She smiled at his chiseled profile. “What a novel concept! Would you take me next time you’re scouting new territories?”
He turned his eyes sideways to her, looked down the ten inches between them, his lips twisting. “I don’t do luxury tours. What you see today is for swooning princes’ benefit. When I go out on my own, I don’t lug mock palaces with me.”
“You’re talking to the girl who spent her first twelve years camping in temperatures in the minus, who picked her own food and washed her one change of clothes in freezing streams. I lived out of a backpack for months when I went back to the States, too.”
Another enigmatic layer painted his eyes before he shrugged. “We’ll see how you fare on this mini-excursion before we talk big treks.”
Her heart pirouetted in her chest.
He was not turning her down flat.
Next moment, her heart slowed its spin, wobbled as a sound she’d never heard … felt before, yawned from nonexistence into her ears, through her marrow.
She swung around … and her heart crashed.
On the horizon, a … a … a mountain was charging their way.
It looked like what she imagined a nuclear shockwave would look like. A tidal wave of roiling, pulverized earth.
At the rate it was advancing, it would reach them—bury them—in minutes.
Three
“S andstorm!”
Maram whirled around to Amjad, her heart bombarding her throat for a way out.
She found him gazing at the horizon, looking tranquil.
Tranquil? He must be frozen in alarm!
She pounced on him. He let her drag him to Dahabeyah, only to start emptying what he’d packed in the horse’s saddlebags.
“What are you doing?” she exclaimed. “We have to rush back!”
He shook his head, extracting folded cloth and goggles. “No. We’d only meet the storm and get blasted. If by some miracle we don’t, anything standing still on that low ground—aka our cars—will be buried in minutes, judging by the size and intensity of that haboob. The others won’t wait for us.”
She looked around in panic. In the distance, everyone was sealing the horse trailers, leaping into their cars and flooring it out of the camp.
They were leaving.
“But they … they can’t leave!”
“They have to.” He produced a sacklike thing, draped it over the jittery Dahabeyah’s muzzle and eyes before securing it over her neck, which the mare surprisingly accepted. A similar cover for her body followed. “By the time they reach us, they’d have zero visibility and would probably get lost and be buried in the sand after their fuel runs out. They have to go back and hope the fuel lasts driving against eighty-mile-an-hour winds before they exit the storm.”
“But you’re their crown prince! They can’t leave you behind!”
“Coming after me would mean certain death for them.”
“Not coming after you will mean certain death for you. For us.”
“No. They know I can handle myself.”
“How do you handle yourself against—” a bubble of hysteria expanded below her diaphragm as she flung her arms wide toward the cloud that had now consumed the horizon, like a planet-eating monster “—that!”
“Oh, that.” He handed her a pair of goggles. “Been there, done that. I’m actually thinking it’s a way out of being cooped up for two days with those yawn-inducing royals.”
“Okay, who’s suffering from sunstroke now? Are you out of your mind? This is the freaking mother of all sandstorms.”
He swung over Dahabeyah’s back, grimaced at the incoming destruction. “Aih, it’s a nasty one, isn’t it?”
And she shrieked her frustration and fright. “Amjad!”
He only started wrapping his head and face with the yards of cloth. He was done in moments, left only his eyes exposed. Then he extended his hand to her.
She looked at it, her mind seizing, dread as huge as the menace advancing on them clogging her throat.
“Maram.” She lurched. He’d never said her name. Never sounded so … soft. “Do you trust me?”
Her eyes jerked up, saw him as he was born to be, a desert raider fortified against the elements, calm in his ability to withstand them after many battles where they’d called it a draw. She snatched a look over her shoulder, quailed. That cloud hurtling toward them looked like the end of both their lives.
But if she’d trust anyone to survive this attack of nature, it was him. And she did trust him. With the life he’d saved once before.
“You know I do,” she choked.
His eyes snapped narrower, as if with a stab of pain.
Before she could think, he said, voice solemn, “Then trust me when I say this. I won’t let anything harm you.”
She nodded, accepting his pledge as fact, reached out. The moment the warmth and power of his calloused rider’s hand closed on her clammy, trembling one she felt she was sealing her fate.
But then it had been sealed from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. Then again during that bomb scare. She was choosing his path again, would always choose it, come what may.
She surged up, boosting his tug as he swept her in front of him.
In blinding succession, he removed her hat, wrapped her head and face like he had his and fitted her with the goggles. Before he lowered them over her eyes, he half turned her toward him.
“I’ll enfold you in my abaya, hold you secure, so don’t worry about holding on.” His voice poured in her ear through the layers between them, earnest and fortifying. She shuddered, nodded as he secured her as he’d said. “We’ll descend the dune, which will give us time before the haboob clears it. But it will catch up with us. I want you to be ready for the force of the wind and the sand hitting us even through our protection and with us traveling in its trajectory. But it’s all bark and no bite. I’m proof it’s survivable with no ill effects. I have a nearby shelter. We’ll go there and wait it out.”
She again nodded, noticed that his watch had GPS. He consulted it before he nudged Dahabeyah. Without hesitation, the mare stumbled down the steep slope.
She felt her heart plummet with each footfall. If it weren’t for Amjad’s steel arm and thighs melding her to him, she would have fallen off.
When they reached flat land, he again urged
