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There were teams all over the country working hard on mine clearance: Lana knew all about it, since it was her own favourite project in Parvan.
She also knew that, except for the routes that were the nomads’ regular pathways between their summer and winter grounds, including this one where the road had been built, these bleak, difficult mountains were scheduled to be the last area cleared.
It made sense to clear the valleys, the towns, the farmlands and nomad trade routes first. But it meant that even if they saw a cave or overhang, she and Arash could not just climb up to take shelter. They were safe from mines only for a few yards either side of the road, and all that had been mostly levelled to make way for the road.
A gust of wind roared down the mountainside, shaking the truck as it bumped along, spattering sand and gravel against the windshield, making her shiver.
Storm and mountain—you couldn’t beat them for making a human being feel frail and insignificant.
“We can’t pitch the tent if there’s going to be a storm. We’ll have to sit it out in the truck,” she observed in a level voice.
There was silence. He did not deny it.
Lana felt the first real thrill of alarm. Sitting in a truck overnight while a storm raged with only Arash and a survival candle for company! It defied imagination. The man could barely bring himself to be civil to her at the easiest of times.
She eyed the clouds again.
“Is there going to be a lot of snow?”
It was a stupid question, which she knew as soon as she asked it. When the weather was unseasonable in the first place, who could guess? But it was just ordinary human nature to ask, Lana figured. It didn’t really mark her as ignorant, but by the glance Arash threw her, you’d think she was a specimen of a species that lacked basic reasoning capabilities.
Arash shrugged. “Two inches? Two feet?”
“Two feet?”
“It is impossible to guess.”
His voice was rough and flat, not sharing anything with her, and she had to breathe deeply to calm her irritation. She had only been making conversation to ease her nerves, and besides, he must know the ropes a lot better than she did. She’d never been up here before, but his family estates were in the Koh-i Shir mountains somewhere, so why shouldn’t she ask an expert?
But what was the point in defending herself?
They always did rub each other the wrong way. It was one of those inexplicable, unfounded antipathies. Each would have been happy never to see the other again, she thought, if only one of them would leave town.
But Parvan was Arash’s home, and he wasn’t going to emigrate. And, apart from this short break which Alinor had insisted on, Lana wasn’t going anywhere, at least until after Alinor’s baby was born. And then—well, she wasn’t ready yet to name a day when she would leave Parvan.
She had never met such brave, strong, true people as the citizens of Kavi’s little country of mountain and desert, and here—helping, with her father’s money, to put the war-torn country back together—she felt that she had found her reason for being.
“What is this, Lana, adopt-a-country?” her father had demanded in amused exasperation at yet another request for a contribution. In one of his weak moments she had convinced him to match, dollar for dollar, all the funds she raised elsewhere. “Don’t I already support most of the villages and roads and wells and schools? And that mountain highway—what are you calling it, the Emerald Road?—is sucking up cash like a vacuum cleaner! What else can there be?”
“Dad, face it—if you don’t spend your money on something like Parvan, what’ll you spend it on? Trying to buy power, that’s what. And then you won’t be a great guy anymore, you’ll be a monster, and everyone will hate you,” she had explained ruthlessly. “And I don’t want everyone in the world hating my dad.”
“I’m not trying to buy power at the moment, Lana,” he had told her. “I’m trying to endow a museum.”
The new museum was his baby, and it needed lots of funds, too. But he almost always came through for her. And sometimes their interests coincided, for many wealthy Parvani families were forced into selling their ancient treasures to finance the rebuilding of their lives.
At least Lana could always make sure the Holding Museum paid well.
Kavi and Alinor and all the people whose lives she touched—whose villages and homes and farms were rebuilt, much sooner than could otherwise have been possible, with her father’s generous donations and the money she raised with her fund-raising events—of course were grateful.
Only Arash stood outside the circle of her admirers. As a sheikh and tribal leader with a valley full of farms and villages to care for, he had not interfered when his people had received their share of the generosity. But as the man whose own estates and family home had suffered, he would accept nothing from her.
And although she was certain that his painful limp could be helped with surgery, he had virtually pretended not to hear her offer to finance a trip for surgery abroad.
She had never understood his reasons, and she no longer bothered to try.
She turned her head to run a look over his strong, uncompromising profile as he drove, his own attention firmly on the road. He was wearing a leather jacket and denim jeans and boots, but he looked no less a sheikh than when he was in full traditional dress.
“Will this thing drive if there’s that much snow?” she couldn’t help asking.
“There are too many unknowns to predict anything with certainty,” he said.
“So we might end up waiting for a helicopter rescue?” Her heart sank. And how long would that take? she wanted to ask, but she suppressed the desire. His answer would only be another irritating refusal to guess, and she was already gritting her teeth.
“I knew I should fly,” she muttered.
Arash lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. “And why didn’t you?”
“Well, you know the answer to that better than I do, Arash!”
“I know only that Kavi asked me to see you safely to Central Barakat and that you insisted on coming by road.”
She threw him a look. “I do know, Arash, that I’m providing cover for some secret mission to Prince Omar.”
Arash frowned at the road. “I am entrusted with no mission other than delivering you safely to my cousin Omar and Princess Jana in Central Barakat.”
Of course he wouldn’t tell her if he was. “So why was it so important that you and no one else accompany me?” she demanded sceptically.
There was a short silence.
“But this was your own choice,” he said in slight surprise.
Lana’s mouth gaped. “My choice? What, to have you along? Why would it be my choice?”
“Naturally I found your motive inexplicable.”
Lana turned to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “Did you really think that I had asked Kavi to force you to come with me? Kavi couldn’t have told you such a thing!”
He threw her a glance, shrugging. “It was one possible explanation for something inexplicable.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence!” she snapped. “What did you think my motive was, Arash, just as a matter of interest?”
The truck slowed as his eyes briefly but electrifyingly met hers.
“I thought your motive would be revealed in time. I didn’t trouble, therefore, to wonder.”
“Don’t hand me that!” she commanded irritably. “If you thought I engineered this, you must have had some ideas about why! What was my reason, Arash?”
She stared at him, her mind whirling, fury already bubbling up inside, and she thought how dangerous it would be to be stranded alone with Arash, of all men. She knew there was a well of resentment in her towards him…. There wasn’t another of Kavi’s Cup Companions she didn’t like, whom she wouldn’t rather have been with now.
“What reason could I possibly have for wanting to be alone with you up here in God’s country?”
He made no reply. After a minute, she opened her mouth on a slow, outraged breath.
“I don’t believe it!” Suddenly she could hardly get the words out for the rage that assailed her. When she spoke, her voice shook.
“What did you think, Arash? Did you think I maybe wanted to get you alone to make you an offer?”
She saw a muscle leap in his jaw and was sure she had hit home.
“What kind of an offer, exactly, were you envisaging? Just a brief affair, or was I going to go so far as to propose a mutually convenient marriage of wealth with an ancient title? Was that it?”
“It was not that I believed it. It was merely one possible explanation that crossed my mind.”
“You really have to be seen to be believed!”
He slowed the truck with a quick jab at the brakes and turned to her, a blaze of fury on his face.
“You deny that such a possibility has occurred to you?”
She stared at him, the words tumbling from her lips. “Yes, I deny that such a possibility has occurred to me! What gives you the right to speak to me like this?”
His eyes were dark with feeling, and a shiver ran all over her. What on earth could be coming now?
He lifted a hand from the steering wheel and his finger pointed at the end of her nose. His eyes flashed violet, and the fury in his voice now astonished her.
“What gives me the right? You give me the right, Lana. You with your quiet suggestion that I am for sale at public tender!”
Two
It had been Lana’s idea to offer a fabulous fund-raising dinner on a jet, flying guests who had paid a substantial sum for the honour overnight from London to Parvan, where they would greet the sun as it rose over magnificent Mount Shir. Then they would land at the capital to meet the Regent Prince and his wife at a palace champagne breakfast.
On board the luxuriously appointed jet, donated for the occasion by the princes of the Barakat Emirates, subscribers were also privileged to meet some of the Cup Companions….
Lana had quickly learned that Kavi’s handsome Cup Companions had a drawing power second only to Prince Kavian himself, and she included them in nearly every fund-raising event. The long-suffering Companions joked that they were no better than performing bears at such times, but uncomplainingly took their turn.
It was just chance that Arash was one of the performing bears whose turn it was to appear for that particular fund-raiser—an event scheduled to last for nearly a day, and for most of which they were, of course, all captive on the aircraft.
Sheikh Arash Durrani ibn Zahir al Khosravi never failed to please women who fantasized about the Cup Companions. His charm was rough and unstudied; he never came across as practised or polished, but he had a natural charisma that had an effect in spite—or maybe because—of a sometimes impatient tongue.
Arash was tall, dark and arrogantly, powerfully good-looking, with a firmly held mouth behind a neat curling beard. His flashing dark eyes sometimes seemed black and sometimes glowed deep violet, a colour so unusual that people couldn’t help remarking on it.
The fact that he had been wounded in the war with Kaljukistan and walked with a limp only added to his romantic glamour.
When in addition he was wearing the Companions’ traditional state dress of flowing white oriental trousers snugly cuffed around the ankle, beaded thong sandals on strong bare feet, and a rich wine-dark silk tunic surmounted by his jewelled chain of office and his war medals—well, Lana knew it was a strong female heart that could resist.
Lana’s own heart had been immunized early, so she was in no danger, but she had seen women trip over their own feet when they were still twenty paces away.
It nearly always amused her, the effect one smile from a Cup Companion could have on the donations, but it was not amusing when the Companion in question was Arash.
Probably because she didn’t like him.
She also hated having to pretend enthusiasm for him with these adoring women. Arash, whose eyes sometimes seemed to hide a deep sorrow even when he smiled, was a rich source of inspiration for dreamers. She wanted to say, Don’t go anywhere near him, he’s dangerous to know…but of course she never did.
Anyone would have been guaranteed to ask how she knew. But she had never talked about it to anyone. Not even Alinor guessed that Arash and she had a past that had affected her so deeply that she still could hardly look at a man….
“I suppose he suffered an awful lot in the war,” Lucinda Burke Taylor had said with clinical soulfulness an hour or so into the flight, and Lana knew that Lucinda had sought her out for a purpose.
It was going to be a bumpy night.
Usually Lana had no difficulty enthusing about the Companions to smitten women, and the donations went up when she did. But this woman had already married two high-profile, low-income men, and a Chinese poet-in-exile was already next in her sights. It was as obvious as the day was long that she thought of these transactions in terms of purchase. His culture and brains for her money. And she believed it an equal transaction.
If she was going to start aiming at Arash…but it wasn’t Lana’s business. Arash would have to look after himself.
“I’ve heard he’s the Grand Sheikh of his tribe now. It sounds so fascinating!”
“If you consider losing your father and older brother in the same war fascinating.”
“Oh, of course, I didn’t mean—I just meant, the whole business of being sheikh of a tribe, in this day and age! It’s just so—!”
After a struggle Lana mastered herself. “He’s very close to the prince, too. One of his closest and most trusted advisors,” she confided.
His back turned to them, Arash was talking to someone Lana had earmarked for him. She provided each Companion with his own list of three or four of the wealthiest and most charitable people at any event. They all disliked the task, but each could be counted on to speak to everyone on his list. And usually a good proportion of Arash’s targets made donations afterwards.
“And he’s not married, right?”
The gunsight eyes followed as Arash and the guest unconsciously moved closer to them. Lana gritted her teeth.
“Not married, and hasn’t got a bean,” she heard herself say flatly.
The woman’s eyes brightened at this information.
“Really?” She turned to fix her gaze on Lana, who had to consciously refrain from ducking. “Do you mean he’s—” Her voice dropped to a confidential murmur. “Is he looking for a moneyed wife?”
It would be husband number three for her, and incidentally would mean sinking the fortunes of the dissident poet, but why not? Arash’s estates were in ruins, and just because he wasn’t accepting any from Lana didn’t mean they didn’t need an injection of cash.
It wasn’t up to her to guess whether he would consider an offer or not.
“Might be worth putting your bid in,” Lana said, glad that the other woman was apparently deaf to irony.
Arash’s gaze met hers briefly across the space that divided them. He had heard some of the discussion. But instead of sending him an apologetic look, as she would have with any of the others, Lana merely raised her eyebrows in a shrug and shepherded Lucinda in his direction.
“Your Excellency…” she began, giving full weight to his title because of the impact it had on most Westerners. But the way Arash eyed her she knew he suspected her of irony.
Well, to hell with him. He knew nothing about her. If he had known her at all, he would have understood that he could take her father’s money without obligation.
“…may I present Lucinda Burke Taylor?”
Maybe Lucinda would have better luck. Maybe Arash would be more comfortable with a cash sale. Maybe that had been her mistake. She hadn’t asked for anything in return.
