The Desert Lord’s Bride

“I told you never to approach anything you don’t know, to look but never touch. But you almost attacked that lionfish and it struck back so hard its spine penetrated your wetsuit. And it could have been worse, a stonefish…” He stopped, his face working, his fists bunching.

From a long distance she heard herself stuttering, “I’m s-sorry…b-but a-all I knew was it’s poisonous and it was going to sting you…”

He went totally still. His face drained of all agitation and expression. Froze. And her ears were filling with thunder.

Then she was again watching it all happen to someone else as Shehab swooped down on her, carried her to the deck where she realized the thunder wasn’t blood roaring in her ears, but his helicopter, which, it turned out, could land on water. He had her inside, she didn’t register how, in the back, secured on a stretcher, then stood up to strip down to his knee-length swimming trunks before kneeling beside her.

She lost all perception of time as the flight ended and he rushed with her in his arms into the mansion, his men streaking before them, opening doors. But this time he took a different path, one leading somewhere she’d never been before.

The sensation of wading in a dream thickened as he swept her through what felt like endless spaces shrouded in dimness and incense, their Spartan sparseness stamped by virility and power. This must be his quarters. Her gaze clung to the huge bed, a bed she’d longed to share with him. Now she might never share it…

Consciousness surged as lights rose, illuminating the space he’d crossed into. The impression of moving through the landscape of One Thousand and One Nights intensified as she gaped around the gigantic, all-marble-and-stone chamber. It interconnected on each side with two others, each space ringed with arches supported by tapering columns. The middle chamber, which he’d just entered, sprawled beneath a soaring dome dotted by circular bottle-glass openings that let sunbeams slash through the half light permeating the place, pouring from the semi-opened windows that ringed the walls beneath the dome.

He gave her no chance to linger over details as he rushed to the chamber on the right. It was dominated by a shallow rectangular pool, tiled in checkered black-and-beige marble. He lowered her onto a long stone seat with utmost care before rushing away. He calibrated some mechanism at the wall, hurried back, jogged her out of her stupor by scooping her up again. She opened groggy eyes to find him stepping into the pool. Her thoughts swirled in confusion, wondering why he considered giving her a bath important as he lowered them both into the water. And she screamed. It was boiling.

He restrained her, his arms cleaving her back to his chest, his legs imprisoning hers. “Shh…shh…ya galbi, it must be done.”

“You must…boil me?” She twisted in his arms, unable to bear the scalding heat. “And…you’re boiling…yourself, too…”

He only lay back in the water, submerging them both, then clamped his limbs around her tighter and crooned, “The water temperature is only 114°F.”

“Only?” she whimpered, the initial shock passing, only for the full measure of discomfort to register, every cell overheating, every drop of moisture pushing to the surface, flooding out, getting lost in the surrounding water.

He kept her submerged, his hands and voice gentleness itself. “I know it’s very uncomfortable, but it’s for the sting.”

She thrashed her head against his chest, feeling as if she were suffocating one cell at a time, her lifeforce seeping out of her every pore. “But I don’t feel it anymore.”

“That’s the effect of the local anesthetic, but it isn’t a treatment for the poison. Only high heat can stop it.”

“So-I won’t die?” she choked, just now realizing she’d been too numb to think, to be really scared.

“Ya Ullah, you thought the poison was fatal?” She nodded, shook her head, nodded again. He let out a dark groan as he hugged her tighter, burying his face in her neck. “The one with fatal consequences is the stonefish’s sting. The worst of the lionfish’s is the pain, which is excruciating. I tried to catch one when I was eleven. Yes, we were both reckless at that age. So I have first-hand experience with the agony you suffered. But the poison isn’t to be treated lightly. If not neutralized by heat, it would have coursed through your blood until you started vomiting before you lost consciousness from hypotension.”

“I was starting to get queasy…thought it was a sign of-of…”

He turned her face to his, stemmed the rest of her projection in his mouth, his growl reverberating inside her.

Her consciousness was slipping away when he wrenched his lips from hers and heaved them both out of the water. “Enough. Any more heat and you’ll faint from heatstroke.”

She shuddered hard as the cooler air hit her. He tightened his hold around her as he stepped out of the pool and strode to the middle chamber. She lay limply in his arms, her head cushioned by his muscles, her bleary eyes taking in a raised marble platform of purest white right below the center of the fenestrated dome. It seemed to glow in the unearthly illumination. Or maybe her vision was all fuzzy. Whatever it was, it felt like a continuation of her journey into the dream.

Images invaded her mind, her nerve endings, of Shehab, naked, lying face down on the marble as steam swirled around his magnificent body, his muscles glistening, their tautness after a grueling day’s negotiations relaxing under her hands, all hers to caress and cosset, to tease and taste.

He put her on the platform as if he were placing a priceless work of art on a pedestal, and her imagination made a sharp turn to him rising from his surrender to her pampering, yanking her to his slick, hot flesh, letting her feel what she’d done to him before laying her down on the marble…

The sequence shattered as her sweltering skin touched the cool marble for real. He leaned over her, one arm at the back of her thighs, the other at her upper back, his face flushed to copper, drenched in sweat, clenched in anxiety as he seemed to count her breaths. “How are you feeling now, ya galbi?”

She gulped around the thick, dry thing that used to be her tongue. “Thirsty.”

He let out some expletive in Arabic, some self-abuse by the look on his face, laid her down completely before streaking away. She turned a head that felt filled with seawater, saw him disappear into his bedroom. He seemed to reappear at once, carrying two bottles and two glasses. He filled each glass from a bottle, scooped her up, put the first glass to her lips and his lips to her temple. “Drink, ya galbi.”

She did, and with every gulp of cool water felt every cell surging with clarity and energy once more.

After the second glass of water, he gave her the other drink. She sampled it, winced at the sourness of the first sip, before she fully tasted its richness, the complexity of flavors. She drank it all down thirstily, moaning her enjoyment.

As she began the second glassful she asked, “What’s this?”

“It’s a special cocktail of mine, one I use after extreme workouts, a mixture of hibiscus, carob, sugar cane, pomegranate and a few desert fruits, mostly daum and hab’bel azeez.”

“It’s amazing. An elixir.” She finished the second glass. “Feels like all the vital stuff I lost from sweating gallons is back in residence. In other news, I can feel my back again, so the anesthetic must have worn off. But since I feel no pain and I guess this is me thinking straight again, it seems your trying to make soup out of me worked.” He winced, still anxious as his eyes roamed over her. She leaned back in his embrace, her hand following the slash of his cheekbone lovingly. “I’m fine now. You saved me.”

He turned his lips into her palm, planted a hot, shuddering kiss. “Only because you saved me.”

“But I didn’t. It turned out there was no real danger.”

“There was. It might not be fatal, but the pain can be incapacitating, and the poison is disorienting. And then you didn’t know that was the extent of the danger when you took the sting. Ya Ullah-that you did that, endangered yourself for me…”

Something painful thrummed inside her chest at the agonized look in his eyes. She didn’t want him to feel bad about it. She never wanted him to feel bad about anything for a second.

She caught his face in her hands. “You would have done the same for me. And it was better me than you. There was no way I could have gotten you out of the water. Seems through my mess of half-learned knowledge and panic, I made a decision that turned out to be rational, volunteering as the victim of choice.”

His grated his teeth. “And you’re never going to do something like that again. Swear it to me now. You’ll never