have been hammered apart without Amjad raising and lowering her with him to the rhythm of the horse.
Then the sandstorm caught up with them.
She heard its roar like a monster opening its jaws wide to swallow them, felt it snatching her heart out. Then it hit them with the force of a train, engulfed them, overtook them as the roar turned into a soul-splitting wail. The desert disappeared in a limbo of solid yellow dust.
At one point she thought she heard Amjad’s voice, sounding … amused? The sandstorm’s brain-liquefying screeching must have damaged her ear drums.
Then she deciphered his words and knew he was. “One good thing about haboobs, you no longer need your SPF 50 sunscreen.”
She pressed into him, her screaming tension easing gradually. Even if this felt like the end of the world, it couldn’t be too serious, could it? He couldn’t be so devil-may-care in the face of death, could he?
Apparently, Amjad could.
Ride endlessly, endure the harrowing bombardment of the sand and wind, the suffocation of breathing scorching, dry-as-tinder air through cloth and intersperse it all with caustic comments on anything his brilliantly twisted mind could come up with, delivered into her ringing ear. Favorite targets in descending order were her father, Ossaylan, Zohayd, the region, women, men, politics, business and pretty much everything that made the world go round.
Problem was, she couldn’t.
She could only hold herself up, refusing to be the deadweight he invited her to be. She held herself up steadier every time he consulted his illuminated GPS and forged on with total assurance, thinking he believed their destination was drawing nearer.
But their destination seemed to be receding.
She’d weathered the first half-century of the ride relatively well. The next quarter started to take its toll. This last one was becoming unbearable. And she had no idea how many more centuries it would take before they reached his “nearby shelter.”
Couldn’t she just faint? He was doing fine riding and holding her up all without her input. He had told her to nap, as if they were on a long, uneventful journey in the tranquil luxury of one of his limos. He might have had a point.
Might as well let the rest of the ordeal fade away …
Maram came to with a jerk.
Yellowish nothingness greeted her scratching-open eyes.
She thought she was suspended in the limbo between sleep and wakefulness, where everything was a blank sheet waiting for awareness to fill it with the details and depth of perceptions.
Then those flooded in. She hadn’t been caught in a nightmare. She had been in a sandstorm, with Amjad. Still was.
So she’d fainted. Or surrendered to the exhausting-cum-lulling ride and taken the nap Amjad had advised her to. Amjad, who was forging through the brutality of the sandstorm, carrying her like a weightless rag doll as he ascended barely visible steps leading to a columned patio of what looked like a single-story construction. It might be the only visible part of a castle for all she knew. She couldn’t see beyond a few feet.
Not that it mattered what it was. They’d made it.
He had. Gotten them to safety. Like he’d promised.
He was carrying her like she’d told him to ages ago, across the threshold of a refuge. In seconds he slammed a foot-thick door shut behind him, isolating them in the sudden safety and relative silence of a blessedly cool, dark interior.
He held her with one arm for the moment it took to snatch off his goggles. Their shape was imprinted into his flesh, and he looked haggard. But as he hastily removed the coverings off her face, the sight of his eyes sent her sluggish heart revving. Although bloodshot, they glowed an eerie green, smoldered down at her with anxiety and … guilt?
Why guilt, when he’d saved her? Perhaps he was blaming himself for not anticipating the storm and exposing her to the ordeal.
Or maybe, moron, with you slumped like a dead fish in his arms, he thinks you’re dying or something.
She savored his unguarded—and no doubt never to be repeated—expression a moment more before forcing life back into her muscles. She stirred, struggled to pull off her own goggles, half believing she’d tear her skin away with them. They left her face with a pop.
She groaned at having air instead of a semi-vacuum around her eyes. Her sight blurred and adjusted like a lens struggling to find focus. She saw his expression shift back to that projection of indifference he wore like an impenetrable shield.
Then a corner of his now-colorless lips lifted in that world-renowned smirk and he rasped out a bass, “Welcome to my lair.”
Her stinging gaze clung to his until he looked ahead to navigate through a corridor that made her feel as if he were taking her deeper into the arcane sanctum of a wizard.
Which he was. He’d always practiced magic. At least on her.
They entered a spacious rectangular hall with adobe walls and stone floors strewn with hand-woven kilims. Their same combination of bold, dark colors imbued cushions of every size covering one long, low, wooden settee resting against the wall with a huge square oak table in front of it. Flanking the corridor, the hall continued into two more areas. One had a fireplace of yet another mix of rocks and stones, huge cushions on the floor and a tableyah, a foot-high circular table of palm wood that looked handmade, with the anachronism of a sleek silver laptop on top making it look more primal. The remaining area was a kitchen with a brick oven built into the wall, a sink and a cooktop in a huge island with a countertop of unpolished quartz. The rest of the walls were covered by an extensive pantry.
Leading from the hall, she could see another corridor extending to what she assumed were two more rooms. If you could call them that, when neither had a door, just walls forming the corridor and separating them from each other.
Four large, arched windows flanked the open areas, the eerie illumination of the sandstorm seeping through their shutters. They buzzed in their frames with its bombardment. The resoluteness of their seal allowed nothing to penetrate their defenses, or the place would have been knee-deep in sand. Everything looked pristine.
It could have been a dump, and it still would have been the best place she’d ever been for saving them from the death screeching for their souls outside. But even had that not influenced her opinion, it was more evocative and enthralling than all the imposing edifices she’d seen in the region. Being composed of the elements of Zohayd’s nature, reflecting its origins, faithful to its essence, it was real, unpolished and unpretentious. It made her feel as though she’d stepped into the atmospheric setting of one of the One Thousand and One tales with which Shahrazad had assuaged her king and husband Shahrayar’s madness.
Now that she was there, she could imagine Amjad building nothing else as his hideaway from the world. It possessed the rawness of his aura, the unadorned impact of his power …
Her musings came to a halt as his hands changed pressure on her body. She almost cried out when he lowered her to her feet. She swayed, looked up into eyes that had turned golden green in the unearthly light, and quivered with the need to nestle into him again.
Not
