‘This is Qusay. It is safe for women here.’
‘There are still strangers. Tourists.’
Ridiculous! There was no one else here in this remote corner of their country. The roads were too basic, the infrastructure negligible, and the closest this part of the coast had to a tourist resort were the tiny villages that scraped an existence from the sea and he knew it. But there was a better way of showing how flawed his argument was. ‘Are not you a tourist yourself? Should I then be fearful of you?’
His intake of air was audible, and his already gravel-rich voice deepened. ‘I am Qusani, born and bred.’
‘But you don’t live here. You’re only here until Kareef is crowned, and then you’ll return to your home halfway around the world. That makes you little more than a tourist. And, based on your own assertion, that makes you someone I should be wary of. Given the way you snatched up my abaya so I could not cover my body, I’d say you were right.’
He grabbed her arm, his fingers like a manacle around her, wheeling her around. Her eyes widened with something that looked more like fear than the surprise he’d anticipated. Only there was no time to try to work out why—not when he had a point to make. ‘I am not a tourist! What the hell is wrong with you? I am Prince of Qusay.’
She blinked, and when she reopened her eyes the fear had gone, but there was a brightness there that he hadn’t noticed before. A life force that had been missing. ‘So they say,’ she whispered, soft as the silken sands on which they stood. ‘But are you really? Why is it that you cannot even look like a prince of Qusay?’ She waved her free hand towards him. ‘Look at what you wear. Armani suits. Cotton shirts with collars. This is not the Qusani way. Why do you insist on turning your back on your heritage if you are so proud to be Qusani?’
‘Because this is not my home!’
And she smiled, and thanked the force that had released her from having to hold her tongue every second of every day, even if that force had a little too much to do with Rafiq’s unwanted kiss.
‘Exactly my point. A tourist. In which case, I’d better get back to camp before I put myself in any more danger.’
Breathless and heady, she jerked her arm out of his hand and strode off down the beach, expecting any moment for him to run after her and grab her again, to show her how wrong she was. But there was no thud of footsteps across the sand behind her and no iron-fingered clasp to stop her.
Rafiq watched her walk away, wanting to growl, wanting to argue, wanting to protest. A tourist she’d likened him to. A mere holidaymaker who had no right to be here in Qusay.
Yet those protests died, his words stymied, as he remembered. She’d smiled. Maybe at him rather than with him, but she’d actually smiled. And didn’t that turn his growl of irritation into a growl of something infinitely more satisfying?
He turned to watch her go, hypnotised by the sway of her hips under the abaya that now clung to her sea-moistened curves. Curves that he had seen in close proximity. Curves that he had ached to reach his hands out to—curves he could have reached out for if only they hadn’t been filled with the fabric of her dress.
A siren he’d thought her before. A sea witch who lured men to their deaths.
Maybe so—but not before he’d had her first.
She was lucky to have escaped him this time. Even now he should be tumbling her down on the soft sand, rolling her under him, instead of watching her march alone up the beach like a victor.
But then she’d changed. He snatched up the sandals he’d left where he’d sat waiting for her, meaning to turn and follow Sera, but stopped, dropping down onto the sand instead, wondering at this new revelation.
She had changed. The woman he’d seen outside his mother’s apartments—the woman who’d refused to look at him let alone speak to him, the woman whose eyes were bleak and filled with despair, the woman he’d barely recognised as the Sera he’d known—was gone.
A new Sera seemed to have taken her place. Not his old Sera, for the Sera he remembered had been sweet and filled with light and laughter. The Sera who was emerging from that bleak shell was different. Tougher underneath. And yet with such an air of fragility, as if at any moment she might shatter into a thousand pieces. But at last she’d smiled.
A tourist, she’d called him, challenging him to deny it, refusing to accept his arguments when he had offered them.
Was that how he was seen? Rafiq the tourist prince?
The idea grated, even as he could see some kind of case for it. For what thought had he really given to Qusay? No more than he’d ever given it before—it was the island of his birth, and the place that had let him down. The place he’d ultimately turned his back on. He hadn’t considered what it would mean to be its prince, even while his own brother was about to be crowned.