by Jennie Lucas
“He’s called the Tsar of the Desert,” one of the women had whispered. “He came here with a broken heart.”
Another woman tossed rose petals into the fragrant water. “But the desert healed him.”
A broken heart? Kasimir? If she hadn’t already heard his story about his lost love, Josie would have found that hard to believe. With a shiver, she pictured him, all brooding lips and cold eyes… and hard, broad-shouldered, muscular body, towering over her. A man like that didn’t seem to have feelings. She would have assumed he didn’t have a heart to break.
But now she knew too much. An orphan who’d been stabbed in the back by his beloved older brother. A romantic who’d waited to lose his virginity, then fallen for his first woman, even planning to propose to her. If she’d known Kasimir when he was twenty-two…
Josie shivered. She would have fallen for him like a stone. A man with that kind of strength, loyalty, integrity and kindness was rare. Even she knew that.
She knew too much.
Now, as she left his tent, she looked out at the twilight. Stop having a crush on him, she ordered herself. She couldn’t let herself get swept up in tenderness for the young man he’d once been—or in desire for the hard-eyed man he’d become. She couldn’t get caught up in the romance of the desert, and start imagining herself some intrepid lady adventurer from a 1920s movie matinee. Kasimir was not some Rudolph Valentino-style sheikh waiting to ravish her, or love her.
No matter how he’d looked at her an hour ago.
I never should have kissed you. I was wrong. Josie, I’m sorry.
She pushed away the memory of his haunted voice, and hardened her heart. She couldn’t completely trust him—no matter how handsome he was, or how he made her feel. There was something he wasn’t telling her. And she wasn’t going to stick around to find out what it was.
The air was growing cool in the high desert. She saw the darkening shadows of dusk lit up by torches on both sides of the oasis. It looked like magic.
She’d find a chance to escape. And this time, she wouldn’t just run off. She’d figure out a plan. She’d seen horses on the edge of the encampment. Perhaps she could borrow one. She’d never been much of a planner. Bree had the organized mind for that. Josie was more of a seat-of-your-pants type of girl.
She’d figure it out. She’d seize her chance. Sometime when Kasimir wasn’t looking.
Josie looked for him now, turning her head right and left. She pictured his handsome face, so intense, so ruthless. No wonder, under the magnetic force of his complete attention, she’d once felt infatuated—at least before she’d realized he was a liar and kidnapper. Her brief crush wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. With Kasimir’s chiseled good looks, electric-blue eyes and low, husky voice—and the sensual stroke of his practiced fingertips, rough against her skin—any woman would have felt wildly attracted. But her crush was over now. Her hands tightened. She wasn’t going to let him stop her from doing what she needed to do.
But it couldn’t hurt to be fortified with dinner before her escape. Her stomach growled. Calories would give her energy, which would give her ideas. Josie looked around for the dining tent. The sun was setting at a rapid pace.
A man in an indigo turban bowed in front of her. “Princess,” he said in accented English.
Princess…? She blushed. “Oh. Yes. Hello. Could you please tell me where Kasimir—Prince Kasimir—might be?”
The man smiled then gestured across the encampment. “You go, yes? He waits.”
“Yes, of course,” she stammered. “I’ll hurry.”
Josie went in the direction he’d pointed. She wasn’t sure she was going the right way, until she suddenly saw a path in the sand, illuminated by a line of torches in the dusk.
She followed the path, all the way up the spine of the tallest sand dune. At the top, she discovered a small table and two chairs on a Turkish carpet, surrounded by glimmering copper lanterns.
Kasimir rose from one of the chairs. “Good evening.” Coming forward, he bent to kiss her hand. She felt the heat of his lips against her skin before he straightened to look at her with dark, sizzling blue eyes as he said huskily, “You look beautiful.”
She gulped, pulling back her hand. “Thank you for the clothes, and the bath,” she said weakly. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
He gave her a warm smile that took her breath away. “You are worth waiting for.”
Silhouetted in front of the red-and-orange twilight, Kasimir looked devastatingly handsome in the long Moroccan djellaba with its intricate embroidery on the edges and loose pants beneath. His head was bare, and the soft wind ruffled his black hair as he pulled back her chair. “Will you join me?”
Holding out her chair was such an old-fashioned, courtly gesture. And in this setting, with this particular man, it was extremely romantic. In spite of her best efforts, a tremble rose inside her. I do not have a crush on him anymore, she told herself firmly, but apparently her legs hadn’t gotten the message, because they turned to jelly.
She fell into her chair. He pushed it back beneath the table, and as she felt his fingertips accidentally brush her shoulders, she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t exhale until he took his own seat across the small table.
“How lovely,” she said, looking around them. “I never would have thought a table could be brought up here. It’s enchanting….”
“Yes,” he said in a low voice, looking at her. “Enchanting.”
Their eyes locked in the deepening twilight, and spirals of electricity traveled down Josie’s body to her toes, centering on her breasts and a place low and deep in her belly. Looking at the hard angles of his chiseled face, she felt uneasy. She suddenly wanted to lean across the table, to touch and stroke the rough dark stubble of his jawline, to run both her hands through his wind-tousled black hair….
What was she thinking? Nervously, she looked down at the flickering lanterns that surrounded the carpet. She was relieved to see four servants with platters of food coming up the path illuminated by torches in the dusk.
“I’ve ordered a special dinner tonight that I hope you’ll enjoy,” her captor said softly. “Would you care for some white wine?”
She gulped. “Sure,” she said, trying to seem blasé, as if drinking wine in the Sahara with billionaire princes was something she did every day. Oh, good heavens. With her billionaire prince husband.
Pouring wine from a pitcher into a crystal-and-gold goblet, he handed it to her. Smoothly, she lifted it to her lips. She didn’t much like the smell, but she took a big drink anyway.
Then she sputtered, and nearly choked. Making a face, she pulled the glass away from her lips.
“Don’t you like it?” Kasimir asked in surprise.
“Like it?” She blurted out. “It tastes like juice that’s gone bad!”
He laughed, shaking his head. “But Josie, that’s exactly what wine is.” He tilted his head, giving her a boyish grin. “Though I don’t think the St. Raphaël winery will be using those exact words in their ads anytime soon. No wine, huh?”
“I didn’t like it.”
“I never would have guessed. You hide your emotions so well.”
For an instant, they smiled at each other, and Josie’s heart suddenly twisted in her chest. Then, turning away, he lifted his hand in signal. “I’ll get you something you’ll like better.”
He spoke in another language—Berber?—to one of the servants, and the man left. After serving their dinner, the other three, too, departed, leaving Kasimir and Josie to enjoy a private dinner in the Sahara, beneath the shadows of red twilight.
“Ooh.” Looking down at the table, Josie saw a traditional Moroccan dinner, full of things she loved: tajine, a zesty saffron-and-cumin-flavored chicken stew—pickled lemons and olives, carrot salad sprinkled with orange-flower water and cinnamon and couscous with vegetables. She sighed with pleasure. “You have no idea how often I ate at the Moroccan restaurant, trying to imagine what it woul
d be like to travel here.”
“How often?”
“Every time I got my hands on a half-off lunch coupon.”
He grinned at her, then the smile slid from his face. His expression grew serious.
“So,” he said in a low voice, “does that mean you forgive me? For bringing you here?”
She looked in shock at the vulnerability in his eyes. Something had changed in him somehow, she thought. The warm, generous man sitting across from her in exotic Moroccan garb seemed very different from the cold tycoon in a black suit she’d met in Hawaii. Had the desert really made him so different? Or was it just that she knew too much about the man behind the suit?
“I don’t like that you lied to me about Bree,” she said slowly. “Or that you brought me out here against my will. But,” she sighed, taking a bite of the tajine as she looked at the sunset, “at the moment it’s a little hard for me to be angry.”
He swallowed. Reaching across the table, he briefly took her hand. “Thank you.”
She shivered as their eyes met. Then he released her as the servant returned with a samovar of filigreed metal. He left it on the table in front of Kasimir, then disappeared.
“What’s that?” Josie said, eyeing it nervously.
He smiled. “You’ll enjoy it more than wine. Trust me.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’d enjoy anything more than that,” she confessed.
“It’s mint tea.”
“Oh,” she sighed in pleasure. She watched him pour a cup of fragrant, steaming hot tea. “This is kind of like a honeymoon, you know.”
He froze. “What do you mean?”
“The bath with rose petals. This wonderful dinner. The two of us, in Morocco. It’s like something out of a romantic movie. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought…”
Whoa. She cut herself off, biting down hard on her lower lip.
He looked up from the samovar. “You’d have thought what?”
“You were trying to seduce me,” she whispered.
His shoulders tightened, then he shrugged, giving her a careless smile belied by the visible tension in his body. “I could only dream of being so lucky, right?” He swept his arm over the horizon, over the tea and the lanterns, with a sudden playful grin. “You can see the tricks I’d use to lure you.”
“And I’m sure they’d work,” she said hoarsely, then added, “Um, on someone else, I mean.” Looking away quickly, she changed the subject. “How did you find this place?”
He set down the elegant china cup on the table in front of her. Sitting back in his chair, he took a sip of his own wine. “After Nina dumped me, I had the bright idea that I should go see every single place where I held mining options. After our partnership dissolved, I still held the mining rights in South America, Asia and Africa.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Vladimir was happy to let those lands go. He didn’t believe I’d ever find anything worth digging.”
“But you proved him wrong.”
“Southern Cross is now a billion-dollar company, almost as wealthy as his.” His lips curved. “I left St. Petersburg with total freedom—no family, no obligations, almost no money, nothing to hold me back. Every young man’s dream.”
“It sounds lonely.”
He took a drink from his crystal goblet. “I bought a used motorcycle and got out of Russia, crossing through Poland, Germany, France, Spain—all the way to the tip of Gibraltar. I caught a ferry south to Africa, then in Marrakech, I took roads that were barely roads—”
“You wanted to disappear?” she whispered.
He gave a hard laugh. “I did disappear. My tires blew up, my engine got chewed up by sand. I was dying of thirst when they—” he nodded towards the encampment “—found me. Luckiest day of my life.” He took another gulp of wine. “They call this place the end of the world, but for me, it was a beginning. I found something in the desert I hadn’t been able to find anywhere.”
“What?”
He put his wineglass down on the table and looked at her. “Peace,” he whispered.
For a moment, they both looked at each other, sitting alone on an island amid an ocean of sand in the darkening night.
“What would it take to make you give up the war with your brother?” Josie asked softly.
“What would it take?” His eyes glittered in the deepening shadows. “Everything that he cares about.”
“It’s just so… sad.”
He looked at her incredulously. “You’re sad? For him? For the man who took your sister?”
She shook her head. “Not for him. For you. You’ve wasted ten years of your life on this. How much more time do you intend to squander?”
He finished off his wine in a gulp. “Not much longer now.”
The brief, cold smile on his face made her shiver. “There,” she breathed. “That smile. There’s something you’re not telling me. What is it?”
Kasimir stared at her for a long time, then turned away. “It’s not your concern.”
She watched the flickering shadows from the lanterns move like red fire against his taut jaw. He clearly wanted to end the subject. Fine, she told herself. What did she care if Kasimir wasted his life on stupid revenge plots? She didn’t care. She didn’t.
She bit her lip, then said hesitantly, “Is hurting your brother really more important to you than having a happy life yourself?”
“Leave it alone, Josie,” he said harshly.
Josie knew she should just be quiet and drink her mint tea but she couldn’t stop herself from replying in a heated tone, “Maybe if you just talked to him, explained how he’d hurt you—”
“He’d what, apologize?” Kasimir ground out. “Give me back my half of Xendzov Mining, wrapped in a nice gold bow?” His lips twisted. “There must be limits even to your optimism.”
She looked up quickly, her cheeks hot. “You keep telling me to be honest, to be brave and bold, but what have you done lately that was any of those things?”
He looked at her.
“If I weren’t bound by my vow,” he said, “I’d do the bravest, boldest, most honest thing I can think of. And that’s kiss you.”
She sucked in her breath.
Exhaling, Kasimir looked up, tilting his head back against his chair. “Look at the stars. They go on forever.”
Josie stared at him, her lips tingling, her heart twisting in her chest. Then she slowly followed his gaze. He was right about the stars. They had never looked so bright to her before, like twinkling diamonds above a violet sea. Looking at them, she felt so small, and yet bigger, too, as if she were part of something infinite and vast.
“You really want to kiss me so badly?” she heard herself say in a small voice.
“Yes.”
“And it’s not just because I’m—handy?”
He groaned. “I never should have said that. I knew I was wrong to kiss you. I was trying to act like it was no big deal.” His lips quirked upward. “Hoping maybe you wouldn’t notice that it was.”
Her own lips trembled. “Oh, I noticed.”
Their eyes locked across the table. As they faced each other, alone in the desert, the full moon had just lifted above the horizon. The world seemed suspended in time.
“But why me?” she choked out. “You could kiss any woman you wanted. And we both agreed I’m not your type….”
Tilting his head, Kasimir looked at her. “You keep talking about my type. What is my type?”
She looked down at her plate, which had been filled with enough tajine and bread for your average Moroccan lumberjack. It was now empty—and just a moment ago, she’d been considering going back for seconds. She bit her lip. “She’s thin and fit. She spends hours at the gym and rarely eats anything at all.”
He gave a slow nod. “Go on.”
Josie looked down at her linen trousers and plain cotton blouse that had felt so good, but now seemed dowdy and dumpy. “She’s very glamorous. She wears tight red dresses and six-inch stiletto heels.” She ran a
hand over her ponytail. “She has her hair styled every single day in a top salon.” She pressed her bare lips together. “And she wears makeup. Black eyeliner and red lipstick.”
He gave her a crooked smile. “Yes. Even when I wake up beside her in bed, her lipstick is perfectly applied.”
“What, you mean when you wake up in the morning?” Josie blinked, pulled out of her reverie. “How is that even possible? Do magic makeup fairies put lipstick on her in the middle of the night or something?”
He lifted a dark eyebrow. “Obviously, she gets up early, to freshen up her makeup and hair before I wake up.”
Josie dropped her fork with a clang against her plate. “Sheesh! What a waste of time!” She thought of how much she loved sleeping in on mornings she didn’t have to work. And if she happened to be sharing a bed with a man—a man like Kasimir—there surely would be better ways to wake up. Not that she would know. Her cheeks flared with heat as she pushed away the thought. She scowled, folding her arms. “You would never know the flaws of a woman like that. So long as she’s wearing lots of lipstick and a tight red dress, you don’t really know her at all.”
Kasimir stared at her in the moonlight.
“You’re right,” he said softly. “And that’s why I want you.”
Josie dropped her folded arms. “What?”
“More than I’ve ever wanted any woman.” He sat forward in his chair, his eyes intense. “I know your flaws. They’re part of what makes you so beautiful.”
She swallowed, looking down as she mumbled, “I’m dowdy and frumpy.”
“You don’t need sexy clothes for your natural, effortless beauty.”
“I’m a klutz.” She looked down at her empty plate, feeling depressed. “And I eat too much.”
“You eat the exact right amount for your perfect body.”
“My what?” She gasped out a laugh, even as her throat ached with pain. “You don’t have to sugarcoat it. I’m chubby.”
“Chubby?” He shook his head. “You drove me insane in your wedding dress. You taunted me in that sliver of white lace, teasing me with little flashes of your breasts and thighs until I thought I’d go mad.” Standing up, he walked around the table. “You have the type of figure that men dream about,” he said quietly. “And if you haven’t noticed, I’m a man.”
