and he lifted his head, and looked down into her face for one long, tortured moment before his mouth found hers again, plunging, hungry, devouring.
She was aflame, melted, an inferno of need. A fire of desire she hadn’t known existed roared up in her, consuming thought, reason, everything except the fact that he was there and she needed him.
His body was hard and urgent against her, as if with the need of years, and her hand found and encircled the hard, seeking flesh, and his groan shivered along her nerves to send her joy a notch higher.
Still the silk of her shirt thwarted his intent. He lifted away from her, grasped the fabric in two hands and ripped it again and again until it parted for him from top to bottom.
She lay with her body exposed now in the soft lamplight, exposed to the fire of his gaze, her throat arched and inviting as she looked up at him. His eyes ran greedily over the perfection of her, painted with the golden glow—hair, eyes, mouth, breasts, waist, hips, sex, thighs, ankles…sex.
He drew her against him then, the whole length of her bare skin aligned with his, and his arms wrapped her. Her face pressed into the hollow of his shoulder as his hand curved behind and between her thighs. Gently his fingers slipped into the moist depths that waited for him.
He stroked the delicate lips while her moist breath panted against his throat in little pleasured moans. His touch was sure, as if he had known her body intimately for ten years, or as if it had been waiting for this moment all that time. In what seemed like seconds she lifted against his expert touch, crying and sighing, a sound he remembered as if from yesterday.
She mewed and slid down from the peak, and then he drew away from her. Then his hand clasped her thigh, lifted her leg up, and his body shifted against her and, with a thrust that made her cry out, he pushed his way home at last.
He filled her to bursting. She cried out, arching into a pleasure that she had not experienced in ten long years. ‘Salah!’ she cried, in a voice he remembered, and a groan was torn from his own throat.
His body thrust again and again into the hot nest of her, and with each thrust they cried out together. His hand cupped her neck, so that they looked into each other’s eyes. She stroked his strong chest, his arms, greedily, hungry for the feel of his skin, and every caress drove him higher.
‘How I have waited for this!’ he cried then, gazing into her eyes, then down at the place where their bodies met, and his look held such passionate hunger that her pleasure began to peak in an overwhelming burst and she sobbed with too much pleasure.
It was too much for them both. The pitch of their joy, and their need, was overwhelming. He grunted, pushed in again and again, and as she melted into powerful, sobbing release, his head lifted, his neck arched up, his body swelled harder, made a convulsive thrust, and then he cried out with her, a long, involuntary sound that was half weeping, half joy, and fell down against her.
Desi awoke to shaded sunlight and lay for a moment in a mood of lazy well-being, wondering why it should be so. Behind her head the breeze blew in through the wooden slats shading the window, cool and fresh. As she yawned and stretched a muscle protested, and she remembered what had happened in the night. A smile played over her lips and she turned her head.
The bed beside her was empty. It was late, and he had said he had work today. She was not sorry. She needed time to think.
Ten years. She stretched like a cat, feeling that her arteries carried warm honey instead of blood from her heart to her body. Ten long years since she had felt this magic in her limbs.
He wants to marry Sami.
Her heart contracted at the thought, withdrawing the honey from her muscles, and Desi flung herself to her feet. What had she done? What kind of fool was she?
Sami was right. Salah had never got over her. The thought touched her in some deep part of herself that she was afraid to look at more closely.
She hadn’t got over Salah, either, that much was obvious. It might have been better if she had had some suspicion that that was the case, Desi reflected. She had been totally unprepared for the onslaught of his feelings, and her own. And she had fallen at the first fence.
Closure. If Salah now felt he had closure, she had done Sami no good at all. Instead of putting up a roadblock, she had only paved his way to marriage with her friend.
And as for her—what grief had she stored up for herself?
Breakfast was served to her in her suite, where she sat on cushions at a low table, beside a window open onto the fountain. Salah, Fatima told her, had arranged for one of the chauffeurs to take her on a tour of the city if she wished.
Desi spent a restless day, wandering through mosques and gardens, around the magnificent tomb and gardens of a thirteenth-century Barakati poet. It was all beautiful and impressive: soaring domes, exquisite mosaic and delicate stone arabesques, but Desi could take it in with only half her awareness. She kept thinking about what had happened last night, and what might be going to happen tonight.
Was once enough to give Salah the closure he was looking for? How could she bear to be with him for so many days and nights, with this bottomless need assailing her, if he no longer wanted her?
Another bout of the heartbreak she’d suffered ten years ago would kill her.
In the late afternoon, as she got into the car after a visit to a small, breathtakingly ancient mosque, her phone beeped with a text. Sami, just waking up in Vancouver.
How RU? What’s happening? Talk to me!
OK. Nothing to report, lied Desi, who just could not talk about what had happened. Sightseeing in city today, with guide. Leaving 2morrow 4 site.
Who is guide? Sami wanted to know.
Today, Faraj. Tomorrow, Salah. TRIP TAKES 5 DAYS ACROSS DESERT!!! WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME?
OMG! I had no idea. Vry sry but at least will give u lots of time to work your magic! Car will be air conditioned, LOL.
It’s not the heat, it’s the COMPANY!
ROFLMAO. Good luck. U know I wish u every success…
That was, oddly enough, the first time it occurred to her that if, for reasons of his own, Salah really was set on marrying Sami, he would not be very happy if she, Desi, managed to sabotage his plans. If she succeeded in getting permission for Sami to marry Farid from Khaled al Khouri against Salah’s wishes, five days in his company on the way to the site would be nothing compared to five days in his company on the return…
She could only cross that bridge when she came to it.
She arrived back at the palace at the end of the day sunburnt, tired and hungry, and desperate to see Salah again. Desperate to know that something had been awakened in him by their lovemaking.
‘His Excellency not come. All meeting very hard all,’ Fatima said. ‘He say tomorrow come up at fajr, breakfast very quick. You live after fajr. In summer go early!’
‘Get up at fajr?’
Fatima shook her head with her inability to translate the word. Thinking it must be a number, Desi held up fingers. ‘Seven o’clock? Six? Eight?’
Fatima, too, began to use sign language. She looked up and moved her hands in a broad arc. ‘Sky night, not sun. Sun—’ She stretched one arm out to indicate the horizon and wiggled her fingers.
‘Sunrise? Get up with the sun?’
Fatima shook her head vigorously. ‘Before sun! Fajr. Muezzin!’
Muezzin, she remembered, meant the call to prayer. The first call to prayer came when the world was still dark. So they would set out before daybreak.
That entailed no particular hardship for Desi, who might not wake up for less than ten thousand dollars, but