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His bear hug was all-enveloping. Impossible to draw back from.
But I don’t want to! I don’t want to pull away from him.
The cry came from deep within, from a place she had not known existed. Not until last night.
It seemed an age before he let her go, but when he did he simply said, his eyes alight, his smile wide, ‘Breakfast awaits.’
He scooped up a silken robe that was lying draped across the unused bed. It was in sea-green, vivid and vibrant, and he threw it around her and slipped the towel from her.
‘You must keep covered,’ he growled, and there was an expression in his eyes that she did not need a dictionary to describe. ‘Or we’ll never get to breakfast.’
His arm around her shoulder, he led her out. She went with him, as meekly as a lamb. For it was the only thing in the world she wanted to do.
Out on the terrace the silent army of servants had set a lavish breakfast table, shaded by an awning, and they took their places. Beyond the terrace and beyond the outdoor pool glittering in the morning sun, the palm trees guarding it, the desert stretched to infinity. All the world was here, in this one place.
In this one man.
Nikos raised his glass of orange juice to her, his smile wide and warm. His eyes warmer still.
‘To us, Diana,’ he said.
To us? she echoed silently. There was no ‘us’—there was only an empty shell of a marriage, designed to make use of each other, with no future in it. None.
But, as she raised her own glass defiance and a reckless daring surged up in her. Beyond this desert hideaway there could be no ‘us’ for her and Nikos.
But while we are here there can.
And for that... Oh, for that she would seize it all.
* * *
‘All strapped in?’ Nikos said, checking her seat belt. He nodded at their driver. ‘OK, let’s go.’
With a roaring gunning of the engine the driver grinned and accelerated the four-by-four almost vertically up the perilous slope of the dune.
Within seconds Diana discovered why it was called ‘dune-bashing’. She shrieked and covered her eyes as the skilled driver performed manoeuvres that took them to the top, then slid them down the other side, then careered up again to totter precariously at an impossible angle before plunging down in a huge flurry of sandy and sideways sliding.
Nikos hoped that she was, despite appearances, enjoying herself.
By the time the driver finally screeched to a juddering halt, turning back to Nikos with a triumphant grin on his face, he believed she was.
‘Oh, good grief!’ she cried, half-laughing, half-shaking as she finally let go her death grip on the door strap. ‘I was absolutely terrified!’
‘Me too,’ Nikos admitted ruefully.
He turned to the driver, exchanging comments on how he’d performed those almost impossible and certainly potentially lethal manoeuvres on the steep soft sand.
Diana caught at his arm. ‘No, Nikos, you are not to try doing it yourself!’ she exclaimed feelingly.
He turned towards her. ‘Worried for me?’ he asked, grinning. His eyes glinted. ‘How very wifely of you.’
It was lightly said, but it was like a sudden sword in her side, reminding her of just how little right she had to be ‘wifely’. But she could not, would not think of that now. Not here in the desert, cocooned in this world so distant from their own.
And then Nikos was announcing his need for lunch—for breakfast had been long ago, before they’d set out to try their hands at the ship of the desert, mounting camels as the patient beasts lay on the sand, clambering up with a serpentine grace and starting to move with their slow, swaying gait.
Diana had found the experience unforgettable as her camel trod silently along the way, feeling only the desert wind playing across her heated cheeks, her head shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, the blown sand off the tops of the dunes catching in the light, the burning azure bowl of the sky arching over them, and the endless ocean of sand stretching boundless and bare all around. She’d felt as if she were in a different world. Ancient and primeval, timeless and eternal.
Far, far away from the real world beyond.
