It would be dangerous, oh so dangerous, to let him love her. And yet, for one night, just one night…
“Tell me a story,” she begged softly.
He turned his head towards her, so that the light was lost from his eyes and she only sensed the way his gaze touched her, dark and probing, almost angry.
“A story?”
“You always have some story that’s relevant to whatever situation we’re in. Haven’t you got a relevant story now?”
“Relevant to what part of this situation, Jalia?” his voice asked softly, and she suddenly felt that where softness was, there lurked danger. “To our search for your runaway cousin, who may have died for a foolish fear? Or to our desire for each other, which we pretend not to be consumed by even though it burns us like a drought every minute, every second we are alive?”
Jalia gasped. Need flamed over her, burning and desperate, because he had put it into words.
“Latif—” she protested. Whether she would have begged him to love her, or to leave her alone, she really didn’t know. But whatever she might have said was lost when he spoke.
“A story, you say. Shall I tell you the story of how my desire grew, Jalia? But it did not grow. It was born a giant. In the first moment that I looked at you it was already too big, too powerful, too overwhelming to kill.
“I could only trap it, like a tiger in a net of ropes, hampered, bedevilled, unable to run, made mad by its confinement. Is this the story I should tell you? And what will you tell me in return?”
He paused, and she licked her lips, but no word came.
“You came to this country determined to hate it, to resist it, to reject its claim on you and your mind and heart. I saw this and still I could not stop my heart’s knowing that you are mine. You belong to me, Jalia—my heart, my mind, my body, my soul…all that I am says that it is so.”
She was shivering with reaction, with fear and dismay. This was more, so much more than she had imagined. This, then, was what she had protected herself against when she put Michael’s ring on her finger.
“No,” she said, her heart fluttering with panic.
“No,” he agreed harshly. “I know it. You have said it every way you can. After the Coronation, before I could try to tell you, to make you see, you fled me. Didn’t you? You ran from me because you knew without my telling you.
“I would have hidden it, I would have played the slow game, the Western game, where a man pretends he does not want a woman—or maybe it is not a pretence. How does a man see what his whole life depends on and then pretend he does not need it?
“You knew how it was with me. But I did not know you knew until you had run away from me.
“I could not chase after you, to that cold country where you live, not when there was so much for me here, so much work that every day, every hour counts. And even if I had gone to bring you back—you are a woman who does not love this country. Was it right that I should go after you, bring you home, make you mine, when your whole heart could not be here?
“I said to myself, I will let her go. A man does not love forever in one moment.”
Chills coursed over and through her, of an emotion so powerful it was like drowning.
“That was my foolishness, to think so,” he went on, his deep voice beating with emotion like a drum. “You are mine, and it has been so since the first moment. Nothing changes that, whether you stay or go, whether you admit it or not.
“You are mine because my heart bound itself to yours before you were born. Because fate made us one heart and then divided it, and now I have found you again.”
She tasted salt on her lips, and discovered that she was crying. Tears of grief because of who she was, because she couldn’t be the woman she might once have been, that woman whose heart could go to him freely, who could see her fate, her whole life, in a man’s words.
“Oh, Latif,” she whispered desperately.
“No,” he said, “I must tell you the story you asked for. Here in the land that is mine, I must tell you. You came back, but not to me. You were next to me, but out of reach. You came back with a ring that tells me you belong to another man. That is our story, Jalia.”
Eight
He raised himself on one elbow beside her, and his head blotted out the rising moon. It was a welcome darkness, a darkness in which anything was possible, and without conscious thought, driven by a hunger too strong to resist or to name, she reached for him.
With the cry of a soul stretched beyond its limits he wrapped his arms around her, dragged her bodily across the little distance that separated them, so that she was pulled half out of her sleeping bag. Then with a muttered word of protest—against her? against his own weakness?—he bent and smothered her mouth with his kiss.
Jalia’s heart leaped like a wild animal, twisting and writhing against the cage of her ribs, straining to get into his hand, the strong, hard hand that gripped her ruthlessly and pulled her against him, as if his hands understood her heart’s call, were trying to free her heart to love him.
His mouth was fierce against her lips, pressing, chewing, his tongue seeking, his hunger harsh against the soft flesh he desired. With a moan Jalia gave herself up to the assault, her arms clinging, her mouth opening wide to receive his kiss, to give whatever he asked.
Her body raged with a passionate need that distantly amazed her, her blood hot, melted gold, a rich, slow river delivering glowing desire to every part of her, body and soul.
Her breasts sang with delight at the pain of being crushed against his warm chest, at the joy of feeling his heart’s wild beating against her body. Her skin shivered and burned as his hands pressed and owned her back, her arms, her neck and face.
His mouth lifted from her mouth and traced over her cheek and chin, then, as her head fell obediently back, down the long line of her throat to the wild pulse at its base.
Then he lifted his head and his hand gripped her upper arm and held her away.
“But my story does not end here,” Latif said ruthlessly, and his voice grated with the effort he was now exerting over his own flesh, his blood, his heart, his soul.
“Latif.” Jalia moaned her loss in the syllables of his name, a pleading that had never been in her voice before. “Latif, love me, please love me.”
He raised his chest, and cool air brushed her. She felt how real the bonds that linked them were, now, because they were being torn as he drew away from her.
“Latif!” She lifted her hands to his face, feeling she would die if she could not hold him and love him.
He caught her wrist and held it tight, too tight, lifting her hand into moonlight.
“Do you ask me to love you with this on your finger?”
The breath rasped in her throat. She had forgotten Michael, forgotten the ring, forgotten everything in the mad sweetness that flooded her.
“Yes!” she cried, for the sweetness still beckoned her on. “Latif, please!” She reached for him again.
“Take it off,” he growled, as the tendrils of belonging took advantage of their closeness to enwrap them.
“What?” Jalia pressed a kiss into the little hollow in his shoulder that had been designed for her lips. Drunkenly she thought that she would give anything for the right to kiss his skin just here, all the rest of her life.
“Take off this man’s ring. You will marry me. Swear it, and I will love you and you will be mine forever.”
So the serpent entered paradise; and she felt its cool silkiness shiver up her heated body, and trembled under the sudden chill of its whispered reasoning.
“What do you mean?” she faltered.
“Do you think I want you for one night, one week, one year, even? You are mine, Jalia. In your heart already you belong to me. Only say it, and I will love you.”
An emerald sparkled in a stray moonbeam as his eyes burned her from the mysterious darkness where his face was. His hands held her tightly, and a part of her thought that she would always be safe in a hold
such as this.
“I can’t marry you,” she protested, and inexplicable tears burned her cheeks.
“Can’t?” He repeated the word in a harsh, grating voice, and she saw a flash of white teeth.
“You know I can’t. You said it yourself,” she accused. “I don’t belong here, Latif. It’s not my home.”
“A woman belongs with her husband. His home is her home. You belong with me. You are Bagestani. Your blood is here. Your heart is here. Your people call to you. I call to you.”
His hands tightened on her as the words rained down on her, as if he knew that he had lost. He bent and kissed her again, and fire swept out from the contact of his mouth into her body and soul.
“Answer me,” he commanded.
“I want to be your lover,” she sobbed. “Please take me as a lover, Latif, and don’t ask me for more.”
He sat up, his sleeping bag falling down to his hips, exposing his hard-muscled torso to the sharp light and shade of moonlight.
“Are you such a fool as this?” he rasped. “Do you think we can be lovers, and then you will go back and marry that man, and forget what love we had, forget how my body has branded you?
“If I love you, I make you mine! You will be closer to me than my own heart! What shall I do when my heart wishes to leave my body? Do you ask this of me?”
His eyes were black hollows in the harsh shadow now, his face angled and sharply defined in the moonlight, making him more like a bird of prey than ever.
Her heart twisting with hurt, she drew back from him into the comfortless warmth of her own sleeping bag.
But fear was more powerful than the pain. She knew this was not a question of heart, or even of love: she hadn’t known him long enough for that. This was powerful sexual passion, masquerading as love, and she would be ten times worse than a fool to be swayed by it.
Like Noor. Who was now in a downed plane somewhere, paying, perhaps with her life, for a too-long toying with dangerous magic. Was she, who had seen the truth so clearly in Noor’s case, going to be blind in her own?
“I’m not Bagestani, Latif,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I’m English. We can’t change the past. I can’t live by your rules.”
The look on his star-shadowed face then she knew she would remember all her life long. His jaw clenched and, deft as a wild animal, he slipped away from her side and into the night.
She awoke to sunlight and the sound of cracking wood and turned her head to see Latif on his haunches, the long line of his naked back tucking down into lean hips and thighs as he tended the fire.
He must have hamstrings like elastic bands: he sat easily on the flat of his feet, his butt resting down on his calves, as if the difficult posture were second nature to him.
Watching him now she sensed something that surprised her, because he had always seemed at ease in the city and palace environment: here he was in his true element.
Now she could understand what people meant when they said he was a mountain man. The Sultan had told her that during the long years of working for Ghasib’s overthrow, Latif had been his chief liaison with the mountain tribes. The nomadic mountain tribes could not be policed and respected no borders; Latif had slipped in and out of Ghasib’s Bagestan at will.
Here she became aware of something she couldn’t have named before—his inner silence. He had a capacity for stillness, as if he had learned patience from the mountains. It was deeply attractive.
He was quiet, concentrated, open, like an animal drinking at a spring—as if the mountains were a source of sustenance to him.
And like an animal at a spring, he became aware of her regard, and turned his head. Their eyes met for the first time since he had gone off into the darkness last night. She had fallen asleep without hearing him return.
“Sabah al kheir,” he said, in the poetic greeting that was still used in the mountains. A morning of joy.
“Sabahan noor,” she replied with a smile. A morning of light.
And it was. The air was fresh and clear and invigorating, and Jalia accepted the now-familiar jolt of longing for a simpler life, slithered out of her sleeping bag, got up to stretch and yawn luxuriously.
When she recovered, he was watching her with unreadable eyes.
“Yes, you are very beautiful,” he said. His voice was a rough, possessive caress, and her flesh moved with that heavy awareness that seemed to be associated with him.
She felt fully in her body now, felt how her breasts sat against her rib cage, felt the mobility of her hips, the length of her own legs. Her skin felt every spot where the cotton of her pyjamas brushed her, felt the elastic snug around her slim waist. How her bare feet were planted on the ground, as if she drew her aliveness from the rock, as much as from the air.
She brought her arms across her breasts, her right hand clasping the opposite shoulder, the left hand under her chin, as she stood looking down at him. Unconsciously she stroked the opals with her thumb.
“Yes,” he said, taking the gesture as a protest, “and you are mine, and you do not know it. You do not wish me to say it, but I only tell the truth. You are mine. If you wear another man’s ring, even if you marry him, does it change the truth? If it is the truth, nothing can change it.
“We belong together. It is better to say it. My silence was not right. I should have told you in the first moment, when I knew it. Then there would not be this engagement. The fault is mine.”
Jalia would have denied everything, if only she could have trusted herself to speak. Sensation was running over and through her, half indignation, half melting response. If she opened her mouth to speak, could she know which half would get the microphone?
The mountain man turned back to his task with the fire, and Jalia picked up her toiletry bag, towel and clothes and slipped off up the slope to her morning scrub.
So there were going to be no reproaches over what had happened last night. Latif was, apparently, a man not inclined to sulking when he didn’t get what he wanted, and as she washed in the icy little mountain stream, gasping with the shock, she thought of how it would be to have such a man for a husband.
Most of the men she dated sulked, one way or another, if they didn’t get their own way. As if they had never quite got over some disappointment with their mothers.
Latif was a man who could, it seemed, accept setback as a part of life, not—as with so many of the men she knew, including Michael—as something someone had done to him.
Her father had always said the mountain men of Bagestan were a breed apart. Maybe you had to come to the mountains to get a real man. If you wanted one. Jalia didn’t. Anyway, it was too late for her. To have a man like Latif as husband, she should have been here from birth, for how could she ever fit in to this culture and life, growing up the way she had in the bustle and freedom of a world-class city?
She wasn’t sorry, not really. She belonged in another world, when if history had been different she might have belonged in this one, and that, too, was just life.
But a part of her, she realized as she rubbed herself down with the rough towel, trying to get warm again after her chilly dip—a little part of her was sorry to think that she would never experience Latif’s real passion.
And she did wonder if she would always remember Latif’s passionate proposal as the moment of wildest romantic thrill of her life. How could any Western man match it?
She dressed and returned down the slope to the evocative smell of coffee and wood smoke.
Latif had draped two round flat pieces of naan over the spit, and when he handed one to her it was toasted and deliciously flavoured with the fat of last night’s meat it had absorbed from the spit.
She spread some goat’s cheese on the bread and rolled it up for a simple, succulent breakfast.
“Where to this morning?” she asked, for something to say.
“I want to go down into the valley. It is a journey on foot, since the road has been washed out in many places. Do you want to come with me
, or wait for me here?”
Jalia hesitated. “How long will it take?”
“If I go alone, a few hours. If you come with me, longer.”
Maybe it was his arrogant assumption that she would slow him down, or maybe just a reluctance to sit here doing nothing, she wasn’t sure. But with a little flick of her head that made him smile, Jalia opted to accompany him.
Nine
Arrogant or not, he had been speaking nothing but the truth. Latif went over the deep gullies the rains had gouged into the road with an ease and a balance that terrified her, while Jalia could only inch her way with his help.
When they came to a terrifying drop, an ugly, massive gouge in the road that fell away to nothing, he took her piggyback, and the sheer power and strength beneath her knees had a rhythmic, muscled beauty that carried to her animal brain a deep, pure erotic message, so that her legs’ sudden tightening around him caused him to lose his hold for a second, almost pulling them to their doom.
On the road again her body was lazily reluctant to get down.
Panting with the aftermath of sharp fear and sudden desire, Jalia straightened her clothes fussily, irritated with herself for that uncontrolled response. If she didn’t get a grip, she’d find herself married to the man, for no better reason than to experience his lovemaking.
A truth suddenly dawned on her, as stunning as a clap of thunder—every time she had argued with Noor about her foolish attraction to Bari, she had been talking to herself. She might not have allowed the information into conscious awareness, but unconsciously she had recognized how wildly attracted she was to Latif.
What a fool she had been, blind and smug: because if she had allowed herself to see the real problem, she could have taken much smarter action to avoid Latif.
And she wouldn’t be where she was right now—dependent on him for her survival, and hoping against hope that he would crack and make love to her before she cracked and promised him whatever price he asked.
The Ice Maiden's Sheikh Page 6