Within the first sweltering hour, the salt plain gave way to sand and their pace slowed, but that was only what she had expected. However, when the landscape began changing again from sand and scrub to dunes that began to build from almost imperceptible rises in ground level into gradually steeper gradients, Faye’s brow pleated in dismay. She had not been prepared to see deep dunes on the careful route she had traced for the simple reason that there was none close to Jumar City. Obviously she had drifted too far out into the desert.
Stark unease assailed Faye. But for the rushing sound of the wind that was getting steadily stronger, the silence beat at her ears. The light seemed to be fading, only it couldn’t be, she told herself, for it was barely five in the evening. She had at least three more hours of daylight, plenty of time in which to complete her journey. However, the sun now lay behind a peculiar reddish haze and dark clouds were gathering in a sky as grey as a stormy sea.
So it was going to rain, she thought, possibly even a full thunder and lightning job. The stallion snorted and jerked, a nervous ripple running through his powerful haunches. Of his own volition, he broke into a canter, resisting her efforts to pull him back. He was far too strong for her to hold and he plunged wildly up the side of a steep dune. That was when she heard the thwack-thwack sound of an approaching helicopter above the wind.
‘Calm down, boy…’ she urged as the horse began to buck.
She tried to hang on but she was thrown and she hit the sand like a stone. The silky soft grains provided an unexpectedly hard surface and she was winded. By the time she caught her breath, removed the backpack which was digging into her spine and began to rise to her feet, the helicopter had landed and a male figure was striding towards her.
It was Tariq, but Tariq as she had never seen him before. She had the momentary sense of time having slipped back for before her stood a male who was every inch an Arabian prince in his regal splendour. He was sheathed in black gold-edged robes, worn over a pristine cream undershirt, a kaffiyeh covering his proud head, his clothing flowed back from his hard, muscular physique in the teeth of the buffeting wind. She collided with blazing golden eyes that had an electrifying effect on her already leaping nerves. Behind him, obedient as a pet dog and now infuriatingly calm, trotted the black stallion.
‘Are you insane to run into the desert in a sandstorm?’ Tariq roared at her with raw force. ‘But you will suffer now too for I will not leave Omeir here to die—’
‘Sandstorm…d-die?’ Faye stammered in shock.
Tariq was already swinging round and vaulting up onto the stallion’s back. Omeir was the horse, she worked out. Leaning down, Tariq hauled her up in front of him in a manoeuvre that made her awesomely aware of his masculine strength, not to mention his superior horsemanship. His sense of balance was superb.
‘Tariq…how did you—?’
‘Keep quiet!’ he bit out above her head. ‘Don’t you realise how much danger we’re in?’
As he sent the stallion leaping forward at a breakneck speed, she caught a last glimpse of the helicopter sitting abandoned on the sand. Danger? Yet he had come for her alone. Sandstorm? The sky was beginning to glow the most spooky red. Involuntarily, she shivered, clutching her backpack beneath her arm. Omeir galloped full spate along a wadi between the dunes. The wind lashed her cheeks, carrying grit that stung and dust that made breathing a choking challenge. She bent her head, closed her eyes. He’s not getting away with doing that, so why should you? Guilt almost ate her alive at that point.
A little while later, she squinted from beneath the scarf she had pulled down over her brow. A whirling terrifying wall of sand the height of the sky was folding in. The sand already borne on the wind was fast reducing visibility but she saw the big dark irregular shape of a rocky outcrop looming ahead. Shelter? Barely thirty seconds later, Tariq swept her up and dropped her down onto the sand and, for a stricken moment, she honestly thought he had decided to dump her because her weight was slowing him and Omeir down too much.
Plunged into craven panic, trying to stay upright in a gale threatening to blast her off her feet, she cried, ‘Tariq?’
‘Move!’ Tariq was already behind her and only as he thrust her forward did she register that the mouth of a cave lay directly ahead of them.
Faye stumbled into the sandy interior on legs as weak as paper straws. Omeir surged deeper into the cave to stand sweating and shivering. Faye turned round just in time to see an uprooted date palm pitch into view and land only a few yards outside the cave. She fought to catch her breath in the sand-laden air, eyes huge, shaken face pale. Until that moment, she had not appreciated just how violent and destructive a sandstorm could be.
‘You might have killed us both…you might have killed Omeir. Though he knows this oasis well, he was too frightened to find his way here on his own!’ Closing a hand over her taut shoulder to steady her, Tariq pressed her through a break in the rock walls. ‘The ground falls steeply here…watch your step.’
The passage opened out into another cave. The first thing Faye noticed with relief was the improved quality of the air and then she recognised the unmistakable sound of flowing water.
But for the pale linen of his undershirt glimmering in the darkness, she could hardly see Tariq. Feeling her way along the rough wall with a trembling hand, she dropped her backpack and slowly sank down onto the sandy floor. The last thing she expected and probably the last thing she wanted just then was for Tariq to strike a match and light an oil lamp.
She blinked in disconcertion. Flickering light illuminated soaring pillars of ancient rock and the glimmering pool of water refreshed by an underground stream. It also showed her a sight which at any other moment would have struck her as pure comedy: Omeir virtually squeezing his girth through the same passage by which they had entered and trotting over for a noisy drink at the rock pool.
With pronounced reluctance, Faye focused on Tariq. ‘Obviously you and wonder horse have been here before.’
Tariq slung aside his gold-bound kaffiyeh, luxuriant black hair tousled above his hard, bronzed, dusty features. She literally saw his even white teeth grit. He dropped down lithely by the edge of the water and splashed his face, using the cloth he had flung down as a towel. ‘So it amuses you to be sarcastic and flippant when you have done wrong…that is no surprise to me.’
This time, it was Faye’s teeth that gritted. It had been an incredibly long day and she ached in places she had not known she could ache. More galling still, that exhausting ride into the desert had been a total waste of time and effort. Emotions already high after what she had endured, hot temper now bolted through her at the speed of light. His tone was so outrageously pious and superior, she leapt upright again with clenched fists. ‘Go on…call me a cheat and a liar for trying to—’
‘Run away?’
‘I wasn’t running away!’ Faye launched at him even louder, pride stung by that label. ‘You gave me no choice. You forced me—’
‘I forced nothing. You agreed to my terms.’
Soft, full mouth tightening, Faye i
gnored that succinct and unwelcome reminder. ‘My departure was my way of letting you know that, just like you, I won’t surrender to blackmail—’
‘I did not employ blackmail in any form.’ Rising to his full imposing height, fabulous cheekbones taut, Tariq subjected her to a scorching appraisal. ‘Give me one good reason why I should have agreed to settle your brother’s debts and demanded nothing in return!’
At that blunt invitation, Faye simply saw red. Percy’s smug words on the phone earlier had stung her pride like acid. In speedy succession, she recalled every piece of hurt and humiliation she had suffered since first meeting Prince Tariq ibn Zachir. Then she breathed in so deep, she trembled and gave him on her terms what she considered to be one very good reason. ‘After what you did to me a year ago, I don’t think it would have been such a big deal for you to give me one free favour!’
Tariq elevated an imperious brow. ‘What I did to you?’
‘You turned what should have been the happiest day of my life into a nightmare! You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?’ Faye’s voice shook on that realisation. ‘I’m talking about my wedding day. You asked me to marry you. You let me put on a wedding dress and wear something blue—’
‘Something blue?’ Tariq questioned with frowning bewilderment. ‘What is this “something blue”?’
‘And all the time you knew that you were going to turn right round and divorce me straight after the ceremony. Not because you’d had a change of heart but because you had planned it that way from the start!’ Faye’s long-repressed sense of injustice was now rising as fast as her voice pitch. ‘You asked me to marry you but you didn’t mean one word of that proposal. I trusted you but you betrayed my trust.’
In receipt of that condemnation, Tariq strode forward, his gaze flaming molten gold. ‘How you can accuse me of betrayal when you conspired with your stepfather to set me up for blackmail?’