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He saw her bite her lip as she glanced at her watch. ‘Will it take long? We’ve been gone hours already and I feel bad leaving Yousra by herself for too long.’ And he felt a pang of admiration for this woman who he could see wasn’t using Atiyah as an excuse to get away from him, but was genuinely concerned for his sister.
‘It won’t take long,’ he promised.
It was only a few kilometres further on through the desert sands that they found it, an oasis of palm trees, an island of green amidst the golden landscape, almost empty but for a few families picnicking on and paddling in the shores of a pond alive with waterfowl, its fringes thick with water lilies of white and pink.
‘It looks idyllic,’ she said as the car pulled into the shade of the palms, and they climbed outside. The desert air was hot and dry, but there was a breeze fanning through the greenery and over the water and Tora’s abaya fluttered in the warm air as she took in the contrast between desert sands and lush greenery.
‘Kareem said this was once a resting place for the caravans that traversed the dunes. Now the city has spread closer and it has been retained as a park for the people of Qajaran.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ She turned to him then, her eyes alive and bright. ‘Can we paddle, do you think? Only it’s been such a long day and my feet are killing me.’
He wasn’t sure why she asked when she was already slipping off her sandals and raising the hem of her abaya to slip her feet into the water’s edge. ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Bliss. You have to try this for yourself.’
He shook his head, even as he laughed. It was crazy. He swam laps for fitness and he’d been a champion rower along with his desert brothers when he’d been at university, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever paddled before. And then, because he figured there was no time like the present, he shucked off his loafers and rolled up the bottom of his trousers and joined her.
She was right. The water was cool and clear and the perfect antidote to hot feet tired from traipsing around half a dozen palaces. Tiny fish darted around his ankles while a crane stood on one leg, watching warily from a distance, and Rashid wondered at the pleasure in such a simple occupation. Tora turned around then and pointed to one of the families whose children were laughing in the shallows at their father holding up a baby whose little feet kicked at the water, giggling gleefully as he splashed himself and everyone around him. ‘We should bring Atiyah here for a picnic—what do you think?’
And something shifted enough inside him that it almost sounded like a good idea. He would like to, he thought, if this woman came with them. ‘Maybe,’ he said as he stepped out of the water and sat on the grassy edge, looking up at the mountains in the distance, and thinking...
She came and sat down next to him. ‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ she said, flapping at the bottom of her wet hem while she studied the henna designs on her feet as they dried in the warm air. ‘That was magic. I don’t think you’re ever too old to paddle.’
Alongside her he made a sound, half snort, half laughter. ‘Just as well, really, given that’s my first time.’
Her head swung around. ‘Seriously? You’ve never paddled before?’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘But when you were a kid—you must have gone to the beach or something?’
He shook his head as he looked out over the water, his elbows on his bent knees. ‘The school I went to had a pool. It’s not like I didn’t learn how to swim.’
But he’d never experienced the simple delights of paddling in the shallows? And she thought back to that night on the terrace when he’d told her he wouldn’t send Atiyah off to boarding school, and she wondered. ‘How old were you when you were sent to school?’
‘I don’t remember, I just remember always being there.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a good school, set in leafy Oxford. I can’t complain.’
‘But so far from home.’
‘That was my home.’
‘But your parents?’
‘My mother died when I was in infancy. I grew up believing my father was also dead.’
A chill went down Tora’s spine. Atiyah was his sister so his father had been alive... It was so horrible, she couldn’t help but want it to be untrue. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
And he turned and looked at her with eyes that were dark empty holes, and she regretted her words even before he spoke. ‘Do you really think I’d kid about a thing like that? No, I never knew he’d been alive all that time until I was summoned to a meeting in Sydney to be told that he’d actually been alive for the thirty years I’d believed him dead, only to have been killed in a car crash weeks before. Not only that though, because I was now the proud guardian of his two-month-old child. How would you feel, learning all that?’
