To Touch a Sheikh. Оливия Гейтс

horsewoman that she’d risk it in this terrain. His eyes had said she just wanted to be as close to him as possible. She hadn’t denied the accusation. The truth consisted of both his version and hers.

      They’d ridden uphill for twenty minutes at a trot. Every second brought a new level of awareness of the hot, living rock she enveloped, the powerful heart that boomed beneath her ear, the scent that induced a hormonal surge with each inhalation.

      By the time they’d reached their destination, she thought she’d melted around him, could never be extricated from his flesh again.

      He swung down, leaving her jangling from the loss of him. She wondered if he’d help her down—but he’d already given her too many concessions. He wasn’t about to act the gallant knight.

      She didn’t want him to. Not out of, gasp, gentlemanliness. In time, she’d make him wish to offer those gestures out of the consideration he’d come to feel for her.

      She was getting down from the horse when she saw his eyes flood with a somberness she’d never seen there before.

      It shook her to see into the depths she knew he kept hidden beneath his irreverence and indifference.

      Before she could probe, he turned away, went to the edge of the towering dune overlooking the whole area.

      She followed him on shaky legs, every wobbling step melting the fraught moment away. The view mesmerized her, a landscape that had been molded by the elements in the crucible of time, powdering mountains into frozen-in-turbulence oceans of gold dust.

      “Wow,” she breathed in wonder. “I’ve seen almost nothing but desert vistas since coming to the region. But this beats them all hands down. How did you discover this place?”

      “It’s called exploring.”

      She smiled at his chiseled profile. “What a novel concept! Would you take me next time you’re scouting new territories?”

      He turned his eyes sideways to her, looked down the ten inches between them, his lips twisting. “I don’t do luxury tours. What you see today is for swooning princes’ benefit. When I go out on my own, I don’t lug mock palaces with me.”

      “You’re talking to the girl who spent her first twelve years camping in temperatures in the minus, who picked her own food and washed her one change of clothes in freezing streams. I lived out of a backpack for months when I went back to the States, too.”

      Another enigmatic layer painted his eyes before he shrugged. “We’ll see how you fare on this mini-excursion before we talk big treks.”

      Her heart pirouetted in her chest.

      He was not turning her down flat.

      Next moment, her heart slowed its spin, wobbled as a sound she’d never heard … felt before, yawned from nonexistence into her ears, through her marrow.

      She swung around … and her heart crashed.

      On the horizon, a … a … a mountain was charging their way.

      It looked like what she imagined a nuclear shockwave would look like. A tidal wave of roiling, pulverized earth.

      At the rate it was advancing, it would reach them—bury them—in minutes.