The Sheik Who Loved Me(76)

Her panic mounted as she squinted into the sun trying to find focus, to scan the surroundings.

Then she saw him. Relief swooped through her. He hadn’t left. He’d moved into the meager shade of a rock. His back was to her and his head was bent low over something in his lap.

She got up and went over to him, the muscles of her legs aching with each step.

He looked up as she approached. And in his eyes was something unreadable. Then she saw what he held in his hands. A leather-bound book. The Little Mermaid.

She sat quietly beside him.

He closed the book and ran his strong brown hands over the cover. His eyes were liquid ink. “I’d never read it, you know.”

She nodded. She didn’t know what to say.

“All this time and I never read her favorite story. How could I have let that happen?”

“David,” she softly, “don’t be so hard on yourself.”

His eyes lifted to hers. “Thank you, Jayde.” His voice was low and full of gravel. “Thank you for being there for Kamilah…in…in a way I never was. I just didn’t see it. I didn’t know how. This is what I should I have been doing all along. Reading to her. Fairy tales. Indulging her in her childish fantasies. I should have been playing with her, allowing her to be a child. I should have let her know it was okay to have fun…that it wasn’t a slight to her mother’s memory.”

She placed her hand on his arm. “You needed to let yourself know it was okay to live again, David. And that comes only with time. Don’t blame yourself.”

He sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes and held his face up to the sky as if to stop the kinetics of gravity drawing the tears down from his eyes. “And time we’ve had. It’s now time to move forward. We’ll get her, Jayde.” He whispered up to the heavens as if convincing himself as well as the universe. “We’ll get her. And we’ll let her be a kid. I won’t let her down again. Ever.”

Jayde’s stomach tightened into a ball. He was saying “we.” But she knew she would not be a part of the equation. Not once they’d freed Kamilah. There wouldn’t be a place for her. He’d made that clear enough. “You have never let her down, David.”

“I did. By not saving her mother. She blames me. She holds me responsible for her mother’s death.”

“No, she does not blame you, David,” she said softly. “She has never blamed you.”

His eyes flashed to hers. “How would you know?”

“Because she told me. She told me what happened that day, what she saw through her own eyes. And she told me how hard you tried to save her mother and she told me how very proud she is of you.”

His mouth pulled sideways as he tried to contain his emotion. “She told you that?” His voice was thick.

“Yes, David,” she said softly. “Yes, she did.”

He opened his mouth and let out a whoosh of air. Then he turned to look at her. “Thank you,” he whispered, his eyes tunneling deep into hers. “Thank you, Jayde.”

Then he clenched his jaw. His eyes turned cold and determined. He jerked to his feet. “Come,” he said, holding his hand out to her. “Let’s go and give my baby that happy ending. The one you promised her.”

Jayde reached out, grasped his hand. And she felt a new connection between them. A solidness that hadn’t been there before.

He strode over to the camels he’d hobbled near the fetid water, showing no sign of the fatigue that gripped her. “If we keep moving through the night,” he called out as he untied the camels, “and throughout tomorrow, we could be in Al Abèche before next nightfall.”



They stopped once more in the late evening and then pressed on into a night that was as stinking hot as the day that had preceded it. The moon was an almost nonexistent sliver, and the only light that guided them came from stars splattered over the huge black dome of sky.

The farther north they went, the drier the desert, the more hostile the terrain, the blacker the night. In places, sand dunes gave way to sharp rock ridges, and flint in the stone glinted at them like sharp teeth in the dying light of the waning moon.

Jayde knew that once they reached Al Abèche they would be only twenty miles from the Libyan border. The Falal fortress was only another ten miles into Libya. There they would contact Gio Moriati and they would wait for Sauvage and his team to bring Kamilah to them. They would then fly out by helicopter. Dr. Watson would be waiting to treat Kamilah on Shendi if all went according to plan.

She ran over the timeline again and again in her head, trying to stay awake on her camel as dawn once again seeped up from the horizon.