by Annie West
‘Someone beat you? I thought you’d been in an accident.’
Finally, against his better judgement, he forced his weighted eyelids open. The world was dark and blurred. It took a long time to focus. When he did his breath seized in his lungs.
Damn the old man. He knew Tahir too well. Knew him better than Tahir knew himself.
She glowed in the wavering light, her smooth almost oval face pale and perfect. Her nose was neat and straight. Her lips formed a cupid’s bow that promised pure pleasure. His pulse leapt just from looking at it and, despite his pain, heat coiled in Tahir’s belly when she furtively swiped her tongue along her top lip as if nervous.
The slightly square set of her jaw hinted at character and a determination that instantly appealed to Tahir. And her eyes…He could sink into the rich sherry-tinted depths of those wide eyes. They looked guileless, gorgeous, beguiling.
Glossy dark hair framed her face. Not a stiff, sprayed coiffure but soft tresses that had escaped whatever she’d done to pull her hair back.
She looked fresh, without a touch of make-up on her exquisite features. She blinked, eyes widening as she met his gaze, then long lush lashes lowered, screening her expression.
She was the picture of innocent seduction.
His poor battered body stirred feebly.
If he’d had the energy Tahir would have applauded his father’s choice. How had he known that façade of innocent allure would weaken his son’s resolve more than the wiles of a glamorous, experienced woman?
Tahir remembered the first time he’d fallen for the mirage of sweet, virginal womanhood and scowled. Who’d have thought after all this time he’d still harbour a weakness for that particular fantasy? He’d made it his business to avoid falling for it again.
His hand firmed around hers, feeling the fragility of her bones and the thud of her pulse racing. Her face was calm but her pulse told another story.
Did she fear his father? Had she been coerced?
He grimaced, searching for words to question her. But his eyes flickered shut as the effort of the last minutes took its toll. His fingers opened and her hand slid away.
‘Go! Leave before he hurts you too.’ Even to his own ears his words sounded slurred and uneven. Tahir groped for the strength to stay awake.
‘Who? Who are you talking about?’
‘My father, of course.’ Walls of pain rose and pressed close, stifling his words, stealing his consciousness.
Annalisa lowered his head and shoulders to the pillow.
Shock hummed through her.
Looking into his searing blue eyes was like staring at the sun too long. Except watching the sky had never made her feel so edgy or breathless.
Even the sound of his deep voice, a mere whisper of sound from his poor cracked lips, made something unravel in the pit of her stomach.
Belatedly she looked around, past the lamp and the lowburning campfire, towards the dune where he’d appeared.
Had he been attacked? If so, by a stranger or by his father, as he’d claimed? Or was that a figment of a mind confused by head wounds? As well as the gash at his temple Annalisa had found a lump like a pigeon’s egg on the back of his skull.
For hours she’d been checking his pupils. Though what she’d do if he had bleeding to the brain she didn’t know. She couldn’t move him. It would be days before the camel train returned and this part of the country’s arid centre was a telecommunications black spot.
Fear sidled down her spine and she shivered. All night she’d told herself she’d cope, doing her best to rehydrate the stranger and lower his temperature.
Now she had more to worry about.
She got to her feet and searched her supplies. Her hand closed around cool metal and she dragged it out.
The pistol was an antique. It had belonged to her mother’s father, been presented to Annalisa’s father on the day he’d wed. A traditional gift from a traditional man. All the men of Qusay knew how to shoot, just as they knew how to ride, and many still had skills in the old sports of archery and hawking.
Annalisa’s father, an outsider, had never used the gun. As a respected doctor he’d never needed to protect himself or his family. But she felt better with it in her hand.
She’d brought it for sentimental reasons, remembering how he’d carried it on their trips into the wilderness.
Once more that dreadful sense of aloneness swept over her, pummelling her stomach and stealing the calm she’d worked so hard to maintain.
What if someone else was out there, lost and injured or angry and violent? She bit her lip, knowing she couldn’t search. If she left the oasis her patient would likely die of dehydration and exposure.
She returned to his side. His temperature was too high. She picked up the cloth but was loath to touch him again.
Despite the nicks and abrasions marring his face he was a handsome man. More handsome than any she’d met before. Even with deep purple shadows beneath his eyes and the wound at his temple. Dark stubble accentuated a lean, superbly sculpted countenance. Even his hands, large and strong and sinewed, were strangely fascinating.
Annalisa remembered the feel of his fingers encircling her wrist and wondered at the sensations that had bombarded her. She’d felt wary yet excited.
Her gaze slipped to his bare chest. She’d spread his shirt open to bathe him and try to reduce his fever.
In the mellow light from the lamp and the flickering fire he looked beautiful, despite the bruises marring his firm golden skin. His chest was broad and muscular but not with the pumped-up look she’d seen on men in movies and foreign magazines. His latent strength looked natural but no less formidable for that. As for the way his powerful torso tapered to a narrow waist and hips…Annalisa knew a shameful urge to sit and stare.
Even the fuzz of dark hair across his pectoral muscles looked appealing. She wanted to touch it. Discover if it was soft or coarse against her palm.
Her gaze strayed to the narrowing line of hair that led from his chest down his belly.
Annalisa’s pulse hit a discordant beat and staggered on too fast. Heat washed her cheeks and shame burnt as she realised she’d been ogling him.
Determined, she squeezed the cloth, took a fortifying breath and wiped the damp fabric over him.
She refused to think about how her hand shook as it followed the contours of his body, or about the alien tingle in her stomach that signalled a reaction to a man who, even asleep, was more potently virile than any male she’d encountered.
Tahir woke to pain again. At least the throb in his head didn’t threaten to take the back off his skull, as it had before. Only one jackhammer was at work there now.
His lips twisted in a rueful smile that felt more like a grimace from scratched, sore lips. He stirred, opening his eyes a fraction. Not darkness. Not bright daylight either. The light filtering through his lashes was green-tinged and shadowed.
He heard the soft stirring of the wind, breathed deep and inhaled the unique scent that was Qusay. Heat and sand and some indefinable hint of spice he’d never been able to identify.
A searing blast of confused feelings struck him, roiling in his gut, rising in his throat.
‘I’m not dead, then.’ The words, hoarse as they were, sounded loud.
‘No, you’re not dead.’
His muscles froze as he heard a voice, half remembered. Soft, rich, slightly husky. The voice of a temptress sent to tease a man too weak to resist.
She spoke again, ‘You don’t seem particularly pleased.’
Tahir shrugged, then stiffened as abused muscles shrieked in protest.
He didn’t explain his innermost thoughts to anyone.
‘Why is it green? Where are we?’ He kept his head averted, preferring not to face the owner of that voice till he had himself in hand. He felt strangely at a loss, unable to summon his composure, as if this last beating had shattered the brittle shell of disdain he used to maintain distance from the brutality around him.
Tahir blinked, amazed at how vulnerable he felt. How weak.
‘We’re at the Darshoor oasis, in the heart of Qusay’s desert.’ Her voice slid like rippling water over him and for a moment his hazy mind strayed.
Till her words sank in.
‘The desert?’ He whipped his head round then shut his eyes as a blast of white-hot pain stabbed him.
‘That’s right. The light’s green because you’re in my tent.’
A tent. In the desert. The words whirled in his head but they didn’t make sense.
‘My father—’
‘He’s not here.’ She broke in before he could cobble his thoughts together. ‘You seemed to think he was here too but you’re confused. You were…disturbed.’
Tahir frowned. None of this made sense. His father lived in the city, with easy access to his vices of choice: women, gambling and brokering power and money corruptly.
‘You seemed to think you’d been beaten.’
Instantly Tahir froze. He would never have admitted such a thing, especially to a stranger! Not even to his closest friends.
Who was this woman?
He forced his eyelids open again and found himself sinking into warm sherry-tinted depths.
By daylight she looked even better than she had the first time. For he remembered her now, this woman who’d haunted his thoughts. Or were they dreams?
‘Who are you?’ A swift glance took in hair scrupulously pulled back from her lovely face, an absence of jewellery, a long-sleeved yellow shirt and beige cotton trousers. She didn’t dress like a local in concealing skirts. Yet surely only a local would be here?
From where he lay, looking up, her legs looked endless. She moved and he watched the fabric pull tight over her neatly curved hip and slim thighs. A moment later she sat on the floor beside him, her faint, sweet fragrance tantalising his nostrils. Her shirt pulled across her breasts as she leaned towards him.
A jolt of sensation shot through his belly.
No. He wasn’t dead yet.
Perhaps there were some compensations after all.
‘My name is Annalisa. Annalisa Hansen.’ She paused, as if waiting for him to say something. ‘You arrived at my campsite days ago. Just walked out of the desert.’
‘Days ago?’ How could he have lost so much time?
‘You’re injured.’ She gestured to his head, his side. ‘My guess is you were in the desert for quite a while. When you reached me you were seriously dehydrated.’ She lifted a hand to his brow. Her palm was cool and curiously familiar.
He had a jumbled recollection of her touching him earlier. Of blessed water and soothing words.
‘You’ve been drifting in and out of consciousness.’ She leaned back, lifting her hand away, and Tahir knew a bizarre desire to catch it back.
‘Your little friend has been worried.’
‘Little friend?’ Automatically he looked past her, taking in the cool interior of the tent, the neatly stowed gear in one corner. A ripple of pages as a furtive breeze played across a book left open a few metres away.
‘You don’t remember?’ She surveyed him seriously.
‘No.’ He remembered just in time not to shake his head. He was no masochist and the pain was already bad enough. ‘I don’t recall.’
It was true. His thoughts were fluid and incomplete. He was unable to fix anything in his mind.
‘That’s all right,’ she said with the calm air of one who’d perfected a soothing bedside manner. Vaguely he wondered who this woman was, caring for him at a desert oasis. ‘You’ve taken a nasty knock to the head so things could be jumbled for a while.’
‘Tell me,’ he murmured, forcing down rising concern at his faulty memory. He recalled a casino. A woman all but climbing into his lap as the chips rose before him. He remembered a cruiser in a crowded marina. A party in a city penthouse. A meeting in a hushed boardroom. But the faces were blurred. The details unclear. ‘What little friend?’
The woman…Annalisa, he reminded himself…smiled. A shaft of sunlight pierced the interior of the tent, or so it seemed, as he stared up into her calm, sweet face.
‘You were carrying a goat.’
‘A goat?’ What nonsense was this?
‘Yes.’ This time her smile was more like a grin. Her dark eyes danced and she tilted her head engagingly. ‘A little one. Obviously it’s a friend of yours. It’s been foraging for food but it keeps coming back to sleep just outside the tent.’
A goat? His mind was blank. Frighteningly blank.
‘What else?’ he murmured. There must be more.
She shrugged and he caught a flash of something in her eyes. Distress? Fear?
‘Nothing else. You just appeared.’ She waited but he said nothing. ‘So, perhaps you could tell me something.’ She lifted a hand and tugged nervously at her earlobe. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Tahir…’
‘Yes?’ She nodded encouragingly.
A sensation like a plummeting lift crashed through the sudden void that was his stomach. Blood rushed in his ears as he met her gaze. The kaleidoscope of blurry images cascaded through his brain into nothingness.
‘And I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.’
He forced a smile to lips that felt stiff and unfamiliar. ‘I seem to have mislaid my memory.’
CHAPTER THREE
FOR a man who couldn’t remember his name Tahir was one cool customer.
Annalisa read the shock flaring in his eyes and the way he instantly masked it. Ready sympathy surged but she beat it down, knowing instinctively he’d reject it.
Despite never having left Qusay, Annalisa had seen a lot in her twenty-five years. As her father’s assistant she’d seen the effects of accident and disease, the way pain or fear could break even the strongest will.
Yet this man, traumatised by wounds that must be shockingly painful, smiled at her with a veneer of calm indifference. As if he were one of her father’s scientist friends and they were conversing over a cup of sweet tea in her father’s study.
Yet none of her father’s friends looked like Tahir. Or made her feel that warm tingle of awareness deep inside.
Years ago, with Toby, the man she’d planned to marry, she’d known something like it. But not so instantaneously, nor so strong.
There was something about Tahir that she connected with at the deepest level. More than his extraordinary looks or the innate sophistication that had nothing to do with his beautiful clothes. Something that set him apart. She was drawn by his core of inner strength, revealed as intensely blue eyes met hers with wry humour, ignoring the unspoken fear that his memory lapse was permanent.
He comes from another world. One where you don’t belong.
She’d do well to remember it.
A pang shot through her and her calm frayed at the edges. Just where did she belong?
All her life she’d never fitted in. She was a Qusani but didn’t live as other Qusani women or fit their traditional role. She was poised between two worlds, belonging to neither. She’d been part of her father’s world, his assistant, his confidante.
But he’d gone, leaving her bereft.
‘What’s wrong?’ Tahir’s deep voice roused her from melancholy reflection. ‘Are you all right?’
Despite herself Annalisa smiled. Lying flat on his back, bruised and barely awake, his memory shot, yet this man was concerned for her?
She laid a reassuring hand on his arm. His muscles tensed beneath the fine cotton of his shirt. His warm strength radiated up through her fingertips and palm.
A zap of something jagged between them as she met those piercing eyes. His nonchalant half-smile disappeared, replaced by frowning absorption.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said briskly, slipping her hand away. It tingled from the contact and she clenched it at her side. ‘Your foggy memory is normal. It should come back in time.’ She drew her lips up in a smile she hoped looked reassuring. ‘You’ve got two head wounds. Either would be enoug
h to knock you about for a couple of days.’
Or do far worse. Ruthlessly she pushed aside the fear that he might be more badly injured than she realised.
‘You speak as if you have medical experience.’
‘My father was a doctor. The only doctor in our region. I helped him for years.’ She turned away, horrified by the way memories swamped her again, and the pain with it. ‘I don’t have medical qualifications but I can set a sprain or treat a fever.’
‘Why do I suspect you’ve done much more than that for me, Annalisa?’
The sound of her name on his lips was strangely intimate. Reluctantly she turned back, meeting his warm gaze, feeling his approval trickle through her like water in a parched landscape.
‘You’ve saved my life, haven’t you?’ His voice dropped to a low rumble that vibrated along her skin.
Annalisa shrugged, uncomfortable with his praise. Uncomfortable with her intense reaction to this stranger. She’d done all she could but he wasn’t out of the woods yet. Fear edged her thoughts.
‘You’ll be okay, given time.’ Fervently she prayed she was right. ‘All you need to do is rest and give yourself time to recuperate. And try not to worry.’ She’d do enough worrying for the pair of them.
Even now she couldn’t quite believe he was holding a sensible conversation. He’d drifted in and out of consciousness since he’d stumbled into her life, leaving her terrified but doggedly determined to do what she could.
‘I want to check your reactions.’ She moved to kneel at the end of the mattress. ‘Can you move your feet?’
She watched as he rotated his ankles and then lifted first one foot then the other. Relief coursed through her.
‘Excellent. I’m going to hold your feet. When I tell you, push against my hands. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Gently she lifted his heels onto her knees and cupped his bare feet with her palms. A curious jolt of heat shot through her from the contact. She blinked and tried to concentrate.
His feet were long, strong and well shaped. For a moment she knelt there blankly staring, absorbing the sensation of skin on skin.
