Billion dollar baby bargain.txt

by Неизвестный

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 remembered.

  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.

  Three

  P erhaps 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 sweeping the world?” she said, picking up the magazine and flipping it shut.

  “Congratulations, darling, we’ll look at it again later. It’s a cold supper tonight, everyone, shall we eat

  now?”

  Tears blinding her, Desi got up and banged out through the screen door into the star-filled night. The

  door banged a second time behind her, but she did not stop running.

  He caught up with her down by the water’s edge.

  “Desi!”

  “Why did you do that? Why did you humiliate me in front of everyone?” she demanded.

  “If you are humiliated, it is not me. That picture, Desi—”

  “Oh, shut up! Shut up! There is nothing wrong with that picture! It’s a fashion shoot! I was so lucky to

  get that job, girls wait years for something like that! It’ll open so many doors for me!”

  That was her agent talking. The truth was that modelling, the teenage girl’s fantasy, had never really

  been Desi’s dream. Perhaps it was the impact of her parents’ ideals on her, her island upbringing, for

  what she had seen of the life so far she did not like. But, perversely human, when pressed, she defended

  what she did not believe in.

  “Desi, we are going to be married. You will be my wife. You can’t pose like this for other men.”

  “Men?” she cried. “That’s not a men’s magazine! It’s fashion! It’s for women! I’m advertising a

  handbag!”

  “No,” he said levelly. “You advertise sex.”

  He had the outsider’s clarity, but it was too much to expect that she could see what he saw, or that he

  would understand the intimate connection between sex and sales.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Desi, one picture is not important. But this work you do—will it all be like that? Is this what a

  modelling career means?”

  “All like what, for heaven’s sake? I was fully dressed! Wait for it, Salah, next month I’ll be in an

  underwear catalogue! What is your problem?”

  “Desi, a Muslim woman cannot do such things. It is impossible.”

  She was silent, listening to the crickets. Then, “I’m not a Muslim woman,” she said slowly.

  “Desi!” he pleaded.

  She burst into tears. “And if that’s what it means—that my photograph is seen as disgusting, then…and

  if that’s what you think—if that’s what you see when you look at that picture of me…oh, God, you make

  me feel like a…like a…”

  They were too young to see that what had motivated his outburst was not religion, but jealousy. Sexual

  possessiveness.

  “And if you’re so high and holy, Salah, what about what we’ve been doing? How does that stack up with

  your principles?”

  “We love each other. We are going to be married!” he said, but she thought she could see doubt in his

  eyes.

  She said accusingly, “You think what we’re doing is wrong, don’t you?”

  “No, Desi!”

  She cringed down to the bottom of her soul.

  “Oh, God! That is so sick!”

  If he felt guilty about their lovemaking, what did that mean about how he saw her? Shame swe
pt through

  her. And the stupid fragile dream she’d been dreaming cracked and split open, and the real world was

  there, beyond the jagged edges, telling her she’d been a fool.

  Suddenly she was saying terrible things to him, accusing him of tricking her into sex, and then judging

  her for giving in. Horrible things that she did not believe, but was somehow driven to say.

  His face grew white as he listened, and then Salah erupted with things about the corrupt West which he

  did not believe and always argued against with friends at home.

  Corrupt. The word hung in the air between them as they stared at each other, bewildered, their hearts

  raw with hurt, and far too young to make sense of what was happening.

  “You mean me!” she cried then. “Well, if I’m corrupt, you’re the corrupter! I hate you!” She whirled

  and ran back into the house and up to her room.

  She locked her bedroom door, and buried her head under the duvet, trying to drown out the sound of

  pebbles hitting her window during the night, the whispered pleadings at her door.

  She did not come down again until after breakfast the next morning, just in time to say a cool goodbye to

  Salah, with all the others, before her father took him to the ferry. As he got into the car he looked at her

  with the reproach of a dying stag who cannot understand what has motivated his killer.

  Salah never came to the island again.

  Four

  T he palace clung to a rocky slope above the winding river and the city between, brooding over the

  scene like a dream of white, terra cotta and blue. From the plane, in all the glory of its dome and its

  arched terraces, the palace had looked like something out of a fairy tale, but approached from below it

  had the air of a fortress.

  It was some time before she understood that they were approaching it. They drove through the centre of

  the city, past the bustle of a market, through a small herd of reluctant goats driven by a grinning urchin,

  then along wide streets bordered on two sides with high white walls topped with greenery. So entranced

  was she with the unfamiliar sights that it was only after they left these walls behind that she realized

  there was only the palace ahead.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, when the answer was already obvious.