Free Guilty Pleasure by Lora Leigh Page B

of her had been enough, or perhaps a dance, a flirtatious remark, or a heated little exchange. But always there had been the knowledge in the back of his mind after those occurrences, that she was still his. That she still belonged to him.
    Until the full seven days had passed with no sight of her and no small comments or tidbits of information from her normally too talkative father, Joe. And suddenly he needed all those things desperately.
    Thankfully, Marty had shown no interest for any man other than him. So there had been no threat that she would be taken from him. But his past had always been the reason he couldn’t reach out for her, either. Why he couldn’t possess her.
    As he stood, staring out the window of the room used to meet with his brother, Khalid watched as Shayne walked through the wide French doors leading from the bar to walk into the confines of the garden below.
    His past was about to rise again with a vengeance. It was also the reason Shayne was in D.C. It was the reason Azir had sent Abram on his hasty trip from Saudi.
    Azir was desperate to regain Khalid’s favor. Favor he had never possessed, and never would. The man who had bought, raped, and tormented Khalid’s mother was a monster to him. The only reason Khalid had agreed to go to Saudi just after he turned eighteen was to find a way to destroy Azir.
    Azir hadn’t been destroyed, though. Abram and Khalid had been the ones to suffer.
    Staring out into the flowering gardens below, it wasn’t the beauty of the perfect blooms he saw.
    He saw his past.
    He saw the blood.
    Raking his fingers through his hair, he drew in a hard, frustrated breath before turning away and stalking back to the drink he had sat on the table next to the couch and tossed it back quickly. Grimacing at the burn as it traveled down his throat, Khalid wondered if he would ever erase the sins of the past from his soul.
    His jaw clenched as memories and rage threatened to flood him. It had been ten years, and still he couldn’t get the sight of it, the horror of it, out of his head.
    He could still hear Abram’s howls of rage as they echoed through their father’s desert palace. He could see the woman he and Abram had pledged themselves to, spread out upon her marriage bed, naked, her gaze staring in blank horror at the ceiling above the bed, blood covering her body and the satin sheets, and pooling between her thighs.
    And now, here he was, so many years later, tempting that horror to strike once again.
    “The day will come, brothers,” Ayid had warned them in a letter sent to both Khalid and Abram weeks later, “when you will claim a woman that is yours rather than another’s. The day will come when you will cling to one heart. And when it does, we will be there. We will strike. And you will know it was your actions that took the life of the one you love. Just as your actions took ours.”
    Khalid knew he must be insane, because there wasn’t a chance in hell that he could endure the pain Abram had endured when he lost Lessa. Should he lose Marty to the vindictive cruelties of his half brothers, he would go on a killing rampage unlike any Ayid and Aman could imagine.
    Even knowing it was more than he could endure, he couldn’t stay away from her. Not anymore. But more important, she had declared herself, and Marty wasn’t backing down in spite of what she had said a week ago. He knew Marty too well. Even if Khalid didn’t respond, his brothers would take notice of her eventually.
    And with that knowledge came the realization that to have her, he would have to protect Marty as he had never been able to protect another. And there was one man, besides Abram, who he trusted to help him do that.
    Moving from the meeting room, Khalid strode down the stairs to the main bar where he found Shayne sitting in solitude, as he normally did, a newspaper raised as he lounged comfortably in one of the recliners in the corner of the large room.
    The CIA agent claimed, to the members