A Reputation For Revenge(45)

“It’s a compound fracture,” Kasimir said behind her. She turned and got one vision of his strangely calm face, before he twisted around and spoke sharply in Berber to the other two boys. They scattered, shouting as they ran for the encampment.

Kasimir knelt in the sand beside her. He looked down at the injury. As Josie cuddled the crying boy, Kasimir spoke to him with incredible gentleness in his voice. The boy answered him with a sob.

Carefully, Kasimir ripped the fabric up to the knee to get a closer look at the break. Tearing off a corner of his own shirt, he pushed it into Josie’s hand. “Press this just below the knee to slow down the blood.”

His voice was calm. Clearly he was good in a crisis. She was not. She swallowed, feeling wobbly. “I can’t—”

“You can.”

He had such faith in her. She couldn’t let him down. Still feeling a bit green, she took a deep breath and pressed the cloth to a point above the wound as firmly as she could.

Rising to his feet, Kasimir crossed back across the sand and returned a moment later with his snowboard. Turning it over to the flat side, he dug sand out from beneath the boy and gently nudged the board beneath the injured leg. He ripped more long bits of fabric from his shirt, giving Josie a flash of his hard, taut abs before he bent to use the board as a splint.

The boy’s parents arrived at a run, his mother crying, his father looking blank with fear as he reached out to hold his son’s hand. Behind them another man, dark-skinned, with an indigo-colored turban, gave quick brusque orders that all of them obeyed, including Kasimir. Five minutes later, they were lifting the boy onto a makeshift stretcher.

Josie’s knees shook beneath her as she started to follow. Kasimir stopped her.

“Go back to the tent,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do.” His lips twitched. “Can’t have you fainting on us.”

She swallowed, remembering how she’d nearly fainted at the sight of the boy’s injury. “But I want to help—”

“You have,” he said softly. He glanced behind him. “Ahmed’s uncle is a doctor. He will take good care of him until the helicopter arrives.” He pushed her gently in the other direction. “He’ll be all right. Go back to the tent. And pack.”

Josie watched anxiously as the boy was carried to the other side of the encampment. He disappeared into a tent, with Kasimir and the others beside him, and she finally turned away. Dazed, she looked down at her clenched hands and saw they were covered in blood.

Slowly, she walked back to the tent she shared with Kasimir. She went to the basin of water and used rose-scented soap to wash the blood off her hands. Drying her hands on a towel, she sank to the bed.

Go back to the tent. And pack.

She gasped as the meaning of those words sank in. She covered her mouth with her hand.

She’d won. By pure mischance, she’d won their race.

There would be no seduction. Instead, from this night forward, she’d be sleeping alone in a separate tent.

Once, Josie would have been relieved.

But now...

Numbly, she rose from their bed. Grabbing her backpack, she started to gather her clothes. Then she stopped, looking around the tent. Kasimir always dumped everything on the floor, in that careless masculine way, knowing it was someone else’s job to follow after him and tidy up. Looking across the luxurious carpets piled thickly across the sand, Josie’s eyes could see the entirety of her husband’s day: the empty water bucket of solid silver. The hand-crafted sandalwood soap. His crumpled pajama pants. And in a corner, his black leather briefcase, so stuffed with papers that it could no longer be closed, none of which he’d glanced at even once since the day they’d arrived here.

In the distance, she heard a sound like rolling thunder.

Tears rose to her eyes, and she wiped them away fiercely. She didn’t want to leave him. This was the place where they whispered secrets to each other in the middle of the night. The bed where, if she woke up in the middle of the night, she’d hear the soft sound of his breathing and go back to sleep, comforted that he was beside her.

No more.

When she was finished packing, she grabbed her mother’s tattered copy of North and South. For the next hour as she waited, sitting on the bed, Josie tried to concentrate on the love story, though she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over.

Kasimir’s footstep was heavy as he pushed aside the heavy cotton flap of the door. She looked up from her book, her heart fluttering, as it always did at the breathtaking masculine beauty of his face, the hard edge of his jawline, dark with five o’clock shadow, and the curved edge of his cheekbones. His blue eyes looked tired.