Guarding the Princess Read Online Free Page B

in what had just happened at the lodge.
    “They died because they were there with you—those men mean business. Come, we need to move. Now.”
    “Clean water,” she whispered. “Those people need water. This mining-rights deal was our way in to get it to them. It was the one thing—the last thing I could give them. My last mission.”
    “Hey, look at me.” He tilted her face up, forcing her to look at him. His eyes were ghostly in the darkness.
    “Get up onto those pretty, long legs of yours, and you’ll live to fight another day, because there will be another day, another deal.”
    She wanted to say there wouldn’t. She’d be getting married. This had been her very last fight. Her swan song. And she’d lost. She’d lost it all.
    “My Cessna is down there, see?”
    She looked where he was pointing. Over the grassland in faint moonlight the fuselage of a small single-prop plane glinted. Then a cloud passed over the moon and darkness was complete—the plane seemed to vanish as she felt the hot breeze stiffen. Carefully she got to her knees, and then to her feet. He steadied her by the elbow as wooziness and nausea swept through her again.
    “You ready?” he said.
    Dalilah nodded. He regarded her for a moment, then said, “Stay right behind me, okay—that’s an order.” He clicked on a flashlight and started to walk.
    She stumbled after him in the darkness, her brain reeling as she tried to process it all. For two full years she’d naively believed that peace had finally come to the Al Arif family and their desert kingdom of Al Na’Jar.
    Now this.
    The thought that her brothers had purposely misled her infuriated Dalilah beyond words. It had been like this all her life—the older alpha males in her family always trying to coddle and protect her, supposedly for her own good. Did they give her absolutely no credit? Did they not understand she could take measures to protect herself? That she held the same fierce allegiance to country as they did—and that she was marrying Haroun because of it?
    Now Amal was after her blood and they’d dispatched this brusque brute of a male to “save” her.
    “Hurry up!” he yelled over his shoulder as she began to lag behind.
    She muttered a curse in Arabic, slowing even further in softer sand.
    He stopped, spun round. “Jesus, Princess, do you want me to carry you, or what?” Frustration cut through his voice.
    Refusing to dignify him with an answer, she stopped, bracing her hands on her hips as she tried to catch her breath.
    “Okay, this is it.” He reached forward to grab her arm, but she jerked free of his grip, standing her ground. “You’re a patronizing misogynist, you know that?” she snapped. “Call me Princess one more time and I’ll take my chances with Amal and his men! Screw you and my brothers!”
    She caught what looked like the glint of a smile crossing his face.
    Her anger spiked. “They had no right to keep this from me!”
    “Yeah, but they’re also paying my bills—and my job is to get you home alive.”
    “I swear it, if you call me Princess one more time, you’ll be sorry.”
    Brandt grabbed her hand. “Believe me, you’ll be more sorry if you stand here worrying about my manners.”
    He began to drag her at a clip through the long grass toward his plane. But as they neared, Brandt felt a sudden prickling down the back of his neck. He stilled, stopping her. Something was off. Then as he squinted into the darkness, the sliver of moon broke momentarily through the clouds and he saw what his subconscious had already noticed—the propeller was gone. A cold dread sank through his chest.
    Thunder growled softly over the plain, and a fork of lightning stabbed with a loud crack down to the earth, briefly and starkly illuminating the plane. Static raised the hair along his forearms.
    “Get down to the ground,” he said quietly to Dalilah, eyes fixed on his plane as he doused his flashlight.
    “Why?”
    “Because you’re a lightning