Sheikh's Castaway. ALEXANDRA SELLERS

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СКАЧАТЬ could hardly see, hardly breathe in the downpour, but he had challenged her and she wasn’t going to give in. She wiped her hair out of her eyes and tried again.

      “Watch my paddle,” Bari ordered, and that made it easier. Looking down she could follow the direction of his paddling, and she got less rain in her eyes.

      They paddled together, side by side, wordlessly battling the waves that tried to drag them towards the sinking plane. Then suddenly, pushed close and then swept on by a high swell, they were past it and out of danger.

      “That’s good enough,” Bari said. They drew back inside, and he rolled up the door flap and sealed it, and now at last they were cocooned against the storm. Soaking wet, Noor reflected, and chilled, and in a tiny space that was awash with water and bouncing like forty miles of bad road, but suddenly it seemed like comfort. She slumped down against the rounded side of the raft, panting, her heart drumming in her ears, and realized what a relative thing comfort was.

      For a minute or two they rested in silence as their breathing calmed. Then Bari opened the flap again and looked out, using the paddle to turn the raft around and get a wider view.

      They had been carried well away from the plane, now half-submerged. It would disappear soon. Gazing past Bari’s head into the grey seascape, Noor caught no sight of ship or land. Still, such heavy rain might easily disguise land that was quite close.

      Bari closed the flap again.

      “No sign of land?” Noor said, hoping to be contradicted.

      “No, but with a little luck we’re near the Gulf Islands.” He reached for the emergency pack again and pulled out a plastic-covered sheet of paper whose bold title read “Immediate Emergency Procedures.”

      Lightning flashed and flashed again, throwing an eerie orange glow over the interior, and making it hard for Noor’s eyes to acclimatize. Bari frowned down at the paper for a moment, then lifted a hand to the centre of the canopy and turned on a little light.

      Noor, uncomfortably curled in one corner, her shoulders resting against the edge of the raft, felt light-headed with the constant motion. Water was trickling down her back from her soaked hair. Her lacy stay-up stockings were slipping on her wet thighs, and she lifted a hand to strip them off as Bari pulled some rope and a curiously shaped piece of plastic out of the red sack.

      “What’s that for?” she asked, but he only shook his head as if her question were a bothersome fly. After a moment, her eyes fell on the wedding dress damply scrunched up under the satchel. It was slowly absorbing the water sloshing around the floor of the raft, but it was better than nothing. Noor reached out and pulled at the hem.

      She knew she was being foolish and stupidly sentimental as she avoided using the beautiful overskirt and instead lifted one of the flounced underskirts and bent to wipe her face and hair on the impeccably hand-stitched silk. It came away blotched with black, green and tan, so no doubt her face was a mess. She tried wiping her hair and her arms, because she was starting to feel chilled, but the dress was too soaked to make any difference.

      For several minutes as Bari got his bearings there was silence between them. Noor sat straighter and tried not to feel sick. Normally she was a good sailor. The raft was stamped with the information that it was for four, but it was a small enough space even for two when one of them was a runaway bride and the other her furious ex-bridegroom, she told herself with grim humour.

      It was moving up and down with the stormy swell, the waves slapping it, the water on the floor sloshing around to produce deep discomfort. Once they felt a heave and a toss and then water pounded down on them, pushing at the canopy, and she knew a wave had washed right over them. The incessant drumming rain and the silence within made the little space even more claustrophobic.

      Noor shivered. She had never been so close to the elements, so profoundly at their mercy.

      And in this mood, that included Bari himself.

      “How long do you think it will be before they find us?” she asked nervously.

      Bari lifted an eyebrow and looked up from what he was reading.

      “Who do you imagine will be looking?”

      Five

      There was a heartbeat of shocked silence. Thunder cracked and rolled again, but now, Alhamdolillah, it was moving off.

      “What?” she whispered.

      “Who knows we were on the plane? Who knows it went down?”

      “But—radar!”

      Bari shook his head. “We were probably flying underneath radar most of the time.”

      He began to unravel the sea anchor rope. “Even when people do discover that we went off in the plane, will there be any reason to assume that we have not arrived safely at our destination, whatever that might be?”

      She stared at him. Did he really mean this might go on?

      “Unless, of course, someone is expecting you somewhere.” His eyes were hard as he spoke.

      She didn’t know what that meant. “What about our hotel booking? Won’t they ask questions when we don’t turn up?”

      A crack of laughter escaped him. “Who will be expecting us to take a honeymoon when we didn’t get married?”

      He went on with his task, as if he could forget from moment to moment that she was there. She hated that. Bari had never ignored her before, and although now she knew his intense interest had been an act, still she missed it.

      She suddenly began to wonder what had happened after she ran. When had the alarm been raised? The guards at the gate must have noticed as she went roaring past in the bridal limousine, but what had they actually seen?

      “Did people know what happened? Did they…” She faded off.

      “Did they know my bride had changed her mind?” Bari supplied in harsh mockery, and abruptly the cool veneer dropped and his raw anger surged up again. “I don’t know what they knew,” he growled. “What does it matter? Insulting our families, our friends and all our guests! No reason on God’s earth could justify such behaviour!”

      No one ever criticized Noor, and in her current fragile state the stinging rebuke hit her hard.

      “You were my reason!” she flared. “Easy for you to feel you should be allowed to walk all over me, but it’s a bit much to expect me to agree!”

      She was all the angrier, perhaps, because now that events had overtaken her, she was suddenly feeling very guilty. In countries like Bagestan and Barakat, hospitality was taken very seriously. It was practically a religious duty. And she had grown up in a family of exiles determined to maintain such traditions. It was in her blood almost as much as his.

      “Walk all over you? Easier to walk over a bed of nails!” he snorted.

      “With a soul as calloused as yours, no problem!”

      “Not so calloused that I don’t know when I’ve been lucky.”

      “Oh, I don’t think so!” Noor СКАЧАТЬ