LITMIR.BIZ

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her legs folded with unconscious grace, naked toes curling as she rested on one elbow and ate with her fingers. All her guard had come down. She was eating more food than she’d had at one go for a decade. This was a total sensual delight.

      He watched her soften, and the predator in him gloried in his success even as he told himself it meant nothing.

      The last course was put in front of them then, a pastry oozing with the promise of sweetness, and she summoned resistance at last. ‘That looks lovely, but I never eat sugar,’ she said.

      ‘This is made with honey.’

      ‘Or honey.’ But for once she could not resist. ‘Just a taste,’ Desi said.

      Fatal mistake. ‘Oh, that is just too delicious!’ she exclaimed, hastily dropping the little gold fork.

      Salah bent his head, and she saw his eyes clearly. They glinted amusement at her, and something else, and her blood leapt so painfully in response she almost whimpered.

      ‘Do you push temptation away so easily, Deezee?’ he asked, his voice caressing her nerve endings like soft sandpaper.

      She looked at him, a hard man if there ever was one. ‘Don’t you?’

      ‘Not such temptation as this,’ he said. She knew he did not mean the little honey-crusted sweet. Flame flickering in the black eyes, he picked up the sweetmeat from her plate with his fingers, tilted his head back and caught it on his tongue.

      It nearly flattened her. Sensation roared over her skin, bringing every cell to attention.

      His gaze caught hers before she could turn away, and it was all there in her eyes. She saw him read it. The heat rose up in her cheeks, but she could not tear her gaze from his.

      Her eyes were emerald with desire. He smiled like a wolf, dark and determined, and said what he did not want to say…

      ‘Shall I come to your bed tonight, Desi?’

      Warmth flooded her body. Oh, how could she be so weak? She’d had ten years to get over this!

      ‘No.’

      He shrugged. ‘Then you must come to mine.’

      ‘Mmm. I’ll be riding a flying pig.’

      She was falling apart, and it was only the first day. Desi took a deep, trembling breath. She was headed out of her depth here. The sooner she got out of the palace and onto the dig with other people, the better.

      She sat up, drew her legs under her, pressed a cushion behind her back.

      ‘So, you never actually told me—how many hours will we be on the road?’

      ‘Hours? What do you mean?’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Desi, the trip across the desert will take four days at least, probably five.’

      Chapter Eight

       HOW was flight? Have you seen HIM yet?

       Where R U?? Please call!

      There were five texts from Sami on her BlackBerry, each one more frantic than the last, and a half a dozen missed calls. Desi should have texted Sami from the Arrivals hall or, failing that, the car, and was stunned to realize she had forgotten. She’d completely forgotten her phone, if not her life, from the moment she’d met Salah.

       Has he murdered U? What is going onnnnnnnnnn?

      Desi sat with the thing in her hand. She should call Sami to update her, but…she just did not want to talk about Salah and their meeting and the dinner she’d just shared with him.

      Or the fact that she had turned down the chance to share his bed.

      Meanwhile, she had to respond.

      Sry, sry!! Horrible jetlag. S picked me up, going to sleep now. Ttyl, she sent.

      She ruthlessly shut the phone off before Sami could call. Then she lay in the fairy-tale bed, surrounded by soft lamplight and ancient luxury, trying to think. Trying to get distance on the evening she had just experienced.

      Five days in the desert alone with Salah! How was it possible? How had Sami not known?

      What would she do, alone with him day after day, night after night, a forbidding stranger who somehow shared a past with her? A man who thought making love with her would give him closure?

      He wanted her. His love might be dead—he said it was, and she believed him—but Salah wanted her. She was alone now because she had chosen it. He would have come to her bed if she’d wavered for one second. If she’d flicked an eyelash.

      Might he still come? She couldn’t be sure. She had said no, but—he might think that if he came to her room she wouldn’t be able to keep on saying it.

      And he’d be right. Desi was afraid. All the defences she thought she’d built up over ten years had disappeared in the space of one short breath. She was vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been with any other man. And she didn’t know what he really wanted.

      Closure. That was such an extraordinary thing for a man like Salah to say! What closure would sex give him? You have haunted me, Desi. Was it true? Or did he have some ulterior motive for saying it?

      Desi flung the sheet back, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and sat with her head in her hands. After a moment she got up and began to pace.

      The intimacy of the roof garden. The constant harking on the past. The fact he had ordered food he had lovingly described to her ten years ago. The irresistible way he’d chosen tidbits for her, fed her. Painful reminders of their love, scorching tokens of intimacy, the actions of a man determined to win back an old love.

      All false. All stage dressing. Salah did not want to win her back. He had made that very plain, a long time ago.

      Why, then?

      He wants revenge. The thought dropped into her head with an almost audible click. Four days. Five. He could find a dozen ways to get revenge, she was sure, alone with her in the desert for five days. But what could he want revenge for?

      Everything that happened had been his own doing.

      A few days after he left, Salah had phoned her. He begged her, he pleaded his love. He knew now that it was jealousy that had motivated him. He had believed that look in her eyes was only for him, and there it was in the photo, for anyone who looked at her. He had taken refuge in blaming her, too easy to do.

      ‘But I will never do anything like that again, Desi. I will understand myself better.’ If only she would forgive him.

      The call came too late. Their argument had shaken Desi to the core, and suddenly all the changes that before had seemed so easy frightened her. Move away from her family and friends, to a country on the other side of the world whose language she didn’t speak, whose people and culture and religion she knew nothing of, where she knew no one save Salah? Have children who would be citizens of another country?

      History was against them, too. That week there had been a graphic television documentary showing a woman stoned to death in the capital of Kaljukistan. Television news was full of the atrocities towards women there. Women dying because no male doctor was allowed to attend them. Girls’ schools closed, women teachers and doctors thrown out of work. Women beaten in the street by armed policemen for showing a lock of hair.

      Desi was deeply frightened. How well did she really know Salah? How could she love him when she didn’t know who he was?

      She was too young by far to handle the terrible, contradictory feelings that raged through her at the sound of his voice.

      ‘I don’t love you,’ she cried.

      ‘You do,’ he insisted, but he was young, too. ‘You love me, Desi. We love each other. I love you! I love you

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