Free To Catch a Bride by Anne Gracíe Page B

Laila. You and Ali.”
    Laila shook her head. She cupped Ayisha’s chin and said, “Listen to me, daughter of my heart. What future is there here for you, dressed in men’s clothes, hiding all the time from those who come looking? How will you marry? How will you have children?”
    “Maybe I don’t want to marry.”
    Laila shook her head, her eyes wise and knowing. “You will, chick. One day you will meet a strong, handsome man and your heart will beat thud-thud-thud.” She thumped her fist against her chest. “And your knees will go weak and your woman’s loins will warm and—aha, you blush! Perhaps you have already met someone, perhaps this Englishm—”
    “No, it is your foolishness that makes me blush,” Ayisha retorted. “My woman’s loins will warm indeed!” She could feel her cheeks warming, nevertheless. So what if she did find the Englishman appealing to look at? He was handsome, that was all.
    Laila chuckled. “Ah, little one, until you have gripped a strong man between your thighs and felt him thrusting like a stallion as he pours his hot seed into your body, do not talk to me of foolishness.”
    Ayisha stared, her mouth drying at the picture Laila’s words conjured in her mind. Laila had always been earthy, but this . . .
    “Now you really are blushing, and me, too.” Laila gave a deep chuckle and hugged Ayisha. “It’s been so long since I have had a man in my bed, I forget my manners.”
    “Is it truly like that between a man and a woman? So . . .” Ayisha groped for a word. “Magnificent?”
    Laila sighed. “With my husband, it was, though I know from other women it is not always like that with their men. But he was mad for me, and I for him, and when he came to me at night, he was like a stallion.” Her eyes glowed, remembering.
    “But he divorced you.” Ayisha could not imagine the pain it must have caused Laila.
    The light died from Laila’s eyes. “I thought he loved me, and perhaps he did, a little.” She made a helpless gesture.
    “But not enough. Marriage is about property—and my family is poor, remember?—and about children, and so when I could give him no child, he divorced me and took another wife.” She gave a wistful sigh. “She brought him land and gave him sons, so he was probably a stallion with her, too.”
    Ayisha shook her head. After fifteen years of love and trust in a man, that was Laila’s reward. Tossed aside and thrown to the mercy of that slug Omar.
    It was what happened when you trusted a man to take care of you. It happened to Mama, it happened to Laila. Ayisha would never make the same mistake. Never.
    “Do you think of him often?” Ayisha asked.
    Laila shook her head. “No, it is just . . . Sometimes I wake in the night, hot and restless, and I miss . . . a stallion in my bed.”
    She looked at Ayisha and giggled. “Look at your face! I have shocked you, an old woman like me talking of such things. Come, let us get the baking finished. The morning is passing.”
    “Five and thirty is not old,” Ayisha said.
    “It might as well be, living on memories as I must.” Laila sighed. “I will sleep alone the rest of my life, for Allah has made me barren, and what man would take a barren woman to wife? But you, Ayisha—you choose to live like this, hiding as a boy.”
    She let her words sink in, then said, “It is not a future for you, dear child; it is lifelong imprisonment.”
    She was right, Ayisha knew.
    Laila arranged the rounds of dough on baking sheets. “Take the cover off and I’ll see if the oven is hot enough.” She took up a small jug of water and a sprig of herbs. Ayisha removed the cover of the oven door. Heat gushed out.
    Laila flicked water onto the stone base of the oven with the herb bunch. It hissed. “Perfect,” she declared. “Pass me the trays.”
    Ayisha passed the bread trays to Laila, who pushed them deftly into place with a long wooden paddle, then covered the door again.
    “Don’t let me forget the time,”