The Royal Elite: Ahsan (Elite, Book 2) (14 page)

He was late for a race.

. . .

Sessily had the gelding curried, saddled and bridled in good time. Stable hands came and went, leaving her to her task. She mounted the steed and took him for a brief ride in front of the stables, getting used to him and the saddle. He was a responsive animal and relatively easy to control. Once she thought she had a good feel for his gait, she dismounted and tied him up inside the shade of the stable again, wanting to keep him from the heat. Likely, being from the desert clime, the gelding was used to it. Nevertheless, Sessily left him right where he was.

She hadn't seen Ahsan yet, and contemplated the delay. He knew the race was
supposed to happen
late in the day, before dusk. Where was he? Bothering the women?

Her lips thinned and she smacked a pair of leather gloves on her thigh before setting them on a bale of hay. With a sudden yank and pull, someone turned her by the shoulder and pushed her up against the stall. Sessily had no time to do anything; a hand clamped over her mouth and another trapped one of her arms to her side. A body crowded her into the stall door so that she had no room to move at all.

“Scream and I'll make sure you regret it,” the man said.

Sessily, heart pounding hard in her chest, recognized him as one of the men who'd delivered the horse. There had been a driver and two passengers. This was the brown haired one with a rugged, slightly craggy face. She shook her head to indicate that she wouldn't scream. He was covering her nose, too, making it difficult to breathe.

“Good. You have until sunrise to do your job here. If word does not come by the time the sun is up, your sister will pay the consequences. Do we understand each other?”

By sunrise. That was less than a day. Not nearly enough time for her to figure out a new plan to rescue all the girls and herself. The addition of the five new ladies meant she needed a change in plans. Not everyone would fit into an SUV, and she couldn't very well ask to drive the limousine. For now, all she could do was nod in an attempt to get him to release her.

“You've been warned,” he added, his hand tightening over her mouth.

As suddenly as he'd spun her around, the craggy-faced man lurched backward, off balance. A surprised look crossed his face as Ahsan slammed him against the opposite set of stalls, startling a few horses down the way.

Taller by a handful of inches, broader across the shoulders, Ahsan loomed over the man with one arm shoved tight against his throat. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

Sessily gasped for breath, terrified Ahsan might have overheard the 'instructions'. Terrified, too, that the man would accidentally give the game away. She should have known anyone Bashir hired would play it off better than that.

The man shoved against Ahsan, which had no effect at all. “You have no business coming between us—what we
have
between us. Let go of me immediately.”

Sessily wanted to evaporate on the spot. That wasn't the route she expected him to take. And what could she do? If she argued the point, Ahsan would get suspicious. But it galled her to pretend the beast meant anything to her.

“I don't care what you have between you. You'll cease to manhandle her on my property. That may be the way you do things where you come from, but I won't tolerate it here.” Ahsan's gravelly voice was rife with warning. He added more pressure to the arm lodged against the man's neck.

Sessily, struck by an idea, said, “He's upset that I wagered 'pink slips' with the horses. It's truly nothing.”

Ahsan didn't so much as glance her way.

“Are we clear?” Ahsan asked the man again, enunciating each word. Anger made his accent thicker.

The man gave Sessily a hard, pissed-off look, then muttered what sounded like agreement.

“No, I want to hear you say it.” Ahsan didn't relent one inch.

“I'm clear! I won't touch her while she's on your property.” The man struggled, clearly no match for the taller, stronger Ahsan.

“Good. You can spend the rest of your stay in the truck.” Ahsan shoved the man to the side, forcing him to stumble until he got his balance back.

“But it's a hundred degrees—okay, okay.” The man held his hands up in surrender when Ahsan stalked forward, intent apparently on 'helping' the stranger find the truck.

After the man disappeared outside, Sessily faced Ahsan. Wringing her hands, she tried to gauge his mood. He didn't look at her immediately, watching the entrance to the stall as if making sure the man didn't reconsider and come back. Finally, he met her eyes.

Sessily shuddered inwardly at the aggressive, dominating wall of flesh Ahsan made. He exuded discontent from every pore, eyes dark and hard.

“Thank you for intervening. His temper got away from him,” she said.

“Do you always allow him to handle you that way?” Ahsan asked. A muscle flexed in his whiskered jaw. He leaned against the stall door that he'd slammed the man into, arms hanging at his sides.

“No, of course not. He doesn't usually...he's not usually so abrupt.”

“Abrupt is too kind. Bastard works better. Do the other men of your stables take such liberties?”

Sessily didn't want Ahsan thinking her countrymen were anything like Bashir's hired hand—who wasn't even Romanian. He was some hired thug doing Bashir's bidding. Then she remembered Ahsan circling the helpless women in his own foyer, and stopped herself just in time from telling him that he had no room to be talking.

The nerve.

She didn't want to consider why Ahsan came to her rescue if he was a man of questionable caliber. It was only because she was a guest, his guest, and he'd made his attraction to her fairly clear. That's all it was. Ahsan was thinking with his second head.

Shaking off the bundle of nerves that had set in, she said, “No, of course not. He was just someone the manager hired on—and someone who will obviously not have a job when we return home.” Sessily paused, then added, “Are we having our race, or not? The day is growing shorter by the second.”

He studied her with a calculating gaze, the same muscle flexing again in his jaw.

Sessily hated when he stared at her like that, as if he was slicing straight to her core to expose any and all lies. She arched a brow, desperate to get his mind off the incident.

“Let me saddle up. I'll meet you at the starting line.” He pivoted away before she could answer and stalked down the center corridor of the stables, ignoring the outstretched muzzles of several horses along the way.

Taking several deep breaths, Sessily tracked Ahsan deeper into the stables, then turned to collect her steed.

The time for the race was at hand.

The fury over seeing some strange man abuse Sessily lasted until he pulled Faisal up beside her mount. Any other day, he would have made a show of examining her horse, probably teasing her about made-up faults, but right now he wasn't in the mood. He could tell with one glance that she wasn't in the mood for teasing, either. Her jaw was set, gaze unreadable.

“Ready for this?” he asked, giving her one last chance to opt out.

“Oh, I'm more than ready.”

“If you have a problem at any time during the race, just pull up.”

“I will.”

“See you at the finish line.”

“I'll have tea waiting.” She looked forward, shifting the reins in her hand.

Unexpectedly, he barked a laugh. It wasn't a playful kind of laugh, but he was darkly amused nevertheless. Settling Faisal—who knew a race was imminent—Ahsan got serious, leaning slightly forward in the saddle.

One of his men stood to the side of the track out of harms way with a yellow handkerchief in hand. He raised it with no fanfare, waited exactly three seconds, then flashed his arm down in the traditional signal to start a race.

Faisal surged forward, gaining a full gallop almost immediately. The stallion was so well trained that Ahsan could have let go of the reins and allowed the horse to finish the race on his own. He maintained control of the reins anyway, guiding the stallion down the short straightaway toward the first curve. Sessily was somewhere behind him already, probably eating his dust.

The sun, slanting low toward the horizon, painted the landscape a darker orange with shadows collecting at the base of the dunes. Ahsan squinted his eyes against the glare, speeding through the first curve and into another straightaway. He thought he heard Sessily behind him, a steady pound of hooves past the rush of wind in his ears. Not bothering to look back, he got low over his stallion's back, encouraging the animal onward with thick whispers that made the horse flatten his ears. There was such freedom flying over the sun-baked terrain, as if nothing else mattered but the heat and the arid wind and the surging muscles beneath him.

A cry or call caught his attention. Sessily. Faisal's ears flickered and his stride slowed as Ahsan sat up to glance back, concern that she'd taken a fall contorting his features.

. . .

The horse looked like a black devil, flying over the sand with shocking speed. And his rider, equally devilish, was the epitome of a wild man with his hair whipping at his shoulders, body moving as if horse and human were one. For such broad shoulders and tall stature, Ahsan was as graceful as the wind on Faisal's back.

Sessily gauged the distance between mounts to be five yards or so and Ahsan was gaining. If she didn't catch him before the bigger curve at the halfway mark, she knew she would have no chance to win.

She didn't have a chance now, she knew, but a fierce determination to cross the line ahead of Ahsan made her try.

“Yah! Come on!” She urged the gelding on, getting lower over the horse's back like
Ahsan—who suddenly sat up and twisted a glance back.

For a terrifying moment she thought their animals were going to collide. The gelding snorted and side-stepped, racing past the slowing Faisal. She couldn't figure out why Ahsan had paused as he did, and didn't care.

“Go, go!” she urged the gelding, wishing she had a name for him. They flew past Ahsan, heading for the mid-way curve. Desperation made her urge the gelding to go faster, faster, faster.

Impossibly, she thought she just might win. Ahsan would likely cry foul, blaming his 'pause' in the race. What had he said? There were no rules other than crossing the finish line first.

Into the curve, she bent even lower over the gelding's neck, the mane whipping against her cheek and throat. She was going to do it. She was going to win, and Faisal would be hers. Ahsan's most prized horse in all the stables.

She wished she could celebrate the blow to Ahsan's pride. Rather, it was grim determination that goaded her forward, leaning with the gelding as he tore over the terrain. Only two more curves and a final straightaway to get to the finish line.

. . .

Sessily raced past, hair coming undone from a high knot to blow like a banner behind her. Willow-thin and clinging like a burr, she was riding all out. Ahsan cursed under his breath and caught Faisal between strides to urge him forward again. His fear that Sessily's mount had gone down, or that she'd fallen off, vanished as he discerned that she'd either planned that little escapade or that he'd misunderstood all along.

A mischievous bug struck as he came into the mid-way curve; he held Faisal back just enough to allow Sessily to remain in the lead. Once they hit a straight shot, he encouraged the stallion to hang off the gelding's flank, a position Faisal didn't appreciate and fought against. Through two final curves, he inched forward, coming up on Sessily's left. Once they made the final straightaway he let Faisal go. Within four long strides, the stallion surged past the gelding, dust and sand flying from his hooves.

Ahsan thought he heard Sessily make a noise of protest, or surprise, but he didn't glance aside. He focused ahead until his steed flashed past the finish line, then slowly brought Faisal down to a brisk walk. The stallion tossed his head and snorted, nostrils flared wide.

Sessily's expression pinched into a frown as she crossed the finish line second. Easing to a trot, she gave Ahsan a direct look that explained better than words the displeasure she experienced at being overtaken when she thought she'd won.

He smiled, broad and toothy.

“Hey, you gave it your best. You stayed on, that's a start.”

She blustered and waved a hand in the air as the horses circled each other, moving between a restless walk and trot. “Of course I stayed on. I almost had you.”

“Never. But that stunt making me think there was a problem almost worked.”

“It wasn't a stunt! I was urging my...the...this horse to go faster.” Her spine stiffened at the suggestion she'd 'cheated'.

“You don't even know your own horse's name?” He arched a brow. Typically, the best of the best horses in a stable were unforgettable.

“Of course I know his name.” She lifted her chin, chest rising and falling while she got her breath.

“And? Who am I adding to my stables?”

Her expression shifted into something wicked. “Bob.”

He laughed, lighter-hearted from the adrenaline coursing through his system. “That's B.S. What's his name?”

“Bob.”

“I'm not calling him Bob. If that's on his papers, I'm not going to be very happy.” He wasn't calling any horse
Bob.
The look of surprise on her face made him wonder what she was thinking. So he asked. “What?”

“Nothing. You'll have to make do.” She brought the gelding to a halt before several stable hands who waited to take the horses and cool them down.

Ahsan threw his leg forward over Faisal's neck and slid to the ground, landing with a thud of boots. He let someone take Faisal's reins, then headed over to Sessily and held his hands up, offering to help her down. “I don't have to do anything.”

She eyed his hands, then his face, and for a moment, he thought she meant to ignore his help. Then she slid her leg over, giving him access to her body to ease her down. He noted how well the narrow span of her hips fit between his hands, and how good her hair smelled when she stood with her back to him, reins slipping between her fingers.