The Sheikh’s Disobedient Bride(32)
The elderly man only looked more puzzled and Tally wanted to pull her hair out in mad chunks. This was a nightmare. A nightmare. How could Tair think she could possibly stay here, the only woman—and a Western woman at that—in this camp? He was out of his mind.
“Tair,”Tally said more loudly.
The old man just looked at her with absolute incomprehension.
“He doesn’t have a clue as to what you’re saying,” an amused voice said behind her and Tally spun around.
“How long have you been standing there?” she demanded, exhaling a huffy puff even as she pushed her long hair back from her face.
“Long enough to enjoy your pantomime.”
“Very funny.” But it was, she knew and she smiled reluctantly. “So you’re back. Did you get the bad guys?”
His lips curved but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. “Most of them.”
She felt his mood then and it was somber, heavy, and Tally wondered just what had taken place out there in the desert tonight. “Hungry?” she asked more gently.
He nodded. “Let me just wash. I’ll be right back.” He returned shortly, jaw clean shaven, his hair wet, combed back from his face, the thick shoulder-length strands a glossy black in the soft yellow candlelight.
“You look…nice,” Tally said awkwardly, shyly.
Tair laughed. “You sound so surprised.”
“No, I…um, no.” Blushing she moved to the table laden with trays and bowls, more food than Tally had seen in a long time. “No,” she repeated and knelt on one side of the table.
“Let’s eat.”
Over dinner she asked him why the older man didn’t understand her when she asked for him.
“No one here knows me as Tair,” he answered, dipping a hunk of the bread in the stew.
“Then what do they call you?”
“Sheikh Zein el-Tayer. Or Soussi al-Kebir.”
Chief of the Soussi Desert.Tally bit her lip, thinking how odd it was that his name which had been so strange was now so familiar. “How does Tair come from Tayer?”
He grimaced. “Good question. It’s pronounced like the English word for tire, and it shouldn’t be hard to say but when I attended boarding school in England, the headmaster could never say my name quite right and pretty soon all the boys were calling me Tair.”
“An English boarding school? That explains some things. So, did it bother you they couldn’t get your name right?”
“No. A name’s a name. There are other things more pressing.”
“Like?”
“Politics. Survival.” He hesitated and when Tally said nothing he continued. “You don’t know our history, or our culture so I can’t expect you to understand the turmoil in this region, but politics have given us a violent legacy. We’ve fought to maintain our independence but it’s not been without great personal cost.”
She didn’t know if it was his expression, or his tone, but she knew somehow, sensed it maybe, that he’d suffered. Personally suffered. It wasn’t just his people’s conflict but his own. “Those scars,” she said hesitantly, indicating his torso where his robe covered the thickened tissue crisscrossing his chest, “are they a result of this violent legacy?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him closely, really looked at him and she saw lines in his face, creases at his eyes, grooves near his mouth and the hollows beneath his high cheekbones. “You’ve been to war?”
“I live the war.”
She didn’t know what that meant. It was such a vague, cryptic thing to say. Part of her wanted to know what he meant and another part of her didn’t. He was frightening, too frightening, his body a canvas of cuts and wounds, his strength formidable, his courage incomparable. She’d never met anyone who could do what he could do. She’d never thought it possible that a man could do what Tair did.
But there was a dark side, too. He wasn’t a good man, couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be called thoughtful, kind, or compassionate. “How do you live war?”
“You attack. Steal. Injure. Kill.”
“I see.” And she did, too well. She could picture him doing all of the above, and remorselessly, as well. “You’ve killed in self-defense?”
“If you want to call it that.”
Again she hesitated. “And if I don’t?”
“It’s what it is.”
He met her questioning look with a slow, mocking smile. “Revenge,” he added quietly. “A settling of scores.”