she whispered.
“What?”
“I said, you’re clueless, Nicky. About how to decorate this mansion of yours.”
“It’s not a mansion. It’s an apartment. And I told you, I don’t have time for such things. That’s why I bought the place furnished.”
“Furnished?” Dawn made a face at Amanda, who smiled. “How somebody could take a ten-million-dollar penthouse and make it look like a high-priced bordello is beyond me.”
“If you have any idea what a bordello looks like, high-priced or low, I’ll definitely send you home,” Nick said, trying to sound affronted but not succeeding.
“You don’t, either, dearest brother, or you’d never have the time or energy to bed all the females the tabloids link you with.”
“Dawn—”
“I know, I know. You’re not going to discuss such things with me.” Dawn plucked a bit of lint from her skirt. “You know, Nicky, I’m not the baby you think I am.”
“Maybe not. But it won’t hurt if you let me go on living with an illusion.”
His sister laughed. “When you see what I’ve bought you, that illusion will be shattered forever.”
“We’ll see about that.” Nick’s voice hummed with amusement.
Dawn grinned, covered the mouthpiece of the phone and looked at Amanda. “My brother doesn’t believe you’re going to shatter his illusions.”
Amanda thumbed a strand of pale golden hair behind her ear. “Well, I’ll just have to prove him wrong,” she said, and told herself it was just plain ridiculous for an intelligent, well-educated, twenty-five-year-old woman to stand there with her knees knocking together at the prospect of being the birthday gift for a sheikh.
CHAPTER TWO
AMANDA swallowed nervously as Dawn put down the phone.
“Well,” Dawn said, “that’s that.” She smiled. “I’ve laid the groundwork.”
“Uh-huh.” Amanda smiled, too, although her lips felt as if they were sticking to her teeth. “For disaster.”
“Don’t be silly. Oh, Nicky will probably balk when he realizes I’ve asked you to redo the penthouse. He’ll growl a little, threaten murder and mayhem…” Dawn’s brows lifted when she saw the expression on Amanda’s face. “I’m joking!”
“Yeah, well, I’m not so sure about that.” Amanda clasped her arms and shivered despite the heat of the midsummer afternoon. “I’ve gone toe-to-toe with your brother before, remember?”
Dawn made a face. “That was completely different. You were, what, nineteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Well.”
“Well, what?”
“Well, that’s my point,” Dawn said impatiently. “You didn’t go toe-to-toe with him. He had the advantage from the start. You were just a kid.”
“I was your college roommate.” Amanda caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Otherwise known as The American Female With No Morals.”
Dawn grinned. “Did he really call you that?”
“It may sound funny now, but if you’d been there—”
“I know how you must have felt,” Dawn said, her smile fading. “After he hauled me out of the Dean’s office, I thought he was going to have me shipped home and locked in the women’s quarters for the rest of my life.”
“If your brother remembers me from that night—”
“If he does, I’ll tell him he’s wrong. Oh, stop worrying. He won’t remember. It was the middle of the night. You didn’t have a drop of makeup on, your hair was long then and probably hanging in your face. Look, if it all goes bad and Nicky gets angry at anybody for this, it’ll be me.”
“I know. But still…”
Still, Amanda thought uneasily, she’d never forgotten her first, her only, meeting with Nicholas al Rashid.
Dawn had talked about him. And Amanda had read about him. The tabloids loved the sheikh: his incredible looks, his money, his power…his women.
Back then, Amanda didn’t usually read that kind of thing. Her literary aspirations were just that. Literary. She’d been an English major, writing and reading poetry nobody but other English majors understood, although she’d been starting to think about changing her major to architectural design.
Whichever, the tabloids were too smarmy to catch her interest. And yet she found herself reaching for those awful newspapers at the supermarket checkout whenever she saw a photo of Dawn’s brother on the front page.
Well, why wouldn’t she? The man was obviously full of himself. It was like driving past an automobile accident; you didn’t want to look but you just couldn’t keep from doing it.
Dawn thought he was wonderful. “Nicky’s a sweetheart,” she always said. “I can’t wait until you meet him.”
And, without warning, Amanda did.
It was the week before finals of their freshman year. Dawn was going to a frat party. She’d tried to convince Amanda to go, too, but Amanda had an exam in Renaissance design the next morning so she begged off, stayed in the dorm room they shared while Dawn partied.
Unfortunately, Dawn had one beer too many. She ended up sneaking into the bell tower at two in the morning along with half a dozen of the frat brothers, and they’d all decided it would be cool to play the carillon.
The campus police didn’t agree. They brought Dawn and the boys down, hustled them into the security office and phoned their respective families.
Amanda was blissfully unaware of any of it. She’d crawled into bed, pulled the blanket over her head and fallen into exhausted sleep just past midnight.
A few hours later, she awoke to the pounding of a fist on the door of her dorm room. She sprang up in bed, heart pounding as hard as the fist, switched on the bedside lamp and pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“Who’s there?”
“Open this door,” a male voice demanded.
Visions conjured up from every horror movie she’d ever seen raced through her head. Her eyes flashed to the door, and her heartbeat went from fast to supersonic. She hadn’t locked it, not with Dawn out—
“Open the door!”
Amanda scrambled from the bed, prayed her quaking knees would hold up long enough for her to fly across the room and throw the bolt—
The door burst open.
A thin, high shriek burst from her throat. A man dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt stood in the doorway, filling the space with his size, his rage, his very presence.
“I am Nicholas al Rashid,” he roared. “Where is my sister?”
It took a few seconds for the name to register. This broad-shouldered man in jeans, this guy with the silver eyes and the stubbled jaw, was Dawn’s brother?
She started to smile. He wasn’t a mad killer after all…but he might as well have been.
The sheikh strode across the room, grabbed her by the front of her oversize D is For Design T-shirt and hauled her toward him. “I asked you a question, woman,” Nicholas al Rashid said. “Where is my sister?”
To this day, it bothered Amanda that fear had nearly paralyzed her. She’d only been able to cower and stammer instead of bunching up her fist and slugging the bastard. A good right to the midsection was exactly what the tyrannical fool deserved.