Marguerite Kaye - Summer Sheikhs

What would she do, alone with him day after day, night after night, a forbidding stranger who somehow shared a past with her? A man who thought making love with her would give him closure?

He wanted her. His love might be dead—he said it was, and she believed him—but Salah wanted her. She was alone now because she had chosen it. He would have come to her bed if she’d wavered for one second. If she’d flicked an eyelash.

Might he still come? She couldn’t be sure. She had said no, but—he might think that if he came to her room she wouldn’t be able to keep on saying it.

And he’d be right. Desi was afraid. All the defences she thought she’d built up over ten years had disappeared in the space of one short breath. She was vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been with any other man. And she didn’t know what he really wanted.

Closure. That was such an extraordinary thing for a man like Salah to say! What closure would sex give him? You have haunted me, Desi. Was it true? Or did he have some ulterior motive for saying it?

Desi flung the sheet back, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and sat with her head in her hands. After a moment she got up and began to pace.

The intimacy of the roof garden. The constant harking on the past. The fact he had ordered food he had lovingly described to her ten years ago. The irresistible way he’d chosen tidbits for her, fed her. Painful reminders of their love, scorching tokens of intimacy, the actions of a man determined to win back an old love.

All false. All stage dressing. Salah did not want to win her back. He had made that very plain, a long time ago.

Why, then?

He wants revenge. The thought dropped into her head with an almost audible click. Four days. Five. He could find a dozen ways to get revenge, she was sure, alone with her in the desert for five days. But what could he want revenge for ?

Everything that happened had been his own doing.

A few days after he left, Salah had phoned her. He begged her, he pleaded his love. He knew now that it was jealousy that had motivated him. He had believed that look in her eyes was only for him, and there it was in the photo, for anyone who looked at her. He had taken refuge in blaming her, too easy to do.

‘But I will never do anything like that again, Desi. I will understand myself better.’ If only she would forgive him.

The call came too late. Their argument had shaken Desi to the core, and suddenly all the changes that before had seemed so easy frightened her. Move away from her family and friends, to a country on the other side of the world whose language she didn’t speak, whose people and culture and religion she knew nothing of, where she knew no one save Salah? Have children who would be citizens of another country?

History was against them, too. That week there had been a graphic television documentary showing a woman stoned to death in the capital of Kaljukistan. Television news was full of the atrocities towards women there. Women dying because no male doctor was allowed to attend them. Girls’ schools closed, women teachers and doctors thrown out of work. Women beaten in the street by armed policemen for showing a lock of hair.

Desi was deeply frightened. How well did she really know Salah? How could she love him when she didn’t know who he was?

She was too young by far to handle the terrible, contradictory feelings that raged through her at the sound of his voice.

‘I don’t love you,’ she cried.

‘You do,’ he insisted, but he was young, too. ‘You love me, Desi. We love each other. I love you! I love you more than the world. Please, please, Desi, we are going to get married!’

But her wild fears had proved stronger than his young courage.

‘You’re just like the Kaljuks!’ she accused him at last. ‘You want to stop me doing anything except stay at home and have babies!’

Two weeks later she learned from Sami that Salah was in Parvan, fighting alongside Prince Omar and the Cup Companions. The agonizing pain in her heart told Desi the truth of her own feelings, but there was no way to tell Salah now.

Desi had felt utterly helpless. She had destroyed something precious, and now that she saw her mistake, there was no way back.

Before she could think what to do, Leonard J. Patrick came to town.

Leonard J. Patrick was the hot North American modelling agent. He had a nose for what he called raw star quality. When he came gunning for Desi, her future was practically guaranteed: supermodel status, celebrity, stardom. And just then, it seemed like the answer.

He swept Desi off to the best consultants on the continent, gave her a movement coach and a personal trainer. He created a signature look for her.

Desirée. Leo launched her with fanfare, and his nose wasn’t mistaken.

Sometimes she had the feeling, almost too deep to reach, that just because others envied her didn’t mean the life was right for her. She ached for Salah with a need so deep it burned her.

Salah’s been wounded.

Standing by an ocean, plugging one ear against the music and laughter floating from the balcony above the exclusive stretch of beach, Desi had stumbled and almost fallen, as if the ricochet from the bullet had hit her.

‘Wounded? How?’

‘He was leading the charge on a Kaljuk position,’ Sami sobbed out. ‘Baba’s trying to find out more. We think he’s in a field hospital…’

‘A friend of mine has been wounded in the Parvan-Kaljuk War,’ Desi told Leo. ‘I have to go there. Please don’t take any more bookings for me right now.’

But hard as he tried, Leo never managed to make space in her booking calendar…

‘He’s back in Central Barakat,’ Sami told her, sobbing with a mixture of relief and grief. ‘He’s in the best hospital, Uncle Khaled says. Oh, God, Desi, it’s his head !’

Desi sent a card, a cute one with a patched-up teddy bear. Too shy to say all that was in her heart, she wrote only a few lines. If he answered, when he answered, she would be braver. She knew he would answer.

If he could…

At night she dreamed of him. She dreamed he was lost somewhere in the darkness, needing her, calling her name. But she couldn’t find him, and when she opened her mouth to call, she had no voice.

‘He’s out of danger,’ Sami reported, after three nightmare weeks. ‘They’ve taken him home, my aunt is nursing him there now.’

At last a letter came with a Barakati stamp. She knew, she knew it could only be from Salah, and she knew, too, that now she would have the courage to face Leo and tell him what she must: her life here was over. This was not the life for her. She belonged with Salah.

She tore it open in all innocence, her heart wide open.

It was short. Her eyes ran over the few lines, grief clawing at her even before she took in the meaning. Why do you write me? What can we be to each other now? You betrayed your honour. A man must marry a woman of honour, or regret his foolishness all the rest of his life.

THE moonlight coming through the fan of coloured glass over the door threw shadows of red, blue and green onto her face as Desi pulled open the door and stepped out onto the balcony. All was still. Moonlight bathed the courtyard, was reflected from the smooth surface of the pool below, bright against the black water, shimmering a little as wind dusted across its surface. The tree rustled, touched by the same soft wind.

A sleepy bird asked the time. A night insect clicked and buzzed in the tumbled greenery.

The wind pressed the silk of her nightshirt against her body, the moon outlining in white gold everything the wind revealed. Wind and Moon conspiring in the revelation of beauty.