To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

“But you’re their crown prince! They can’t leave you behind!”

“Coming after me would mean certain death for them.”

“Not coming after you will mean certain death for you. For us.”

“No. They know I can handle myself.”

“How do you handle yourself against—” a bubble of hysteria expanded below her diaphragm as she flung her arms wide toward the cloud that had now consumed the horizon, like a planet-eating monster “—that!”

“Oh, that.” He handed her a pair of goggles. “Been there, done that. I’m actually thinking it’s a way out of being cooped up for two days with those yawn-inducing royals.”

“Okay, who’s suffering from sunstroke now? Are you out of your mind? This is the freaking mother of all sandstorms.”

He swung over Dahabeyah’s back, grimaced at the incoming destruction. “Aih, it’s a nasty one, isn’t it?”

And she shrieked her frustration and fright. “Amjad!”

He only started wrapping his head and face with the yards of cloth. He was done in moments, left only his eyes exposed. Then he extended his hand to her.

She looked at it, her mind seizing, dread as huge as the menace advancing on them clogging her throat.

“Maram.” She lurched. He’d never said her name. Never sounded so…soft. “Do you trust me?”

Her eyes jerked up, saw him as he was born to be, a desert raider fortified against the elements, calm in his ability to withstand them after many battles where they’d called it a draw. She snatched a look over her shoulder, quailed. That cloud hurtling toward them looked like the end of both their lives.

But if she’d trust anyone to survive this attack of nature, it was him. And she did trust him. With the life he’d saved once before.

“You know I do,” she choked.

His eyes snapped narrower, as if with a stab of pain.

Before she could think, he said, voice solemn, “Then trust me when I say this. I won’t let anything harm you.”

She nodded, accepting his pledge as fact, reached out. The moment the warmth and power of his calloused rider’s hand closed on her clammy, trembling one she felt she was sealing her fate.

But then it had been sealed from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. Then again during that bomb scare. She was choosing his path again, would always choose it, come what may.

She surged up, boosting his tug as he swept her in front of him.

In blinding succession, he removed her hat, wrapped her head and face like he had his and fitted her with the goggles. Before he lowered them over her eyes, he half turned her toward him.

“I’ll enfold you in my abaya, hold you secure, so don’t worry about holding on.” His voice poured in her ear through the layers between them, earnest and fortifying. She shuddered, nodded as he secured her as he’d said. “We’ll descend the dune, which will give us time before the haboob clears it. But it will catch up with us. I want you to be ready for the force of the wind and the sand hitting us even through our protection and with us traveling in its trajectory. But it’s all bark and no bite. I’m proof it’s survivable with no ill effects. I have a nearby shelter. We’ll go there and wait it out.”

She again nodded, noticed that his watch had GPS. He consulted it before he nudged Dahabeyah. Without hesitation, the mare stumbled down the steep slope.

She felt her heart plummet with each footfall. If it weren’t for Amjad’s steel arm and thighs melding her to him, she would have fallen off.

When they reached flat land, he again urged Dahabeyah and the mare broke into a bone-jarring gallop. Maram would have been hammered apart without Amjad raising and lowering her with him to the rhythm of the horse.

Then the sandstorm caught up with them.

She heard its roar like a monster opening its jaws wide to swallow them, felt it snatching her heart out. Then it hit them with the force of a train, engulfed them, overtook them as the roar turned into a soul-splitting wail. The desert disappeared in a limbo of solid yellow dust.

At one point she thought she heard Amjad’s voice, sounding…amused? The sandstorm’s brain-liquefying screeching must have damaged her ear drums.

Then she deciphered his words and knew he was. “One good thing about haboobs, you no longer need your SPF 50 sunscreen.”

She pressed into him, her screaming tension easing gradually. Even if this felt like the end of the world, it couldn’t be too serious, could it? He couldn’t be so devil-may-care in the face of death, could he?

Apparently, Amjad could.

Ride endlessly, endure the harrowing bombardment of the sand and wind, the suffocation of breathing scorching, dry-as-tinder air through cloth and intersperse it all with caustic comments on anything his brilliantly twisted mind could come up with, delivered into her ringing ear. Favorite targets in descending order were her father, Ossaylan, Zohayd, the region, women, men, politics, business and pretty much everything that made the world go round.

Problem was, she couldn’t.

She could only hold herself up, refusing to be the deadweight he invited her to be. She held herself up steadier every time he consulted his illuminated GPS and forged on with total assurance, thinking he believed their destination was drawing nearer.

But their destination seemed to be receding.

She’d weathered the first half-century of the ride relatively well. The next quarter started to take its toll. This last one was becoming unbearable. And she had no idea how many more centuries it would take before they reached his “nearby shelter.”

Couldn’t she just faint? He was doing fine riding and holding her up all without her input. He had told her to nap, as if they were on a long, uneventful journey in the tranquil luxury of one of his limos. He might have had a point.

Might as well let the rest of the ordeal fade away….

Maram came to with a jerk.

Yellowish nothingness greeted her scratching-open eyes.

She thought she was suspended in the limbo between sleep and wakefulness, where everything was a blank sheet waiting for awareness to fill it with the details and depth of perceptions.

Then those flooded in. She hadn’t been caught in a nightmare. She had been in a sandstorm, with Amjad. Still was.

So she’d fainted. Or surrendered to the exhausting-cum-lulling ride and taken the nap Amjad had advised her to. Amjad, who was forging through the brutality of the sandstorm, carrying her like a weightless rag doll as he ascended barely visible steps leading to a columned patio of what looked like a single-story construction. It might be the only visible part of a castle for all she knew. She couldn’t see beyond a few feet.