“I didn’t like it.”
“I never would have guessed. You hide your emotions so well.”
For an instant, they smiled at each other, and Josie’s heart suddenly twisted in her chest. Then, turning away, he lifted his hand in signal. “I’ll get you something you’ll like better.”
He spoke in another language—Berber?—to one of the servants, and the man left. After serving their dinner, the other three, too, departed, leaving Kasimir and Josie to enjoy a private dinner in the Sahara, beneath the shadows of red twilight.
“Ooh.” Looking down at the table, Josie saw a traditional Moroccan dinner, full of things she loved: tajine, a zesty saffron-and-cumin-flavored chicken stew—pickled lemons and olives, carrot salad sprinkled with orange-flower water and cinnamon and couscous with vegetables. She sighed with pleasure. “You have no idea how often I ate at the Moroccan restaurant, trying to imagine what it would be like to travel here.”
“How often?”
“Every time I got my hands on a half-off lunch coupon.”
He grinned at her, then the smile slid from his face. His expression grew serious.
“So,” he said in a low voice, “does that mean you forgive me? For bringing you here?”
She looked in shock at the vulnerability in his eyes. Something had changed in him somehow, she thought. The warm, generous man sitting across from her in exotic Moroccan garb seemed very different from the cold tycoon in a black suit she’d met in Hawaii. Had the desert really made him so different? Or was it just that she knew too much about the man behind the suit?
“I don’t like that you lied to me about Bree,” she said slowly. “Or that you brought me out here against my will. But,” she sighed, taking a bite of the tajine as she looked at the sunset, “at the moment it’s a little hard for me to be angry.”
He swallowed. Reaching across the table, he briefly took her hand. “Thank you.”
She shivered as their eyes met. Then he released her as the servant returned with a samovar of filigreed metal. He left it on the table in front of Kasimir, then disappeared.
“What’s that?” Josie said, eyeing it nervously.
He smiled. “You’ll enjoy it more than wine. Trust me.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’d enjoy anything more than that,” she confessed.
“It’s mint tea.”
“Oh,” she sighed in pleasure. She watched him pour a cup of fragrant, steaming hot tea. “This is kind of like a honeymoon, you know.”
He froze. “What do you mean?”
“The bath with rose petals. This wonderful dinner. The two of us, in Morocco. It’s like something out of a romantic movie. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought...”
Whoa. She cut herself off, biting down hard on her lower lip.
He looked up from the samovar. “You’d have thought what?”
“You were trying to seduce me,” she whispered.
His shoulders tightened, then he shrugged, giving her a careless smile belied by the visible tension in his body. “I could only dream of being so lucky, right?” He swept his arm over the horizon, over the tea and the lanterns, with a sudden playful grin. “You can see the tricks I’d use to lure you.”
“And I’m sure they’d work,” she said hoarsely, then added, “Um, on someone else, I mean.” Looking away quickly, she changed the subject. “How did you find this place?”
He set down the elegant china cup on the table in front of her. Sitting back in his chair, he took a sip of his own wine. “After Nina dumped me, I had the bright idea that I should go see every single place where I held mining options. After our partnership dissolved, I still held the mining rights in South America, Asia and Africa.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Vladimir was happy to let those lands go. He didn’t believe I’d ever find anything worth digging.”
“But you proved him wrong.”
“Southern Cross is now a billion-dollar company, almost as wealthy as his.” His lips curved. “I left St. Petersburg with total freedom—no family, no obligations, almost no money, nothing to hold me back. Every young man’s dream.”
“It sounds lonely.”
He took a drink from his crystal goblet. “I bought a used motorcycle and got out of Russia, crossing through Poland, Germany, France, Spain—all the way to the tip of Gibraltar. I caught a ferry south to Africa, then in Marrakech, I took roads that were barely roads—”
“You wanted to disappear?” she whispered.
He gave a hard laugh. “I did disappear. My tires blew up, my engine got chewed up by sand. I was dying of thirst when they—” he nodded towards the encampment “—found me. Luckiest day of my life.” He took another gulp of wine. “They call this place the end of the world, but for me, it was a beginning. I found something in the desert I hadn’t been able to find anywhere.”
“What?”
He put his wineglass down on the table and looked at her. “Peace,” he whispered.
For a moment, they both looked at each other, sitting alone on an island amid an ocean of sand in the darkening night.
“What would it take to make you give up the war with your brother?” Josie asked softly.
“What would it take?” His eyes glittered in the deepening shadows. “Everything that he cares about.”
“It’s just so...sad.”
He looked at her incredulously. “You’re sad? For him? For the man who took your sister?”
She shook her head. “Not for him. For you. You’ve wasted ten years of your life on this. How much more time do you intend to squander?”
He finished off his wine in a gulp. “Not much longer now.”
The brief, cold smile on his face made her shiver. “There,” she breathed. “That smile. There’s something you’re not telling me. What is it?”
Kasimir stared at her for a long time, then turned away. “It’s not your concern.”
She watched the flickering shadows from the lanterns move like red fire against his taut jaw. He clearly wanted to end the subject. Fine, she told herself. What did she care if Kasimir wasted his life on stupid revenge plots? She didn’t care. She didn’t.
She bit her lip, then said hesitantly, “Is hurting your brother really more important to you than having a happy life yourself?”
“Leave it alone, Josie,” he said harshly.
Josie knew she should just be quiet and drink her mint tea but she couldn’t stop herself from replying in a heated tone, “Maybe if you just talked to him, explained how he’d hurt you—”
“He’d what, apologize?” Kasimir ground out. “Give me back my half of Xendzov Mining, wrapped in a nice gold bow?” His lips twisted. “There must be limits even to your optimism.”
She looked up quickly, her cheeks hot. “You keep telling me to be honest, to be brave and bold, but what have you done lately that was any of those things?”
He looked at her.
“If I weren’t bound by my vow,” he said, “I’d do the bravest, boldest, most honest thing I can think of. And that’s kiss you.”
She sucked in her breath.
Exhaling, Kasimir looked up, tilting his head back against his chair. “Look at the stars. They go on forever.”
Josie stared at him, her lips tingling, her heart twisting in her chest. Then she slowly followed his gaze. He was right about the stars. They had never looked so bright to her before, like twinkling diamonds above a violet sea. Looking at them, she felt so small, and yet bigger, too, as if she were part of something infinite and vast.
“You really want to kiss me so badly?” she heard herself say in a small voice.
“Yes.”
“And it’s not just because I’m—handy?”
He groaned. “I never should have said that. I knew I was wrong to kiss you. I was trying to act like it was no big deal.” His lips quirked upward. “Hoping maybe you wouldn’t notice that it was.”
Her own lips trembled. “Oh, I noticed.”
Their eyes locked across the table. As they faced each other, alone in the desert, the full moon had just lifted above the horizon. The world seemed suspended in time.
“But why me?” she choked out. “You could kiss any woman you wanted. And we both agreed I’m not your type....”
Tilting his head, Kasimir looked at her. “You keep talking about my type. What is my type?”
She looked down at her plate, which had been filled with enough tajine and bread for your average Moroccan lumberjack. It was now empty—and just a moment ago, she’d been considering going back for seconds. She bit her lip. “She’s thin and fit. She spends hours at the gym and rarely eats anything at all.”