‘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 everything seemed to conspire against this determined nobility: the heat, their innocence and the fact that they were always together, so often alone.
It was there under the dock, when he told her about the war in Parvan, that their control finally broke.
Brave little Parvan, which had been invaded by the Kaljuks, and had long been fighting an unequal war with little help from its friends. Prince Omar of Central Barakat had formed a company of Cup Companions and joined the war on the side of Prince Kavian of Parvan.
‘The Kaljuks are monsters,’ Salah told her. ‘Prince Omar is right—we can’t let them do what they are doing to Parvan. He is right to join the fight.’
Desi’s heart choked with a sudden presentiment of doom.
‘You—you wouldn’t go, would you?’
‘My father has forbidden me, he says I must finish one year of university first. He thinks the war will be over this winter. The Kaljuks are tired and Parvan will never give up. But if it is not—what else can I do, Desi? I must join the Prince. I must help them.’
Tears starting in her eyes, she begged him not to go to war. She pleaded her love and their future. The life together they would never have if he were killed. Those four children who would never be born.
‘Marry me now, Desi,’ he said roughly, drawing her in against his chest and holding her tight. ‘Then, if I die, I will leave you with a son to take care of you when he grows up. Come home with me! Marry me now!’
He kissed her then, when all their barriers were down. And amid the perfect silence of nature, that silence that is wind and birdsong and still water, they could no longer say no to the wild desire in their blood.
She always marvelled, afterwards, at the coincidence. After two weeks of utter joy, of living in their own secret, magic world, on the night before Salah’s departure, her brother Harry arrived for the weekend bringing a magazine.
‘Baby, it’s you!’ he said proudly, opening it to show them all something that the family was still a long way from being used to: a full-page ad with Desi’s photo.
It had been her first high-fashion assignment, shot in Toronto months before, and it had been a very different world from any she had experienced up till then. Desi had been awed by the arrogance of the makeup artist, never mind the photographer, who everyone said was the absolute best…
The results, too, were different: the peak of professional skill evident in the ad, which was all in shades of bronze. Desi sat on a director’s chair with her feet sprawled wide, her knees angled in, in a trench coat, buttoned and belted, but exposing a V of sensual dark lace at both breast and hip. With her elbow resting on the arm of the chair, propping up her chin, Desi gazed at the viewer with limpid beauty. Between her feet was a fabulous leather handbag. Glossy shoes matched the bag.
The family and guests crowded round. ‘You look absolutely stunning!’
‘Oooh, very sexy!’
‘I’ll buy one! Just show me the money!’
Everybody was delighted, thrilled for her. Only one voice was silent. Desi looked shyly up at Salah, expecting his proud approval.
His face was dark with shock.
‘They exploit you,’ he said quietly, and it was a terrible slap, all the worse because it was public. The babble in the room damped down as Desi gasped and blushed bright red.
‘Exploit me? Do you know how much I was paid for that shoot?’ she cried indignantly. ‘And the hotel where they put us up…’
‘They put you up in a fine hotel and pay you to expose yourself,’ Salah said.
‘Expose? My legs!’ she cried. ‘Everybody does it! I’m not nude, you know!’
‘Yes,’ he said. And it was true that the positioning of the bag between her feet, with the innocent vulnerability in her eyes, was disturbingly erotic.
For once her mother rose to the occasion.
‘Isn’t it wonderful the differences you still find in cultural perceptions, when we’re all so worried about American monoculture