Oasis of the Heart

by Jessica Hart

  OASIS OF THE HEART

  Jessica Hart

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  Max Falconer didn't have a very high opinion of Cairo. In fact, she was just the kind of woman that he wanted to avoid, Glamorous, beautiful, immaculately dressed... He couldn't think of anything worse! Cairo Kingswood didn't care what Max thought of her. She had one thing on her mind—to make a success of her business for her family's sake, And if that involved a few white lies—then so be it! Unfortunately for the two of them, they had ended up stranded in the desert together. It was a potentially explosive situation.

  CHAPTER ONE

  'MAX FALCONER? You're in luck. That's him over there.'

  Cairo's gaze followed the pointing finger to where a lean, dusty-looking man was unloading equipment from the back of an equally dusty pick-up truck.

  Unaware of her interest, he paused to take off his hat and wipe his forehead with the back of his arm in a gesture that told Cairo that he was as hot and tired as she was.

  Her green eyes rested on him a little doubtfully. Max Falconer will help you, they had all said. You couldn't have a better guide, they'd told her. Max knows his way around the plateau as well as any Tuareg.

  Cairo had been intrigued by what she had been told of the Englishman who had made his home in the desert, and had secretly imagined a flamboyant, rather romantic figure, but as she watched him methodically unload his truck she was conscious of a pang of disappointment. This man wasn't romantic at all. He merely looked tired and bad-tempered.

  'Are you sure that's him?' she asked the young engineer who had stopped to give her directions.

  He grinned. 'That's him all right. There's only one Max Falconer.'

  Cairo suppressed a sigh. Nothing was turning out as she had expected this trip. There were no guides available in the town, but when she had been told about the English geologist her spirits had risen once more. It would be even better if she had a friendly, English- speaking companion for the trip, especially if he was as interesting as he had been made out to be. Now, her green eyes were unimpressed as she studied the real Max Falconer. He was very far from being the flamboyant figure she had envisaged. In fact, she couldn't imagine anyone looking less flamboyant. There was an austere, contained air about him, a sense of deliberate self- control, and, although she had to acknowledge that he looked more than competent, he certainly didn't look very friendly. He had very ordinary-looking brown hair, and what she could see of his face held a. guarded expression. Cairo's hopes for a fascinating guide and congenial companion were fading rapidly.

  Still, beggars couldn't be choosers, she reminded herself. She had to get up that plateau, and, if Max Falconer was the only person who could take her there, then she would just have to put up with him.

  Squaring her shoulders, she smiled her thanks and began to pick her way across the grit and rubble towards Max. The engineer watched her go with regret. Cool, beautiful girls were a rare sight in the rough and ready surroundings of a desert construction camp, and his eyes rested appreciatively on the long, slim legs shimmering in the heat haze as she approached the pick-up truck.

  In spite of appearances, Cairo was feeling anything but cool. The heat was crushing and the harsh desert sunlight seemed to bounce around her, glancing off her bright hair like metal. For the umpteenth time, she wished she were at home in a wet and windy London spring. She'd been told that Max Falconer had been in Shofrar for years, that he actually chose to live here. Cairo couldn't imagine anyone wanting to live in this brown, barren furnace of a country. As far as she could see, there was nothing here but a few rocks, a chaotic bureaucracy and mile upon mile of flat, featureless desert.

  Thinking wistfully of elegant city streets as she walked down the dusty road, Cairo had momentarily forgotten about Max until she suddenly realised that he had straightened and was watching her approach. Through the heat, her gaze met his, and she faltered.

  His eyes were intensely light in his sunburnt face, so icy and unexpected that she had to resist the urge to step backwards. She couldn't tell what colour they were. She only knew that they were very cold and chillingly indifferent, and that they made her heart lurch uncomfortably.

  Max turned back to the truck, releasing her from that glacial look, and Cairo took a sharp, involuntary breath. She felt oddly shaken. There was something in his eyes that forced her to rearrange her ideas about him yet again. The severity she had noticed from a distance hid an aura of suppressed power that was unmistakable at close quarters. This was no dully capable geologist. This man was tough, and far from unimpressive.

  She had been right about the bad temper though. His brows were drawn together over his nose and his mouth was set in a grim line. After that one look, he had ignored her, and something about the deliberate way he went on unloading the vehicle made Cairo's hackles rise.

  'Are you Max Falconer?' Her voice came out much sharper than she intended. She had been thrown off balance by the unexpected impact of his eyes, but it was only because they were so light in his dark face, she reasoned. She certainly wasn't going to let herself be intimidated by that

  Max hoisted a battered metal box off the back and set it carefully on the ground before he answered. 'Presumably Chris has just told you who I am, or he wouldn't have pointed me out.' It was strange that a voice so deep and deliberate could sound so cold. 'Why bother to ask him if you're not going to believe him?'

  'Why not just say yes or no?' Cairo retorted with a snap. It had been a long day. She was hot and tired and fed up with trekking around Menesset in search of a man who was turning out to be thoroughly disagreeable. If only she didn't have to ask a favour of him!

  Taking a deep breath, she took off her sunglasses so that he could see who he was talking to, and forced herself to sound pleasant. 'My name's Cairo Kingswood.' Her eyes were screwed up against the glare, but she saw his gaze flick up at her, narrowed and uncomfortably penetrating, before it dropped back to the dusty truck. Something tugged at the back of Cairo's mind, something that might have been recognition, but she brushed the thought away irritably. She was sure she would have remembered if she had ever met anyone as rude as Max Falconer before! Look at him, carrying on stacking up his wretched boxes as if she wasn't there! He hadn't even acknowledged her introduction.

  'I've got a bit of a problem,' she said at last, when it was obvious he wasn't going to say anything. 'Everyone tells me that you're the one person who can help me.'

  Max lifted the last box off the truck, and banged the tailgate back up.

  Brushing his hands on his khaki trousers, he looked at Cairo at last. 'Who's everyone?' His eyes, she saw now, were a pale grey-green, their startling lightness intensified by a fringe of dark, almost sooty lashes.

  'Just about everyone I've talked to since I arrived in Shofrar yesterday,' said Cairo, forcing her mind away from his eyes and back to the problem in hand.

  She thought morosely of her frustrating morning trailing around Menesset, of endless shaking heads and charming shrugs of regret and the last word of advice: find Max Falconer. Now she had found him, and suddenly her request didn't seem quite so simple.

  She hesitated for a moment, then pointed with her sunglasses towards the vast, steep-sided plateau that reared out of the flat desert in the distance.

  From the camp on the outskirts of Menesset, it appeared a vast table of rock, but she knew that it stretched for hundreds of miles, its stony surface eroded by unimaginable time into a weird m
oonscape. The plateau was about as far from civilisation as you could get, and Cairo shuddered at the very thought of it, but that was where she had to go. 'I need a guide to take me up there,' she said.

  'Plenty of guides in Menesset,' Max said unhelpfully.

  'But there aren't.' Cairo's hair was dark, shining gold, and fell in soft waves to her jaw. Now she pushed it away from her face in frustration. 'I didn't take into account that Shofrar is a Muslim country. Ramadan ends tonight so everyone's celebrating Id-el-Fitr and no one's going anywhere for the next few days. I haven't got long, and I can't afford to wait for them all to come back from their holidays.'

  Max was unsympathetic. 'You should have thought of that before you came,'

  he said, opening the door of the pick-up and leaning inside to collect a notebook from the dashboard. 'It doesn't take much to find out when the local holidays are before you leave, and if you'd bothered to do that much research you'd have found out that this is no time to be in the desert anyway.

  It's much too hot to climb the plateau now. The tourist season ended a month ago.'

  'I was told you go up to the plateau all the time,' Cairo protested as he straightened.

  'I do—but I'm not a tourist.'

  'Nor am I,' she said. 'I'm here on business.'

  'Business?' he echoed incredulously, staring at her with that unnervingly light gaze. 'How can you possibly have business on the plateau?'

  'I'm here to represent my clients, Haydn Deane Associates,' said Cairo, trying to sound professional, but the effect was rather spoiled by having her face screwed up against the sun. To hell with courtesy, she thought as she put the sunglasses back on her nose. It was wasted on Max anyway. The dark glasses made her feel cooler and more businesslike. 'Haydn Deane are an advertising company,' she went on. 'They're anxious to do a fashion shoot using the plateau as a backdrop.'

  To her chagrin, instead of being impressed as he was meant to be, Max Falconer burst out laughing. 'A fashion shoot on the plateau? They must be mad!' His teeth were strong and white and the laughter momentarily dissolved the grimly austere lines of his face.

  'Haydn Deane are very far from mad,' Cairo said coldly, insulted and more than a little disconcerted by the way his laugh transformed his face. 'They're a creative and extremely successful company who are responsible for a number of award-winning advertisements.'

  'They'll be responsible for an award-winning cock-up if they try and do a shoot here,' said Max brutally. He had stopped laughing and she decided she must have imagined that glimpse of a suddenly attractive man. 'They've got no idea what it's like.'

  Cairo struggled to keep her cool. She mustn't lose her temper now! 'That's precisely why I'm here. My partner and I run a consultancy doing all the liaison and preparatory work on one-off international projects like this. Far from having "no idea", our clients are so well aware of the likely problems that they have employed me to do a reconnaissance of possible sites and iron out all the logistical problems before they arrive. Surely that makes sense?'

  she added with artificial sweetness, but Max was unmoved.

  He pushed his notebook into the pocket of his old blue shirt. It was very faded and had an oil stain on one sleeve, and his trousers weren't in much better condition. 'If you think it makes sense to take a group of self-styled creative city people into one of the hottest and most inhospitable places of the world in the middle of summer, you must be out of your mind!'

  'The end of May isn't summer,' said Cairo stubbornly. 'I know it will be hot, but I've been told it's quite possible.'

  'It's possible if you're very fit, very tough and have a good guide. You, Miss Kingswood, don't seem to fit into any of those categories.'

  Cairo lifted her chin. 'I'm tougher than I look.'

  'I'm sure you're quite tough enough when it comes to getting your own way,'

  said Max, looking her up and down, his cold eyes assessing her smooth skin, the thick, glinting hair and effortlessly elegant clothes. She wore a knee-length linen skirt with low-heeled pumps and a silky olive-green shirt.

  'I've met your type before,' he said in a hard voice. 'You look like a spoilt brat to me. I don't suppose you've ever done a day's work in your life, let alone had to rough it.'

  This was uncomfortably close to the truth and Cairo's eyes slid away from his, her jaw working in frustration. She was tired of being dismissed as spoilt by people who never made the effort to know her any better. It wasn't her fault that her father had pampered and indulged her from the day she was born, and, if she hadn't had any experience of work before now, well, that had all had to change. It had taken long enough for anyone to give her the chance to do a day's work! Only Piers had been prepared to give her a chance, and the thought of her partner and why she was here stiffened her resolve.

  'I'm working now,' she told Max and glanced disdainfully around her at the stark prefabricated buildings of the camp and the dusty road which stretched off towards the empty horizon. 'I can assure you, I'm not here for the fun of it! I've got a job to do up on the plateau, and I've done plenty of research about what's involved.'

  'If you'd done any research at all, you'd have known there's no way you could get an advertising team up there.' Max gestured towards the plateau, which seemed to float above the heat along the distant horizon. 'Did you find out how long it takes to climb up to? Eleven hours, and that's on a good day.

  Eleven hours of climbing an almost vertical path in temperatures of well over a hundred degrees, and you can't stop and rest for too long, or you'd never get to the top before dark. And the plateau is not a place to be wandering around in the dark, Cairo Kingswood. It's full of treacherous crevices and gulleys. If you fall down them, you never get up again.' Max glanced at her appalled expression and shook his head. 'You wouldn't last five minutes,' he said with finality.

  'Want a bet?' said Cairo, much more bravely than she felt.

  'No, because it's not going to be put to the test,' he said with flat refusal. He retrieved a battered hat from the cab, brushed the dust off it and set it on his head. 'I'm not prepared to take you up to the plateau, and that's that.'

  Cairo took a deep breath. He couldn't refuse, not after it had taken all this time just to find him! She tried an appealing smile. 'Please,' she begged, even though it went against the grain to be grovelling to him. 'It's very important.'

  'What's important about advertising?' Max looked at her with a contemptuous expression. 'The whole business is corrupt. All advertising does is sell false images to persuade people to spend their money on things they don't need and probably don't even want. As far as I'm concerned, that's dishonest, not important!'

  Cairo bit her lip, taken aback by the unexpected bitterness in his voice. Why should he care so much about advertising? It could hardly affect him much stuck out here! 'It's important to me to do my job,' she said after a moment. 'I can't do that unless I get up on to the plateau, and you're the only person who can take me.'

  'My heart bleeds for you,' he said shortly, shutting the door of the cab, and Cairo's heart seethed at his indifference.

  He could have shown a little more concern at her plight! What was she to do now? She couldn't go home and tell Haydn Deane she hadn't been able to get up on to the plateau. Piers was relying on her to make a success of this, their first job, and she couldn't let him down. If word got round that they were unreliable, they would never get any more work, she thought desperately, and what would happen to her father then?

  She watched helplessly as he bent to secure the lid on one of the boxes.

  'Won't you change your mind?' she asked, hating herself for the pleading note in her voice.

  'Why should I?' Max asked, straightening abruptly, and at the expression on his face Cairo took an involuntary step backwards. 'You don't impress me with all your talk of business and award-winning advertisers.' His voice was scathing and she felt herself flush humiliatingly. 'As far as I'm concerned, if we had no advertisers, the world would be a far better p
lace, and if you think I'm going to waste my time on a totally irresponsible venture like the one you've described to me, just to indulge some brainless executive's ego, you've got another think coming. Do I make myself clear?'

  'Perfectly,' said Cairo in a frosty voice. She wasn't used to being talked to like that, and she didn't like it. 'If that's the case, I won't bother you any more.'

  'Please don't,' said Max.

  He really was insufferable! Turning on her heel, Cairo stalked back along the road to the guest quarters and slammed the door of her room behind her.

  She wished she had never heard of Haydn Deane or Shofrar, wished Piers had never talked her into coming here. The place was a nightmare and the bureaucracy even worse, and to cap it all she had had to end up pleading with the likes of Max Falconer.

  Cairo banged around the room furiously. What did he have to feel so superior about, anyway? He was only some grubby geologist.

  Her eyes ached from the glare outside and she washed her face with cold water. The confrontation with Max Falconer had left her tense and frustrated, and her angry face glared back at her from the mirror above the basin, cheeks flushed and slanting green eyes a-glitter.

  Turning up the air-conditioning, she threw herself down on the narrow bed with a sigh. 'There's nothing to it,' Piers had said. 'All you've got to do is get yourself up on to that plateau, find a couple of good locations and then fix up a few donkeys to take everyone up there next month. It'll be easy.'

  Easy? Cairo grimaced at the ceiling. It hadn't taken long to find out that things were going to be far from easy. She would have to wade through interminable red tape to get all the necessary permits from the government, and that was nothing compared to the problem of getting on to the plateau in the first place. If only she had arrived a week earlier, she could have found a guide in Menesset and been up and down the plateau long before the holiday, instead of being reduced to grovelling to Max Falconer—and much good that had done her!

  Why couldn't Haydn Deane have chosen somewhere a little more accessible for the shoot? Max was right, she admitted grudgingly. Some bright spark had probably seen some pictures of the plateau and decided that it would make a suitably dramatic location without giving any thought to how they were going to get all the people and equipment required up there.