by Lynne Graham
There appeared to be no more guards but she still had to find her way out of the fortress. Fortunately for her, everywhere seemed to be deserted and she went down another flight of steps to find herself in a walled courtyard with closed gates and a pack of parked four-wheel drives. She wished she could steal a car and wondered what the punishment for that would be in Djalia. But starting up a car engine would attract attention, wouldn’t it? Or would it? Vehicles had been coming and going at all hours late into the night while she’d watched. At the same time she doubted her ability to drive up a steep sand dune and feared coming to grief at that first hurdle.
Picking her way between the cars while on the watch for anyone moving, she reached the gates and, with all the strength she had, she thrust down the iron bar on the gate to open it. As it creaked noisily open she slid out through the gap with a fast-beating heart and fled.
CHAPTER THREE
MOLLY RAN UP the dune through the deep pitted tracks left by the cars, desperate not to be spotted by guards at the fortress before she could get out of sight. She reached the peak and, because it was much colder than she had expected, she drew in a deep breath and kept on running, grateful that she was fit. Running was, after all, what she did for exercise at home, but running in a dress was another story altogether, she discovered, with the stretch of her legs restricted and her strides shortened. She thought about simply pulling the dress up to her waist but, although she could see no sign of life in the moonlit landscape, she didn’t want to expose herself in her underwear in a country where that was probably unacceptable.
She stayed on the tracks but they mysteriously petered out around the time the sun started rising and the glare of that alone made studying her surroundings a challenge. She was looking for a landmark of some kind to take as a direction to ensure that she didn’t get lost, but all she could see was marching lines of sand dunes. What did you expect? she asked herself irritably. A signpost to the airport?
Well, no, but she had hoped to find a recognisable road at least, only there wasn’t a road or tracks anywhere that she could see. Yet the cars must have travelled from somewhere, she thought in frustration, veering off to the left when she espied flatter land there because climbing a dune without tracks was too difficult and too tiring to get her anywhere fast. A stony plain stretched before her then, occasional small bits of vegetation appearing, which persuaded her that she was heading in the right direction and likely to draw closer to what she dimly thought of as civilisation. Buildings, roads, cars...people. It infuriated her that probably all those things were close by, but she couldn’t spot them because of the blasted dunes blocking her view. She stilled a few times and simply listened, hoping to catch sounds that would lead her in a certain direction, but there was nothing, only the soft noise of the light breeze in her eardrums and the fast beat of her own heart. While she was sipping her water, mindful that she needed to conserve it, however, Azrael was shouting for the first time in all the years Butrus had known him.
‘How could any woman be that stupid?’ he was demanding wrathfully soon after Gamila had discovered her unoccupied bed and a search had established that Azrael’s guest was no longer anywhere on the premises. ‘There is nothing out there but miles and miles of desert.’
‘But Miss Carlisle doesn’t know that...unless someone mentioned it,’ Butrus remarked, looking at no one in particular. ‘She will soon get tired and too hot and come back. Perhaps she simply went for a walk—’
‘A...a walk?’ Azrael erupted afresh in disbelief. ‘She has run away! She is a very stubborn, determined woman. I tell you...she has run away because I told her that she couldn’t leave!’
‘It is a source of greater concern to me that anyone was able to leave without a single guard challenging them,’ admitted Halim, the commanding officer of Azrael’s household guard, with a frown. ‘There will be an investigation into that worrying event after the woman is found. If someone can get out so easily, someone could have got in and reached His Majesty—’
‘His Majesty is very well able to defend himself!’ Azrael bit out rawly. ‘I am going out to look for her—’
‘I would not advise that,’ Butrus interposed, forgetting his usually punctilious manners in his dismay.
‘Nobody knows this part of the desert better than me...nobody is a better tracker!’ Azrael fired back at him with unarguable assurance.
‘But a severe sandstorm is due to move in before nightfall,’ Halim reminded his royal employer nervously. ‘You must not put yourself at risk when there is no need. The whole guard are already out there searching for her.’
But Azrael had always been stubborn as a rock and highly resistant to advice. He felt personally responsible for Molly’s disappearance and if anything happened to her he knew he would carry the shame of it to the end of his days. Furthermore, having spent his childhood at the fortress and many months in almost the same locality as an adolescent following his father’s execution, he did know the terrain better than anyone else available. When he had changed into more suitable desert apparel, the dark blue robes of his nomadic heritage, he politely refused Halim’s companionship, knowing that Halim’s disability would make hours on horseback a day of physical suffering for him. Halim had stumbled on a landmine during the struggle to topple Hashem from power.
‘You are not to take such risks.’ Butrus was still protesting Azrael’s involvement right to the door of the stables. ‘If anything happens to you, what happens to Djalia? You agreed with the council...no more personal risks.’
‘Don’t be silly, Butrus. This is an emergency,’ Azrael responded squarely. ‘I will scarcely come to harm in a storm. I was a member of our special forces. There is nothing the desert can throw at me that I cannot handle.’
‘The woman is not worth the danger to your life,’ Butrus breathed, his voice quavering with emotion.
Azrael was taken aback to see the level of concern in his adviser’s eyes and he gave his shoulder a rather awkward pat before vaulting up onto the back of his horse. ‘No one life is worth more than another. You taught me that,’ he reminded him with quiet authority.
‘I spoke in error.’ Butrus was still arguing vigorously as Azrael rode out of the courtyard.
Around the same time, Molly was beginning to realise that she might have made a very bad decision when she left the fortress. Once she crossed the flat plain to reach the one and only landmark she had even seen since venturing out, she knew she was weakening. The heat was unbelievable. She had never felt heat of that magnitude in her life. The sun above was relentless and the sand was scorching, burning her feet even through the soles of her canvas shoes. Afraid of getting sunburned, she had pulled her hands up into her sleeves and kept the towel over her head to cover her face.
She had rationed her water, belatedly realising that she had brought nowhere near enough water to meet her needs in such a challenging environment. Simultaneously she had asked herself what she had planned to do if she had miraculously found the airport. She had not thought through what she was trying to do. How could she have boarded a plane to go anywhere? She had no money, no identification, no phone, no passport, none of the necessities required for travel...
Now as she headed for the little triangle of shade she could see below the giant rocky outcrop, she was getting scared because she was down to her last inch of water in the bottle and, although she wasn’t yet admitting it to herself, she knew she was lost because when she had, at one nervous point, attempted to retrace her steps she had discovered that the steadily building breeze had already covered them up, leaving her with no idea of which direction she had come from. Now her head was aching and she was getting cramps in her legs and resting until the heat at least eased off seemed the best option available.
She hated deserts because everything looked the same, she told herself fearfully as she slumped into the shade, and something with more legs than she cared to count scampered out of the gloom and sped off, as alarmed by her approach an
d startled cry as she was by its flight. She didn’t like insects or snakes or lizards and she had already seen far too many such creatures to relax, having discovered that although the landscape looked reassuringly empty, that was a misconception. A whole host of nasty things lurked in unexpected places. She rocked back and forth, dimly appreciating that she was no longer quite firing on all mental cylinders and that she was unwell.
She had done the Djalians’ work for them, she reflected dizzily. She had wandered off, got hopelessly lost and now she was going to die in the desert. She had another tiny sip of water, moistening her dry mouth while noticing that her arm had developed a sort of tremor that was unnerving.
Like Azrael—unnerving like Azrael. He had disturbed her, set off her temper and enraged her. It was his fault this had happened to her, his fault she had made such a dumb decision, she brooded, steeped in physical misery. She was hot, thirsty, dirty, sore and the tip of her nose hurt where the sun had got at it. The King, who had tried to buy her off.
Although the money would have come in useful, she acknowledged sleepily, her thoughts beginning to slow down, making her feel a little like a clock that badly needed winding up. Maurice would miss her visits, she thought, even if he couldn’t tell her apart from the mother she barely even remembered. And she didn’t mind that reality, no, of course she didn’t, when her grandfather had been the only person who ever seemed to love her. Did that mean that she was just unlovable? She had often wondered that. Her father hadn’t cared enough about her to protect her from his wife, while her stepmother had hated her almost on sight. Tahir had liked her in the wrong way, she reasoned in a daze, while Azrael... Why was she thinking about him again? Well, Azrael had hated her on sight too.
And then suddenly there was noise, the ground beneath her shifting as a horse galloped across the sand towards her. Poor horse, she thought numbly; if it was too hot for her, it had to be too hot for the horse as well. The horse, however, carried some sort of tribesman and she contrived to stretch out an arm and wave from the shade as though she were hailing a bus to stop for her.
The figure vaulted off the horse and the ground under her hips moved at the thump of booted feet.
‘You stupid, stupid woman,’ a familiar voice scolded.
And a weird kind of joyous relief engulfed Molly as she struggled to focus on those intense dark golden eyes, which were all that showed in the headdress he wore that covered his mouth as well. Azrael had found her and, instantly, she knew she would be all right.
Azrael was less confident because the storm was moving in fast in a threatening dark smudge, which he could already see on the horizon. The high winds had brought down the mast and his phone had not worked since his last call when he had phoned in to share that he had identified Molly’s tracks. Now they were too far from the fortress to make it back ahead of the storm. How the hell had she got so far before he found her? She had travelled miles into the desert, through mile after mile of the most blazingly unwelcoming landscape on earth. And she had done it without adequate clothing or footwear and any of the many pieces of equipment that would have kept her comfortable and safe. She was crazy but she was also strong, Azrael acknowledged, squatting down to hand her a water bottle and grab it off her again before she made herself sick.
‘Hands off, Mr Grumpy,’ she told him with a giggle.
She was delirious from heat and thirst, Azrael interpreted in frustration. He lifted her and bundled her into a cloak, noting the red tip of her nose with a groan.
‘What’s wrong?’ she slurred.
‘You have burned your nose.’
‘Do I look like Rudolph?’
‘Who’s Rudolph?’ Azrael lifted her and draped her over his horse like a folded carpet. She was safe: he had found her. A little of the tension holding his powerful frame taut dissipated. He would take her to the cave and plunge her in the pool to cool her off. Hopefully by that stage the storm would have passed and they could be picked up. No aircraft could take off in such weather because it was too dangerous.
‘Santa’s reindeer,’ Molly responded thickly, struggling to vocalise and think at the same time. ‘ I don’t like you.’
‘Keep quiet,’ Azrael intoned flatly. ‘Save your strength.’
What strength? Molly would have asked had she the power because she felt as floppy and as weak as a newborn and she hated the smell of horse. ‘Horses stink.’
Azrael rolled his eyes and tugged on Spice’s reins to head for the cave where he had hidden as a child with his mother from Hashem’s soldiers. ‘You didn’t do too badly for a city girl,’ he heard himself pronounce. ‘It was an outstandingly stupid move, of course, but you travelled a great distance—’
‘Shut up,’ Molly moaned.
Azrael grinned. ‘There’s nothing I enjoy more than a trapped audience.’
‘Butrus thinks you walk on water, O Glorious Leader,’ she mumbled.
‘I am an ordinary man,’ Azrael countered with crushing calm.
Molly’s eyes closed. Ordinary? Somehow she didn’t think so. Mr Gorgeous had come after her and saved her and she was grateful even if he did annoy the hell out of her. She didn’t mind that he had become Mr Grumpy again by the time he found her. ‘Thanks,’ she framed hoarsely.
And that was the last thing Molly remembered before she recovered consciousness in what felt like a freezing cold bath. Her eyes were heavy and gritty and opening them took as much effort as trying to lift her arms out of the water.
‘No,’ a familiar voice declared. ‘You must stay in the water to cool your body down.’
She let her eyes stay closed because she thought she was dreaming. They had been in the desert where there was no water, certainly none he could submerge her entire body in. Her mind wandered off again and she drifted, only minimally aware of being roughly towelled, something catching at her ribcage and a yanking sensation before she was laid down somewhere, fabric of some kind lying lightly on her skin. She felt cool, wonderfully, blessedly cool for the first time in hours and she made no protest when she was lifted up and a bottle was put to her lips to drink. She gulped back the water and lay down again, her senses beginning to return to her. Her lashes lifted only a little because her eyes were so heavy and she had a blurred glimpse then of a man undressing.
She shouldn’t look, a bossy little inner voice told her brain. She shut her eyes and breathed in deep, stifling that prissy voice, and she looked. And what she saw was a sight she was persuaded even at that moment that she would never forget... Azrael naked and an absolute symphony of bronzed, muscular male perfection from his wide, smooth brown shoulders, down the long, graceful golden line of his spine to his small, taut, masculine buttocks and his powerful hair-roughened thighs. A thick blue-black mane of hair brushed those amazing shoulders as well. She closed her eyes again fast, feeling like a shameless voyeur. She was perving on him when he thought himself unobserved, having assumed that she was asleep, and she should be ashamed of herself. She had never thought a man could be beautiful before and now she had learned different because, stripped of clothes, Azrael was magnificent.
Azrael slumped down into the chill of the cave pool with intense relief. His body had betrayed him as his mind could not. He was so turned on he literally hurt from the pounding pulse of his arousal. A man without ready access to sex should never, ever be forced to undress a woman, he reasoned in exasperation. He had removed only the dress, submerging her in the bra and panties she still wore, determined not to give Molly any reason to accuse him of overfamiliarity.
And then the blasted towel had caught on the bra hook and ripped the heavy-duty bra half off, a garment more surely suited to an old and very sensible lady rather than a young and beautiful one. So, having partially detached and damaged the wretched thing, he had had to remove the bra, revealing the sort of bountiful pale curves topped by the most succulent nipples that any man would have... Azrael gritted his teeth, killing his thoughts stone dead, perspiration breaking on his brow. He was be
ing thoroughly punished for his lack of physical control. But he had done what he had to do and she was safe and unharmed, he reminded himself soothingly. Now he should be able to relax...but relaxation had never been more of a challenge for him.
Molly wakened to a shadowed darkness that startled her as she gazed up at the craggy stone roof far above and realised that she was not in a building but in a very large cave. And then she saw the rusty old lantern glowing on the edge of the rock pool that she now appreciated must have illuminated that glimpse she’d had of Azrael naked. A small waterfall emerged directly from the rocks behind the pool and flowed down to break the still surface of the clear water. She blinked and sat up, remembering her experience in the desert with a shudder and acknowledging that, considering her earlier condition, she now felt astonishingly normal. She would have to thank Azrael. Had she thanked him? She wasn’t sure. But he deserved thanks for defying her worst expectations and coming out into the desert to find her and rescue her. So, where was he?
She sat up, disconcerted to discover that her breasts were bare but relieved she was still wearing her knickers. She was lying on some sort of old rug that smelled a little musty and her dress had been laid over her like a sheet. In haste she pulled it on over her head and scrambled upright, extracting her hair and smoothing it down in an effort to control her curls. Only then when she turned her head did she see the flickering shadows at the far end of the cave where a small fire burned and a dark figure sat, his back turned to her. She hastened to shove her feet back into her sneakers.
As she trod over the sandy floor of the cave she became aware of a low rumbling sound and her brow pleated. ‘What’s that noise?’ she asked.
‘The sandstorm is moving in.’ Azrael turned his head, his bold bronzed profile etched against the leaping flames. ‘I had to find you before it hit and we can’t return to the fortress until it’s over.’