It’s nothing like you read in books. No rest stops between here and where we’re going. Poisonous creatures that sting and bite. Dust, sun, heat—this isn’t some glorified field trip.”
She stepped up on the running board and turned to face him, now somewhat closer to eye level, and used that added height to glare at him, her chin tilting to match the challenge in her posture. “Say it,” she demanded, the tiniest wobble in her voice breaking through his resistance more than the bravado she put on. “Tell me I can’t go. I’ll tell Jamison that I did all I could, but, whatever you promised him, you broke your word. Go ahead, Khalil. Tell me I can’t go. I’m happy to go pack my bags and find a way out of your gilded palace in the sand and go home. But you have to say it, because I came all this way for Jamison, and I’m not going to be the one who lets him down.”
Son of a …
“Just sit down and shut up already,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Adalyn drew a deep, satisfied breath, and at the second her lungs felt filled to capacity the true meaning of her victory pushed the air back out again in a rush. She’d just had a fight in order to be allowed to ride out into the scorching desert in a big dangerous truck with a man who really didn’t want her with him.
So not a victory.
She edged onto the seat and closed the door. He rounded the truck and climbed back in at the driver’s side, slamming his own door and bringing down another shard of glass from the window she’d broken and that now had a tiny hole in the center. The window that now looked … really dangerous.
“Aren’t we going to change to a truck without a broken window?”
“No. Want to change your mind and go back inside?” He pulled on his seat belt and started the truck.
Yes!
“No, I’m going with you unless you order me not to.” And now that she thought about it, that was a really stupid idea.
The trucks started rolling forward, continuing on … Without her bag! “Are we going to turn around and fetch my bag?”
If she’d eaten anything in the past several hours, she’d have been sick. No bag meant no protein bars, no water purification tablets … She was going out into the desert where they probably only had water sources of questionable cleanliness …
“No. Want to change your mind?”
Yes. Yes.
“Is that all you can say?” She grit her teeth and fixed her gaze in front of her. “I’m coming with you. But if I start to stink in the next couple of days I’m going to roll around in your fresh clean clothes so you can bask in my stench just as much as I’ll have to.”
“Good. Someone as irritating as you are shouldn’t smell so good.”
The urge to take off one shoe so she could better beat him with it nearly overwhelmed her limping self-control. Yet more evidence that being sleep-deprived in a foreign land brought out the worst in her.
Could someone get motion sickness if they were only going a few miles per hour? Her stomach thought so. “You’re the one who’s all sultan-like, but I wouldn’t think it kingly to tuck tail and run when confronted with a problem. You should put off your trip and stay home to get treatment.”
“Amazingly enough, this isn’t just something I can put off. I’m not going into the desert because you don’t want me to. I’m also not going just because I’m tired and want to sleep, though honestly I am really looking forward to that part. In the other truck is a cool box with vaccinations to be given. The tribes don’t have the best access to clean water, and though we’ve put measures into motion to change this they still struggle with disease because of it.”
Okay, that deflated her anger balloon a little. Except that bit about the unclean water, and her not having the tablets … “Maybe not, but you’re not going to get my bag because you want to put me out. So don’t get too smug and superior just because you have a valid reason for going on this trip.”
She pretended he hadn’t said she smelled good, because she really didn’t know what to do with that information. Thank him? Give him the name of her favorite perfume?
“Fine.” He grabbed the radio handset and said something she didn’t understand as the truck rolled on.
The other truck hadn’t yet passed through the gate, and she turned to look over her shoulder, trying to work out what he’d just done. “Why did you agree to my coming in the first place if you’re so all fired against it?”
“I was tired, Jay was persistent,” Khalil answered, hanging the radio handset back in its place.
With how stringently he wanted her to not go with him, Adalyn had no illusion he would wait if she climbed out of the truck and ran to pick up her bag. Resigned, she dragged on her seat belt.
Looking at him made her angrier. Looking out the side window made her feel sick. Looking out the front terrified her. She went with angry and twisted slightly under the confines of her overly tightened seat belt to look at Khalil.
Even scowling, as he was, he was handsome. That probably played into his privileged air. Royalty, doctor, handsome … It all added up to spoiled and used to getting what he wanted. He probably had insomnia because his bed was too lumpy, like the princess and the pea.
“I don’t buy it,” she said, trying to ignore the way her stomach squeezed and rolled with every creak and crackle from the window she’d broken. The wind tore at the shards, barely holding together. What if the bits flew up and got in his eyes and blinded him and he crashed them into something deadly? She chanced another glance back at the hole, mentally calculating what was safest—for the windows up front to be up or down. If she rolled down her window, would the air flow drag the shards into the cab or push them out of the truck rather than in? Maybe they wouldn’t fly around at all. Maybe this was just another paranoid scenario playing out in her mind, like the thousands of fiery deaths she’d imagined on the way there.
Stay on topic.
Khalil was the topic. And narrating all her bloody imaginings to him wouldn’t inspire any sort of confidence that she could help him. “I can’t believe that with this level of aversion you left the situation to chance. You’re too domineering and controlling to leave this up to fate. You fit the alpha-male mold even without the royalty stuff added on, but without even knowing me you counted on me chickening out. That’s dumb. Maybe you should try to sleep more.”
Antagonizing him probably wouldn’t inspire confidence in her, either.
He looked sideways at her, his eyes off the road long enough to increase her worry. She took a deep breath and tried to relax her arms and shoulders. With the road rushing at her, she couldn’t even release a fraction of that tension. She closed her eyes and tried again, channeling the physical manifestation of her fear to her right hand, where she could at least grip and abuse the armrest on the door and he might not see.
“You should try to sleep now,” he said, his voice remarkably level.
“Yeah, that won’t happen. I tried to sleep all the way here. It didn’t work at all.”
“Try again.” Whatever anger she’d roused in him earlier was now gone. He could’ve been telling her the time of day for all the emotion reflected in his tone. Maybe she hadn’t antagonized him so much after all. “We have a few hours’ drive ahead of us.”
“That may be, but …” But. But how much should she reveal? Would it make him act like less of a jerk if he knew what she was putting herself through for him? Or, more accurately, for Jamison? Or would he just use it as ammunition to get her back out of the truck and his presence? “I can’t sleep in a moving car. Or plane. You should be able to understand someone not being able to sleep when they want to. I would love to go to sleep and block all this out, but I can’t.”
“The