by Sophia Lynn
"It's fine. I promise that I am careful. I'll be happy to take advantage of your offer when it starts to get really cold, but until then, I am happy to walk. It's good for me, you know, with all the books and dust and things..."
It was mostly true. She did love the exercise and the beauty of the mountains. However, there was also a solitude on the trail that she craved. They had gone wandering the mountains before, but never on foot. They were always on horseback or, on one impressive occasion, a helicopter. On foot, she felt small and humble.
That was during the day, however. At night, she found it a little harder to keep occupied and to keep her mind on things unrelated to the sheikh. At night, she found herself apt to dwell, and that was when she had the idea to write.
Anna had never been much of a writer. She loved to read and she admired her favorite writers greatly, but in general, she dismissed her own writing attempts as mere chicken scribbles. However, that was before she had something to write about, and now she certainly did.
One night, when she thought that she was going to go crazy with longing and desire, she sat at her desk and realized that there was some stationery in the drawer. She pulled it out curiously, and she let her fingers drift over the paper that was as pale as milk but thick and almost velvety to the touch. When she looked around a little more, she found a pen as well. Inspired, she started to write:
Dear Rakim:
What happened to us? One moment, you made me the happiest woman in the world, and the next, you have cast me aside like some kind of unwanted wife...
It might have been a little overwrought, and it was certainly more emotional than she had ever wanted to be with him, but pages and pages later, Anna thought that she felt a little better. She sighed and put the pages aside, because she could not imagine ever sending them, but she still returned to it the next night.
Over the next few days, Anna wrote her heart out. She worked in the library, she walked down to the town, and she wrote. She wrote so long that her hand started to complain. She wondered if she should switch to the computer, but something in her rebelled against that. She needed the ancient connection of hand to pen to paper. There was something deeply soothing about it, almost meditative, and she hung on to the comfort it gave her.
She wrote about what had happened with Iriq from beginning to end. She talked about the relief she had felt when she saw Rakim. She discussed the beginning of their relationship, and revealed how much she missed him now.
Emotions that had formerly felt too enormous to be borne were made smaller as she trapped them on paper, and when she put the pages away, Anna felt like she was putting the emotions away as well. They still leaped out to surprise her from time to time, but on the whole, she thought she was getting a grip on them.
Then, Rakim appeared.
***
It was growing late when she finally began to make her way up the footpath to the palace. There were only a handful of shops in the town, and though she had long since explored all of them, there were still things that could surprise her.
The woman who ran the grocery store had gestured her to the back, where she showed her two small barrels filled with a creamy white flower. The scent was heavenly, and Anna had smiled with delight to see them.
"They are for good luck," the woman had said, and Anna hadn't needed the extra inducement to buy a bundle. They would look lovely in her apartment, she thought, and then she had realized how dark it was getting.
On her way back up the mountain, Anna had to reluctantly concede that the groundskeepers were likely right. There was a chill to the air that hadn't been there before, and with the dark coming on so quickly, she couldn't make out the path very well.
Anna shivered.
If she knew it less well, it would have been too easy to get lost, to mistake a twist for a turn and to find herself entirely lost on the mountain. The darkness also disguised the parts of the path that she knew to be untrustworthy. With a brief moment of carelessness, she could easily shatter her ankle and be left screaming for help.
This should be my last trip to the town like this, she thought with a sigh.
She almost didn't see him.
The indigo light could apparently hide men as well as depressions in the rock, because when he spoke, she felt a deep chill run through her.
"It is easy to forget how beautiful you are. Then when I am reminded, your beauty strikes me through the heart."
It was as if a ghost was speaking to her out of the past. Anna froze, and then her eyes finally focused on Rakim, who was sitting on a small boulder off of the path. He wore his worn traditional clothing in dark silk. He was so still that he looked like part of the landscape.
This moment had played out in her mind so often. She had thought that when she saw him again—if she saw him again—she would be furious. She would go up to him and tell him exactly what kind of cad he had been. She had been afraid that she might have wept. She thought that perhaps she would have been so overcome with emotion that she would not be able to defend against it.
Now that the time had come, however, Anna did neither.
Instead, she dropped her flowers to the ground and threw herself at him. God only knows what she would have done if he hadn't opened his arms to catch her, but he did, and she was clinging to him as if she never wanted him to let her go. He smelled and felt exactly the way she had remembered, exactly the way that she had dreamed of for the past few weeks. It was like putting a banquet in front of a starving child, and now she was gorging herself as if she couldn't get enough.
His arms were wrapped tightly around her, his cheek pressed against the top of her head. It took her a few moments to recognize these things, but then she realized what was happening and let go.
"Well, that is certainly a welcome," he said, and she stood back from him with shock.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, feeling strangely numb.
"I am doing precisely what it is I please," he said with a shrug. "This palace belongs to me. The town belongs to me, as does the library you work in. To some extent, you could say that you belong to me as well..."
He looked at her as if he expected her to mount some kind of defense against his words, but she only shrugged. There was a certain amount of truth in them, and she had long decided that she wasn't going to fight against things that were true.
Instead, she knelt to gather her flowers from where they had fallen. She could feel his bright blue gaze on her, and then, to her surprise, he leaned down to help her as well.
"I know these," he said. "They were a favorite of my mother's when I was a boy."
"They're so beautiful," Anna agreed. "The woman who sold them to me told me that they were for good luck, but she could have said that they symbolized plague and I would have purchased them anyway."
"Finding them is meant to be a rare thing. They only bloom in cold weather, but the winter here kills them off quickly after they do."
For a moment, it was like old times. He was speaking to her with that gentle humorous lilt to his voice. Soon enough, he would take her hand and they would make their way back to the palace. They would kiss, touch, make love, and it would be just as it was before.
Then the present intervened, and though they did begin the rest of the walk back to the palace together, there was a careful distance between them, something almost formal.
There were a dozen questions in Anna's mind, but she stayed quiet. There was simply too much between them—too much strife, too many questions.
"I want you to dine with me tonight," he said, as they approached the palace. "Nothing formal, just the two of us in the east solar."
"Is that a command?" Anna asked, and though she had not wanted to start anything, there was a little bit of acid in her words.
He paused, thinking about it for a moment, and when he answered, there was a slight smile on his lips. That smile stirred up a response deep within her, and she remembered in a powerful and visceral way that a part of he
r would always belong to him.
"You should take it as you like," he said, "but the fact remains that I would very much like to see you at dinner in an hour."
He strode off once they were inside, leaving her to make her own way back to the library.
In the safety of her own apartment, it felt as if she was pulled back into some strange world that she didn't understand. Anna had spent the past few weeks putting her life back in order, and now here came the tempest again, ready to tear it apart.
He had told her to take his words as she liked, but she knew deep within her that there was absolutely no way she was going to stay away. She thought about what she would do as she put the flowers in a vase she had found, and then decided that it was like planning for something that she could not see. Inevitably, she would simply have to take things as they came.
Of course, that didn't mean that she had to go to dinner covered in dust from the walk. Anna took a long hot shower, and went to her closet to find at least a skirt and tunic. When she was done, she hesitated. She still looked so plain.
The words of the woman in town and Rakim's own words came back to her, however, and she turned to the creamy white flowers in their vase. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to turn to them and to snap one off of its stem. When she tucked it behind her ear, Anna smiled.
For luck, the woman had said, and she was surely going to need some tonight. It occurred to her to wonder what she might need luck for. She wasn't sure what she wanted or what was going to happen, but Anna knew that she needed to make sure that she was ready. She had braided her hair back, but at the last moment, she pulled it down again, brushing it to fall in pale waves down to her shoulders.
“Well, are you ready?” she asked her reflection, but it didn't have any new answers to give her, so she simply had to shrug and walk away.
***
The east solar was a small room for the palace. Despite its comparatively small size, however, there was an elegance to it that could not be denied. The tall windows looked out over the valley, taking in both the gorgeous indigo sky above and the twinkling of the town lights far below. Once upon a time, it had been the domain of the sheikha—the place for her to hold her salons and to meet her own honored guests in comfort and privacy.
Now it was decked out in midnight-blue silk hangings, and there was a small table close to the window laid out for just two people. It was empty when Anna appeared, and instead of taking her place at the table, she went to stand at the window instead. She could feel the chill of the mountain air through the glass, and she hugged herself tightly.
Anna wasn't thinking of much when the door behind her creaked open. In the dim glass, she could see the room behind her as clearly as in a mirror, and she saw Rakim appear in the doorway. She wondered if she saw more than he wanted her to as he paused, mouth slightly open. There was something that she could not read in his face, but she did not flinch as he approached her.
Anna could tell that she wasn't the only one who had prepared for dinner. He still wore silk, but it was crisp and sharp, gleaming black. Dressed in the traditional garb of his people, the tunic and trousers gave him an almost military air.
“Why do you have blue eyes?” she asked, and he seemed unsurprised by her words as he came to stand behind her.
“A family inheritance of sorts,” he said. “My father and my mother were both born in Abu Dhabi, but my father's mother was an Anvarran aristocrat. They're pale with eyes like this, and apparently, their genetic stock is strong. When I was born, my mother was shocked, and before someone told her the full story, she was terrified that my father was going to think that she was cheating on him.”
“They are striking,” Anna murmured. “I was always curious. It finally occurred to me to ask.”
He smiled a little, and it was almost like old times. However much she wished she could turn back the clock, however, there was a tension between them that hadn't been there before. She was suddenly struck by the image of the two of them on separate platforms, connected by a tightrope wire. The way to the other was perilous in the extreme, and a single twang could send the other spiraling to the dark depths below.
“Do all of your family members have hair as pale and eyes as green?” Rakim asked, leaning in close. She knew that he was breathing in her scent, and she tried to calm her heart, which had started to thud in anticipation of his touch. It was hard, though, because with him so close, a very real part of her assumed that things were all right, that they could simply return to being who they had been.
“It's from my mother's side of the family,” she said with a shrug. “My father's side were fair, but the eyes and the hair…I'm a carbon copy of my mother and my grandmother. It's the only inheritance they had to give me. I like it well enough, I suppose.”
“You have rare looks,” Rakim remarked. “I have always thought so. It took me some time to realize how beautiful you truly are, but when I did, I could not stop looking.”
She turned to face him, and when he didn't step back, she found herself looking up into his face.
“What's going on?” Anna forced herself to say. “What is this?”
She had more questions, a dozen more, perhaps even hundreds, but he only gave her a speculative look before stepping back. No, it wasn't quite like their time before. Now she could sense that edge of cruelty to him she had seen the night of the soiree. Now she knew what it was like to have him send her away. He had given her the option to stay in her room, to avoid dinner with him, but she hadn't done that. Anna knew herself well, and there was no way she would have been able to do so.
“This is dinner,” he said simply. “Come, sit with me.”
Reluctantly, she followed him to the table where he pulled the chair out for her. Just as Anna was seated, a kitchen staff member appeared, pushing a small cart in front of him. Even before he removed the silver plate covers, the smell was amazing, and Anna was briefly distracted.
“I thought it might be enjoyable for you to try some French cuisine tonight,” Rakim said with a slight smile. “We've mostly had local cuisine, and I was craving something different.”
She had to admit that the meal was delicious. It was lamb in a delicate cream sauce, served with a spicy ragout that Rakim told her was more a Provencal dish than a proper French recipe. Dessert was a goblet of spiced pear sorbet, sweet and with just enough spice in it to be interesting.
Anna waited throughout the meal for some hint of what was going on, but Rakim offered her nothing. To the best of her observations, they were two adults having a delicious meal together, and when nothing continued to happen, she could feel her nerves straining.
Somehow, she managed to make it through dinner, but by the end of it, she felt stretched thin. She hung on until the food had been cleared away. At every pause in the conversation, she expected him to say something, to bridge the gap that had grown between them, to address what had happened in Abu Dhabi, but there was nothing.
After the food had been cleared away, however, Rakim stood up and crossed to her, a slight smile on his face. He offered her his hand, and when she took it, he helped her to her feet.
“Rakim,” she said, “I've felt as if I've been off-balance all night.”
“Really? Why is that?” There was something almost playfully menacing about his tone, as if he were an enormous cat toying with a mouse. In the past, that tone had made something inside her quicken and arch with desire, but she couldn't figure out what it meant now.
He reached up to touch her face, and for a moment, Anna managed to forget about everything that had taken place between them. She relished the prickle of electricity that traveled between them, leaning in and letting her eyes flutter closed.
Then, as if struck by lightning, she pulled back, her eyes wide.
“No!” she said, and when she saw him flinch at the volume of her voice, she was grimly satisfied.
“No,” she repeated, eyes flashing. “This is going to stop now until you
tell me what is going on. You can't just...just send me away like a misbehaving dog and then come back to see me when you want to. You cannot treat me like that. I won't let you!”
She was breathing hard and staring at him, waiting to see what his next move would be, but he only slouched back on one leg, crossing his arms over his chest as he gazed at her speculatively.
“Treat you like what?” he asked. “Like a beautiful woman that I want in my arms?”
“Like your whore!” Anna spat. “That's not what you pay me for, remember? You want to send me back here to work on your library? You want to ignore me because of some...some damned thing that happened at a ball? Fine, but you do not get to treat me as if you have access to who I am and what I am...”
She caught the glacially dangerous light in his eyes just before he struck. She started to step back, but it was far too late. He went from being a few steps away to being right in her space, his powerful arms circling around her.
In the way his breath changed the moment they touched, in the way she could feel him trembling as he held her, she could feel how much he needed her. There was a desire and a craving there that went all the way down to the core of him, and she knew it because it went all the way down to the core of her as well.
“I think you have forgotten who the master is here,” he murmured, and when she opened her mouth to protest, his mouth captured hers with a passion that stopped just short of being vicious. It was almost an attack. He was merciless with her, holding her close so that she could not escape even if she wished to, his tongue invading her mouth and sending shivers of pleasure through her body. Pressed as close to him as she was, she could feel his response to her body clearly. If there was a doubt in her mind that he needed her just as she needed him, it disappeared.
When they broke apart gasping, she manned one last desperate attempt to make him see reason.
“We can't do this,” she protested. “We can't. There is so much that we need to say, so much that we need to resolve before we can—”
