How to get awaitable Thread.Sleep?

Question

I'm writing a network-bound application based on await/sleep paradigm.

Sometimes, connection errors happen, and in my experience it pays to wait for some time and then retry operation again.

The problem is that if I use Thread.Sleep or another similar blocking operation in await/async, it blocks all activity in the caller thread.

What should I replace Thread.Sleep(10000) with to achieve the same effect as

await Thread.SleepAsync(10000)

?

UPDATE

I'll prefer an answer which does this without creating any additional thread