Irritated beyond measure by her good sense, by her care for what he’d most wanted to hide, he rolled over and snapped, ‘If I want food I’ll ask for it, Hana.’ He used cold, deliberate English, to remind her of the danger if she kept distancing herself from him.
In return she made a mocking bow, a liquid movement like the night gathering around her. ‘Of course, my lord. I’ll bring your food at midnight after caring for you and my patients all day, if such is your wish.’ She wasn’t smiling, but there was a lurking imp in her eyes…and she still hadn’t said his name.
She’d left the hut before he recovered from the surprise that she was making fun of him. Putting him in his place with a few words…He watched her walk away, her body shimmering beneath her shifting burq’a like a fluid dance. ‘Hana!’ he yelled before he could hold it back.
She turned only her head, but he felt the smile she held inside. ‘Yes, my lord?’
Though the term could be a continuation of her teasing, it made him frown. What did she know about him? ‘I’m sorry,’ he growled. ‘I’ll eat whenever you think is best.’
She inclined her head. ‘Concussion makes the best of us irritable.’ Then she was gone.
It was forgiveness, he supposed, or understanding. He didn’t particularly like either—or himself at this moment. He’d lost his inborn arrogance the day Fadi died, or so he’d thought.
Never had he acted with such arrogance with the lowest pit worker, and he’d never lost it over a woman’s disinterest before. Yet within two hours of meeting Hana he’d become a cliché—a guy in lust with his nurse, cheated because she wasn’t entertaining him with flirtation, or distracting him from his pain and lack of control over his body by touching him.
Cheated because she’d touched his body as a nurse, not a woman…by seeing him as a patient—a scarred, angry patient she needed to heal—and not a man.
Growling again, he rolled over and punched the thin pillow, folding it to make it thicker. But rest was impossible while he knew she’d be back.
It was deep in the night when he came awake with a smothered exclamation—smothered because a hand covered his mouth. ‘Not a word,’ an urgent voice whispered. The bed dipped and sagged as a soft, rounded backside snuggled into the cradle of his hips. Strange back-and-forth motions made the rusted bed squeak.
The hut was a gentle combination of silvery light and shadow. The tender lavender she wore ignited his senses; the feel of her against his body instantly aroused him. Did she taste as sweet and silky as she smelled and felt on his skin? And her hair was loose, reaching her waist in thick waves, falling over his bare arm in butterfly kisses. Like a paradox, the hand reaching backward, covering his mouth, held him silent in ruthless suppression.
‘What are you doing?’ It came out as muffled grunts.
‘Sweeping my body indents from the ground,’ she replied in a fierce whisper. ‘I told you to be quiet. Now they’ll know we’re awake, and will want to know why. Take off your shirt.’ She stood, and as he stripped off his shirt her burq’a fluttered to the ground, leaving her only in cami-knickers and a thin cotton vest top. ‘Lie on me, and pretend to enjoy it,’ she mouthed.
Pretend? The moment he was on her she’d know just how far from a game this was. He thanked Allah that though she’d seen and treated his scars, she couldn’t see them in the dark.
Moments later she gasped softly and closed her eyes. Lying stiff and cold beneath him, she managed to whisper, ‘Make sounds of pleasure.’
He groaned. Moving against her softness, his body realised how long it had been since he’d loved a woman. It was screaming to him to take this pretence to a perfect conclusion. Yet there’d been an odd note of intensity in her whisper. It went beyond what he would have expected in this situation, and from a widow.
Frowning, he looked down at her, moved by the incandescent beauty of her uncovered face, by the glossy waves of hair shimmering across his pillow and over her shoulders in the moonlight. ‘It’s all right, Hana, I’ve done this before.’
‘What, you’ve faked it for killers before? What an adventurous life you’ve led,’ she murmured mockingly in his ear; yet her teeth were gritted, her body so taut with rejection of his touch he thought if he moved at all, he might bounce right off her.
Lifting his face to see her more clearly in the glowing half-light, he saw her eyes were still closed, and there was a sheen of sweat on her brow. She was terrified and trying her best to hide it, but of what was she more frightened: the danger all around them, or the fact that the scarred, ugly stranger lying on her body was obviously ready for action?
Working on the instincts that had saved his life several times, he murmured in a croon he kept for intimate situations, but in English so the men outside wouldn’t understand, ‘Hana, this goes only as far as it needs to for Sh’ellah’s men. You saved my life—you’re saving my life again right now. I’d never hurt you or impose my will on you.’
She made a moaning sound that wouldn’t fool Sh’ellah’s men if they were in the radius of hearing. Her eyes remained squeezed tight shut. ‘Thank you.’ She arched her body up to his and made a more convincing noise of passion.
Feeling her sweet-scented, fluid body against him, he almost forgot his good resolutions.
Then she stiffened and made a muffled noise, as if finding release. ‘Alim,’ she cried, using his name for the first time. ‘Alim, my love, I’ve missed you so much!’
Moments later a face appeared at the window; its shadow blocked the moonlight. ‘Who is there?’ Alim demanded harshly in Maghreb. ‘Leave us to our privacy!’
The light reappeared as the head disappeared. He heard a whisper in a mixture of English and another language, but was unable to make it out. He spoke all forms of Arabic, French, German and English, but the African cadences were beyond him.
‘Swahili,’ she whispered, as tense as her body, though her voice had returned to the voice of a stranger, keeping him at a distance. ‘They’re saying that Sh’ellah—the local warlord—won’t be pleased at this. He had plans for me.’
‘I know who Sh’ellah is.’ Anyone who’d worked more than a year in the Sahel knew the names of local warlords and what boundaries were where. A wise man also made certain he knew when and where the borders shifted, or he ended up carrion feed. ‘He wants you?’ he almost groaned in despair. ‘That complicates matters.’
‘He wants me because I’m young and different to most women in the region. He knows nothing of me. I’ve always been heavily veiled when his men come. All they or he ever see is my eyes.’ She shrugged, in a fatalistic gesture. ‘I’m packed and ready to leave. I can go tonight—but you won’t make it. We have to wait another day.’
‘No.’ He knew what she hadn’t said: Sh’ellah would think nothing of killing him to have Hana once or twice, before dumping her body in the shifting sands. ‘I’ve worked through injury before. We should get out of here tonight.’
Worried eyes searched his. ‘We have to be several kilometres away before they find we’re missing, and you were unconscious only hours ago. Fever and concussion aren’t conditions to play with.’
Touched by her concern, he whispered, ‘I’ll be all right.’
She made an impatient gesture. ‘No, you won’t—but there’s no choice. We need to head to the refugee camp. A plane arrives on Wednesdays. It’s Thursday now—it will take almost two weeks by foot. With your injuries, we’ll need an extra day, travelling by night. We’ll take pain-relief tablets with us, a suture kit and extra water.’
‘If we head for the truck we don’t need to take more than four days. We can drive the rest of the way.’
She frowned. ‘That’s sixty kilometres away.’
Teeth gritted now, he muttered, ‘I’ll make it.’
‘All right, if you say so.’ Those lovely, slanted eyes stared in open doubt. ‘I think you can roll off me now. It’s customary.’
He wanted so badly to laugh, he did, but made it low and rippling, like a lover’s laugh.
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He was stunned by her quick thinking and thorough planning. His respect for her grew by the minute. Yet Alim was acutely aware of her near-nude body beneath him, her braless state, the sweetness of her skin and her gentle scent. It was almost a relief to move away, to gain distance—but she snuggled into his arms, making sure the sheet covered the clothes they still wore.
‘My love,’ she murmured in Maghreb. ‘We’ll have to take an old suture kit, and bring only the willow-bark infusion,’ she whispered, making it seem intimate. ‘I’m sorry, but we buried all the new medications. We can’t afford to dig them up now.’
‘It’s okay.’ He gathered her against him, kissing her hair—and the lavender filled his head. ‘I love your scent.’
Her mouth tightened. She stiffened in his arms, and the budding trust vanished. ‘It’s not meant to entice. It’s to keep off fleas, mosquitoes and bed bugs. Scorpions don’t like it, either.’
She sounded frozen. Given the stiff revulsion she’d exhibited only moments before, Alim wanted to kick himself for being so stupid as to think she could want him. Right now, he could think of no reassurance that she’d believe, so he drawled, ‘Bed bugs and scorpions…oh, baby, nobody does pillow talk the way you do.’
After a stunned few seconds, she burst out laughing.
Relief washed through him, and he grinned—but the way her face came alive with the smile, the harplike sound of her laughter, made him ache. Now he could see how well her name suited her—or it had once.
Then she whispered, ‘I have an aloe and lavender cream for your scars, as well. It looks as though you need pain relief for it. You never finished the plastic surgery you needed, did you?’
She’d ruined their connection by the question, by mentioning his deformity and all its reminders. He moved away from her, trying not to show how hard it was not to fling her away. It was all he could do to ground out a single word. ‘No.’
As if she heard his thoughts, she backed off. ‘We need to be gone in an hour. There’s only one way from the village they won’t be covering—where the wild dogs are. It’ll be dangerous, but they usually sleep until dawn. We have to be past their territory by then. There’s a small track, an old dried stream we can take, which has some shade for sleeping by day.’
‘Right,’ he replied, wondering if the feel of his skin against her had done anything but revolt her, having seen him unclothed…having treated his burns as no one had done since he left the private facility in Bern three years ago.
He closed his eyes, squeezing them tight. No wonder she’d been so stiff and cold with him. No wonder she’d turned aside when he’d called her his dawn star. He was a poet from the slag heaps, a monster daring to look upon beauty and hunger for what he couldn’t have.
Hana wasn’t the kind of woman who’d welcome his touch for his wealth, and he was fiercely glad of that—of course he was. He wasn’t that desperate.
‘I’ll ask one of the men here to pack you a change of clothes. We can only take one each; we need the room for water and medicine. I have dried fruits and energy bars stored in my backpack. We’ll fill one canteen with willow-bark infusion for your pain. You’ll have to be sparing with it.’
He kept his voice brisk and practical, hiding his turmoil of desire and sickening acceptance of her rejection. ‘Travelling at night should help. I have some ibuprofen in my pack I can use. Only a dozen tablets, but—’
She rolled up and sat at the edge of the bed. ‘Excellent.’ She actually smiled at him. His heart flipped over at the look in her eyes, holding no pity, just approval; and even if she only smiled in relief that he wouldn’t be moaning and groaning all the way to the refugee camp, he’d take it. He’d take any piece of happiness she doled out to him, because it felt as if she hoarded it like miser’s gold. And it might just mean she wasn’t totally revolted by him.
What had happened to her to change her from the happy woman she’d been once, he didn’t know—but he had at least a week to find out.
Chapter Three
IT WAS close to three a.m. before they left the hut. Flickering lights a short distance away showed Alim how closely the village was being watched.
‘We’ll need to commando crawl,’ he whispered as they watched another cigarette being lit, another flashlight sweep a slow arc. ‘These packs are bulky.’
She nodded. ‘And we have to move in silence. They have to believe the villagers know nothing except my husband showed up without warning yesterday, and we disappeared at night.’ She handed him a bundle of clothes. ‘Put these on. You need to blend into the environment.’
He looked at the clothes, some kind of dun colour, smeared with mud and dirt, and felt intense admiration for her yet again. She thought of everything. ‘Can you turn your back?’ he asked gruffly, unable to stand that she’d be revolted by his body again.
She nodded and turned away. He felt pity radiating from her, but her practical words made him wonder if the compassion he’d sensed had been the workings of his paranoid imagination. ‘You won’t be able to wear your clothes until we’re out of Sh’ellah’s reach.’
As he turned to answer she slipped out of her burq’a with a swift movement, and his breath caught in his throat, remembering her lovely curved body in the knickers and camisole…
He swallowed the ridiculous disappointment. Of course she wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt with running shoes beneath! What colour he couldn’t make out in the murky darkness, but probably brown, like his; her hair looked plaited. She rolled the garment up and stored it in her backpack, and shoved her plait beneath a brown cap.
She shouldered her pack and dropped to the ground, and began belly-crawling. ‘Let’s go.’
Ignoring the severe pounding inside his head, the light fever that still hadn’t abated, he lay down flat and followed her.
It took a gruelling half-hour to make it past the village boundaries to the territory of the wild dogs. Now the moon had set past the village, the delicate filigree beauty around him had faded to a grim, dusty night as thick as the dirt coating them further with every movement.
Alim followed Hana around the hut to the fields, heading towards the only path out, his concentration on two things—being quiet, and trying with all his might not to cough or sneeze. The neckerchief she’d given him to cover his nose and throat was so thickly coated in dirt it was hard to breathe. His scarred skin began to pull and itch in moments.
At the head of the path, she thrust a canteen in his hands. ‘Wet the bandanna using as little water as possible, and wring it out,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘We have to stay flat until we reach the stream bed. Our last opportunity to fill the canteens for fifty kilometres will be there. Move slowly, and try not to let your sweat touch ground. We can’t afford to make a sound, or give off any scent. The dogs don’t have assault rifles, but they can tear you apart in seconds.’
So that was why she’d only brought dried, wrapped food, and double-wrapped everything in tight-tied bags. Fighting the unwanted arousal her lips against his ear had given him—damn his body for all the stupid ideas it had—he nodded and kept following her. Elbows thrust forward and sideways, then a knee, one side then the other, measuring every movement in case it was too big or would dislodge a pebble and make a noise to alert the dogs.
The next hour was excruciating. Breathing through a wet bandanna, don’t move too fast, don’t cough or sneeze, don’t itch, don’t break into a sweat, don’t make a noise or you’ll become dog meat. He was forced to follow her, his head pounding with concussion and the stress of aching to go forward, to take the lead and somehow protect her, but this was her turf. She alone knew the way out of danger.
For the first time in his life he had to trust a woman in a life and death situation—but from everything she’d already done, all without flinching or complaint, he knew if there was one woman on earth he could hand control to without fear, it was Hana.
Finally, as he knew he had to breathe clean air or pass out, the flat ground
gave way, and they slithered slow and quiet down a little slope; the dust became hard, crusty earth, the cracked mud of a dead stream, and when he heard Hana give a soft sigh he sensed they’d passed at least the first of the current menace facing them.
He slipped the bandanna from his nose and mouth, and dragged in a breath of fresh air without a word. Never had breathing felt so luxurious.
‘No water here.’ She sighed. ‘Our task just got harder, and you’re still concussed. Are you sure you’re up to this? Once they know we’re gone there’s no turning back.’
‘I can do it,’ he reiterated through a clenched jaw. Did she think he couldn’t take a little hardship just because of a bump on the head, a touch of fever?
‘We have to turn north as soon as we can.’ The words breathed in his ear, softer than a whisper, slow and clear, making him shiver in sensuous reaction. ‘We still have fifty kilometres to the truck.’ The second zephyr of sound stirred his hair and left a small trail of goose bumps.
‘Maybe we should leave it where it is and travel south toward the refugee camp by night,’ he whispered, as soft as he could. ‘If they’ve found the truck they’ll expect us to come for it.’
‘You’ll never make it to the camp by foot with concussion—it will only worsen without rest. And the boundaries for the warlords change almost daily. If we cross one unseen line, you’re dead, and I soon will be, once Sh’ellah finishes with me.’
He shuddered with the force of the flat whisper. ‘It’ll take three more days to reach the truck, and then we have to backtrack. A hundred and sixty kilometres through enemy lines in a truck so noticeable it practically screams foreigners.’
She looked at him, her eyes cool, calm—and how she made him ache with her beauty when she was coated in dust and clumps of mud, wearing a baseball cap and a shirt that looked like charity would reject it, he had no clue. ‘Let’s go.’
The utter relief to be upright, enjoying the luxury of walking again, flooded him until the headache grew to severe proportions. He said nothing to her until she called for another halt.
Desert Jewels & Rising Stars Page 125
