Oasis of the Heart Read online

  Trudging on with her head bent, it was some time before she noticed that Max had stopped above her and was waiting in the shade of an overhanging rock. The thought of a rest quickened her step. She would expire from heat and thirst if she didn't sit down for a while.

  Max sat on the stony ground, arms resting on his knees, and head turned to watch her plod the last few yards uphill towards him. Cairo was very conscious of her red face and the sweat trickling down her back, and she was bitterly resentful of the cool amusement she could detect lurking around his mouth. She knew he was comparing the elegant woman who had approached him yesterday afternoon with the hot, dishevelled girl who was puffing and panting towards him now. She scowled at him as she unbuckled her rucksack and pulled out her water.

  'You'll have to make better time than this if you want to make it to the camp site before dark,' said Max.

  'I'm going as fast as I can,' Cairo snapped, intent on unscrewing her water bottle. The water was warm and brackish, but she tipped back her head and let it splash over her face and pour down her parched throat as if it were nectar. Satisfied at last, she took off her hat, pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and wiped her wet face with the back of her hand.

  Max got to his feet as she screwed the top back on and put the bottle back in her rucksack. 'Ready?'

  Cairo opened her mouth to protest that she hadn't had time to rest when she met his eyes. He was just waiting for her to complain! Well, let him wait!

  She wasn't giving in that easily. She lifted her chin at him, green eyes bright with challenge, and swung her pack back on her back. 'Ready,' she said, and pushed the straw hat back into place.

  There was a flash of reluctant admiration in Max's eyes before he turned away. Cairo felt insensibly cheered as she settled her glasses back on her nose and took a deep breath. She would show him! Her legs felt shaky, and she longed to collapse in a heap in the shade, but the thought of Max's contempt forced her to put one foot in front of the other, and she trudged doggedly after him.

  If she hadn't known better, she would have thought that it was for her sake that Max stopped again, not too long afterwards. He shrugged off his pack in the deep shade of a crevice as Cairo climbed slowly up towards him.

  'We'll rest here for a while.'

  She dropped down beside him and closed her eyes, too tired to even find her water bottle. Her heart was pounding with effort and her head felt as if it was held in a vice of heat and glare and thirst.

  'Here,' said Max gruffly, and she opened her eyes to see him holding out an orange which he had cut into quarters with his knife. They were green on the outside, but juicy and orange within, and Cairo sucked at them greedily. She had never tasted anything as delicious before.

  'Thank you,' she mumbled through the pith. The sweetness had an immediate effect, and when she had found herself a drink and wiped her face, she felt much better. Taking off her hat and glasses, she ran her fingers through her damp hair and lay back against her pack again with a sigh.

  'Why are you doing this?' asked Max abruptly. 'All this talk about doing your job just doesn't ring true somehow. You don't strike me as a career type.'

  He was right there, thought Cairo. Until a year ago, she had never had to work at all, but that was a year ago. Things had changed since then.

  'I'm doing it for the same reason most people do their jobs,' she said. 'I need the money.'

  'There must be easier ways of making money than putting yourself through this.' Max glanced over at Cairo, slumped against her pack, her golden hair dark with sweat and her long legs sprawled out in front of her in the dust.

  Her trainers and short white socks had been pristine white that morning; now they were brown and ingrained with sand. 'This consultancy business sounds like a lot of hot air. Why don't you get yourself a proper job?'

  Cairo fanned herself with her hat. 'I haven't got any qualifications,' she admitted. There had been no need for her to get a job after she had left school, and she had drifted on, always talking about doing some course, but never getting around to it until it was too late.

  'It's hard to believe it from the way you've carried on since you've been here, but I presume you've got a brain somewhere in your head,' said Max caustically. 'There must be something you can do.'

  That was what she had thought, thought Cairo, remembering bitterly the long months when she had tried to get a 'job, any job; those humiliating agency interviews when she had to admit that she had no qualifications and no experience, the endless letters of rejection, the slow, painful realisation that as far as the world was concerned she was completely useless. Her confidence had been gradually eroded, so that in the end she had been delighted to get work as a waitress. That was before she'd run into Piers again. He was the one who'd picked her up and restored her confidence and made her realise that she had been on quite the wrong track.

  'You can get by on ordinary jobs,' she said to Max. 'But if you want to make big money, you've got to take a risk. If our .consultancy is a success, we'll make far more money than if we'd stuck at a nice, safe job.'

  'Oh, money!' sneered Max. 'I might have known that it would come down to that. Is that all that's important to you?'

  Cairo thought of her father's face as he added up his debts. 'It is at the moment,' she said evenly. Suddenly, she wanted to cry and make Max understand, but he had obviously given up in disgust, stretching out in the shade and tipping his hat over his eyes.

  It was the first time she had been able to look at him properly. He was wearing shabby trousers and an old khaki shirt, its long sleeves carelessly rolled up above his wrists, and open to reveal the strong brown column of his neck. She found her eyes drawn to the pulse beating slow and steady at the base of his throat. His hands were linked behind his head and he looked utterly relaxed and at home in this stark, alien environment.

  She glanced around her. The rocks seemed to press in on every side, the walls of the chasm looming above her, and the path twisting up and up above them, littered with rock falls. The silence hung hot and heavy. Far, far above her, in the narrow strip of sky, an eagle hung apparently motionless on a thermal current.

  Cairo shivered. How could Max look so... so right in this awful place? She shifted imperceptibly closer, remembering what he had said about her utter dependence on him. His solid strength was overwhelmingly reassuring, and her fingers tingled with the unnerving realisation that she wanted to reach out and touch him.

  Cairo remembered wryly how disappointed she had been when she had first seen him. She had been distinctly unimpressed, but one look in his eyes had been enough to realise that Max was no more the quiet, ordinary man he had appeared from a distance than he was the flamboyantly romantic figure of her imagination. There was an intriguingly detached quality about him, an air of self-sufficiency, as if he had not the slightest interest in anyone else or what they might think of him. Cairo doubted if he had.

  Her gaze lingered on him speculatively. He would be easier to deal with if he were as cold as he appeared at first sight, she thought, but his eyes revealed a man much more passionate beneath the surface. It left Cairo with a feeling of potentially explosive tension which was as unsettling as it was elusively familiar. She had sensed it before, she knew she had.

  Her eyes strayed to his mouth, the only part of his face not covered by his hat. Just looking at it gave her a strange feeling, and her lips seemed to burn once more with the memory of his kisses. No, he wasn't nearly as cold as he liked to appear.

  Unaware of her scrutiny, Max wriggled his shoulders into a more comfortable position, and Cairo drew a sharp breath, startled by a sharp jab of sudden, unaccountable, unwanted desire.

  'What's the matter?' Max lifted his hat at her indrawn gasp and squinted at her. Even in the shadow, his light eyes were uncomfortably penetrating, and Cairo looked quickly away.

  'Nothing,' she said in a strangled voice. Horrified at her own reaction, she cleared her throat and improvised hastily, 'That is, I was just
wondering if we might have met before.'

  Max gave a hard look and then, much to her relief, dropped his hat back over his eyes. 'I hardly think we move in the same circles, do you?' he said dismissively.

  'No.' He was irritating, overbearing, arrogant, intolerant and downright rude, Cairo reminded herself fiercely, unable to stop her eyes sliding back up his throat to that unexpectedly sensual mouth. The heat must have affected her more than she had thought. She searched around for something to say, desperate to keep on talking and keep her mind off Max's mouth and Max's body and the way Max's fingers had tangled in her hair.

  'What do you do, exactly?'

  'I'm a geologist.' Max sounded resigned at her question. 'I'm doing a survey of the structures and potential minerals of the plateau for the Shofrar government at the moment.'

  'Do you work for the same company as Bruce Mitchell?'

  'No, I'm an independent consultant.'

  'A consultant?' Cairo was unable to prevent mimicking his comment to her.

  'Why don't you get a proper job?'

  'I work best on my own,' said Max, unperturbed, but a reluctant smile bracketed his mouth, sending a disquieting jolt of warmth through Cairo.

  She jerked her eyes away. 'Have you been working here long?'

  'What is this? A cocktail party?' He tilted his hat to send her a sardonic look.

  'This kind of interrogation reminds me of London parties. Everyone interrogates you in the same way—"What do you do? Do you enjoy it?"—and all the time their eyes are sliding over your shoulder, looking for someone more interesting to talk to. It's all gush and superficial charm. Why do you bother if you're not interested?'

  'I am interested,' said Cairo, wondering about the bitterness that edged his voice when he talked about London. 'I wouldn't bother wasting any charm on you, superficial or otherwise, but, for better or worse, we are travelling together,' she added reasonably. 'I just thought it would be nice to know a little more about you. If I hadn't really wanted to know how long you'd been here, I wouldn't have asked.'

  Max sighed. 'If it's that fascinating, the answer's about seven years.'

  'Don't you ever want to go home?'

  'What to?' He pushed back his hat and sat up, resting his back against the rock. 'I grew up in a city, and I never want to go back there. It's all nice and civilised on the surface, but underneath it's rotten to the core. Most of the people I knew were obsessed with money- just like you—and if it wasn't money, it was with protecting appearances at all costs, with pretending to be what they weren't. Corruption starts at that level, and I found it nauseating.'

  Cairo winced. Her father had been vilified in the Press for being corrupt, and the label still stung. Corrupt suggested someone devious and rotten, as Max had said, but her father had never been that. Foolhardy, perhaps, even dishonest, but not bad. How could she explain to Max that someone who had broken the law in his business dealings could also be kind and loyal and absurdly generous?

  'Things aren't always as black and white as you make out,' she said after a moment.

  'No,' he agreed unexpectedly. 'They're not. But they are in the desert. That's why I like it here.' His eyes were on the eagle, circling effortlessly high above them. 'The desert strips a man down to the essentials. Time takes on a different meaning out here. There are no images in the desert, no worrying about making an impression. You are what you are.' He glanced at Cairo suddenly, his eyes light and sharp. 'You ought to spend more time in the desert. It might make you less tense.'

  'I am not tense!' said Cairo, nettled, and turned her face away deliberately, determined not to show any more interest.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THEY sat on in silence. Max had an ability to sit absolutely still, Cairo noticed, watching him huffily out of the corner of her eye. His eyes were shadowed by his hat, and it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  He baffled and intrigued Cairo. He was so unlike any man she had met before, and, much as she wanted to ignore him, she couldn't help speculating what had brought him to the desert in the first place. Something must have caused that burning hostility to city life. Was it a woman? Had his heart been broken by a girl who loved money more than she loved him? He didn't look like the kind of man who would break his heart over a woman. He was too self-sufficient for that.

  Cairo slid another glance over towards him, wondering what sort of girl Max would love. She wouldn't be tall or blonde or sophisticated, that was for sure, she thought with a pang of something that was almost like jealousy.

  She had never met anyone so unresponsive to her charms.

  Tracing patterns in the dust with her finger, Cairo realised that she didn't like imagining Max with another woman, smiling at her, touching her, running his hard hands over her skin... She felt her spine shiver at the thought, and she glanced at him again, only to find him watching her with an unreadable expression.

  Their eyes met with a jarring contact, and the tension seemed to jump suddenly between them. Cairo found herself flushing, certain that he knew she was remembering how he had kissed her.

  'We'd better go,' said Max abruptly.

  'Yes.' Cairo scrambled to her feet, too glad of the diversion to remember how tired she felt, but she grim-aced as she heaved the rucksack back on to her shoulders. It seemed to have doubled in weight, and rubbed uncomfortably against her skin.

  'It looks like you've got a bit of sunburn there.' Max's finger brushed inadvertently against her shoulder as he pointed, and she flinched as if from an electric shock. He raised a sardonic eyebrow. 'I thought you weren't tense?'

  'I'm not,' she said between clenched teeth. 'It's just a bit sore.'

  Max was typically unsympathetic. 'Serves you right for wearing a sleeveless shirt. This is no time to be getting a tan.'

  'Actually, I was thinking of staying cool,' said Cairo crossly.

  'You'll stay much cooler with a thin layer on.' Max gave an irritable sigh and opened his rucksack. After digging around for a moment, he pulled out a faded shirt in a dull, muddy green colour. 'Here,' he said, tossing it over to her. 'Put that on. I don't want you on my hands with sunstroke.'

  His expression warned her not to argue. Wrinkling her nose at the colour, Cairo slipped it on over her sleeveless top. She couldn't get any hotter than she was, and anyway it would be worth it to stop the straps rubbing her shoulders. The shirt was far too big for her, so she rolled up the sleeves and knotted the tails loosely over her hips with an instinctive sense of style.

  'Very haute couture,' said Max maliciously.

  'Sludge-green is in this year,' she retorted with mock pretension, and the fact that Max almost smiled was enough to make her hardly notice her back as she heaved it on again.

  Cairo lost track of time as the path wound its way up the gorge in an endless series of hairpin bends. At times, she found herself edging along the rock wall, with a vertiginous drop down to the bottom of the gorge at the other side of the narrow path, and, although she didn't suffer from vertigo, she was glad that Max waited for her at those parts.

  Her face was white and tense after the first of these ordeals, and Max frowned as he saw her wipe her face with a trembling hand.

  'Are you all right?' he asked brusquely, and immediately Cairo's head came up.

  'I'm fine.'

  Still, she was immensely relieved when they finally made it to the top of the gorge, hours later. 'You've done the worst bit,' said Max. 'It's relatively flat from now on.'

  Cairo was breathing too hard to reply, or even wonder at his encouragement, but she nodded her head gratefully as she reached for her water bottle. Her fingers felt as if they had swollen to the size of sausages in the heat and she fumbled with the fastenings on her pack until Max opened it for her and unscrewed the water bottle with an exasperated shake of his head.

  'Thank you,' she gasped, tipping it back, too thankful to resent his irritation.

  When she lowered the bottle, she saw to her astonishment that Max was smiling an
d holding up a hand in greeting. Blinking, she looked over her shoulder to see two men loping towards them through the rocks, and for a moment she wondered if she were hallucinating. They wore plastic sandals and each had a string bag hung over his shoulder. They might have been popping down to the shops for a pint of milk.

  'What are they doing here?' she whispered to Max as they came up, grinning.

  'They're smugglers,' he said out of the corner of his mouth. 'Libya is just at the other side of the plateau. They bring in tea and take back chewing gum.'

  He squatted down with the two men and chatted as they smoked the cigarettes he offered them. Clearly excluded as a woman, Cairo sat awkwardly to one side. Max had an astonishingly attractive smile when he chose to use if, she noticed grudgingly. He never smiled like that at her.

  What was so special about the smugglers?

  The two men had been giving her curious looks, and as they made to leave they smiled at her and called out some comment to Max. His reply made them laugh, and they dropped over the lip of the gorge on to the path with a cheery wave.

  'What was all that about?' asked Cairo suspiciously.

  'They think you're very beautiful.' Max's tone made it clear that he didn't share their opinion. 'They were just envying me my woman.'

  'I hope you made it clear that I was no such thing,' Cairo said, piqued.

  'Of course I didn't,' he said with an irritable look. 'Do you really want it known that a single, unprotected girl is wandering around the plateau up for grabs? Those men wouldn't be averse to smuggling a blonde girl into the country. You'd probably be worth a good deal more than a bag of chewing gum.'

  'Nice of you to admit it!' said Cairo in a voice that dripped acid. 'I'm surprised you didn't offer me in exchange for their tea while you had the chance!'

  'It would have been a bargain,' he retorted nastily. 'I wish I'd thought of it. A bag of tea would be lighter, easier and a lot more useful to take along with me than a spoilt blonde!'