Her Desert Dream

It was something she’d done hundreds of times, after all.

It was just another job!

Kal rose as she entered the main saloon and the just another job mantra went straight out of the window. Not that he did anything. Offer her his hand. Smile, even.

That was the problem. He didn’t have to do anything, she thought as he stood aside so that she could lead the way to where Atiya was waiting beside a table that had been laid with white damask, heavy silver, crystal, then held a chair for her.

Like a force of nature, he just was.

Offered wine, she shook her head. Even if she’d been tempted, she needed to keep a clear head.

She took a fork, picked up a delicate morsel of fish and said, ‘Lucy tells me that you’re her husband’s cousin. Are you a diplomat, too?’

Conventional, impersonal conversation. That was the ticket, she thought as she tasted the fish. Correction, ate the fish. She wasn’t tasting a thing.

‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘My branch of the family has been personae non gratae at the Ramal Hamrahn court for three generations.’

No, no, no!

That wasn’t how it worked. She was supposed to ask a polite question. He was supposed to respond in kind. Like when you said, ‘How are you?’ and the only proper response was any variation on, ‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Personae non gratae at the Embassy, too,’ he continued, ‘until I became involved in one of Lucy’s charitable missions.’

Better. Charity was Rose’s life and, firmly quashing a desire to know more about the black sheep thing, what his family had done three generations ago that was so terrible-definitely off the polite questions list-Lydia concentrated on that.

‘You help Lucy?’

‘She hasn’t mentioned what I do?’ he countered.

‘Maybe she thought I’d try and poach you.’ Now that was good. ‘What do you do for her?’

‘Not much. She needed to ship aid to an earthquake zone. I offered her the use of an aircraft-we took it from there.’

Very impressively ‘not much’, she thought. She’d definitely mention him to Rose. Maybe they would hit it off.

She squashed down the little curl of something green that tried to escape her chest.

‘That would be the one your father owns?’ she asked. Again, she’d imagined a small executive jet. Clearly, where this family was concerned, she needed to start thinking bigger.

‘Flying is like driving, Rose. When you get your licence, you don’t want to borrow your father’s old crate. You want a shiny new one of your own.’

‘You do?’

A lot bigger, she thought. He came from a two-plane family.

Something else occurred to her.

He’d said no one in his family did anything seriously, but that couldn’t possibly be true. Not in his case, anyway. Obtaining a basic pilot’s licence was not much different from getting a driving licence-apart from the cost-but stepping up to this level took more than money. It took brains, dedication, a great deal of hard work.

And, yes, a heck of a lot of money.

‘You are such a fraud,’ she said but, far from annoying her, it eased her qualms about her own pretence.

‘Fraud?’

Kal paused with a fork halfway to his lips. It hadn’t taken Lucy ten minutes to rumble him, demand to know what he expected from Hanif in return for his help, but she knew the family history and he hadn’t expected his offer to be greeted with open arms.

He’d known the only response was to be absolutely honest with her. That had earned him first her sympathy and then, over the years, both her and Hanif’s friendship.

Rose had acted as if she had never heard of him but, unless Lucy had told her, how did she-

‘Not serious?’ she prompted. ‘Exactly how long did it take you to qualify to fly something like this?’

Oh, right. She was still talking about the flying. ‘I do fun seriously,’ he said.

‘Fun?’

‘Give me a chance and I’ll show you,’ he said. Teasing was, after all, a two-way street; the only difference between them was that she blushed. Then, realising how that might have sounded, he very nearly blushed himself. ‘I didn’t mean…Lucy suggested you might like to go fishing.’

‘Fishing?’ She pretended to consider. ‘Let me see. Wet. Smelly. Maggots. That’s your idea of fun?’

That was a challenge if ever he’d heard one. And one he was happy to accept. ‘Wet, smelly and then you get to dry out, get warm while you barbecue the catch on the beach.’

‘Wet, smelly, smoky and then we get sand in our food. Perfect,’ she said, but a tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth suggested that she was hooked and, content, he let it lie.

Rose speared another forkful of fish.

‘In her letter,’ she said, ‘Lucy suggested I’d enjoy a trip to the souk. Silk. Spices. Gold.’

‘Heat, crowds, people with cellphones taking your photograph? I thought you wanted peace and privacy.’

‘Even the paparazzi have children to feed and educate,’ she said. ‘And publicity oils the wheels of charity. The secret is not to give them something so sensational that they don’t have to keep coming back for more.’

‘That makes for a very dull life,’ he replied gravely, playing along, despite the fact that it appeared to fly directly in the face of what Lucy had told him. ‘But if you wore an abbayah, kept your eyes down, your hair covered, you might pass unnoticed.’

‘A disguise?’

‘More a cover-up. There’s no reason to make it easy for them, although there’s no hiding your height.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘It’s what I’m here for.’

‘Really?’ And she was the one challenging him, as if she knew he had an agenda of his own. But she didn’t wait for an answer. ‘So what did you buy?’ she asked.

He must have looked confused because she added, ‘Car, not plane. I wouldn’t know one plane from another. When you passed your test?’ she prompted. ‘A Ferrari? Porsche?’

‘Far too obvious. I chose a Morgan.’

Her turn to look puzzled.

‘It’s a small sports car. A roadster,’ he explained, surprised she didn’t know that. ‘The kind of thing that you see pilots driving in old World War Two movies? My father put my name on the waiting list on my twelfth birthday.’

‘There’s a waiting list?’

‘A long one. They’re hand-built,’ he replied, smiling at her astonishment. ‘I took delivery on my seventeenth birthday.’

‘I’ll add patient to serious,’ she replied. ‘What do you drive now?’

‘I still have the Morgan.’

‘The same one?’

‘I’d have to wait a while for another one, so I’ve taken very good care of it.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Don’t be. It stays in London while I’m constantly on the move, but for the record I drive a Renault in France, a Lancia in Italy and in New York…’ he grinned ‘…I take a cab.’

‘And in Ramal Hamrah?’ she asked.

Suddenly the smile took real effort.

‘There’s an old Land Rover that does the job. What about you?’ he asked, determined to shift the focus of their conversation to her. ‘What do you drive for pleasure?’

She leaned forward, her lips parted on what he was sure would have been a protest that she wasn’t finished with the question of Ramal Hamrah. Maybe something in his expression warned her that she was treading on