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A pearl fell like a teardrop. A second followed, landing in her palm. Noor’s fingers involuntarily caught it, massaged the cool little sphere between finger and thumb. How completely her dreams were being destroyed. And yet…
If they had gone through with the wedding, there would have come a point when they sat side by side in the plane like this. The thought gave her a curious sensation of being in two lives at once. Was there a parallel universe in which they had been married? That other life seemed so close. She could almost feel it, as if she might blink and find everything the same, but different.
Would she have gone on believing Bari loved her, living her fool’s dream? Would he have kept up the pretence once he had what he wanted, or would she have learned immediately that he had made a fool of her? Would she ever have guessed if she hadn’t overheard the truth…
“She’s so spoiled! All she cares about is clothes and jewellery and having a good time. She’s just totally frivolous!”
Noor had been standing at the mirror, layers of silk and lace surrounding her, her tanned skin and auburn hair gleaming like the rich heart of a white rose, when the bitchy malice filtered through from the room beyond.
“And I don’t believe she’s in love with anyone but herself!”
And just like a droplet of dew on the rose’s heart was the fabulous al Khalid diamond. Bari’s grandfather’s wedding gift to her had simply taken her breath away. Noor was used to wealth and all its pleasures, but Bari’s family fortune went beyond wealth. The diamond was the biggest single stone Noor had ever seen, and it lay against her hand with a dark fire that almost burned her—like Bari’s eyes, she thought with a delicious flutter.
“She is young yet.”
“She’s twenty-four. Why are you making excuses for her?”
Noor let it wash over her. She had heard it before, directly or implied. The women in Bari’s family were not uniformly delighted with his choice of bride, but what should she care about that?
“She has been raised by overfond parents, it’s true,” said the more placid voice of Bari’s aunt. “But she is an al Jawadi by blood. She has more depth than she knows yet.”
Of course they didn’t know she could hear. She was in the large, luxurious bathroom set between her bedroom and another. A moment ago Noor had been at the centre of buzzing activity, the hair stylist and the makeup artist competing with the dressmaker and her personal maid for her attention, but now, with the excuse of one last nervous visit to the toilet, she had stepped in here to be alone for a moment and catch her breath.
And she had heard voices murmuring together in bitchy comfort in the other bedroom.
“He’s only known her a few weeks,” the younger one was still protesting, and Noor wondered if this particular cousin, whoever it was, was in love with Bari herself.
“You are talking like a true Westerner. Why should a man know his bride? It is enough that his family knows her family.”
In a moment she would go back into her bedroom to face the renewed onslaught of perfectionism from her dressers and wait for Jalia and her bridesmaids to tap on the door to tell her it was time. Time to be escorted to meet the richest, the handsomest, the sexiest man ever to have deserved the title “Cup Companion,” the man who had known he wanted to marry Noor Ashkani—Princess Noor Yasmin al Jawadi Durrani—practically from the first glance.
“It’s different when the marriage is arranged, though, isn’t it?” The murmurs in the next room grew louder as the two women moved past the slightly open door, in complete ignorance of the fact that the subject under discussion was on the other side of it. “Then the families at least have—”
“How is it different? This marriage might not have been arranged in the traditional way, but it was your grandfather who chose the bride.”
“Really?” The younger voice sounded both shocked and deliciously intrigued, and Noor’s eyes widened with startled dismay. “You mean Bari isn’t in love with her?”
She sounded thrilled, Noor noted. Cow.
“He was very bitter when his grandfather told him what was necessary.” The voices faded again and she heard the opening of the door that led onto the broad, shady balcony.
“How—but why would Bari agree to something like that? He’s so independent!”
“Bari has no choice.” The other voice was matter-of-fact. “If he wants the right to the property in Bagestan and the money to restore it, he has to marry as he is instructed. Your grandfather wants an alliance with the Durranis. He will leave the property away from Bari if—”
The door shut, cutting the voices off, and leaving Noor stunned and as white as her veil among the broken pieces of her stupid, childish dreams….
A loud rumble brought her back into the here and now, with all its dangers. Oh, if only her father had never told them their history! If only she could return to her ordinary life, and never learn whose blood ran in her veins. Princess! They had been happy as they were! And now…her life had so changed that it might end here, miles from her home, in the next few minutes.
Another, louder crack of thunder, and she bit back a cry. She had seen flickering light within the roiling darkness. If lightning struck…
They hit turbulence and dropped for a few metres before landing with a sickening thud on a boiling air mass. Her stomach churned. Oh, let me not throw up! she begged feverishly.
Lightning danced perilously in the black cloud again, and the noise was deafening. They were at the heart of the storm.
Bari struggled against turbulence, hoping he had a heading towards the Gulf Islands as he came down, but he was far from certain. The instruments were jumping so much they were all but useless. And as a mere human he was in the maelstrom, archetypal Chaos, the place where the ordinary senses were powerless as guides.
Flying by the seat of your pants, they called it. On a wing and a prayer. The clichés recited themselves in his head, describing truths no one with sense wanted to discover for himself.
He had been acting like a fool for too long. His judgement had been faulty ever since hearing his grandfather’s ultimatum, and what a pity he could only recognize that now!
But this wasn’t the moment to fan the flames of his legitimate anger, either with his grandfather or with Noor. His mind needed to be clear of everything except the job at hand.
He could keep dropping lower to try to get below the cloud, but that was risky: some of the islands were high and rugged. And even at the coast the foothills were over a thousand feet high in places. So whether he was badly off course or right where he hoped he was, there was terrible risk involved in flying low.
But to continue to fly inside the storm invited even more certain disaster. He had to take the risk and try to put down, trusting that he would break out of cloud in time to see where he was and take evasive action if it wasn’t where he hoped.
Noor’s mouth was dry. Her heart beat with terror; the metallic taste of panic was on her tongue. She had never been afraid for her life before. They could be struck by lightning. Turbulence could break the plane apart. They could fall from the sky like a stone.
Or the earth could leap up in their path and smash them to atoms.
She wanted to lash out and hit something; her legs were tense with the need to run screaming from the scene. She wanted her heart to stop thundering in her chest and cheeks and temples. She wanted to wake up from this nightmare and find herself safe.
“Oh God!” she whimpered as a fist of sound punched the little plane and set it juddering. How was it possible one tiny act had set such a chain of events in motion? If she could have it to do over again…
“Pray for some common sense while you’re at it,” Bari advised with grim humour. He was fighting to hold the plane against the turbulence, and he seemed to have as good a grip on himself as on the controls.
The injustice of the comment infuriated her—or was it the justice of it?—and as if that fury somehow served as an antidote to the emotion that engulfed her, Noor gritted her teeth in sudden revulsion for her own fear. If this was death, she wasn’t meeting it as a coward! She wasn’t going to spend her last few minutes in a panic, pleading with fate or regretting her own stupidity or anything else.
The noise was deafening now—the shriek of wind, the rain and thunder and the protesting engine all conspiring together to produce cacophony. Noor ran her eyes over the instrument panel. Even if they hadn’t been leaping around like drops of water on a summer pavement, the instruments would have told her exactly nothing.
“There must be something I can do!” she cried over the noise.
Bari’s eyes were steady on her for a moment, clocking the shift in her state of mind. He indicated the radio with his chin.
“Try and raise air traffic control again,” he shouted, less because he thought it likely than to give her something to do. “Give them our stats. Height eleven hundred and descending. Bearing two two five. See if they have us on radar and can confirm our position.”
But the radio responded with static. They were out of range, but that told them nothing with regard to their own position—except that a mountain might be between them and the airport. In the distance she heard the pilot of another plane saying he could hear her, but the signal faded and he didn’t respond to her call.
“Go to the distress channel,” Bari ordered, and a thrill of renewed fear zinged through her. Every pilot knew the channel number, but not in the expectation of ever needing it. Her mouth dry, Noor turned the dial to read 121.5. She coughed.
“Mayday, May—” she began hoarsely.
Suddenly there was a flash of light all around them, as though they had touched an electric grid. Then a curious silence, as if the rain were taking a breath, or her heart had stopped beating. Then rippling, cracking, booming thunder.
“Did that hit us?” Noor barely breathed the question.
Bari shrugged. “The electrics are still working.” He pulled back on the throttle, slowing the engine further.
“I’m going to put down. The sea will be choppy, but better to break up on the surface than up here.”
If the sea was beneath them.
Noor felt a sudden calm. Mash’allah. “All right. What should I do?”
“There’s a life raft in the rear.” He sounded doubtful. “Can you get it out?”
She set down the mike and unbuckled herself. “Right.”
“Be prepared for more turbulence.”
She hastily kicked off her shoes and got up, scrabbling her way between the two passenger seats behind and into the back of the aircraft as fast as she could, yanking at the voluminous skirt of her dress, clutching tightly to anything within reach. Meanwhile the plane leaped and bounced as the storm did its unholy best to knock her off balance.
Strange, she thought distantly, all this bucking wasn’t making her queasy now. Maybe having nerves at a fever pitch had something to do with that.
Still the wind howled and shrieked around the little plane. Lightning crackled within the clouds, and the answering thunder pounded and banged them almost physically.
In the luggage space behind the passenger seats, she saw a suitcase-sized container fitted to the bulkhead on a mounting. There were very similar items on the yachts of friends, and in her carefree life Noor had been miles from imagining she would ever actually need one.
She knelt into the cloud of her dress and wrestled with the clasps holding the case in the cradle. She noted only distantly that the tip of one perfect peach-coloured fingernail snapped off in the process.
“LIFE RAFT, 4 PERSON. DO NOT INFLATE IN AN ENCLOSED SPACE.”
Bari swore as the plane bucked again, and Noor fell against the seat and then the bulkhead as she dragged the case awkwardly off its mounting. It was heavy and hard and had a mind of its own, but with curses and tears she at last manoeuvred it to a position behind Bari’s seat. Two more fingernails tore in the process.
The sweat of struggle was on Bari’s forehead, and his face was white with strain. A black curl fell over one eye. “Sit down,” he called. “We’ll break out of cloud soon and I may have to take it back up fast.”
Fear rushed through her again at this stark statement of what she already knew—that they might be blindly flying towards a mountainside. Biting her lip, Noor struggled back into her seat and shoved her arms through the safety harness, clicking it home.
Rain pounded the metal body of the plane, and the wind screamed around them, in an intensity of sound she’d never heard before. Thunder rolled all around. She felt the noise in her skin, in her body, as if sound itself embraced her, a physical thing.
She picked up the mike again. “Mayday, Mayday, this is India Sierra—”
Suddenly they were out of cloud, driving through rain so heavy there was scarcely any improvement in visibility. But below she could see water, and she let her breath out on a long silent sigh. Thank God, thank God. Alhamdolillah. She glanced at Bari, but she saw no emotion other than fierce concentration on his face.
“Brace yourself,” he said briefly. The water looked choppy and unforgiving. Noor pushed her free hand against the control panel, pressed her stockinged feet against the floor.
“This is India Sierra Quebec two six, we are—”
He slowed the engine, dropping lower, trying to gauge the height of the chop by what he knew of the sea as a sailor. It was rougher than he had hoped.
The belly of the plane touched down with a hollow thump, and then another and another as they hit the waves. Bari wrestled to keep the plane from nose-diving, the muscles of his arms bulging with the effort. As he slowed to a standstill, a bigger swell grabbed the starboard wing. With a sharp, terrifying scream of metal the plane slewed around, bounced up, smacked down, pitched forward and then dropped back.
Four
The high scream stopped. The propellers stopped. The pounding rain increased in ferocity, but still it sounded like silence to the two in the cockpit. Bari slapped his harness open.
“Are you hurt?” His voice was harsh.
“No,” Noor said faintly. The truth was she was so shocked that if she did have broken bones she wouldn’t have known.
“The hull is damaged,” Bari said, flinging open his door onto driving rain and waves that slapped against the belly of the plane, stretching greedy fingers into the cockpit. “We’ve got a couple of minutes before it goes under.”
Noor, dizzy and shaken, struggled out of the harness and her seat again.
Bari was in the open doorway, the rain slashing at him, staining his jacket dark, plastering it to his skin. He tied the cord from the life raft to a metal brace with quick expertise. Somehow he did not look incongruous in his wedding finery. The purple silk jacket that was dress uniform to a Cup Companion only emphasized his physical power and masculinity. Around his hips the jewelled belt of his sword glowed dully. He looked like an ancient painting of a noble warrior, ready for anything.
Lightning crackled behind his head, and thunder exploded around them like a small bomb.
“Take your dress off,” he shouted.
Her hand went unconsciously to her throat. “But I’m—”
“Now!” His voice was harsh. “Do you want to drown?”
She was too stunned by events to argue. He was right. If she fell into the water, the dress would drag her down. Anyway, what did she have to hide from Bari? He had been so intimate with her body he practically owned it.
Bari didn’t waste time watching to see her obey. He dragged the life raft through the opening and heaved it onto the water.
Noor reached up behind her neck and her fingers tugged at the first of the dozens of tiny silk-covered buttons that ran down her back. She managed to undo three or four, watching as Bari jerked at the cord of the plastic case now riding the waves a short distance away, but the dress was too tight for her to reach further.
“You’ll have to undo me,” she said hoarsely, and so quietly he didn’t hear against the sudden hissing and snapping as the life raft opened. Noor coughed. Since trying to make the Mayday call she seemed to have no voice.
“You have to undo me!” she cried louder.
He looked at her. She was offering her back, her head turned to look over her shoulder into his face. Bari’s eyes took in the lifted shoulder, the fall of glowing auburn hair, the partly opened neckline of the dress, the soft skin of her back as it disappeared under the delicate white silk.
Even now, with danger crackling all around, the thought of the might-have-been passed over them. Wordlessly his hands rose to the buttons, and moved against her back to undo her wedding dress…as he might have done in a hushed bedroom somewhere, their hearts beating not with fear but desire….
He undid two of the tiny, impossible buttons, and then muttered something she didn’t hear. His hands clenched against her skin for a moment before he wrenched them apart. The fabric screamed its protest at the violation of the should-have-been, and he tore the dress open from neck to hip. Buttons flew like little pellets, landing all around with a sound that was curiously distinct against the noise of the storm.
They said not a word. Bari lifted his hands and turned back to his task with the raft. It was nearly fully inflated now, and he quickly picked up a small satchel as water began to seep into the plane, staining the carpet with a warning that time was short.
Noor dragged the dress off, down her arms and over her hips. Clutching hard on the seat back against the rocking of the waves, she let it drop with a swoosh to the floor and stepped out of it. Now she was wearing nothing but a teddy and stockings.
She dragged the heavy weight of the dress up and flung it over her arm, and then stood waiting for his signal.
There was a loud pop as the bright red canopy snapped into place over the raft. Bari held the raft close to the battered plane, and she watched him toss the sheathed sword and the satchel through the canopy entrance. The eyes that glanced over her were clinically impersonal. Not even by a tightening of his mouth did he seem to remember that the last time he had seen her like this lovemaking had followed.
Lightning crackled between earth and sky, and the black clouds roiled as thunder echoed across the water. A gust of wind smacked them, causing the plane to make a terrifying shift.
“Shoes?” Bari shouted.
“Off.”
“Jump onto the canopy.”
She clutched her dress and prepared to leap. “What the hell’s that for?” he demanded harshly.
