Эбби Грин – Summer Sheikhs: Sheikh's Betrayal / Breaking the Sheikh's Rules / Innocent in the Sheikh's Harem (страница 15)

‘She knows because it’s the reason marriage negotiations aren’t taking place yet. Till your father gets back from the dig. But by all means let’s not discuss the dig if you’d rather not!’ Desi said. ‘Let’s talk about something else. We’ve made love two nights running. Have you got the closure you wanted?’

Immediately she wished the words unsaid.

Salah turned his head and looked at her with a look so smouldering she felt physical heat. Memory roared up, making her weak.

‘Have you?’ he countered.

‘I wasn’t the one looking for closure. Why won’t you give me a straight answer?’

‘You were looking for something. Have you got it yet?’

‘I was looking to go to your father’s dig,’ she snapped. How much hurt he could still inflict! ‘Are we there yet? No? Well, then, not.’

He flicked a glance into her eyes.

‘So you didn’t come here to see me?’

‘Salah, how many times do you need that question answered?’

‘Truthfully, only once.’

‘By which you mean, you won’t accept any answer till you hear what you want to hear. I’m happy to oblige. What answer would you like? Let’s get it out of the way.’

‘Desi.’ His voice was almost pleading, and her eyes jerked involuntarily to his face. ‘I know that you are not here for the reason you say. I know you. You can’t tell me a lie and I don’t know it.’

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she said, as bitterness welled up in her throat. ‘You don’t know me now, you didn’t know me then. You couldn’t have written that letter if you’d known the first thing about me.’

He shook his head at the attempt to derail him. ‘Tell me why you have come.’

‘Not from any motive you are contemplating.’

‘Is that an admission? What motive, then?’

‘Oh, leave it alone!’

The honeyed languour was gone from her body. Sunlight was beating into the car with such ferocity she was getting a headache. Heat and sun rarely bothered her, she blossomed in the heat, but this was different. A strip of chrome on the wing mirror was reflecting the sun straight into her eyes. She realized she hadn’t put on her sunglasses, opened her bag and pulled them out.

‘Hiding your eyes won’t help.’

‘On the contrary, it may prevent a headache,’ she said sharply. A herd of camels grazed on nothing in front of a settlement of half a dozen mudbrick houses. Tourists pressed cameras against the windows of a bus, snapping pictures as they passed. The highway curved around to the west; Mount Shir was behind them now. Ahead was an endless stretch of sand, shimmering in the heat, the highway a silver-grey ribbon laid across the vastness.

The road to nowhere, she thought.

After lunch in a small village restaurant, where they waited out the midday heat for another hour, Salah turned the four-wheel drive vehicle off-road and struck out across the dunes.

Now they were completely alone. Within a few minutes they had left all signs of civilisation behind, and were surrounded by the rich emptiness of the desert. Heat shimmered over the dunes; the sun was a white blast furnace against a blue of startling intensity; the pale sand, broken by rocky outcrops now and then, stretched to infinity. Only when she turned to look back at Mount Shir was there any relief for her eyes.

After several hours, the sun began to set ahead of them, the sky turning fiery red and orange and the sun getting fatter and heavier as it approached the horizon. As she watched, the sky shaded to purple, and now the sun was a massive orange ball, larger than she recalled ever seeing it before. When it began to sink behind the horizon, the sky above turned midnight blue.

The sun disappeared in a blaze; the sky went black very quickly. And still they drove.

Salah did not put on the headlights. The world was shadows. There was no human light visible anywhere, just stars and a moon almost at the full, bathing the dunes in ghostly purple. Desi was seized with a sudden, atavistic dread.

She shifted nervously. ‘When do we stop for the night?’

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘An hour or so. Are you tired?’

She shrugged and took a sip of water from the bottle ever present between them.

‘A little. Aren’t you going to put the headlights on?’

‘What for?’

‘Can you drive in the dark?’

‘Why not?’

‘But how do you know where you’re going?’

Salah laughed. ‘There is only one way to navigate in the desert, Desi—by the sky. In daylight, by the sun. At night, by the stars. My forebears have done it for many thousands of years. Don’t worry—if my ancestors had not been good navigators, I would not be here.’

She laughed, and the strange dread lifted. They spoke little, but a feeling of peace and companionship settled over her as they drove on into the night. She almost forgot the harsh accusations of the morning in her pleasure at being with Salah in a world of two.

She had no idea how long they drove when at last a flickering light appeared in the distance. ‘What’s that? Is that a town?’

‘You will see,’ he said, and flicked on the headlights.

A cluster of strangely patterned tents met her eyes: a Bedouin encampment. By the time they reached it, a party of tall robed men was there to welcome them. Under instruction, Salah parked the Toyota against the wire fence of an enclosure, and they got out to be greeted by the men.

They were a tall race, clearly. The men towered over her in their flowing robes and turbans, with the dignified bearing of those who have never lost their connection to the land. They chatted with Salah in soft welcoming voices and led them past the wire enclosure, which proved to be a camel corral. In the flickering torchlight as they passed she saw a dozen beasts crouching on the ground, chewing and whuffling, their outrageous long curling eyelashes made even more seductive by moonshadow. Her heart leapt with the alien magic.

They were led to the centre of the encampment of tents, where there was torchlight and a charcoal brazier. Other men were moving about, laying a carpet with plates and food. Another took their bags and disappeared.

‘Is this a hotel?’ Desi asked in amazement.

‘It is a nomad camp. But the people are by tradition very hospitable. They are used to strangers appearing out of the desert. There are guided tours of the desert for foreigners. Such tourists nowadays often stay with the desert nomads like this.’

Desi was enchanted. A tall moustachioed man of impressive bearing and impregnable dignity bent to offer her a silver basin and a bar of soap, poured water over her hands as she washed, then gave her a weather-beaten square of cloth to dry them.

‘Is this a work camp?’ she asked. ‘Why are there no women?’

‘Women do not serve strangers,’ Salah said. ‘In the morning probably some will come and show you their craft work.’

‘Lovely! What sort of things do they make?’

‘Dolls, pottery, maybe. You will have to wait and see.’

Very soon food was laid before them.

‘Is it the desert air, or is this food totally delicious?’ Desi demanded, falling on it with a reckless abandon that she would have to pay for by eating starvation rations soon.

‘We haven’t eaten since lunch,’ Salah pointed out mildly.

‘Yes, but I’m so used to going without food, it shouldn’t get to me like this,’ Desi said. ‘I’ve been eating far too much since I got here; at this rate I’ll have to fast completely for a week!’

‘Not on this trip, please. The desert is dangerous enough without that.’

Desi nodded, taking his point, and consciously slowed her eating.

‘They use so much oil!’ she protested. ‘In the palace, too. Is that what makes it so flavourful? How on earth does everybody in this country not turn into an elephant?’

Salah laughed aloud. ‘Olive oil,’ he corrected her, as if he were talking about gold. ‘Olive oil is very healthy, as well as giving its delicious flavour to food. We grow our own species of olive. Barakati olive oil is rare but very prized in the world, and very little is exported. Its flavour is excellent.’

When the last of the food had been presented, they were politely left with only each other and the stars. Above them a shooting star rushed along a golden pathway to oblivion.

Suddenly the night air was heavy around them, weighted with awareness. And now that there was nothing to cloak it, their hungry need rose up like heat from the sand to cloud the space between them.

‘They are preparing our tent,’ Salah said, his voice low and hoarse. ‘Will you sleep with me, tonight, Desi? I want you.’

Chapter Eleven

HER heart leapt with yearning, her body melted into instant need. But she looked at him for a moment, resisting, remembering his harsh words earlier in the day.

‘Tell me what it means to you, that you want me,’ she said quietly.

‘It means you are a beautiful, sensual woman.’

‘Not good enough. Next answer.’