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      When she had put on the leggings and jeans and her sweatpants she began to warm up again. She quickly pulled on her boots and jacket, tied a big silk scarf around her head and face, pulled up her hood and made the drawstrings tight. She slipped a small toiletries bag with the bare essentials into her pocket.

      Meanwhile Arash had stuffed two backpacks full, and was tying a rope around his waist. When that was done he took the other end and began to tie it around her.

      “What on earth are you doing?” she demanded.

      He threw her a look and went on tying the rope.

      “Answer me, Arash!”

      His hands stilled for one moment of what looked like irritation and he looked into her eyes at close quarters. In this grey light his eyes were the colour of crushed dark violets. She could almost smell their perfume.

      “I am tying a rope around your waist,” he said levelly.

      “I can see that!”

      He shrugged. “You asked the question.”

      “You know what I meant!”

      “The reason for what I am doing is as obvious as the action itself. What do you want me to say? If you get blinded by the storm, do you relish the prospect of wandering off the path away from me and getting lost—or worse? Do not waste time on argument, Lana! Every second counts! You must submit to me in this! If you challenge me every step of the way, we are doomed.”

      You must submit to me in this.

      Lana swallowed. Of course he was right. He was the expert here. “Sorry,” she muttered, and then turned and slipped into the straps of the backpack he held up for her. A moment later he had shouldered another one himself, larger, heavier.

      “Ready?” he asked.

      Together they stepped into the storm. Survival depended on mutual cooperation now. She wondered if they could achieve it.

      She had gone to London to study at university, wanting adventure, wanting travel, wanting to get away from the restrictions that her father’s sudden wealth imposed on her life.

      Lana had been born and raised in an ordinary, comfortably-off family environment, with a father she hardly saw and a mother who was proportionately devoted to maintaining home and family. She rarely spent time with her father because his field was computers, and when Lana was about five he had taken the plunge of starting his own company.

      Within ten years Jonathan Holding was almost a billionaire, and Lana’s life had changed completely. She had of course enjoyed the freedoms that such wealth offered, but she had equally disliked the restrictions that it imposed.

      The worst effect was in her dating life. She had only been sixteen when she had had to fight off a date rape from a guy who, when a well-placed kick had finally calmed his ardour, had drunkenly apologized and confessed that he had wanted to be able to claim he had deflowered Jonathan Holding’s daughter.

      He was a student at a nearby private school for boys. That night she had learned that there was a competition among the guys: the goal was to get the “virgin’s panties’ of the daughter of someone famous to hang on your gym locker door. Lana Holding’s panties would be almost as much of a feather in a guy’s cap as those of the daughter of a high-profile movie star, who was her fellow student.

      That experience had made her very, very wary. Afterwards she listened to her friends when they talked about sex, about how they had meant to resist but had been overcome by their own passion, or by a guy’s, or by his arguments or bad temper, or merely by their own impatience to know what it was all about….

      Not Lana. The experience gave her breathing time, and a good reason for resisting during those first cloudy, hormone-hazy days of growing up. And when the cloud had cleared a little, she had realized that she wanted a lot more from a guy than just his determination to get her underpants from her. And a lot more from herself than just her hormones crying out for relief.

      She had decided to go abroad to university, where with a little luck she could be just an ordinary person again. She had taken her mother’s name to become plain Lana Brooks, though at her father’s insistence she had agreed to live in a building with extremely high security.

      Lana had been lonely in the huge and luxurious apartment, until she had invited her best friend, Alinor, to share the place with her.

      Alinor had already caught the eye of the mysterious graduate student Kavian Durran, who rumour said was an important member of the Parvan royal family. He was accompanied everywhere he went by the two Parvani friends who had come to England with him. Rumour said they were actually bodyguards.

      One of them called himself Arash Khosravi.

      Three

      Lana bit hungrily into a piece of naan. “Where are we?” she asked, chewing.

      Buffeted by howling winds, they had been struggling across rocky ground for well over an hour, and if there was a path, she certainly hadn’t seen any markings.

      Every step terrified her. The thought of what would happen if he put his foot on a mine made her sick with fear. She had gritted her teeth till her jaw ached. Not him, she had silently pleaded. After all that he’s suffered, don’t let him… She didn’t like him, but she was a long way from wanting to watch a landmine blow his foot off.

      But he had brought them safely to their first rest stop. “Five minutes,” he had said, eyeing the sky. The snow had started to fall almost as he spoke, and a layer of powder was already settling on the ground, being blown into little ridges under rocks and against stones.

      Arash had set a hard pace, and his knee must be bothering him. She knew he had been hoping to reach their destination before the first sign of snow, and he did not hide his anxiety to get going again.

      “In that direction,” he replied now, pointing in a direction she guessed was south, “not far from the Barakat border. Maybe twenty miles.”

      “And in the direction we’re heading?”

      There was warm soup left over from lunch, in the thermos flask. It had been filled this morning by a woman in Seebi-Kuchek, the village where they had spent the night, and although of course Lana had thanked her, she was a lot more grateful for it than she had imagined being.

      They had only the flask lid as cup. Arash lifted the cup to his lips once for every time she did, but he could barely have warmed his lips for the amount he drank.

      “We are heading towards a river valley. There we will find shelter.”

      She didn’t bother to ask how much longer they had to go. They would either make it before the storm broke or they wouldn’t. She nodded, finishing the last bite of her bread, and dusted the crumbs from her knees. Arash held up the cup of soup to her.

      “Finish this off.”

      She was hungry. A long time ago, in a past of plenty which she could now hardly recognize, she might have drunk the soup without a thought. Lana had always been an exhuberant eater. She had never worried about her weight, or whether people—other СКАЧАТЬ