She sat on the rug and opened her legs, and he crawled between them. She pushed open his dressing gown and raked her hands over his skin, and it was his turn to tremble while she explored him, running her fingers over muscles that bunched under her touch. She explored him as though he was new to her, a lover she’d never seen before…and yet as though, too, she knew him as well as she knew herself, and knew he belonged to her.
From the first she’d been this way, unhesitating, as easy with his body as she was with her own.
But there was more between them tonight than simple possession.
You’re all I have left.
There it was, the thing buried in the deepest recess of the hidden place in his heart, in the dark cupboard he hadn’t been able to keep shut since the day she returned. He’d uttered the words, and they still beat in his heart.
She was all he had left, and she was precious to him.
He raked his hands over her, too, in the same way she touched him. He moved his hands over her skin, over her firm breasts and along the delicate angles of her collarbone. He traced the circle of her waist and the swell of her hips, the fine bones of her wrists and ankles, and she stretched and moved under his touch, the restless tigress tonight.
He caught hold of her hair with one hand and grasped her chin with the other and kissed her hard. She broke away, and made as if to pull away. He pulled her back, and she let her head fall back, and she was laughing, in that way she did, low and beckoning. He pushed her thighs apart, and thrust into her, and she laughed again, and wrapped her legs about his waist.
We’re both a little mad, she’d said, and perhaps they were.
They joined this night in a maddened way, in a long, ferocious coupling, as though there was no more time left, as though this was the first time and the last time.
That, at least, was what he thought of it later.
Now, though, while he was inside her, there was nothing in his mind, nothing in the world but her and this moment and the heat and pleasure of the lovers’ storm they made.
It raged and quieted and raged again. Then she cried out, again and again, words he didn’t understand and one he did: his name. Then he let himself spill into her, and he sank down onto her. He lay there, for a moment, feeling her heart beat against his chest. Then he rolled off her and onto his side. He pulled her up against him and buried his face in her neck.
She lay there, listening to his breathing quiet.
She was dear to him and he was dear to her, and this was what was most important.
Karim had doted upon her and showered her with jewels, but to him she was only a pretty toy. If she had displeased him, he would have given her away—or even had her killed—without a second thought.
“There was no bond,” she murmured.
“That was English,” he said, “but I couldn’t quite make it out.” His voice was low, sleepy.
“Never mind,” she said. “Sleep.”
“How can I sleep at a time like this?” he said.
She turned her head a little, but she couldn’t see him. She felt him lift his head, though. He brushed his cheek against hers.
“I thought I understood what had happened to you,” he said. “But I understood only a part. When you told your story to John Beardsley, I thought I’d heard all there was to hear. But I think it was all Iwantedto hear. I didn’t want to know any more. When you vanished—”
His voice caught, and he paused. “If I’d been there, Zoe, I’d have found you. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t bear to think of that. And so I made myself stop. I—I don’t know what it was, exactly. But I stopped. Thinking. Caring. It was harder than I let on, to carry on, after Gerard died. When you were gone, perhaps I simply lost heart.”
She hadn’t realized. All she’d known, when she first saw him after her return, was that he wasn’t the same. She hadn’t been the only one damaged by her captivity. Her parents had suffered. Her brothers and sisters, too, though perhaps not as deeply, because they were starting families of their own.
“I caused more pain than I knew,” she said. “I told my family I was sorry, but I didn’t understand what the trouble was. I didn’t understand why Mama had grown so nervous and flighty or why my sisters and brothers were so angry with me. They said I made a disruption, and I thought the disruption was my coming back. But the disruption was my disappearing, and the years Papa spent trying to find me, and what happens to a family when they can’t know for certain what’s become of a loved one.”
“But it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “Everyone knows that now. Everyone knows you didn’t run away.”
He knew the story itself: the stroll through the Cairo bazaar and the maid who’d sold her—the maid who’d claimed Zoe had run away, and whom everyone had believed, because Zoe was famous for running away.
“As though I were so mad as that,” she said, “to run away in a crowded place, where no one spoke my language. But everyone except Papa would believe I would do such a mad thing, because I was the wild daughter, the rebellious one. I’m daring, Lucien, but even at twelve I had some sense.”
He kissed the nape of her neck. “Not much, but some,” he said.
She smiled.
