by Jessica Hart
'Right now?' she murmured, letting her hands work their own magic on him, and shifting her body beneath his in wanton invitation.
'Yes,' said Max again, and then spoiled the effect by pressing her back down on to the sleeping mat. 'Well, perhaps not quite yet,' he amended as he found her mouth with his own.
'Let's stay another day,' he suggested as they lay entwined in the shallows after another swim. Cairo was tingling all over from the invigorating water and the aftermath of their lovemaking, and she was unprepared for his suggestion.
Stay another day. It wasn't the same as don't go, but it was heaven all the same. Another day alone with Max. It wasn't much to ask.
But she was so far behind schedule. Piers and Haydn Deane would be expecting her back tomorrow, and it would still take her several days to clear the permits with officials in Menesset and make all the other arrangements about accommodation and transport.
'I can't,' she said drearily as the dream vanished. 'I've got to get back.'
Max released her abruptly. 'Why? Bored already?'
'No!' Cairo sat up, chilled at the expression on his face. .'No, Max, it's not that. You know it isn't. I've just got to get this job finished.'
'Forget about the job,' he said, getting to his feet and stepping into his trousers which had been drying on a rock next to Cairo's dress. 'Surely you've seen enough of the desert to know that this isn't just a backdrop for some stupid advertisement in a magazine that's going to be flicked through and immediately forgotten?' He pulled Cairo up and ran his hands tantalisingly over her shoulders. 'We'll stay here today and you can Send them a telex from the camp tomorrow telling them you can't find anywhere suitable.''Max, I can't,' said Cairo in despair, torn by her loyalty and the longing that his touch always roused in her. 'There are people relying on me.'
His hands dropped from her shoulders. 'Like Piers, for instance?'
'Yes, Piers, among others,' she said, trying to stay calm and reasonable.
Max wasn't even making the effort. 'What is it about that man that makes women make fools of themselves for him?' he demanded bitterly, shrugging on his shirt and beginning to roll up his sleeves.
'I haven't made a fool of myself,' said Cairo grittily. 'Stop blaming Piers or me for your sister's problems. I don't know what the situation is between them, but Piers has always been a friend to me. A friend,' she stressed, 'not a lover. It was Piers who gave me a chance to set up in business when no one else would.'
'It was also Piers who sent you off completely unprepared into the desert when if he'd had any sense of decency he'd have come himself. He's using you, Cairo, just as. he seems to use every other woman he comes across.'
Cairo snatched up her dress and pulled it over her head. She had lost the battle to hold her temper. 'What would you know about it?' she demanded, buttoning it up all wrong. 'You don't even know Piers. I do, and even if he was using me, which he isn't, I said I would do this job and I'm not going back on my word!'
'I can't believe that this famous job of yours really means more to you than all that we have here,' said Max, baffled and angry.
'It doesn't.'
'Then prove it by staying another day. Prove it by not bringing the shoot here.'
Cairo pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. 'Max, I can't.'
'Why not?'
He wouldn't understand about the chains of guilt and loyalty and love that bound her to her father. He wouldn't understand how much it had meant when Piers had offered her a way to make some money at last after the bleak months of rejection.
'I... can't explain,' she said dully.
Max's face closed. 'You don't need to explain. I can work it out for myself.
You can't wait to get back to so-called civilisation, can you? You can wear your make-up every day, and spend your day going through your Filofax and your nights at parties having meaningless conversations with meaningless people. You can tell them all about the little fling you had in the desert. That should give them all a good laugh!'
'Oh, what's the point in arguing?' Cairo cried bitterly. 'You won't listen anyway. You're too pigheaded and prejudiced to see anything but your own point of view!' She marched over to her pack and began stuffing her things back in it. 'If you ask me, you've just got a chip on your shoulder because of your mother. It's not my fault she left you! You think that everyone's like her, but they're not, and I'm not either! You're the one with the problem. It might surprise you to know that cities are full of kind, decent people who manage to cope with life without cutting themselves off in the desert.'
Max was looking white about the mouth. 'Well, you'd better go back there if it's all so wonderful,' he said harshly, and threw his pack into the back of the jeep.
They drove straight back to the camp in bitter silence. Max sat grim-faced beside her, and Cairo was too hurt and angry to relent. He was so unreasonable! Did he really expect her to drop everything just to spend an extra day with him? He hadn't mentioned staying any longer, she remembered bleakly. She didn't mean that much to him.
Everything had been so perfect last night. How had it all gone so wrong, so quickly? Cairo's heart felt as if it were cracking, splintering into a thousand pieces of ice, but she wouldn't let herself cry. Her jaw ached with the effort and a dull pain thudded behind her eyes.
She loved him so much. Her body burned with the need to reach across and touch him, and she had to sit with her hands gripped so tightly together that the knuckles showed white. It would never have worked, she tried to tell herself. Max's reaction this morning had proved that. He would always associate her with the kind of life his mother led. Staying another day wouldn't have made any difference.
If she had agreed to stay, they wouldn't have been driving back in this cold silence. Cairo couldn't stop imagining what they might have been doing, if only she had said yes. They would have found some shade among the rocks, and thrown down the mats. They would have talked and touched, and when the heat of the day was passed they would have made their way back to the pool to swim in its cool waters and make love once more as the sun went down. Cairo's body throbbed, so vividly she could imagine it. She knew exactly how Max's hard body would have felt beneath her fingers, how his lips would have felt against her skin.
All she had had to do was say that she would stay another day.
Cairo stared unseeingly through the cracked windscreen, her green eyes dark with regret. Another day, her heart whispered. What difference would it have made?
It would have made it even harder to say goodbye.
As they drove into the camp, Max spoke for the first time. He stopped the jeep outside the guest quarters, but didn't turn off the engine. 'You'd better get your stuff out of the back,' he said tonelessly. 'I'm going on.'
'Where are you going?'
'Nowhere that has any interest to you,' he said in the same expressionless voice.
Cairo hauled her pack out of the jeep and dropped it on the ground. 'I suppose you're going to commune with some of your precious rocks?' she said, unable to help herself, and Max was provoked out of his careful control.
'They'll be better company than you,' he snapped.
'They're welcome to you!' Cairo made a point of slamming her door shut.
'I'm going back to the real world!'
'You're welcome to each other,' snarled Max, shoving the jeep into gear, and he drove off with a screech of tyres, leaving Cairo coughing in the dust cloud he left behind him, and blaming the drifting sand for the tears in her eyes.
CHAPTER NINE
PIERS was elated when Cairo showed him the photographs. 'This is exactly what they wanted,' he enthused as he spread them out over the desk. 'Those rocks against the sand will make a spectacular backdrop for the shoot.'
Cairo thought of Max and her heart contracted. The desert isn't just a backdrop, he had said. Piers would never understand that.
She stared down at the photographs. They looked so unreal against the clutter of the desk. There was the rock she had sat
on while she waited for Max to reappear. She could visualise him so clearly that she half expected him to step out of the picture, and she closed her eyes in sudden anguish. If only she could forget! Every detail of the day she had taken the pictures was etched on her memory: the arguments with Max, digging out the jeep, the icy water closing over her head as he threw her in the pool, Max throwing back his head and laughing, his eyes reflecting the light from the water, his hands as they peeled the sodden dress from her shoulders...
Cairo moved abruptly away from the desk. 'Do you think Haydn Deane will mind that it's not actually the plateau?'
'Not if we present it to them properly. This looks like a great location you've found, and they're bound to be impressed by your efficiency in making all the arrangements beforehand.' Piers gathered up the photographs and banged them between his hands on the desk to make a neat pile. 'You've done a great job, Cairo. I told you it would be easy!'
Cairo thought of the long climb up the plateau, of Max's grey face as he clutched the hand the snake had bitten, of the dull ache in her heart, but she said nothing. There was nothing to say.
'You don't seem your usual sparky self,' Piers commented in concern. 'Are you all right?'
'I'm fine,' said Cairo with an over-bright smile. 'Just a bit tired, that's all.'
She couldn't remember much of the last few days in Menesset. Moving jerkily like a robot, she had visited officials, dealt with interminable red tape, booked hotel rooms and arranged for three vehicles with drivers to take the whole party out to the location. Once or twice she had caught sight of her reflection as she nodded and smiled and charmed her way past officials, and she marvelled that she could look so normal when her heart was breaking.
'So you'll be OK to see Haydn Deane this afternoon?' said Piers with undisguised relief. 'They've been champing at the bit waiting for you to get back. They want to get everything moving as quickly as possible. It's just as well you didn't stay any longer.'
'Just as well,' Cairo echoed desolately, pushing aside the memory of that morning at the pool when Max had asked her to stay another day. She walked over to the window and stood looking down at the street. The pavements were thronged with people, their umbrellas up against the spring rain, and the traffic was banked up impatiently behind the lights. This had been home before she went to Shofrar, but now she longed for the vast skies and empty horizons of the desert with an almost physical ache.
Cairo turned to face Piers once more. 'Piers, do you know a girl called Joanna?' she asked on the spur of the moment.
His face lit up. 'Joanna Haddington? Do you know her?'
'Not exactly. I met her brother in Shofrar.'
'That'll be the famous Max, I suppose,' said Piers a little glumly. 'Joanna adores him, but it doesn't sound as if he approves much of me. I gather he practically brought her up after their parents split, and he's the one she turns to for advice. I'm not quite sure why; apparently he's filthy rich but opted out of things here to go and work in the desert. He only comes home to see Joanna occasionally. He's obviously a bit of an eccentric.'
'He's not an eccentric!' said Cairo, nettled. A vision of Max rose before her, silhouetted against the glare with his old hat, eyes narrowed as he looked towards the horizon, and her heart cracked. 'He's the sanest man I know.'
Piers looked unconvinced. 'I just wish Joanna wasn't under his influence quite so much. He's not much use to her out in Shofrar, and besides, she's got me to look after her now.'
'That doesn't sound like you, Piers,' said Cairo. 'I've never even heard you mention Joanna before! I thought you were the love 'em and leave 'em type?'
'Not any more.' His handsome face lit up with boyish enthusiasm. 'We've been trying to keep it a secret, but I'd marry Joanna and settle down tomorrow if I could. I've never met anyone like her before. She's so sweet and gentle. She's so different from the other girls I used to go out with. They were like you, could look after themselves, but Joanna's not like that. She's the sort of girl you want to protect.'
Joanna was a lucky girl, Cairo couldn't help reflecting. She wished she brought out the protective instincts in men. She was tired of looking after herself.
'If you feel like that, why don't you get married?' she asked Piers.
'Joanna went through a pretty ghastly divorce last year, so she's still vulnerable. I don't want to rush her into anything. Everyone would assume I'd just married her for her money, like her last brute of a husband did.' Piers paced around the room. 'That's one of the reasons I was so anxious to make a success of this business. I want to show Joanna that she can trust me, that I'm not just a loser who'll never have any money of his own,' he said, smacking his fist into his hand. 'If Haydn Deane OK this new location of yours this afternoon, we'll be on our way. I haven't told Joanna much about our partnership yet,' he went on. 'I wanted to wait until I could be sure it was going to be a success.'
He would have told Joanna just enough to make her suspicious, Cairo thought wryly. She had probably followed Piers one day, had seen him meet her, perhaps disappear into the office with her, and had obviously drawn her own conclusions. Why hadn't Joanna just asked Piers instead of writing to Max about her suspicions? Cairo wondered exasperatedly. She would have saved a lot of trouble all round if she'd used her head for a change!
Cairo was nervous as they waited to see two of the associates at Haydn Deane that afternoon, but, as Piers had predicted, they were delighted with the photographs and were soon taking all the credit for deciding that the plateau wouldn't have been a suitable location after all. They were even more impressed by the detailed arrangements Cairo had made, and asked her to travel back with the group to make sure everything went as planned.
'We'd like to move as soon as possible on this one,' they said. 'The clients want to use Jasmin, but she's only available for a few days in two weeks'
time. Can you firm up all the arrangements for then?'
Cairo nodded, but her heart sank at the news that she was going to have to deal with one of London's top models. Jasmin was so well known that she never used a surname, and she had a reputation for being difficult. Cairo dreaded to think how she was going to react to conditions in the desert.
Piers was beaming as they left, jubilant at the prospect of having their fee paid at last. The associates had also dropped some heavy hints about some other jobs in the pipeline, and he was bursting with enthusiasm.
'We're on our way!' he said to Cairo, sweeping her into a hug. 'I can't wait to tell Joanna! Thanks to you, we've got the first job in the bag. There'll be no stopping us now, Cairo, just you wait and see. Our troubles are over!'
His might be, Cairo thought bitterly, but hers were only just beginning. She had to learn to live without Max.
On the flight from Shofrar, she had told herself that once she was back in the routine at home it would be easy to put him behind her, but the differences only served to emphasise how much she missed him. She missed his loose easy stride and the way he wore his hat. She missed the acidity in his voice and the exasperation in his eyes when she made him cross. She missed the air of cool self-sufficiency that made her feel so safe. Most of all, she missed the touch of his lean, hard body and the way he had smiled before he kissed her.
Cairo tried to sound enthusiastic about the prospects of the business when she went to visit her father. The fee for their first job would enable her to pay back the loan het godmother had made, and after that any money she earned could go towards paying off what remained of his debts. 'It'll take some time, though,' she warned, unwilling to get his hopes up too high. 'But if things go as well as Piers seems to think they will, we could pay off quite a few this year.'
Jeremy Kingswood looked at his daughter. There was a fine-drawn look of exhaustion about her and her bare face was burnt brown by the desert sun but she was somehow more beautiful than before. He frowned as he saw the unhappiness shadowing the huge green eyes.
'You look tired,' he said quietly. 'This past year hasn't been easy f
or you, has it?' Leaning forward, he took her hand and squeezed it. 'I'm sorry, darling, I never wanted you to have to worry like this. I wish you'd give up this idea of paying off the debts. Now that we've sold everything, there aren't that many left. I'll manage somehow.'
Cairo put her free hand over his. 'You looked after me for all those years, Daddy. Now it's my turn.' She saw the emotion quiver on his face, and smiled at him, trying to turn the conversation to more cheerful channels. 'I'm lucky to have such an interesting job. Not everyone gets to jaunt off to the desert as part of their work!'
Jeremy Kingswood contented himself with squeezing her hand, and followed her lead. 'What was it like?'
Cairo thought of the stark grandeur of the plateau and the fierce light, the perfect curve of the dunes and the shadows at sunset. She thought of the guelta where the bees had hummed in the cedar trees, and the clear green waters among the bleached stones. She didn't think she would ever be able to explain what the desert had been like.
'It was very hot,' she said. 'Hot and empty. Lots of rocks and lots of sand.'
Her father was looking horrified. 'Poor Cairo! You're such a city girl, too!
You must have hated it!'
The green eyes darkened with memory. 'I didn't hate it,' she said, and to her horror, her voice cracked. 'I loved it.'
Cairo couldn't believe how many people it appeared were essential to take a few simple photographs. They would need at least another car, she realised when Haydn Deane sent her the final list of personnel, and she would just have to hope that there were more hotel rooms available when they got there.
At least this wasn't the tourist season.
She was longing to see the desert again, but dreading taking other people back to share her memories, and when she met the group at the airport before the flight her heart sank even further. They were exactly the kind of people Max would most despise, gushing and affected, littering their conversations with 'darling' and extravagant gestures.
The model, Jasmin, drew all eyes. She was tall and exotically dark, with a wide, dramatic red mouth and sultry brown eyes. There was a steamy, smouldering quality about her that made Cairo feel like a Brownie. She had recognised her at once, of course, had even seen her at a few parties, but she was unprepared for the dislike she felt when she finally met her.
