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‘Blast you! Let go of me!’
‘No.’
I began to fire a barrage of bad language at him, most of which I had picked up from Arabian sailors and traders in the bazaar, and none of which I actually understood. Mr Ambrose listened, not loosening his grip the tiniest bit. When I had finally run out of breath, he commented: ‘You seem to have made a promising start learning Arabic. However, your vocabulary could be called somewhat one-sided.’
‘You can take your vocabulary and stick it up a camel’s…’
I might have gotten further had he not right in that moment covered my mouth with a kiss. Heat surged through me, my body instinctively moulding itself to his, growing softer, stopping to fight. No, that wasn’t true. I never stopped fighting. But a moment ago I had been fighting to get away. Now I was fighting to get closer!
From somewhere, I heard a low growl. My eyes, closed in ecstasy, flew open to look for the hyena, or lion, or whatever was lying in wait in the dark night. Only then I realized where the growl had come from: my very own throat!
Slowly, my hands managed to crawl up his chest, until they had reached his face and could pull him closer. He made a low, masculine sound in the back of his throat, and an involuntary smile tugged at my lips.
‘So…’ he murmured against my mouth. ‘About the effectiveness of my modified version of cuddling…’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you still cold?’
Cold? Is he kidding?
Cold was forgotten. The concept of cold belonged to another universe now.
‘No! I’m not!’
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘You… you…arrogant son of a bachelor! You Ibn himar!’[24]
‘Not according to my birth certificate.’
‘Kol Ayre!’[25]
‘That would present slight anatomical difficulties.’
‘Kool Khara!’[26]
‘I do not like the taste of it much. Mind your language!’
My disgraceful language apparently didn’t bother him too much, though - for the next thing he did was pull me closer and press another kiss on my lips. Rolling over, he placed himself so that one side of me was shielded from the bitter cold by the thickest wad of blankets, the other by his body, and, gently breaking our kiss, he pulled me against his chest. Sometime later, I drifted off into sleep, suppressing a grin as I snuggled into him.
*~*~**~*~*
Over the next few days, a tacit agreement developed between Mr Ambrose and me. We did our best to detest each other during the day, me flinging examples of my ever-growing vocabulary of Arabic swear words at him, he building up a thick wall of silence. But in the night…
In the night, different things happened.
We would lie down next to each other again, and he would fold me in his arms, creating a small cave of warmth for me amidst the cold desolation of the desert around us. The whole night he would hold me like this - and not just for warmth, either. The taste of his lips on mine… Up until then, I hadn’t thought it possible for anything to rival the savoury scrumptiousness of solid chocolate. I had been mistaken.
When, in the morning, he returned to his usual cold, standoffish, silent self, I sometimes asked myself whether I hadn’t simply dreamed up his night-time alter ego. But then the sun would go down, and the dark shadow of a tall man would stalk towards me.
‘Lillian?’
‘Yes?’
‘Come to me.’
The nights passed. I supposed the days passed too, but recently I had started paying a lot more attention to the former than to the latter. We travelled at a slow crawl through the desert, or maybe we were whizzing through it faster than a racing horse. I didn’t really know. In a landscape where everything always changed, blown away by the wind, it was hard to say where you were at any given time and how fast you were moving.
