Sheikh's Ex-Girlfriend (Khayyam Sheikh Series #1) by Sophia Lynn Page B

people who had passed through it, loud, quiet, good, bad, and everything in between. It made her want to weep for their passing, and it made her want to laugh because she was alive.
    Instead, she stepped closer to Nasim, wrapping her arm around his waist. As naturally as if they had been doing it for years, he dropped his arms across her shoulders, bringing her snug against his body.
    “This is real as well,” he said softly. “This place, where my ancestors decided that they would wander no longer. They felt something, and they built, and centuries later, they gave it up.”
    “Do you see yourself here?” she asked. “Do you wonder what it would have been like if you had lived in this place six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred years ago?”
    “Sometimes,” he admitted. “But not here. Let me show you something else.”
    Mystified, she followed him through the silent halls of the fortress. The centuries pressed down on her, and she wondered if this was what it was like for astronauts or for time travelers. She was in a place where she was completely out of her element, lost in the wreckage of history.
    The hallways were dim, but then they rounded a corner and came to a circular chamber that was unexpectedly full of light. She could see that the windows were tall and open; once upon a time, they would have been filled with glass or perhaps with colored paper. The impression of the room was one of great light and airiness, and even now, long after the original inhabitants had gone on to something else, it made her smile to see.
    “This doesn't look particularly defensible for a fortress,” she noted.
     Nasim smiled faintly. “It wasn't. If you look at the door we just came through, you will see that it is very heavily fortified. This was a peace-time room, a place for the ladies of the court to come out and see the desert pass them by.”
    “The ladies of the court?”
    “The women of the harem,” he said. “The women of Khayyam have never been quite as cloistered as women elsewhere in the Arabic world, but their lives were still circumscribed to a few locations. This chamber seems to have been one of them, a place where they could go to see the world that moved on without them.”
    Now that he had told her, she could imagine it. She could think of being a woman draped in heavy wool and fluttering silk, allowed to walk through the halls of a dim fortress. The door would open, and suddenly her dark eyes would be dazzled with the turquoise of the sky and the gold of the desert sands. She would feel the wind on her face for the first time in who knows how long, and oh, she would laugh …
    “I couldn't have taken it,” she said abruptly. “To be kept in a little dark cage, only allowed to see the light when I was permitted.”
    “You couldn't,” Nasim agreed. “You are someone who needs to fly free, and keeping you captive would only cause you to break your wings on the bars of your cage.”
    She leaned back into his arms, and after a moment, he wrapped his arms around her tightly.
    Perhaps that was what made it bearable, she thought. This sense of security, this sense of safety. Love that bloomed only in the darkness of thick stone walls.
    She turned in his arms, lifting her face up to his. “I think,” she said softly, “I want you to kiss me now.”
    Nasim paused for a moment, shock on his features, but then he bent his head to hers. This kiss was different from the ones that they had shared before. It was slow, but there was a burning passion to it that had been banked for too long. They had to move carefully, they had to be slow and gentle with each other or they might go up in flames.
     She felt his large hand come up to cradle her face, a gesture of aching tenderness. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to turn to nuzzle it, flickering the pink tip of her tongue along the cup of his palm. She felt that familiar tremor go through his body, and deep inside herself, she could feel