‘So a big wind might blow up from nowhere and we’ll get stuck in the sand?’
‘It is not unknown. Not even unusual. Try this, Desi,’ Salah said, reaching out a long arm to set an array of taster-size morsels in front of her.
The odour of the food reached her nostrils then, utterly intoxicating.
‘Oh, that smells amazing!’ she cried, scooping up a morsel of something mysterious, then heaved a sigh as the flavour hit her taste buds. ‘That’s delicious. That’s the food of the gods!’
You make it sound like the food of the gods, she had said.
He looked at her, and she knew he was there again, too. She sought for something to say to dislodge the time shift.
‘So do we—’
‘Why does my father’s work interest you, Desi?’
Her heart sank. She tossed her hair back to look at him. ‘It was all in my letter. Didn’t your father tell you?’
‘You tell me.’
Damn. This wasn’t fair. The letter, mostly composed by Sami, was supposed to have paved the way, established all the lies. Desi was all right about living the lie, since so much depended on it, but she hated having to tell it, face to face. Especially to Salah. Especially now.
Especially as it was, she knew, so ludicrously unlikely a lie.
‘Did he tell you that I’m going back to university to do a degree?’
‘Now?’
She nodded uncomfortably. ‘I’ll start part-time this year…if I can. Middle Eastern history and archaeology.’
‘Why? Don’t you have a very successful career?’
‘Modelling won’t last forever,’ she said, and it was perfectly true. ‘I want a smooth transition when the time comes.’
‘A smooth transition into archaeology? What awoke this sudden interest?’
‘Not that sudden. I’ve been curious about archaeology ever since that summer the university came to dig on the island,’ she said. ‘Remember that First Nations site they were digging? We used to go and watch every day. I never forgot the thrill of seeing someone uncover an arrowhead!’
That part at least was true—eleven-year-old Desi had been fascinated as the past was unveiled: the discovery of the floor of the longhouse, the settlement’s refuse mound, the arrowheads of chipped stone. One of the students had encouraged her interest, telling her what each find said about the people who had lived on the site, showing her how the history of two hundred years ago could be discovered even without written records.
‘Two hundred years?’ Salah had said in youthful disdain. ‘In my country we have cities five thousand years old!’
Desi had reacted to the challenge with predictable outrage. ‘So what?’ she had cried. ‘I bet there are lots of countries where they have them ten thousand years old!’
His mouth smiled when she reminded him; his eyes were too shadowed to read.
‘You made me so mad! But I think I made up my mind then that one day I’d come to Barakat and see what you were talking about, a city five thousand years old!’
‘And now you are here.’
She hated the way he said it.
‘Won’t you find archaeology tame after a career as a supermodel?’
‘It beats marketing a perfume called Desirée,’ she said dryly. Her distaste for that at least was no lie. ‘“Feminine, delicate, but with a smouldering hint of sensuality.” Or a chain of restaurants: Desi’s Diner. How would you like it?’
He had the grace to laugh.
‘But isn’t a chain of restaurants with a smouldering hint of sensuality just what the world needs?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Not from me.’
‘And only an urgent visit to my father’s site will save you from this fate?’
How she hated the lies! But Sami’s anguished voice was there in her head…I’ve only got one chance to derail this thing…
‘I told you—it’s the only time I have free,’ she said. ‘This is the time I go to the island every year. I thought how great if I could get in on the ground floor with your father and he let me volunteer on the site for a couple of seasons. That’s a requirement of the course.’
The explanation had sounded halfway reasonable during the planning stage. She wasn’t sure now.
To her relief, Salah hardly seemed to hear. He was tearing at a chicken wing.
‘Try this,’ he said, leaning right over to hold up to her mouth a piece thick with a purply-black sauce. Desi automatically opened her mouth and bit into the tender flesh, then grunted at the rich, melting flavour.
‘Mmm! What is that black stuff? I’ve never tasted anything so yummy in my life!’ she said when she could speak.
‘Pomegranate sauce. Another speciality of the mountain tribes.’
A drop of sauce was on her cheek too far for her tongue to reach. Salah caught it with a fingertip and presented it to her mouth. She licked instinctively, then her eyes flew to his.
He slid his wet finger deliberately across her lower lip.
The hoarse intake of her breath told him everything. A jolt of electricity zapped the night air. In his black eyes two tiny golden flames were reflected, as if to warn her his touch would burn. His white teeth tore off a bite from the same piece he had offered her, and the sensual intimacy of that hit her another blow.
Desi dropped her eyes and made a business of wiping her cheek with a napkin. She tried to think of something to say, but her mind had been tipped onto its back and lay there, kicking helplessly. She felt gauche, inexperienced. As if the ten years were smoke and mirrors.
Silence fell, a silence thick with feeling, expectation, a question asked and answered.
She began to eat.
The little lamps on the cloth lighted his hand as he ate, emphasizing the strength of his fingers, the fluid grace of his wrist that transformed into power whenever he grasped a bit of naan or a goblet. Involuntarily the memory came to her of that same hand, painted in moonlight and shadow, rough and tender with inexperienced passion as they lay under the dock.
Sometimes, too, his mouth and jaw were touched with gold: a stern mouth, a full lower lip that the chiaroscuro painted in more sensual lines than was revealed in ordinary light. His eyes were mostly shadowed, except for a black glinting in the darkness.
‘You go to the island still?’ he asked. She wished he had started any topic but that one, but she had to answer.
‘My parents live there full-time now. I spend a month there every summer, and Christmas if I can.’
He asked after her parents, her young sister, after Harry, her brother. Softly, softly, he drew her into remembering. She knew it was deliberate, to prove some point, to set some mood—but she could neither prevent it, nor resist.
The shadows, the stars, his voice, the talk of those island summers—everything conspired to take her back to the sweet hours they had lain undetected and undisturbed in their refuge under the ancient dock, their world of two. She began to feel like that child-woman again, on the brink of discovery of self and other, of love and desire, of her own sexual power, and another’s.
He had been her lover. She knew what it meant for those hands, with light and shadow playing on them like this, to caress and stroke her. Sometimes when his hand disappeared again into shadow, her body shivered in the unconscious