to her stomach, looking for the signs that a child was growing there.
When he cut the rotor, she came across the lawn towards him and leaned in the passenger door, peering towards the seats in the back of the helicopter. Rashid pulled his mouthpiece away from his chin so she could recognize him.
“Hello!” he cried over the engine noise.
Julia did a double take. She hadn’t been expecting him to be piloting the helicopter himself, and a fresh wave of nervous energy swept her.
“Hello!” Her voice held the sound of her determination to keep this pleasant. She had a deep, primitive urge to turn and flee.
“Can you climb in?” He spoke so matter-of-factly that her fears were momentarily calmed. He’s a Kamal, she told herself. That doesn’t mean he’s going to murder me in cold blood.
He leaned across to offer her a hand, but she clambered in without his help. He frowned to himself without knowing why. Something to do with wanting to be needed. Especially because she was pregnant.
With his son.
He helped her strap herself in, however, and gestured towards a headset in front of her. Julia took off her straw hat and slipped the headset over her ears. A moment later the chopper lifted smoothly off under his guidance, and they were airborne.
“Did you bring a bathing suit?” Rashid’s voice said in her headset.
It felt too intimate to have his voice inside her head like this. It reminded her of the last time she had heard him so close. Then he had not needed the assistance of a headset to give the impression of closeness; his voice had sounded close because his mouth was against her hair.
Beautiful, he had murmured. You are so beautiful….
Julia’s cheeks burned with the memory. “I did,” she said, hefting her drawstring bag as evidence without meeting his eyes. She dropped the bag between her feet and turned to look out. He had taken them out over the water and was heading north.
So the private place he had in mind was not on any of the Tamir Islands. She had wondered if he meant to take her to his horse farm on Siraj.
“Are we going to a yacht?” she wondered, half to herself, forgetting that her headset, too, had a microphone.
“No, an island.”
“An island? Rashid, I don’t have a passport with me!”
He laughed. “Stop worrying, Julia.” Again his voice was intimate and seductive in her ears. “Your seat reclines. Lie back and relax.”
In the cocoon of the helicopter with him, she felt strangely detached from the normal world. If she had not known Rashid was a Kamal, she would have felt an instinctive trust of him.
There was nothing she could do about this situation except start screaming to be taken home. Or go along with it.
She was tired after her sleepless night, and she would do better in the coming discussion if she caught some sleep now. With a resigned shrug, Julia found the mechanism, reclined her seat, and, with the sun bright above them, and sparkling almost painfully from the deep blue of the Mediterranean below, closed her eyes and let herself drowse. The memory was never far away….
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