Lord of the Desert Read online

  He chuckled again at her enthusiasm. He couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone like her except for once, a few years ago. He pursed his chiseled lips and studied her again, closely. “I understand that Qawi is smaller than even one of your states.”

  She looked around her with eyes that seemed to find everything interesting. “Yes, but America is pretty much the same wherever you go,” she pointed out. “Here, the music is different, the food is different, the clothes are different, and there’s so much history that I could spend the rest of my life learning it.”

  “You like history?”

  “I love it,” she said. “I wish I could have gone to college and studied it, but my mother had cancer and I couldn’t leave her alone very much. I had to while I worked, of course, but I couldn’t take classes, too. There was no time. And no money. She died four months ago and I still miss her.” She smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ramble on like that.”

  “I enjoyed it,” he replied, and seemed to mean it. “Mademoiselle Barton!” the concierge called to her.

  It took several seconds for her to realize that the concierge had mistaken her for Maggie. Which was just as well, she supposed. She excused herself, went around the tall man with the briefcase in one hand, and went to the desk.

  “Mustapha has already left to take a party of our guests to the Grotto of Hercules,” he said apologetically. “But if you still wish to go, our car is at your disposal, and we can ask one of the other guides to accompany you.”

  “I don’t know…” Gretchen said hesitantly. She didn’t think she was going to enjoy the trip all alone.

  “Excuse me,” the tall man interjected, joining her at the counter. “I had planned to go see the Grotto myself. Perhaps I could intrude on the young lady’s company…?”

  She looked up at him with pure relief. “Oh, that would be lovely…I mean, if you’d like to go?”

  “I would.” He glanced at the concierge and spoke rapidly and in a language Gretchen couldn’t begin to understand. Comments passed back and forth and the concierge chuckled to himself. Gretchen was wondering if her impulsive acceptance was going to get her into trouble. She knew nothing whatsoever about the stranger…

  “The gentleman is quite trustworthy, mademoiselle,” the concierge said to her when he noticed her worried look. “I can assure you that you will come to no harm in his company. Shall I ask, uh, Bojo—another guide—to bring the car to the front door now?”

  Gretchen glanced at her companion, who nodded.

  “Yes, then.” She hesitated. “But your briefcase…”

  He handed it to the concierge with another brief spate of comment in that same musical but puzzling language and turned to Gretchen with a smile. “Shall we go?”

  The hotel’s stately Mercedes, with a tall, intelligent Berber at the wheel, easily identified by the way he wore his mustache and beard, slid easily into the flow of traffic. Their guide, like the taxi driver at their arrival in Tangier, had the window down and spoke volubly to other drivers and pedestrians with long, sweeping waves of his arm as he passed them. The stranger told her that he’d instructed Bojo to take them first to the Caves of Hercules, which she’d wanted to see earlier, and then on to Asilah.

  “Bojo was born in Tangier. He knows half the population and is related to the other half,” the tall man said, lazing back against his seat with crossed arms to observe her.

  “Like back home in Jacobsville,” she said, understanding. “Small towns are nice. Everybody knows everyone else. I don’t think I’d be happy in a big city, where I wouldn’t know anybody at all.”

  “Yet you left your small town to take a position in a foreign—very foreign—country,” he said, and it was a question as much as a statement of fact.

  She smiled absently as she looked past the driver’s head to the narrow city streets ahead, lined with palm trees and pedestrians in brightly colored clothing. “With my mother dead, and no close relatives, I seemed to be looking at a dead end of a future back home.”

  “You are not married, then?”

  “Me? Oh, no, I’ve never been married,” she said absently. “I had a boyfriend.” She grimaced. “He thought I’d inherit a lot of property and money when my mother died, but the property was mortgaged to the hilt and there was only enough insurance for a simple funeral. He just vanished after the funeral. He’s dating a banker’s daughter now.”

  Her companion’s face hardened visibly. He was studying her intently, but she didn’t notice. “I see.”

  She shrugged. “He was nice to me, and at least I had someone for a little while, when Mama was the worst.” She sighed as her eyes followed the coastline. “Before, I never got to date much. She’d been sick for a long time, you see, and there was only me to take care of her. My brother helped as much as he could, of course, but he works for the government and he travels most of the time.”

  “And there was no one else who could have helped you? A close friend, perhaps?”

  She shook her head. “Just my friend Maggie, but she lived in Houston. Lives in Houston,” she faltered. “I lived on our little family ranch with Mama that my brother managed to save. We have a foreman who lives there now and works for shares.”

  “This friend,” he persisted in a deceptively lazy tone. “Did she come abroad with you?”

  “Yes, but she had to go home unexpectedly.” She frowned, wondering if she should be so forthcoming with a total stranger.

  “And left you all alone and at the mercy of strangers?” he taunted in a soft, teasing tone.

  She glanced at him with a suddenly impish smile. “Are you going to offer me candy and ask me to go home with you?” she asked.

  He chuckled softly. “I abhor sweets, as it happens,” he said, crossing his long legs in their elegant slacks. “And you seem a bit too astute to be picked up in such a manner.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she murmured. “I’m partial to chocolates. I could be a real pushover to anybody with a pocketful of Godiva soft centers.”

  “A fact I shall have to have to keep in mind, mademoiselle…Barton,” he said, so suavely that she missed the faint hesitation in his voice.

  She searched his dark eyes, not liking to start off their friendship with a lie. “Mademoiselle Brannon,” she corrected. “Gretchen Brannon.”

  He took the hand she offered and lifted it to his mouth. She grinned. “Mademoiselle Brannon,” he corrected. “Enchanté.” His eyes narrowed. “I understood the concierge to call you Mademoiselle Barton.”

  She grimaced. “That’s Maggie Barton, my friend and my roommate. Her foster brother was terribly injured in an accident and she flew home this morning.” She bit her lower lip. “I probably shouldn’t ramble on about it, but she wants me to do something that isn’t quite ethical and my conscience is killing me.”

  He leaned back, his eyes calm and faintly amused. “Please,” he invited with a gesture of one lean hand. “Often it helps to speak of problems to an uninterested but objective stranger.” When she hesitated, he chuckled. “We are strangers, n’est pas?”

  “Yes. And I don’t guess you know anybody in Qawi?”

  He lifted his eyebrows expressively.

  She shrugged. “Well, Maggie got a job working for the sheikh there and since she can’t take it now, she wanted me to take her place without telling anyone who I was.”

  His eyes were twinkling. “You disapprove?”

  “She wasn’t really thinking straight, or she wouldn’t have suggested it. I don’t like telling lies,” she said flatly. “And I’m not any good at them, either. Besides, I don’t think I can pass for an executive-type businesswoman who’s also a widow. I’m not sophisticated and I don’t know how to plan parties or welcome visiting dignitaries. All I know how to do is legal work. I worked for a firm of attorneys in Jacobsville.”

  He listened attentively, his eyes narrow with speculation and a half smile on his wide, thin mouth. “Amazing,” he murmured.


  She looked up at him with wide gray eyes. “What is?”

  “Never mind.” He searched her eyes. “So you think the job is beyond your capabilities?”

  “Certainly it is,” she said. “I’m going to finish my vacation here and then fly to Amsterdam and go home,” she added, making her decision as she spoke.

  One dark, elegant eyebrow lifted. “Do you believe in fate, Miss Brannon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. I think you should go to Qawi.”

  “And live a lie?” she murmured unhappily.

  “No. And tell the truth.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward abruptly. “I know the Sheikh of Qawi. Rather, I know of him,” he said unexpectedly. “He is a fair man, and he admires nothing more than honesty. Use your friend’s ticket. Take the job.”

  “He won’t give it to me,” she interrupted. “He was emphatic about Maggie’s qualifications, and one of them, for some reason, was that she’d been married…”

  “Tell him the truth, and take the job,” he repeated firmly. “He will make allowances. I happen to know that his need of an assistant is personal and immediate. He will not want to waste time trying to find someone else with Madame Barton’s qualifications.”

  “But I’m not qualified,” she emphasized.

  He smiled. “To meet people?” he chided. “You and I are strangers, yet here we are sharing a holiday trip.”

  She let a smile touch her soft mouth. “That was only because I almost knocked you down,” she pointed out. “I can’t really make a habit of it, just to meet people.”

  He waved a hand. “I think you will make an excellent assistant.”

  “As I mentioned earlier, I can’t speak any other language except Spanish.”

  “You can learn Arabic.”

  “And worst of all, I’m not Muslim,” she worried.

  “Neither is the sheikh.” He leaned forward with a grin. “Qawi is unusual as a nation in the mixture of her cultures. There are as many Jews and Christians as there are Muslims, owing to an unusual colonial history. You will feel right at home,” he assured her. “And in the past two years, it has become an ally of both the United States and Great Britain.” He grinned wickedly. “Oil contracts are lucrative temptations to democracies. How many friends Qawi has gained because of her new wealth!”

  She smiled. “You make this sound very easy,” she told him.

  “As it is.” He frowned as he studied her oval face. She was attractive, but no real beauty. However her features were nice, and she had warm eyes. Her mouth was perfect. He grimaced as he looked at it and mourned for what he could never experience again. Her hair, though, was what fascinated him. It was platinum blond, obviously long, and definitely natural. She reminded him, oh, so much, of Brianne Martin…

  She was looking at him, too. She wondered how he’d gotten those scars on his face. There were others on the back of his left hand, the same side as those on his face.

  He saw her curiosity and touched his cheek lightly. “An accident, when I was much younger,” he said frankly. “There are other scars, better hidden,” he added in a harsh undertone.

  She smiled self-consciously. “Sorry,” she said at once. “I didn’t mean to stare. They’re not disfiguring, you know,” she added easily. “You look like a pirate.”

  His eyelids flickered. “Mademoiselle?”

  “You need an eye-patch and a cutlass and a parrot, though,” she added. “And one of those sexy white ruffled shirts that leaves half your chest bare.”

  His delight was in the explosion of brilliance in his black eyes, in the hearty laugh that fell like music on her ears. She had a feeling that he laughed very rarely.

  “Oh, and a ship,” she continued. “With black sails.”

  “One of my ancestors was a Riffian Berber,” he told her. “Not quite a pirate, but very definitely a revolutionary.”

  “I just knew it,” she said with glee. She searched his dark eyes and felt a thrill in the pit of her stomach that had no counterpart in her memory. Her breath was catching in her throat. No man had ever made her feel so feminine. “Have you ever ridden a camel?” she asked.

  “What prompted that question?” he asked.

  She indicated a man standing with a small herd of camels at the front of a hotel on the coast, whose parking lot they were just entering. “I really do want to ride a camel before I go home.”

  “There are no saddles, you know,” he said as the driver parked the car and got out to open the door for them.

  Gretchen looked at her gray slacks and sandals. “No stirrups, either?”

  “No.”

  She looked longingly at the camels. “They’re so pretty. They’re like horses on stilts.”

  “Treachery!” he remonstrated. “To compare a mere beast of burden with something so elegant as our Arabian horses!”

  She arched her eyebrows and looked up at him. “Do you ride?”

  “Of course I ride.” He looked at the camels with distaste. “But not in a suit.” An Armani suit, but he wasn’t going to mention that.

  She caught his sleeve lightly. She didn’t touch people often, but she felt safe with him. He wasn’t a stranger, even though he should have been. “Please?” she asked. “I don’t even want to go far. I just want to know what it’s like.”

  It was like gossamer strands of silk brushing open nerves to have her soft green eyes look at him that way. Her fingers weren’t even touching his skin, but he felt their warmth right through the fabric, and his breath caught. Something unfamiliar tautened his tall, fit body.

  “Very well,” he said abruptly, moving away from that light touch.

  She dropped her hand as if he’d burned it. He didn’t like to be touched, she noticed. She wouldn’t forget again. She grinned at him as they approached the camel master. “Thanks!”

  “You’ll fall off and break your neck, most likely,” he muttered darkly. He spoke to the camel driver in that same odd dialect she didn’t understand, smiling and gesturing with his hands as the other man did. They both looked at her, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Come along,” the tall man told Gretchen, nodding her toward a small wooden block that was standing beside one of the well-groomed tan camels. The single hump was covered by a blanket and there was a tiny braided rope to hold on to.

  “I’m not quite sure…ooh!”

  The tall man had lifted her right up in his arms. He smiled at her shock as he put her on the camel’s back and handed her the single small braided rein. “Wrap your legs around the hump,” he instructed, “and hold tight. I’ve told our friend here to walk her slowly up the hill and back. No galloping,” he assured her.

  She dug her small camera out of the fanny pack around her waist and handed it down to him. “Would you?”

  He grinned. “Of course.”

  She rode, laughing at the odd side to side gait of the beast. She waved at the grinning motorists who passed her as the camel’s owner led the camel up and down by the side of the small paved road. The whole way, the tall man watched them and took photos. He didn’t look much like a man of action, and she couldn’t really picture him on a camel. He seemed like a businessman, and he was probably as fastidious about dirt and camel hair as he would have been about mud. She’d dreamed of a man of action racing across the desert on a stallion. Her companion, who was charming and good company at least, was no counterpart of the daring sheikh she’d read about in the 1920’s novel from which Valentino’s movie had been made. It was a little disappointing. She had to stop living in fantasies, she reminded herself, and held on tight to the little rope as she bounced along.

  When they returned, and the Moroccan had coaxed the camel onto its knees, the tall man handed him the camera and said something under his breath. He reached up and lifted Gretchen down in his strong arms, pausing to turn toward the camera. “Smile,” he instructed, and looked down into her wide, curious eyes. She smiled back, her heart whipping into her throat, her lips pa
rted with lingering pleasure and the beginnings of an odd longing.

  “Did you enjoy it?” he asked, hesitating.

  “It was wonderful,” she said breathlessly. She searched his eyes slowly, aware of the smooth fabric of his jacket, where her nervous hands rested, and the narrow, unblinking scrutiny of those black eyes. She couldn’t quite breathe while he held her.

  He felt her breath against his chin and again that unfamiliar stirring made him frown. He put her down abruptly and moved away to retrieve the camera. Gretchen stood watching him with nervous discomfort. She felt as if she’d done something very wrong. She had no idea what.

  He was back very shortly. He handed her the camera and smiled politely, as if nothing had happened to mar the pleasure of her first camel ride. “The grotto is just down that path. Come along.”

  She went first, leaving him to follow. There was a stall at the entrance to the Caves of Hercules and she hesitated with her eyes on a small, flat circle of rock with a raised dome and what looked like a fossil on it. Fascinated, she picked it up, finding it silky to the touch.

  “Your first souvenir? Allow me,” he murmured, paying for it.

  “But…”

  He held up a hand to silence her protest. “A trifle,” he waved away the cost. He nodded toward the cave’s entrance. “Go slowly. This is a living cave. You will find limestone walls where, for centuries, men have hewn millstones from them.”

  She went inside, feeling the cool dampness of the caves as she walked along the bare ground and mingled with other tourists. There was an opening toward the sea which looked very much like a map of Africa. The walls had circles carved out—the millstones, she thought. She cradled her souvenir in her small hands and took out her camera again, photographing the walls and, when he wasn’t looking, her strangely attractive companion. She was enjoying his company as she’d enjoyed little else in her life. And she didn’t even know his name!

  She moved back toward him. He was watching the waves through the opening in the cavern, his hands deep in his pockets, his expression taciturn and brooding.