Her Royal Protector (a Johari Crown Novel) (Entangled Indulgence) (16 page)

“What do you want me to promise?” Still that flat, empty look behind the blue.

“That you won’t touch me again,” she said.

“Aly, believe me, this is not the way. Let me—”

“It’s my way, Arif. It may not be your way. And I know you’ve got lots more experience, and you may even be right, but you’re going to let me do this my way.”

He looked at her and sighed. “All right. What assurance do you want from me? That I won’t try to love you again unless you ask me?”

“Since I will never ask you, that’ll do. Unless I ask you in so many words. I’m sure you’re a man of your word, Arif, so will you give it to me?”

He shook his head in resignation, and his whole demeanor abruptly angered her. Why was he playing this game with her? He’d already had all her secrets, he was already convinced she had nothing to do with the Kaljuks. Was it wounded pride? Or merely that he didn’t like the idea of six weeks without sex, and she was handy?

She cringed inside. Better than nothing. Wow. They could put that on her epitaph.

“All right, I give you my word,” Arif said, as if the subject now bored him. He bent and picked up her bag. “Now let’s get back to the boat.”

Hot tears burned her eyes as she followed him along the dock, but she’d be damned if she let them fall.

…

Arif steered between two moored mega yachts and out into the Gulf. The sun was beating down on the world, making the varnished trim glisten, the bleached teak underfoot warm.

With a loud hungry flapping, the mainsail unfurled from the mast and slipped along the boom over their heads. He turned the wheel and the sails caught the wind with a whack to lift
Janahine
into soaring motion.

“Lots of wind,” he said, shutting off the engines. The perfect silence of the sea greeted them.

“Lovely day for a sail,” Aly agreed ironically.

Arif’s heart twisted with a jolt that made him stagger. Her innocent openness as she had accepted his body into her own, her cries of joy as he moved in her, those grey eyes so open, so loving, the sense of completion he had felt. All were gone now. He looked down to where she sat on the edge of the wheel well. Her face was closed against him. Such unhappiness written there that he longed to take her in his arms and soothe her.

But it was better this way. She was right to avoid him. He could offer her nothing, and she was a woman who deserved a man’s entire future. Anguish burned his blood. His hands tightened on the wheel, stilling the urge to reach for her. He had no right to try to change her mind.

His jaw clenched at the thought of his own blindness. Only now did he see how wrong he had been, taking a woman like her to bed without a thought for its effect on her—or himself. Everything in his life had been against his loving her, and he knew it, and thought that made him safe. He had not thought of the effect on her at all, except to think he was doing her a favor by showing her what sex could be.

He had wanted to protect her against all comers. He should have protected her against himself.

For himself, it was not too late. He could pull back from the brink. No one went over the edge so soon. No one loved so quickly and completely.

Except your own father.

Aly had already been guarded against love, against self-belief. If he could tell her he loved her, tell her they must make it work because their whole future was at stake—that would heal whatever damage he had done, in time. He was sure of that. But with no future to offer he didn’t have the right to try. He could not make the sex right for her and then walk away. She was not the woman for that.

It was all or nothing. And that meant, had to mean, nothing.

She sat silent, and he saw tears in her eyes. Each trembling drop was acid on his soul. A man does not make his beloved weep.
You will know a man by the way he treats his wife.

But she could never be his wife. Except in his heart.

His body ached now, his groin heavy and thick with a kind of yearning he had never experienced before with any woman. To sink himself into her now would not be the simple meeting of bodies he was used to. It would be to own her, to make her his, to be one with her and with all life. Too late he saw the power of what had driven him.

Farhad was still moving about the deck tidying up the ropes, pretending to notice nothing. A sail flapped and Arif lifted his head from the contemplation of her face and made adjustments to his course and the sails. And now they were heading towards a distant grey shape on the horizon.

“Faatin,” Arif said, pointing.

They were well heeled over;
Janahine
was practically singing in the wind, and Aly reached to grab the handle on the console for balance.

He was a fool. He was a hundred times a fool.

Chapter Sixteen

Faatin proved to be a small, uninhabited island, where black cliffs towered above a white sand beach, fringed by forest, that nestled between two long rocky outcrops to form a natural harbor. Like the breast and arms of the Black Goddess of ancient times.

“It looks like a woman,” Aly exclaimed.

They had been mostly silent on the journey, exchanging the odd impersonal comment about the sea or the yacht. But all the time she had been calling herself an idiot to have believed for one brief shining moment that her father had been wrong about her.

How close she had come to believing herself in love.

“Yes,” Arif agreed. Aly’s heart twisted with pain every time his gaze, flat and impenetrable, passed over her. “The ancients understood what it meant. Today, however, too many men prefer to forget that the word
Faatin
, which means charming and seductive, is related to an ancient word for Goddess.”

The water was clear and turquoise all the way to the white bottom ten meters down, the waves crisp and shining in the afternoon sun, and the prow of the boat cutting through them produced a perfect roll of white froth. Even so far from shore she thought she could smell flowers. Her heart was breaking with the perfection of the moment, aching for the thought of what it might have been, if she were less of a fool. If only she had stayed in her cabin to think over what she had learned calmly. What would have been the harm of living for a few days more in the dream? The end would have been the same—heartbreak. There had been no reason to rush toward it.

Her body heated
every time she let her eyes run over him, every time she thought of the night just past. There was no controlling that.

Overhead the mainsail luffed with one loud, lazy whack and then caught the wind again. Arif looked up, sniffed the wind, called to Farhad, then said to her, “The wind is changing. We’ll get the sails down here and go in on the engine.”

He changed course and the boat stopped, the sails flapping in the wind. His hand was reaching for the toggle of the sail motor when a giant gust of wind powered out of the cliff face and across the water to slam
Janahine
broadside with a shock that made the rigging chime like a demented clock and set the boat rocking.

If she had not already been holding on, Aly would have been blown to the deck. As it was, she staggered, tripped, and sat with a bump. The mainsail was flapping wildly now; the genny was trying to take off. She heard Arif curse and shout to Farhad, then the whine of the genny furling motor. It came in smoothly enough, but the mainsail was getting completely out of control.

Another whack of wind, more crazy jangling of the rigging against the mast. Aly’s mouth went bitter with primitive fear. This was no ordinary change in the wind. The sea was another creature now: wild and angry, unpredictable, battering them from all directions. She heard the engine start. Arif struggled with the wheel as the mainsail, with terrifying slowness, began to retract into the mast. Aly made to stand again, but Arif shouted, “Stay low,” so she sat where she was, clinging to the low cockpit wall, and willed the sail to hurry.

The roar was deafening as Arif brought the bow dead into the wind, but there was not much relief. The wind still pounded them relentlessly, tearing at the sail, at the rigging, coming low across the water to blast the hull with horrendous waves as if Poseidon himself had risen up to slap the boat into submission.

There was a grudging whine from the sail motor, and the mainsail stopped moving. Arif shouted an instruction and Farhad ran to leap up in the seating area, from where he could reach the boom, grabbed the mainsail and jerked it back and forth, struggling to free the pulley that had stuck. For a few moments Arif flicked the mainsail toggle off and on as Farhad worked at it.

Aly grabbed the chrome handle and stood up. “Let me help,” she shouted. Her words were lost in the terrifying shriek of wind, but her body language was clear.

After a moment he leaned close and shouted in her ear, “Take the wheel. Hold her dead into the wind.”

He stood firm as she slid under his arm, straightened up and closed her hands on the wheel. It was vibrating with a power that stunned her.

“Can you hold her?” he shouted in her ear. Too buffeted by wind to try to turn her head to shout, Aly only nodded. Slowly, Arif lifted one hand and then the other, and now she was holding the wheel against the full might of the wind, and it was an awesome force. She had one moment for a mental nod to that godlike power, and then pitted herself against it, standing like da Vinci’s
Proportions of Man
, her legs spread wide, her arms at full extent over the circle of the wheel, fighting to hold the nose to the wind. Arif leapt up beside Farhad, then like a trapeze artist he slung himself up onto the boom and sat astride, locking his ankles underneath, struggling with the pulley as the wind tried to drag him down, tried to tear his shirt and shorts and even his hair off and whistle them away.

The noise was unbearable. The wind shrieked and howled and banged the hull as if a psycho with an iron bar were coming after her. The sea smashed over the bow with malevolent fingers, trying to drag the boat down. Panic sank its teeth into her stomach and venomous fear shot through blood and nerves, making for her heart and brain. She tasted bile. With aching arms she kept her grip on the wheel.
Janahine
was being battered from side to side on the massive waves now, the mast going a little further each time, a little closer to the sea. If the boat heeled right over and the mast hit the water they were all dead. In a sea like this they were dead.

Don’t think.
She had to focus on her task, on the wheel. The muscles of her back and arms were being shredded with the effort to hold it on course. Never in her life had she fought so hard, hurt so much, been so afraid. Every time she let it slip off true, the wind slapped the boat, the mainsail whacked insanely, and she was sure Arif would be thrown down at her feet. Steering dead into the wind she could barely open her eyes, barely breathe, and she gritted her teeth and lived in dread of the sound of his body hitting the deck.

The wind whipped her hair against her face and head with vicious cracks. If she opened her mouth, it tried to tear off her cheeks. The hideous howling deafened her. The boat rocked and bucked, and the spray smashed over her, as if some living thing, some conscious enemy, wanted to knock her flat. Her arms ached, her legs shook with the effort, her back was in spasm. She wouldn’t be able to do it. She would not be strong enough. He would die, they would all die, because she was weak.

The two men still struggled overhead. Once the pulley moved forward a couple of inches, but her relief was premature, and it only jammed again.

“Turn the switch.” How she heard Arif’s shout above the wild storm she could not tell; it was as if he spoke into her inner ear. She gripped as hard as she could on the wheel with her left hand and reached out to flip the switch with a quick snap of her right. The mainsail whacked with a noise like thunder, Farhad slipped but caught himself, and Aly grabbed the wheel again and struggled to pull it back into the heading. Above her head the sail pulley moved two inches, then another inch.

“Back again,” Arif shouted, and again she could not hold the yacht’s heading as she used one hand to move the toggle back to the retract position. She heard the thump of a body meeting the deck and looked up in horror, her eyes narrowed to slits against wind and the salt spray. Arif had jumped down and was beating his way to the foot of the mast. He was going to try to climb it.

“Arif,
no
!” Aly shrieked, but the wind whipped away her words. She was in a nightmare, trying to scream and nothing coming out. The horror drove into her bones now, aching and cold, as she watched Arif climb up. The wind battered him as the mast rocked from side to side; it was an insane attempt, he would die. The lean body swung out dangerously into empty space, first on one side and then the other, and each time she felt a scream in her throat. Her heart beat in sickening bursts. She turned her head and spat out the taste of bile. The wind snatched it away.

A wave slapped hard over her, but she dare not lift a hand to wipe her face. She was almost numb now, her eyes flicking between her heading and Arif as he climbed higher and higher on the shifting, rocking mast, watching him almost lose his grip as the elements conspired to tear him out of life. At last he reached the top, looking so vulnerable and alone she wanted to weep. Clinging on with one arm, he pounded and hammered at the stuck sail.

He was completely at the storm’s mercy now. Her own weakness, any false move, would bring him smashing down to be broken on the deck. His life was in her hands. Aly stopped glancing up at him and focused on her heading, her whole body juddering with the effort to keep the head into the wind. She would not give in. She must not fail.

Then somehow she touched a tiny point of inner calm, a peace that told her that they might survive or they might perish, but that whatever the outcome they would have done their best, their utmost, all three of them, and that nothing gave them better odds than having Arif in command. His strength seemed to embrace her, to power her own blood and muscles. If they survived it would be through his skill. If they perished, there was no one in the world who would have survived this. It was in the lap of the gods. As mortals they were doing all that was possible to them.

Time disappeared, self disappeared, there was only the moment. She reached a pitch of focus, as if boat and storm were one, and she and Arif and Farhad were part of the one, a small part of a massive drama. Her arms and legs and back were locked in ferocious effort, her eyes burned down to see her course heading, she made her course adjustments on a kind of high instinct, without conscious thought. There was no room for thought.

Dimly she was aware of Farhad staggering to a locker, pulling out a tool, going up the mast to give it to Arif. Coming down to swing up onto the boom again and work at the pulley. Over the cacophony of the storm she heard the rhythmic
whack, whack, whack
of human intent.

After a time she could not measure she sensed a change. Slowly, slowly, shoved and pulled and hammered by Arif and Farhad at both ends, the mainsail was at last furling into the mast. The wind, too, was abating. Inch by inch the yacht became easier to hold on course. And at last Arif came down the mast and leapt down beside Aly to take the wheel from her suddenly trembling hands. With one hand he pulled her tight against him, and she wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her face against his chest, where the strong, steady beat of his heart set her world to rights again.

…

They motored into the embrace of the Black Goddess’s arms, not surprised to find another boat, a small motor cruiser, moored on one side of the perfect, natural harbor. Arif steered to the opposite side before dropping anchor. The first thing he did was call the other boat to make sure all was well with them, but the man who answered said, amidst painful ear-bursting radio squawking, that their only problem was a broken radio.

Aly was aching in every muscle, and the storm had passed and the sea inside their safe harbor was inviting in the evening sun. “I’m going in for a swim,” she announced.

“I want to take a look at that sail before dark,” Arif said. “Can you wait?”

“You know it’ll be dark in less than an hour. Arif, every one of my muscles is screaming.”

“All right. Be sure to stay near the boat, and come aboard before it gets dark.”

“Yes,” Aly said. It was risky to swim after dark, because if any member of the shark coterie came swimming by, she wouldn’t see it. That meant time was short. She dashed into her cabin, ripped off her wet clothes, put on her swimsuit, and within three minutes was going down the swim ladder.

The water was soothing on her strained muscles, and swimming gently helped to relieve the awful cramping. She turned and floated on her back, gazing up at a still blue sky, letting the water take away the ache. Not thinking about anything. Not about the storm, nor what she had learned about her own strength during it. Not even about the look in Arif’s eyes when the storm had passed and the first thing he had done was hold her. It would be weakness to let herself dream it meant anything more than human relief.

The sky was changing color and she was swimming in shadow now, so it was time to get aboard again. Aly rolled over to discover she hadn’t been travelling in the direction she’d imagined: she was, in fact, quite close to shore.

Very close, if she thought about it.

It was still light enough to look for turtle nests. She could just do it. There had already been a fierce wind, and the tide was coming in. High tide tonight. Any turtle signs that had been left behind by the wind would in all probability be lost to her by tomorrow.

She didn’t need her equipment for a simple eyeball check. She could just make a quick pass and be back in the water in no time. If she saw a nest she could set a stone and then mark it properly in the morning.

Arif might stop her if he knew, but they had dropped anchor on the western side of the bay, shadowed now by the high wall of rock in the setting sun, and she was in shadow. Her black swimsuit was good camouflage against the rocks. And once on the beach the trees and scrub would hide her.

She glided up onto the sand in the shadows of the long rocky arm of the Goddess that formed the natural breakwater, stood and slipped up to where the trees began. The little forest gave her some cover, and Aly walked quickly, scrolling over the sand with her eyes, looking for those telltale signs that a turtle female had returned to the place of her birth to lay eggs for a new generation. She would not be seen while in shadow, but where the shadows stopped trees and sand were still bathed in bright gold.