The Desert Princes. Jackie Braun

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СКАЧАТЬ least there was sound and voices and life going on outside of her own small concerns to put everything in perspective. There was just one more thing she had to do. Picking up the phone, she placed her order.

      He had never learned to give up, Raffa accepted, as he stood in silence by the door listening to Casey making her phone call. He didn’t eavesdrop either, as a general rule, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

      ‘Raffa—’ She whirled around, a guilty expression on her face. She even hid the phone with her hand, as if she had done something terrible.

      ‘My apologies for alarming you, but the door was open…’

      ‘The bell boy just collected my luggage,’ she explained, replacing the receiver in its nest. ‘I told him I’d be right down and not to bother with the door.’

      ‘And then you remembered a call you had to make?’

      ‘No…not exactly.’

      She still wouldn’t look at him.

      ‘It was a call I had to make before I left A’Qaban,’ she said, so softly he had to strain to hear her.

      She wasn’t going to tell him, so he would have to repeat what he’d overheard. ‘An order for pencils and colouring pads, crayons and paints for the children you met in the desert?’

      The nod of her head was almost imperceptible, and then she lifted her chin to confront him. ‘It’s only a small thing, Raffa.’

      ‘Small?’ he frowned. ‘Whose opinion are you stating now?’

      ‘I mean on the scale of things you do here—on the scale of your proposals for spending the money we raised at the auction, for example.’

      ‘The money you raised,’ he corrected her.

      ‘It’s such a little thing.’

      ‘Not for the children…’

      She mulled this over before speaking, and when she raised her head to express her thoughts he thought her the loveliest and most precious creature on earth. It struck him like a knife in his heart when he saw the tears in her eyes. If he should lose her—

      ‘I just thought we’d forgotten the small things that matter.’ Mashing her lips together with embarrassment, she made a small, self-deprecating sound accompanied by an even smaller gesture. ‘The little things that make life…’

      ‘Fun?’ he supplied as Casey’s voice tailed away. Had he forgotten those things too?

      She swallowed as their gazes held. ‘There should be fun…’

      She made it sound like a question and he could understand why. Beyond lust and business there hadn’t been too much time for fun, and he remembered now with a wistfulness that was new to him their impulsive dance with the children in the desert.

      ‘Yes, there should be fun,’ he assured her. She always put others first, but who made time for Casey?

      The flight Casey was supposed to be taking home to the UK had experienced an unexpected delay. Once it was clear there would be no further flights that day, and he had changed into jeans and a casual top, he persuaded Casey she might as well hitch a lift with him to the Bedouin encampment. He wanted to make sure she had the pleasure of distributing the gifts herself. He wanted her.

      She was so excited. Seated next to him in the cockpit of the helicopter, he could sense her pleasure and impatience to return to the desert. It had completely obliterated her reluctance to have anything more to do with him.

      He couldn’t believe he had almost lost her. He couldn’t believe she had been slipping through his fingers like sand while he had been obsessed by duty. It had taken Casey to prove to him that duty went far beyond the chequebook and must have a heart. She was that heart. In a few, short intense days she had broken through his emotional guard with her innocence and her goodness and integrity. She had shown him that money could never be the answer to a country’s problems.

      He glanced across to find her staring intently through the Plexiglass viewing panel at their feet. Children were already gathering on the ground and waving up at them.

      ‘Be careful, Raffa.’

      Her exclamation came through his headphones as he brought the helicopter down in a slow, controlled descent. ‘Don’t worry—the adults have seen us too.’

      And the women. He’d wired ahead to warn them they were coming, and also to ask a favour.

      Casey forgot all her concerns in the sheer pleasure of being back amongst the people she already felt so close to. She had never felt this much at home, she realised, watching the Bedouin teacher surrounded by her pupils. She had just handed over the art supplies, and now the teacher was deciding with the children on what should be their first project.

      The children looked shyly at Casey as she left the mobile schoolroom in front of Raffa. They had stood up respectfully when he said goodbye, reminding Casey that for all his darkly glittering glamour and sex appeal Raffa was their king. And she was…

      She was going home.

      ‘That was a heavy sigh,’ Raffa commented as he closed the door behind them.

      ‘I’ll miss them,’ Casey admitted. ‘I can’t believe how much.’

      ‘You don’t have to go.’

      ‘I think we both know I do.’ She stared at him for a brief moment, wishing that life could be different sometimes—easier.

      ‘There is no easy answer,’ Raffa agreed, as if reading her mind. ‘And what I’m about to suggest has never been easy for you.’

      She followed his gaze down the dusty path. ‘Oh, no…’ She pulled a face. Raad, Raffa’s stallion, and the smaller dapple grey she had ridden before were tethered in the shade beneath a thatched awning. ‘You’re kidding me.’

      ‘You think?’

      ‘Raffa…’ Her heart turned over. She knew that look of his so well—though she had always seen it before in a very different context. She lifted her chin. ‘Humour now?’ If he was mocking her—

      ‘Humour always.’

      There were no followers, no bodyguards, no people clustered around them. They had walked away from the small group of school buildings and were hidden from sight.

      ‘No, Raffa.’ She turned her face away, but he backed her towards the nearest palm.

      ‘Yes,’ he growled, low and husky, pinning her there.

      ‘No…’

      He teased her with almost-kisses all the way down her neck, around her ear, her cheek, and finally, somehow, her mouth. She must have turned to tell him to stop, Casey reasoned, managing to hold out for around a nano-second before she was lost. Was she supposed to resist something she wanted so badly?

      ‘Do you forgive me?’ Raffa murmured, continuing to tease her.

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