They hadn’t looked cold before.
He’d held her in his arms and looked down at her and her heart had skipped a beat. For his blue eyes had simmered with heat, a boiling spring steaming with desire, a summer storm that promised lightning set to rent the sky in two. And then his desperate eyes had found her mouth and her trembling had changed direction. She had trembled not from the shock of the near disaster; she had trembled from the shock of knowing he wanted her.
And from the shock of wanting him.
Her hands twisted into knots in her lap. She must be crazy to even think it.
And yet there had been no mistaking Rafiq’s desire. She had witnessed the need in his storm-tossed eyes. And while it had shocked her, and sent her trembling anew, she could not deny that the knowledge had secretly thrilled her, even while it had terrified her.
Rafiq still wanting her?
It was beyond comprehension. Beyond belief.
Even his kiss made no sense. For his kiss, when it had come, as his turbulent eyes had promised it must, had been nothing like the tender kisses they’d exchanged in their youth. This kiss had been ruthless and hard, savage in its intent, almost as if he’d wanted to punish her, and yet still it had brought with it an awakening of her senses, an unfurling of emotions and passions that she’d been long since denied.
Had long since denied herself.
A kiss so momentous it had reawakened both her heart and her soul.
But at what cost?
Her hands twisted and retwisted while she sat patiently, an expression of the turmoil going on inside herself, until the driver pronounced his work done. A graze and a bruise was the only visible external damage, but he gave her a warning to let him know if her pain worsened.
Could her pain worsen? Surely it wasn’t possible. For this pain she felt now, the pain uppermost and foremost in her mind, was not just the mere throb of a temple; this pain was akin to the intense sting of a numbed limb whose blood supply had been cut off and then suddenly resumed, whose numb flesh had reawakened to the stabbing pins and needles of sensation as the flow returned.
Except that pain did not normally last longer than a minute or two, and this was not some arm or leg that felt the pain of sensation returning.
This was her heart.
Their party made camp where the desert track met the sea. The sun was already low on its downward track towards the water, a fireball already sinking, almost extinguished, and the mountains that were their goal loomed dark and threatening before them.
Rafiq had not been happy, but there was nothing else for it. In the light of the advice from the travellers at the oasis, and supported by his drivers, Rafiq had agreed that they had lost too much time today, and that the path up to Marrash would be too treacherous in the dark. They would camp by the coast.
And while he didn’t say it outright, while the drivers remained silent on the subject, Sera knew he held her responsible. Knew that he was angry.
For, when once his eyes had all but demanded her attention, he’d been avoiding her ever since the accident, ensuring he sat in the front with one driver while she sat in the back seat with the other, guaranteeing they wouldn’t have to share the same seat or inadvertently make eye contact. Guaranteeing he wouldn’t have to so much as look at her.
Even now, while the camp buzzed with activity around them, while a meal was prepared and the final touches put to the tents that would house them tonight, he kept his distance, leaving her to her own devices.
How could he make any plainer the fact that he regretted their kiss? And how could he have better shown his contempt for her but to bend her to his will and then drop her cold?
Which didn’t make forgetting it any easier for her.
For his taste lingered on her lips.
And the memory of the touch of his fingers raking through her hair while his mouth had plundered hers still set her scalp to tingling. How was she expected to just forget those sensations? That kiss had awakened something inside her. A yearning. Long-forgotten feelings.
She swallowed, squeezed her eyes shut, and wished she could so easily shut out the tangle of unwanted emotions. Because she didn’t want to feel. She had taught herself long ago not to feel. It was the only way she’d been able to close out the revulsion. The disgust.
And yet his kiss had brought feeling back, sharp and prickling and uncomfortable.
Later, after a meal heavy with silence, she wandered alone along the long sweep of sandy beach, the caw of gulls and the foaming crash of the waves and the sea-softened wind that toyed with her hair her only companions.
Her feet left imprints in the damp sand, footprints the next incoming swoosh of wave wiped away, as if she’d never walked that way.
On and on she walked, until the lure of the beckoning sea became too much, and she stopped and decided she was far enough away from the camp. She walked higher up the shore, to where the foaming waves would not reach, and stood there, contemplating the endless sea, shimmering silver under the moon’s pearlescent glow.