She stirred but didn’t wake as Scott began to run a solitary finger down her spine. He couldn’t wait for her to open her eyes and revive his memories of the previous night. When Scott had, in those early days, watched Hannah walking from the Jordanian Embassy, dressed in those drab clothes so obviously selected with Karima Saib’s tastes in mind, he thought she still looked stunning. Some packages, when you remove the brightly-coloured wrapping, fail to live up to expectation. When Hannah had first taken off the dowdy little two-piece suit she had been wearing that day, he had stood there in disbelief that anyone could be so beautiful. He pulled back the single sheet that covered her and admired the sight that had taken his breath away the night before. Her short-cropped hair; he wondered how the long flowing strands would look when they fell on her shoulders as she wanted them to. The nape of her neck, the smooth olive skin of her back, and the long, shapely legs. His hands were like a child’s that had opened a stocking full of presents and wanted to touch everything at once.
