The childhood sweetheart she had come here to seduce, and betray.
Chapter One
‘BABA’S a gineer.’
That mystical communication, imparted to Desirée by Samiha on their first day at school, had entranced Desi with its exotic otherness and bound her instantly to her pretty, dark-eyed new friend. Soon she learned that Baba meant Daddy, and that gineer meant he had come to the west coast to build something big. But the magic never quite faded.
It was the first day of what grew into a lifelong friendship. Desi and Sami were inseparable all through school. They spent their summers together, too, on a small island off the B.C. coast, where the Drummond family’s lakefront ‘cottage’ was a century-old black clapboard farmhouse with outbuildings.
Her ex-hippie parents were hoping to turn the place into a year-round home, growing their own food, and hosting retreats, healing courses and dream workshops in the summer to see them through the winter. But the project never generated enough income for her father to give up his university post and permanently move the family from Vancouver.
Every summer Desi and her brother and sister were each allowed to invite a friend to stay. Every year from first grade on, Desi took Sami.
The summer Desi turned nine, Samiha’s cousin Salah came from Central Barakat to stay with Sami’s family and improve his English. Salah was twelve, the same age as her brother Harry, and for some reason no one could afterwards remember, he was invited to the cottage.
Salah and Harry became friends, and after that every year it was somehow taken for granted that Salah would be a part of their summer adventure.
Salah was deeply attractive, a fascinating boy. Those first few summers, Desi hovered between hero worship and competitiveness in her feelings for him, half determined to prove she was braver and brighter than any boy, half wishing Salah were her friend instead of her brother’s.
Such feelings were a perfect primer for something deeper, and it wasn’t long in coming. At the end of the summer she turned fourteen, Desi was just entering on puberty, and a new awareness between herself and Salah beckoned. The next summer, Salah didn’t make his annual visit to Canada.
During those two years, Desi grew up. Her breasts formed, her waist appeared, and her height shot up six inches that was almost all leg. Her face shifted from sweet roundness to a haunting elegance.
The just-sixteen-year-old who greeted her old sparring partner the following summer was tall, very slender and quirkily beautiful—so ‘unusual’ that she had been spotted in the street by a scout and signed with a modelling agency.
As for Salah, at nineteen he showed more clearly the man he would be: slim but powerful, with broad, thin shoulders, a dark, intense gaze and a voice that came from his toes. He was also broody, inscrutable and very sure of his opinions.
Of course she fell in love with him. Of course she did. The friend of childhood whom she already adored, transformed into a romantic hero? Salah was now intensely good-looking, darkly masculine—and so much more adult than the boys at school. And his innocent integrity was a complete contrast to the predatory male sleaze her father and minders kept at a distance in the modelling world.
He was clearly sunk by the new Desi, whose flowing hair moved even when she didn’t, whose creamy skin glowed with sensual promise, whose bikinis showed off the curve of full small breasts, fabulous legs, smooth abdomen and firm rump, and who could scarcely eat for fear of gaining an ounce.
That was the year, by an unlucky coincidence—though they thought it perfect enough then—that both her brother Harry and her friend Sami missed the usual holiday on the island. Samiha had gone back to the Barakat Emirates for a visit, and at the last minute Harry had got a summer job to earn money for university. He came to the island only on odd weekends.
It was only natural that Desi and Salah should spend their time with each other.
That summer, too, there was a heat wave, and maybe it was the exhaustion factor that meant her parents didn’t notice the building chemical reaction between them, or maybe it was just their hippy laissez-faire attitude; Desi never knew.
On the mainland there were forest fires, but the islands, although oven-hot during the day, mercifully got rain at night. Mornings began cool and fresh, with mist lifting off the lake, but by ten the temperature was soaring, and by eleven most of the paying guests were prostrated by the heat.
Everybody hated the intense heat—everybody except Desi and Salah. Salah was used to such temperatures, and as for Desi—she felt she was waking from a lifelong sleep. The heat energized her, made her blood sing, her muscles flex, as if she were a runner waiting to begin a race she knew she’d win.
Not just the heat, of course, contributed to the feeling.
They became inseparable. Looking back on that summer, Desi remembered bright hot days lasting forever, and an all-encompassing joy in sheer being. They ran together, swam together, talked, explored.
They didn’t stop competing with each other, of course. But that only added to the intensity, spiced their meetings, kept them on their toes.
‘Salah?’
They gazed at each other for a frozen moment, and suddenly, treacherously, against all the odds, the warm, sweet, sensual memories of a decade ago stirred to melting in her. The sun-burnt warmth of his naked chest against her trembling hand. Black eyes filled with love and need. The intoxication of desire that he had tried so nobly to resist…
Kiss him hello. You need to knock him off balance right at the start, before he gets his lines of control in place.
Desi couldn’t have moved to save her life. She couldn’t have kissed Salah to save the world. All she could do was stand there, her gaze locked with his, and wonder how she would ever manage to do what she had come here to do, while yesterday’s vision of a full, young, passionate mouth and eyes intense with longing arose to confuse the impression of tight control and harsh judgement she saw in his face now.
Then his mouth moved.
‘Who were you expecting?’
‘Not you.’
If he had expected anything, it was not that his heart would leap so painfully at his first glimpse of her. This fact annoyed him almost as much as her daring to come here. It argued a weakness in him, and he would not be weak where she was concerned. He was no longer a boy, to be at the mercy of his own needs, and hers. He would not be manipulated by her sexuality, practised as it was. He was a man, as she would discover.
Her right eyebrow flared up in the nervous way he remembered. Her eyes seemed slate grey now, as if her anxiety had drained them of colour. She had chameleon eyes, a fact he remembered well. He had never met a woman whose eyes changed colour in such a way. In his memory they were mostly turquoise, deep and rich, like the jewel. Green sometimes when they made love in daylight…and sometimes this green-tinged, slate grey…
‘I was not expecting you, either,’ he said grimly.
‘Then I wonder who you’re here to meet.’
‘I hoped that you would change your mind. You should have.’
‘Excellency,’ the passport officer murmured, and His Excellency Salahuddin Nadim al Khouri surfaced to take her passport from the outstretched hand. A muscle in his jaw moved.
‘Come, Desi,’ he said, turning to lead the way. He pronounced it, as he always had, Deezee. The memories it summoned up skated on her nerves. Desi, I love you. I will love you longer than the stars burn.
Now that the gaze was broken, she could move. She fell into step beside but a little behind him. Like a good Muslim wife, she told herself, and with an irritated little skip that was totally unlike her, she caught up with him.
Her heart was in turmoil,