Read Online Sheikh's Scandalous Mistress by Jessica Brooke, Ella Brooke - Free Book Online

growled as he nibbled the skin on her neck. “Then all those other men were fools.”
    “I love the way you say that,” she said, but her voice grew quiet, and he wasn’t sure she quite believed him.
    “And yet, you seem like there’s something huge weighing you down. Would you like to talk about it?”
    “Well, I feel like I’ve been hijacked a bit. I’m never like this, but all this stress has been building on me for over six months and it’s only gotten worse since I got sent here.”
    “You make it sound as if Abu Dhabi is Siberia. As if coming to Ali Babba’s and to me was a punishment.”
    “Maybe it was. I angered a very powerful man in my country.”
    “May I ask who?”
    She sighed and shook her head. “Senator Darryl Jackson. Have you heard of him?”
    He frowned and thought over what he knew of American politics. He kept up with what he could, and he mainly focused on the president or on the movers and shakers of Wall Street, people he needed to go to in order to get financing for his casino or other projects. The senator’s name didn’t ring any bells.
    “Sorry, I don’t know him.”
    “He’s been in power a long time, and no one knows it yet, but I’ve been working for six months to link him to illegal arms dealing and funding to some extremely powerful Central American drug cartels. His people didn’t like that, and there were huge suits threatened at the Washington Sentinel . The compromise was either I get exiled to the fluffy beat or I get fired. This was the best I could do.”
    He nodded again and kissed her throat, letting his tongue trail over the pulse point near her clavicle. “That assuredly explains the chip on your shoulder and the fierce tongue.”
    “I bet you’d like my fierce tongue.”
    “That I know I would,” he said. “I…do you need my help? Maybe I can put some of my own intelligence detail on helping find more concrete evidence to nail Jackson to the wall.”
    She quirked her head back at him, angling her body so that she could see him fully. “I can’t do that. This is my fight, the man I’ve spent time focusing on. I’ll get him, and I’ll get him with even more research and tapping of my sources than before. You know,” she huffed, “after I get back from Japan or South Africa or Singapore, wherever else there’s a resort opening or a celebrity wedding. I’m supposed to be on my tour of the quote-unquote glamorous life until at least Christmas.”
    “When there’s a punishment, then it really does stick, doesn’t it?”
    “My editor did stick up for me. I should be fired and blacklisted. I have no doubt that when unbridled, Senator Jackson has all that power. He may have more,” she added, her eyes clouding with dark thoughts, their blue somehow dampened even as her voice grew low and thoughtful.
    He grabbed her chin and forced her to look him directly in the eyes. “Are you in physical danger?”
    “I can’t let that bother me.”
    “That’s not what I asked,” he said, feeling fear flare through his gut.
    He’d known his share of power-hungry dignitaries and rulers among the allies of Abu Dhabi. There were definitely men among them that he knew would stop at nothing to eliminate threats. Somehow, he was getting the feeling that his reporter was underplaying the danger she was in, that this Jackson was not a man who would take resistance or exposes lightly.
    If at all.
    “He’s not tried anything since I got here. That’s all I know. I think he was happy to basically bury my career, but you know that old saying about phoenixes rising from the ashes,” she said, a hungry glint now back in her eyes. That worried him as well. It was one thing to be brave but quite another to be downright foolhardy. “I just am in journalistic hell.”
    “But there are worthy stories here. You can tell people about the gallery, about the work we’re doing to help with the hidden people of Abu Dhabi. There are stories everywhere, things you can see