‘He wants me because I’m young and different to most women in the region. He knows nothing of me. I’ve always been heavily veiled when his men come. All they or he ever see is my eyes.’ She shrugged, in a fatalistic gesture. ‘I’m packed and ready to leave. I can go tonight—but you won’t make it. We have to wait another day.’
‘No.’ He knew what she hadn’t said: Sh’ellah would think nothing of killing him to have Hana once or twice, before dumping her body in the shifting sands. ‘I’ve worked through injury before. We should get out of here tonight.’
Worried eyes searched his. ‘We have to be several kilometres away before they find we’re missing, and you were unconscious only hours ago. Fever and concussion aren’t conditions to play with.’
Touched by her concern, he whispered, ‘I’ll be all right.’
She made an impatient gesture. ‘No, you won’t—but there’s no choice. We need to head to the refugee camp. A plane arrives on Wednesdays. It’s Thursday now—it will take almost two weeks by foot. With your injuries, we’ll need an extra day, travelling by night. We’ll take pain-relief tablets with us, a suture kit and extra water.’
‘If we head for the truck we don’t need to take more than four days. We can drive the rest of the way.’
She frowned. ‘That’s sixty kilometres away.’
Teeth gritted now, he muttered, ‘I’ll make it.’
‘All right, if you say so.’ Those lovely, slanted eyes stared in open doubt. ‘I think you can roll off me now. It’s customary.’
He wanted so badly to laugh, he did, but made it low and rippling, like a lover’s laugh.
He was stunned by her quick thinking and thorough planning. His respect for her grew by the minute. Yet Alim was acutely aware of her near-nude body beneath him, her braless state, the sweetness of her skin and her gentle scent. It was almost a relief to move away, to gain distance—but she snuggled into his arms, making sure the sheet covered the clothes they still wore.
‘My love,’ she murmured in Maghreb. ‘We’ll have to take an old suture kit, and bring only the willow-bark infusion,’ she whispered, making it seem intimate. ‘I’m sorry, but we buried all the new medications. We can’t afford to dig them up now.’
‘It’s okay.’ He gathered her against him, kissing her hair—and the lavender filled his head. ‘I love your scent.’
Her mouth tightened. She stiffened in his arms, and the budding trust vanished. ‘It’s not meant to entice. It’s to keep off fleas, mosquitoes and bed bugs. Scorpions don’t like it, either.’
She sounded frozen. Given the stiff revulsion she’d exhibited only moments before, Alim wanted to kick himself for being so stupid as to think she could want him. Right now, he could think of no reassurance that she’d believe, so he drawled, ‘Bed bugs and scorpions…oh, baby, nobody does pillow talk the way you do.’
After a stunned few seconds, she burst out laughing.
Relief washed through him, and he grinned—but the way her face came alive with the smile, the harplike sound of her laughter, made him ache. Now he could see how well her name suited her—or it had once.
Then she whispered, ‘I have an aloe and lavender cream for your scars, as well. It looks as though you need pain relief for it. You never finished the plastic surgery you needed, did you?’
She’d ruined their connection by the question, by mentioning his deformity and all its reminders. He moved away from her, trying not to show how hard it was not to fling her away. It was all he could do to ground out a single word. ‘No.’
As if she heard his thoughts, she backed off. ‘We need to be gone in an hour. There’s only one way from the village they won’t be covering—where the wild dogs are. It’ll be dangerous, but they usually sleep until dawn. We have to be past their territory by then. There’s a small track, an old dried stream we can take, which has some shade for sleeping by day.’
‘Right,’ he replied, wondering if the feel of his skin against her had done anything but revolt her, having seen him unclothed…having treated his burns as no one had done since he left the private facility in Bern three years ago.
He closed his eyes, squeezing them tight. No wonder she’d been so stiff and cold with him. No wonder she’d turned aside when he’d called her his dawn star. He was a poet from the slag heaps, a monster daring to look upon beauty and hunger for what he couldn’t have.
Hana wasn’t the kind of woman who’d welcome his touch for his wealth, and he was fiercely glad of that—of course he was. He wasn’t that desperate.
‘I’ll ask one of the men here to pack you a change of clothes. We can only take one each; we need the room for water and medicine. I have dried fruits and energy bars stored in my backpack. We’ll fill one canteen with willow-bark infusion for your pain. You’ll have to be sparing with it.’
He kept his voice brisk and practical, hiding his turmoil of desire and sickening acceptance of her rejection. ‘Travelling at night should help. I have some ibuprofen in my pack I can use. Only a dozen tablets, but—’
She rolled up and sat at the edge of the bed. ‘Excellent.’ She actually smiled at him. His heart flipped over at the look in her eyes, holding no pity, just approval; and even if she only smiled in relief that he wouldn’t be moaning and groaning all the way to the refugee camp, he’d take it. He’d take any piece of happiness she doled out to him, because it felt as if she hoarded it like miser’s gold. And it might just mean she wasn’t totally revolted by him.
What had happened to her to change her from the happy woman she’d been once, he didn’t know—but he had at least a week to find out.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS close to three a.m. before they left the hut. Flickering lights a short distance away showed Alim how closely the village was being watched.
‘We’ll need to commando crawl,’ he whispered as they watched another cigarette being lit, another flashlight sweep a slow arc. ‘These packs are bulky.’
She nodded. ‘And we have to move in silence. They have to believe the villagers know nothing except my husband showed up without warning yesterday, and we disappeared at night.’ She handed him a bundle of clothes. ‘Put these on. You need to blend into the environment.’
He looked at the clothes, some kind of dun colour, smeared with mud and dirt, and felt intense admiration for her yet again. She thought of everything. ‘Can you turn your back?’ he asked gruffly, unable to stand that she’d be revolted by his body again.
She nodded and turned away. He felt pity radiating from her, but her practical words made him wonder if the compassion he’d sensed had been the workings of his paranoid imagination. ‘You won’t be able to wear your clothes until we’re out of Sh’ellah’s reach.’
As he turned to answer she slipped out of her burq’a with a swift movement, and his breath caught in his throat, remembering her lovely curved body in the knickers and camisole…
He swallowed the ridiculous disappointment. Of course she wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt with running shoes beneath! What colour he couldn’t make out in the murky darkness, but probably brown, like his; her hair looked plaited. She rolled the garment up and stored it in her backpack, and shoved her plait beneath a brown cap.
She shouldered her pack and dropped to the ground, and began belly-crawling. ‘Let’s go.’
Ignoring the severe pounding inside his head, the light fever that still hadn’t abated, he lay down flat and followed her.
It took a gruelling half-hour to make it past the village boundaries to the territory of the wild dogs. Now the moon had set past the village, the delicate filigree beauty around him had faded to a grim, dusty night as thick as the dirt coating them further with every movement.
Alim followed Hana around the hut to the fields, heading towards the only path out, his concentration on two things—being quiet, and trying with all his might not to cough or sneeze. The neckerchief she’d given him to cover his nose and throat was so thickly coated in dirt it was hard to
breathe. His scarred skin began to pull and itch in moments.
At the head of the path, she thrust a canteen in his hands. ‘Wet the bandanna using as little water as possible, and wring it out,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘We have to stay flat until we reach the stream bed. Our last opportunity to fill the canteens for fifty kilometres will be there. Move slowly, and try not to let your sweat touch ground. We can’t afford to make a sound, or give off any scent. The dogs don’t have assault rifles, but they can tear you apart in seconds.’
So that was why she’d only brought dried, wrapped food, and double-wrapped everything in tight-tied bags. Fighting the unwanted arousal her lips against his ear had given him—damn his body for all the stupid ideas it had—he nodded and kept following her. Elbows thrust forward and sideways, then a knee, one side then the other, measuring every movement in case it was too big or would dislodge a pebble and make a noise to alert the dogs.
The next hour was excruciating. Breathing through a wet bandanna, don’t move too fast, don’t cough or sneeze, don’t itch, don’t break into a sweat, don’t make a noise or you’ll become dog meat. He was forced to follow her, his head pounding with concussion and the stress of aching to go forward, to take the lead and somehow protect her, but this was her turf. She alone knew the way out of danger.
For the first time in his life he had to trust a woman in a life and death situation—but from everything she’d already done, all without flinching or complaint, he knew if there was one woman on earth he could hand control to without fear, it was Hana.
Finally, as he knew he had to breathe clean air or pass out, the flat ground gave way, and they slithered slow and quiet down a little slope; the dust became hard, crusty earth, the cracked mud of a dead stream, and when he heard Hana give a soft sigh he sensed they’d passed at least the first of the current menace facing them.
He slipped the bandanna from his nose and mouth, and dragged in a breath of fresh air without a word. Never had breathing felt so luxurious.
‘No water here.’ She sighed. ‘Our task just got harder, and you’re still concussed. Are you sure you’re up to this? Once they know we’re gone there’s no turning back.’
‘I can do it,’ he reiterated through a clenched jaw. Did she think he couldn’t take a little hardship just because of a bump on the head, a touch of fever?
‘We have to turn north as soon as we can.’ The words breathed in his ear, softer than a whisper, slow and clear, making him shiver in sensuous reaction. ‘We still have fifty kilometres to the truck.’ The second zephyr of sound stirred his hair and left a small trail of goose bumps.
‘Maybe we should leave it where it is and travel south toward the refugee camp by night,’ he whispered, as soft as he could. ‘If they’ve found the truck they’ll expect us to come for it.’
‘You’ll never make it to the camp by foot with concussion—it will only worsen without rest. And the boundaries for the warlords change almost daily. If we cross one unseen line, you’re dead, and I soon will be, once Sh’ellah finishes with me.’
He shuddered with the force of the flat whisper. ‘It’ll take three more days to reach the truck, and then we have to backtrack. A hundred and sixty kilometres through enemy lines in a truck so noticeable it practically screams foreigners.’
She looked at him, her eyes cool, calm—and how she made him ache with her beauty when she was coated in dust and clumps of mud, wearing a baseball cap and a shirt that looked like charity would reject it, he had no clue. ‘Let’s go.’
The utter relief to be upright, enjoying the luxury of walking again, flooded him until the headache grew to severe proportions. He said nothing to her until she called for another halt.
After he’d taken some tablets with water, she said, ‘We’ve gone almost as far as we can before sunrise.’ She saw him rubbing at his underarm with his arm, trying to scratch unobtrusively. ‘How’s your skin? Is it itching with all the dirt?’
His jaw tightened and he stopped moving. Yet another reminder: Beauty was letting the Beast know just who he was to her, reminding him what he was to himself. ‘I’m fine.’
‘I don’t want to embarrass you. You won’t be able to travel at night if the grafted skin or the burns rip, bleed or itch. We just crawled more than five kilometres. There has to be damage.’
‘I said I’m fine.’ He sounded curt with rejection she didn’t deserve, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Give me the cream and I’ll do it when I need it.’
Hana sighed. ‘There are ways to rub the cream in that optimise stretching and physical comfort for you while we’re travelling. It will also give you better sleep. I can see you’re uncomfortable with my doing it, but we have four days of hard walking to go, sleeping in dirt and mud that could irritate your skin, and—’
Alim heard his teeth grind before he spoke. ‘You’re not going to stop arguing until you get your way, are you?’
‘Probably not,’ she conceded with a gentle laugh.
His head felt like a light and sound show, brilliant stabs of pain shooting from his neck to his eyes. He couldn’t manage rubbing the entire length of his scars now if he tried. ‘Do it, then.’
The words had been clipped, order from master to servant, but she didn’t argue. ‘Stay still, and close your eyes.’ Her voice was gentle, soothing, stealing into his battleground mind with tender healing.
He felt her undoing the buttons of his shirt…oh, God help him for the male reaction to her touch she’d be bound to see. The sun was beginning to rise.
‘Your tension won’t help, you know. Breathe deeply, relax and let me make it better.’
She might have been speaking to a child, but her warm, wet hands against his itching, burning scars, filled with beautiful, scented oils, took away any power to speak. He breathed, and felt the irritable tension leaving him, leaving him only aroused.
‘That’s it, much better. I’m sorry I can’t use any water to wash away the dirt, but the olive oil is helping.’ Her hands were tender magic, kneading softly, moving in slow, deep circles. Her fingers rotated over his skin, deep then soft; her palms pushed up and around, spreading more oil. ‘This solution is fifty per cent cold-pressed olive oil, forty per cent pure aloe juice and ten per cent essential oils of lavender, rosemary and neroli. I make ten litres a month for burns victims or scarring from rifle wounds. A village about forty kilometres from the refugee camp is a Free Trade village, and orders everything I need.’
‘Hmm.’ She could be reciting the alphabet or the phone book for all he cared. Her voice was a siren’s call, an angel’s song; her touch was sweet relief, bliss, releasing him from the burning ropes of limited movement, giving him freedom to lift his arm as she moved it to massage where the scar tissue was worst. Though she said and did nothing a nurse wouldn’t do for any patient, she made him feel like a man again, because she’d treated him like a man.
‘It’s feeling better?’ she asked softly. She sounded—odd.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he mumbled. Feeling as if he were floating, he opened his eyes to a slit—and if he weren’t so utterly relaxed he’d have started. Hana was looking at his body as she massaged, and it held no revulsion, no clinical detachment. Her eyes in the soft rose light of the sunrise looked deeper, softer…her breathing had quickened…she wet her lips…
Then she looked at his face, her cheeks flushed and her lips parted in innocent, lush surprise, and in her expression was something he’d never seen from any nurse.
It was something he’d never seen from any woman. Those lovely, slanted almond eyes held something like innocent languor…beautiful, breathtaking, aching desire. Good, old-fashioned, honest wanting, woman to man.
Then she saw his eyes open, and the look vanished as if it had never been there. ‘Good. I’m glad it helped,’ she said, her tone aiming for crisp, but it wobbled a touch. ‘Get dressed. If I remember rightly, there’s a good overhang a few kilometres away, where we can sleep.’
Was he possibly grinning as widely
as he wanted to? ‘Why don’t we sleep here? You look so tired, and it’s been a long, hard day for us both.’
‘It isn’t far enough from the village.’ She was the one now speaking through gritted teeth. ‘When we reach the truck, you call the shots. Right now, this is my territory. If you want to live, you’re doing things my way.’
Unable to muster up an argument when she’d saved his life again tonight, he shrugged; but he hated that she was right and he couldn’t argue, couldn’t take charge and protect her somehow. ‘Three days,’ he said softly. ‘Then you’d better believe I’m calling the shots. I’ll get you to the refugee camp safely, Hana, that I swear—but you’ll obey me, no questions asked.’ And we’re going to explore that look you gave me just now, the man in him vowed, exultant.
She nodded; far from pushing back, there was a suspicious twinkle in her eyes. ‘I will obey you joyfully, my lord, for I am a weak woman in need of your strength.’ She mock-genuflected before him, touching her forehead to the ground as she spoke. ‘It must be the reason why I never left the village before. I was waiting for you to guide and direct me.’
He had to choke down laughter at her unexpected sense of humour. ‘Can it, Hana,’ he said, using a phrase from one of his former pit crew, ‘and let’s get going.’
She grinned and bowed again; then, with a grin that held more than a touch of the imp—pretty, so damned pretty—she said, ‘We should crawl again for a while. It’s getting light.’
The prospect made him forget temptation for the present. Alim groaned and dropped to his stomach, but Hana was ahead of him, already wriggling down the hill.
He’d been too busy trying to breathe before to notice how enticing that wriggle was. No—he’d ignored it, thinking it was useless. But after that look…
If they’d been anywhere else, had she been another woman…but they were crawling through mud in wild dogs’ territory with a warlord’s men with assault rifles in every other direction; and this was Hana, who’d frozen beneath him. She deserved his respect, not the burden of unwanted fascination from a man who looked like a damned monster—and he had no magical spell she could reverse with her kiss. The way he looked now was how he’d look for life.
The Sheikh's Destiny (Harlequin Romance) Page 4
