She had never seen real desert so close before. Mountains and sea were her natural background; from her childhood she had never questioned the rightness of that.
Until now. Now, as she watched an eternity of dusky sand pass, smoky tendrils of longing and belonging reached out from the stark landscape into the vehicle, into her being, her self, and clasped her heart.
‘So,’ Salah said, in a harsh voice that immediately brought her back to the now. ‘So, Desi, you come to my country at last.’
She could feel her emotions rising to the bait, and fought down the impulse to rake over their ten-year-old history.
‘Well, I guess you could…’
‘After ten years, what have you to say to me?’
‘I didn’t ask you to meet me, and I’ve nothing to say to you,’ she said, forgetting Sami, forgetting everything except basic life-saving procedures.
‘You lie. What do you come for, if not this?’
This?
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded.
He looked at her for an electric moment, his eyes blazing as if he were struggling against some powerful impulse, and she held her breath and awaited the outcome.
‘You know what I mean.’
She licked her lips. ‘Didn’t your father tell you why I’m here?’
Salah snorted. ‘My father’s work! Even the immigration official knew better than to believe it. Why do you come to me now? What do you want? What do you hope I can give you? You are too late.’
She couldn’t believe this. What was time, then? Ten years since they had spoken, but here they were, picking up the argument as if scarcely an hour had passed.
‘I don’t want anything from you! Who told you I wanted—?’
He pulled her sunglasses off, flinging them down on the seat between them.
‘Do not hide behind darkness and tell me lies.’
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She grabbed the glasses up again, fumbling to unfold them.
‘When women veil their hair it is to protect their modesty. When they veil their eyes it is to conceal deceit.’
It was impossible to put the glasses back on, after that, impossible to leave them off. She glared at him, anger rising in her.
‘And when men accuse women it’s to avoid facing their own guilt. What do you want?’
‘We will discover. But I did not go to you, Desi. You came to me.’
‘That’s a Napoleonic ego you’re nursing there, Salah. I came to your country.’
The flesh on his face tightened. ‘To visit my father,’ he said, measuring every word.
‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘I think we’re back where you started, aren’t we?’
He was not fazed.
‘Why do you deny it? There is no shame in returning to your first love when other men are unsatisfactory. If your first love has waited for you, all is well.’
‘Do you have any idea how pompous you sound?’
‘Do you regret our unmatched passion, Desi?’ His black eyes burned into hers. ‘That day in the cabin—do you remember it? What could ever reach it, if we lived a thousand years? Is that why you are here?’
The memory of that 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,’