Free Must Have Been The Moonlight by Melody Thomas

Camels stretched out their long swanlike necks to the ground and closed their eyes. The heat continued to rise like the mouth of a hot oven. Brianna saw her mare pacing the corral and ran across thecamp. In the chaos, she could hear Christopher calling her name. The horse reared when Brianna grabbed onto the mane, desperate to get the mare to kneel as the others had done. The sky continued to darken with violent, swirling particles of sand. She’d never seen anything so powerful as the darkness that was bearing down on them, and fought with the panicked horse until strong arms suddenly came around her.
    “Get back!” Major Fallon took the reins. His hand went over the mare’s nose and mane. He spoke gently, making a clicking noise with his tongue. Brianna watched the horse kneel. He secured a cloth over the mare’s eyes and nose, then reached for her, and caught a jolt of electricity. It arced from his hands, and her eyes shot to his. “We have to get down,” he yelled against her ear.
    Brianna’s gaze swung to the sky. A heavy blanket went over her as Major Fallon took her down into the sand beside the mare.
    Her ragged breathing was the only sound in the narrow tomb in which she’d found herself enclosed. “I can’t breathe,” she whispered in panic.
    “You can.” Major Fallon’s breath ruffled the loose tendrils of hair on her cheek. One of his legs lay over hers to still her panicked movement. “Unless you try to get out of here.”
    She put a hand between them. “I need a knife. Give me a knife.”
    He pulled back to look at her. “And have you bleed all over me?”
    “I don’t want to kill myself. I need to cut my bindings.” She shoved against the hard ridge of his belly. “You’re too damn close!”
    The low sound of his answering laughter filled the narrow space between them. “Unfortunately, we’re both going to have to live with that,” he said, his voice growing louder above the wind. “I would urge you to be still.”
    The moaning, howling wind struck them. Brianna coveredher ears and pressed her face against his chest. Michael was conscious of his arms surrounding her in an attempt to keep some of the terror at bay, fitting the softer curves of her body against the harder angles of his. A length of her hair had shaken loose from the turban.
    “I swear, I don’t cry,” she said. “I don’t jump at bogeymen in the dark. I don’t faint—”
    “I’m not accusing you of being weak.”
    “Yes, you are.” She wiped a sleeve on her nose and pulled back to look up at him in accusation.
    Michael found himself staring into the most extraordinary liquid-blue eyes he’d ever seen. Her musk filled the enclosed space, no doubt along with his. He shouldn’t have been tantalized, he told himself.
    “I can feel it.” She laughed. “You’re being nice.”
    His eyes dropped to her mouth. Annoyed with the extent of his growing arousal, he removed the knife from his hip. “Do you really want your bindings cut?”
    “With that horrible thing? Are you insane?”
    He stabbed the knife into the sand to anchor the blanket at his head. “You’re going to have to stop squirming.”
    “I hope Abdul covered my photography equipment.”
    “You’ll probably have to remember where it was and dig it out.”
    Alarmed, her gaze lifted. “How long do one of these…these simoons last?”
    “Days.”
    “Days!” she gasped. “We’ll die of starvation.” Then she saw that he was laughing. Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Truly, Major, you are such a bore.” Her body relaxed a little as she seemed to compose herself. “You can let go of me.”
    He complied, and she lay on her back and looked up at him. With her head wrapped in the turban, her Mona Lisa expression in place, she looked astonishingly serene in the dim light. Distracted by the length of dark hair that had fallen from her turban, he propped his head on his hand.
    “Maybe a few hours,” he rectified.
    “Do you think Christopher and