Lord of the Desert

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 parted 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.