The Ice Maiden's Sheikh (5 page)

She might not go for his type, but from the beginning she had instinctively felt that there was something about Latif that spelled danger for her. She should have done anything rather than let herself get into this vehicle with him and head off into a country of stark beauty with no time limit and no destination.

But she knew it too late.

They got lost in the passes.
Jalia looked around her as they drove over the rough stony road. My God, and well they might! she thought. The road itself was sometimes hardly discernible to an untrained eye; could she be sure of following it even five miles?

If she tried to get away from Latif up here she'd be the Woman Who Never Returned. They'd find her skeleton in twenty-five years…

She was stuck with him. Because she knew without asking that he would not turn around and take her back home. And she was afraid to ask, for fear of what the asking would tell him.

She was watching him, hardly aware of her own focus, in a state near panic. He was so attractive, so vital, like a healthy wild animal. His blood seemed to pulse with life just under his skin.

And he was getting under hers. He always had, if only she'd had the wit to realize it.
This
was why she'd run home after the Coronation. It was why she was wearing Michael's engagement ring right now.

Not because of some nameless threat from her parents, but because she was on a precipice with Latif Abd al Razzaq, as surely as the pebble she had knocked over the ridge to the valley.

N
ight closed in quickly in the mountains. As darkness fell Jalia sat by their campfire on a plateau, watching the sunset.

In the broad rugged pass they were travelling through, the villages were few and far between. Below, a boy followed a couple of skinny goats along a sloping path, his lazy switch urging them home. In the little village on the edge of the valley, a white cloth hung on a line, flapping in the breeze. Smoke trickled up from a hearth fire.

She wondered who was tending that fire, and whether that woman's life was anything like her own.

It was Sey-Shahin Valley again, but from a different vantage point, for the road had twisted away from the valley for the past few days as it fought its way through the passes.

Last night they had stayed in a small village clinging to a rugged slope. It was the last village they had seen.

Today they had travelled a whole day through bleak, empty passes, in a large erratic circle around the base of one giant falcon-shaped peak.

The road had finally led down into the tunnel hewn through the living rock. An hour ago they had emerged onto a narrow plateau, with the valley spread out below them.

To one side, a tiny waterfall showed where a mountain stream tentatively flowed again after the years of drought. There they had found a level, lightly wooded spot to pitch their tent.

The haunting sound of goats' bells and a distant
muezzin
mingled on the clear air. The sun was going down in flames behind the mountains, and in the long, lonely shadows all around her lay a starkly beautiful landscape dominated by the two rocky sentinels, one towering above her, one on the opposite side of the green valley.

Over all brooded the ever-present, distant white peak now bathed in liquid gold, Mount Shir.

Jalia wished it were not so beautiful. Out here, face-to-face with the land, she found that it pulled at her heart with a feeling that was almost pain. From the beginning of the adventure this yearning for the might-have-been had been aching in her, just beyond the reach of consciousness.

Since her first view of Sey-Shahin Valley, though, she had been sharply aware of it: if Ghasib had never betrayed her grandfather, this would have been her country. She would have been familiar with these
crags and passes, with the magical green valleys, with the handsome and courageous people who lived here, where life held such different values than those she had grown up among.

And where she might have thrilled with delight when Latif Abd al Razzaq took command of every situation and of her, looked at her with possessive eyes, told her what a man could do to make his wife love him….

The memory of that conversation in the car on the day of Noor's disappearance had been called up again since her moment of enlightenment overlooking his valley home, and now, with the birds in the valley singing the sun down, the air crisp and clear all around, and water set for boiling in the fire she tended, it summoned up in her a fierce longing.

What Latif had spoken of was part of the mountain warrior's code in the land that should have been the land of her birth—bravery in battle, generosity to friends, hospitality to strangers, and for your wife…virile lovemaking.

At the time, sitting in the car beside him, feeling so attacked by his disapproval, she had been sure Latif had said what he had merely to be provocative. But after that strange silent exchange on the crag overlooking the valley, something had changed between them.

Now her imagination kept revisiting earlier moments, reassessing what she had seen and felt from him. And now, when it was too late to do her any good, the truth of that conversation in the car seemed so wildly obvious she could hardly believe she'd missed it—Latif had spoken the way he did because
he was attracted to her. Because, in spite of his denial, he
had
imagined teaching her—what had he said?—
a man's power over a woman.
Even then.

And the attraction had not lessened with proximity. What a fool she had been to come with him on this fruitless search! Instead of saving Noor, she had put herself in danger.

She could feel the intensity of his desire, as if the air thickened around them, whenever he approached, and it was getting more powerful and impossible to ignore by the hour.

She could feel it now, when he was out there in the shadows somewhere, hunting. It was over her like a cloak, a blanket of sexual heat, stroking her hair, kissing her skin with a hunger unlike anything she had dreamed possible.

How had she not understood it from the beginning? How had she been so blind?

Need burned like honey in her muscles as she remembered his eyes, his deep voice, making her stretch slowly and lift the heavy fall of hair from the back of her neck while an unfamiliar sensuousness warmed her, and she heard his voice again in her head.

Who is your fiancé, that you do not understand a man's power over a woman?

She raised her head, and Latif was there, standing in the black shadows on the other side of the fire, watching her with a face like a brigand's, the face of a man who sees what he wants and means to take it.

Jalia's eyes widened as she stared up at him, double flames leaping in her half entranced, half frightened gaze, her hands frozen in her own hair, sensual need
making all her movements languid with unconscious erotic temptation.

He could take her now—the truth was there in her eyes. For one night he could make her his.

This night.

Latif's gaze licked around her with flame hotter than the fire. His lips parted for a moment, then closed resolutely. She saw how passionately full his mouth was, and how iron control held it firm. If a man like him ever let go…

If the mountain beneath her cracked from side to side…

Without a word he turned away and bent to drive a notched stake at one side of the fire with neat blows from his axe. Then a second, on the other side. He set a third, thinner stick to rest on the notches. On it was a small animal carcass, neatly skinned. The flesh began to hiss and blacken as the fire licked it.

 

Later they lay side by side in their sleeping bags with the night all around them. Overhead the stars gleamed against the lush black fabric of the sky, dense and rich, and so far away.

She was bone tired, she was well fed, but still she couldn't sleep. Jalia lay gazing up at the stars, wondering which of the thousands of sparkles she saw were still alive, and which had died before the earth gave birth to life, yet still sent their light through the void to thrill her.

She felt Latif stir beside her, and turned her gaze. He was lying on his back, his hands crossed under his head. She saw starlight reflected in his eyes. He couldn't sleep either, and she knew why.

It would be dangerous, oh so dangerous, to let him love her. And yet, for one night, just one night…

“Tell me a story,” she begged softly.

He turned his head towards her, so that the light was lost from his eyes and she only sensed the way his gaze touched her, dark and probing, almost angry.

“A story?”

“You always have some story that's relevant to whatever situation we're in. Haven't you got a relevant story now?”

“Relevant to what part of this situation, Jalia?” his voice asked softly, and she suddenly felt that where softness was, there lurked danger. “To our search for your runaway cousin, who may have died for a foolish fear? Or to our desire for each other, which we pretend not to be consumed by even though it burns us like a drought every minute, every second we are alive?”

Jalia gasped. Need flamed over her, burning and desperate, because he had put it into words.

“Latif—” she protested. Whether she would have begged him to love her, or to leave her alone, she really didn't know. But whatever she might have said was lost when he spoke.

“A story, you say. Shall I tell you the story of how my desire grew, Jalia? But it did not grow. It was born a giant. In the first moment that I looked at you it was already too big, too powerful, too overwhelming to kill.

“I could only trap it, like a tiger in a net of ropes, hampered, bedevilled, unable to run, made mad by its confinement. Is this the story I should tell you? And what will you tell me in return?”

He paused, and she licked her lips, but no word came.

“You came to this country determined to hate it, to resist it, to reject its claim on you and your mind and heart. I saw this and still I could not stop my heart's knowing that you are mine. You belong to me, Jalia—my heart, my mind, my body, my soul…all that I am says that it is so.”

She was shivering with reaction, with fear and dismay. This was more, so much more than she had imagined. This, then, was what she had protected herself against when she put Michael's ring on her finger.

“No,” she said, her heart fluttering with panic.

“No,” he agreed harshly. “I know it. You have said it every way you can. After the Coronation, before I could try to tell you, to make you see, you fled me. Didn't you? You ran from me because you knew without my telling you.

“I would have hidden it, I would have played the slow game, the Western game, where a man pretends he does not want a woman—or maybe it is not a pretence. How does a man see what his whole life depends on and then pretend he does not need it?

“You knew how it was with me. But I did not know you knew until you had run away from me.

“I could not chase after you, to that cold country where you live, not when there was so much for me here, so much work that every day, every hour counts. And even if I had gone to bring you back—you are a woman who does not love this country. Was it right that I should go after you, bring you home, make you mine, when your whole heart could not be here?

“I said to myself, I will let her go. A man does not love forever in one moment.”

Chills coursed over and through her, of an emotion so powerful it was like drowning.

“That was my foolishness, to think so,” he went on, his deep voice beating with emotion like a drum. “You are mine, and it has been so since the first moment. Nothing changes that, whether you stay or go, whether you admit it or not.

“You are mine because my heart bound itself to yours before you were born. Because fate made us one heart and then divided it, and now I have found you again.”

She tasted salt on her lips, and discovered that she was crying. Tears of grief because of who she was, because she couldn't be the woman she might once have been, that woman whose heart could go to him freely, who could see her fate, her whole life, in a man's words.

“Oh, Latif,” she whispered desperately.

“No,” he said, “I must tell you the story you asked for. Here in the land that is mine, I must tell you. You came back, but not to me. You were next to me, but out of reach. You came back with a ring that tells me you belong to another man. That is our story, Jalia.”

H
e raised himself on one elbow beside her, and his head blotted out the rising moon. It was a welcome darkness, a darkness in which anything was possible, and without conscious thought, driven by a hunger too strong to resist or to name, she reached for him.

With the cry of a soul stretched beyond its limits he wrapped his arms around her, dragged her bodily across the little distance that separated them, so that she was pulled half out of her sleeping bag. Then with a muttered word of protest—against her? against his own weakness?—he bent and smothered her mouth with his kiss.

Jalia's heart leaped like a wild animal, twisting and writhing against the cage of her ribs, straining to get into his hand, the strong, hard hand that gripped her ruthlessly and pulled her against him, as if his hands
understood her heart's call, were trying to free her heart to love him.

His mouth was fierce against her lips, pressing, chewing, his tongue seeking, his hunger harsh against the soft flesh he desired. With a moan Jalia gave herself up to the assault, her arms clinging, her mouth opening wide to receive his kiss, to give whatever he asked.

Her body raged with a passionate need that distantly amazed her, her blood hot, melted gold, a rich, slow river delivering glowing desire to every part of her, body and soul.

Her breasts sang with delight at the pain of being crushed against his warm chest, at the joy of feeling his heart's wild beating against her body. Her skin shivered and burned as his hands pressed and owned her back, her arms, her neck and face.

His mouth lifted from her mouth and traced over her cheek and chin, then, as her head fell obediently back, down the long line of her throat to the wild pulse at its base.

Then he lifted his head and his hand gripped her upper arm and held her away.

“But my story does not end here,” Latif said ruthlessly, and his voice grated with the effort he was now exerting over his own flesh, his blood, his heart, his soul.

“Latif.” Jalia moaned her loss in the syllables of his name, a pleading that had never been in her voice before. “Latif, love me, please love me.”

He raised his chest, and cool air brushed her. She felt how real the bonds that linked them were, now,
because they were being torn as he drew away from her.

“Latif!” She lifted her hands to his face, feeling she would die if she could not hold him and love him.

He caught her wrist and held it tight, too tight, lifting her hand into moonlight.

“Do you ask me to love you with this on your finger?”

The breath rasped in her throat. She had forgotten Michael, forgotten the ring, forgotten everything in the mad sweetness that flooded her.

“Yes!” she cried, for the sweetness still beckoned her on. “Latif, please!” She reached for him again.

“Take it off,” he growled, as the tendrils of belonging took advantage of their closeness to enwrap them.

“What?” Jalia pressed a kiss into the little hollow in his shoulder that had been designed for her lips. Drunkenly she thought that she would give anything for the right to kiss his skin just here, all the rest of her life.

“Take off this man's ring. You will marry me. Swear it, and I will love you and you will be mine forever.”

So the serpent entered paradise; and she felt its cool silkiness shiver up her heated body, and trembled under the sudden chill of its whispered reasoning.

“What do you mean?” she faltered.

“Do you think I want you for one night, one week, one year, even? You are mine, Jalia. In your heart already you belong to me. Only say it, and I will love you.”

An emerald sparkled in a stray moonbeam as his
eyes burned her from the mysterious darkness where his face was. His hands held her tightly, and a part of her thought that she would always be safe in a hold such as this.

“I can't marry you,” she protested, and inexplicable tears burned her cheeks.

“Can't?” He repeated the word in a harsh, grating voice, and she saw a flash of white teeth.

“You know I can't. You said it yourself,” she accused. “I don't belong here, Latif. It's not my home.”

“A woman belongs with her husband. His home is her home. You belong with me. You are Bagestani. Your blood is here. Your heart is here. Your people call to you. I call to you.”

His hands tightened on her as the words rained down on her, as if he knew that he had lost. He bent and kissed her again, and fire swept out from the contact of his mouth into her body and soul.

“Answer me,” he commanded.

“I want to be your lover,” she sobbed. “Please take me as a lover, Latif, and don't ask me for more.”

He sat up, his sleeping bag falling down to his hips, exposing his hard-muscled torso to the sharp light and shade of moonlight.

“Are you such a fool as this?” he rasped. “Do you think we can be lovers, and then you will go back and marry that man, and forget what love we had, forget how my body has branded you?

“If I love you, I make you mine! You will be closer to me than my own heart! What shall I do when my heart wishes to leave my body? Do you ask this of me?”

His eyes were black hollows in the harsh shadow
now, his face angled and sharply defined in the moonlight, making him more like a bird of prey than ever.

Her heart twisting with hurt, she drew back from him into the comfortless warmth of her own sleeping bag.

But fear was more powerful than the pain. She knew this was not a question of heart, or even of love: she hadn't known him long enough for that. This was powerful sexual passion, masquerading as love, and she would be ten times worse than a fool to be swayed by it.

Like Noor. Who was now in a downed plane somewhere, paying, perhaps with her life, for a too-long toying with dangerous magic. Was she, who had seen the truth so clearly in Noor's case, going to be blind in her own?

“I'm not Bagestani, Latif,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I'm English. We can't change the past. I can't live by your rules.”

The look on his star-shadowed face then she knew she would remember all her life long. His jaw clenched and, deft as a wild animal, he slipped away from her side and into the night.

 

She awoke to sunlight and the sound of cracking wood and turned her head to see Latif on his haunches, the long line of his naked back tucking down into lean hips and thighs as he tended the fire.

He must have hamstrings like elastic bands: he sat easily on the flat of his feet, his butt resting down on his calves, as if the difficult posture were second nature to him.

Watching him now she sensed something that sur
prised her, because he had always seemed at ease in the city and palace environment: here he was in his true element.

Now she could understand what people meant when they said he was a mountain man. The Sultan had told her that during the long years of working for Ghasib's overthrow, Latif had been his chief liaison with the mountain tribes. The nomadic mountain tribes could not be policed and respected no borders; Latif had slipped in and out of Ghasib's Bagestan at will.

Here she became aware of something she couldn't have named before—his inner silence. He had a capacity for stillness, as if he had learned patience from the mountains. It was deeply attractive.

He was quiet, concentrated, open, like an animal drinking at a spring—as if the mountains were a source of sustenance to him.

And like an animal at a spring, he became aware of her regard, and turned his head. Their eyes met for the first time since he had gone off into the darkness last night. She had fallen asleep without hearing him return.

“Sabah al kheir,”
he said, in the poetic greeting that was still used in the mountains.
A morning of joy.

“Sabahan noor,”
she replied with a smile.
A morning of light.

And it was. The air was fresh and clear and invigorating, and Jalia accepted the now-familiar jolt of longing for a simpler life, slithered out of her sleeping bag, got up to stretch and yawn luxuriously.

When she recovered, he was watching her with unreadable eyes.

“Yes, you are very beautiful,” he said. His voice was a rough, possessive caress, and her flesh moved with that heavy awareness that seemed to be associated with him.

She felt fully in her body now, felt how her breasts sat against her rib cage, felt the mobility of her hips, the length of her own legs. Her skin felt every spot where the cotton of her pyjamas brushed her, felt the elastic snug around her slim waist. How her bare feet were planted on the ground, as if she drew her aliveness from the rock, as much as from the air.

She brought her arms across her breasts, her right hand clasping the opposite shoulder, the left hand under her chin, as she stood looking down at him. Unconsciously she stroked the opals with her thumb.

“Yes,” he said, taking the gesture as a protest, “and you are mine, and you do not know it. You do not wish me to say it, but I only tell the truth. You are mine. If you wear another man's ring, even if you marry him, does it change the truth? If it is the truth, nothing can change it.

“We belong together. It is better to say it. My silence was not right. I should have told you in the first moment, when I knew it. Then there would not be this engagement. The fault is mine.”

Jalia would have denied everything, if only she could have trusted herself to speak. Sensation was running over and through her, half indignation, half melting response. If she opened her mouth to speak, could she know which half would get the microphone?

The mountain man turned back to his task with the fire, and Jalia picked up her toiletry bag, towel and
clothes and slipped off up the slope to her morning scrub.

So there were going to be no reproaches over what had happened last night. Latif was, apparently, a man not inclined to sulking when he didn't get what he wanted, and as she washed in the icy little mountain stream, gasping with the shock, she thought of how it would be to have such a man for a husband.

Most of the men she dated sulked, one way or another, if they didn't get their own way. As if they had never quite got over some disappointment with their mothers.

Latif was a man who could, it seemed, accept setback as a part of life, not—as with so many of the men she knew, including Michael—as something someone had done to him.

Her father had always said the mountain men of Bagestan were a breed apart. Maybe you had to come to the mountains to get a real man. If you wanted one. Jalia didn't. Anyway, it was too late for her. To have a man like Latif as husband, she should have been here from birth, for how could she ever fit in to this culture and life, growing up the way she had in the bustle and freedom of a world-class city?

She wasn't sorry, not really. She belonged in another world, when if history had been different she might have belonged in this one, and that, too, was just life.

But a part of her, she realized as she rubbed herself down with the rough towel, trying to get warm again after her chilly dip—a little part of her was sorry to think that she would never experience Latif's real passion.

And she did wonder if she would always remember Latif's passionate proposal as the moment of wildest romantic thrill of her life. How could any Western man match it?

She dressed and returned down the slope to the evocative smell of coffee and wood smoke.

Latif had draped two round flat pieces of
naan
over the spit, and when he handed one to her it was toasted and deliciously flavoured with the fat of last night's meat it had absorbed from the spit.

She spread some goat's cheese on the bread and rolled it up for a simple, succulent breakfast.

“Where to this morning?” she asked, for something to say.

“I want to go down into the valley. It is a journey on foot, since the road has been washed out in many places. Do you want to come with me, or wait for me here?”

Jalia hesitated. “How long will it take?”

“If I go alone, a few hours. If you come with me, longer.”

Maybe it was his arrogant assumption that she would slow him down, or maybe just a reluctance to sit here doing nothing, she wasn't sure. But with a little flick of her head that made him smile, Jalia opted to accompany him.