—to keep her in place and completely in the dark as to why she was suddenly being held in what her brother called “protective custody. ” Even the U. S. marshal service wasn’t this damned diligent.
Even her parents were refusing to help her. Her mother’s fear for her only daughter, her “baby” as she called her, had Marilyn Galbraithe going along with whatever her son had cooked up this time.
And that son hadn’t even given his sister the courtesy of facing her and giving her a clue as to how long this would last, if there was an end in sight, or the details involving the danger she was facing.
She had a good idea. After all, she was well aware of the fact that his brother, Ayid, had finally played his final hand and attempted to murder Khalid and his fiancée, Marty, less than a month before. Just as Ayid’s twin, Aman, had gone after Abram in D. C. as he waited in a hotel to meet with FBI Director Zack Jennings and the Homeland Security Director to declare his U. S. citizenship based on his mother’s status as an American citizen.
Instead, Khalid had killed Ayid, and Abram had killed his youngest brother, Aman. Though, to keep Abram’s defection to the U. S. a secret, Khalid had taken the blame for both deaths.
She suspected this was why she was placed in isolation in the monstrous mansion her brother now owned. The mansion that shadather, Azir Mustafa, had bought for him.
She wanted to hear it from him, though. She wanted to know exactly why Azir Mustafa thought threatening her was going to gain him anything. And she wanted to know why the hell Khalid thought that destroying the life she was building for herself was going to help.
She’d been all but imprisoned by her overprotective parents for far too many years. Her mother had been so terrified Paige would be kidnapped or taken, that she would disappear as had once happened to her, that she had kept Paige always in sight.
Bodyguards. Security-enhanced private schools. Private tutors. She’d been so overprotected she had nearly smothered to death.
Escaping had taken every ounce of strength she had, because she loved her parents. Because even in their attempts to ensure her safety, she had always been aware of their love for her. Jus
t as she had been of the nightmares they suffered from a past haunted by the horror of her mother’s kidnapping, forced marriage and rapes at the hands of a monster. That monster had been the father of her half-brother’s and the father of the man she couldn’t push out of her mind or her fantasies.
“Stay away from me. ” His eyes blazing with black fury and none of the sexual satisfaction he should have felt after spilling himself only moments before into the lover he had shared with his cousin, Tariq. Only moments before he came to her. “For both our sakes, Paige, stay the fuck away from me!”
That had been eight years ago. Eight years since he had buried his lips and tongue between her thighs and threw her into an ecstasy she still hadn’t felt again. Not before and not since. Eight years since he had fucked her with his tongue yet, he had never even kissed her.
In those years she had taken a lover, she had finished college, and she had begun a career that she enjoyed. But still, there was a regret that lay inside her like a weight. The regret that came with so many “what might have been’s. ”
Moving from her room to the stairs, she waited. Standing back from the steps just far enough that he couldn’t see her, Paige peeked into the shadows below as he moved to the second floor, turned, and a few seconds later, she heard the door to his suite close.
Her lips tightened into a hard smile.
Ten days. It was ten days too long and she was damned tired of waiting, of being patient and fighting to understand why her parents and her brother had to live in fear of the day that Azir Mustafa or one of his family members would come after her.
Moving quietly, swiftly, she made her way to the second floor and the door of the master suite.
No lights shone from beneath the door, but that didn’t mean anything. She’d seen Khalid move in the dark as though he were born to itt>
His brother, Abram navigated it as though he owned it though.
She shook that thought away. She was not going to think about Abram tonight. She was not going to allow the rest of her night to be as restless as her days had been with the fantasies and the memory of those stolen moments in her bedroom all those years ago.
