Oasis of the Heart

by Jessica Hart

  It gave Cairo a strange feeling to be standing there with Max, knowing that they were probably the first people to see those paintings for thousands of years. Her gaze lingered on a woman bending protectively over a child in an age-old gesture. She found it surprisingly moving.

  'Some things never change, do they?' she said, almost to herself. 'The people who painted these lived totally different lives, but they must have been just like us, loving each other, loving their children.' She leant forward to look more closely at the graceful figure. 'This woman is thousands of years old, but she and I are just the same.'

  Max eyed her with a glint of amusement. 'I don't imagine she refused to move without her personal organiser, or was allowed to spend hours on her beauty routine every day!'

  'That wasn't what I meant,' said Cairo, trying to sound frosty< but unable to prevent a reluctant smile tugging at her mouth. 'As far as the important things in life go, we would have had lots in common,' she added, more seriously.

  'Oh, yes?' Max was patently unconvinced.

  'I was a child like everyone else,' she insisted. 'You can tell from these paintings that those people loved their children, just like my parents loved me. And one day, I'd like to get married and have children that I could love just as that woman must have loved her child.'

  'Funny, I wouldn't have put you down as a maternal type,' said Max with a curious look. He stuck his hands in his pockets and studied her dispassionately. 'No, I'd have thought you'd think of a baby as a designer accessory and hand it over to a nanny so that you could make yourself up in peace.'

  Cairo looked back at the woman bending over her child, and her face softened. 'No, I'd love to have children,' she said, unconsciously wistful.

  'It should be easy enough for a girl like you to find a husband, surely?'

  Cairo thought of the men she had been out with. They had been attractive and charming, but somehow she had never been able to rid herself of the notion that they might not have been so attentive if her father had not been quite so rich. After the scandal broke, there had been a lot fewer invitations.

  She sighed. 'Perhaps I'm just choosy.'

  'Or waiting for someone rich enough?' Max's voice was harsh.

  She looked up at him, her eyes very clear and green beneath her hat. 'I'm waiting for someone who really loves me,' she said.

  There was an odd little silence. Cairo was very conscious of Max standing beside her, looking down into her eyes with a peculiar expression in his own.

  If she lifted her hand, she would be able to touch him, and with the thought came an urge to take a step closer and lean against his broad chest and listen to his heart beating. It was so strong that for one appalled moment, she thought that she had swayed towards him, and she jerked her gaze away, almost stumbling as she stepped back.

  They spent that night in a sheltered gully. There were shallow caves at the bottom of the cliffs, all carpeted with drifts of sand, as soft and white as talcum powder, and glittering in the last slanting rays of the sun.

  Cairo was unusually silent. She felt awkwardly nervous, as gauche as any teenager. She was terrified of meeting Max's eyes in case he could read the sudden, inexplicable desire that had seized her. .It didn't make any sense.

  She didn't even like the man! Why did her pulse thump insistently at the mere thought of his mouth, his hands? Why did her skin burn whenever she remembered how it had felt to be held in his arms?

  She ought to be thinking about Haydn Deane, she told herself feverishly.

  She should be worrying about what she would tell her father if this trip was the disaster it was shaping up to be, but all she could think about was Max and whether she would share his sleeping bag again tonight.

  Her stomach churned at the prospect. She didn't know whether she longed to lie beside him, or whether she was terrified at the risk that her body might betray her.

  Max seemed preoccupied too, and the long silences between them jangled with tension. Why was her body doing this? Cairo wondered helplessly, watching him light the paraffin stove. His trousers were stretched over the taut muscles of his thighs as he hunkered down by the stove, and she could see the line of his spine through his faded shirt. She wondered how he would react if she ran her finger down it, and her heart knocked nervously against her ribs at the idea.

  He was just an ordinary man, she told herself desperately. She just happened to be in an extraordinary situation with him. That was all. In a few days, they would be back to normality, and they would both be only too glad to say goodbye to each other. Cairo let the sand trickle slowly through her fingers.

  How long had she known Max? Three days, was that all? Already it was impossible to imagine never seeing him again.

  The heat evaporated into the clear air as darkness fell. Cairo did her best to behave normally and make conversation as they ate the simple meal of soup and chewy bread, but it was hopeless. Max seemed to have lapsed back into bad temper, and made no effort to keep the conversation going. Her voice sounded brittle and her sentences kept trailing off into a taut silence.

  They shared the mug of coffee as they had the night before. Whenever their hands touched, a current of electricity seemed to flow between them, and Cairo would gulp at the hot coffee, burning her tongue. In the end, she decided that she would just have to broach the subject of where she would sleep herself. Max obviously wasn't going to help her.

  'I should have brought a sleeping bag with me,' she began nervously.

  Max shrugged. 'It would have been more sensible, but you can't do anything about it now. You'll just have to carry on sharing mine.'

  'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It makes it rather awkward.'

  'What's awkward about it?'

  'Well... sleeping together.'

  'It doesn't bother me,' said Max brusquely. 'Sleeping is the operative word, after all. If you think I'm having trouble containing my animal lusts, you can stop worrying. Girls like you just don't interest me.'

  'Girls like you just don't interest me'.

  Cairo stiffened as the sense of recognition that had nagged at her ever since she had first met Max clicked suddenly into place, and she sat bolt upright, staring at him incredulously. How could she have forgotten? She should have known as soon as he kissed her!

  Max frowned, at her expression. 'What is it?'

  'I do know you,' she said slowly. 'I thought I did. You're Davina Fothergill's son.'

  When she was younger, Davina had been a celebrated hostess, famed for her beauty, her parties and her succession of wealthy husbands. Gerald Falconer had been her first, Cairo remembered now. He had also been the richest, but, after Davina had left him and their two children for a man more prepared to indulge her jet-set pretensions, he had become more and more reclusive. She hadn't heard his name mentioned in years.

  'It is you, isn't it?' she asked, when Max didn't say anything.

  He swilled the coffee dregs around the mug before chucking them away on to the ground. 'It's not the way I think of myself, but yes, she is my mother,'

  he said with a bitter edge to his voice. .He wasn't looking at Cairo. 'You're out of date, though. I believe she calls herself Mrs Kellerman now.'

  That was right. Cairo remembered there had been a splash in the gossip pages a couple of months ago when Davina had got married for the sixth time, looking as glamorous as ever. It was hard to believe that she had a son as old as Max, but Cairo knew that it was true. She remembered meeting him.

  She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Did he remember? She hoped not.

  It had been New Year's Eve, about ten years ago. Davina, married to her fourth husband by then, had thrown a huge party and invited a glittering array of the rich and famous. Jeremy Kingswood had taken his adored daughter. At sixteen, Cairo was just learning how to use her undoubted good looks, and had enjoyed herself enormously flirting with all the men. Only one had remained impervious to her charm.

  'Who's that?' Cairo whispered to her friend, Emily.
<
br />   'Who?'

  'The guy standing next to Phil over there. The one who looks completely uninterested in anyone.' Even in his early twenties, Max had had a remote quality that had set him apart from the hectic gaiety around him.

  'That's Davina's son, Max,' Emily told her. 'Davina usually ignores her children, but she's playing at being a mother this Christmas. It's part of her new image. I think Max would rather have stayed with his father, but his sister likes being with Davina and she made him come and play at happy families. He looks as if he'd rather be anywhere but here, doesn't he?'

  Cairo was intrigued by Max's air of cool inaccessibility and, flown with her first taste of success at this glamorous, adult party, she made a giggly bet with Emily that she would get him to kiss her before the night was out.

  With all the confidence of a pretty sixteen-year-old, she set out to charm him, but Max ignored her inviting smiles and looks, and was patently uninterested in her chatter. Piqued, Cairo was determined to win her bet. As the party revved up towards midnight, she saw him slip outside on to the long terrace, and, grabbing a piece of mistletoe, she followed him through the French windows.

  He was standing by the balustrade, with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the frosty gardens. The severity of the black dinner-jacket and tie suited him, and the moonlight threw the lines of his face into austere relief.

  Cairo strolled up to him with studied casualness. 'All alone?'

  Max closed his eyes briefly and a nerve hammered in his jaw. 'As you see,'

  he said between clenched teeth.

  'Wouldn't you like some company to see the new year in?' asked Cairo with what was meant to be a seductive smile.

  'Frankly, no.' Max swung round to face her. 'Since you seem to be too stupid to take a hint, I'll make it as clear as I can. I'm not interested in girls like you.

  I prefer a more sophisticated technique.'

  Cairo's green cat eyes narrowed. She had been pampered and adored all her life, and she wasn't used to being spoken to like that. She didn't like it one bit, but she was too used to getting her own way to give up without a fight.

  She had made a bet with Emily, and she was determined to win it.' Don't I even get a kiss for New Year?' she said, spinning the mistletoe provocatively between her fingers.

  'Is that what it will take to get rid of you?' Max reached out without warning and jerked her towards him. His fingers dug cruelly into her bare arms, and suddenly Cairo was frightened.

  'Let me go!'

  'No. You wanted a kiss,' he said as he bent his head. 'Now you're going to get one.'

  Cairo's experience of school dances hadn't prepared her for a kiss like that.

  Max's mouth was cool and ruthless, and Cairo felt the ground rock beneath her feet, discovering too late that she had been playing a dangerous game.

  Max was no schoolboy, and she was shattered by an explosion of conflicting emotions when he dropped her rudely down to earth.

  'There,' he said coolly, putting her away from him. 'You've had your kiss.

  Now run along and practise your technique on someone who doesn't mind spoilt, silly little girls.'

  Cheeks burning with humiliation, Cairo had fled.

  Now, as the memory swept back all too vividly, she felt her face grow hot once more, and she was glad of the darkness so that Max couldn't see her too clearly.

  'You probably don't remember me,' she said lightly, hoping desperately that it was true. 'We met at a party once.'

  Max turned his head, and his piercing eyes gleamed in the moonlight. 'I remember you all right,' he said. 'You were the girl who was determined to have what she wanted. You haven't changed that much.'

  Cairo bit her lip at the sardonic note in his voice. 'Why didn't you say if you recognised me?'

  'You didn't remember. Why should I remind you of an incident that wasn't particularly enjoyable for either of us?'

  If only she could forget again! Cairo felt all the rage and humiliation and deep, secret excitement that she had felt at sixteen as she had rushed away from him. All the time she had been trying to be cool and businesslike, he had been remembering her as an adolescent! No wonder he had been so contemptuous!

  She tried to carry her embarrassment off with a laugh. 'Do you know, I'd forgotten all about that kiss!' She had been so humiliated that she had deliberately wiped it from her memory. 'It was all very silly, wasn't it?'

  'Very,' Max agreed. 'I hope you didn't make a practice of throwing yourself at every man like that?'

  Cairo's fists clenched. He wasn't making it any easier for her! 'As a matter of fact, it was just a silly bet I had with a friend. It wasn't anything to do with you.'

  She had hoped to sound cutting, but Max was unperturbed. 'So you won your bet?'

  Cairo hesitated. 'No,' she said at last. 'No, I didn't.' She hadn't wanted anyone to know about that kiss. 'I didn't tell her. I just pretended you'd gone.'

  'I see.' Max's uncomfortably penetrating eyes rested on her profile. 'Well, that explains your attention, anyway. I didn't think I was your type.'

  'You weren't,' she said shortly.

  'If I'm not your type, what is?' he asked in a mocking tone.

  Cairo thought about touching her lips to his throat last night. She thought about the strength in his arms, and the warmth of his body and the heart-clenching set of his mouth. Then she pushed those thoughts firmly aside. She wasn't going to be humiliated a second time!

  'If I said the complete opposite of you, that ought to give you some idea of the kind of man I like,' she said. Out of the edge of her eyes, she could see his mouth curl in quiet amusement, and her chin tilted. 'What about you? What type of girls do you like?'

  Max stretched his long legs out before him, and leant back against the sand, linking his arms behind his head. 'A girl who isn't a type,' he said. 'A girl who's just herself.'

  Cairo felt her heart twist with jealousy. 'Who is this paragon?'

  'I'm not sure that she exists,' said Max with an edge of bitterness, and she wondered how cynical his beautiful, faithless mother had made him.

  'If she does, you're not going to meet .her stuck out in the middle of the desert,' said Cairo, more sharply than she had intended.

  Max looked up at the still desert night. 'I might,' he said.

  Cairo spent ages getting ready for bed. She spun out cleaning her face and brushing her teeth and packing everything away as long as she could in the vain hope that Max might have fallen asleep before she got there, but at last she could put off lying down beside him no longer. She kept thinking about Max, about how he had been then and the man he was now. He had broadened out, become tougher, harder, and the remote quality that she had first noticed had intensified into that distinctive self-sufficiency. But his eyes were the same, and he had the same devastating ability to make her feel edgy and unsettled.

  Lifting her side of the sleeping bag, Cairo slid beneath it and lay rigidly at the very edge of her mat, but it was so narrow that she was still bare inches away from Max. She tried to wriggle into a more comfortable position, just as he shifted on his mat, and their arms brushed inadvertently. Cairo flinched away as if she'd been stung.

  'What are you so tense about?' asked Max testily.

  'Nothing. I just don't find sleeping like this particularly comfortable.'

  'Does it bother you that you once asked me to kiss you?'

  'Of course not!' Cairo gave an unconvincing laugh. 'I'm hardly likely to be bothered by the memory of a silly little kiss like that!'

  Max propped himself up on one elbow to look down into her face. 'What sort of kiss would bother you?'

  'None!'

  'I don't believe that,' he said softly, leaning over to lift a strand of hair from her cheek. 'I've kissed you twice now, remember?'

  The breath dried in Cairo's throat as her heart slowed to a painful, irregular thud. 'I'd prefer to forget,' she managed through stiff lips.

  'Would you?' Max leant closer until his mouth was a
lmost touching hers.

  Cairo was mesmerised by his eyes. She wanted to look away, but she was held, helpless beneath him. His body was tantalisingly close, and she ached with a dark, desperate need.

  'Would you?' he whispered again against her lips, and Cairo's hands lifted of their own accord and slid instinctively up his arms and over the muscles in his shoulders, luxuriating in the feel of the warm, smooth skin that covered such steely strength.

  Low in her throat, she murmured what might have been a protest, but as Max's mouth found hers at last it was swept away by a tide of sheer desire.

  Her arms tightened, pulling him closer so that his body crushed her slenderness, and her lips opened eagerly to his questing tongue. His mouth was warm, insistent. Dimly she realised that this was what she had been thinking about all day: Max's kiss, deep and demanding, and his hands hard against her skin. He had slipped beneath her T-shirt, and she quivered beneath his touch as his fingers burned over the silken length of her thigh.

  Excitement was crackling along her senses, and when Max lifted his head abruptly, she gasped for breath. He was breathing hard too, but the suddenly shuttered expression in his eyes shocked her back to devastating reality. Her arms dropped from his neck.

  T-I thought you weren't interested in girls like me,' she said shakily, moistening her lips with her tongue.

  'I'm not,' said Max. 'Let's just say that I was interested to see whether your technique had improved.' His gaze rested on her mouth for a moment. 'It has.' Then he rolled back to his mat and straightened the sleeping bag over them both as if nothing had happened.

  Cairo couldn't speak. She was shaking with reaction, her body burning with rage and humiliation and unsatisfied desire. She turned her back on him so that he wouldn't see the devastation on her face, but pride came to her rescue at last.