LITMIR.BIZ

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with both hands and tried to get her breathing under control.

      He had asked her out! Not a date. Nobody in their right mind could call it a date. It was a thank-you offer. Maybe even a pity offer. But he’d made it, and she’d accepted, and he still wanted to do something else for her. “Anything,” he’d said. “Anything at all.”

      Oh, brother. Would she ever get a chance like this again?

      ALEX SPENT ANOTHER HOUR in the stable, just leaning over the top of the bottom half of the stall door, watching Khalahari and Khalid.

      They would lose Jabbar soon, it was inevitable. He’d had a long, good life, and enriched their lives as much with his presence as with the foals he provided that made up the bedrock of The Desert Rose, the growing legend of The Desert Rose as a premier Arabian stud.

      Jabbar. The last legacy of his parents, the only thing besides his two brothers and the golden ring he wore on his right hand, left to remind him of Sorajhee.

      There were so few memories, clouded by the passage of time and the fact that he’d only been four-and-a-half years old when he was suddenly ripped from his mother’s arms and put on a plane, traveling halfway across the world to a new land, a new family.

      He could remember his father, but only vaguely. A tall man, who never hesitated to bend down to speak to a small child. A man whose face Alex believed he saw in his own mirror as he shaved each morning, now that he was thirty-two, already a year older than his father had been when he was murdered.

      Flashes of a long white robe. A bright white smile in a swarthy, sun-kissed face. Big hands, hands that gently held those so much smaller. The soft musical murmur of Arabic, a language Alex once knew but now had almost totally forgotten.

      That was a sin, and a shame. But Uncle Randy had seen no need to keep up the boys’ Arabic lessons, or so he’d said, right up until the day he’d sat the three of them down and told them otherwise.

      Hiding. They’d been in hiding for twenty-seven years, all of them. Hiding from their Uncle Azzam, who still ruled in Sorajhee. Alex kept up on the news about his homeland, although he didn’t say anything to his brothers, his aunt or his uncle. There was no need to worry them, make them think that he might plan to one day go back, claim his rightful throne.

      It was too late for that. Years and years too late. All that was in Sorajhee were the graves of his parents. He didn’t know the people, didn’t even know much of the language. His life, his memories, and those of his brothers, were here in Texas.

      Alex knew his father had died trying to make Sorajhee strong, safe from invasion, and that his mother had died to avenge their father and reclaim the throne for her sons. Now, with the passage of years, and the borders still firmly closed, Azzam’s rule was keeping Sorajhee out of the mainstream, keeping open only the ports that were the main income-making industry in the small country. Nobody save the natives of Sorajhee were allowed outside the ports, inside the country that was nearly an island, with only one strip of well-defended border touching the mainland. It was as if Azzam had built a high fence on three sides of the country and marked it “No Trespassing.”

      Sorajhee was the past, both because of the time Alex had spent away from the land, and because his Uncle Azzam had decreed it to be so. But Azzam had been lucky so far. Keeping his ports open had kept the greedy eyes of the Middle East turned away from him for years, concentrating them instead on oil-rich countries like the neighboring Balahar.

      But nothing stands still, and Alex, from his reading, felt sure that Sorajhee and Balahar would soon have to unite, as his father had prophesied, or they would both be overrun.

      No. This was no place for a son of Ibrahim Bin Habib El Jeved. Enough Jeved blood had already been spilled, enough Jeved lives had been altered forever. Let his Uncle Azzam realize his brother had been right, or let him perish. Alex sometimes wondered if he was fatalistic or if what he felt inside him was the age-old Arab belief in fate. Either way, the fate of Sorajhee was not his. That he did know.

      Alex had a job, a sacred trust his mother had given him that last day. He was to take care of his brothers, of Jabbar. He was to help his uncle Randy. And that is what he’d done. He was at peace with his past and with his future.

      “I just heard,” Cade said, leaning on the wood beside Alex. “I got back from town a little while ago, and Mickey stopped me to give the good news. He’s a beaut, Alex. A true son of his sire. He’ll be black as Jabbar, too. Glorious and proud. But that will take a while.”

      Alex smiled at his brother. “First he has to learn to control all four legs at one time,” he said. His brother, youngest of the twins by a few very important minutes as far as the succession went, was the Coleman who had chosen running the business end of The Desert Rose as his life’s work. Both Cade and Mac resembled Alex, but there was something softer, more human, about their dark handsomeness. More of Rose lived in her twins.

      Alex flicked at Cade’s lapel. “A suit? You’re wearing a suit? Where did you say you went? And what’s her name?”

      “Business, big brother, I went into Austin on business,” Cade corrected him, then shook his head. “Okay, and a girl.”

      “There’s always a girl, isn’t there, Cade?” Alex said, turning to walk away from the stall. He was filthy, a little bloody, and suddenly he wanted a hot shower and clean clothes. “If you weren’t so damn good at your job, I’d have to call you a playboy, you know.”

      “Well, now I’m insulted. I’d like to be considered a playboy. Has a certain ring to it, you know,” Cade said, obviously joking. “Not that anyone could call you a playboy, big brother. When was the last time you were out on a date? Your Bridle High School senior prom?” They walked across the stable yard together, Cade careful of his dress shoes, heading for the main house.

      “Just because I don’t see one girl for drinks at seven, and another at ten for a late dinner, and call that a double date, doesn’t mean I don’t have a social life. As a matter of fact,” he said, knowing he was about to put his foot in his mouth, “I have a date tonight.”

      Cade stopped dead outside the front door of the house. “Excuse me? I couldn’t have heard that right. You have a date? Has anyone notified the newspapers? Who is it?”

      “Hannah Clark,” Alex muttered under his breath as he opened the front door, gestured for Cade to enter the house ahead of him.

      “Oh, Hannah Clark,” Cade said, wiping his feet on the mat, his attention momentarily distracted, as he knew his Aunt Vi didn’t think he was too old to be scolded for tracing stable yard dirt into her house. “Whoa! Wait a minute. Did I just say Hannah Clark?”

      “Actually, I said it.” Alex hung his hat on one of the hooks just inside the foyer. “She delivered the foal, a breech, and I wanted to thank her.”

      “Uh-huh,” Cade said, watching as Alex stripped off his jacket and hung it on another peg. “Aunt Vi hates when you do that, you know. She says the rack is just for show. You weren’t even supposed to come in the front door in your boots. But, then, having a date with the Hannah Slip-on-a-banana Clark has probably scrambled your brains. Hannah Clark, Alex? Really?”

      “Oh, shut up,” Alex said, stomping off to the wing of the house where he and his brothers all had their own rooms.

      Chapter Two

      Half of Hannah’s wardrobe now resided on her bed, on a small chair in the corner and draped over the desk in front of the windows. And still she didn’t know what she would wear.

      Fourteen pairs of jeans. How had she ever accumulated fourteen pairs of jeans? Granted, some of them dated back to her high school days, as she hadn’t grown as much as a quarter inch since the tenth grade. She’d lived in jeans then, as she pretty much lived in jeans now. Jeans, and flannel shirts, or tank tops in the summer.

      The only dresses in her closet were the prom gown she’d worn the night Bobby Taylor stood her up for the sophomore Sweetheart dance and the navy-blue

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