Prince Under Cover

Like the chauffeured limousine awaiting them at the curb, provided by her birth father—her real-life fairy godfather—Sheik Khalaf Al-Sayed, a multimillionaire oil mogul. It amazed Miah how quickly a person could come to accept luxuries as the norm.

The chauffeur helped Lina into the back seat, then turned to Miah. “Ms. Mohairbi, I found this on the floorboard. I thought perhaps it had fallen out of your pocketbook.”

Miah frowned, accepting the envelope. The moment she recognized the block lettering, she froze. This hadn’t come from her purse. Someone had placed it in the car. When? How? “Did you leave the limousine unattended at any time, Mehemet?”

His black eyes became evasive. “Only one moment…to answer nature. But I lock first.”

“Okay.” It was a silly thing to lie about, but she knew he couldn’t have locked the car. Otherwise, the note would not have been in it. And it was unlikely he’d seen whomever had put the envelope inside it. She quickly read the enclosed note, feeling the heat drain from her cheeks.

“Avoid stress,” the doctor had said. But this…this… Miah squished the blackmail note in her fist and shoved it into her pocket. This would bring her mother’s ailing heart to a dead stop.

Miah squelched the urge to curse and got into the car, letting the soft leather embrace her. She’d thought the first payment to the vile extortionist would be the end of it. But there had been a second demand. And now another. God, how naive she’d been. He wanted ten thousand more or he’d ruin her wedding. Destroy her mother. Start a scandal that could strip her of her future. She stared out the window as the limo merged with traffic. She hated the shivering in her stomach that felt as if she’d swallowed a full glass of ice shavings.

Fear.

Truth didn’t scare Miah. Lies did.

Perhaps that was because she’d discovered last January that her whole life had been a lie. Had Grant Mohairbi’s life also been a lie? Had the father she’d grown up loving, adoring, honoring been who her mother and she had thought he was? Had he been a freedom fighter? A hero? Or had he been a mercenary? An assassin?

“Darling, is something wrong?” Lina touched her clasped hands. “You’re very pale. For a moment there, you looked absolutely…terrified.”

“Terrified? Don’t be silly. No, no,” she managed to say in a tone that sounded normal. “I was thinking about the wedding. Nothing for you to fret about, honest.”

But her mom’s brow knit, a sign she wasn’t going to let this go so easily. “Are you having second thoughts about marrying someone you’ve been betrothed to since you were a baby?”

She doubted anyone would blame her if she were having second thoughts, but she couldn’t afford them. She had agreed to the marriage without coercion from anyone, agreed to it for all that it would give her—including her own money, an enormous inheritance that would allow her to pay off the extortionist once and for all. She said, “No second thoughts.”

None she would admit to out loud, anyway. Not to her mother. Not to herself. Outside, stifling damp heat prevailed; inside, air-conditioning froze the sweat on Miah’s brow.

“You’re going to be a beautiful bride, darling.” Lina touched her hand as the car inched along in heavy morning traffic. “I’m so excited about tomorrow.”

Miah’s internal alarm went off, shredding all thoughts of the blackmailer’s note. “Well, you don’t want to get too excited, Mom. Perhaps you should take a nap this afternoon.”

“That sounds like a great idea, but not if you’re going to pace the floors, bored while I rest.”

“I’m not going to pace. Fact is, there are a few minor details, a couple of items for my trousseau I want to pick up. So, I’ll be plenty busy.”

The limousine pulled up to their building farther along Lake Shore Drive. They occupied a penthouse with a magnificent view of Lake Michigan. It was a far cry from the tenement apartment they’d called home for most of her life.

Miah walked Lina through the lobby to their private elevator. “I’m just going to change into something a little more comfortable.”

“MORE COMFORTABLE” was impossible for Miah to achieve. The ice chips in her stomach still had her shivery half an hour later. She had to get the money and drop it off before one today, and it was nearly that now. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass doors as she exited the apartment complex. Her long, lean legs flashed from beneath the scrap of hot pink skirt that hugged her slim hips, while her slender upper body sported a neon green, sheer top over a creamy camisole. Her thick, blunt-cut raven hair swung across her mid-back and shoulders with every step, and framed her face…which looked shades too pale at the moment.

Her outfit drew a look of disapproval from the chauffeur as she met him at the curb. She climbed into the back seat of the limo and waited until he closed the door, then tugged on the hem of her short skirt. Her mother had tried to steer her toward the conservative styles she favored, but Miah needed variety. Color. Flash.

Making her clothing allowance stretch had meant shopping in consignment stores and thrift shops. Even though she could now afford to buy her favorite designers new, or spend thousands on a single blouse, she still shopped in the same stores she’d always frequented.

She liked her style. But no one else seemed to. Not her mother, not her newly discovered father, and especially not her fiancé. Too bad, she had decided. She was who she was. Nothing could change that. And today, she needed the “old” Miah more than ever to get through the next hour.

The chauffeur intruded on her thoughts. “Where would you like to go, Ms. Mohairbi?”

Oh God, she’d been daydreaming, wasting time she didn’t have. Her heart moved with uncomfortable quickness. “Chicago First Federal, Mehemet.”

Miah tried relaxing, but the traffic moved with aching slowness while time seemed to spin off the dial of her wristwatch. Would the blackmailer keep his threat if she was late? Would he send his vile story to the editor of The Clarion, a local tabloid that thrived on exposés and half truths? Her father, the sheik, had warned her that a scandal in the States could affect her acceptance by the people of Nurul. She could not afford to let this story get out. Not even if it were a lie. She tapped her foot, feeling ill, helpless, muttering, “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”

After what seemed an hour, Mehemet pulled into the bank’s parking area. Miah was out of the limo and to the front doors before he could unstrap his seat belt. When she returned a few minutes later, he was standing beside the open back door of the stretch car with his dark face clenched, but he said nothing, only nodded.

Miah swept past him. She clutched her purse—with the ten one-thousand-dollar bills secured in a plain white envelope within—to her thudding heart. Mehemet had been hired by her father and likely ordered to keep watch over her. She was not making his work easy, and a flash of concern that the chauffeur might report her odd behavior to the sheik scraped her aching nerves raw. She didn’t want to have to explain herself. Her actions.

She edged onto the seat, gripping her purse in both hands as if someone might reach into the locked car and snatch it from her. “The Brinkmire Cavalli Gallery, Mehemet.”

As the words slipped from her, Miah realized she’d repeated this trip with Mehemet two other times in the past four weeks, first to the bank, then to the Brinkmire Cavalli Gallery. Three times in the past four weeks. She groaned inwardly. The blackmailer was draining her financially and emotionally. And the chauffeur had to notice that even though she always went to the bank first, she never bought anything at the gallery. Would he start to get curious? Mention it to her father? Her fiancé?

The ice chips in her stomach seemed to be forming into a solid block.

The gallery was located near Grant Park, the end building in a row of refurbished warehouses. It was a mid-size structure, four stories tall. The original second floor had been removed in order to create the high ceilings. The top two floors were used as offices and storage, the gallery occupying only the ground level. The main salon dissected into dozens of spaces that could be widened or narrowed depending on what was being exhibited at any given time. There were also several intersecting rooms that allowed a steady stream of foot traffic to pass through without causing a bottleneck.

Miah need not have worried about that this afternoon. She seemed to have the place almost to herself. Her spike heels clicked on the tiled floor, echoing the quick, fearful thud of her pulse in her ears. She’d cut this close. Too close. Was the blackmailer here already? Struggling to swallow, she picked up her step and hurried through the salon toward the interlocking rooms, her destination the back exit. She raced past exhibits by the newest up-and-coming artists, through the room displaying paintings by established favorites, and one full of antique weaponry, guns and swords.

Toward the back of the building, near the public bathrooms, she stopped and glanced around, making sure no one was watching or paying particular attention to her. But she seemed to be alone, the eerie silence broken only by her footfalls. How she’d love to be able to ram one of her pointed heels into the extortionist’s shin. She ducked into a narrow hallway, striding to the single waste bin near the door. She plucked the envelope from her purse and dropped it into the bin.

Divesting herself of the money seemed to suck the air from her lungs. She tried to inhale, but it was as if her throat had closed. A panic attack? She glanced up at the exit door. No. Going out this way would probably set off the security system. A prickling sensation hit her neck—that uneasy sense that someone was staring at her.

The blackmailer.

She spun around. A woman stood at the end of the hall, eyeing her questioningly. She wore a security uniform. “Can I help you, miss?”

“No.” Miah was amazed she could find her voice, but the woman seemed to have startled away her panic. She tucked her purse under her arm, gesturing toward the trash bin. “I—I was just throwing out a tissue.”

Though the panic didn’t return, the sense that she was being watched lingered as Miah retraced her path back to the main salon. She cast periodic glances over her shoulder, studied the faces of those she passed. Was he nearby? The nasty puke who seemed to know details about her life that were no one else’s business—such as the fact that her recently opened checking account contained enough money to pay the exorbitant amounts he demanded for his silence?

Outside, the heat struck her with the force of a blow, and she realized she was so tense that a light breeze could probably blow her over. She needed some TLC. Needed Cailin. Her best friend.

Needed a tall thirst-quenching beer. Needed one last afternoon to be the wild woman she’d been before January. Tomorrow, her life changed forever. Today, she could indulge some of her favorite things, could forget a blackmailer’s demands. His threats. Could bank the fires of worry about her mother. Stave off the apprehension she felt about the marriage.

She instructed Mehemet to leave her at Finnigan’s Rainbow—a family-owned and operated bar and grill—on Michigan Avenue in the heart of the shopping district, and take the rest of the day off.

Cailin was working the bar with her brother, Rory. Both wore Kelly green polo shirts and black pants. He grinned at Miah and hollered above the din, “Princess, what brings you slumming on the eve of your wedding?”

Princess. Miah slid onto a bar stool. She had to admit that aside from the money for her mother, the fact that she would be an honest-to-God princess after saying “I do” touched a chord inside her, as though something internal had aligned, connected.

Cailin snapped her brother’s backside with a bar towel. “She’s not officially a princess until tomorrow, you doof.”

The Finnigans all had fiery red hair and mischievous blue eyes. Cailin was the only girl, a natural beauty. She greeted Miah with a smile. “Hey, girlfriend, nice to see you looking like your old self.”

“Thanks.” Miah caught her friend’s gaze darting to the door. Bobby “The Buzzard” Redwing, Cailin’s ex-boyfriend, had been hassling her. Miah had no more interest in encountering the Buzzard than Cailin; he was a reporter for the very tabloid to which she feared the blackmailer would sell his story of Grant Mohairbi.

She drew a shaky breath. She had to lose this mood. Quit thinking about the blackmailer. Determined to do just that, she forced a smile. “Hey, Rory, can ‘almost royalty’ get an ice-cold one and a slice of pizza in this dive?”

Cailin laughed and drew the attention of a couple of men at the end of the bar. She had a knockout figure, round where Miah was lean, skin like peaches and cream. Rory set a frosted mug of foaming beer before Miah, then went to fetch her pizza, leaving Miah and Cailin to chat. But the first thing out of Cailin’s mouth was “Uh-oh.”

Her gaze fixed on something over Miah’s shoulder.

Miah tensed. “Is it ‘The Buzzard’?”

“Nope. This one’s all yours. The Gorgeous One.”

Miah’s heart thumped. Talk about stress-inducing. He would not be happy to see her dressed like this. She gathered her poise and glanced around at her fiancé. Six feet of gorgeous male animal, the most handsome man she’d ever encountered. Hollywood should have come knocking on his door years ago. Prince Zahir Haji Haleem. His dark, heated gaze landed on her like a sensual stroke played over her body. There was something possessive in that look, something that sent heat into her belly and fire through her blood.

She swallowed hard against the knot forming in her throat. It scared her, this heat she felt every time he was near. If his look, his casual touch could make her this flustered, this hot, he might just burn her up during serious intimacy. And she didn’t doubt for a minute that this man—who had, before their engagement, been linked in tabloids with several of Chicago’s top socialites, married and single, and who had so obviously majored in Pleasing Women 101—would be more than proficient at lovemaking.

Miah was no prude herself, no innocent. But she felt such shyness around this man. This stranger. Could she actually go through with marrying him? The thought brought an image of her mother’s smiling face, and Miah knew she not only could, she would. Nothing must cause her mother’s smile to vanish.

She took a swig of the beer, then thumped the mug onto the bar, slipped off the stool and, on her three-inch sandals, crossed to where he waited as though he’d sent her a silent command to come to him.

“Hello, Zahir.”

“Miah.” His gaze did a lazy climb from her gaily painted toenails, up the strappy heels and skimpy clothing to her face. She clenched her hands against the blush his sexy perusal brought to her flesh, lifted her chin and stared him in the eye. “Like what you see?”

He smirked. “Every man in the bar seems to.”

“And you object to that?”

“I believe objections, were I to have any, would fall on deaf ears.” He wore a black, Armani three-piece suit. His raven hair curled against the virgin white of his shirt collar. He smelled of a spicy autumn afternoon, and seemed somehow able to defy the heat.

“I like color,” she said. If he had his way, she’d be covered from head to toe in flowing veils all fit for a funeral. But that she would never do.

“Color likes you back.” He caught her chin in his big hand, startling her.

The blush swept her body again, gaining heat this time as it reached her face. She could pull away, but sensed the room watching them. She whispered, “What are you doing?”

He leaned closer, as though to kiss her. Her breath jammed in her throat at the raw sexuality in his very touch, his very nearness. The pad of his thumb traced the soft flesh above her upper lip. “Foam…from the beer.”

“Tha—thank you.” She took a faltering step back. “How did you know to find me here, Zahir?”

“Actually, I wasn’t looking for you, love.” His voice was a mix of Northeastern crisp and Middle Eastern mellow. “I had no idea you were here. I was passing by and spotted that tabloid reporter—what’s his name— Redwing, outside.” He glanced at the door as though he half expected The Buzzard to burst through it, camera flashing. “The last thing I want is him getting wind of where and when the wedding is coming down.”

Coming down? That was a strange way to refer to their wedding. She lowered her voice. “Bobby Redwing has been hassling Cailin. He’s probably not after you or me.”

“In the past, he’s been very persistent, very good at ferreting out…secrets,” Zahir said in a distracted voice as though he were speaking to himself. He touched his chest near his heart and an odd expression played around his alluring mouth. Then he seemed to shake himself and flashed her a too-quick, too-bright grin. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you, love?”

Miah flinched. “No. Nothing.”

Nothing except a blackmailer’s secret.

“What about you, Zahir?” What don’t I know about you?

His gaze flicked away from hers, a sure sign he was hiding something. Miah felt the uneasiness returning, the second-guessing. She was marrying a man she didn’t know. A stranger. One who could have secrets she didn’t even suspect.

Maybe dangerous secrets.

Chapter Two

Javid blew out a taut breath and stepped from the dark interior of Finnigan’s Rainbow into the blinding afternoon on Michigan Avenue. Pretending to be Zahir was taking its toll. He hated lying, even necessary lying. Just now, he’d have sworn Miah knew, sworn she was going to expose him right there in the pub. He tugged sunglasses from his suit pocket and glanced around, but saw no sign of Redwing. This game of hide-and-seek he was constantly playing with that damn snoop was wearing thin.

Tomorrow. It would all be over tomorrow. Thank God. He’d survived more than one tight situation in recent days, but none that had left him this rattled…and that was her fault.

Heat sizzled off the sidewalk, several degrees cooler than the fire in his belly, a fire for a woman he didn’t want to want, a woman he wanted so badly he ached. He took long strides away from the pub, berating himself with every step, unable to abolish the image of her long luscious legs in that scrap of hot pink, her shapely feet in those high-heeled, mind-numbing sandals, the way that green top made her amber eyes shimmer like spun gold.

“Damn it all.” Miah Mohairbi was an assignment. The daughter of the devil himself. She was also a vixen. He’d never met a woman quite her equal, and he’d met a lot of women since he’d been old enough to pay attention to his hormones—women here and in the Middle East, women at Harvard during college, women around the globe at each stop on his worldwide travels as Anbar’s Goodwill Ambassador.

Miah was unique. Beautiful, yes, but she was so much more than that. She had a sharp mind, a wicked tongue, style and defiance. She could be hard one moment, tender the next. To his chagrin, he found the conflicting aspects of her personality endlessly intriguing. If only circumstances were different. If only she were not Sheik Khalaf Al-Sayed’s blood child.

Thank God this torment ended tomorrow. After that, he could guarantee Miah would hate him—once she discovered he’d been lying to her, posing as his twin; once he helped arrest the father she seemed to adore, once he exposed Al-Sayed to the world for the heartless bastard he was.

An odd tightness twisted his heart at the thought of breaking hers. He checked his watch, then glanced around for Redwing. That damn reporter had made him late, but he hadn’t dared risk being followed to the Langston Building. He’d ducked into Finnigan’s Rainbow to avoid him and had run smack into Miah. The memory of meeting her unexpectedly like that, of her dressed like that, threatened to distract him anew.

His beeper went off. He stepped out of foot traffic and into a shop doorway to view the readout. “They” were waiting for him. Keeping an eye out for Redwing, Javid walked past the Langston Building, then circled back, went inside and took the elevator to the penthouse. The automatic door slid open on Solutions, Inc., the fictitious corporation that fronted for Chicago Confidential, an elite division of the Federal Department of Public Safety.

The outer office smelled new, but had the ageless elegance of corporate lawyers’ suites—thick carpet, brocade waiting room chairs, cherry-wood receptionist desk, file cabinets and paneling. Picture windows framed the Chicago Harbor.

Liam Wallace, the building maintenance man, had one slender hip hitched on the edge of the desk, his head bent toward Kathy Renk, Solutions’s receptionist. Javid couldn’t see what they were doing, but when he cleared his throat, they jumped apart as though he’d caught them necking.

Kathy’s apple-size cheeks glowed pink, and Javid wondered if he had caught them necking. The idea amused him, since the two were usually bickering over some inane thing or other. Not to mention their obvious differences. Liam was all of twenty-two, with ambitions to strut fashion runways parading the latest designs by Armani and Klein. He had the looks, the sculpted body, the hollow cheekbones.

Kathy, some seventeen years his senior, smoothed her blouse over her generous figure, gave a nervous tug at her short brown hair that was flecked with blond highlights. She had Meg Ryan features and a smile that never quit.

She beamed at him now, her face still red. “Mr. Haleem, they’re expecting you. You want the usual?”

“Please.”

“You’ve got it. Diet pop. Rocks.”

As he headed to the inner office, Javid heard Liam hiss, “It’s not crazy.”

“No.” Kathy snorted. “You are what’s crazy.”

Vaguely wondering what this newest spat was about, Javid let himself into the special ops room. He’d have thought that by now he’d be used to this room, but it always amazed him, always made him feel as though he’d stepped into the cockpit of The Enterprise, the Star Trek spaceship, with its wall-to-wall blinking lights, switches, screens and dials. Every kind of electronic device imaginable. Even some unimaginable. Certainly things Javid didn’t understand, but that made chasing after terrorists a whole lot easier than the bad guys liked.

Andy Dexter, the tech whiz whose genius had assembled this room, was not present. In front of each chair at the round table was a built-in laptop screen for briefings.

The only incongruous sight in the room was the antlers mounted on the wall, a gift from the head of Montana Confidential to the head of this new unit.

Javid closed the door. Four voices stopped in mid-discussion, all heads turning toward him. Javid greeted each agent by name. When not on undercover assignment for Chicago Confidential, the three men and one woman seated at the round table pursued successful careers, most unrelated to law enforcement. Javid took an empty chair, apologized for keeping them waiting and explained his delay.

“Redwing didn’t spot you coming in just now, did he?” Vincent Romeo asked, his tone as unrelenting as his frown. Javid had learned that the head of operations seldom cracked a smile. His mind ran at warp speed, always attending to business—and this unit’s business was serious. Vincent reacted accordingly.

“I doubled back on my route,” Javid assured him. “No sign of Redwing.”

“Good.” Whitney MacNair Romeo, Vincent’s gorgeous redheaded wife had been learning the ropes when Javid first met her. These six months later, she had earned her stripes and done the unit proud. Her family came from the same area of Martha’s Vineyard as his grandparents and mother, and her accent roused old memories. Not all of them good. “We can’t risk exposure at this point.”

Exposure. Javid thought again about Miah and flinched. “I’m damn glad this will be over with tomorrow.”

The agents picked up their discussion where Javid had interrupted it—something about the chief guard in charge of watching Zahir. At the mention of his brother’s name, Javid sat back in his chair, his mind rolling back to how it had all begun for him at about the same time the Chicago branch of Confidential opened its doors.