summer welled up in her at his words. Heat burned her blood. That incredible, bone-deep, never-to-be-repeated yearning for the touch of another human being—it was as if she had sat by a fire she thought was ashes and dust, and with one measured kick he had set it roaring into an inferno again.
‘I regretted it for a while,’ she said. ‘And then not. What about you?’
‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘I want to see your hair.’
Her head twitched back. ‘Don’t touch me!’
‘Ten years.’
She could not prevent him. He reached out to grasp the brim of her hat and slowly pulled it off. At his bidding, the ash-blond hair came tumbling down around her shoulders. It was like being undressed by any other man.
‘Still the colour of the desert at the edge of the mountains.’
One strong finger reached for a lock, curled around it. He had said it ten years ago. Not the golden sand you see on postcards, Desi, he had whispered as they lay in each other’s arms, and he kissed a lock of her hair, more beautiful than that. The colour before sunset, just where it flows into purple foothills. I will show you.
Her skin shivered with unbearable sensation. He was watching her with half-lidded hawk eyes, the better to see her with. She lifted her chin to draw back, and could not.
Time, the great trickster, stopped altogether then, and they stared at each other, unmoving, his hand locked in her hair, her eyes wide, hypnotized. Outside the car, blinding sun and a harsh, unforgiving landscape. Inside, the unforgiving landscape of the heart.
The car went over a bump, kicking time into motion again. Desi lifted her hand and pulled her hair from his grasp.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she began, but even as she spoke the command his control snapped. One strong dark hand clamped her wrist and his other arm went around her waist to pull her into his embrace, thigh to thigh, breast to chest, her hands helpless, her body arcing against him as if in erotic submission.
For a moment they were frozen there, eyes fixed on each other’s face, but if it was the past she was yearning for, there was nothing of the tender boy she remembered in the angry blackness of a gaze that seemed to swallow her every attempt at conscious thought, fatally weakening her resistance.
At last she found the use of her hands and lifted to push them against his shoulders. Still he held her, resisting the pressure with frightening ease. His keffiyeh fell forward over one shoulder, cocooning them in their own little world.
Their own world. It had always been their own world.
‘Salah!’ she protested, but the name was lost in a gasp as his lips took possession of hers.
His mouth was strong and hungry, and her body heat went instantly to melting point as the kiss devoured her. Need like a starving child rose up in her then, an ancient, unfamiliar yearning—hunger, and thirst, and the bone-deep ache of a decade bursting a heart that had been locked tight against feeling for too long.
Terrified by the force of her anguished need, gasping at her overwhelming response, she resisted the powerful urge to wrap her arms around his neck and drink deep of what she had been deprived of so long, and instead struggled and pushed against him, dragging her parched mouth away from water in the desert, fighting against instinct and compulsion like one who knows the source of all they need is poisoned.
He lifted his mouth at last. Again they were still, staring into each other’s eyes at point-blank range, her hair flowing over his arm, his black gaze over her face.
‘I always liked to taste my name on your lips,’ he said, remembering.
Something like panic gripped her. ‘Let me go.’
Salah breathed as if for ammunition in the battle for self-control, and opened his arms. She flung herself back indignantly, flicking her hair, tweaking her clothes straight, avoiding looking at him for fear of what he could read in her eyes.
With all her heart she wanted to avoid confrontation, pretend this had never happened. But it would be fatal to let it pass. At last she could raise her eyes and stare at him.
‘If you kiss me again I will hit you,’ she said between her teeth.
‘Beware of chain reactions, then.’
His voice was like iced gravel. A thrill of something that was not quite fear went through her.
‘Can we leave it out?’ she cried. ‘I’ve been flying for most of a day and I’m tired!’
He nodded, lifted up and opened a briefcase, pulled out some papers, and began to study them. Suddenly he was the stranger again, in the unfamiliar keffiyeh and desert robes. He looked like an oil sheikh.
Just like that, it seemed, he could dismiss her from his consciousness. Desi resisted the sudden, mad urge to go for him and tear off the intimidating headgear, as if that would restore him to the boy she had known.
But there was more than a keffiyeh between this chiselled, haughty face and the Salah she’d once overwhelmingly loved.
Chapter Three
PERHAPS if her parents had been more awake to what was going on, Desi’s personal disaster might have been averted. But the house was at peak capacity, with every bed full, and in the heat there seemed to be twice as much work, with guests demanding fresh towels, cold drinks and extra service.
They had a retreat, a place that the children had used as a hideaway for years: under the old wooden pier that lay on one side of the lake a few hundred yards from the house. Every summer Desi and her brother dragged an air mattress underwater and up onto the rocks beneath, and then inflated it so that it lay half floating, half moored.
They called it their clubhouse. Sometimes, when avoiding household chores or ignoring mealtimes, the children had hidden there, giggling and listening to their mother call.
In sunlit hours, the spot was pleasantly shady. In rain, they could pretend it was dry. And in the evening it was perfection to sit there with a small smudge coil keeping the mosquitoes at bay, talking about life, death and destiny, and what they would do when they grew up.
Salah and Desi spent many hours there that summer, away from the paying guests who wandered up and down at the lake’s edge. In the searing heat, it was pleasant to lie there, while shafts of burning light pierced the gloom, the air mattress bumping lightly against the sides of the pier or the rocks as the water lapped. In the evenings they lay in each other’s embrace, watching as stars and moon appeared.
With her head resting on his shoulder, his fingers threading her hair, they dreamed together about the future. They would get married as soon as she finished high school. She would move to the Barakat Emirates to be with him, and make her life there. They would have four children, two boys and two girls.
Neither Salah nor Desi meant for it to happen, though it was always Salah who drew back, when Desi was too much in love, and too drowned in sensation, to know where the point of no return was.
‘We have time, Desi,’ Salah would say gently. ‘All our lives. We can wait.’ And of course she agreed.
But
