His secretary prompted him with the last words he’d dictated, enabling him to continue. When he’d finished, he gestured with his hand. “You may go.” As soon as his secretary had left, his gaze returned to the clock, and his vizier quietly entered the room.
“Ah, Naseer, it’s time, then.”
The vizier’s hooded eyes narrowed with disapproval. Zavian knew his vizier’s thoughts on his plans, but, for once, wasn’t prepared to discuss them. They were nonnegotiable. There was no way he could continue with half his mind on Gabrielle and half on running his kingdom. No, he wanted her here, and he wanted her out of his system. The reality of being with her must surely reduce his need for her, bring it back into proportion. Because if there was one thing he’d learned from his vizier, it was that familiarity bred contempt. But he didn’t require contempt. He needed only to slacken his obsession, and slake his thirst, so he didn’t need her anymore.
Zavian walked toward the door, but before he could leave, Naseer coughed. Zavian swallowed back his impatience. He respected Naseer. He’d been his father’s advisor and got the job done, and done well. But one thing he wished his vizier wasn’t, was so subtle. It made him impatient. “What is it, Naseer?” He tapped his fingers against the door handle, wanting to get going, to see the person who’d consumed his every waking and sleeping moment for the past twelve months.
“She isn’t on the flight.”
Zavian ground his teeth. He’d been precise about the contract. Nothing had been left to chance, let alone the travel arrangements. “Get that professor on the phone and demand to know why.”
Again the deceptively obsequious bow of the head—his vizier was anything but submissive. “There is no need for that.”
“Why?”
“Because I have tracked her movements. She’s traveled overland. She’s still arriving today, but by a different entry point.”
Zavian drew in a jagged breath. He’d done everything to bring her to him, and she was close now, and yet she still managed to change his plans without his knowledge. Nothing had changed. Catching Gabrielle was like trying to hold water in the palm of your hand, like trying to contain starlight on an oasis. You think you have it for a few satisfactory moments only to find that it’s left you, following a course of its own devising, leaving you all the more obsessed with retrieving it again.
“She cashed in her first-class ticket and is journeying through neighboring countries and entering through the desert border control. No doubt reminiscing about growing up with her ridiculous grandfather.”
Zavian decided to overlook his vizier’s slur on Gabrielle’s grandfather—the result of an old feud that went back far beyond Zavian’s time. Zavian had always liked Gabrielle’s grandfather. More than liked—he’d been there for Zavian when his own family hadn’t. “Take me there.”
“What is the point? She’ll be arriving at the palace later today as arranged.”
“The point is, Naseer, that I wish to see her arrive. I wish to see her walk into my country with my own eyes. I need to know she’s here.”
His vizier shook his head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Of course. As you, yourself, have said, obsessions result from a lack. I intend to make sure I have no lack, and then the obsession will ease.”
“It may not ease completely.”
“It doesn’t need to. Anything less than an obsession I can deal with, anything less than an obsession can be buried deep.”
Naseer nodded, his mouth twisting as he resisted vocalizing his doubts, which Zavian could read in his eyes. “I have a car waiting.”
As Zavian strode through the old palace, along the secret corridors constructed by his great grandfather for security, his thoughts were still of Gabrielle. He knew what she was doing. He’d made sure she had to come, and she was trying to arrive incognito, trying to resist his command. She surely couldn’t have forgotten what life was like here. How he controlled everything, just as his father had done before him, and his before him. She’d always thought she was better than him, that she could outwit him. She was an innocent still. An innocent with whom he was obsessed. But not for much longer.
It was a half-hour winding drive to the border crossing, up through the narrow mountain range which divided the high desert from the plain upon which the city lay. A cluster of palm trees indicated the site of what was once a small village centered around a well. The village was long gone, cleared by his unscrupulous great grandfather, replaced by utilitarian buildings for the border guards.
“Stop here.” They parked some distance from the other cars—one, a taxi, the others no doubt belonging to the border control officers—and watched from the shade of the palm grove. He glanced at his driver, who’d pressed his earpiece closer to his ear.
“Five minutes,” said the driver, knowing what his king required—accurate information at all times.
Zavian stepped out of the car and stood under the tree beside the oasis, filled after the recent rains. He looked out to the quiet, sun-bleached desert where nothing moved. Immediately in front of him was his own border control hut. Shimmering in the distance he could see the hut of the border control belonging to the neighboring country, Tawazun, with whom the three countries which comprised the ancient lands of Havilah hoped to unite through marriage. But Zavian had no thoughts of the Tawazun princess, with whom his marriage was being brokered at this very moment.
Between Tawazun’s border and his own was an empty no-man’s-land, broken only by the barest of tracks. This was a place where Bedouin had lived for centuries, their movements ebbing and flowing with the seasons. Trust the arrogant Gabrielle to imagine she could use the route undetected. No, Zavian reflected. Not arrogant. Gabrielle was many things, but she wasn’t arrogant. Her decision was more likely a result of a naive sentimentality.
A radio crackled with the jarring guitar riff of an American pop song, its electronic whine incongruous in the setting. His eyes watered as he concentrated on the white light of the far checkpoint. His eyes narrowed as he found what he was looking for—a swirl of sand that filled the bright blue sky and sent a jolt through his body. He sucked in the hot, dry air to calm his response to the merest suggestion of her presence.
She emerged from the shadows of the lone building to walk the five-hundred-yard stretch through no-man’s-land, the details of her form slowly becoming visible beneath the moving cloud of sand. She was wearing a full-length gray abaya with a long scarf around her head, which the desert breeze lifted until it became one with the cloud of sand which punctuated each step. Finally, she stopped to speak to border control, her hand pressed to her chest, trying to keep her scarf in place while presenting her passport documents.
She could have been anyone. Large sunglasses covered her eyes, and her robes were cheap, the sort a common Bedouin woman in the market might have worn. She wanted to pass unnoticed. She’d failed. There was nothing about her movements, or figure, that would ever allow her to pass unnoticed, not to his eyes anyway. She had a grace, a swaying feminine gait, which was entirely her own, altogether seductive, even if she was completely unaware of it. It was natural, he knew that much. Undesigned. And he felt it all the more keenly because of it.
The land through which she’d just walked was stony and barren—a fitting entry—belonging not to one nation or another, displaced, just like she’d always been. He turned his back on her and returned to the car. He nodded to his driver, and the car purred into motion, leaving behind the lone woman as she re-entered his country. He glanced into the wing mirror and saw a long strand of blonde hair fly out of her abaya, teased by the wind, as she turned at the sound of his car leaving. He remembered the texture of her hair, like silk. He rubbed his fingers together as if reliving the feel of it between his fingertips. He swallowed and looked away.
Gabrielle was beginningto regret her impulsive desire to enter Gharb Havilah from the desert. Somehow she’d forgotten the intensity of the heat. Even the short walk between countries, through no-man’s-land, had been challenging, the heat scorching her throat, the wind drying her eyes. She’d forgotten how inhospitable the desert was, how alien, how unforgiving to the people who made their home there. But more than that, she’d forgotten how much she loved it—not in an intellectual way, but at a deep visceral level which clawed at her gut. Its beauty wasn’t picture postcard perfect but as raw and uncompromising as its ruler.