FERN’S ANTENNAE PICKED UP his presence before she heard or saw him. All the hairs on her body lifted and a jolt of such electric awareness shot through her, she expected her tablet to short out.
She kept walking, heartbeat picking up speed under the sense of being pursued, but she wasn’t frightened. Not exactly. He wouldn’t hurt her.
But when she finally heard his voice asking, “Where the hell are you going?” his stern undertone was daunting enough to make her halt with apprehension.
She hugged the tablet to her chest like a shield and turned to face him. They were still under the palms at the top of the spring so the filtered light left only a few glinting strips on his face, not enough to read his expression, but she received his message of disapproval loud and clear.
He didn’t think she was looking for one of the guards, did he? They were so elusive, she wouldn’t know where to find one if she needed one.
“The plateau,” she replied, managing a conversational tone. “We couldn’t see much of the sky from the camp. I wanted to see if it’s worth asking to bring the children up tomorrow night for a proper stargaze.”
“You’re not allowed to leave the camp without an escort.”
That took her aback. “I’m not supposed to take the children out of the camp. No one said I can’t go for a walk by myself.”
“I’m telling you that you can’t. You could fall or get a bite, especially in the dark.”
“Are you serious?”
“Completely.”
She had read all the stories about stupid tourists getting themselves into sticky situations and didn’t fancy becoming one, but his order seemed silly. She huffed, feeling like she was being treated like a child. “Fine. Will you take me?”
A loaded silence was his response.
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” he growled impatiently.
What did one say to that? She hugged the tablet so tightly her fingers hurt where the edges dug in.
When he moved toward her, she pivoted to the side of the trail, making room for him to take the lead.
He stopped in front of her, hands coming to her upper arms the way they had this afternoon. His touch was light, but his voice heavy. “Come off the path with me.”
“Zafir,” she whispered hoarsely, but a pulse of desire expanded in her so hard her entire body hurt. She reminded herself there was no future with him, but the warning carried zero weight against her inner yearning. Even if all she had was his kisses and caresses, it was more than she’d ever imagined for herself.
She wasn’t completely senseless, though. She understood one dire consequence she’d be courting if she went with him.
“I don’t have anything. I’m not on the pill.” The white of his thobe filled her blurred vision and the scent of him, dusty and spicy and heady, fogged her senses into a state of capitulation. Was she making assumptions saying that? Looking like a fool? At this point it didn’t matter. She’d already bared herself about as much as anyone could, but he needed to know how completely unprepared she was for anything like this.
“I won’t make love to you like that,” he assured in a voice that gently stripped her of her flimsy defenses, like sensually pulling away silky veils. “Your virginity is for the man you marry. I just want to hold you. Kiss you and touch you like I did this afternoon. You liked it, yes? It was good?”
He sounded like he really wanted to know. Like he couldn’t tell? She’d shattered under his touch!
His husky whisper, the feel of his breath stirring her hair, brought it all back so she was exactly as she’d been a few hours ago: completely enthralled by him. She bit back a moan and her head felt too heavy for her neck. Her forehead fell against the hard wall of his muscled chest.
“You’re so sweet, Fern. Like honey.” He drew her to align with his body so she could feel his arousal through their clothes. She pushed the tablet away from between them and let it fall to the sand. His hands molded her with familiarity even as he shuffled her off the path to a place where they had a measure of privacy.
“This is bad, Zafir. You said so,” she reminded.
He only braced his back on a palm trunk and opened his legs to make a space for her. She was burning alive, but she snuggled into his heat, arms encircling his neck like her body knew what it was doing even if she didn’t. She angled her head and followed the pressure of his hand in her hair to mate her mouth to his.
So bad and so good. They kissed like long-lost lovers. Maybe he was using her. Maybe she was being fanciful, but this felt like reunion. His hands on her were magic, his mouth divine. The evidence of his desire for her was so mysterious and heartening, she couldn’t help pressing into him with gratified joy.
When he pulled her shirt free and stroked her back, she caught back a moan and searched for his skin, but it was impossible to find. The shape of his chest and ribs were hard and wide, enthralling to her splayed fingers, but the cloth of his thobe was trapped by the press of their bodies.
He loosened her bra and found her breasts. His knowing hand tenderly caressed her and circled her nipple, making it feel taut and achy. She wriggled her hips into him even more. Oh, she wanted him to suckle at her again.
“Zafir,” she said, breaking their kiss to gasp. “I want to feel your skin, too.”
He breathed a ragged curse against her lips and set her back a step, pulling up his thobe from between them. When she burrowed beneath it and discovered the hot skin of his waist, her hands couldn’t get enough. His chest expanded, his abdomen contracted, his chest hair was a fine, intriguing texture traveling in a line downward—
She gasped as she was realized what grazed her wrist. “You’re naked under here.”
“I am.” He opened the button at her throat and moved to the next.
“Can I—”
“Yes.”
Looking down but seeing only his sleeve as he continued opening her buttons and the bunched white cotton draping her own arms, she let her fingers hesitantly explore, blind but curious.
So amazing. His shape was steely under a layer of smooth velvet, and he quivered at her light touch. Taut and aggressive and so thick. She couldn’t imagine how men and women fit together when she held the girth and weight of him in her fist.
“Am I doing it right?” she asked in an anxious whisper.
“Harder,” he murmured against her lips, cupping both her breasts beneath her loosened bra and then teasing her nipples so she pinched her legs tight against a pulse of heat.
She loved this. Loved feeling him tighten in her hand, loved hearing his breath catch and feeling his tongue delve into her mouth as he kissed her and seemed excited by her touch. If she could give him what he’d given her this afternoon, she’d be overjoyed.
He drew back unexpectedly and she looked into his shadowed face, wondering if it was a trick of the light that his eyelids were so low, his mouth slack with passion.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, loosening her touch on him.
“Nothing.” He sounded drugged. “Keep going. It feels good.”
He gathered her skirt as he talked. The hem tickled her bare legs, sensitizing her, building anticipation so she throbbed between her thighs. He slouched lower and caught her leg to guide her knee over his muscled thigh, opening her to his touch. Her thigh was scraped by the abrasion of his and she flinched.
“What—?” Off balance, she fell into him, hand squeezing and making him grunt. “I’m sorry! I’m bad at this.”
“No, Fern, you’re not.” He laughed softly against her mouth as he caressed her through her knickers.
Her turned to gasp and pull away a fraction before he could kiss her. “What are you doing?”
“We’ll do this together.” He tucked his fingers into her underpants and let the cotton trap his hand against her needy flesh.
Her body responded with a rush of liquid heat, clasping with hollow need.
“This is really bad. It has to be,” she murmured, thinking, under the shirt, down the pants. Nothing good came of this, but it felt incredible.
“Do you want to stop?” His lips played along her jaw, enticing her mouth to catch up to his while her mind was filled with nothing but the delicate stroke of his fingers where she ached and throbbed.
“No,” she admitted on a sob, pushing into his hand for a firmer touch.
“Neither do I.”
* * *
Fern woke to a pleasant awareness of the flesh between her legs and a memory of holding the sun as it went supernova in her hands. Afterward, as they’d leaned there, shaking, his arm locking her to his pounding heart, he’d whispered, “It’s probably best we don’t go all the way, Fern. It might kill us.”
She smiled into her pillow as she thought of it again. The way he’d kissed her after they’d put themselves back together had been incredibly encouraging.
“It’s not bad, Fern,” he’d promised her. “It’s not smart,” he admitted in a dry whisper, “but what we’re doing isn’t sinful. I won’t let it go too far. You won’t lose your job or get pregnant. I’ll be discreet.”
“You’re saying you want to do this again?”
“Don’t you?”
“I do,” she’d breathed, massaging the muscles of his back, incredulous that she was in his arms, that he held her so close, that this was even happening. She had pushed aside reservations and worries about being the only fruit in the bowl, focusing instead on the way he kneaded her bottom and seemed reluctant to release her so they could find the things they’d dropped on the path and walk back to camp. He had kept her hand in his until the last moment.
Her mother would call this kind of sneaking around cheap, but even if he was taking advantage of her naiveté and inexperience, he was doing it tenderly. This was the kind of affair she’d always secretly dreamed of. She couldn’t imagine regretting it, especially if there weren’t any long-term consequences.
That word—long-term—made her bite her lip and lick at the sting.
Zafir and Amineh were close, but in the way of adult siblings who lived in two separate countries. They stayed in touch, but didn’t spend a lot of time together.
This affair, if it qualified to be called such a thing, would be very short-lived. She had absolutely no future with Zafir, she knew that. Still, she couldn’t resist stealing this chance to be intimate with him, not because she wanted to learn about sex, although that was definitely part of it. She also liked feeling desirable and prized. But more than all of that, she wanted to learn about him.
So she wouldn’t worry about the future. They had today, Fern assured herself as she pushed up from her bed, already wondering how he would find her and when.
Except the din from the camels that she had put down to one of their cranky periods seemed to be growing and the babble of voices speaking Arabic increased in volume.
Peeking out of her tent, she discovered they were being invaded.
* * *
Zafir’s father had loved all things Western, to the point that he’d pushed his new ideas too hard and fast on a culture still catching up to the twentieth century and far from ready to embrace the twenty-first. Ra’id’s father had been more conservative, which had bequeathed a host of different issues on Ra’id as a leader, but one thing they both needed without question was the support of the Bedouin clan that roamed their lands.
He and Ra’id had come to the oasis specifically to meet with the leader of this tribe and reaffirm their alliance with him. The tribe might stay as long as a week, but Zafir found himself wishing they would hurry themselves along.
Fern was waiting for him. Fern, with her shy touch and eagerness to please and her abandonment to passion. They were behaving like teenagers in the back of a car and it was one of the most exhilarating experiences of his life.
Yet he was back to barely acknowledging her when he glimpsed her walk past with his nieces. She wore her abaya and it had smudges of dust at the wrist, but she still managed to look prim and cute at the same time. Her glorious hair was hidden beneath a black scarf, the curled tip of the tail peeking from the hem on her back. She had pinned a veil across her face so only the freckled bridge of her nose was visible, along with her quiet gray eyes.
Her strawberry-blond lashes had dropped demurely when she’d caught his eye. He could only see that narrow band of her face, but he’d been sure she had blushed.
Because she was remembering.
The memories stoked heat through him, too, filling him with need, but there wouldn’t be so much as a conversation between them while the nomads filled the oasis. The servants kept to themselves and his guards might turn a blind eye to his stealing off with her, but he couldn’t afford to dent his reputation with people who already mistrusted him for his father’s bold antics.
So he kept his distance while discussing where decent range land could still be found and stayed up late, nodding his head to the music and admiring the skills of the sword dancers. When asked, he agreed that yes, he was considering remarrying. No, nothing was formalized, but yes, he would search for his match within his own borders.
He kept to himself that the prospect filled him with dread. He resented his father for seeking his own pleasure at the expense of not just his country, but his immediate family. Even the woman his father claimed to have loved beyond reason, Zafir’s mother, had suffered under his father’s selfish pursuit of his own happiness. Zafir refused to commit the same crime. His marriage had been difficult, but he had Tariq from the union and more stability in his country as a result. The sacrifice had been worth it. He would do it again.
But not yet. After he left the oasis.
Indulging himself with Fern didn’t make him like his father, he reasoned, throwing an arm over his eyes as he lay in bed fighting the urge to go to her. One small dalliance with an English woman on holiday was not the same as sentencing two children—two—to a lifetime of conflict in their identity.
Not that he allowed that conflict to continue to rage in him anymore. He was wholly a man of the desert and did his best to prove it, hunting with the men the next day and playing a type of polo on camels the following. If he longed for the sweet yet tart taste of strawberry bursting in his mouth, no one, most especially the forbidden fruit in question, knew.
Until the next afternoon when she stunned him by calling, “Zafir!” and came running toward him across the camp.
His companion, the sheikh of this visiting Bedouin tribe, stopped beside him and swung a look of startled denunciation at Zafir. Who was this girl to act so familiar?
Zafir bristled, accosted by a sensation like his innermost desires, the things he kept most private to himself, had been turned out onto the sand. Like she was jerking back a curtain and crying “he’s English, he’s mine” exactly when he was needing to be seen at his most independent and Arabic.
And because of that instant sense of exposure and shame in his own weakness, he stopped her with a glare.
She halted and a startled, guarded look came into her eyes as she looked uncertainly between them.
“I mean, abu Tariq,” she said, using the more formal address as she took a few hurried steps toward him. Amineh had arranged for Fern to spend time with the Bedouin women, to observe their sewing and weaving, but it really was better if Fern was seldom seen and rarely heard while the nomads were here.
“Not now,” he stated flatly and started to turn his friend away, asserting that she was nothing to him.
“It can’t wait,” she insisted, circling into his line of vision.
He let her see his outrage. If she thought their touchy-feely little tryst entitled her to his attention on her whim, she was dead wrong.
Hurt flashed in her eyes, but even though her slim build seemed to pull tight and become even more narrow, and the little he could see of her face was pale enough to make her freckles stand out in dark spots, she kept her gaze locked with his.
“A girl is ill. Her mother isn’t taking it seriously and I can’t find your sister. I only have Bashira to interpret.”
The man beside him demanded to know what she was saying. Zafir translated, aware exactly how much Western interference was welcomed, especially when it involved women making demands. His friend urged him to let the girl’s mother be the judge. He dismissed Fern with a step toward her and a flick of his hand to shoo her away.
The action, not meant to actually strike her, still set Zafir’s control on edge. Bigotry was his fatal weakness and Fern was being advised firmly of her insignificant status.
She jerked back a step, trepidation fixing her eyes on the man as she excused, “I wouldn’t do this if I wasn’t worried—”
The wounded throb in her voice told Zafir she realized how completely she was being disregarded. But where he would have called her meek at any other time, she showed inordinate boldness, straightening her spine, growing a fraction taller and speaking with insistence.
“But her mother doesn’t want to talk about it because she, well, the girl looks about thirteen. Her mother thinks she’s starting her time. I think it’s appendicitis.”
“Time...?” Comprehension dawned. “She probably is,” he averred. What did he know about these things?
“I’ve had both and you don’t get a fever from puberty,” she retorted hotly. “You can’t ignore this. I can’t. Come and see for yourself.”
That imperative tone of hers made the other sheikh huff out a noise of impatience.
Fern looked braced for a blow, but she stood her ground and stared hard at Zafir, genuine fear in her eyes as she willed him to do as she asked.
If she was wrong, this would turn out badly.
It might anyway. When he assented with a growl and followed her, the girl’s mother was appalled that Fern had brought her daughter’s condition to the attention of men, most specifically ones in such exalted positions. She tried to wave them away, scolding Fern thoroughly in loud, rapid Arabic. All the women and girls in the communal tent stared, Zafir’s nieces included. The girl was so embarrassed, she started to move to the back of the big lean-to.
The Bedouin sheikh pressed Zafir to come away, telling him to let the women handle things. His vile glare at Fern, sharp with censure and mistrust, didn’t abate when he looked at Zafir.
Fern caught at Zafir’s sleeve and tugged as the girl failed to get her feet under her. “That is not normal,” she insisted. “You have to make them realize.”
“You’ve had your appendix out? Tell me the symptoms,” he growled. He crouched to talk to the mother and girl and lifted a hand to stay his companion’s arguments as he translated Fern’s suspicion.
The girl started to cry and her mother wrapped her arms around her, both of them denying it could be that serious. He understood. Who wanted to need surgery when they were two days by camel to the nearest hospital?
Zafir called on one of his guards who was trained as a medic. The guard wasn’t allowed to physically examine the girl, of course, but he agreed that the diagnosis could be correct. The father of the girl was found and the entire family sent by helicopter with the girl for treatment.
Fern buttoned herself into her tent—an act that poked at Zafir’s conscience—but if he had just had a girl airlifted to a hospital for menstrual cramps, he was going to look worse than his father for listening to her. His attempt to hide that they had a personal relationship would be moot. An affair was already presumed. He’d be labeled as weak, ruled by the same aberrant crush that had undermined his father’s ability to govern well.
An air of tension hung over the camp as they waited word via the relay station. Ra’id and Amineh returned from being in the desert with another group, concerned that they’d seen the helicopter come and go. Zafir explained and Ra’id came to Fern’s defense, assuring the Bedouins she wasn’t the type to stir up false drama.
Zafir couldn’t have argued in her favor. It would have looked suspicious and the fact was, he didn’t know her well enough to judge her as knowledgeable or trustworthy.
He only knew he never should have touched her.
* * *
“Fern.” Amineh’s voice woke her to the first fingers of daylight. “Are you awake?”
“Yes.” She sat up, eyes gritty, and watched the zip climb on the front of her tent.
Amineh poked her head in. “You were right. It was appendicitis. She had the surgery late last night and will be okay. Can you dress and come out? Her uncle wants to thank you.”
Relief lifted a huge weight off her chest. Fern took a big breath and let it out. She’d barely slept, she’d been so worried.
And hurt.
Zafir had been so dismissive, like she didn’t know her place. He’d certainly made it clear how much value he placed in her opinions. Her mother was right. Men didn’t respect women who were easy.
A few minutes later, after ensuring she was covered to the tips of her fingernails, only her eyes showing, she approached the group of men waiting for her near the nomad’s cooking fire.
Zafir was in her periphery. She thought she felt his eyes on her, but didn’t look to check. It was probably just her constant awareness of him playing up anyway.
The tribal leader, the man who had tried to convince Zafir not to listen to her, set his palm on his chest, closed his eyes and bowed his head. Through Amineh, Fern expressed her relief that the girl would survive. The nomads spent a short hour packing and were gone before anyone was hungry for lunch.
The rest of the day was quiet, even the children not talking much. The men kicked a football with Tariq and Jumanah down the beach while Bashira settled in to show Fern the clothing she’d made for her doll with the help of one of the Bedouin women. Amineh joined them and sat down next to Fern with a huge sigh.
“Now we can relax.”
“Be honest,” Fern said as Bashira ran off in search of a dress she’d forgotten in her tent. “Did I cause a political disaster?”
“It could have gone south if you’d been wrong, but you weren’t. Zafir has to be so careful not to be seen as acting like our father and our father was so determined to not just modernize, but Westernize. He tried to settle land rights on the tribes and make them farm it. They’re already losing clansmen to cities and steady jobs. Their way of life is hard enough without government eroding it. Seeing Zafir with Ra’id, whose family always respected their rights to migrate, goes a long way. That’s why we make a point of meeting here like this. The Bedouins travel so much, and talk to so many different people, their opinion can be the difference between large-scale support or opposition for Zafir.”
“And I nearly derailed the whole thing.”
“You did the right thing. You know that. In fact, Zafir tells me you earned yourself an offer of marriage for it.” Amineh nudged her shoulder into Fern’s.
“What?” Zafir had told Amineh about them? And he wanted to—
“From the cousin of the girl you saved,” Amineh continued, her grin widening. “I guess this young man heard you were learning to weave and that the children liked you. He saw you have red hair, which intrigued him. You’ve already had your appendix out, so that will never be an issue...” She gurgled the last words with great humor.
That was not where she had thought Amineh was going. Mortified by how her hopes had soared under such a wrong assumption, especially when Zafir wasn’t even speaking to her, Fern could only look at the ground as an enormous blush flooded into her cheeks.
Amineh burst out laughing and called down the beach to the men, “I told you she’d turn red as a fire engine!”
Fern tried to act like she saw the humor in it, but she was achingly aware that she was secretly dreaming for more with Zafir when the hard fact was, Amineh had just outlined to her how completely wrong she was for him. Not worth the consequences, he’d said that first morning, and no doubt that had been reinforced for him by yesterday’s events.
Assuring herself it was for the best, that furthering their physical intimacy would only set her up for a broken heart, she maintained her distance, ate alone and was in a surprisingly sound sleep when she woke to a hand over her mouth.