“I was starting to get queasy…thought it was a sign of-of…”
He turned her face to his, stemmed the rest of her projection in his mouth, his growl reverberating inside her.
Her consciousness was slipping away when he wrenched his lips from hers and heaved them both out of the water. “Enough. Any more heat and you’ll faint from heatstroke.”
She shuddered hard as the cooler air hit her. He tightened his hold around her as he stepped out of the pool and strode to the middle chamber. She lay limply in his arms, her head cushioned by his muscles, her bleary eyes taking in a raised marble platform of purest white right below the center of the fenestrated dome. It seemed to glow in the unearthly illumination. Or maybe her vision was all fuzzy. Whatever it was, it felt like a continuation of her journey into the dream.
Images invaded her mind, her nerve endings, of Shehab, naked, lying face down on the marble as steam swirled around his magnificent body, his muscles glistening, their tautness after a grueling day’s negotiations relaxing under her hands, all hers to caress and cosset, to tease and taste.
He put her on the platform as if he were placing a priceless work of art on a pedestal, and her imagination made a sharp turn to him rising from his surrender to her pampering, yanking her to his slick, hot flesh, letting her feel what she’d done to him before laying her down on the marble…
The sequence shattered as her sweltering skin touched the cool marble for real. He leaned over her, one arm at the back of her thighs, the other at her upper back, his face flushed to copper, drenched in sweat, clenched in anxiety as he seemed to count her breaths. “How are you feeling now, ya galbi?”
She gulped around the thick, dry thing that used to be her tongue. “Thirsty.”
He let out some expletive in Arabic, some self-abuse by the look on his face, laid her down completely before streaking away. She turned a head that felt filled with seawater, saw him disappear into his bedroom. He seemed to reappear at once, carrying two bottles and two glasses. He filled each glass from a bottle, scooped her up, put the first glass to her lips and his lips to her temple. “Drink, ya galbi.”
She did, and with every gulp of cool water felt every cell surging with clarity and energy once more.
After the second glass of water, he gave her the other drink. She sampled it, winced at the sourness of the first sip, before she fully tasted its richness, the complexity of flavors. She drank it all down thirstily, moaning her enjoyment.
As she began the second glassful she asked, “What’s this?”
“It’s a special cocktail of mine, one I use after extreme workouts, a mixture of hibiscus, carob, sugar cane, pomegranate and a few desert fruits, mostly daum and hab’bel azeez.”
“It’s amazing. An elixir.” She finished the second glass. “Feels like all the vital stuff I lost from sweating gallons is back in residence. In other news, I can feel my back again, so the anesthetic must have worn off. But since I feel no pain and I guess this is me thinking straight again, it seems your trying to make soup out of me worked.” He winced, still anxious as his eyes roamed over her. She leaned back in his embrace, her hand following the slash of his cheekbone lovingly. “I’m fine now. You saved me.”
He turned his lips into her palm, planted a hot, shuddering kiss. “Only because you saved me.”
“But I didn’t. It turned out there was no real danger.”
“There was. It might not be fatal, but the pain can be incapacitating, and the poison is disorienting. And then you didn’t know that was the extent of the danger when you took the sting. Ya Ullah-that you did that, endangered yourself for me…”
Something painful thrummed inside her chest at the agonized look in his eyes. She didn’t want him to feel bad about it. She never wanted him to feel bad about anything for a second.
She caught his face in her hands. “You would have done the same for me. And it was better me than you. There was no way I could have gotten you out of the water. Seems through my mess of half-learned knowledge and panic, I made a decision that turned out to be rational, volunteering as the victim of choice.”
His grated his teeth. “And you’re never going to do something like that again. Swear it to me now. You’ll never put yourself at risk. Not for anyone or anything.”
His intensity shook her. She’d already acknowledged the inescapability of loving him, but she had to cling to a bit of herself, unsurrendered to him. Otherwise she wouldn’t know how to exist when it was over.
Escaping both his fervor and her thoughts, she pretended lightness. “I never swear. Dad drilled that into me.” At his aggrieved glance at her deliberate misinterpretation, she rushed on, “And then, all’s well that ends well, OK? I may have ruined our dive, but think of it this way. I managed to arm you with one more adventure on this island. Now how about we concentrate on important stuff? Like the fact that you have your own honest-to-goodness Turkish bath? This is the steam room, right?”
His eyebrows dipped at her obvious sidetracking maneuver. “The hararet, yes. A Turkish word that comes from the Arabic hararah, or heat. You’re distracting me, right?”
Her smile was tremulous and entreating. “Is it working?”
His hold tightened from solicitous to possessive, his gaze melting from aggravated to devouring. “You need only to breathe, to exist, to distract me, to be the one thing I can think of. Don’t you know that by now?”
Suddenly her body filled with a spike of longing beyond her endurance. “All I know is, when I was disoriented, I could only think that even though every moment we’ve had together has been the best thing that has ever happened to me, I still felt incomplete because you didn’t…because we didn’t…and that it was now too late.”
Farah’s words ripped through Shehab like shrapnel, tore away the barrier he’d erected to suspend thought until she was safe.
And the enormity of what she’d done sank through him.
She’d put herself between him and mortal danger.
He’d never thought such a sacrifice possible from someone other than his brothers, Farooq and Kamal, or bodyguards who made their livelihoods selling their bodies as shields. He’d never even expected that any of the people who populated his life, in permanence or transit, would sacrifice a measure of their well-being for him. And for Farah to offer the ultimate sacrifice, her very life for his, was beyond comprehension. Beyond endurance.