LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Trust me, Salah,’ she said. ‘You are imagining this. Every part of what you imagine is the product of your own fantasy. I am not remotely interested in reviving old times with you.’

      He laughed and before she could stop him, clasped her wrist. She felt her pulse hammering against his thumb. She thought he was going to pull her against him again, it would be so easy, but abruptly he let go.

      ‘It is in your blood. In every part of you. As in me,’ he said, with a kind of angry self-contempt. Her heart kicked.

      He waved a sultan’s wave and a waiter came from nowhere and cleared the little baskets away.

      Now there was nothing but space between them. He lay resting on one elbow, looking at her. He didn’t move, but he seemed to come closer. Drawing back was agonizing to her, an iron filing trying to move out of the magnet’s powerful field.

      ‘Shall we make love here, Desi, as we did under the dock?’

      ‘Don’t be—’

      ‘I can tell them to go. We will blow out the candles. There will be only you and me and the stars.’

      ‘And your conscience.’ She felt desperate, grasping at anything that would keep him away. ‘Wouldn’t that get in the way?’

      ‘My conscience?’

      ‘Aren’t you engaged to Sami?’ she said.

      Chapter Seven

      SHE hadn’t meant to blurt that out. She had planned to act as if she didn’t know. Some things she could do. Pretend to be someone who would go after her best friend’s fiancé wasn’t one of them.

      But Desi was grasping at any defence. It had become sharply clear in the past few minutes that she could not trust herself if Salah made a serious assault. The armour that had served her for years was not up to this challenge. Her heart was melting with grief and regret, her skin was electric with feeling.

      She wouldn’t let it happen. It would be a betrayal of everything. It would kill her to make love with him.

      ‘But isn’t that why you’ve come just at this moment, Desi?’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Your timing is too good to be coincidence. You know I can never again make love to you once I am married. Our chance would be lost forever.’

      ‘You don’t think being engaged to my best friend puts you out of bounds already?’

      ‘We are not engaged. No discussions have yet taken place. And a man must come to terms with his past before he marries, isn’t that so?’ Salah said. ‘So that he can go to his wife without…regret. You have haunted me, Desi, how can you imagine otherwise? If I am going to marry, first I should have—what do you call it?—closure.’

      Her heart was beating in hard, painful thumps. In her worst imaginings she had not foreseen losing control over the proceedings so quickly.

      ‘And how, exactly, would sex with me give you closure?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Is it an ego thing? Are you hoping to hear me say that sex with you set the bench-mark and nothing since has lived up to it?’

      ‘Is it true?’

      ‘No, it is not!’

      ‘You always lied badly,’ he said.

      ‘And you always had an ego as thick as butter.’

      ‘I judge by my own experience, Desi,’ he said.

      The admission rushed through her like wildfire. She felt faint.

      ‘I don’t believe you! A few weeks, ten years ago!’

      ‘And what about you? Don’t you, too, wish for this closure?’

      ‘I got closure long ago,’ she lied. No closure was possible for a blow like the one he’d delivered. ‘The day you told me I was soiled merchandise.’

      ‘And this old man, was he a good lover?’ Salah asked, an expression in his eyes she couldn’t read.

      ‘What old man would that be?’

      ‘The one you nearly married, Desi. Do you forget lovers so easily? Did he please you as I did?’

      ‘Leo was forty-five!’

      ‘Was it—’

      ‘And it’s none of your bloody business!’

      She picked up one of the glasses and took a gulp of water. It blasted into her mouth, burned her throat, stung her nerves. She gasped and coughed.

      ‘My God! What is this?’ she cried, staring down at the glass in horror.

      Salah laughed aloud. ‘Wine, Desi,’ he said, just as her brain belatedly interpreted the taste and gave her the answer.

      ‘Oh, that’s wild!’ The tension of the past minutes exploded into laughter as she sank back against the cushions. ‘For a minute there I thought you…’ She broke off when she saw where she was heading. ‘Have you ever done that?’

      ‘Tried to poison you?’

      ‘Drunk one thing when you were expecting something else!’

      ‘In England, once,’ he confided, ‘I drank what I thought was coffee. It was not coffee. For two seconds, I thought, They have given me pigs’ urine to insult me! Then I realized it was tea.’

      She let out a whoop. The incident shook them both out of the mood of angry recrimination. They lay laughing together over nothing, like the old days, the old nights, under the moonlit dock.

      They had always laughed together. It was one of the things she’d loved most, missed most…

      Laughter shared with a lover. It didn’t get better than that.

      And now, when he was no longer threatening, when her guard was down, the layers of protection she had laid down over the past tore away. In one moment she was naked again. Her heart coiled with yearning. Oh, what had they done? What had they lost?

      The waiter arrived with the next course, a tray with a dozen little dishes that all looked impossibly succulent. Just as Salah had promised, ten years ago.

      She had to stop this. Salah was already dangerous enough without help from her own feelings. If there was one thing she was not going to do on this trip, it was get seduced into sex for the sake of closure.

      For him it would be closure. For her, she saw suddenly, it might be just the opposite.

      Desi sat up and tucked her feet under her.

      ‘So, when do we go?’ she asked in a bright voice, as the dishes, one by one, were laid on the cloth between them. ‘Do we leave first thing in the morning?’

      He jerked his chin in the way she remembered. ‘Not tomorrow. You need at least a day to acclimatize before going into the desert. Maybe two.’

      ‘But—’

      ‘And I have business tomorrow. The day after, if you insist. At sunrise.’

      She nodded agreement. ‘How long does it take to get to the site?’

      ‘How long?’ Salah was examining the various offerings with close attention. ‘That depends.’

      ‘It depends? On what?’

      The last dish was set down, the waiter bowed and left, and Salah began spooning various bits of food onto a small plate.

      ‘On what?’ he repeated absently. ‘Oh—it may depend on the weather, the wind…’

      ‘The wind? What, we’ll be sailing?’ she asked ironically.

      ‘You are not so ignorant about the desert that you do not know that wind can be

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