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“My home,” Karim said coldly. “My little piece of Alcantar.”
Ethan began to wail. Karim reached for him. Rachel tried to stop him. Ethan screamed louder.
“Let go of the boy,” Karim said quietly, and, really, what choice was there?
She let go, watched her baby all but disappear in the arms of the only man she’d ever hated more than she’d hated Rami, more than she’d hated the endless chain of men who had tromped through her mother’s life.
The doorman stared at her. Then he held out his hand.
“Miss?”
She slid across the soft leather seat, ignored the extended hand and marched to the lobby door. The doorman rushed by her and managed to open it just as she reached it. She breezed past him, past a high desk with another uniformed
flunky seated behind it.
“Miss,” he said, as politely as if this kind of circus took place here every day.
Karim was waiting for her, standing beside an elevator with Ethan in his arms.
A smiling, gurgling Ethan.
Traitor, Rachel thought, as she stepped inside the elevator car.
Unless she was willing to walk away from her baby—and that would never happen—she was now, to all intents and purposes, the Sheikh’s prisoner.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOMEWHERE around three in the morning, even New York City finally slept.
Not Karim.
He stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows in his darkened bedroom, bare-chested, wearing only gray sweatpants that were a leftover from his days at Yale. Behind him, the rumpled bed offered mute testimony to the hours he’d spent tossing and turning.
Ridiculous.
He should have been exhausted.
He hadn’t slept at all last night, and his day had started with the discovery that his brother had a child. Add in his confrontations with Rachel, the five-hour flight from Nevada to New York, the hours spent in his study, trying to catch up with the messages and emails on his cell phone and his computer …
He’d fallen into bed somewhere after midnight. Sleep should have come quickly.
It hadn’t.
Instead, he’d envisioned Rachel in a guest suite down the corridor. What was she thinking? What was she doing? Had her anger at him eased or was she still breathing fire as she had hours earlier, when she’d found out he wasn’t taking her to a hotel but to his home?
The memory almost made him laugh.
He’d never seen a woman so furious. And she hadn’t been shy about letting him know it.
