The bottom line was she’d been crazy to prolong her torment.
She’d long acknowledged she’d fallen in love with Malek during those first few hours, but extending her knowledge of him, prolonging the exposure, the glorious interaction, deepening the soul-deep bond had been an act of sheer lunacy.
She’d had a chance of surviving without him before those weeks. She’d thrown it away.
She stood staring sightlessly as the Jeeps made their way down the mountain, numb, burning despair seeping into her as she made the decision to walk away, today.
Suddenly she was distracted as if from the depths of a nightmare as one of their Jeeps lurched as the ground beneath it gave way. The driver tried to veer off the collapsing slice of mountain, failed and tilted sideways, over and over and over down the ravine leading to where they were.
The moment it crashed a dozen hundred feet away, chaos erupted. Screams, dozens of people running towards the crash, Malek ahead of everyone, his shouts drowning everyone else’s with orders and directions, his speed outstripping them all.
She was running, too, her mind streaking ahead.
Get emergency bag. Prepare for the worst. Take charge. This is your turf.
She came back from fetching her bag to see Malek on top of the Jeep, sending everyone running back to fetch all they’d need to extract their people from the crumpled mess. She got nearer, her eyes riveted on him as he knocked in the remainder of the windshield to get to the injured inside. And then she saw it.
A boulder rolling down the mountain, right at him.
White noise exploded inside her skull, flooded her limbs with the power of desperation. She dimly felt she’d fly, as she needed to, to reach him, to shield him.
Then she did reach him, shielded him.
That knowledge and the detonation of all-encompassing pain were the last things she registered.
Malek heard the uproar rising again over the strident panting filling his ears. The sheer panic congealing his blood told him it was about Jay.
He wrenched around, saw it all at once.
Jay streaking towards him, her face a panicked, manic mask. The boulder he wouldn’t be able to outrun. Janaan stopping in its path up the slope. The boulder hitting her with the speed of a racing car, knocking her down and rolling right on top of her before it hit the Jeep, its momentum almost spent. Spent against Janaan’s body. Her body.
And suddenly he was flying, swooping down on her, her name an endless roar erupting from his chest, pouring from his eyes. Janaan.
Lying there broken. Because of him. And he wouldn’t be able to reach her. Like he hadn’t been able to reach Majd.
“Sheikh Malek.”
He heard the shouted admonition. Felt the strong hands trying to snatch him back from the precipice of madness.
“Sheikh Malek, she needs you now. She needs you.”
Saeed. His right hand. Right now, his right mind. He’d just said the only thing that could wrench him out of the vortex of despair, the incapacitation of horror and guilt.
Janaan needed him. He couldn’t afford to lose his mind, or have a stroke. He’d succumb to either, or both, only when he’d taken care of her, when he’d saved her.
“Sheikh Malek, we can take care of her from here …”
His roared “No!” silenced whomever had dared suggest anyone but he would care for her. Only he would fight for her. No one else. Ever.
He reached a quaking hand to her carotid. She was alive.
He knelt over her, kissed her all over her swelling face, mixed his tears with her blood, murmured his pledge, “I’m here, ya habibati. I will never leave you. Never.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JANAAN WOKE UP in heaven.
She’d woken up many times before. Hazy, distorted times, in the mobile surgery unit’s IC, in a different and far larger IC, in a hospital bed somewhere huge, ultra-modern and soothingly lit. The only constant she was sure she saw was Malek. In her delirium, in her episodes of distressing semi-wakefulness. Pouring caring, healing and love over her. He looked so haggard, so stricken, she wept. She couldn’t see him this way.
She thought there was a stretch of time, the last she remembered, when she had been awake and talking. To him, to Hessuh, Saeed and Rafeeq. She remembered it as if she were remembering a half-forgotten movie. As if it hadn’t been her sitting in that hospital bed. She remembered she’d wondered why she was there.
Now, as she opened her eyes to find herself draped in an ethereal cocoon of gossamer curtains cascading from a golden frame, and felt herself drowning in the luxurious depths of sheerest white and softest cotton, drenched in nerve-tingling spicy scents, warmth and mellow sunlight, she remembered why.
She’d hurtled into the path of a thundering boulder.
Judging by the persistent IC themes, it must have shattered her. Judging by Malek’s constant presence, it must have been him who’d put her back together.
“I will have to lock you up.”
Malek. His voice as dark and haggard as she remembered he’d looked in her delirium.
She twisted around, homing in on it. She found him two feet away on the other side of the gigantic bed, sprawled in a huge, high-backed armchair, his legs wide apart.
Through the gauzy curtain she saw he was wearing an abaya, white and embroidered with gold all along its opposing openings.
It was the first time she’d seen him in traditional garb. He looked regal, overwhelming in anything, but in this, he was. Whoa. He was just … just … Whoa.
This was what he was born to wear. Her incomparable prince of the desert.
He stood up in one of those flowing moves that never ceased to stun her, with him being so big and tall, and the abaya fell open. And she had her first unhindered view of his body.
She should have known that all the fantasies that had tormented her in endless nights of deprivation would be nothing to his reality. It had been merciful she hadn’t had enough imagination to do him justice.
She didn’t need imagination now. Would never need it again. From now on she’d have memory. Of the chest she’d longed to lose herself against, a painstaking sculpture of perfection and potency, dusted in just the exact thickness of ebony silk to accentuate each slope and bulge of sheer maleness, to offset polished flesh, before the tantalizing layer arrowed down over an abdomen hewn from living granite by virility gods and endless stamina and discipline. Below that, string-tied white pants straight out of a thousand and one Arabian nights hung low, way low, on those narrow, muscled hips and those formidable thighs, the loose cut doing nothing to hide the shape and size of his briefs-bridled manhood.