Sheikh's Castaway

by Alexandra Sellers

  “Get back! You’ll overturn us!” he ordered furiously.

  Noor lifted her hands as if the belt were hot, and slid back inside, wiping the rain and hair from her eyes, her heart beating in tumult as she watched him.

  Bari cut the cord that tied them to the plane and moved back inside. He wiped the sword uselessly against his wet sleeve, sheathed it carefully in the confined space and set it down.

  Something beside her head on the canopy caught her eye. Her eyes sparkling, she said, “There appears to be a little knife stuck to the canopy here, Bari. I suppose not everyone is expected to be carrying their own ceremonial sword.”

  She caught the glimmer of a smile, of the old, humorous Bari, but there was no time for laughter. The sea smashed over them, the little raft rose with a sickening swoop, and the moment was lost. With a loud, terrifying complaint from the torn wing, the plane shifted again. Would they be dragged with it?

  A red polythene bag was tied to the floor. Bari wrestled the neck open, then drew out a small plastic scoop and fixed a metal handle to it. Everything he did was quick, with an air of urgency that only heightened her anxiety. A breath of nervous laughter escaped her.

  “What’s that for?”

  Bari tossed it down.

  “Never used a paddle before?” he asked. “You’d better learn fast.”

  With a neat economy of motion he pulled another one out of the sack and fitted that together.

  “Shouldn’t we close the entrance? We’re getting a lot of water in here,” Noor complained.

  “There’s work to be done first. Pick that up and come and help me.”

  All her life Noor had been pampered. The only girl, and the youngest child, she had always been special. No one made real demands of her. Her needs were always met through someone else’s work—servants, her parents, her brothers, even her cousin Jalia had all conspired to cushion her against the truth that life required effort. Any effort Noor made went in the direction of fun.

  And no one—including Bari—had ever spoken to her in the tones he was using now.

  “What’s the point? Where are we trying to get to? We don’t even know where we are!”

  “We know we’re too damned close to the plane, and it’s sinking,” he informed her flatly. “We have no time to argue. Try to spread your weight as much as possible. It’s dangerous to have all the weight on one side, but we have no choice.”

  Bari pushed his head and shoulders out into the rain and began to paddle, fighting to get the raft away from the downed plane. It lay helpless in the water, with its ugly broken wing, and their position was dangerous—a wave could smash them against the hull. Or they might be caught by the wing, or hammered by the tail, as the plane went under.

  Or simply sucked down with it when it went.

  After a moment, to his surprise, Noor moved up behind him and put her head out, paddle at the ready.

  “What do I do?” she shrieked against the storm.

  His biceps bulged under the soaking-wet jacket. “We’ll aim to get around the nose and out that way,” he shouted.

  Noor could hardly see, hardly breathe in the downpour, but he had challenged her and she wasn’t going to give in. She wiped her hair out of her eyes and tried again.

  “Watch my paddle,” Bari ordered, and that made it easier. Looking down she could follow the direction of his paddling, and she got less rain in her eyes.

  They paddled together, side by side, wordlessly battling the waves that tried to drag them towards the sinking plane. Then suddenly, pushed close and then swept on by a high swell, they were past it and out of danger.

  “That’s good enough,” Bari said. They drew back inside, and he rolled up the door flap and sealed it, and now at last they were cocooned against the storm. Soaking wet, Noor reflected, and chilled, and in a tiny space that was awash with water and bouncing like forty miles of bad road, but suddenly it seemed like comfort. She slumped down against the rounded side of the raft, panting, her heart drumming in her ears, and realized what a relative thing comfort was.

  For a minute or two they rested in silence as their breathing calmed. Then Bari opened the flap again and looked out, using the paddle to turn the raft around and get a wider view.

  They had been carried well away from the plane, now half-submerged. It would disappear soon. Gazing past Bari’s head into the grey seascape, Noor caught no sight of ship or land. Still, such heavy rain might easily disguise land that was quite close.

  Bari closed the flap again.

  “No sign of land?” Noor said, hoping to be contradicted.

  “No, but with a little luck we’re near the Gulf Islands.” He reached for the emergency pack again and pulled out a plastic-covered sheet of paper whose bold title read “Immediate Emergency Procedures.”

  Lightning flashed and flashed again, throwing an eerie orange glow over the interior, and making it hard for Noor’s eyes to acclimatize. Bari frowned down at the paper for a moment, then lifted a hand to the centre of the canopy and turned on a little light.

  Noor, uncomfortably curled in one corner, her shoulders resting against the edge of the raft, felt light-headed with the constant motion. Water was trickling down her back from her soaked hair. Her lacy stay-up stockings were slipping on her wet thighs, and she lifted a hand to strip them off as Bari pulled some rope and a curiously shaped piece of plastic out of the red sack.

  “What’s that for?” she asked, but he only shook his head as if her question were a bothersome fly. After a moment, her eyes fell on the wedding dress damply scrunched up under the satchel. It was slowly absorbing the water sloshing around the floor of the raft, but it was better than nothing. Noor reached out and pulled at the hem.

  She knew she was being foolish and stupidly sentimental as she avoided using the beautiful overskirt and instead lifted one of the flounced underskirts and bent to wipe her face and hair on the impeccably hand-stitched silk. It came away blotched with black, green and tan, so no doubt her face was a mess. She tried wiping her hair and her arms, because she was starting to feel chilled, but the dress was too soaked to make any difference.

  For several minutes as Bari got his bearings there was silence between them. Noor sat straighter and tried not to feel sick. Normally she was a good sailor. The raft was stamped with the information that it was for four, but it was a small enough space even for two when one of them was a runaway bride and the other her furious ex-bridegroom, she told herself with grim humour.

  It was moving up and down with the stormy swell, the waves slapping it, the water on the floor sloshing around to produce deep discomfort. Once they felt a heave and a toss and then water pounded down on them, pushing at the canopy, and she knew a wave had washed right over them. The incessant drumming rain and the silence within made the little space even more claustrophobic.

  Noor shivered. She had never been so close to the elements, so profoundly at their mercy.

  And in this mood, that included Bari himself.

  “How long do you think it will be before they find us?” she asked nervously.

  Bari lifted an eyebrow and looked up from what he was reading.

  “Who do you imagine will be looking?”

  Five

  There was a heartbeat of shocked silence. Thunder cracked and rolled again, but now, Alhamdolillah, it was moving off.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Who knows we were on the plane? Who knows it went down?”

  “But—radar!”

  Bari shook his head. “We were probably flying underneath radar most of the time.”

  He began to unravel the sea anchor rope. “Even when people do discover that we went off in the plane, will there be any reason to assume that we have not arrived safely at our destination, whatever that might be?”

  She stared at him. Did he really mean this might go on?

  “Unless, of course, someone is expecting you somewhere.” His eyes were hard as he spoke.

  She didn’t
know what that meant. “What about our hotel booking? Won’t they ask questions when we don’t turn up?”

  A crack of laughter escaped him. “Who will be expecting us to take a honeymoon when we didn’t get married?”

  He went on with his task, as if he could forget from moment to moment that she was there. She hated that. Bari had never ignored her before, and although now she knew his intense interest had been an act, still she missed it.

  She suddenly began to wonder what had happened after she ran. When had the alarm been raised? The guards at the gate must have noticed as she went roaring past in the bridal limousine, but what had they actually seen?

  “Did people know what happened? Did they…” She faded off.

  “Did they know my bride had changed her mind?” Bari supplied in harsh mockery, and abruptly the cool veneer dropped and his raw anger surged up again. “I don’t know what they knew,” he growled. “What does it matter? Insulting our families, our friends and all our guests! No reason on God’s earth could justify such behaviour!”

  No one ever criticized Noor, and in her current fragile state the stinging rebuke hit her hard.

  “You were my reason!” she flared. “Easy for you to feel you should be allowed to walk all over me, but it’s a bit much to expect me to agree!”

  She was all the angrier, perhaps, because now that events had overtaken her, she was suddenly feeling very guilty. In countries like Bagestan and Barakat, hospitality was taken very seriously. It was practically a religious duty. And she had grown up in a family of exiles determined to maintain such traditions. It was in her blood almost as much as his.

  “Walk all over you? Easier to walk over a bed of nails!” he snorted.

  “With a soul as calloused as yours, no problem!”

  “Not so calloused that I don’t know when I’ve been lucky.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so!” Noor snapped furiously. “A few minutes ago you were all for forcing me to the altar! Anyway, you weren’t marrying me for my sweetness and light in the first place, were you? You had other mo—”

  “Not even for your self-control under stress,” he agreed. “Do you never consider pulling your own weight, Noor? Whatever you want is right?”

  That was so outrageously unfair she gasped. “What do you know about it?” she demanded. “You’ve only known me for a few weeks! Ask my real friends if you want to know!”

  Bari only shook his head and opened the hatch again. As more rain drove inside, he pushed something down into the water, then began playing out a line. Noor watched in silence. Not even for ready money would she now have offered her help. It would seem like giving in to his opinion of her, trying to win his favour. Not for a world!

  But it irked her that he seemed not to have any expectation that she would be of help in what he was doing. Maybe he really did believe that she couldn’t pull her weight; in any case, it seemed he could dismiss her completely from his field of consciousness.

  She wished she could return the insult. She could probably have shared the raft with anyone else without feeling so claustrophobic; it was Bari’s presence that made her feel so stifled.

  The raft slowed and steadied somewhat as the little sea anchor took hold, and Bari closed the entrance again.

  “Is there a first aid kit?” Noor asked, and Bari’s piercing gaze fixed her.

  “Where are you injured?”

  “I only want the scissors.”

  “What for?” he demanded suspiciously.

  “Life’s not exciting enough, Bari. I’m going to punch a hole in the raft and add a bit of drama!” she snapped sarcastically, then held up one hand. “I broke my nails.”

  “The manicure will have to wait.”

  “I need to cut them off! They’ll catch on everything!”

  “You haven’t lifted a finger so far, so what are they catching on?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Other things have priority right now,” he said with cold precision.

  “Like what! Rowing to Australia?”

  “You can start bailing.” He tossed her yet another implement made of red plastic. “Use the observation hatch to get rid of the water.”

  Anything was better than sitting in sloshing water getting chilled, she supposed, but the bailer wasn’t easy to use, and every time she put an arm out the hatch, water trickled down into her armpit, something that quickly became a form of Chinese torture.

  Bari began to attach a plastic pouch to a narrow sleeve in the canopy above his head.

  “What’s that?” she asked warily, because she thought she knew.

  “It collects rainwater.”

  Noor shook her head. “You’re worried about conserving water?”

  “The storm will pass. What then?”

  Noor bit her lip and went on bailing.

  When it was a little more than half full, Bari removed the bag and tied the neck, setting it down. Then he picked up a plastic cup and began to help her bail. They worked together in silence for a time, bailing out as much as they could. Then they began sponging the floor dry.

  “Do you think a boat or a plane will see us when the storm clears?”

  “Not necessarily immediately.”

  “How long?”

  He looked up from his task, as if exasperated that she insisted on forcing herself on his notice.

  “You are not a fool, Noor! You know as well as I do that it is possible to be lost at sea for a very long time.”

  “But this is the Gulf of Barakat, not the Pacific!”

  He apparently didn’t consider that worth answering. She wondered whether they risked being carried out of the gulf and into the broader sea.

  Abruptly she began to shiver. Her teeth chattered, and she realized how cold she had become. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop the convulsions as shock suddenly began to make itself felt in her.

  “I’m scared,” she admitted in a whisper. “I’m so cold. Bari, would you—hold me?”

  She despised herself for this show of weakness even as she asked.

  Bari turned. His eyes fell on her bare foot, her ankle, then moved slowly up her brown calf to her bent knee. Then to the thin silk clinging to her body as snugly as a bathing suit. The teddy was made almost transparent by the wet, so that the nest of hair between her thighs was sharply revealed.

  Just for a moment his eyes registered something very different than the bored irritation he had been treating her to. For one electric second they flashed with the familiar black fire that had so seduced her, and with an immediacy that was almost physical, Noor was remembering that other time they had been enclosed together in a storm….

  They had sailed down the coast one morning and dropped anchor in a ruggedly scenic turquoise bay just before lunch. They swam in the crystal sea, over the submerged ruins of an ancient settlement that was now no more than a few squares outlined in raised earth and some scattered potsherds in the serene white sand, evidence of their kinship with those who had been drawn to this pleasant bay aeons ago.

  Overlooking the bay, above on the rocky finger that marked the last reach of the Noor mountain range, was a more recent house in traditional Bagestani style. Its once-white paint was grey and peeling, its domed roof badly weather-damaged. A wooden door sagged on its hinges.

  There were many such estates in Bagestan, she knew—abandoned by those who had fled the country under Ghasib’s rule—including her family’s own. Closer to the cities, such properties had mostly been expropriated by the government, but in remote areas often they had been left to the elements.

  Noor had gazed up at the house as she swam in the jewelled water.

  “So tragic,” she said, for the house fired her imagination. “It must have been so beautiful, and now it looks—lonely. I wonder who it belongs to, and whether they intend to come back now and restore it.”

  Bari hadn’t answered. Their bodies gleaming, they climbed back aboard and rinsed the salt off under the freshwater sh
ower hose at the stern. Bari, the nozzle held above his head, suddenly pointed up at the sky. Dark clouds were moving out from behind the mountains.

  “More rain,” he said, with deeply felt satisfaction.

  Then they sat under the yacht’s shady awning, opened the picnic and spread out the little dishes of bulghur salad, imam bayaldi, houmous and a dozen other enticing concoctions.

  The scent of richly spiced succulence rose delicately on the soft wind that blew over them, bringing the welcome rain clouds closer. Noor sighed luxuriously. She felt a sense of perfect physical well-being, bathed in a sensual glow that was the product of the heat, the sea, the food…and Bari’s long muscled body, Bari’s eyes.

  He wanted her.

  He had wanted her from the moment they met; he’d never tried to conceal that. That was why she had told him she was a virgin right at the beginning. She always told the men she dated, sooner or later, but with Bari it had to be sooner. Only with my husband, or my future husband, she’d said, the very first time he kissed her.

  He had nodded, but she’d seen the muscle clench in his cheek, and his black eyes had burned hot enough to scorch her. And for the first time in such a situation she had felt the coil of something that might have been regret. For the first time she considered whether her friends—who talked about sex as if it were a great adventure to be undertaken with any man who looked like a promising travel companion—might be right.

  Maybe he’d seen that momentary doubt. Something had flickered in his eyes then, as if he’d known he was the man who had the power to change her mind. Noor steeled herself to resist an onslaught, but in the days that followed Bari had never tried to wear her down, verbally or physically.

  Other men had tried to undermine her, taking her to the brink and then insisting on her passion and their rights, but that treatment only fuelled her determination. Bari kissed her once, the kiss that so shifted her inner certainty that it had provoked her instant declaration of her status. After that, he hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t caressed her, hadn’t complained…only his gaze had been given the freedom of her body. His eyes, not his mouth, had tasted the curving lips that had been made for kissing; his eyes had pierced her, as intimately as any thrust of his body, leaving her melting for more. His eyes, not his voice, told her what desire was in his blood.