It was as beautiful as any five-star hotel.
There was a large walnut dressing table and a pretty lemon-coloured bed, which had been turned back.
Adele helped Leila to change into a nightgown and then Leila sat on the edge of the bed and Adele helped her with her legs.
Really, she was unsure whether Leila could not manage or simply was not used to doing it herself.
‘I’ll come and wake you in a couple of hours so that you can do some leg exercises.’
‘Very well. If I need you or I am concerned about something I shall have a stewardess alert you, but now it is time for you to get some rest too, Adele,’ Leila said. She could be bossy too! ‘There should be a robe for you to change into before we land. There will be more of a selection for you when we get to Mamlakat Almas. Could you please dim my light on your way out?’
Adele did so.
‘Thank you,’ Leila said. ‘Now you go and relax.’
It was incredibly hard to, though, especially when she came out of the Queen’s bedroom and saw that Zahir was still talking on the phone.
She went to sit on her allocated seat and then changed her mind and decided to head to her own room, but Zahir ended the call then.
‘Adele, come and sit in the lounge.’
‘No.’ Adele shook her head. She was blushing, but not from embarrassment. She was heated and turned on just at the sight of him and the memory of their kiss. Sitting on a sofa with him dressed in next to nothing had no chance of ending well.
He knew what was on her mind.
‘No staff will come unless they are summoned.’
‘What if your mother gets up?’
He smiled.
‘My mother doesn’t get out of bed without the help of a maid. You’ll know when she wants to get up! Come on.’ He gestured with his head for her to join him. ‘We need to talk.’
They did and so Adele went over.
She went to sit on a chair but he patted the seat on the sofa beside him and rather tentatively she sat down.
‘I was just speaking with an architect and arranging to meet.’ He pointed to his laptop screen and she saw building plans.
‘I’m not returning to London, I haven’t renewed my contract,’ Zahir, rather bluntly, told her. ‘I am hoping to bring about change to the health system...’ He gave a small mirthless laugh. ‘Actually, there is no real system.’
‘None?’
‘There is one small hospital but it is under-resourced and overstretched. Most doctors stay a month and leave and I don’t blame them. My father is resistant to change.’
‘When you say you’re not coming back, for how long?’
‘Maybe never.’ And he was brutally honest then. ‘I have long held off on marriage, but my father will insist on it if change gets under way.’
And just as that evening when she had seen the flowers, and had known they had not come from him, today she knew that marriage could not apply to her.
‘There are many traditions and legends and rules in my land,’ Zahir explained. ‘I could take the whole flight to tell you about them and only then would we scratch the surface. The main thing I am trying to explain is that I cannot see my country accepting you. That is why I have done nothing about us.’
‘Zahir, I don’t want to live there,’ Adele said. ‘I would never leave my mother for a start, but we could have had a year, Zahir. A whole year of...’
And she felt like slapping his cheek for his restraint. ‘Now you’re leaving, just as I find out you wanted me all along. Why did you tell me all this now when there’s nothing we can do? Why did you say to your mother I could come when you knew you were going to marry? Why kiss me...?’
‘Would you prefer that I hadn’t?’ he asked. ‘I could have left, and let you carry on assuming that I disliked you. You could have had your holiday in France and returned and found out I had gone...’
She tried to picture it and she didn’t like what she saw.
‘Perhaps I would have returned in a few years’ time and by then I’d be married, perhaps you would be too.’
And she sat there.
‘All I can tell you is that I was not ready to say goodbye and had you not come today, it would have been goodbye, Adele.’
‘What happens now?’
He shrugged his broad shoulders.
‘That’s no answer.’
‘Because I haven’t been to the desert to ask for a solution.’
No, she did not understand their ways.
Neither, fully, did he.
He had sought solutions under the sun and the stars on many occasions.
The answers were always the same but in various orders.
Do what is essential.
Be patient.
In time the answers will unfold.
Yet they hadn’t.
He did not want his father to die, yet that was the only solution that Zahir could see.
‘Adele, it was either say goodbye in the car that morning and you would never know how I feel, or bring you to my home. I chose the latter.’
Adele looked into his beautiful eyes and she was now very glad that he had.
To have never known his kiss, to have never sat here looking him in the eye, as painful as it might prove, she was glad to be here.
There was an ache for contact and he solved that with his thumb, running it along her bottom lip.
‘I want to kiss you,’ he said, and he looked at her mouth as he spoke.
‘Someone might come.’
‘Not unless I summon them.’
And she looked at his mouth too.
‘Leila might call. Anyway, I’m working.’
‘If you are needed they will buzz through to your room.’
She half expected the oxygen masks to suddenly ping down, she felt so light-headed.
‘This might be the last chance,’ Zahir said, and he saw the struggle in her eyes.
‘Just a kiss?’ Adele checked, because just a kiss surely couldn’t be wrong.
‘Just that,’ he said.
She stood on legs that felt unfamiliar and walked the length of the lounge and past the Queen’s room.
There were no staff around, the only sounds the engines and her own pulse whooshing in her ears.
She stepped into the small bedroom and told herself that there was no chance they would be caught.
Yet she knew this was wrong.
Zahir came in then and turned the lock on the door.
All this for a kiss.
‘One kiss,’ Adele said, as he went for the drawstring of her linen pants.
‘Just one,’ Zahir said, and her thighs were shaking as she stepped out of her clothes.
She lifted her arms and he peeled off her top.
He unhooked her new and very lacy bra and peeled