by Olivia Gates
She was distracting him. Even thinking she owed him nothing but hostility, even if she wasn’t acknowledging the sincerity of his outrage on her behalf, she was still trying to defuse it.
Before he kissed her, compelled her to carry out her earlier threat, he said, “Talia, I’m going to take off those layers of clothes…”
“Oh, no, you’re not!” she squeaked.
“Then you do it. But I will have them off. Then you’re going to lie down against me. You’re going to stretch those muscles, or they’re only going to get worse. I’ll massage them with anti-inflammatory ointment.”
She remained stiff in his hands for a moment longer before she capitulated, nodded and unzipped her coat.
He followed those capable hands as they undid the layers of clothes beneath it. And when he realized she wore a corset under her man’s undershirt, he felt blood desert his head, his heart seeming to pump it only to his loins. He’d been in enough trouble when he’d believed her figure was as uneventful as a boy’s. She’d been subduing a very…eventful one.
When she’d moved things around to expose only her midriff, she looked at him awkwardly. She tensed again when he began to turn her, and he whispered in her ear, “Let me take care of you. Don’t resist me.”
A breath shuddered out of her as she let him manipulate her body onto his lap. “Resistance is futile, huh?”
He smiled down at her as he opened the ointment tube. “Oh, yes. You’re in no shape for it right now. Resist me all you like when you’re no longer in pain.”
She murmured something, a cross between grudging consent and whimpering pain/pleasure as he carefully began to examine her, then spread the ointment he’d warmed first between him palms over her aching flesh. His own flesh ached, too, all over.
Then, as she relaxed into his touch, arched up into his soothing hands, he saw the outline where the impact had bruised her paleness.
All blood was back, shooting into his head.
He heard the viciousness in his voice as he growled, “Just thinking they had their hands on you at all, let alone in violence, makes me contemplate murder.”
She fidgeted at his intensity, her eyes scanning him from her upside-down position. “You mean you don’t do that on auto?”
He gave her a chiding glance. “Murder isn’t even in the same solar system as manipulation or framing innocents for fraud. Don’t you think you’re taking your enmity too far?”
She sighed as she relaxed again under his cosseting hands. “I don’t know. Maybe you think killing someone a suitable punishment for abusing their power, as an ultimate example for others. As for taking my enmity too far, let me throw one of your brothers in jail for five years, ruin his future and destroy his psyche, and then we’ll discuss the exaggeration of my beliefs and reactions.”
He stopped his massaging movements when she started to quiver. She could be getting cold or tender…or aroused. He was all of that. And though all he wanted was to rip off his clothes and hers and remedy all the causes of their distress, he knew that must remain a fantasy for now.
With what stood between them, maybe forever.
He kept his hands pressed lightly into her flesh for a few more defusing moments, his gaze tangling with her turbulent one.
Then he removed his hands, helped her up. She declined his help straightening her clothes. Then, with her eyes still wrestling with his, she nestled into the farthest part of the cockpit from him, against her door.
He’d thought he could postpone this until she was less raw, until he’d decided how to go on from here. But her withdrawal snapped something inside him. He had to settle this score. Now.
He pressed closer, showing her he wouldn’t take her categorizing him as the villain and shunning him. “Let’s get one thing clear, Talia. I was not a party to what happened to your brother. So I have no more to say on this matter. And nothing to apologize for.” Satisfaction surged as he saw that sense of fairness of hers flickering in her gaze, admitting his point. “So, until I’m in a position to learn more, and do something about it, I won’t let you bring it up again. The subject of your brother is closed for now.”
He held her eyes until she gave him a resentful if conceding huff.
He gave her an approving nod, as if sealing their treaty.
Then he said, “Now, to the only subject we should concern ourselves with for the duration. Our survival.”
Five
“What do you mean our survival?”
Harres frowned at Talia’s glower. His was of confusion. Hers seemed to be equal measures that and a revival of anger.
“What kind of a question is that? We’re in the middle of nowhere, as you pointed out. The most hostile nowhere on the planet.”
“Yeah, sure. So?”
He shook his head, as if it would shake her words into making sense. “You were worried about getting out of this alive. I thought you understood the danger we’re in.”
“I thought I was in danger. The only danger I thought I was in was human-induced.”
His exasperation rose to match hers. “You mean me- induced.”
She shrugged, unfazed by his displeasure. “Yeah, you-induced. I was thinking you’d use my being out here with you as the only way of rejoining humanity, as…persuasion to get me to spill. And that once you were certain I wouldn’t give you anything, you wouldn’t be too gung ho about my well-being, maybe even my survival.”
Blood bounded in his arteries until he felt each hammer against the confines of his body.
He forcibly exhaled frustration before he burst with it. “I thought we got this ridiculous—and let me add, most dishonoring, injuring and aggravating—misconception out of the way.”
Her eyes seemed to be giving him a total mind-and-psyche scan before she gave a slow nod. “I guess so. But since that only happened in the past few minutes, I had no time to form an alternate viewpoint. I sure didn’t consider for a second that you were in any danger. After the escape, the gunshot and the crash, that is. After you survived all that in one glorious piece, I thought you were home free.”
“How is it even possible you think so?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Her voice drenched him in sarcasm. “Maybe my first clue was how glib about the whole situation you were. You know, being so cheerful and carefree that you spent most of the past hour laughing and lobbing witticisms in between pestering me for my gender, interrogating me for my agenda and trying to deluge me with testosterone.”
And he had to. He laughed again. “It’s your effect on me. You make me cheerful and carefree, against all odds.”
Her lips crooked up in a goading smile. “Next you’ll say I made you kiss me.”
“In a fashion. You made me unable to draw one more breath if I didn’t. You made me thankful. That I found you, that I saved you, that you saved me, that you exist and that you’re with me. And you did make me do it in the most important way, the way all of the above still couldn’t have made me. Because you wanted me to.”
She gave her lips, which had fallen open, an involuntary lick, her eyes glittering as if she felt his there, tasted him. Then she gave a smothered, chagrined sound before her eyes sharpened again and she thrust both hands at him in a fed-up gesture. “See? Is it any wonder I couldn’t even conceive that you had anything to worry about? Who talks like that if he’s in any kind of danger, let alone a potentially life-threatening situation?”
He sighed, conceding her point. “Apparently, I do. With you around. But when you talked about my needing your scalpels again, I thought that proved you were aware that I shared your danger.”
She waved a hand. “Oh, I was just pointing out that if you held me here at your mercy, you’d be at mine, too.”
He huffed a stunned chuckle. “We’re sitting inside a crashed helicopter, our as well as my only way out of here. How can you consider that I’m not right with you at the mercy of the desert?”
Her shrug was defensive this time. “Why should I have conside
red that? So the helicopter crashed. But you’re the one, the only, Prince Harres Aal Shalaan. You must have all sorts of gadgets on hand and can contact your people to come pick you up whenever you want.”
He gave a regretful nod. “I do have gadgets, every one known to humankind. And all useless, since we are in a signal blackout zone. The nearest area with possibility of transmitting or receiving anything is over two hundred miles away.”
Her eyes widened with each word until they’d expanded to a cartoonish exaggeration. “You mean your people have no way of knowing where you are?
“None.”
After a moment of wrestling with descending dread, she seemed to come to a conclusion that steadied her. “Well, that alone will have your armies combing the desert to find you.”
“Sure it will.” He sighed in resignation. “And they’ll find me. In maybe a week. We have water on board for a couple of days.”
“They can’t possibly take a week to find you!” Her protest came out a squeak. “With all the high-end tech stuff at their disposal, and the whole country out looking for its precious prince, I bet they find you within a couple of hours from the moment they realize you’re missing!”
He wanted to press her into his flesh and absorb her worry. But he owed her the truth. He would see her to safety, but he had to prepare her for the grueling experience that he couldn’t spare her before he did.
Bleakness clamped his heart, erasing any lightness as he forced himself to decimate her hope. “They have no way of knowing where to start looking. Once my men go back home and realize I didn’t precede them, they’ll go back to where we originally landed as a starting point to search. But they’ll have no way of knowing which way I headed, or how far in which direction I crashed.”
“So they’d take longer, maybe a day or two,” she still argued. “Surely they’ll crisscross the area with enough aircrafts, one of them is bound to spot us within that time frame.”
He shook his head, needing to erase any false expectations. Those were more damaging than painful reality. “Relying on visual search over an area of a hundred thousand square miles? With some of the dunes around here over one thousand feet high? Apart from a stroke of luck, I was being optimistic when I said a week.”
Silenced howled after his last word.
She stared at him with horror gathering in her eyes. Then it burst from her lips. “Oh, God. You’re stranded here with me.”
He couldn’t hold back any longer. He reached out and cupped her velvet cheek in soothing cherishing. “And I couldn’t have dreamed of better company to be in mortal danger with.”
Her mouth opened, closed, then again. She couldn’t have looked more flabbergasted if he’d said he was actually a plant.
Then she slapped his hand away with a furious sound. “How can you joke about this now? About anything?”
“I’m not joking in the least.” He reached out to her again and she snapped her teeth at him like the infuriated feline she was. He withdrew his hand with a sigh. “You can chomp any part of me you like, but it won’t change the fact that what I said is the truth. Apart from not wishing you to be in any discomfort or danger, there’s no one else I’d rather have with me now.”
Tears suddenly eddied in a swirl of silver in her eyes, had his blood churning in his heart before two arrowed down her cheeks.
Then she choked out, “Oh, shut up!”
He hooted with laughter. “And you take me to task about being cheerful? I’d be mute if you had your way, wouldn’t I?”
She shot him a baleful glance, even as her lips twitched, too. “You’ve said enough, don’t you think?”
“Actually, I was getting to the interesting part.”
“What interesting part? How after a few millennia they’ll dig our bones from this desert and put them in an exhibit and have scientists hypothesizing that we were actually Adam and Eve?”
He dug his fingers into his seat so he wouldn’t yank her to him and claim those lips under his. “How…anthropologically imaginative of you. But I have no intention of becoming a fossil just yet. To this end, we’ll have to get out of this hunk of twisted metal and have us a desert trek.”
She said nothing. Then she shifted, came closer and patted her lap. “You should lie down again. It’s clear you did hit your head and everything you’ve said and done so far has originated from a swollen brain.”
His eyes laughed into her in-doctor-mode ones. “You mean you don’t think I have one by default?”
“Sure, as is no doubt expected of your princeliness. But when you start suggesting we take a two-hundred-mile stroll in ‘the most hostile nowhere on the planet,’ it’s time for medical intervention.”
“Actually, it’s only a fifty-mile stroll. That’s the distance to the oasis I was taking us to when we had this little diversion.”
He winced inwardly at the hope that swept her ultra-expressive features, rearranging them into the image of relief, then reprimand. “Why didn’t you say so? That’s not too far.”
“That’s two marathons’ worth. In the desert. With temperatures reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit at midday and 20 at night. And that’s if we’re talking a linear path to our destination, which we’re not. Not with the seas of dry quicksand in the way.”
She raised her chin defiantly at him. “If you’re trying to scare me, save it. I didn’t come to Zohayd from an air-conditioned exam room in a five-star hospital, but from an understaffed and hectic emergency room in a teaching hospital and a couple of aid stints in Africa. I’ve been steeped in discomfort all my working years and I’ve rubbed shoulders with danger and despair quite a few times, by choice.”
He had to pause to admire her for a moment before he said, “I’m only trying to prepare you. I’ll see that we get through this, in the most efficient way possible, but I need you to be aware of the facts. So far, we’ve gone through the easy part. Now we face the desert.”
He could see her defiance and determination wavering, uncertainty and fear skirting their protective shell, scraping against it for chinks, for a way in.
But the good thing about challenge was that it kept one focused. Maybe he should escalate it, keep all her faculties locked on it, and on him.
He crooked his lips, knowing by now that would stoke her ready flames. “Anyway, great to know I won’t have a swooning damsel on my hands.”
“As long as I don’t have a swooning dude on mine!”
There she was. Ricocheting right back at him. And he laughed again, shook his head at his helpless reaction.
They were in a demolished multimillion-dollar helicopter in what might as well be another planet for all the area’s desolation. He was going to brave the desert’s mercilessness in his weakened condition to ensure her safety. She seemed to wish him and his whole family erased from the face of the earth.
And yet, he had never enjoyed anything as much, never looked forward to anything more.
But though he did, and had said they’d focus on their current predicament, he couldn’t forget the beef she had with his family. An unjustly imprisoned sibling was the stuff of undying grudges. This was worse than anything he’d imagined. He’d thought he’d be bargaining with a news bounty hunter or an intel black marketer. But he couldn’t have imagined this. Imagined her. What she was, how she affected him, what she had against his family.
Even the response he wrenched from her was one more strike against him.
Not that he’d let this, or anything, stand in his way.
He wanted her to give him everything. The info. And herself.
He always got what he wanted.
And he’d never known he could want like this.
Everything she knew, felt, was, had to be his. Would be his.
He cocked his head and her gaze slid unwilling admiration and sensuality over the hair that fell to his shoulder.
Pleasure revved inside his chest. “Now we’re squared on that, how about shelving your enmity until we survive this?”
“You’re only playing nice because you need me. Primary closure of a wound of that caliber is in four to ten days.”
He knew that. He also knew she needed to provoke him to keep her spirits up. He let her. “And you need me. You won’t find any passersby here to hitch a ride with to the nearest oasis. So how about you be nice to me?”
Her eyes stormed through vexation, futility and resignation before she harrumphed. “Okay, okay. I concede the need is mutual.”
“It is. In every way. Even if you’re too mad right now to concede that.”
She blasted him with a glare of frustration. He only grinned and dueted her exasperated, “Oh, shut up.”
Six
No one could know how absolutely majestic and humbling night could be until they’d been in the desert at night.
Problem was, it was also downright petrifying and alien.
Talia had known they were in the middle of nowhere. But before she got out of the helicopter, that had only been a concept, a figure of speech. Now it was reality. One that impacted her every sense and inundated her every perception. As she at last had the chance to appreciate.
And what a vantage she had to appreciate it from.
Harres had crash-landed them about five dozen feet from the top of one of those thousand-foot dunes he’d spoken of. From this spot she had an almost unlimited view of the tempestuous oceans of sand that seemed to simmer with their own arcane energy, emit their own indefinable color and eerie illumination. At the edge of her vision, they pushed in a scalpel-sharp demarcation against a dome of deepest eternity scattered with stars, the unblinking shrapnel of the big boom. Under their omnidirectional light, each steep undulation created occult shadows that seemed to metamorphose into shapes, entities. Some seemed to look back at her, some seemed to beckon, some to crawl closer. It made her realize how Middle Eastern fables had come to such vivid and sometimes macabre life. She certainly felt as if a genie or worse would materialize at any time.
