Quite simply the desert helped him put life in perspective. It was where time warped and everything seemed possible.
Even getting his daughter back.
As he rode he watched the hypnotic and sensual sway of the woman on the camel ahead of him and he found himself wondering if it was the same for her. What was she thinking as they headed into this void of sand? In so many ways she was a woman after his own heart. She challenged him in more ways than he could imagine. And she did things to his body he hadn’t dreamed possible. As he let his mind go, he found himself wishing it had been different. That there had been a possibility of a future for them. That she could have been his Sahar, a gift to him and Kamilah from the sea.
He shook his head.
He was beginning to feel the effects of fatigue. They’d been going all night without a stop. He looked to his right and saw that a copper tinge was already beginning to bleed into the sky, heralding the arrival of the sun.
He settled back into the hypnotic sway of the camel. And almost instantly his mind took off again. He found himself wondering if perhaps there could still be a future for them.
No.
He jerked his mind back. He was being a fool. She was a government agent doing a job. And once this mission was over she’d simply move on to the next. She would slip as effortlessly into some other world as she had into his. And perhaps as easily into another man’s heart. There was no room for him and Kamilah in a future like that.
Then her words echoed like a ghostly taunt in his head. You made it impossible for me not to…to love you.
His throat constricted. Yeah, so maybe she’d fallen for him. But it had been the biggest mistake of her life. She’d said so herself.
He swallowed the bitterness in his mouth. That was then. That was Sahar. This was now. This woman was Jayde.
But something still ate at him, something he just couldn’t let go. The need to know began to, once again, burn in his gut as the copper on the horizon fired into a livid orange and the Sahara sands began to glow.
He clucked his tongue, urged his camel to move faster until he’d caught up and was riding alongside her.
“Jayde?”
She swung her head around and her eyes caught his. David’s heart stalled. She’d never looked more beautiful to him as she did right now in her peasant gear with a piece of cloth tied like a turban over her head. In the golden dawn light her eyes were a liquid and lambent green made only more beautiful by the deepening bronze tan of her skin. In spite of her obvious fatigue, she looked proud. Regal. A princess of the desert.
“What is it?” she asked.
He’d lost his train of thought the second he’d looked into her eyes. “I…ah…back on Shendi, you…you told me your amnesia was real.”
“It’s the truth, David.”
“When, Jayde, when exactly did your memory return?”
She halted her camel, shifted around in the saddle to face him. “Why?”
The sun exploded over the horizon, and the sands around them caught fire. He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the flare. “I need to know. Did you remember before…before we were together, on the yacht?” Before we made love.
The look that shifted into her eyes made his heart sink. “David, you told me once you abhorred a liar. I’m not going to lie. Everything I tell you from now is the whole truth.” She studied his face.
But he said nothing, just waited.
“I began to remember first in little bits and pieces. I didn’t know what was happening and I thought I might be imagining things. It scared me. Then…then when you showed me into your office and I saw the map of Azar with all those little pins, I got a big chunk of the picture. And then, at dinner…when I saw Tariq’s face, that’s when it all really started slamming home. It all just came down on me and I was totally confused. I needed to sort it out…in my mind.”
He glared at her. So she had known. He clenched his jaw. She had known before he went to her on the pier. He kicked his camel forward.
“David—”
He ignored her. She’d known who she was when she’d made love to him. And that burned like all hell.
“David!” she demanded. “David, stop! Listen to me!”
He stopped, turned slowly back to face her.
“What I felt for you was true, dammit. That was not a lie. What we shared was not a lie!” Her eyes flamed like the growing globe of heat rising fast in the sky. “You put life back into me, David.” Her voice caught. “Don’t you see? I had nothing before I met you. Dead to emotion from the day my mother killed herself. You made me live again! And I didn’t ask you to do it. I didn’t ask you to make me feel again.” Ferocious emotion brought angry spots of color to her cheeks. He could feel heat beginning to rise from the sand.
“And now—” her voice quavered “—and now that I’ve felt what it’s like to…to love…I’ve lost it all. Everything. Every damn thing that means anything to me. I’ve lost you. Kamilah. My job.” Her voice broke. Tears shone in her eyes. “Don’t for one minute think I’m enjoying any part of this. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask you to sneak in under my guard.”
His chest cramped. “Jayde—”
She held up a palm. “Forget it. Just forget it. Don’t say a thing. We’ve got a job to do and that’s the only reason I’m here. You know it. I know it. So let’s get on with it.”
“Jayde, I…I’m sorry.” And he truly was. For her. For himself. For his child. For what had happened to his brother. For the unfulfilled promise to his dead father. For his mother who could never love the desert. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
Her mouth opened.
“Yes. I’m sorry. For everything. I…I wish it could have been different.”
She stared at him. Then something shuttered in her eyes. She pressed her mouth into a tight line and kicked her camel forward in a spurt of dust.
He let his camel drop back. He felt shaken. Shut out. Unsure.
And in love.
Yes. He couldn’t hide from it. He was in love with this incredible woman. And there was a desert of distance between them.
Chapter 14
The sun shrank to a scorching white-hot ball as it climbed into its zenith. It bleached color from the world and set the sand blazing with blinding light. The dunes swelled in size like monstrous waves, torrid and desolate as far the eye could see. And beyond the heaving sands, the horizons simply vaporized into a blur of white heat.
Jayde felt her breathing become labored, and she could see her camel was suffering. They had dismounted and were walking to give the beasts a break. Her feet burned, and sand rubbed blisters into bleeding patches of raw skin. The guerbas were almost empty and Jayde knew no man or woman could last longer than one day in this heat without hydration.
“How far to the next water?” She called out to David, her voice hoarse, her lips thick, cracked.
“Should be a wadi over the next ridge,” he called back. “We can water there if it hasn’t dried up already.”
Great, she thought as they pressed laboriously on up one dune and down the next, the distant ridge never appearing to get any closer. Her calf muscles felt as if they were tearing apart. Her back ached and her tongue felt swollen to twice its size. The sides of her throat literally stuck together. She was seeing bright pinprick spots and swarms of black dots in her peripheral vision. She was beginning to feel dizzy and slightly crazy as desert madness and the sheer size of the place tried to grip her mind.
She stumbled in the shifting sand, fell to her hands. It was blistering hot against her palms. David moved instantly to her side. “Here.” He reached for the guerba, held it out to her. “Take some.”
She shook her head. “What if the wadi is not over the next ridge?”
“It will be. Here, drink.”
She let a small sip of water moisten her lips, but she knew how dangerous it would be to finish every last drop. Nothing was a given in this desiccated environment. There may not be water over
the next ridge. She knew David was only saying that to ease her mind. “Thanks.” She handed the goatskin back to him. “I think I’m going crazy. I’m getting mad visions in my head.”
“The jinns,” he said. He helped her to her feet. “Wait here with the camels. I’ll head to the top of that dune and see if I can see the wadi.”
She watched him move up the monstrous mountain of sand until his image wavered in the glistening heat and she thought he might be a ghost, a trick of her mind. She blinked against the glare trying to track his movement to the top. What if he got lost? She’d be dead on her own. She didn’t have a clue where they were. Panic struck her heart. It boiled through her blood. She began to scramble wildly up the dune after him, leaving the camels.
“David!” She yelled as she stumbled up the mountain of sand, slipping back down as fast as she moved forward. “David!” Everything turned to fire around her. The whole world was burning. She was going to die!
“David!” she screamed. She fell to the sand, and a world of fiery flames spiraled around her.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” She felt his arms supporting her, lifting her up. Her focus began to return.
“It’s all right, Jayde, take it easy.”
She looked up into his eyes. His skin was even darker and his eyes more blue. Right now he looked like a god. Her savior. She gripped his shirt with her fists. “Don’t leave me, David.”
Something shifted in his eyes. He smoothed her cheek. “It’s okay, Jayde, it’s just the jinns talking.”
“Don’t leave me. Ever.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t. We’re in this together, all the way. The wadi is just over the ridge. Come. Before we lose the camels and our gear.” He helped her slowly down the dune. And she realized just how vulnerable she was without him. And what a terrible fate could have befallen them if the camels had wondered off because of her mad carelessness.
The water in the dry riverbed was almost nonexistent. It was dark and smelled bitter. But it was water. And right now that meant life. David used it to make zrig, a blend of water, powdered milk and sugar. They sat under a small rock overhang alongside the wadi and drank copious quantities of it.
Jayde could feel her body and her mind slowly begin to return to normal as the moisture and sugar seeped through her system. She took the last sip of her share and returned the bowl to David. She watched as he cupped the enamel basin in his deeply tanned hands and lifted it to his lips. There was something so basic and so beautiful and powerful about this man, she thought. Something so honest.
Maybe it was the jinns. Maybe it was the effect of the desert. Because she felt as though there was nothing to hide behind out here, nothing to veil emotions. And she’d surprised the hell out of herself by begging like a fool for him to never leave her. It was as if something deep and primal had ripped loose and erupted out of her very soul.
Now she felt embarrassed. “I’m sorry, David. I think I lost it back there,” she said. “And I could have lost the camels. It was totally irresponsible.”
His eyes caught hers, held. Then he grinned suddenly, his teeth impossibly white, fine wrinkles fanning out from his cool blue eyes. “Like I said, the jinns got you.”
She nodded. “I guess they did. And they don’t get you?”
“All the time.” He sipped the dregs of the zrig. “We’ll rest here a few minutes,” he said. “Why don’t you lie down, try and close your eyes.”
The notion was overwhelmingly appealing. She desperately needed rest but she hadn’t wanted to hold up their progress by telling him so. She tried to inch farther into the thin line of shadow under the rock. She lay back on a faded blanket and covered her head with the fabric of her head cloth. Trying to hide from the heat and blinding glare of the sun proved futile. She nevertheless drifted into a dazed and delirious state somewhere between dream and sleep.
And in her dream she was drowning in the sea. The waves sucking at her. But she could see the shore, the beach, his palace up high on the ridge. She could see Sheik David bin Omar bin Zafir Rashid, an untamed warrior galloping over ancient dunes on his white stallion, the platinum-hot glare of sun at his back throwing his profile into stark and menacing shadow. He had his arm raised high above his head, brandishing his jambiya, as a blood-curdling battle cry emanated from his throat. He charged over the dunes, over the sand toward the sea, toward her.
Fear clutched her heart. She began to go under, salt tearing at her throat, burning her nasal passages. But the thundering hooves bore down. David reined his stallion and rode over the beach sand and into the white froth of the waves. He swung low over the side of his horse and scooped her naked into his arms.
She clutched onto his shirt, stared up into cool indigo eyes under his turban. He grinned at her, a piratical slash of white against the deep brown of his face.
Then she was riding behind him on his stallion. Naked. Wild. Free. Laughing. She’d survived. She hadn’t died.
And she felt the delicious ache of desire pump blood through her body. And for the first time she could remember, she realized she was truly alive.
Her eyes flashed open. Her heart was racing. Through the cloth covering her face she could see that the sun had moved across the sky. Panic kicked at her. He’d let her sleep too long. They would lose too much time. She jerked up. Her brain was thick. David was no longer beside her.
Her panic mounted as she squinted into the sun trying to find focus, to scan the surroundings.
Then she saw him. Relief swooped through her. He hadn’t left. He’d moved into the meager shade of a rock. His back was to her and his head was bent low over something in his lap.
She got up and went over to him, the muscles of her legs aching with each step.
He looked up as she approached. And in his eyes was something unreadable. Then she saw what he held in his hands. A leather-bound book. The Little Mermaid.
She sat quietly beside him.
He closed the book and ran his strong brown hands over the cover. His eyes were liquid ink. “I’d never read it, you know.”
She nodded. She didn’t know what to say.
“All this time and I never read her favorite story. How could I have let that happen?”
“David,” she softly, “don’t be so hard on yourself.”
His eyes lifted to hers. “Thank you, Jayde.” His voice was low and full of gravel. “Thank you for being there for Kamilah…in…in a way I never was. I just didn’t see it. I didn’t know how. This is what I should I have been doing all along. Reading to her. Fairy tales. Indulging her in her childish fantasies. I should have been playing with her, allowing her to be a child. I should have let her know it was okay to have fun…that it wasn’t a slight to her mother’s memory.”
She placed her hand on his arm. “You needed to let yourself know it was okay to live again, David. And that comes only with time. Don’t blame yourself.”
He sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes and held his face up to the sky as if to stop the kinetics of gravity drawing the tears down from his eyes. “And time we’ve had. It’s now time to move forward. We’ll get her, Jayde.” He whispered up to the heavens as if convincing himself as well as the universe. “We’ll get her. And we’ll let her be a kid. I won’t let her down again. Ever.”
Jayde’s stomach tightened into a ball. He was saying “we.” But she knew she would not be a part of the equation. Not once they’d freed Kamilah. There wouldn’t be a place for her. He’d made that clear enough. “You have never let her down, David.”
“I did. By not saving her mother. She blames me. She holds me responsible for her mother’s death.”
“No, she does not blame you, David,” she said softly. “She has never blamed you.”
His eyes flashed to hers. “How would you know?”
“Because she told me. She told me what happened that day, what she saw through her own eyes. And she told me how hard you tried to save her mother and she told me how very proud she is of you.”<
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His mouth pulled sideways as he tried to contain his emotion. “She told you that?” His voice was thick.
“Yes, David,” she said softly. “Yes, she did.”
He opened his mouth and let out a whoosh of air. Then he turned to look at her. “Thank you,” he whispered, his eyes tunneling deep into hers. “Thank you, Jayde.”
Then he clenched his jaw. His eyes turned cold and determined. He jerked to his feet. “Come,” he said, holding his hand out to her. “Let’s go and give my baby that happy ending. The one you promised her.”
Jayde reached out, grasped his hand. And she felt a new connection between them. A solidness that hadn’t been there before.
He strode over to the camels he’d hobbled near the fetid water, showing no sign of the fatigue that gripped her. “If we keep moving through the night,” he called out as he untied the camels, “and throughout tomorrow, we could be in Al Abèche before next nightfall.”
They stopped once more in the late evening and then pressed on into a night that was as stinking hot as the day that had preceded it. The moon was an almost nonexistent sliver, and the only light that guided them came from stars splattered over the huge black dome of sky.
The farther north they went, the drier the desert, the more hostile the terrain, the blacker the night. In places, sand dunes gave way to sharp rock ridges, and flint in the stone glinted at them like sharp teeth in the dying light of the waning moon.
Jayde knew that once they reached Al Abèche they would be only twenty miles from the Libyan border. The Falal fortress was only another ten miles into Libya. There they would contact Gio Moriati and they would wait for Sauvage and his team to bring Kamilah to them. They would then fly out by helicopter. Dr. Watson would be waiting to treat Kamilah on Shendi if all went according to plan.
She ran over the timeline again and again in her head, trying to stay awake on her camel as dawn once again seeped up from the horizon.
The Sheik Who Loved Me Page 20