Lord of Desire (42 page)

Jafar glanced down at the young woman they spoke of.
Foreign?
But she was not foreign to him. The same English blood that ran through her veins ran through his, though he often tried to forget that truth. And they had been lovers. After the intimacies he had shared with her during that long passion-filled night, intimacies known only between a man and a woman, she was as familiar to him as the desert, as the mountains that he called home.
Alysson, with her defiant, smoke-hued eyes.
Alysson, with her passion and vitality and indomitable spirit, a spirit that called to him and touched something wild within him.
Somehow, in the past few weeks, she had managed to make all the other elements of his life pale to insignificance. And for the mind-numbing eternity of the past days, all his hopes and wishes for the future had converged, centering on the single fervent desire that she would survive her battle with death.

Just then Alysson stirred, muttering some unintelligible phrase. Bending over her, Jafar smoothed a tousled tress back from her hot forehead. "Be still, little tigress," he murmured in English.

The endearment drew a sharp look from the khalif; Jafar could feel Ben Hamadi watching him speculatively.

"Perhaps it is not wise to speak to her in her own tongue,'' the Arab suggested uneasily.

Within Jafar the slow heat of anger uncurled itself. Not hesitating, he raised his golden gaze in challenge. "It calms her to hear her own language."

Ben Hamadi was the first to break contact with that fierce gaze. After a long moment, the Arab let his hawklike features relax beneath his beard. But when he rose to withdraw, he added one last caution. "Take care, my friend,
that
you
do not put her welfare above the lives of your own people."

It was perhaps two hours later that Alysson slowly opened her eyes to find Jafar sitting beside her, his chin resting on his fist.

How strange,
was her first foggy thought. She had been dreaming of that long-ago day in England, of her arrival at the elegant estate of an English date. She had climbed an oak tree and thrown acorns at a fair-haired stranger. But then she had cried and he had comforted her.

Alysson blinked and
squinted
her eyes at the black-robed man beside her. This was Jafar, a fierce Berber warlord,
not
the fair-haired English stranger of her dreams.

But something was wrong about him. His head bowed, he appeared deep in contemplation, while his shoulders slumped as if under the burden of some great weight.

Slowly, weakly, she reached out to touch him on the knee. Jafar
reacted
the instant she moved. Startled, he caught her hand and pressed it between his own as he stared at her.

"Thank you, Allah," he said a long moment later, his voice a hoarse rasp.

Alysson watched him in puzzlement. He looked terrible. Deep lines of weariness etched his face which was covered by several days' growth of beard. She had never seen him so unkempt.

Something else was different about trim as well. His expression of gratitude to Allah had been in English. Why would he speak to his God in her language? But the elusive thought faded under the effort of having to think.

"I . . . didn't die . . ." she whispered, her own voice sounding like the croak of a frog.

A slow smile, beautiful in its sheer happiness, curved his mouth. "No, you didn't." Still holding her hand in his, he reached out to touch her damp forehead. "The fever has finally broken. How do you feel?"

"Thirsty . . ."

Immediately he reached for a cup of opium-laced water. Slipping his arm beneath her shoulders, he held the cup to her lips. "Here, drink this."

Strange,
Alysson thought again. Was their conversation
really in English? She sipped weakly from the cup, watching Jafar, staring into his golden eyes, "Did
I.
. . hit you?"

His brows drew together in a frown at the odd qusstiom, Alysson wanted to ask if she had thrown acorns at him, but she couldn't find the energy to form the words.

"No, you didn't hit me,
Ehuresh,
Now, drink again."

Obediently, Alysson complied. His order had been in French, of that she was certeis. But a fragment of a thought, interposed with the fading memory of her dream, swirled in her hazy mind. Jafar looked so much like the fair-haired English stranger in her dream. And she had heard him use English before. At least once, when he'd unexpectedly came upon her half-naked, he had called her beautiful. And again when he had made love to her that shameful night, some of his passionate words had been in perfect English.

Jafar had said he knew some words of her language,
but
it seemed he was more familiar with English than he had admitted. Of course, it was not beyond possibility that he should have learned English as well as French, the language of his enemies . . .

The unfocused thought brought back all the painful memories of the past few weeks in a fierce rush. His plan to lure Gervase into the desert, her attempted escape . . .

Nothing had changed. He still intended to kill Gervase, still planned to endanger her beloved uncle with his schemes for revenge. And it was her fault.
If she had managed to escape . . .

Alysson closed her eyes, feeling tears forming beneath her lids. She was too weak to face the horrible future, the guilt of failure.

"Sleep, little tigress."

Jafar again, his voice low and gentle
She
felt his soothing hand stroke her forehead and didn't fight it. Praying for the oblivion of sleep, she let herself
be
drawn down into the swirling blackness. But one last puzzling thought prodded her before she drifted into unconsciousness. Had Jafar spoken to her in English?

Chapter 13

S
he had failed. That was the bleak, never-changing truth that haunted Alysson during the slow days of her convalescence.

The knowledge of her failure, even more than the fever, left her shaken and withdrawn. Tears came easily now, and she was thirsty all the time. Her body ached, but her spirit ached more. The guilt was crushing, and so was the fear. Gervase would die because of her. Her Uncle Honord would come in search of her and would be shot by a Berber bullet or mown down by an Arab scimitar.

She couldn't face it, and so she retreated into numbness. Day turned into night, then back into day, but Alysson could find no reason to fight the awful flood of emptiness and defeat that oppressed her spirit. The entire interlude of her attempted escape and Jafar's rescue seemed dreamlike, unreal, as did the past few days.

Jafar cared for her, she knew that. When she needed to eat to regain her strength, he fed her the choicest bites from his own plate, and made her drink nourishing fruit juices. When she was hot and fretful and ached for coolness, he bathed her body with cool water. When she was too weak to move her limbs, he dressed her with as much gentleness as if she were an infant.

Her utter helplessness and dependence only added to her despair. Her life had been saved by a man she professed to despise, and yet she couldn't be glad.

She couldn't be glad, either, about the various visitors who attended her sickbed. Tahar sat with her for several hours each day, keeping her company, but the gentle Berber woman's attempts at conversation drew little response from Alysson.

The blue-eyed Saful expressed Alysson's own sentiments precisely when he was shown in to see her. She had not hurt him badly when she'd crowned him with the wash pitcher—at least not physically. His pride and honor had both suffered much more from the blow, for Jafar had released him from his guard duties and set three other men in his place. The fact that his lord would not trust him again to act as her guard was a bitter, shameful pill for Saful to swallow.

"My soul is dark and gloomy," he told her in Berber, his feelings translated by young Mahmoud.

Wearily Alysson closed her eyes, too wretched to be concerned about anyone's soul, even her own.
Especially her own.

To his credit, Mahmoud tried to cheer her up. For her entertainment the boy brought his pet lizard in to visit her, a black-striped reptile that he called a "fish of the sand."

"See, lady, I make him dance!"

The lizard did indeed seem to be dancing for its supper. In other circumstances, Alysson might have asked Mahmoud to set the poor thing free, for it was cruel to keep a wild desert creature in captivity. But Mahmoud obviously had formed a bond with the ugly little reptile, perhaps because it, unlike people, did not notice the boy's scarred face or awkward limp. Even so, she could not even summon the energy to be concerned for the boy's pain. Her own pain was too great, her hopelessness too overwhelming.

Her listlessness disturbed Jafar most of all. She was recovering her health slowly, but the luster had gone out of her eyes, the fire out of her spirit. The only time he had seen an inkling of the same passionate defiancé Alysson possessed in such great measure before her illness was the first time he bathed her after she regained consciousness. In a pitifully weak gesture, she had tried to cover her nakedness and ordered him from the room, but the rebellion had cost her every ounce of energy she had. He had won the battle, but the victory gave him no satisfaction.

Still he wouldn't abdicate his responsibilities. He continued to change the dressing on her wound regularly, carefully massaging the muscles of her thigh around the scorpion's bite to keep the flesh supple. He continued to feed her, even
though she might have managed it on her own, for she would not have eaten one tenth of the food that he persuaded her to swallow by sheer persistence. And he continued to bathe her.

Four days after the fever had
broken,
Alysson lay quiescent and unmoving as Jafar bared her body for his ministrations. For one brief moment, as he peeled away the gauze to expose the wound on her thigh, she tried to close her legs to him, but Jafar scowled down at her, a glimmer of something protective and fiercely intimate in his eyes.

Subdued, she looked away, her moment of rebellion over.

"The flesh is no longer so swollen and red," he pronounced as he gently washed the lacerated area.

Indifferently, her shoulders moved in the barest of shrugs. "You said wounds heal quickly in the desert."