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 said. “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.
Once, Josie would have been relieved.
But now...
Numbly, she rose from their bed. Grabbing her backpack, she started to gather her clothes. Then she stopped, looking around the tent. Kasimir always dumped everything on the floor, in that careless masculine way, knowing it was someone else’s job to follow after him and tidy up. Looking across the luxurious carpets piled thickly across the sand, Josie’s eyes could see the entirety of her husband’s day: the empty water bucket of solid silver. The hand-crafted sandalwood soap. His crumpled pajama pants. And in a corner, his black leather briefcase, so stuffed with papers that it could no longer be closed, none of which he’d glanced at even once since the day they’d arrived here.
In the distance, she heard a sound like rolling thunder.
Tears rose to her eyes, and she wiped them away fiercely. She didn’t want to leave him. This was the place where they whispered secrets to each other in the middle of the night. The bed where, if she woke up in the middle of the night, she’d hear the soft sound of his breathing and go back to sleep, comforted that he was beside her.
No more.
When she was finished packing, she grabbed her mother’s tattered copy of North and South. For the next hour as she waited, sitting on the bed, Josie tried to concentrate on the love story, though she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over.
Kasimir’s footstep was heavy as he pushed aside the heavy cotton flap of the door. She looked up from her book, her heart fluttering, as it always did at the breathtaking masculine beauty of his face, the hard edge of his jawline, dark with five o’clock shadow, and the curved edge of his cheekbones. His blue eyes looked tired.
Setting down the book on the bed, Josie asked anxiously, “Is he going to be all right?”
“Yes.” He went to the basin and poured clear, fresh water over his dirty hands. “His uncle put a proper splint on his leg. The helicopter just left to take them all to the hospital in Marrakech.”
“Thank heaven,” Josie whispered.
Kasimir didn’t answer. But as he dried his hands, she saw the shadows beneath his eyes, the tightness of his shoulders.
Without a word, she came up behind him. Closing her eyes, she wrapped her arms around his body, pressing her cheek against his back until she felt his tension slowly relax into her embrace.
A moment later, with a shudder, he finally turned around in her arms to face her.
“You were the first to reach him,” he said in a low voice. “Thank you.”
Her eyes glistened with tears. “It was nothing.”
Kasimir gave her a ghost of a smile. “You were much faster than I thought.”
“I told you my father and Bree were gone a lot,” she said in a small voice. “My babysitter was a former championship snowboarder from the Lower Forty-Eight.”
“You grew up in Anchorage, didn’t you?” He gave a low, humorless laugh. “Had a season pass at Alyeska?”
“Since I was four years old.” She gave him a trembling smile. “If it’s any consolation, I’m faster than Bree, too. She’s horrible on the mountain. Strap skis or a snowboard on her feet and she’ll plow nose-first into the snow.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“But you and I,” she said quickly, “it was a close race...”
“Not even.” He bared his teeth in a smile. “You won by a mile.”
With an intake of breath, Josie searched his gaze. “Kasimir, you have to know that I never meant to—”
“And I see you’ve packed. Good.” He glanced down at her backpack. “I’ll show you to your new tent.”
“Fantastic,” she said, crestfallen. Against her will, she hungrily searched his handsome face, his deep blue eyes, his sensual lips. She didn’t want to be away from him. She didn’t. “If not for the accident,” she said, glancing at him sideways, “the race could have ended very differently...”
“Josie, please,” Kasimir growled. “Do not attempt to assuage my masculine pride. That would just add insult to injury.” Picking up her backpack, he tossed it over his shoulder. “I’ll send over your trunk of new clothes later. You’ll likely only be here at the camp for another week or two.”
“Just me? Not you?”
He set his jaw. “I’m going to go look for your sister.”
“I thought you said it was too soon,” Josie said faintly.
He gave her a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’ll leave you and go get her. Both the things you wanted. It’s your lucky day.”
It was ending. He was leaving her. She thought of the time she’d wasted, longing for him to kiss her and doing nothing. Waiting—always waiting—with a timid heart!
“But you said you couldn’t trust me. That if you brought back my sister early, I might demand a hundred million dollars for my land...”
He gave a hard laugh. “You’re more trustworthy than anyone in this crazy, savage world. Including me.” Grabbing her upper arms, he looked down at her. “Serves me right,” he muttered. “I never should have tried to get around my promise.”