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‘It’s okay, I know the owner,’ he replied, watching her walk towards the view he woke up to every morning.
‘I hope they’d be okay with this,’ she said as she reached the partly opened door.
‘They are,’ he assured her, but his answer was lost to her as she slipped through the narrow gap and out onto the stone balcony.
He told himself he was giving her time. That it had nothing to do with having to get himself—who was he kidding?—hislibidounder control. He clenched his fists as if it would erase the feeling of her lip beneath his thumb, her between his arms, the ghost trace of her chest against his... Three years without sex might not kill a man, but one night without Star might just do it.
No. This was for her. He’d seen how devastated she’d looked. Whatever had happened, or not happened, this was about ensuring that she didn’t leave with that look haunting her eyes. Instead, he reached for his phone, fired off a message to the palace staff asking for refreshments to be brought to his quarters, and another to Reza cancelling their meeting. He then purposefully put his phone on silent so as not to be subjected to the barrage of queries his oldest friend was sure to launch at him.
Clenching his jaw and ordering himself to behave, Khalif made his way out onto the balcony. He loved the large, deep green palms potted either side of the doors. The ornate, detailed carvings in the red stone balcony were almost as familiar to him as his reflection. Off to the left was a cream awning, under which were a table and chairs, but he knew that Star had seen none of it, her gaze instead glued to the whole of the city stretched out before her, beneath a sky that was turning the beautiful deep blue of early night and littered with stars more dazzling than any diamond.
‘Burami?’ she asked him without looking away from it.
‘A very,verylarge part of it, yes.’
It was absolutely the height of insanity to bring a woman to his palace quarters. It was something the old Khalif had never done. Had he deprived himself of so much that he was at risk of recklessness? And then he remembered the look in her eyes as she’d sat on the steps and knew that he’d have done it all over again just to see her eyes sparkle.
He heard the soft click of his door, movement in the kitchen area that seemed to pass unnoticed by Star and the door closing once again. The last thing Khalif felt was hungry, but somehow it seemed fitting to serve Star food, when she had done the same for him. The memory of her basking in the sun sliced through him, competing with the dusk that surrounded them now and haunted his suite.
He retrieved the platter of food and pitcher of the delicious apricot drink he thought Star would enjoy and returned to the balcony, stopping mid-stride. Star was still looking out at the desert, but her shawl had come loose and now hung from her shoulders, leaving her hair...
Thick streams of long, lazily curling fire danced on the wind, a riot of golds, deep reds and every imaginable shade of umber, flooding his tongue with the taste of turmeric, paprika and cinnamon.
She had removed her denim jacket and the long-sleeved top slashed across her neck, leaving her collarbone and delicate neck exposed to his desire. The blue cotton, regal and powerful, strong and bright enough to stand beside the glory of her hair, made him think of an ancient astrological chart he’d once seen, created from the deepest of blues and golds, rich with circles, lines, arrows and stars, all working to prove some mystical assertion.
Mystical. That was what Star made him feel. And it hit him like a hammer, as if this moment was something they’d stolen from ancient gods. Something that was just for them.
Star felt him return to the balcony behind her. As if his presence had the power to pull at her like the tide. He was giving her the time she needed. And shedidneed it. She was in the private rooms of a palace looking out at the desert. She’d had to pinch herselfliterally, she thought as she rubbed the pink flesh on her forearm, to know that this wasn’t a dream she’d conjured from her imagination.
She knew that she should feel danger, or at least a very real sense of concern. She barely knew Kal, but that felt wrong. She didn’t feel as if he were a stranger. He was physically imposing, that was true, but, rather than making her scared, it made herwant—want in a way that she’d only ever read about before. She had waited all her adult years to find someone who made her feel the things she’d only ever read about and she was leaving tomorrow.
Star might be very used to daydreams, but she wasn’t naïve. She knew in reality that there was nothing past tomorrow for her, for them. But did that mean she should walk away from the possibility of what tonight held? She wanted to laugh at herself for being presumptuous, but... Her tongue ran over her lip, where his thumb had pressed so gently to such great effect. A tremor shivered over her skin and down her spine. Surely she wasn’t the only one affected by this?
She turned, expecting to find him looking at her, having felt the burn of his gaze across her shoulders and back, but he was busy removing small plates from a tray, two glasses and a pitcher that was rich with condensation from the warm air, despite the dusk falling around them.
‘If you’d like something alcoholic...?’
She smiled. ‘No, thank you. I’m afraid the Soames women cannot hold their drink.’ She reluctantly moved away from the balcony, fearing that she might search the rest of her life for something as beautiful as that view and never find it again.
She slipped behind the table so that she faced the cityscape edged by golden sand that looked like slashes of an abstract painting. He offered her a small glass of theamar al dinshe was going to miss terribly when she returned to England. Her mouth watered in expectation of the sweet, cooling apricot drink, but that was a mere shadow of the explosion of taste that hit her tongue when she drew it to her lips and she was helpless to prevent the moan of sheer delight that fell into the air between them.
‘That issogood,’ she praised unashamedly when she’d finished it. ‘I’m going to have to learn how to make it.’
She chanced a look at Kal and veered back to the cityscape before she could be burned further by the heat in eyes heavy-lidded with desire. It scorched the air she breathed, jolted her heartbeat and pulsed and flared through her body.
By the time Star was ready to risk another glance at him, he had turned towards the desert, staring at the magnificent view as if it were his. Possessively. The way she wanted him to look at her. The way she’d thought, just for a moment, he had.
Blushing, she returned her gaze to the same view, wondering whether Catherine had ever seen it. Star had read over the journals Catherine had written while in Duratra, but she couldn’t seem to make the descriptions from then fit with what surrounded her now.
‘I wonder what this view would have looked like a hundred years ago,’ she half whispered, her voice breaking on the words emerging from a throat half raw from need.
His reply was so long coming she’d begun to wonder whether he’d heard her.
‘There was less metal, less chrome and glass, and it was a touch smaller. But one hundred years ago, Burami was still an impressive city.’ She watched the way his throat worked as he swallowed, his eyes frowning once again at the view. ‘The market you passed on the way to the palace has been there for nearly three hundred years. The skyline would have been not too dissimilar, the silhouette of the minaret and the cross, the turrets of the university. We’ve always had a mix of cultures, religions—mosques near churches, near synagogues, near temples...all from the very beginning.’
He spoke with a cultural pride that was unfamiliar to her, a sense of personal history she felt that she’d only just begun to experience herself.
‘How long has your family been here?’
