Heather Graham (16 page)

The handsome blond man read the paper by the light of his powerful battery-operated torch. Jim Crosby illuminated the text over and over again, line by line, swearing fervently under his breath as he read the words of Wayne Randall’s statements.

A sound overhead pierced through his soft but vehement mutterings. He automatically switched his light off and froze, listening. The blackness that surrounded him became so complete it was impossible to see his own hand even an inch from his eyes.

For several minutes he waited, but he heard nothing more. The sound, he decided, had merely been the shifting of sand. Still, he waited awhile longer before relighting his torch, musing idly as he did so that it made little difference. The light from his torch could never be seen unless someone was so close that it wouldn’t matter anyway.

He started staring at the paper again. This time he focused on the names of Alexandria Randall and Dan D’Alesio. Were they together? He hoped so. Oh, Alex, he thought, I never meant to place you in danger.

If she was with Dan and the sheikh, she would be amply protected, he was sure. But what if something had gone wrong? What if Alex didn’t realize quite what she held? Worse, much worse, what if she didn’t realize where the danger lay? It was so unlikely that she would see.

Groaning softly, he leaned his head back against the limestone wall. He had to have faith. In D’Alesio. And in an Arab sheikh.

T
HERE WERE TEN RIDERS
in the caravan that would cross the desert to the small oasis of Omar Khi Haman. The journey would take no more than two and half hours, so the men were able to ride upon the swift and beautiful Arabian horses that were the pride of Ali Sur Sheriff; but since many gifts would be brought, numerous camels in the elegant trappings of Sheikh Sheriff would accompany the horsemen. At the head of the caravan would be Ali Sur Sheriff—and Dan D’Alesio. And Alex was there to watch the preparations.

Ali hadn’t appeared surprised when Alex told him Dan had agreed to her staying. He had merely nodded—and told her that she must be with Dan or him any time she veered away from the oasis. “I cannot be with you all the time, so when I am not, Dan must be,” he had told her quietly.

Alex wondered what Ali must think had transpired between her and Dan. Dan alternated between a barely concealed hostility and a taunting mockery each time they spoke. And she—she was holding desperately to a cool and aloof dignity.

Standing in silence as she watched the camel packs being secured to the beasts of burden, Alex started violently as she felt the light touch of his fingers run along the side of her neck. She turned, and a shade of her panic must have shown in her eyes, for he smiled slightly with dry amusement.

“Interesting,” he said.

“What?” she murmured defensively.

He touched the little gold sphinx earring that dangled from her left lobe, and Alex wondered bitterly if he was commenting on her jewelry or enjoying the fact that he could so easily make her a nervous wreck as soon as her guard was down. “Very pretty,” he murmured, meeting her eyes with his, which seemed to gleam with a dazzling jet that might truly belong to the devil. “Sexy.”

She was still for a moment, fighting the mercury that ripped along her spine at his mere words. Then she gave him a cool smile that was entirely apathetic. “Glad you like it, D’Alesio. I wouldn’t want you to be shortchanged.”

He laughed, and his laughter was genuine, and the mercury seemed to race along her spine again.

But his laughter ebbed as he reached for her hand and slipped a heavy ring upon her finger, speaking before she could protest. “Ali thought it would be a good idea if his people considered you spoken for. Wear this; it’s kind of like a brand, if you know what I mean.”

She almost hit him—almost. She controlled her impulse when she saw the muscles of his shoulders tighten.

“Thank you,” she managed calmly.

He inclined his head briefly, then left her, as if he had grown tired of taunting her and was once again bitter.

Only moments later the men were ready to leave.

Alex had spent most of her time earlier pleading to accompany them, but both Ali and Dan had been firm. Dan had mentioned then that she was lucky she was being allowed to stay in the UAE at all.

She stood within the confusion, near Dan, watching as he mounted the black stallion he had ridden the day before. He was dressed again in black desert robes, as was Ali. And as antagonistic as she was feeling toward him, she had to admit he made a handsome, romantic figure. He was minus the beard, nose putty and dark makeup today, and next to Ali, it was obvious that he was not an Arab. But it was equally obvious that he was a man at ease and familiar with his surroundings, a confident power wherever he might be. Both he and Ali were striking and charismatic men, ruggedly assured, ruggedly masculine and arresting with that essence of being so basically male.

Strange, she thought vaguely, that she should come across two such vital and volatile men together. Both had a quality that even Wayne lacked; it was something about their eyes, a determination to take the world by the horns and damn the consequences. They shared a love of life, a determination to make every minute count.

Alex worked the ring nervously around her finger, then glanced down at it. Yale, 1973. What am I doing? she thought, panic rising again. She was getting in so deep. He was quicksand, just as her father had said. All she could think of was D’Alesio as a man, and she didn’t want to think of him in that way. Neither did she want to think about his words in the tent or her response to them. It would be one thing if she could think of herself as being noble. But though she really would have done almost anything, it wasn’t nobility that robbed her of breath when he held her. It wasn’t nobility that made her ache inwardly because his touch created mercury within her body, and it wasn’t nobility that made her mind go blank and allow her instincts to take over with a yearning that seemed to lap as a tiny fire might, catching hold of something within her that threatened to burn to wild, consuming proportions.

It is not him, it is me, she thought. She had been alone for over a year, and in that year, though she had met pleasant and attractive men, she had never met one like D’Alesio.

Still, the conflicting feelings she had for him were very upsetting to her. She had been so sure she was still in love with Wayne, and if she was, how was it possible for her to be so attracted to D’Alesio, of all men? In her entire life no one had ever managed to cause her such humiliation, to treat her so crudely, or to raise her temper over the boiling point so quickly. And while she was half hypnotized by him physically, she was still, in a remote corner of her mind, thinking how lovely it would be to see the man in stocks, with herself given free rein to hurl rotten tomatoes at his strong, angular features.

She started as she realized he was seated upon the stallion and staring down at her. The horse was prancing slightly, ready to be off, and the dust was covering her slippered feet. She hadn’t even noticed.

She felt a little catch in her throat as she guiltily thought she should be thinking about her father and not at whatever plight she had gotten herself into. Impulsively she reached up for the broad hands that easily held the reins. “Don’t trust Haman,” she said quickly. “I know he must know something! Please don’t let him—”

“Alex, whatever Haman does or doesn’t know, Ali and I will find out,” Dan said firmly.

“I’d really feel better if I was along—”

“Forget it—and let’s not go through it again.” When his mind was set, his features made him appear to be as implacable as granite.

Alex bit her lip unhappily and looked at the ground. “It’s just … it’s just that it’s going to be so hard to be here all day, wondering. I don’t know what to do with myself.”

He leaned down from the saddle and lifted her chin so that their faces were almost touching. His lips cut a humorless grin across his jaw, one that didn’t touch the hard granite of his features or the endless jet of his eyes. His tone was bitter, but as Alex felt tremors erupt all along her spine, she wondered if the bitterness was directed at her or at himself.

“I’ll tell you what to do all day. Take a long, long bath. Shampoo your hair again. Do whatever you do to your nails. Because tonight you pay up, my love, and this particular devil likes his souls to be clean and fresh and sweetly perfumed and feeling like silk.”

He released her chin, and a barely perceptible nudge of his knee against the stallion’s flanks sent the horse prancing forward.

Alex felt as if a thundering tidal surge had washed over her. Blood seemed to rush to the extremities of her body in heated waves. She wanted to kill him; she wanted to stop the stirring sensation that he created within her with mere words.

“Some of the children will be taking the sheep to the grass plains on the other side of the oasis. Perhaps you would enjoy going with them. The view of the mountains is beautiful from there, and Rajman may escort you so that you are not alone.”

As Alex glanced up a second time to see that Ali had paused before her, she wondered how much of the recent exchange he had heard. She tried to smile. “Perhaps I shall go with them. Thank you.”

“And you will find your things in your tent.” Ali winked. “That camel that ran away from you just happened to run right into camp.”

She kept smiling through clenched teeth. It would be absurd to try to explain to Ali that he’d had no right aiding and abetting D’Alesio in the little charade he had perpetrated against her.

The caravan started off. Alex watched the departure of men, horses and camels until they disappeared over a dune. Then she shrugged and turned to return to her tent.

She almost stepped over Rajman.

“You!” she muttered with hostility, her eyes narrowed menacingly. “You traitorous jackal!”

“Please, please!” Rajman protested, falling into step with her as she marched past him toward her tent. “Please, you must understand. Mr. Dan knew you were coming out to the desert, and that it could be dangerous. In Cairo just last week they had an article in the newspaper about an English girl, a daughter of one oil worker, who disappeared in the desert. It wasn’t here, I grant you; I believe it was in Saudi Arabia. But Westerners just don’t understand the nature of the sheikhdoms! You must believe that Mr. D’Alesio didn’t want you hurt—”

“Hmmph!” Alex sniffed. She entered her tent and snapped the flap closed behind her, but Rajman remained on the outside, pleading with her.

“Dr. Alex, please do not be angry with me. You needed the help of Sheikh Sheriff, and you needed Mr. D’Alesio. Now you have both, and you are no longer a woman alone. Please, you must forgive poor Rajman! I would have had a part in nothing that would have hurt you!”

Alex had been pacing the tent. At his last beseeching, she jerked the tent flap back open. “I assure you, young man, that that journey across the sand slung over the saddle was very painful indeed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rajman said, hanging his head.

“And falling off that damned camel was not a ton of fun.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rajman repeated humbly.

Out of the corner of her eye Alex noticed that her day guards, Laurel and Hardy, were attempting to approach the tent unobtrusively. Apparently they were to follow her wherever she went. Her annoyance with Rajman suddenly shifted to the guards. She jerked the young Egyptian into the tent with her.

“I forgive you,” she stated with little generosity. She didn’t feel much like forgiving anyone associated with D’Alesio, but she could hardly blame the youth for his loyalty to a man he apparently knew well. Besides, Ali had said Rajman might “escort” her out to the grass plains with the children, and she hoped that meant she could shake her guards for a while. They were beginning to make her feel claustrophobic. And the last thing she intended to do was spend the day taking another long bath. She had the childish urge to roll in the sand for an hour before D’Alesio was due back.

“I need to find a few things,” Alex said abruptly. “Then you and I will accompany the children and the sheep.”

Rajman bowed with delight. “That’s wonderful, Dr. Alex! You will give me this chance to atone for myself!”

“Raj, please quit bowing. You’re making me nervous. Just wait one minute….”

She discovered that all her things had indeed been returned to the tent. Strange, but she had never worried about her passport, only the mimeographed documents she carried. Within those documents lay at least half of the puzzle pieces, and if she was to spend the day without going mad worrying about what was happening with Haman, she would need something in which to engross her mind. A search into the New Kingdom hieroglyphics would certainly call for her total concentration.

An hour later she and Raj were sitting beneath the spotty shade of a date nut palm. The grass plains were hardly what she had expected from the descriptive name given the spot.

She would have called it the sand plains. The grass, what there was of it, grew in scattered tufts over a large area about a mile from the oasis. There was dense greenery only on the land immediately bordering the oasis. Ali’s Bedouins were actually no longer wanderers; the sheikh had been introducing methods of irrigation that allowed them to maintain their homestead within the oasis.

The sheep, however, seemed quite content with the straggly little tufts of grass that grew here. And as Ali had said, there was a beautiful view of the mountains rising in the distance to the south.

“What lies over the mountains?” Alex asked Raj before pulling out her notebook to set to work.

“Oman,” Raj replied with a smile. “A country smaller even than the United Arab Emirates, but almost as rich!” He shook his head at fate. “Egypt has the riches of history; this peninsula has the riches of oil.” He gave Alex a wide, white-toothed smile. “Pity we Egyptians didn’t have more of the oil to go with the history!”

Alex grimaced in reply. She had to agree with Rajman. Here, or at least with Ali’s tribe, the method of life was a century backward, but it was grace of custom that had been preserved, not poverty.