No, she thought, and briefly revisited the idea of refusing to leave.
But instead, she undid her seatbelt and got to her feet. ‘Yes.’ She nodded.
‘Good,’ he said coolly.
He stared down at her. For a moment she thought he was going to take her hand, or perhaps her arm, and she was suddenly and acutely conscious of the rise and fall of her breath. But he didn’t move.
She felt her belly clench, the muscles quivering. He didn’t need to. He never had. Just being close to him made her feel hot and tight and restless, as if she had been out in the sun too long.
‘Shall we get this over and done with?’ she said abruptly.
She got to her feet and, stepping outside, stared dazedly at the glowing orange sun sinking beneath the horizon. Right about now in Creech Falls she would have been rubbing sleep from her eyes and rolling out of bed, and her body was still working on Pacific Standard Time. But that wasn’t what made her steady herself against the handrail.
It had been hot in Idaho, but this was like stepping into a solid wall of heat. It was a tangible force that pushed back against her body, then swallowed her up. She could already feel her light cotton blouse sticking to her skin.
‘It gets a lot hotter during the day. You’ll need to take care outside.’
Omar was standing beside her. In the final flickering rays of the sun he looked like a bronze statue of some desert warrior king, not sweating, but shimmering in the heat.
Instantly, she felt hotter and stickier, and grumpier. ‘Sweet of you to worry,’ she said, focusing her temper on his handsome face. ‘But I don’t think it will be a problem. I’m sure they’ll have sun canopies at the hotel.’
Omar had told her that she would be staying at the Lulua and, having looked it up on the flight, she knew that all the jaw-droppingly expensive suites there came with their own private terrace and infinity pool, so there would be no reason to leave.
He stared at her in silence meditatively. Then, ‘If you say so.’ He gestured to the steps. ‘After you.’
On the runway below a limousine was parked between three SUVs, all with blacked-out windows. Four men wearing dark suits and traditional ghutras stood next to the driver’s door of each car. Two other men, each roughly the size of a professional wrestler, waited on either side of the limousine, scanning the empty runway with thousand-yard stares.
She stilled, her body stiffening like an animal sensing a trap. She had grown up surrounded by wealth, but security at her father’s estate had been low-key. In New York, Omar preferred a more obvious presence. But this felt almost theatrically excessive.
‘My father sent them,’ Omar said quietly. ‘I know it feels a little over the top, but it’s just how he likes things done.’
Which, roughly translated, meant that the wishes of Rashid Al Majid would prevail one way or another. Like father like son, she thought as they walked across the runway to the waiting cars.
Thankfully, the limousine was blissfully cool after the furnace heat outside. Omar leaned forward and said something in Arabic to the driver, and even though her nerves were still jangling with jet lag and panic she found herself admiring the way he could switch so effortlessly between languages. After a summer living and working at a polo stud in Argentina she could speak some Spanish, but nowhere near as well as Omar. And he spoke other languages too. For business reasons, he’d told her.
Her mouth thinned. What other reason could there be?
Most people worked to live. Omar lived to work. It consumed him. Even when he wasn’t working, which wasn’t often, some part of him was always thinking about work. No doubt in his dreams, he pursued CEOs across desk-strewn office landscapes in the same way the dogs on the ranch chased imaginary rabbits in their sleep.
Her dreams were different. Confused and confusing so that when she woke, she felt more anxious, less certain. She thought back to when she’d been deciding whether to go and visit her parents’ graves. It had been her first visit to England since their funerals, and in the past she had always found a reason to stay away. It hadn’t been hard: there were so many. And it had been the same this time—only then she’d discovered she was pregnant, and it had seemed like a sign. A chance to reconcile the past with a future she had never imagined having.
A flash of headlights on the side of the carriageway made her blink. She hadn’t told Omar she was pregnant. He had been away on business but it had still been a big decision to visit the graves. Omar had known that, and he had told her repeatedly that he would support her, be by her side. He had asked her to trust him—no, demanded that she trust him, and she had. Idiot that she was, she had believed he would be there for her.
But when it had come to it, his work came first. It always came first. She was just a diversion.
It had been the end of the beginning.
What had followed was the beginning of the end.
‘That’s the Burj Khalifa.’
Omar’s voice cut across the quiet murmur of the engine and the less quiet clamour of her thoughts and she glanced out of the window. She wasn’t generally that bothered about buildings. There was so much in the natural world to astonish. But now she stared in stunned silence at the illuminated needle-thin spire of metal that seemed to pierce the dark blue sky, almost touching the stars.
‘Wow,’ she said softly. ‘It’s like something out of Brave New World.’
Omar’s dark eyes rested on her face. ‘I suppose there is something courageous about taking on the desert.’
That was one word for it.