Sheikh's Castaway (8 page)

He was nearly certain that the island they were on was the most remote of the Gulf Islands, a straggler at the very tip of the chain, called Solomon's Foot. If so, it was well out of the way of any major shipping lanes. And all small-boat traffic among the islands had ended with the evacuations. The only vessels visiting the is
lands now were the dhows and ferries that supplied the Gulf Eden Resort. Their route would bring them nowhere near this island.

If the proverb were true—if the truth of her would be revealed in adversity—what better opportunity for it could he ask than this? To be alone with her, in a place where they would be utterly dependent on themselves and each other. For everything. Food, shelter, companionship, security…pleasure.

And if she did have a heart, what better opportunity could he hope to find for learning whether it could ever be his? There was another saying among the men in his family:
a man opens a woman's heart by repeated knocking at the door of the womb.
It was a reminder that sexual prowess is any lover's most powerful asset.

The moon climbed higher in the sky, white and pure and unshockable, as Bari made his plans.

N
oor awoke as those who live in the natural world have done since humankind's beginning—with the rising of the sun. It came up out of the sea like a knot of molten gold serpents, flaming and twisting against the blushing sky.

Bari was standing looking out over the water.

“Awake?” he murmured as she stirred and lay watching the spectacular unfoldment of the first scene in the drama of the day. Birdsong rippled over them from the forest.

Noor yawned and leaned up on one elbow. “Who could sleep through this!” She dragged the makeshift mosquito net down and moved to sit up, then winced and moved more carefully. Every muscle seemed to have taken a beating.

“Oooh,” she groaned weakly. “I think I need a chiropractor. Everything feels out of place.”

Bari watched as she lifted one arm to admire an
angry bruise. “There will be something for that in the first aid kit.”

Noor nodded and got to her feet. “At least it won't be permanently disfiguring.”

She stretched gingerly. In spite of everything it was invigorating to spend a night in the open when the air was so fresh. She tried an experimental bit of jogging on the spot. Nothing hurt too, too much. She'd actually felt worse after days when her personal trainer had been in a mean mood.

“I don't know how I'm going to manage my workout,” she murmured thoughtfully. Without her gym equipment, how would she get the kinks out?

Suddenly she noticed the expression on Bari's face. “What's your problem?” she challenged him.

He shook his head, laughing. “Not a word, Princess. Would you like a drink?”

In instant answer, Noor's stomach growled, and she discovered she was ravenous.

“My God, so this is hunger!”

Bari collected the water jug from the raft and measured out a small amount for her in the plastic cup.

She swirled the rainwater around on her tongue. How weird it tasted! As if no taste at all could result in a bad taste. She looked into Bari's amused eyes and decided not to share that little experience with him.

“I'm starved. Let's eat!”

“It will be best to forage before the day gets hot,” he agreed. “Afterwards we must—”

“Forage?” she repeated blankly. “What are you talking about?”

His eyes opened with a look that made her want to hit him. “About going to hunt for something to eat. Isn't that what you said?”

Noor laughed in merry disbelief. “Oh, sure! A little stroll down to Cocoa's for some skinny latte and a fat-free muffin!”

“We won't know how difficult it is until we try.” He took an equal measure of water himself and tossed it off in one mouthful, then glanced up at the sun now making a fiery ascent up the cobalt-blue sky. “We should start now. It will get hot quickly.”

“You have to be joking! What am I supposed to do—pick berries into a palm leaf?”

“Unless you have more aggressive survival skills.”

“Is
that
what you call it!”

Bari looked at her in frowning, silent consideration for a moment. Then he half smiled.

“Noor, this is not a joke. How are you proposing to eat until rescue arrives?”

“We've got rations. I saw them.” She knew he knew they were there, so what was his game?

He stood in front of her in an easy pose, his feet firmly at home in the soft grey-white sand, his arms crossed over his chest, the little plastic glass dangling from one finger. His silk jacket was creased and stained, and so were the white trousers, but he still had the proud, unmistakable bearing of a Cup Companion.

It had always thrilled her before. Now it seemed to be turned against her, and she found the condescending reproof of his nod seriously irritating.

“Yes, a very few rations were in the plane's grab bag. We must save them for emergencies, however. I am sorry, but with a little luck—”

“This feels like an emergency to me,” Noor interrupted stiffly. “I'm starved!”

“Nothing like appetite for sharpening the hunter-gatherer instinct,” Bari said, in the manner of a tolerant
drill sergeant with a lazy new recruit. He turned and put the water back into the life raft, and closed the Velcro fastenings. Then he turned. “Come.”

“I don't have any shoes, or have you forgotten? Or clothes.”

He looked down at his own bare feet, and then at her, with an expression on his face that irritated her royally, and took her wrist in a strong, careless, but unmistakably autocratic hold.

“Your feet will soon toughen up.”

“I don't want my feet to ‘toughen up'!” She was sure that he was playing a game. She dug her heels into the sand, pulling her hand from the firm clasp of his own. “And I'm not going hunting barefoot and in my underwear!”

A sudden peal of birdsong underlined the silence.

Bari rested an assessing gaze on her. “What, then? Do you prefer to go hungry?”

“Can't you bring me back something?” she demanded. “You're the big, strong primitive male, after all! You're the one with the ceremonial sword!”

Some change in him made her shift uncomfortably. But really, it was ridiculous! What was she supposed to do half-naked, shoeless and weaponless, in a forest?

“By tradition, yes, I should be your protector,” he said. “But yesterday you rejected tradition, and you rejected me. I am nothing to you now, and you—” his eyes narrowed “—you are nothing to me, Noor. You can't run from me one day and demand my protection the next. If you want breakfast, you will have to help find it.”

She knew she was on dangerous ground, but unaccustomed hunger was making her mulish. “I have found it! It's in those neat little plastic packs of emergency rations over there in the raft! And that's all the hunting-gathering I'm going to do this morning, thanks!”

She stepped forward, but his hand on her shoulder, very firm now, stopped her.

“I think we have already established that in a battle between brains and brawn, brawn inevitably wins. Do you care to put it to the test one more time?”

She looked at him and saw nothing but implacable determination. His eyes were the colour of volcanic lava—the surface black, but with lines of glowing light hinting at a fierce, banked heat within. Was it her imagination, or was that red-gold line of fracture a little wider now?

She used to imagine that what she saw was a deep dynamo of passion—but he had been faking that. What was the source, then, of that half compelling, half dangerous heat?

She was convinced that the man who had yesterday been prepared to marry her would now watch her starve without a flicker of conscience. Noor could just imagine him taking pleasure from eating his bloody kill in front of her without offering her a morsel. Yet the Bari she had known until yesterday—thought she had known—would have acted very differently in these circumstances.

That curious sense of two time streams brushed her again. Suppose she had married Bari, and suppose they had taken off for their honeymoon and been brought down by the storm, ending up here, exactly where they were. How would he be treating her now?

She laughed aloud. “You know, all things considered, I'm pretty lucky! It's not very nice learning that a man's a monster, but it could be a lot worse, couldn't it? I could be discovering right now that I was
married
to a monster!”

“A man protects his wife,” he contradicted her in a gravelly voice. “You are not my wife, by your own choice. Why does that make me a monster?”

Something like regret reached for her, but she shook herself out of its stealthy grip, bent to toss aside the gold foil sheet, picked up the rectangle of white silk she had slept on last night, and wrapped it around herself. It didn't offer much more actual protection than the skimpy teddy underneath, but psychologically, just here and just now, it was almost as good as putting on armour.

She pulled the knot of her makeshift sarong tight above her breast, staring at him as she did so.

With an arrogant blink that was his excuse for a nod, Bari turned and went over to the beached raft again, bending to search inside. When he straightened, he was tucking the knife into his waistband.

“Not packing the ancestral sword today?” Noor commented brightly.

“It is a battle sword,” Bari told her softly. “It would be sullied by the blood of the hunt.” She wasn't sure if he was joking, or speaking for effect, or telling the simple truth.

“Common sense somehow suggests,” she remarked sweetly, “that a hunter has to get a lot closer to his prey with a knife than with a three-foot blade, but I'm not going to argue with the great warrior!”

“It would be a waste of time, and you are hungry,” he agreed pleasantly. Noor stifled her reaction to that, except for the flashing glance that bounced right off him.

He led her along the beach towards the rocks and the higher ground at the southern tip. He wanted to measure out the island, get more of an idea of where they were, before he risked a trek in among the trees.

It was a beautiful walk along the increasingly rocky beach in the morning sunlight, with birdsong coming from a forest that was much more extensive than it had appeared—a giant oasis.

Noor resolutely refused to voice her surprise. But Bari answered the unspoken question.

“The islands, like the coastal regions of the Barakat Emirates and, to a lesser extent, Bagestan, are very fertile,” he explained. “Even after thirty years of Ghasib's mismanagement. Several herbs that grow only here are known for their healing properties and used to be exported to the mainland by the islanders.”

Reluctant laughter burst from her. “I thought that was just my parents' fantasy of the old country! They always said it was the Garden of Eden.”

“There is good rainfall here, probably the same climate that covered a much larger area in antiquity. Some geophysical archaeologists suggest that a huge area—from the Mediterranean to the mountains of Parvan—once was as lush as this tiny area of the gulf. But catastrophic climate change affected the rainfall and, bit by bit, turned the once-fertile land into desert.”

She was tacitly agreeing to a truce, perhaps because the nature of their expedition made them both feel they should be united. Exploring an unknown world, however benign it might prove, made comrades of them.

“No one knows why this tiny area escaped the march of the desert. The prolonged drought in Bagestan has raised fears that the process of desertification may even be starting again. But for the moment, we live in the last corner of the paradise that Adam and Eve knew.”

Paradise. Alone in paradise with Bari al Khalid.

I don't think so!
Noor told herself dryly.

The black rock, when they began to climb, wasn't as hard on her bare feet as Noor had feared. It was smoother than she had guessed from a distance, a little glassy, as if, perhaps, from a long-distant volcanic erup
tion. And she supposed it was exercise of a sort, if not as regimented as her workout.

“This rock is mysterious in origin,” Bari continued in tour-guide mode. “It exists in the Gulf of Barakat and nowhere else on the planet. Experts argue as to its origins. There is little agreement.”

They found a trail, narrow but freshly used, as they climbed higher.

“Do you think there's someone living here after all?” Noor asked, a little breathless with exertion and hope.

Bari shrugged.

“If so, they have arrived only recently. After Ghasib leased the development rights for all the islands to the Gulf Eden Resort chain a couple of years ago, the inhabitants of the islands were forcefully evacuated, and their homes and villages destroyed. The developers planned to create an isolated luxury resort for tourists.”

“It was a big story at home,” Noor remembered. “People were so outraged.”

“Yes, an international outcry delayed the development, and now the Sultan is under pressure to turn the islands into a wildlife sanctuary. But the evacuees have to be considered. Many had lived on the islands for generations. Since the Return, some have been trying to reestablish their homes on the islands.”

Noor looked hopefully around for signs of human occupation. People meant boats. Boats meant getting away from her ex-husband-to-be and his insistence on a return to stone-age living.

Bari knelt to examine some spoor. “Sorry,” he told her dryly, as if her face had been too revealing. “This path has been created by animals. Goats, possibly.”

“Not my lucky day, then,” said Noor sharply.

They couldn't climb very high—the slope was too
steep. When they had got as high as they could, accompanied by the screech of seagulls wheeling and banking around the stony peak, they stopped to get their bearings.

The island, a small, somewhat squashed oval, was lying roughly northeast-southwest. It was generally flat, except at the southern tip, where it pushed upward into a peak of rugged black rock.

It was a breathtaking sight. At their backs the peak seemed slightly concave, a petrified wave arcing over them. They stood in the lee, just where the vegetation lost its hold. Below they could see the goat track they had been following trace the curve of the hillside and then lead down to the forested slope below.

White sand beach curved around more than half of the oval. The southern third, under the peak, was black rock. On the opposite side to the beach where they had landed was a reedy area which Bari said was a mudflat. Within the protection of the rocky peak nestled a green paradise of trees, birds and flowers. The sound of water told them there must be a stream nearby, and down below, a regular break in the rich greenery indicated its path.

A brightly coloured bird shrieked and flapped up towards the sun before tucking its wings and diving back down in among the trees.

Bari suddenly pointed to a spot at about their eye level. After a moment she saw it, a large bird, its wings outspread, riding the currents.