Читать книгу Lord of the Desert - Diana Palmer - Страница 8

Asilah was bustling with activity. Before 1972, Bojo the guide told them, the whole city was inside the ancient walls. Now there were shops outside as well, and new construction underway. As they searched for a parking space in the crowded city, they saw small donkey-drawn carts carrying people from one side of town to the other, and just outside the kasbah on a tree-lined street near the bay, there were sidewalk cafés. But first the guide indicated that they should go away from the old walled city toward the highway, because that was where the once-weekly open air market was held.

“Market day,” Philippe told Gretchen, gently taking her arm to guide her across the busy street which was packed with cars as well as carts. “This will be an adventure.”

It was. She saw beautiful fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, all presented in beautiful order and not one blemish on any of it. There were exotic spices, potions, clothing and hats. There were leather goods and even live chickens and rabbits for sale. Outside the ramshackle order of small tents teeming with people, donkeys and camels lay in the shade waiting for the return trip to their small villages.

“The produce is just beautiful,” she exclaimed. “My goodness, this is even prettier than in our supermarkets back home, but it isn’t refrigerated.”

He chuckled. “Yes, and on this market day, much of it gets sold to city dwellers.”

He acquainted her with the various spices and the displays of olives before the guide led them back into the city.

“Are you thirsty?” Philippe asked her.

“I could drink a gallon of water all by myself,” she panted, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a tissue from her pocket.

He grinned. “So could I.”

He and the guide led her to a small café where he ordered bottled water for her and mint tea for himself. He offered her some tea, but she declined, nervous about trying anything that didn’t come out of a bottle.

“You must try the mint tea before you leave Morocco,” he told her. “It is famous here.”

“I will. Right now cold water sounds better.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

He handed her chilled bottled water and took his mint tea to a small group of tables under a spreading tree near the walls of the old city. Their guide remained behind to speak to a shop owner he knew. “The café owns this small space,” Philippe told her, “and patrons pay at the counter and eat here.”

“This is very nice,” she said, looking around her at comfortably dressed people wandering about. “There are lots of tourists here.”

“Yes. The city is the site of an arts festival which is going on even now. The shops in the old walled city are brimming over, and Asilah has put on its brightest face for the festival. It draws people from around Europe and Africa and from all over the world.”

“You said the revolutionary’s palace was here?” she asked.

He nodded. He sipped his mint tea, finished it, and excused himself to return the china cup and saucer to the stand. She was curious about that, because most of the tourists had disposable containers like hers. Following Philippe with her eyes, she saw the extreme courtesy with which the shop owner treated him. While she was observing that, she noticed something else—foreign men in sunglasses and dark suits standing nearby. They’d parked behind them when they arrived. She wondered why they were here. Whimsically she wondered if they were shadowing some important foreign dignitary who was in disguise. When she got home, she’d have to ask her brother about foreign security. Then she remembered that she was going to Qawi, not home. It made her nervous and a little sad.

Philippe came back and studied her from his great height. “You’re worried,” he said abruptly.

“Sorry.” She pinned a smile to her face as she got to her feet, clutching her half-finished bottle of water. “I was thinking about my new job, if I get it.”

“And worrying,” he persisted.

She grimaced. “I don’t like using a plane ticket in someone else’s name and pretending I’m her, even if he does eventually hire me anyway.”

He smiled. “I think you have very little to worry about in that respect. As for the plane ticket, the concierge will change it for you, into the right name, and Mustapha or Bojo there—” he indicated their tall driver and guide still lingering at the shop counter “—will even take you to the airport and wait with you.”

“They will?”

He grinned at her shocked expression. “Isn’t this done in your country?”

“No, it isn’t,” she said flatly.

“To each his own,” he said tolerantly. “You will find life a little different in this part of the world.”

“I already have,” she said. She laughed gently. “I don’t know that it’s good for me to be pampered like this. I’m just a very ordinary paralegal.”

One eye narrowed. “I think, Gretchen Brannon, that you are not very ordinary at all.”

“You don’t know much about women from Texas.”

“A gap in my education which I hope to correct in the next few days,” he said gallantly. With a twinkle in his black eyes, he added in the classic line from an old Charles Boyer movie, “Will you come with me to the kasbah?”

She laughed helplessly. “I really do watch too many movies. I only thought there was one kasbah until the cabdriver at the airport told me what they were.”

“Charles Boyer and Humphrey Bogart films,” he mused. “They portray a very different Morocco.”

“Yes. Those days are long dead.”

“The old ways, perhaps. Not the intrigue,” he informed her. He put a hand under her elbow to guide her through the gates of the old city and into the maze of narrow streets and small shops. He leaned down to her ear. “Do you see the man in the beige suit wearing sunglasses? No, don’t turn your head!”

She had a flash of vision out of the corner of her eye. “Yes.”

“Now, do you notice the gentlemen in dark suits and sunglasses nearby?”

“I saw them earlier…!”

“Bodyguards.”

“Really?” She sounded breathless with excitement. “Whose are they? Do they belong to the man in the beige suit?”

He pursed his lips amusedly. “Who knows? Perhaps he works for one of the Saudi princes who have estates outside Tangier.”

“The one the guide pointed out, with the heliport and armed guards at the gate?”

“That one. They go sightseeing from time to time. Yesterday I saw the ex-president of Spain in town.”

“So did we! I’ve never met a head of state, former or not.”

He kept his eyes carefully on the path ahead and didn’t reply.

“Those bodyguards, I guess they have guns?”

“Nine millimeter Uzis and they know how to use them.”

She gasped. “Good Lord. I hope nobody attacks him.”

“Nobody knows him,” he said lazily. “Heads of state from the Middle Eastern countries wander around here all the time and are never noticed. They blend in.”

“If you notice the Sheikh of Qawi, how about pointing him out to me?” she asked facetiously. “Maybe I can throw myself on his mercy before I arrive in his capital city like an unclaimed parcel.”

He put on his own sunglasses and grinned. “I can promise you, his own subjects wouldn’t know him in a European suit.”

“Is he…perverse?” she asked bluntly, worried in spite of Maggie’s assurances.

He stopped dead and looked down at her. His eyes, behind the dark lenses, were concealed. “What?” he asked icily.

She bit her lower lip. “My friend, Maggie, said that there were rumors about him and young women. She said they weren’t true and that he started them himself.”

“He did,” he said quietly. “I can promise you that you will be in no danger from him. In fact,” he added thoughtfully, “I think you may find yourself pampered as you never expected to be, under his protection.”

She drew in a breath. “I hope you’re right!” she said fervently. “Oh, look at those shawls!”

She rushed forward to a display over the doorway of a shop. There was a black shawl with pear-shaped fringe work that took her breath.

“A Moroccan scarf, like those the women wear around their heads when they go out in public,” he said. “In Qawi, we call a head covering a hijab. Do you fancy it?”

“I suppose it’s very expensive,” she said, glaring up at him. “But you’re not buying it. If I can afford it, I’ll buy it for myself.”

He grinned. “Ah, that American independence asserts itself! Very well.” He spoke to the man in that gutteral tongue she still didn’t recognize and laughed as he glanced down at her. “It is fifty-six dirhams,” he told her.

“Fifty-six…!”

“Seven American dollars,” he translated.

She let out her breath and smiled. “I’ll take it!”

He helped her find the coins to pay for it and let the man package it for her. He put the parcel under his arm and led her through the maze of other shops where she bargained with delight for a small pair of silver earrings and a worked silver and turquoise bracelet.

“There,” he said as they went down a long cobblestoned path, “is the palace of the Raissouli.”

It took her breath away. The tiles, in white and many shades of vibrant blue, were combined in the most beautiful mosaic pattern she could have imagined inside the white, white walls of the exterior. There was little inside to see, but she touched the ceramic tiles with utter fascination.

“All the tile work is geometric,” she murmured.

“Worshipers of Islam are forbidden from representing anything human or animal in the patterns,” he explained. “Thus the geometric designs.”

“They’re so beautiful.” She sighed with pleasure. “When I think of our concrete and steel and brick buildings back home…”

“But you have wooden ones as well,” he reminded her.

“Yes, old Victorian homes with exquisite gingerbread woodwork. I’ve seen those. In fact, our ranch house is built like that. It isn’t luxurious or anything, but it’s rather pretty when it’s freshly painted.”

He studied the gleam of her platinum hair as they went back out into the sunlight and back out the gates of the old city and onto the streets. “Do you ever wear your hair down, Gretchen?” he asked softly.

“It’s very fine and flyaway,” she said with a smile. “Besides, it gets in my face in the wind, especially the sort they have here in Morocco. It blows constantly.”

“How long is it?”

She searched his curious eyes. “It comes down a little past my waist. Why?”

“I know another woman, also an American, with hair much like yours.” He grimaced. “She cut hers. I imagine her husband encouraged her,” he added darkly. “He knows how much I admire long hair.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Her husband?”

He glared. “They have a son, almost two years old.”

“She turned you down, I gather?”

His chin went up. “I would not offer marriage,” he said evasively. “He did.”

“Why, you rake,” she teased.

He didn’t smile. If anything, he looked grim and introspective.

“Sorry,” she said at once. “I suppose she meant something to you?”

“She was my world,” he said abruptly. “But there again, fate robbed me.” He glanced beyond her and frowned.

She turned, in time to see the man in the beige suit now standing with the bodyguards. One of the two men in black suits on the side of the street was making an urgent gesture with one hand. The man in the beige suit motioned to Philippe.

“We must go at once,” he said, propelling her down the walkway to where their guide was waiting with the black-suited men. He was quite suddenly someone else, someone who exercised authority and expected instant obedience. When they reached the black-suited men, they were standing with the one in the beige suit—the man Philippe had described as an employee of a Saudi prince. But the man wasn’t behaving like royalty at all. In fact, he was acting in a totally subservient manner, almost pleading from the tone of his voice.

Philippe snapped out questions and then orders in a language that sounded different from the one he’d used in these shops. He glanced down at Gretchen with concern and guided her back toward the car, with their guide in front and the other three men behind and to the side of them.

Gretchen didn’t speak. She had a sense of urgency and danger which made her move quickly and keep quiet. She felt Philippe’s quick, approving gaze as they made their way back to the car and got inside. The suited men got into the car behind them, another Mercedes she noticed, and they pulled out into the street and quickly back onto the highway that led to Tangier.

In scant minutes, she realized that they were gaining speed and that a third car was apparently in hot pursuit.

She glanced at Philippe with visible apprehension. He had pulled a cell phone from his pocket and was speaking into it rapidly in a foreign tongue. The car behind them, apparently following orders, suddenly whirled and blocked the narrow road so that the pursuing car had to swerve or hit them. As they raced away, the sound of rapid gunfire echoed behind them. Gretchen’s hands clenched so hard on her plastic bottle of drinking water that she almost burst it.

“It is all right,” Philippe said in a soft, comforting tone, his face hard and somber. “We are perfectly safe. You react well to a crisis,” he added with gentle praise.

“That was gunfire!” she said breathlessly.

“It was not meant for us,” he said nonchalantly. “We have only helped the young man in the beige suit avert a kidnapping attempt. I assure you, the Moroccan authorities are even now on the way to apprehend the perpetrators.”

“But they were armed,” she persisted.

He waved a hand. “Armed, but hardly in the class of Ahmed and Bruno.”

“Who are they?”

He chuckled. “Bodyguards.”

“Oh, yes. The prince’s bodyguards.”

He lifted an eyebrow and smiled at some private joke. He slid back his sleeve and checked his watch. It was thin and gold, expensive-looking. “I regret having to cut short our sight-seeing tour, but we would have had to leave soon, just the same. I have a rather important business meeting later this afternoon.” He lifted his dark head and searched her eyes. “Will you have dinner with me this evening?”

Her heart skipped and she smiled whimsically. “If you…I mean, I really would like that.”

“Bien. I will call for you at a quarter till eight.”

“All right.” She wasn’t used to having dinner so late, but the hotel didn’t serve meals until that hour. She was already hungry. Perhaps she could find something to nibble on in the small refrigerator in her room.

“Did you have breakfast?”

She hesitated. “Well, yes.”

He smiled warmly. “But no lunch. You do know that the hotel serves a marvelous little buffet beside the swimming pool around 3:00 p.m.?”

She sighed with relief and smiled back. “I do now. You see, the menus are all in French and I’ve had to have waiters translate them for me.”

“I will do that for you this evening.” He pulled out his phone again, pushed in numbers and spoke into it rapidly. The reply came at once. He listened, said something else, and put it away with a sigh. “The would-be kidnappers are in custody.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” she said on a heavy breath.

“Sadly, I see it far too often,” he said absently. He said something to the driver, who nodded. He leaned back again and crossed his legs. “I must have Bojo drop me off at the embassy,” he told her. “But he will drive you back to the hotel and escort you inside. I have instructed him to make the concierge aware of our…adventure…this morning, and to look out for you.”

She felt as if he were wrapping her up in soft cotton, like a treasure. She barely knew him, yet he wasn’t a stranger. “Thank you,” she said, feeling that the words were hopelessly inadequate to express what she really felt.

“The entire incident was my fault,” he muttered darkly. “I was careless.”

“I don’t understand. We were only sightseers.”

They approached a group of imposing buildings in the middle of the city and the driver pulled up to the curb and stopped.

“I must go.” Philippe took her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly just above the knuckles, with his black eyes holding hers the whole time. “Don’t brood,” he added gently. “You are safer right this moment than you have ever been in your life.” He turned his head and said something sharp in that gutteral language. Their driver chuckled and replied with a wave of his hand.

Philippe left the car without a backward glance, but as the driver pulled away from the curb, Gretchen noticed that the black car with the two bodyguards slid quickly to the curb in the wake of hers and the two dark-suited men got out and followed close behind Philippe.

She frowned, wondering why they were following him instead of the Saudi prince. “Those bodyguards…” she began.

“Mademoiselle must not worry,” the driver said easily. “Monsieur is in good hands.”

“But aren’t those men supposed to be the Saudi prince’s bodyguards?”

He hesitated. “They are not in the employ of the prince,” he said finally. “They are often called upon to escort visiting dignitaries. And important businessmen,” he added hastily and smiled.

“I see. Thank you.” She smiled and leaned her head back against the seat, relieved and still a little puzzled. Now that she had a friend in Morocco, she didn’t want to lose him so quickly.

Bojo got out of the hotel’s Mercedes, which he had driven, and escorted Gretchen in to the concierge. He seemed different now, very focused and intent as he related, in the language she didn’t understand, what had happened. She noticed that while he was wearing the long striped, hooded robe favored by many Moroccan men, that underneath it he was wearing a suit. She studied him unobtrusively, noting the expensive watch on his own wrist and a diamond-studded ring on his left middle finger. He didn’t look like a hotel guide at all. But then he turned back to her, motioned to one of the bellboys and had her escorted up to her room, all with reassuring smiles and consideration. She wondered if she’d ever get used to all this pampering.

She looked at herself in the mirror and noticed a fine layer of yellow sand. The wind seemed to blow all the time, and she’d noticed that none of the cars seemed to have or use air conditioning, because the windows were always open. The sand came into the cabs and, apparently, everywhere else. She took a quick shower, careful not to use more water than she had to. Water in a desert country must be precious.

Her wardrobe was severely limited by Maggie’s insistence on only one carry-on piece of luggage. She put on a pair of white slacks with a patterned white-and-purple silk blouse and sandals and grimaced at the white Mexican peasant crinkle-cloth dress hanging in the bathroom, which was all she had to wear to dinner. Perhaps she could wear her hair long and put on her single strand of cultured pearls and their matching earrings and pass. She felt uncomfortable at the idea of disgracing Philippe, who would probably turn up in a dinner jacket and be embarrassed by her.

She went down to the buffet luncheon with apprehension, which was lessened when she saw other tourists in bathing suits filling up china plates. The waiter grinned and her and she grinned back. She realized that many of their visitors would be similarly limited in wardrobe and she stopped worrying.

She had prosciutto and melon with tiny pastries of stuffed pigeon and wondered what people back in Jacobsville would think of the entrée. She sipped water “with gas” as the waiter called sparkling water and felt like a Sybarite on holiday. The sun was warm, the grounds exquisitely beautiful and full of blooming roses and other flowers. The sounds of carefree bathers fell softly on her ears as she curled up drowsily by herself in one of two canopied swings behind the row of padded chaise lounges. Before she knew it, she was asleep.

She was dreaming. She was being rocked in a boat while the breeze stirred a loose strand of hair at her throat. Her cheek was resting on a soft pillow that seemed to beat rhythmically. She sighed and stretched, and the pillow made an odd sound.

She opened her eyes and looked up into a scarred dark face with black eyes that held an odd expression. Her cheek was against his shoulder, and she was cradled across his long legs in the swing. For long seconds, they simply stared at each other in the fading sunlight.

“How fortunate that you went to sleep out of the sun’s reach,” he said in a voice that was more heavily accented than she’d heard it before. “Sunburn can be lethal in this climate.”

“Lunch was delicious and I got drowsy,” she said in a hushed tone.

One of his hands was at her throat. He moved it in a faint caress, looking down at her soft mouth for an instant before he lifted his gaze beyond her to the sea. “I sleep very little,” he said quietly. “Mine brings nightmares.”

“About what?” she asked, intrigued by the familiarity of being held close to him when she should be nervous and wary. He was a stranger. He should have been a stranger…

He spread her fingers against the silky fabric of his jacket and smoothed over her short nails. “War,” he said quietly. “Death. The screams of the innocent in the darkness of terror.”

She stared up at him uncomprehendingly, with wide, curious eyes. “Aren’t you from France?” she asked hesitantly.

His black eyes slid down to search hers. “No.”

“Then, where…?”

The hand at her throat moved, so that his thumb pressed the words back against her lips. “It is too soon, Gretchen,” he said gently. “Much too soon for truth. Let us live in a world of utter fantasy for a few days and let tomorrow wait for answers.”

She smiled hesitantly. “What sort of fantasy do you have in mind?”

He traced her mouth tenderly. “A very innocent sort,” he said with an oddly harsh laugh. “The only sort I am capable of.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know. Perhaps it is as well that you don’t.” He smiled down at her, cradled in his arms like a kitten. She smelled of orchids. He traced her cheek with its faint flush and her straight nose, and then her thin eyebrows as if he were sketching her. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-three,” she said honestly.

His forefinger eased between her parted lips, sensuously tracing the upper lip and then the lower one, enjoying her reactions. Her breath was jerky against his skin. Her eyes were dilating. He felt her body stir involuntarily and cursed himself and his fate.

“What are you like in passion?” he asked roughly. “Are you submissive, or do you like to bite and claw…?”

Her scarlet blush interrupted him. He scowled down at her horrified expression just before she struggled away from him and moved a foot away on the swing, trying to catch her breath.

“I don’t know…what sort of women you’re used to,” she choked, avoiding his intent scrutiny, “but I don’t do that kind of thing!”

His arm was across the back of the swing. His narrow black eyes watched her, intrigued. “What sort of thing?”

“Sleep around,” she said flatly and glared at him. “Least of all with a man I’ve only just met. So if that’s why you’ve been so nice to me, well, you’d better find a more modern woman. If I ever go to bed with a man, it’ll be my husband and nobody else. Period.”

The harshness went out of him at once. He looked at her with curiosity and, then, with utter delight. He smiled and then he laughed.

“Go ahead,” she invited warily. “Call me a prude. Say I’m living in the last century. I don’t care. I’ve heard it all before.”

“The small, still voice of reason in a mad world,” he said under his breath. “I knew that you were unique among your countrywomen,” he added huskily.

“I’m a throwback to Victorian times,” she agreed.

He took her hand in his and held it gently. “I don’t want a sexual interlude with you, Gretchen,” he said quietly.

She hesitated. “You don’t?”

He looked at her small hand and hated himself for the curse that denied him a man’s expectations. He smoothed his fingers over hers while he considered his options. He could send her home at once. It would be the best thing for her. But she opened his heart. She made him want to live. She made him laugh and smile and look at the world as a place of fascination and delight. He hadn’t felt that way for a long time. For two years, in fact. He hadn’t ever expected to feel that way again. And if it was like this, so quickly, how would it be as time passed and they got to know each other?

His features twisted. Yes, how would it be when she knew his horrible secret, when the truth came out. Would she look at him with pity, or with contempt and disgust? Could he bear to see that, in her soft green eyes?

He looked at her with torment in his face.

“Oh, don’t look like that,” she said with concern. “Whatever’s wrong, it will all come right one day. Really it will. You have to look for miracles or they don’t happen, Philippe.”

“How do you know that something is wrong?” he asked at once.

She frowned. “I don’t know. But something is.”

His breath caught in his throat. His fingers tightened on hers. He looked into her eyes and knew at that moment that he wasn’t going to be able to let her go.