To Tempt a Sheikh (8 page)

He only looked at her with that boundless tranquility that she felt traversed his being. She answered her own question.

Yes, someone could be. And his name was Harres Aal Shalaan.

And he'd just read her mind. Again.

Before mortification choked her, he let her off the hook. “Like you, your stomach snaps its teeth.” And she realized it was. She hadn't eaten in over twenty-four hours. “So here's the plan. We eat, prepare our gear then move out. It's 1:00 a.m. now. If we move out in an hour, we'll have around eight hours before things get too hot. When it does, we'll set up camp, hide out the worst of it, then set out again before sunset. The schedule throughout will be two hours on, one hour off. More off if you need it. At a rate of about five miles every three hours, we'll make it to our destination in about three days. If we ration ourselves, our supplies should last.”

“If they don't, I'll use the IV fluid replacement. We have a few liters still.”

“See? You
are
the best I could have hoped to be with in this mess.”

“I'm sure you could have managed on your own,” she mumbled, thrilled, annoyed, feeling things were about to get real at last, and struggling not to throw herself into his arms and cling.

“You're admitting I'm not a useless nuisance? I'm deeply honored.”

She studied him for a moment, a suspicion coming over her.

Was he doing this on purpose? Every time she felt her will flagging, he teased her or provoked her and it brought her out of her funk and right back in his face.

Whatever it was, it was working. She grabbed at it with both hands. “It remains to be seen what exactly you are. You might still take us in the wrong direction and we'll end up lost. And fossilized.”

He laughed. Rich, virile, mind-numbing laughter. Made all the more hard-hitting as it mixed with a guttural groan of pain. “I don't take wrong directions. It's a matter of principle.”

Yeah. She'd bet. And she was willing to gamble her life on that. She was going to.

Then again, what choice did she have?

None.

But then again, why should she even worry?

He'd gotten her this far, through impossible odds.

If there was anyone in this world who could get them through this, it was him.

But what if there was no getting through it…?

He suddenly grabbed her hand and yanked her against him.

This time she met him more than halfway. As he'd told her she would.

And whether it was survival, magic, compulsion, or anything else, she needed it. He needed it. She let them have it.

She dissolved in the maddening taste of him deep inside her, with the thrust of his hot velvet tongue as he breached her with tenderness and carnality and desperation. She surrendered to his domination and supplication, all-consuming and life-giving.

Then he wrenched away, held her head, her eyes. “I said you were safe with me, Talia, in every way. I'll keep you safe, and I'll see you safe. This is a promise. Tell me you believe me.”

She did. And she told him. “I believe you.”

T
alia wondered, for the thousandth time since she'd been snatched from her rented condo at gunpoint, if any of the things that had happened since could be real.

One thing was certain, though. Harres was.

And she was following him across an overwhelmingly vast barren landscape that made her feel like one of the sand particles shifting like solid fluid beneath her feet.

They'd set out over six hours ago. Before they had, during the hour Harres had specified for preparations, he'd studied the stars and his compass at length, explaining how he was combining their codes with his extensive knowledge of his land's terrain and secrets to calculate their course. He'd said he needed her to know all he did. She thought that impossible when she couldn't imagine how he fathomed different landmarks when sameness besieged them. Yet he'd insisted it was vital she visualize their path, too, and somehow managed to transmit it to her.

They'd just embarked on their third two-hour hike. He still walked ahead, seemingly effortlessly, carrying his mammoth backpack and towing the piled sled while she stumbled in his wake with her fraction of their load. Which was still surprisingly heavy. He'd been keeping them on paths of firm sand, so it wasn't too hard. At first. She'd soon had to admit anything heavier would have been a real struggle.

She still continuously offered to carry more. Each time he'd answered that silence would boost their aerobic efficiency and increased the steps he kept between them no matter how hard she tried to catch up with him. It wasn't only adamant chivalry, it felt as if he was making sure he would be the first to face whatever surprises the seemingly inanimate-since-creation desert brought, wouldn't let her take a step before he'd ascertained its safety, testing it with his own.

Acknowledging his protection and honoring it, she treaded the oceans of granulated gold in the imprints of his much larger feet, feeling as if she was forging a deeper connection with him with each step, gaining a more profound insight into what made this unprecedented—and no doubt unduplicable—man tick.

It had been hours since dawn had washed away the stars and their inky canvas, the gradual boost in illumination bringing with it an equally relentless rise in temperature. While that had made each step harder than the last, it had given her a new distraction to take her mind off counting them, off the weakness invading her limbs.

He'd shed one layer of clothing after another, was now down to the bandages she'd changed an hour ago and the second-skin black pants fitted into black leather boots. With his back to her, she was finally free to study him, to realize something.

He was perfect.

No, beyond that. Not only couldn't she find fault with him, but the more she scrutinized, the more details she found to marvel at.

He seemed to be encased in molten bronze spun into polished satin ingeniously accentuated by dark silk. His proportions were a masterpiece of balance and harmony, a study in strength and grandeur. She'd never thought a man of such height and muscular bulk and definition could display such grace, such finesse, such poise. How could such a staggeringly physical manifestation combine such power and poetry of motion? And that was when he was half-buried under the backpack and tethered with the sled's harness.
And
that was only his body.

His face was a testimony to divine taste, hewn beauty in planes and slashes of perfection. In the dimness, his eyes had dominated her focus, but now, as she saw his face from every possible angle, she found something new to appreciate with every self-possessed move of his head. Between the intelligence stamped on the width of a leonine forehead, the distinct cut of razor-sharp cheekbones, the command in the jut of a sculpted jaw and nose and the humor and passion molding sense-scrambling lips, she couldn't form an opinion on a favorite feature. Not when so many other things vied for her favor. The eyebrows, the lashes, the neck, even the ears.

And then there was the hair.

Since dawn's first silvery fingers had touched it, she'd become fascinated with it. But it had taken full exposure to the desert's merciless sun to highlight its wonders.

The color seemed to have been painted from a palette of every earth color in creation, forged from resilient gloss and blended with trapped solar energy. As he walked ahead, the undulating silk seemed an extension of his beauty and
virility, transmitting the same power and purpose. Every few minutes, when he turned to check on her, the mass seemed to beckon to her numb fingers to come revel in its pleasures for themselves.

Just then he turned to her again, and that curtain of luxury swished around, catching the nine-o'clock sun, leaving her gulping down her heart. And that was before he gave her that look, that amalgam of encouragement, solicitude and challenge that injected willpower into her veins and pumped it to her limbs. And she realized something.

This was what the Prince of Darkness should look like. To seduce without trying, to enslave into eternity, to induce all sorts of unrepentant sins. To have a woman believe her soul was a trivial accessory.

And she must be starting to hallucinate from exhaustion.

Maybe she should call another time-out before she collapsed.

Problem was, she was exhausted, but nowhere near collapse. Which meant all those thoughts were originating from an unwarped mind.

She tore her eyes away from his hypnotic movements, tried to document the subtle yet rich changes every mile brought to the awesome desert terrain. This place might be a trekker's nightmare, but it was any geologist's, artist's, or nature-lover's dream.

There was so much to delight in as the landscape shifted from magnificent sand dunes to endless gravel-covered plains to sinuous dry lakebeds and stream channels and back again to dunes. The sky, too, transformed from a fathomless ink canopy studded with faraway infernos to a stratus-painted, multicolored canvas to a blazing azure void as the sun rose and incinerated all in its path.

As the heat and glare intensified, she felt so thankful
for the sunglasses he'd had on board—the one undamaged pair that he'd insisted she have—and the cool cotton cloth he'd fashioned into a head cover for her.

At 10:00 a.m. sharp, he stopped.

Though all she wanted was to sit down and never rise again, when he turned to her she rasped, “I can go on.”

He shook his head and took off his harness and bag. “No use going farther only to exhaust you so you'll need longer to rest. Or worse, be unable to go on altogether.”

“You're the one with the gunshot wound. And I'm used to being on my feet for days on end in my work.”

He only took her bag, his smile adamant. “You've gone through the equivalent of four of your grueling days in the last twelve hours.” Before she could protest again he overrode her. “But since it's against your principles to be catered to, you can help me set up the tent.”

She nodded reluctantly. She was dying to rest, but she wanted to get this trek over with more.

He handed her the tent. Then she found out why he'd offered it to her. Because he knew there was nothing for her to really do. Once she unfolded the thing, it sprang into existence with very little adjustment.

After gathering supplies for the next hours, he led her inside and she was even more impressed. It was big enough to accommodate ten people, and he could stand erect inside it. The sand-colored fabric was tough and cool, the floor's insulation total, the openings sealed once zipped and the ventilation ingenious.

But it was still hot. Too hot. And most of the heat was being generated by her smoldering hunk of a companion.

She looked up from gulping water and found him staring down at her with eyes that flared and subsided like fanned coals.

“Take off your clothes.”

She jerked at his dark murmur, a geyser of heat shooting from her recesses to flood her skin.

His eyes left hers, traveled down, as if looking for the origin of the flush that rose to take over her neck and face.

And that was before he added in a will-numbing whisper, “All of them.”

She stared at him, at a loss for the first time since she'd seen him. This was the last thing she…she…

Then his lips twitched, one corner twisting up devilishly, belying the seriousness in his voice when he elaborated, “If you don't, you'll sweat liters we can't replace.”

Oh. Of course. She bit her lower lip, nodded, dispersing the ridiculous alarm and temptation that had slammed into her.

Problem was, in a usual “all of them” clothes-removal scenario she would have kept her underwear on, which would have amounted to a conservative bikini. But with only a man's undershirt over her now undone corsets, she'd be down to her boxer shorts. And she didn't know what mortified her more. That he'd see her topless, or that he'd see how ridiculous she looked in them.

Oh, right. And that was grounds for risking dehydration?

She nodded, exhaled a tremulous breath. “Any hope you'll turn your back?”

He gave her a mock-innocent look. “Why?”

Then he began to take off what little clothes he had left. He started with yanking off his boots, then straightening to undo the fastening of his pants. Her eyes were glued to his every move, her tongue darting to moisten suddenly desiccated lips. It was only when she realized her eyes were sliding lower with her mouth open as she anticipated the big
revelation that she felt fury spurt to douse her mortification and abort her daze.

She met the master-tormentor's gaze defiantly, then started to undress herself. If he thought she'd swoon at the sight of his endowments, that she'd turn around for modesty or try to shield her nudity with virginly arms, he could think again!

As she prepared to yank off the short-sleeved undershirt, Harres stretched and manipulated something at the ceiling. A heavy cloth partition snapped down between them.

She froze, staring at the opaque surface inches from her eyes, until his amused drawl from the other side roused her.

“I did say ‘quarters,' plural.”

And she cried, “You…you…weasel!”

“Now we move from the farm to the animal kingdom at-large.”

The mixture of relief and chagrin choked her as she threw off the rest of her clothes to the sound of his teasing chuckles and tackled her thin matttress as if it were him.

But if she'd thought she'd toss and turn with him inches from her with only flimsy fabric between them, she was mistaken. She felt nothing from the moment she became horizontal, to the moment she came to. To his caresses.

She blinked up in confusion. He was kneeling beside her, running his hands gently over her hair and face and arms.

For a long moment she could only think what a wonderful way this was to wake up.

Then the wonder factor rose exponentially when he smiled down at her. “I called. And called. I even poked you through the partition, to no avail.”

She blinked again, looked down, found herself covered in a light cotton blanket. But since he was the one who'd
covered her, he must have seen everything. Still, he had covered her so that he wouldn't infringe on her. She struggled with the urge to throw her arms around him and bring him down to her, thank him for being so thoughtful. And more.

Instead, she croaked, “What time is it?”

“Sunset.”

She jackknifed up in alarm. “But we were supposed to move out two hours ago!”

“You needed to rest. Now we'll move faster.” Before she could reprimand him for not sticking to their schedule on account of her alleged delicacy, he ruffled her hair and winked. “Hop to it, my dewy doc.”

She huffed as her heart fired against her ribs. He was suddenly treating her like his kid sister. And it
still
turned her insides into a mushy mess.

As she began to reach for her clothes, he turned back to her.

He took her undershirt away from a hand gone lax. He pulled it over her head, guided her flaccid arms through it, managing not to drop the blanket from where it covered her breasts. He drew it away only once the undershirt was securely in place.

Just when she thought she might suffer a coronary, his intent and serious expression turned incandescent with a surge of something dark and driven. Then he leaned down, opened his lips over the junction of her neck and shoulder.

The feel of his tongue and teeth there was like being prodded by lightning. She lurched under the force of sensations that thundered through her. Then he made it worse.

He glided to the tip of her shoulder, scraping her flesh
with his teeth, gathering the sweat beaded on it with his tongue.

He growled against her skin, sending a string of shock waves through her with every syllable.

She thought he said, “A reward…an incentive…”

Then he pulled back and disappeared into his compartment.

She flopped onto her back, gasping, before she forced herself up and into her clothes. Then she crawled to his side to check his wound before they resumed their grueling trek.

She'd have hours to contemplate the meaning of his words.

And the feelings he'd ripped from her depths.

 

By the end of the second day, their water supply had dwindled even though they drank only when absolutely necessary. They were losing gallons in this weather and with the exertion.

After midnight they stopped for their hour's rest.

As she drank, she noticed he didn't. She stopped, insisting he drink, that he was the one losing the most fluids handling ten times the weight she was. He only insisted on taking her up on her offer of IV fluids.

He hung the saline bag on his jacket so that she wouldn't have to stand and hold it for him. She protested the inefficiency of this maneuver, and he calmly unrolled a mat from the sled, propped it against the sloping edge of a dune, tossed a few blankets beside it, then caught her hand and pulled her down on it with him.