Her eyes seemed to be giving him a total mind-and-psyche scan before she gave a slow nod. “I guess so. But since that only happened in the past few minutes, I had no time to form an alternate viewpoint. I sure didn’t consider for a second that you were in any danger. After the escape, the gunshot and the crash, that is. After you survived all that in one glorious piece, I thought you were home free.”
“How is it even possible you think so?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Her voice drenched him in sarcasm. “Maybe my first clue was how glib about the whole situation you were. You know, being so cheerful and carefree that you spent most of the past hour laughing and lobbing witticisms in between pestering me for my gender, interrogating me for my agenda and trying to deluge me with testosterone.”
And he had to. He laughed again. “It’s your effect on me. You make me cheerful and carefree, against all odds.”
Her lips crooked up in a goading smile. “Next you’ll say I made you kiss me.”
“In a fashion. You made me unable to draw one more breath if I didn’t. You made me thankful. That I found you, that I saved you, that you saved me, that you exist and that you’re with me. And you did make me do it in the most important way, the way all of the above still couldn’t have made me. Because you wanted me to.”
She gave her lips, which had fallen open, an involuntary lick, her eyes glittering as if she felt his there, tasted him. Then she gave a smothered, chagrined sound before her eyes sharpened again and she thrust both hands at him in a fed-up gesture. “See? Is it any wonder I couldn’t even conceive that you had anything to worry about? Who talks like that if he’s in any kind of danger, let alone a potentially life-threatening situation?”
He sighed, conceding her point. “Apparently, I do. With you around. But when you talked about my needing your scalpels again, I thought that proved you were aware that I shared your danger.”
She waved a hand. “Oh, I was just pointing out that if you held me here at your mercy, you’d be at mine, too.”
He huffed a stunned chuckle. “We’re sitting inside a crashed helicopter, our as well as my only way out of here. How can you consider that I’m not right with you at the mercy of the desert?”
Her shrug was defensive this time. “Why should I have considered that? So the helicopter crashed. But you’re the one, the only, Prince Harres Aal Shalaan. You must have all sorts of gadgets on hand and can contact your people to come pick you up whenever you want.”
He gave a regretful nod. “I do have gadgets, every one known to humankind. And all useless, since we are in a signal blackout zone. The nearest area with possibility of transmitting or receiving anything is over two hundred miles away.”
Her eyes widened with each word until they’d expanded to a cartoonish exaggeration. “You mean your people have no way of knowing where you are?
“None.”
After a moment of wrestling with descending dread, she seemed to come to a conclusion that steadied her. “Well, that alone will have your armies combing the desert to find you.”
“Sure it will.” He sighed in resignation. “And they’ll find me. In maybe a week. We have water on board for a couple of days.”
“They can’t possibly take a week to find you!” Her protest came out a squeak. “With all the high-end tech stuff at their disposal, and the whole country out looking for its precious prince, I bet they find you within a couple of hours from the moment they realize you’re missing!”
He wanted to press her into his flesh and absorb her worry. But he owed her the truth. He would see her to safety, but he had to prepare her for the grueling experience that he couldn’t spare her before he did.
Bleakness clamped his heart, erasing any lightness as he forced himself to decimate her hope. “They have no way of knowing where to start looking. Once my men go back home and realize I didn’t precede them, they’ll go back to where we originally landed as a starting point to search. But they’ll have no way of knowing which way I headed, or how far in which direction I crashed.”
“So they’d take longer, maybe a day or two,” she still argued. “Surely they’ll crisscross the area with enough aircrafts, one of them is bound to spot us within that time frame.”
He shook his head, needing to erase any false expectations. Those were more damaging than painful reality. “Relying on visual search over an area of a hundred thousand square miles? With some of the dunes around here over one thousand feet high? Apart from a stroke of luck, I was being optimistic when I said a week.”
Silenced howled after his last word.
She stared at him with horror gathering in her eyes. Then it burst from her lips. “Oh, God. You’re stranded here with me.”
He couldn’t hold back any longer. He reached out and cupped her velvet cheek in soothing cherishing. “And I couldn’t have dreamed of better company to be in mortal danger with.”
Her mouth opened, closed, then again. She couldn’t have looked more flabbergasted if he’d said he was actually a plant.
Then she slapped his hand away with a furious sound. “How can you joke about this now? About anything?”
“I’m not joking in the least.” He reached out to her again and she snapped her teeth at him like the infuriated feline she was. He withdrew his hand with a sigh. “You can chomp any part of me you like, but it won’t change the fact that what I said is the truth. Apart from not wishing you to be in any discomfort or danger, there’s no one else I’d rather have with me now.”
Tears suddenly eddied in a swirl of silver in her eyes, had his blood churning in his heart before two arrowed down her cheeks.
Then she choked out, “Oh, shut up!”
He hooted with laughter. “And you take me to task about being cheerful? I’d be mute if you had your way, wouldn’t I?”
She shot him a baleful glance, even as her lips twitched, too. “You’ve said enough, don’t you think?”
“Actually, I was getting to the interesting part.”
“What interesting part? How after a few millennia they’ll dig our bones from this desert and put them in an exhibit and have scientists hypothesizing that we were actually Adam and Eve?”
He dug his fingers into his seat so he wouldn’t yank her to him and claim those lips under his. “How…anthropologically imaginative of you. But I have no intention of becoming a fossil just yet. To this end, we’ll have to get out of this hunk of twisted metal and have us a desert trek.”