Bodyguard Lockdown(21)
One time, when she was no more than ten or eleven years of age, Bari joined her. “I see you up here on your perch, day after day. What are you thinking about, little bird?”
“Daydreams mostly,” she said softly. “I imagine my wishes are caught up in the desert winds and taken across the sands.”
“And where does the Sahara take your dreams?” he asked gently.
Sandra shrugged, not ready to share something so personal. Instead she said, “Aunt Theresa used to tell me that the Sahara was a beautiful woman filled with magic and emotion. Do you think she was right?”
Sadness creased the corners of her uncle’s eyes, deepened the brown to a black, mournful and lackluster.
Theresa Bazan had been murdered only a few months before.
Sandra’s older brother, Andon, was taken several years earlier than Theresa. Both had died at the hands of the Al Asheera.
While Sandra was too young to remember her brother, she knew and loved her aunt.
“Oh, yes.” Bari studied the horizon. “A beautiful woman, full of mischief and surprises.”
“Mischief?” Sandra smiled.
“And danger,” Bari warned. “Don’t ever forget that, Sandra.”
“But only to those who don’t respect her,” Sandra argued. “Even so, the danger adds a sense of adventure. Doesn’t it?”
Bari laughed. “You are loyal to the land, little bird.”
“Not the land, Uncle. My home.”
Bari placed his arms around her shoulder and gathered her close. “My Theresa would have agreed with you.”
“I miss her, too, Uncle. I miss her so much.” Sandra was close to her mother, but in a different way. Unlike Sandra’s mother, who went from her father’s home to her marriage with Omar, Theresa Bazan had traveled the world. She’d been independent, a world-renowned Nobel Prize–winning photographer.
As a Christian, she’d been unable to marry Bari, a royal. So she’d lived with Bari without marriage, and later had given birth to Quamar.
Bari loved her, too. Enough that he’d given up his throne to travel the desert with her. Raise their son together. Until she died. Then Bari raised their son alone.
“She loved you, little bird,” Bari murmured. “She was the one who called you that first, you know. She said that you reminded her of a small bird caught in a cage, relentlessly fluttering her wings, but never quite free.”
Tears pricked the back of her eyes. “She said that?”
“Yes,” Bari replied and patted her knee. “But it’s up to you to prove whether she is right or not. My Theresa never agreed with society’s rules.”
From that day, her uncle always made camp near rocks. Over the years, it remained a private understanding between them. She loved Bari for that and so much more.
“Are you okay?” Sandra started, coming abruptly back to the present.
Booker stood at her feet, his gaze narrowed, studying her face.
“I’m fine. Just resting.”
“Rest somewhere out of the sun,” he ordered. “The last thing we need to deal with is a doctor with sunstroke.”
“I wasn’t planning to stay out here for more than a few minutes.” Sandra slipped off the rock and dusted off her caftan. “Besides, I’m properly covered.”
“Come over here.”
Booker found a few sticks. He stripped out of his caftan, tied it to the poles and created a small lean-to for them to rest beneath.
“I’ll be back with some food,” he told her. “After we eat, we need to rest while the sun is hot. We’ll travel in a few hours.”
As if on cue, her stomach growled. It had been two solid days since she had more than just some cheese and sweet bread.
Sandra sat beneath the lean-to, enjoyed the breeze against her face, the warm sand at her feet.
This is where she belonged. This was worth fighting for.
Booker returned a moment later, brown bag in hand. “Dinner. Your favorite.” He dug into the bag and pulled out a jar. “Bread and peanut butter.”
“Peanut butter?” A wide grin spread across her lips.
“Seems Yesemie shares your obsession for this stuff. I found a secret stash in the back of his jeep.” A moment later he held up a loaf of bread.
“How nice of him.”
“Didn’t find anything else but some water.”
“When you work in a warehouse, why do you need supplies in your car?” Sandra joked, knowing they wouldn’t get far with minimal supplies.
As if reading her thoughts, Booker tipped up her chin. Gave her a soft kiss on the nose. “Don’t worry, Doc. We’ll figure it out.”
“I know.” She smiled, holding the moment in her heart.
With a wink, he stepped away. “You grab the bread.” He settled next her, unscrewed the jar top and unsheathed his knife. “He also left us a few machine guns and explosives.”
“Lucky us.” Sandra laughed, then tore off a big chunk of the bread and held it up.
Booker went still for a second, enjoying the soft, feminine sound as it rolled through her chest, caught on her smile.
He scooped out some peanut butter and spread it across the bread in her hand, deliberately avoiding the touch of their fingertips.
Greedy, she sank her teeth into it and closed her eyes. She ran her tongue over her lips to catch any extra.
“Doc?”
Her eyes opened. Booker stared at her mouth; desire burned hot and pure in his eyes.
“If you keep eating like that, you’re not going to finish,” he warned, his voice low.
A ripple of feminine pride and excitement trickled through her. For the first time in a long time, a few bars of her birdcage broke away.
“Sorry,” she said and almost meant it. Covering a smile, she set her bread carefully in her lap and reached over to him.
He jumped just a bit at the contact of her fingers on his.
“Let me.” She took the knife from him. Before you hurt yourself, she wanted to add, but didn’t.
“You know, there has always been a question I wanted to ask you,” she mentioned instead. She spread the peanut butter, folded over the bread and handed it to him.
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why didn’t you ever ask, Doc?”
“Seriously?” she scoffed. “We had so many secrets between us, Booker, I’d trip over them on my way from our bed to the bathroom.”
Booker didn’t argue her point. Instead he took a bite of bread, chewed for a moment. “There never seemed to be a good time to work on us.”
“We slept together, but we weren’t intimate,” Sandra remarked. “No hand-holding. No quiet, romantic evenings.”
But with no resentment. Just too many walls. Too much responsibility. They were entrenched in their own paths.
They were...her parents, she realized, surprised. Her father buried in his career, her mother in her duties as his wife.
“And you want to know why,” he stated.
“No, actually. I think I figured that one out myself,” Sandra answered truthfully. Somehow her inner radar gravitated toward a man she was comfortable with. A man driven by his past. While responsible and reliable, he was void of emotion. No, she corrected, a man able to suppress and control his emotions.
A man like her father.
“I always wondered how you got your first name.”
“It’s a family name,” he replied, surprised. “Booker was my mother’s maiden name. She came from an affluent background. Her family was big on making sure all the descendants of the women carried their name.”
“Booker?” Sandra frowned. “As in Francis Booker, heir to Booker Enterprises?”
“The same.”
Booker Enterprises was old money. Mayflower money. Been around longer than the Rockefellers. Most known for oil. They had their fingers in every major technical and urban industry.
“Wow.” Sandra blew out the word. “But I thought... Quamar told me once...”
“That I came from a poor background?”
She nodded.
“That’s because I did. On my father’s side.”
“Your father?”
“His name was Malcolm McKnight. My mother met my father on a drill site she was visiting with her father.” Booker took another bite of his sandwich and paused for a moment. “At the time, my grandfather, Samuel Booker, was interested in investing in oil.”
“Samuel as in Sam the horse?”
“Yes. He bought the rights to a drilling site my father worked on.”
“That’s when your father met your mother.”
Booker nodded. “They were sixteen. Just kids. But they fell in love on sight. The trouble was that my mother was an only child with only her father left to raise her. My grandmother had died when my mother was young. My grandfather had wanted my mom to marry into their circle.”