I guess I’m officially a white-knuckle flier.” She bit her lip. It was humiliating to see how little control she’d displayed in the face of fear.
“It’s no matter,” he said brusquely, without glancing up from the text. He snapped open another page, appeared to study it for a moment, then looked up. “There’s no shame in showing fear of flying through the clouds.”
His stony features softened as he looked at her. Sara swallowed hard as a strange surge of emotion threatened to overflow its boundaries. Fear, embarrassment and forbidden lust all roiled inside her, her poor nerve-racked body a fragile vessel for so much unfamiliar torment.
Poor Sara! He could see how greatly she suffered. She’d not betrayed even a moment of hesitation, had not mentioned her lack of flying experience until her fears overcame her as they boarded the aircraft.
Her obvious terror filled him with a powerful protective instinct that shook him to the core. He wanted nothing more than to put his arms around her and comfort her.
And the protective urge frightened him far more than any of the transient sexual thoughts that bedeviled him in her presence.
He’d left his home and his cruel father behind to build his own life, free of ties and obligations he had no use for. He needed no one and no one needed him—until he saw the fear that racked her delicate body and brought tears to her pale jade eyes. He couldn’t sit and watch her suffer. And holding her was a pleasure beyond imagining. At his touch she softened and relaxed. Her shivering eased and her flesh warmed. She leaned into his embrace, welcomed his touch. Welcomed him.
Desire had seized him. Desire to offer her far more than comfort, to take far more than the satisfaction of soothing her fears.
He wanted to experience the sweet agony of her soft body pressed against his. To sink his fingertips into her lush curves. To fill her with the joy that swept through him each time she flashed her lovely smile in his direction.
And she was his for the taking. He could see that.
That knowledge alone should extinguish his desire.
“I bet you were a kid the first time you flew in a plane.” Her voice startled him out of his tortured contemplation and forced him to refocus on the paper he’d been pretending to read.
“Yes, age eleven.” He didn’t dare look up. Those wide eyes cast a spell on him that right now he had no power to resist.
“Were you taking a vacation with your parents?”
A vacation? Did the concept even exist in his country? “No.”
“Well?” Her lips twitched in a half smile as she waited for him to expand. Soft, delicate lips, thin and mobile.
That begged his mouth to close over them.
He struggled to wrench his mind back to her question about his first plane ride. And the memory it conjured dampened his feelings of pleasure.
“I left my home in Oman for the first time to fly to boarding school in England.”
That day he’d left everything he knew, everyone he held dear, to find himself alone and afraid in a strange, cold country where no one understood his speech and customs. It had been a journey from which he would never truly return.
“Were you frightened?”
“Yes. Though perhaps not as you might imagine. I enjoyed the flight. Young boys take pleasure in the power of big machines.” He forced what he hoped looked like a natural smile.
“Why did your parents send you away to school?”
Why indeed? Not so he could receive an excellent education, though that had been a result. Not so he could become familiar with the ways of western culture, though in time he had.
So his father could punish his mother. Rip her favorite child from her arms and banish him to a far land. Simply to show her that he could.
Anger still burned in his gut at the memory of his mother weeping as his father’s aides dragged her screaming son away from her for the last time. Elan never saw her again. Her health was already frail—a neurological ailment—and after he was sent away her decline was swift, her death sudden.
And he could never forgive his father for taking her life as surely as if he’d slashed a knife at her throat.
He realized Sara was waiting for an answer to her question. “They thought it would turn me into a man.”
That, too, was true. His father had reviled his close relationship with his mother. Abhorred how when he was little he’d liked to crawl into her bed to seek comfort from his nightmares, how he followed her on her daily rounds, laughing with her and the women, enjoying her gentle humor and loving caresses.
No son of mine will hide himself in the skirts of a woman! His father’s words still rang in his ears.
“Leaving home so young must have been hard.” Sara’s voice trembled a little as she said the words softly. He realized she must be responding to emotion on his face. A twinge of embarrassment warred with an urge to tell her more.
“Yes. I spoke little English. I’d rarely been to the nearest city, let alone out of the country. I’d spent every day in the bosom of my family, and suddenly I was torn from all I’d ever known. Strange people, strange language, strange food and the English weather…”
Words poured from his tongue unbidden as Sara’s kind eyes watched him. “I missed the bright sun of my home almost as much as I missed my family.”
“I’ve heard the weather in England is a bit grim.” She smiled tentatively.
“My horses were as surprised as I was. They couldn’t understand why the sun had vanished and water kept falling from the skies. They at least enjoyed lush green grass.”
“You took horses with you to boarding school?” Her eyes twinkled with curiosity and interest that only fired Elan’s impulse to share memories he’d kept locked away for so long.
“Yes. I brought my two favorite stallions with me. The school insisted on gelding them. They said stallions couldn’t run with the other horses.”
The painful memory of his close companions being deprived of their manhood stung him. It seemed so symbolic at the time. The three of them together were humbled aliens in a strange land, stripped of their former power and position and all they knew. But together they’d found a way to survive. They’d learned a new language, figured out the rules and learned to play by them.
That long, hard exile from his country and from everyone he’d ever loved had made him into the man he was today.
“Aren’t stallions supposed to be dangerous?” The innocent awe in Sara’s eyes lifted the gloom descending on him.
“They must be handled with care. But a man who’s ridden a stallion can never truly be satisfied with any other horse. To harness the feral power of the herd leader and to move with him as one is an experience like no other.”
A delicate flush spread up across Sara’s chin and cheeks. At first he was surprised, then he realized his words must have triggered a rather different image than the one he intended.
Perhaps she imagined how it would feel to ride him.
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Sara’s blush darkened a shade further.
To be sure, the image intrigued him, too.
The thought of her slim thighs squeezing him, her long, delicate fingers wound into his hair, her hips moving against him, urging him on—
Elan quickly rearranged his paper to cover his lap. His breathing was in danger of becoming audible and he struggled to focus his mind on something that would douse his desire.
Sara’s lips parted as she wrenched her eyes from his face and rifled through her briefcase. Her skin flushed crimson right down to her blouse. Fair