“Are your men all right?” Tally finally dared to ask as she spotted tents ahead, sand piled high against the sides. “The sandstorm won’t have hurt them?”
“They’re fine,” he said curtly, reining his horse in. “You’re the one in danger.”
Men surged around them as they dismounted and Tair brusquely answered several of the men even as he hauled her through the crowd to his tent.
In his tent he thrust her down onto the low chair that faced a simple desk.
“Have you lost your mind?” he roared, planting himself before her, hands on his hips. “What do you think you were doing?”
Tally clenched her hands in her lap. “Running away!”
“It was stupid.”
“Keeping me here is worse.”
“No. Keeping you here is keeping you safe. And I won’t have you running off, putting yourself in danger, making my men chase after you. It’s time you learned to stay put. Act like a woman your age.”
“Why do you keep bringing up my age?”
“Because you’re not a child. You’re a woman of childbearing age—”
“Leave my age out of it!”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? It’s none of your business. Nothing I do is any of your business.”
“You’re wrong about that. Everything you do in my country is my business.” He pulled up a second low stool and sat down directly in front of her, but even sitting he was a full head and shoulders taller, and even sitting he towered over her. “And where were you going anyway?”
She tried to rock back on her chair hating his close proximity. With his dark hair coated with grit and sand, and sand in his black eyebrows he looked wild. Instead of a pirate on a ship, he was a pirate of the desert. “To get help,” she answered coldly.
“Help?”
“Police, or protection—”
“Protection from who?” he roared.
“You!”
He threw up his hands. “I protect you. I saved you from the rebels. I saved you from violent people.”
“I’m sorry, Tair, but you’re the only dangerous man I’ve met in Northern Africa!”
He made a rough sound of disgust. “And just who is going to give you this protection from me?”
“The government of Ouaha.”
“The government,” he repeated, giving her a look she couldn’t decipher even as he shook his head. “I am the government.”
She didn’t like the look in his eye or the smugness at his mouth. “You’re chief of the desert.”
“Yes.”
“But surely there is someone else higher than you…someone with more authority.”
He just looked at her.
Tally’s heart and stomach seemed to be in direct collision and it made her very very nauseous. “Isn’t there a sultan of Ouaha? A king? Someone higher than a sheikh?”
If he heard the panic in her voice he gave no indication. “There is one that holds the title Sultan of Ouaha, but he isn’t one of our people. He is a Berber sheikh from Baraka and he and his family have befriended Ouaha, but they have no power here.”
“But you do answer to him?”
“I answer to no one.”
Reason, not emotion, reason, not emotion she chanted to herself but it wasn’t helping. “But if I went to him, this Sultan who is Barakan, he would help me, wouldn’t he? He would free me. He wouldn’t allow you to keep me, an American woman, hostage here.”
“First, you will not be able to speak to Sheikh Nuri as he lives in London and you don’t have the means to get there. And second, even if you should speak to him, he wouldn’t go against my wishes. We have fought too many wars together, protected each other’s backs too many times. He trusts my judgment. I trust his.”
“So how long do you intend to keep me here?”
Tair shrugged. “Forever?”
“You’re going to feed and clothe me forever? Very generous of you.”
He shrugged again. “Not that generous. You might not live very long. The desert is a dangerous place.”
“A threat?”
“I don’t threaten. No need. My word here is law. Anything I want, I get.”
“Must feel pretty wonderful.”
The corner of his mouth lifted ever so slightly and yet his gaze remained just as flat, hard, unfriendly. “It’s not a boast. Just a fact.”
“So what exactly do you do? What are the job descriptions of a sheikh?”