Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem

The clear attempt at intimidation irritated her. He might as well have said, I am dangerous whether you love me or hate me.

And I’ve done both, Desi told him silently. But no more. I got through having any feeling for you a long time ago.

‘Funny, so is the Arctic,’ she said aloud, because two could play at the innuendo game. ‘Would it be better to freeze to death, or fry, do you think?’

His mouth tightened. ‘It is better to survive.’

For a moment the scar showed white against the skin drawn tight over his cheekbone. It traced a path to above his ear and was lost in the thick black hair under his keffiyeh.

‘And I guess you’d know,’ she said.

Salah’s been wounded. For one unguarded moment she relived the overwhelming anguish that had hit her with those words. She was astonished to discover how shaken she was by the evidence of how close he had come to death. Her hand ached suddenly, as if with the need to touch. But she wasn’t here to soothe any hurt of Salah’s.

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

As they reached the end of the corridor a uniformed guard, clasping a fist to his chest in salute, opened the door for them. Salah paused to issue instructions to him as Desi passed through into blinding sunlight.

She stopped. ‘My bags!’

Salah continued without pausing. ‘Come,’ was all he said, and his burnous streamed out behind him like a king’s cloak as he stepped out into the hot desert wind.

The heat smacked her, a living thing. Desi stopped to take her first breath of the dry, orange-scented air with its tang of plane diesel.

And suddenly here she was. The place he had promised to bring her, ten long years ago. The place she had dreamt of, yearned for—believed would be her home. The desert, he had assured her, where men were men, where life was lived and love was loved with the deepest intensity. Where passion was a part of nature and human nature.

Where his passion for her would never die.

How many times, under his urgent, loving guidance, had she visualized herself in the desert, and how often, long after it was hopeless, had she wished and pleaded for life to have worked out differently! Begged fate to allow her to retrace the steps that had taken her away from that life with him. Ten long years on, she was here.

And she would give a year of her life to be anywhere else.

‘So hot!’ she cried, trying to shake the feeling. ‘It’s only ten o’clock!’

‘This is not a good time for foreigners in Central Barakat,’ Salah said.

‘By foreigners do you mean any foreigner? Or just me?’

‘Are you so different from ordinary people, Desi? Has fame made you weak?’ he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Not many foreigners come at this time of year, unless to work in the oil fields. Next month will be cooler.’

Next month would be too late. It’ll be hell on earth, Desi, but if you don’t go now, I’m lost. She would never forget the mixture of rage, grief and exhaustion in Sami’s voice, the voice of a woman driven to the edge, fighting not to go over.

She glanced at Salah, wondering again how a boy of such passion as she remembered in him could have turned into a man ready to contemplate what he was now contemplating. But his face was closed, impossible to read.

Ten years ago she had understood every expression as it crossed his face. Now he was unreadable. As well read stone. What had done this to him? His injury? War itself?

A white limousine hummed in quiet readiness at the bottom of the steps. A chauffeur in black trousers, white polo shirt and a headscarf like Salah’s leapt out to open the passenger door. As she slipped inside with Salah, an airport official arrived, carrying the two battered leather satchels that had accompanied her around the world over the past ten years. They were stowed in the trunk, doors banged, and the limo moved off.

And suddenly she was the last place in the world she would ever have chosen to be again: alone in a small space with Salah.

Chapter Two

AT THE height of the heat wave, Desi’s father had accompanied her to Vancouver on a two-day modelling gig. Hating to miss one moment of time shared with Salah, she would have cancelled the engagement if she’d dared, and in the stifling heat of the city, she had wondered, not for the first time, why her friends envied her. She missed Salah with a desperate intensity, and could not wait to get back to the island. When they returned, it was Salah who met them at the ferry dock.

‘Your mother is a little sick with the heat,’ Salah explained, but when he looked at her, Desi knew. The knowledge was like chain lightning in her blood, striking out from her heart again and again, every time she thought of it: he had to come. He couldn’t wait even the extra half hour to see her.

‘It has not rained since you left,’ he told her, and Desi’s heart kicked with what he meant.

‘You’ll want to tell Salah all about your trip,’ her father said, with masterly tact, or, more likely, masterly insensitivity. So she got in the front with Salah while her father sat in the back reading the local paper. But they did not talk much. There was a killing awareness between them, so powerful she felt she might explode with it.

The tarmac was practically steaming in the heat, as if it would melt the tires, and when they turned onto the unpaved road that led to the cottage dust billowed up around them in an impenetrable cloud.

‘Like my country,’ Salah said. ‘Like the desert.’ And Desi half closed her eyes and dreamed that they were there, that he was driving her across the desert to his home.

‘I wish I could see it,’ she whispered. ‘It must be so beautiful, the desert.’

‘Yes, beautiful. Like you.’

He might as well have punched her in the stomach. She had never dreamed love would be like this, gasping for air, every cell of her body ready to burst.

‘Am I?’

‘I will take you to see it one day,’ he promised. ‘Then you will know how beautiful you are.’

‘Yes,’ she said softly, and they looked into each other’s eyes and it was as if the promise were sealed with a kiss.

The kiss came later, as they sat on the dock, wet from swimming, watching as the sunset behind the trees painted the lake a rich gold.

‘In my country I will show you an ocean of sand,’ he said. ‘The shadows at sunset are purple and blue. And every day it is different, because the wind—what do you say?—makes it into shapes.’

‘Sculpts,’ she offered.

‘Sculpts, yes. In the desert the wind is a sculptor. I wish I were a sculptor, Desi,’ he breathed, and his hand moved up to explore the line of her temple, cheek, chin, and then slipped behind her neck under the wet hair.

It was her first kiss, and it was unbelievably, piercingly sweet. It assailed her body as though a thousand tender mouths touched her everywhere at once. With Salah bending over her, their mouths fused, she melted down onto the dock, and the sun-warmed weathered wood against her back added its mite to the overwhelming sensation that poured through her.

Her hand lifted of its own volition to the warm skin of his chest, his shoulder, and a moment later Salah lifted his mouth to look at her. His face was gold and shadow, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. They gazed into each other’s eyes.

‘Desi, I love you,’ he said; she breathed, ‘I love you, Salah,’ and all around them was perfection.

She had never seen real desert so close before. Mountains and sea were her natural background; from her childhood she had never questioned the rightness of that.

Until now. Now, as she watched an eternity of dusky sand pass, smoky tendrils of longing and belonging reached out from the stark landscape into the vehicle, into her being, her self, and clasped her heart.

‘So,’ Salah said, in a harsh voice that immediately brought her back to the now. ‘So, Desi, you come to my country at last.’

She could feel her emotions rising to the bait, and fought down the impulse to rake over their ten-year-old history.

‘Well, I guess you could…’