The Sheik's Mysterious Mistress Page 0,35

roasted nuts topped with goat cheese and a zesty dressing, stuffed chicken breasts, a spicy jambalaya with shrimp and sausage and a pasta dish with a vodka cream sauce. All the food was stored in plastic containers and she knew she should eat some of it, but her stomach simply wouldn’t let her. The fact that her throat was swollen with unshed tears didn’t help either.

For the first time in her life, cooking hadn’t soothed her mind and calmed her body. She was still so angry and hurt with Hassan that she wanted to punch him. But that would require touching him and she had to avoid that. Touching, in any way, would lead to things better left to her imagination.

She fell asleep that night, fighting back tears for a man she refused to cry over. He wasn’t worth it if he was going to treat her like this. She deserved so much better but she wasn’t going to find it if she didn’t hurry up and figure out who was trying to kill her and mitigate that problem. If she weren’t so exhausted, she would head right back to her office and do some searches to find her next location. But she could barely keep her eyes open so she let sleep take her away and hopefully soothe her the way her cooking hadn’t accomplished.

Chapter 6

The following day, Dana watched with relief as Hassan walked down the hallway to his next meeting. It would give her at least an hour away from him and she needed the break. She hadn’t slept well last night and had been up early trying to catch up on all of the work he’d left for her. He might be charming, but he was a workaholic as well. The annoying man had gone back to his own office last night and had worked on just about every project he had proposed. And now he wanted reports and data and contracts, all of which she had to hunt down and figure out. Couldn’t he find some other kind of pastime besides working?

As soon as he was around the corner, she stood up and poked her head out of her office doorway. Sure enough, two men were standing outside, apparently protecting her but it felt more like keeping her inside the palace walls.

“Excuse me,” she said sweetly and smiled over at the two men. “Could one or both of you help me with an issue I’m having?”

Both men straightened up slightly and moved towards her. “How can we help?” the older one asked. He had no hair but maintained a perfectly trimmed black goatee. She wondered if baldness had a sort of mean message to someone who was going to infiltrate an area. Did the man shave his head intentionally? Or was that just natural?

Refocusing on the important issue of the day, she came back around her desk and sat down behind it. “Have a seat,” she suggested and gestured to one of the chairs in her office. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Sumeet, ma’am.”

“It’s nice to meet you Sumeet. It actually isn’t my problem but a friend of mine is trying to locate someone who might not want to be found.” She’d considered her words carefully while getting dressed this morning, in another suit that had magically appeared in her closet, and thought that maybe she could track down the guys trying to kill her. If she got to him first, maybe she could convince him that she was content to let him lead his own nefarious life if he would just leave her alone. “If this were your friend, how would you go about finding this person?”

Sumeet leaned forward, elbows on his knees and looked very serious as he narrowed his eyes in concentration. “What does this person do for a living?” he asked.

Dana bit her lit and considered her options. “He…um…might be of the criminal element,” she said diplomatically. She didn’t want to reveal too much, but maybe there were ways to find a person in a legitimate business which might differ when trying to find someone of the more unscrupulous occupations. She had no idea, and needed Sumeet’s expertise.

Sumeet nodded sagely. “How did they meet?”

Dana wasn’t sure how to answer this without revealing too much. She thought about various ways to answer but in the end, stuck to a very non-descriptive explanation. “She sort of saw something she shouldn’t have.”

“Was this in the United States?”

“Yes,” she replied quickly, relieved that it was a question