by Неизвестный
She was alone now because she had chosen it. He would have come to her bed if she’d wavered for one
second. If she’d flicked an eyelash.
Might he still come? She couldn’t be sure. She had said no, but—he might think that if he came to her
room she wouldn’t be able to keep on saying it.
And he’d be right. Desi was afraid. All the defences she thought she’d built up over ten years had
disappeared in the space of one short breath. She was vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been with any other
man. And she didn’t know what he really wanted.
Closure. That was such an extraordinary thing for a man like Salah to say! What closure would sex give
him? You have haunted me, Desi. Was it true? Or did he have some ulterior motive for saying it?
Desi flung the sheet back, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and sat with her head in her hands.
After a moment she got up and began to pace.
The intimacy of the roof garden. The constant harking on the past. The fact he had ordered food he had
lovingly described to her ten years ago. The irresistible way he’d chosen tidbits for her, fed her. Painful
reminders of their love, scorching tokens of intimacy, the actions of a man determined to win back an
old love.
All false. All stage dressing. Salah did not want to win her back. He had made that very plain, a long
time ago.
Why, then?
He wants revenge. The thought dropped into her head with an almost audible click. Four days. Five. He
could find a dozen ways to get revenge, she was sure, alone with her in the desert for five days. But what
could he want revenge for?
Everything that happened had been his own doing.
A few days after he left, Salah had phoned her. He begged her, he pleaded his love. He knew now that it
was jealousy that had motivated him. He had believed that look in her eyes was only for him, and there
it was in the photo, for anyone who looked at her. He had taken refuge in blaming her, too easy to do.
“But I will never do anything like that again, Desi. I will understand myself better.” If only she would
forgive him.
The call came too late. Their argument had shaken Desi to the core, and suddenly all the changes that
before had seemed so easy frightened her. Move away from her family and friends, to a country on the
other side of the world whose language she didn’t speak, whose people and culture and religion she
knew nothing of, where she knew no one save Salah? Have children who would be citizens of another
country?
History was against them, too. That week there had been a graphic television documentary showing a
woman stoned to death in the capital of Kaljukistan. Television news was full of the atrocities towards
women there. Women dying because no male doctor was allowed to attend them. Girls’ schools closed,
women teachers and doctors thrown out of work. Women beaten in the street by armed policemen for
showing a lock of hair.
Desi was deeply frightened. How well did she really know Salah? How could she love him when she
didn’t know who he was?
She was too young by far to handle the terrible, contradictory feelings that raged through her at the
sound of his voice.
“I don’t love you,” she cried.
“You do,” he insisted, but he was young, too. “You love me, Desi. We love each other. I love you! I
love you more than the world. Please, please, Desi, we are going to get married!”
But her wild fears had proved stronger than his young courage.
“You’re just like the Kaljuks!” she accused him at last. “You want to stop me doing anything except stay
at home and have babies!”
Two weeks later she learned from Sami that Salah was in Parvan, fighting alongside Prince Omar and
the Cup Companions. The agonizing pain in her heart told Desi the truth of her own feelings, but there
was no way to tell Salah now.
Desi had felt utterly helpless. She had destroyed something precious, and now that she saw her mistake,
there was no way back.
Before she could think what to do, Leonard J. Patrick came to town.
Leonard J. Patrick was the hot North American modelling agent. He had a nose for what he called raw
star quality. When he came gunning for Desi, her future was practically guaranteed: supermodel status,
celebrity, stardom. And just then, it seemed like the answer.
He swept Desi off to the best consultants on the continent, gave her a movement coach and a personal
trainer. He created a signature look for her.
Desirée. Leo launched her with fanfare, and his nose wasn’t mistaken.
Sometimes she had the feeling, almost too deep to reach, that just because others envied her didn’t mean
the life was right for her. She ached for Salah with a need so deep it burned her.
Salah’s been wounded.
Standing by an ocean, plugging one ear against the music and laughter floating from the balcony above
the exclusive stretch of beach, Desi had stumbled and almost fallen, as if the ricochet from the bullet had
hit her.
“Wounded? How?”
“He was leading the charge on a Kaljuk position,” Sami sobbed out. “Baba’s trying to find out more. We
think he’s in a field hospital….”
“A friend of mine has been wounded in the Parvan-Kaljuk War,” Desi told Leo. “I have to go there.
Please don’t take any more bookings for me right now.”
But hard as he tried, Leo never managed to make space in her booking calendar….
“He’s back in Central Barakat,” Sami told her, sobbing with a mixture of relief and grief. “He’s in the
best hospital, Uncle Khaled says. Oh, God, Desi, it’s his head!”
Desi sent a card, a cute one with a patched up teddy bear. Too shy to say all that was in her heart, she
wrote only a few lines. If he answered, when he answered, she would be braver. She knew he would
answer.
If he could….
At night she dreamed of him. She dreamed he was lost somewhere in the darkness, needing her, calling
her name. But she couldn’t find him, and when she opened her mouth to call, she had no voice.
“He’s out of danger,” Sami reported, after three nightmare weeks. “They’ve taken him home, my aunt is
nursing him there now.”
At last a letter came with a Barakati stamp. She knew, she knew it could only be from Salah, and she
knew, too, that now she would have the courage to face Leo and tell him what she must: her life here
was over. This was not the life for her. She belonged with Salah.
She tore it open in all innocence, her heart wide open.
It was short. Her eyes ran over the few lines, grief clawing at her even before she took in the meaning.
Why do you write me? What can we be to each other now? You betrayed your honour. A man must
marry a woman of honour, or regret his foolishness all the rest of his life.
Nine
T he moonlight coming through the fan of coloured glass over the door threw shadows of red, blue and
green onto her face as Desi pulled open the door and stepped out onto the balcony. All was still.
Moonlight bathed the courtyard, was reflected from the smooth surface of the pool below, bright against
the black water, shimmering a little as wind dusted across its surface. The tree rustled, touched by the
same soft wind.
A sleepy bird asked the time. A night insect clicked and buzzed in the tumbled g
reenery.
The wind pressed the silk of her nightshirt against her body, the moon outlining in white gold everything
the wind revealed. Wind and Moon conspiring in the revelation of beauty.
No wonder the pagans worshipped them, he thought. When they grant such favours as this.
She shivered, as if sensing his presence, but did not turn to the shadows where he stood waiting.
He had known she would come. True desire would always draw the desired. Desirée. The nightingale
sang for the rose…the rose gave up her perfume to the night.
The moon rode fat and heavy in the sky, a few days to the full. Desi leaned on the parapet and looked up
to where the dome glowed purple. The palace looked so different in moonlight. Mysterious, its beauty
shadowed.
She had loved him so much. She had forgotten just how much. Made herself forget. But he had not
killed her love. No, her love had survived that brutality. She had had to kill it by her own hand.
Deliberately, so as to be able to live. It was the only way she knew to survive.
Or believed she had killed it. Tonight she understood that her love was a river driven underground, but
no less a raging torrent for being secret. Now it flooded up from the fertile earth of her being, smashing
its way into the light, gaining strength from the years of being suppressed.
Hot tears stung her eyes. “Salah,” she whispered. “Oh, Salah.”
And in that breath he was there, hard and real, his strong arms wrapping her in a sudden, fierce embrace
against his naked chest.
“I knew you would come,” he growled, and even as she protested, his lips came down hard and
possessive on hers. He kissed her until her protest was a moan of deliverance, until the hand that pressed
against him melted into submission against his chest, moved up around his neck. Then he swept her up
in his arms and carried her back through the doorway to the tumbled bed.
He laid her down among the tossed sheets, but did not take his mouth from hers for a moment. With one
hand he tore off the sarong that was the only garment he wore, releasing his hot, hard flesh to press
against her thigh as he flung himself against the length of her.
He was consumed with need. He was a fool, but this had been inevitable from the moment he saw her.
Her power over him had only increased with time and absence, though he had believed it would be
otherwise. Now memory was conspiring with her beautiful sensuality to bring him down.
But at least he would take her with him: she, too, was lost….
Never had she met such ferocity in a kiss. His lips devoured her, setting fire to her blood. He had laid
her on the bed and stretched his long body beside her, and still his mouth did not let her go.
One hand caressed and held her throat, pushed at the silk collar, the heat of flesh on flesh. Then there
was the high shriek of a tear, and cool air breathed over her breast, for a moment before the fire of his
hand clasped her and stroked her.
Her flesh was scorched by the burning need in his touch. Her body arced under his kiss and lifted
hungrily against the hungry palm enclosing her breast.
His hand slipped from her breast then, moved against her back, her stomach, her hip, discovering and
defining at the same time. Then his hand moved to her thigh, and he cupped her sex with ferocious
possession. She melted as if that statement of ownership alone would be enough to bring her to the peak.
He began to stroke her, his fingers hot and strong and knowing, and her body lifted wildly to the
pleasure of his touch. She whimpered with pleasure and yearning, the sounds he remembered, and still
he did not lift his hungry mouth, but drank in those little mews like wine.
She opened her mouth wider then, as pleasure climbed in her, and he thrust his tongue into the warm
hollow, till the double assault left her sobbing with pleasure.
His mouth tore away from hers, and he lifted his head, and looked down into her face for one long,
tortured moment before his mouth found hers again, plunging, hungry, devouring.
She was aflame, melted, an inferno of need. A fire of desire she hadn’t known existed roared up in her,
consuming thought, reason, everything except the fact that he was there and she needed him.
His body was hard and urgent against her, as if with the need of years, and her hand found and encircled
the hard, seeking flesh, and his groan shivered along her nerves to send her joy a notch higher.
Still the silk of her shirt thwarted his intent. He lifted away from her, grasped the fabric in two hands and
ripped it again and again until it parted for him from top to bottom.
She lay with her body exposed now in the soft lamplight, exposed to the fire of his gaze, her throat
arched and inviting as she looked up at him. His eyes ran greedily over the perfection of her, painted
with the golden glow—hair, eyes, mouth, breasts, waist, hips, sex, thighs, ankles…sex.
He drew her against him then, the whole length of her bare skin aligned with his, and his arms wrapped
her. Her face pressed into the hollow of his shoulder as his hand curved behind and between her thighs.
Gently his fingers slipped into the moist depths that waited for him.
He stroked the delicate lips while her moist breath panted against his throat in little pleasured moans.
His touch was sure, as if he had known her body intimately for ten years, or as if it had been waiting for
this moment all that time. In what seemed seconds she lifted against his expert touch, crying and
sighing, a sound he remembered as if from yesterday.
She mewed and slid down from the peak, and then he drew away from her. Then his hand clasped her
thigh, lifted her leg up, and his body shifted against her and, with a thrust that made her cry out, he
pushed his way home at last.
He filled her to bursting. She cried out, arching into a pleasure that she had not experienced in ten long
years. “Salah!” she cried, in a voice he remembered, and a groan was torn from his own throat.
His body thrust again and again into the hot nest of her, and with each thrust they cried out together. His
hand cupped her neck, so that they looked into each other’s eyes. She stroked his strong chest, his arms,
greedily, hungry for the feel of his skin, and every caress drove him higher.
“How I have waited for this!” he cried then, gazing into her eyes, then down at the place where their
bodies met, and his look held such passionate hunger that her pleasure began to peak in an
overwhelming burst and she sobbed with too much pleasure.
It was too much for them both. The pitch of their joy, and their need, was overwhelming. He grunted,
pushed in again and again, and as she melted into powerful, sobbing release, his head lifted, his neck
arched up, his body swelled harder, made a convulsive thrust, and then he cried out with her, a long,
involuntary sound that was half weeping, half joy, and fell down against her.
Desi awoke to shaded sunlight and lay for a moment in a mood of lazy well-being, wondering why it
should be so. Behind her head the breeze blew in through the wooden slats shading the window, cool
and fresh. As she yawned and stretched a muscle protested, and she remembered what had happened in
the night. A smile played over her lips and she turned her head.
The bed beside her was empty. It was late, and he had said he had work today. She was not sorry. She
needed time to think.
Ten years
. She stretched like a cat, feeling that her arteries carried warm honey instead of blood from
her heart to her body. Ten long years since she had felt this magic in her limbs.
He wants to marry Sami.
Her heart contracted at the thought, withdrawing the honey from her muscles, and Desi flung herself to
her feet. What had she done? What kind of fool was she?
Sami was right. Salah had never got over her. The thought touched her in some deep part of herself that
she was afraid to look at more closely.
She hadn’t got over Salah, either, that much was obvious. It might have been better if she had had some
suspicion that that was the case, Desi reflected. She had been totally unprepared for the onslaught of his
feelings, and her own. And she had fallen at the first fence.
Closure. If Salah now felt he had closure, she had done Sami no good at all. Instead of putting up a
roadblock, she had only paved his way to marriage with her friend.
And as for her—what grief had she stored up for herself?
Breakfast was served to her in her suite, where she sat on cushions at a low table, beside a window open
onto the fountain. Salah, Fatima told her, had arranged for one of the chauffeurs to take her on a tour of
the city if she wished.
Desi spent a restless day, wandering through mosques and gardens, around the magnificent tomb and
gardens of a thirteenth century Barakati poet. It was all beautiful and impressive: soaring domes,
exquisite mosaic and delicate stone arabesques, but Desi could take it in with only half her awareness.
She kept thinking about what had happened last night, and what might be going to happen tonight.
Was once enough to give Salah the closure he was looking for? How could she bear to be with him for
so many days and nights, with this bottomless need assailing her, if he no longer wanted her?
Another bout of the heartbreak she’d suffered ten years ago would kill her.
In the late afternoon, as she got into the car after a visit to a small, breathtakingly ancient mosque, her
phone beeped with a text. Sami, just waking up in Vancouver.
How RU? What’s happening? Talk to me!
OK. Nothing to report, lied Desi, who just could not talk about what had happened. Sightseeing in city