Seduced By The Sheikh Doctor - A Small Town Doctor Romance Read online

  Seduced by the Sheikh Doctor

  Holly Rayner

  Contents

  Seduced by the Sheikh Doctor

  Want More?

  1. Paige

  2. Kehlan

  3. Paige

  4. Kehlan

  5. Paige

  6. Kehlan

  7. Paige

  8. Kehlan

  9. Paige

  10. Kehlan

  11. Paige

  12. Kehlan

  13. Paige

  14. Kehlan

  15. Paige

  16. Kehlan

  17. Paige

  18. Kehlan

  19. Paige

  20. Kehlan

  21. Paige

  22. Kehlan

  23. Paige

  Epilogue

  The Sheikh’s Small Town Baby

  Introduction

  1. Teresa

  2. Jabir

  3. Teresa

  4. Teresa

  5. Jabir

  6. Teresa

  7. Teresa

  More Series by Holly Rayner

  Seduced by the Sheikh Doctor

  Copyright 2018 by Holly Rayner

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit written permission of the author.

  All characters depicted in this fictional work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses, events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.

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  Chapter 1

  Paige

  The cool air of early Washington spring nibbled at Paige’s nose, but she paid it no mind. All her focus and attention were on the small backpack in her hands, as she went over its contents one last time. Everything had to be there. Nothing could be missing. She just needed to be sure.

  “Mom, I’m gonna be late! Hurry up!”

  Normally, Paige might rebuke her son for that tone. She’d raised him better than that, and at nine years old, he was usually a patient, kind, quiet boy. But this was no ordinary morning, and instead, she just muttered under her breath that she was trying to concentrate.

  Everything was there. Of course it was. She’d packed it the day before and she’d rechecked it before they’d left the house this morning, but she couldn’t help the final check. It gave her one more precious moment with her son, before he left her for three whole days.

  She could hear her mother’s voice in her head, laughingly calling her a helicopter mom, but she didn’t care. For nine years, Dylan had been her whole world. It had been just the two of them since the day he was born. She wouldn’t apologize for holding him close as he grew.

  “Mommm, come on!”

  But, of course, there’s always a time to let go.

  “Okay, I think that’s everything,” she said, zipping up the backpack and holding it up. The young boy turned while she threaded his arms through the straps, cherishing the simple familiarity of the routine with a sentimentality as though he were going to be gone three months rather than three days.

  “Now, you remember what I told you about calling me if you have any problems at all?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “And you have my number?”

  “It’s on my phone, Mom.”

  She resisted the urge to check to be sure the cheap cellphone she’d gotten him for emergencies was tucked away in the inside pocket of his backpack. She knew it was. She’d just seen it, for crying out loud!

  She turned him around so that she could see his face, even as he strained his neck to look at where his fellow students were already boarding the bus.

  “Okay, and you have your Aunt Hayley’s address written down, right? She lives there in Seattle. If worst comes to worst and you don’t have your phone, you can always get to her, you understand? Find a police officer, give them her address, and we’ll work it out from there.”

  “Mommm, I knoooow.”

  Of course he did. He was a smart kid, and a trip like this—venturing out into the wide world—was well overdue. He’d have a good time, she felt sure of it, even as she hated to see him go. But she had to, so she gave his arms one final, affectionate pat.

  “Okay, then, go get on the bus with your friends! And don’t forget to have fun!”

  It always came almost as a surprise to Paige how quickly Dylan could get his little arms around her neck, and how tightly his little muscles could hold her. And even after nine long years of single motherhood, the love she felt swell in her heart when he did so still caught her off guard.

  “I will, Mom. Love you!”

  “I love you, too, kiddo,” she said, doing her best not to cry. She would not be the mother who cried at the field trip drop-off.

  And, just like that, she was watching his back as he ran off towards the bus. She sniffled a little. Sniffles didn’t count.

  She could hear the background mumble of the other moms and dads commiserating with each other. No one approached her. That was the thing about always being in a hurry—eventually, people grew to expect that you couldn’t stay and talk and they didn’t try to get you to do so. And if there was one thing that had defined her life for the last nine years more than anything else, it was having too much to do and too little time to do it in.

  Of course, that was all under the assumption that she had Dylan with her. As she got into her depressingly quiet car, she began to realize just how empty the next three days would be without him.

  But that was all right. She’d planned for this. Over the last nine years, she’d gotten good at finding a way to plan ahead for everything. Her life didn’t really work unless she had it all planned out. And this even included how she would avoid facing the cold, empty house that she would be left with, now that Dylan was off on his three-day adventure.

  Paige was going to have a date. An actual, real date, with dinner and wine and everything. It would the first one she’d ever been on, she realized with a start as she pulled out of the parking lot. Since Kyle, Dylan’s father, had left her pregnant and alone at nineteen, she had never gotten into the dating scene. She’d decided early on that Dylan would just be enough for her, at least for the foreseeable future.

  But tonight, maybe all that was going to change. Paige felt her heartbeat rise at the thought.

  She’d gotten serious with screening her potential online dates, and had been careful to weed out anyone that might not be worth the precious time she was giving him. The dating site she’d signed up for was the best reviewed one she could find, and she’d very carefully examined each of the matches as they’d come in. She’d been picky—too picky, her sister Hayley had said, on one of their phone calls—but she was glad of that pickiness, now. The man she had selected to be the first real first date of her adult life was just the sort of man she had been looking for, and she was excited to meet him.

  Her mind idly went over the details of what she would wear as she maneuvered her car towards her daily destination. She wasn’t sure how she was going to focus on waitressing at the Coffee Cup in between worrying about Dylan and distracting herself with anticipation of her date tonight, but she would have to try. Money was tight. It always was.

  As she walked in the front door of Stockton’s best (and only) locally-sourced, semi-gourmet, quick and friendly diner,
she was distracted by a buzzing in her pocket. So much so, that she nearly ran into Alvin, head chef extraordinaire.

  “Sorry, Alvin!” she said, stepping out of the way of the threshold to avoid any further collisions, even though there was no one else scheduled to work this early on a day in their least busy season.

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, doll,” he said. And, in spite of the stressfulness of the day, and as much as she already missed Dylan, she smiled.

  Alvin didn’t normally talk like that—like a character from a black and white movie—but he seemed to have a way of knowing when she could use a smile, and pulled the character out then. Maybe it was because she’d known the old man since she was a little girl that he could tell that a day was challenging, even just from the slightest run-in. But whatever the reason, she was grateful for it. It calmed her a bit, in the midst of the chaos.

  But that was all undone when she saw that the buzzing she had felt was a notification from the dating app. Her heart leapt in her chest, which she took as a good sign that this date tonight was not, in fact, going to be a waste of time.

  But her heart sank just as fast when she tapped through and saw the actual contents of the message.

  “Gotta take a raincheck on tonight! Things at work are crazy. Still excited to meet you!”

  Yeah, sure he was. So excited that he was putting her off to some undefined time in the future on the day of their first meeting. Those exclamation points aren’t fooling anyone, bud.

  She tried to let the bitterness fade. She knew that, ordinarily, if she hadn’t just seen her son off into an uncertain world, she would think more charitably of him, and she did her best to be that person. Maybe it was a legitimate excuse, she granted. Maybe he meant it.

  Still, it was a disappointment, and Paige regretted letting her hopes get raised as high as she had allowed them to get. And, more than anything, she regretted that her perfectly planned avoidance of her lonely, quiet house had fallen to pieces.

  It was going to be a long, long three days.

  Chapter 2

  Kehlan

  Kehlan was scowling. He knew this. He had a tendency to scowl when he was concentrating, and always had. Right now, the subject of his scowl— and his intense concentration—was a chart that he’d taken with him from the hospital.

  Theoretically, he was supposed to be taking a break from hospital duties and tending to patients for the next several days. As of twenty minutes ago, he was supposed to be giving his complete, undivided attention to the conference which he would be attending in Washington, and which he was currently on his way to. But as he had been walking out the doors of the hospital, he hadn’t been able to resist turning back and darting back towards his office so that he could download an electronic copy of this particular patient file onto his tablet.

  There was something bothering him about this this one, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Her symptoms seemed to be consistent with a disease that was unheard of in a woman her age, but with so much information missing, it was hard to be sure. She was a member of one of the tribes that lived in the far east of the country, and while she had been an Al-Derran citizen her whole life, and all Al-Derran citizens had a right to free healthcare, this was her first trip into the hospital in her life.

  As he thought about it, he felt a look of satisfied realization replacing the scowl on his face. This was what he loved about medicine—the puzzle, all wrapped up in helping those in need. Because, no matter what, no matter the level of wealth or influence, everyone who walked into his hospital with a problem was a person in need.

  He picked up his phone, called the hospital, and spoke with the doctor who would be managing his patients.

  “She’s older than she told us,” he said, to the confusion of the other man. “Much older. When you’ve finished treating her, you should get the secret to her skincare routine; you’ll make a fortune.”

  “Kehlan, aren’t you on your way to the conference?”

  Kehlan rolled his eyes.

  “Yes, Hakim.”

  “We talked about this, Kehlan.”

  There was something nice about the way Hakim hassled him. It had always made him feel as though he was just a normal doctor working at the hospital, and that there was no difference in the way he was seen by the other doctors because of his family’s position.

  It wasn’t true, of course. But it was nice to imagine it was.

  “I promise you, this is the last patient file I will look at. From here on out, my mind is only on the conference. Professional enrichment. All of that. But first…”

  A long pause on the line, and then a sigh.

  “Oh, all right. You better be telling me the truth, though. What patient was this again?”

  Kehlan went over the information again, and he could picture his colleague on the other end of the line, doing his thoughtful nod, complete with beard stroking.

  “I see, I see. That seems to make sense. But why would she lie about that? There is no room for vanity in healthcare. She ought to know that.”

  Kehlan shrugged, though no one was there to see him in the back seat of his expensive car.

  “Pride, I suppose. Some women just don’t want to admit they’re getting older. But you see how this changes things, right?”

  The other man agreed, and Kehlan spoke with him briefly about the woman’s care, and how it should change if he got her to admit that she had lied on the intake forms.

  “Okay,” Hakim said, with the same heavy sigh as he had earlier. “Thank you, Kehlan. But you really must go, now. Promise me this is the last time I’ll hear from you for the next three days.”

  Kehlan chuckled. He wondered if Hakim knew he enjoyed him hassling this way. He really seemed to lean into it, at times.

  “I will certainly try.”

  “I hope you do more than try, Your Highness,” his friend mock-grumbled, before wishing him a pleasant trip and hanging up.

  Kehlan smiled as he ended the call. Methodically, he tapped through the process of deleting the patient file from his tablet, consistent with the rules on patient confidentiality. He always made a point to himself of playing by the rules and fulfilling each and every obligation that any other doctor would need to, even though—as a member of the ruling family of Al-Derra—technically, there were very few rules that applied to him at all.

  After the files were deleted, he found himself still staring at the tablet. The mystery had been solved and the patient had been saved from her own pride getting in the way of her medical care, but still, Kehlan felt something bothering him about the case.

  And then, all on its own, something clicked.

  “Driver, change of plans. I’m stopping by the palace first.”

  “Son! This is a surprise!”

  His mother greeted him with all the exaggerated grace that she did everything, and Kehlan appreciated her consistency, if not the strange way it made all of their interactions more formal than they should have been. But it was her way, and he had never questioned it. The Sheikha didn’t stand for questioning; he knew that as well as he knew anything.

  “Yes, I had a patient that reminded me of you and I thought I should come see you before I left. Call it superstition, but I think when something reminds you of a loved one, it’s the universe telling you to go and see them.”

  His mother laughed, though her laugh seemed a little bit strained. Since Kehlan’s father had died, she’d always found it amusing when he would say things like that, in imitation of him. As a man of science, Kehlan didn’t agree with much of his late father’s superstitious beliefs, but remembering them to his mother made them grow on him all the same.

  “And are your patients still entertaining you?” his mother asked, settling into a chair. “What did this one do to remind you of me? Is she anyone I know?”

  Kehlan sighed and settled in across from her. He hadn’t meant this conversation to be long. His flight at the airport would wait for him—one
of the advantages of having a private plane—but that didn’t mean that he wanted to delay it too long. The conference wouldn’t wait the way the plane would.

  But he was already starting to get a sense that this would apparently be one of those conversations, where his mother found a way of lacing her disapproval in between questions that he needed to answer to avoid him calling her on it and objecting, and them digging into the years-long disagreement they had over his choice of career.

  “No one you know,” he said curtly.

  “Oh? And how did she remind you of me?”

  Kehlan smiled and reached forward to squeeze his mother’s hand.

  “Her pride.”

  At that, his mother laughed, and Kehlan thought that they might just have left the sticky matter of his career go by. But just when he thought they’d moved on, his mother circled back to it.

  “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed this business at the hospital,” she said. “You know, we’ve always tried to give you everything, even if that everything is letting you entertain yourself in this way.”

  Kehlan raised a weary eyebrow.

  “It’s not really about enjoying it, mother. And it’s certainly not entertainment. I don’t think any of my patients would be happy to hear the management of their healthcare called entertainment.”

  The Sheikha shook her head and patted his hand.

  “Oh, no, of course it isn’t. I see you don’t believe that it is. But you do enjoy it, don’t you? After all, that’s why your father and I let you do it. Don’t tell me we allowed you all this for nothing.”

  Kehlan sighed. He wished his intuition hadn’t been right. He wished that they weren’t going to delve into this, especially not when he was wanting to leave as soon as possible. But here they were.

  “I don’t remember you and father allowing me to do much of anything.”