Behind her, he pushed off the top of the dune. Smiling, she looked up at him as he glided past her on his snowboard. She saw the joy in his face—the same as when they’d galloped together across the desert that morning.
“You are mine now, kroshka!” he shouted, and flew past her.
Let me fly fast, half her heart begged.
Let him seduce you, the other half cried.
Then Josie turned her head when she heard a scream at the bottom of the hill. One of the roughhousing boys had lost control and crashed into the other, sending the smaller one skidding down the hard sand in panicked yells. The smaller boy, perhaps twelve years old, had a streak of blood across his tanned face and a trail of red followed him across the pale sand.
Josie didn’t think, she just acted. Her knees turned, she leaned forward and she flew down the hill. She had a single glimpse of Kasimir’s shocked face as she flew right past him. But she didn’t think about that, or anything but the boy’s face—the boy who moments before had seemed like a reckless, rambunctious teenager, but who now she saw was barely more than a child.
She reached the bottom of the dune in seconds. Ten feet away from the boy, she twisted hard on her snowboard, digging in for a sharp stop, causing sand to scatter in a wide fan around the boy’s friends, who were struggling up towards him. Josie kicked off her snowboard in a single fluid movement and leapt barefoot across the hot sand.
“Are you all right?” she said to the boy in English. His black eyes were anguished, and he answered in sobbing words she didn’t understand.
Then she saw his leg.
Beneath the boy’s white pants, now covered with blood, she saw the freakish-looking angle of his shin.
She blinked, feeling as though she was going to faint. Careful not to look back at his leg, she reached her arm around the boy’s shoulders. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered, forcing her voice to offer comfort and reassurance. “It’ll be all right.”
“It’s a compound fracture,” Kasimir said behind her. She turned and got one vision of his strangely calm face, before he twisted around and spoke sharply in Berber to the other two boys. They scattered, shouting as they ran for the encampment.
Kasimir knelt in the sand beside her. He looked down at the injury. As Josie cuddled the crying boy, Kasimir spoke to him with incredible gentleness in his voice. The boy answered him with a sob.
Carefully, Kasimir ripped the fabric up to the knee to get a closer look at the break. Tearing off a corner of his own shirt, he pushed it into Josie’s hand. “Press this just below the knee to slow down the blood.”
His voice was calm. Clearly he was good in a crisis. She was not. She swallowed, feeling wobbly. “I can’t—”
“You can.”
He had such faith in her. She couldn’t let him down. Still feeling a bit green, she took a deep breath and pressed the cloth to a point above the wound as firmly as she could.
Rising to his feet, Kasimir crossed back across the sand and returned a moment later with his snowboard. Turning it over to the flat side, he dug sand out from beneath the boy and gently nudged the board beneath the injured leg. He ripped more long bits of fabric from his shirt, giving Josie a flash of his hard, taut abs before he bent to use the board as a splint.
The boy’s parents arrived at a run, his mother crying, his father looking blank with fear as he reached out to hold his son’s hand. Behind them another man, dark-skinned, with an indigo-colored turban, gave quick brusque orders that all of them obeyed, including Kasimir. Five minutes later, they were lifting the boy onto a makeshift stretcher.
Josie’s knees shook beneath her as she started to follow. Kasimir stopped her.
“Go back to the tent,” he sa
id. “There’s nothing more you can do.” His lips twitched. “Can’t have you fainting on us.”
She swallowed, remembering how she’d nearly fainted at the sight of the boy’s injury. “But I want to help—”
“You have,” he said softly. He glanced behind him. “Ahmed’s uncle is a doctor. He will take good care of him until the helicopter arrives.” He pushed her gently in the other direction. “He’ll be all right. Go back to the tent. And pack.”
Josie watched anxiously as the boy was carried to the other side of the encampment. He disappeared into a tent, with Kasimir and the others beside him, and she finally turned away. Dazed, she looked down at her clenched hands and saw they were covered in blood.
Slowly, she walked back to the tent she shared with Kasimir. She went to the basin of water and used rose-scented soap to wash the blood off her hands. Drying her hands on a towel, she sank to the bed.
Go back to the tent. And pack.
She gasped as the meaning of those words sank in. She covered her mouth with her hand.
She’d won. By pure mischance, she’d won their race.
There would be no seduction. Instead, from this night forward, she’d be sleeping alone in a separate tent.