California drivers were not only fools, they were foolhardy.

      The mood he was in, Caz had half a mind to force the VW onto the shoulder of the freeway, yank open the driver’s door and tell the cretin behind the wheel that making a crude gesture to a stranger wasn’t a good idea.

      Luckily for the cretin, he was in a hurry.

      The traffic had been bumper to bumper. When it finally loosened up, he’d waited for the guy ahead to start moving. He hadn’t. Or maybe she hadn’t. Caz had pretty much generated a picture of who was behind the VW’s wheel. A woman. Middle-aged, peering over the steering wheel with trepidation, nervous about the rain.

      The finger-in-the-air thing had changed his mind.

      No gray-haired Nervous Nellie would make such a gesture. She wouldn’t yap on a cell phone while she was driving, either. At least, he thought he’d seen the driver holding a cell phone to her ear. It was hard to tell much of anything because of the rain, and who was it who’d said it never rained in Southern California?

      Hell.

      He had to calm down.

      Driving fast would help. It always did. It was what he did at the end of virtually every meeting with his advisors back home, take one of his cars out on the straight black road that went from one end of Suliyam to the other.

      From no place to nowhere, his mother used to say.

      Caz always thought of her when he was in California. She’d left his father and come here, where she’d been born, when he was ten. She died when he was twelve, and he’d only spent summers with her for the intervening two years.

      “Won’t you come home with me, Mama?” he’d ask at the end of each summer. And she’d hug him tightly and say she’d come home soon…

      But she never did.

      He’d hated her for a little while, when he was thirteen or fourteen and Hakim let slip that she’d left his father and him because she’d despised living in Suliyam. He hadn’t known that. His father had always told him his mother had gone back to her beloved California for a holiday, that she’d taken ill and had to stay there to get the proper medical care.

      It turned out only part of that was true. She’d gotten sick and died in California, all right, but she hadn’t gone for a holiday. She’d abandoned everything. Her husband, her adopted country…

      Her son.

      Caz frowned, saw an opening in the next lane and shot into it.

      It had all happened more than twenty years ago. Water under the bridge, as the Americans said.

      He had more important things to think about.

      Caz sighed. He was wound up like a spring about tonight’s dinner appointment. He had to relax. That woman was to blame for his bad mood. What an aggressive female! A feminist, to the core.

      Was that the genie in the bottle he’d be setting loose, once he began implementing his plans back home? Maybe, and maybe he’d regret it, but you couldn’t lead a nation into the twenty-first century without granting rights and privileges to all its citizens.

      Even women.

      Surely they wouldn’t all turn out like…

      No. He wasn’t going to think about Megan O’Connell. He’d wasted too much time on her already. All in all, this day had been a mess.

      First that abominable meeting this morning. He’d taken one look at the buffet table, the champagne, the people staring at him and he’d been tempted to turn and walk out. He hadn’t, of course. He was his nation’s emissary. Manners, protocol, were everything.

      How come he’d forgotten that with the woman? He’d lost it with her and he knew it but, damn it, she’d deserved it. That temper. Those threats…

      Those eyes, that mouth, the certainty that the body beneath the awful suit was meant for pleasure…

      “Hell,” Caz said, and stepped harder on the gas.

      Business. That was what he had to concentrate on tonight.

      It was what he’d wanted to concentrate on this morning, but Simpson had screwed it up. Instead of serious discussion with the man who’d written that excellent proposal, he’d had to endure an eternity of all those people fawning over him.

      Bad enough his own countrymen insisted on treating him as if he were Elvis risen from the dead. That, at least, was understandable. It was tradition, the same tradition, unchanged for centuries, that would make implementing his plans a rough sell. His advisors would look aghast at his determination to create a modern infrastructure in Suliyam by opening it to foreign investors. He intended to commit much of his own vast fortune to the plan, as well.

      His people would balk, protest, tell him such things could not be done.

      It was tradition.

      And it was tradition, too, that said he could not possibly bring a woman into Suliyam as his financial advisor.

      He had explained all of that to Simpson from the first. He knew there were bright, well-educated women in the west. Hadn’t his mother been one of them? But Suliyam wasn’t ready for such things. He supposed it was one of the reasons his parents’ marriage had fallen apart.

      He hadn’t told that to Simpson, of course, but he’d made it clear he would not be able to work with anyone but a man.

      ‘‘No problem, your worship,’’ Simpson had said.

      “I am not called by that title,” Caz had told him pleasantly. “Please, just address me as Sheikh Qasim.”

      Hakim had given him a look that meant he didn’t approve. Caz had ignored him. Hakim was devoted and loyal, but he believed in the old ways and those days were coming to an end.

      “I will assign my best person to write this proposal, your majesty,” Simpson had replied.

      Caz put on his signal light and shot across three lanes of traffic to the exit ramp.

      He’d given up correcting the little man. What did it matter how Simpson addressed him as long as he found the right man to get the job done?

      He had. The proposal was everything Caz had hoped for and more. He’d searched hard for the right firm to handle the account, narrowed his choices to three and asked them to come up with written proposals for the best possible utilization of investment funds in Suliyam.

      Three months later, each company had submitted a fine proposal. Still, making the final decision had been easy. The T S and M report stood head and shoulders above the others. Caz knew he’d found his man.

      Simpson was an annoyance, but Frank Fisher, whose name was on the proposal, was brilliant. He was the right person for the job: logical, methodical, pragmatic.

      All the things Megan O’Connell wasn’t.

      The woman was a creature of temper and temperament, all blistering heat one moment and bone-chilling ice the next. Their encounter proved, as if proof