Undercover Sultan
Undercover Sultan
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
Sheikh Haroun al Muntazir was honor-bound to recover a priceless family jewel…but what was lovely operative Mariel de Vouvray's mission? Until her motives were made plain, he had to keep her close - yet at a distance. But with one stolen kiss Haroun's resistance turned to air. Was Mariel's melting surrender a trap of ultimate danger…or a precious haven offered by his future beloved wife?
He Was Absolutely Devastating, Wearing Rich Black Silk That Made Him Look Like A Sultan.
Never in her life had Mariel lost her heart so thoroughly to a total stranger—or to anyone! But it would be insanity to think anything could come of it—she was a spy and he was…? She had better find a way to get her heart back.
The dark stranger slipped up silently behind her, not touching her, his hands gripping the railing on either side of her own. She felt his body warm the luscious silk she was wearing till it was a kiss on her skin, and pressed her lips together, praying for the strength to resist.
She knew nothing about him. The sooner she got away from him the better.
She would stay here tonight, but that didn’t mean she was spending the night in his bed. And yet, if he made a real move, if he tried to make love to her—she knew she would find it impossible to resist….
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the world of Silhouette Desire, where you can indulge yourself every month with romances that can only be described as passionate, powerful and provocative!
Silhouette’s beloved author Annette Broadrick returns to Desire with a MAN OF THE MONTH who is Hard To Forget. Love rings true when former high school sweethearts reunite while both are on separate undercover missions to their hometown. Bestselling writer Cait London offers you A Loving Man, when a big-city businessman meets a country girl and learns the true meaning of love.
The Desire theme promotion THE BABY BANK, about sperm-bank client heroines who find love unexpectedly, returns with Amy J. Fetzer’s Having His Child, part of her WIFE, INC. miniseries. The tantalizing Desire miniseries THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS: THE LOST HEIRS continues with Baby of Fortune by Shirley Rogers. In Undercover Sultan, the second book of Alexandra Sellers’s SONS OF THE DESERT: THE SULTANS trilogy, a handsome prince is forced to go on the run with a sexy mystery woman—who may be the enemy. And Ashley Summers writes of a Texas tycoon who comes home to find a beautiful stranger living in his mansion in Beauty in His Bedroom.
This month see inside for details about our exciting new contest “Silhouette Makes You a Star.” You’ll feel like a star when you delve into all six fantasies created in Desire books this August!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Undercover Sultan
Alexandra Sellers
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.
Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.
What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.
Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, England.
to
Steve Aylott and Colin Moult
and to
Brian, Mark, Steve, Bob and Craig
who, during the writing of this trilogy,
redecorated the house around me.
Ah, Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire?
—Edward FitzGerald
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Prologue
“They have the Rose.”
The line was silent as Ash absorbed it. “How?” he asked.
“They got there before me,” Haroun said. “Two men. One said, ‘We’ve come for the Rose.’ She had no reason to challenge them. As she said, they looked the part.”
“What does that mean?”
“Swarthy, apparently. He walked in and she said she led him to the coffee table, where Rosalind had told her it was. He glanced at the ornaments and picked it out without much hesitation. So he knew what he was after.”
Ash muttered a curse. “Did you get a description? Apart from all-purpose Arab?”
“Not of him. His companion has a scar high on his right cheekbone. Pulls the eyelid down a bit,” Haroun said. “Now, does that sound familiar, Ash?”
“Half the veterans of the Kaljuk war have some kind of facial scar,” Ash said. “Where does that get you?”
“Well, it reminds me of someone, and it’ll come to me.”
“Let me know when it does.”
“What have your hackers found in Verdun’s computers?”
Ash grunted. “What they’ve found is the best firewall in three continents. We can’t get in.”
Haroun paused, thinking it over. “Well, we’ve got to know how he learned about the Rose so fast. I’d better get over to Paris and see what a direct assault will achieve.”
Ash hesitated. “There’s an air traffic strike brewing in France.”
“I’d take the train anyway. Faster.”
“Your predilection for faster is just what worries me. You’re too headstrong for this stuff, Harry. I don’t want you trying to break in to Verdun’s offices. A guy with that kind of firewall on his computers is going to have good protection on the physical plant, too. Go to work on one of his employees.”
Harry was shaking his head before Ash was halfway through this speech, and maybe it was fortunate Ash couldn’t see him. “That will take too long. We’ve got to risk something more direct.”
Ash groaned. “We can’t afford to risk something more direct. Michel Verdun is in it with Ghasib up to his neck. I don’t want him cornered.”
Harry said reasonably, “Ash, you’ve held me off from this for too long. We have to find out how much Verdun knows and how he is getting the information.”
“Not to the point of risking your life.”
“Why not? Your life is going to be at much greater risk in a couple of weeks,” Haroun pointed out.
“All the more reason to keep you safe.”
“Ash, we’re agreed we need to get the Rose back. At the very least we have to prevent Verdun’s agents from delivering it to Ghasib. We can’t afford to trust anyone with this. I’m on the scene. Who better than me?”
Ash hesitated, marshalling his arguments, and Haroun rushed on, “Anyway, it’s my fault we lost the Rose. If I’d been there an hour earlier it would be in my hands, not Verdun’s. So I’ve got a slightly larger interest here. Sorry, but you can’t stop me. It’s a question of pride. You asked me to get the Rose, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
He hung up while Ash was still cursing.
One
The young woman, small but shapely, her lips a rich red, her wild red-gold mane held up at one side with a jewelled comb, earrings dangly, skirt micro-short, ran lightly up the steps and into the dim lighting of the hotel foyer. She was short and very slender, with a long waist and low, curvy hips. Her dark stiletto-heel suede boots were above the knee, her neatly muscled stomach bare between the hip-hugging leather skirt and the white bolero top, revealing a neat gold ring in her navel. A delicate butterfly tattoo quivered on her stomach. A smart leather backpack was slung over one shoulder.
The concierge smiled involuntarily as he watched her. Many of the girls who used his hotel were beautiful, mostly actresses and students supplementing their incomes. This one, who called herself Emma—of course not her real name, he understood that—was not the most beautiful among them, but she had a certain something. It always cheered up his Friday night to see her.
“Bonsoir, ma petite,” he called. “Ça va?”
“Bonsoir, Henri,” she returned with a smile, crossing to where he held up the key for her. She was the one he could not place. With the others he could usually make a guess at their daytime occupation, but Emma was an unknown.
She was unusual in other ways, too. Always the same room. Always the same client. Only Friday night. Every Friday night.
Emma was not a regular in the usual sense of the word, but on Friday nights she was here at eleven, whatever the weather. Henri always saved the same room for her for two hours, and on the rare Friday night that she did not turn up, she paid him the following week.
She had arranged it this way to protect her client, who arrived separately and came in by the service entrance. Henri had never seen him. Emma had not said so, but Henri could guess that the man was a known figure—a foreigner, of course, since what Frenchman would have worried about such an arrangement becoming public? The président’s own mistress and illegitimate daughter had attended his public funeral alongside his wife, as was only natural. But foreigners were odd about practical sexual matters, there was no denying.
Henri had found himself agreeing that of course the man could come in the back way, although it wasn’t usual. Henri liked to vet the girls’ customers, so that if there was any trouble he could be as helpful as possible with the police. He ran a decent place and kept in well with the flics. His pride was that he took no money from the girls. He charged their clients for the room. The arrangement between the girls and their clients was their own business. He was an hôtelier, not a souteneur.
But Emma paid for the room herself. Now she slipped the money onto the counter and took the key, smiling that smile, and he thought it a pity that she spoiled the line of her own luscious mouth by painting it larger. Her mouth was generous enough, and he had often thought of telling her so. But she wasn’t like the other girls. She was warm, friendly, she never got above herself, but she was not confiding. He had never quite had the courage to give her the kind of avuncular advice he offered to some.
As usual, she ignored the elevator and went lightly up the wide marble stairs, and Henri watched with an absent smile till the flashing, slim brown thighs were out of sight.
Mariel put the key in the lock and slipped into the silence of room 302. A small night-light was burning. In the shadows the air of faded elegance that marked the hotel was a little softened; you could almost imagine yourself back in time. Before the war this had been a solid, respectable establishment. Then the Germans had used it as a military headquarters, and after the war it had never quite recovered its former status. It had been in steady decline ever since, but the furniture and hangings had been of good quality once, and although badly worn, still bore testament to the old respectability.
With the quickness of familiarity, Mariel locked the door behind her in the semi-darkness, leaving the key in the lock, and crossed to the window. She dragged back the curtains and slipped the bolt that secured the large sash window. When she pulled up the window, the night air blew in, the indefinable perfume that was Paris. She heaved a breath, slipped her other arm through the strap of her small backpack, sat down on the windowsill and neatly swung her legs over the edge. Then she jumped.
She landed almost silently on her toes on the ancient, slightly wobbly iron fire escape a few inches down and stood while her eyes acclimatized to night. Overhead only the stars gave any light. Below, one or two windows illumined the small, narrow courtyard.
After a moment, keeping close to the wall, she started up the steps. The courtyard, if it could be called that, was completely surrounded by the brick walls of buildings that abutted each other. The hotel was four stories high. One flight up, the fire escape, last remnant of something that had once honeycombed the space, made a right turn and ran along the wall of the adjacent building for a dozen yards. Mariel kept close to the wall all the way. At the far end it stopped against the back wall of a third building, which sat parallel to the hotel on the next street over. Here there was another window, open just a chink at the bottom. Mariel slipped expert fingers into the chink, pushed the window open, leapt up, swung her legs through. Her feet reached for the toilet seat in the darkness.
A moment later she tiptoed past the row of porcelain sinks and slowly opened the door onto the corridor. Behind her head the word Toilettes was marked in chunky italic brass letters on the grey door. Mariel glanced to right and left as she stepped through, and although the turn of her head seemed casual, her gaze and her body were alert.
The dimly lighted hallway was empty. It probably dated from the same era, but the decor of this building was very different from that of the hotel she had just left. Here there had been extensive updating—sunken lighting in the lowered ceilings, the walls neatly painted in grey, grey carpeting on the floor, and brass plates or letters announcing the names of the various companies behind the doors that lined the corridor.
Mariel went lightly and quickly to a door leading to the stairs, down two flights, and out into another identical hallway. Only the names in brass were different.
Shrugging out of her backpack, she pulled out some keys as she strode down the hall towards a door with a brass plate reading Michel Verdun et Associés, and sent up a little prayer. She didn’t start breathing again until she was inside in the darkness with the door closed, and the alarm code had worked.
She had been doing this every Friday night for weeks now. Sooner or later she was going to get caught. One day, she supposed, she might even walk in on Michel himself. She was sure he was often here at night.
If she did walk in on him, she had a story ready: she had been out for the evening, had lost her apartment keys and had come to the office because she kept a spare set in her desk.
Michel might be suspicious, but she hoped that he would be distracted by the signs that his employee led a double life, computer whiz kid by day, working girl by night. And that his confusion would buy her some time and the chance to get away. Afterwards, of course, she could not risk showing up for work again. Her usefulness as a spy would be over from that moment. But with luck Michel would never discover, among the many people he was cheating, exactly whom she had been spying for.
But tonight the office was dark. Mariel made her way aided by the light filtering in the long row of windows from the street, and the glow from half a dozen computer screens. At her own desk she tossed her bag down. First she opened the bottom drawer and pulled a few items out at random, setting them on the desk. This was set decoration. If Michel happened to come in, she hoped it would look as if she had been searching for her key.
Then she slipped into the chair and grabbed her computer mouse with one hand. The screen saver was a shot of moving clouds and sea, and was another thread in the fabricated character of Michel Verdun’s wuss of an employee. Mariel’s screen saver of choice would have been something closer to the wild starbursts on the desk next to hers—or perhaps a series of morphing faces. She liked colour and wackiness and excitement.
The serene sky dissolved, and her desktop appeared.
For a few moments Mariel typed and clicked until the window she wanted appeared. Then she grabbed up a pen and, on a bright pink Post-it note, copied the short list of letters and numbers that appeared. She carefully double-checked them, then deleted the file and exited. After a few moments the desktop would dissolve and her screen saver would reappear, leaving no evidence that she had touched the computer.
Mariel pulled a zip disk from a drawer, stood and, armed with the little pink square of paper, moved through the shadows and paused before an internal door.
Noting the first figure she had scribbled down, she keyed the code into the security keypad. She waited till she heard the click, then opened the door and slipped inside, closing it firmly behind her before reaching for the light switch. It was just possible someone in a building opposite might phone the police if they saw lights.
A few feet away, two bright squares of light showed two identical images of a naked couple deriving a great deal of apparent mutual satisfaction from the close conjunction of their rather improbably endowed bodies. After a moment the fluorescent lights flickered and settled into a bright glow.
Against the wall were two computers on a long desk. Beside it were several tall black filing cabinets. These and a chair made up the entire contents of the room. These were Michel’s top secret, dedicated computers. The room was off limits to everyone save Michel himself.
Mariel crossed to one of the computers. She dragged the wheeled chair over and sank down, dropping the pink note beside the keyboard, reaching for the mouse. The pornographic movie loop disappeared as the desktop came up on one screen, but on the other the couple moved tirelessly through their paces.
It was Michel’s favourite screen saver. Mariel hardly saw it anymore. She knew Michel did it to annoy, and it was annoying if she thought about it. Under ordinary circumstances she would have taken a stand, but these were very far from ordinary circumstances. Michel was a man whose guard went down around women whom he was successfully sexually harassing, and it was no part of Mariel’s plan to figure in his mind as a woman to reckon with. Mariel the Mouse was her role.
The real Mariel de Vouvray would have mentioned twice that she found his screen saver offensive and then would probably have kicked the screen out of the monitor the third time to make her point. The Mariel Michel knew lowered her eyes and bit her lip whenever he summoned her to some discussion while the screen saver was on. Which was something he did to all the women staff—too regularly for chance.
But that was okay. If she did her job right, she would have all the revenge she could want on Michel Verdun. And Mariel intended to do her job right.
Mariel was a corporate spy. She had ostensibly been working for Michel Verdun et Associés for four months—but in fact she was working for her American cousin, Hal Ward, of Ward Energy Systems in California.
Hal was the inventor of the world’s most efficient fuel cell technology, but he hadn’t stopped there. His work now involved research and development into a variety of energy alternatives to fossil fuel and the combustion engine.
And someone was carefully and consistently stealing the results of that research and passing it on to foreign-based companies and governments. The pipeline for the stolen material had finally been tracked last year. Michel Verdun et Associés was a “détective privé”—detective agency—based in Paris, with links all over the Middle East and, most importantly, with the country of Bagestan. It was Bagestan, and Bagestan’s unpleasant dictator, Ghasib, who benefited most from the stolen industrial secrets.
Hal wanted the leak stopped. But Michel Verdun—as might be expected—had some of the best data protection software in the world on his computers. Hal had decided to put someone right inside Michel Verdun’s organization, not only to discover the source of the leak in his own corporation, but to unravel Michel Verdun’s entire operation, from leak to end user.
Mariel de Vouvray’s father was French, and a not too distant cousin of Hal’s father. Her mother was American, and the sister of Hal’s mother. Mariel had spent every summer in California almost since she was born, many of them on Hal’s family estate. She was fluently bilingual. She had taken her university degree in computer intelligence and then had gone to work full-time for Hal. She was a natural for this job.
It had been a relatively simple matter to get her into Michel’s organization. Through one of his friends in Silicon Valley, Hal had engineered the head hunting and abrupt departure of one of Michel’s key computer people. Mariel’s fluent English and glowing references from her mythical former job (courtesy of another good friend of Hal’s), added to her willingness to start immediately, had nailed her the post left vacant by the departure.
Since then, slowly and carefully, because time was not the most important factor, Mariel had wormed her way into the most secret parts of Verdun’s organization. She had placed “moles” into his computer programming so that her own computer was e-mailed a copy of all his new passwords and codes every week. She had reconnoitred the building and found the old disused fire escape, and the hotel.
Every Friday night before she left the building at the end of the day she went up to the fourth-floor toilets, unlocked the window and opened it a crack. Then she went home, changed into her disguise and returned as Emma.
And then she checked the computers in this room for data files that had arrived during the week and sent them on to Hal Ward’s own safe computer. Even if Michel did discover that he was being spied on, he would not find out where the information had gone.
Mot de passe? demanded the screen, and Mariel consulted the little paper and keyed in that week’s password. Then she summoned up the list of everything that had arrived during the past week. Michel routinely deleted the files as he dealt with them, but Mariel had installed a mole on the computer that saved all files to a second, hidden folder. Since she had been inside his firewall when she did it, the program remained undetected.
Michel had a finger in lots of pies, most of which were rotten. He had agents, moles and hackers everywhere, stealing data and sending it to these two computers anonymously. He then sold it to his many clients.
One of the things for which she most despised him was the work he did for a Swiss bank. Michel investigated the lives of the people who were fighting to get back the money that had been deposited before the Second World War by relatives who had afterwards died in German concentration camps. The bank was hoping to blackmail vulnerable people into dropping their claims. He did the same for a multinational pharmaceutical giant, investigating the backgrounds of anyone—politicians included—who challenged them.
That was Michel Verdun. Very, very choosy about his clients—he wouldn’t touch anyone who didn’t have money.
Mariel scanned the list of received data with practised skill. Michel’s system worked on a number code. Agents sent data signed with a code. In return he paid money into anonymous bank accounts. Anyone trying to sort out his little empire would have one hell of a time.
It hadn’t taken Mariel long to learn that one code prefix always related to Ghasib. Suffixes sometimes were also apparently assigned, but she hadn’t discovered yet whether a suffix related to a particular source or a particular job.
Of course Mariel’s priority was anything with a Ghasib prefix. Tonight there were nearly a dozen. It had been a busy week for the Ghasib spies. And most carried the same suffix number.
In the past few weeks there had been a new suffix used on more and more incoming Ghasib data, but since most were encrypted she had not been able to glean much.
She opened each file before sending it, and read it if possible. Then she downloaded it onto a zip disk and deleted it from the secret folder. When she had checked and downloaded all the new files she would take the zip disk to her own computer and send the files off to Hal.
She never sent anything out from the secret computers. Michel’s firewall was extremely efficient, and he had software monitoring all traffic from this machine.
Mariel lifted her head, listening for a moment. Nothing. Listening was an automatic response, making sure you didn’t get too deep in what you were doing. She checked the clock—11:38—then clicked on the next Ghasib-prefixed e-mail. A few lines of encryption gibberish met her eyes, and she instantly exited again and clicked it to download to the zip disk. The next few were the same.
The last file had only just arrived, so Michel hadn’t seen it yet. Mariel felt a curious presentiment as she clicked it open. Maybe it would be significant. Maybe this would be the break she needed.
Another encrypted message, with an attachment this time. Mariel bit her lip as she clicked on the attachment.
It was a photograph. The image slowly formed on the screen, and Mariel blinked and opened her eyes in dumb disbelief. It was no one she recognized, but it was the most gorgeous man she had ever clapped eyes on.
In her life.
Mariel sat gazing at the handsome masculine face while her brain circuits started misfiring, one by two by four, triggering off a chain of explosions that blew reason into the void. She knew about the reality of love at first sight. Coup de foudre, it was called in French. She believed it was possible.
But she had never heard before of anyone falling head over heels in love with a face in a photograph.
Two
Waving dark hair above a broad, wide forehead. Strong square eyebrows. Eyes dark with an intensity that seemed to burn her. A mouth tilted with devilment, passion in the beautifully shaped full lips, and a kind of wildness in the expression as a whole. Like looking into a storm.
Who was he? Mariel had a deep feeling of recognition, but was that real, or just the effect the face was having on her, as if she had known him in another lifetime, was destined to love him in this one?
She shook her head, trying to re-establish a sense of reality, and glanced at the computer clock again. She had lost her sense of time. Was it really only 11:48, or had the clock frozen along with her brain? She was suddenly frightened. How long had she sat here, staring at this not-quite-stranger’s face?
It was her job to download the file, she reminded herself, like a child who had forgotten the alphabet. But she could not bear to lose the face. Without any pause for rational thought, she dragged the cursor over Print. She clicked the mouse, heard the printer whirr into life, and then bit her lip with regret. This, she told herself, was the way spies crashed in flames—letting your guard down for one fatal second.
But it was too late now.
She downloaded the file to the disk, then deleted it from the secret folder. Michel would never know it had been opened.
Two minutes later she was still standing there, the zip disk in her hand, waiting as the printer ground back and forth over the page. The colour printer printed slowly, and it printed exceeding fine. What a fool she was! She ought to be getting out of here, but now she was rivetted, waiting. Printers were not her field. She was afraid of what might happen if she tried to abort the print. Would it spew the thing out the next time it was activated?
Usually when she had finished, Mariel locked this office before returning to her own desk to send the contents of her disk. But the printer was going to take forever. So to save time she went out to her computer and slipped the zip disk into the slot.
Michel had secret software on every computer in the place, which allowed him to recap every keystroke his employees typed. She was pretty sure Michel checked each of the firm’s computers in rotation every week, reading e-mails and the history of everyone’s cyber activity. If so, he never found any evidence of her Friday-night activities. Mariel simply disabled the program whenever she wanted an activity to go unrecorded. She did that now, then fired off the contents of the disk to Hal’s safe address, and deleted all record of the transaction before restoring the monitoring software.
She wiped the zip floppy, dropped it into a drawer, and went back to the private office. The printer had finally finished.
Mariel plucked the page from its tray, and again all thought left her head as her eyes fell on the image of that perfect, masculine face. What a devil-may-care smile, what eyes! Who was he?
So entranced was the spy that she did not hear the sounds of stealthy entry in the outer office. She heaved a sigh, flicked off the light, pulled open the door, and stepped through.
The man getting his bearings in the outer office was as surprised as she was. For a moment they were silent, gaping at each other.
“It’s you!” Mariel whispered, amazed, as the world reeled and rocked and all the landmarks she knew sank without trace.
The man standing halfway across the office in the gloom, looking much more dangerous in the flesh, was the man whose picture she had just taken from the printer.
Haroun al Muntazir frowned and cursed himself for a fool. Ash was right, he was too impetuous. To break in to the office when someone was in it was the work of an ignorant amateur.
But the woman in front of him was a mystery. The brassy red wig and the black leather micromini and boots might have been enough to tell him what her profession was, even if she hadn’t been so sexually alluring that he had the urge to negotiate terms with her there and then. But what was she doing in Michel Verdun’s office?
When he managed to unfix his eyes from her, his gaze fell on the grotesque picture on the screen in the office behind her. A porn video. That went some way towards explaining her presence—did Verdun come to the office at night to indulge his extramarital passions?
Which meant he was behind her in the office? Hell! thought Haroun. Just my luck I’ve broken in on orgy night.
Then he belatedly heard what she’d said. It’s you. What did that mean? Some kind of hooker’s ploy to convince a client he was the stuff of her fantasies?
It followed that she didn’t know her client by sight. Maybe she thought he was the one who had booked her time.
With typical boldness, he decided to bluff. He could get out of this yet.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he agreed. “Have you been given the details of what’s expected?”
She nibbled at a corner of her mouth, unconsciously turning her red mouth into an exotic, inviting flower. Haroun’s blood was too quick to respond.
Mariel quietly folded the paper she held, hiding the photo. How on earth had he got in? Her brain rushed to fill the gap—had Michel given him a key? Had the photo been sent to identify him to Michel prior to a meeting? Did that mean Michel would be arriving here?
Did his question mean this man was assuming she was the contact he was due to meet? She forgot the outfit she was wearing, what she must look like to him.
“No. Um…I’m filling in at the last minute,” she stammered. “Michel—is sick. So if you don’t mind briefing me…”
Haroun breathed a quiet sigh. The fates were being kind to him tonight. So Verdun’s regular girl, Michelle, was ill, and the replacement needed briefing. Well, he certainly would enjoy briefing her, but the important thing was to get out of here before Verdun arrived.
“My car,” he said, looking at his watch so that she would understand he was a man in a hurry.
She felt a surge of sharp regret that the face she had fallen for belonged to a man connected to a villain like Michel Verdun. Then her spy’s practical brain took over. She wondered whether he bought secrets, or sold them. She might, with luck, pick up something interesting from him, and that would be the last of her usefulness to her cousin Hal. Because her work at Michel Verdun et Associés was finished as of tonight.
“All right, I—I’ll just get my bag.” She whirled to run lightly to her desk, as eager to get out of here as the stranger could want. She picked up the items she had tossed on her desk, dumped them back in the drawer.
It took only a second, time which Haroun passed in contemplation of the sloping hips, the firm bare thighs. “Let’s go,” she said, kicking the drawer shut. She had just picked up her bag when she noticed that the secret office door was hanging open. She ran lightly back across the room.
As she reached it, there was the sound of a key in the main door.
Mariel froze, her eyes flying to the stranger. In amazement she saw that he was running silently towards her. He was much bigger than she. He scooped her up in one arm and shoved her through the doorway into the secret office ahead of him. One hand clamping over her mouth, he pushed the door almost shut.
They were in darkness, the only light in the room the glow from the two horrible screen savers flickering on the computers.
His hand tightened over her mouth as the sound of the outer office door opening reached them. “If you make a sound I will strangle you,” the stranger whispered in her ear. Mariel shook her head, her eyes wide, speechlessly promising to be silent, and slowly his hand slipped down to her throat, where it rested in light warning.
A crack of illumination told her that whoever had entered the outer office had put the main light on. It had to be Michel.
Her only hope now was not to be discovered. And clearly Adonis here felt the same. But who was he, then? If he was afraid of Michel, Michel clearly hadn’t given him a key. So how had he got in? And why?
He stood beside her, his body hard, watching through the tiny crack of the door. She could smell the musky scent of him, feel the firm muscles of his arm, his thigh, his chest, as he held her.
“The alarm’s been coded,” she heard a mutter from the outer office. Michel’s voice. Who was he with? She turned in the stranger’s hold and tried to see out the crack. One finger slipped up to her lips in warning.
Probably it was the danger that transmogrified that light brushing of his finger over her mouth into the most erotic thing she had ever experienced. Mariel’s blood raced so that she felt faint. Her body seemed to melt with yearning for the hard curves of the stranger’s body.
His voice rasped in her ear again. “There is your client,” he whispered.
Michel was just coming into her line of vision, moving towards the back corner of the outer office. He hadn’t noticed that the secret office door was ajar, but he would.
“You can go out to him.”
He probably planned to take off in her wake, but the last thing Mariel could do now was walk out and greet Michel. “No,” she whispered desperately, just as another man came into view, his eyes dangerous and wary. “No.”
“No?” The stranger’s gaze narrowed, raking her face in the thread of light in a new assessment.
The second man had a gun. A small, square automatic. Mariel felt as if her eyes were glued to the neat silver barrel in his hand. Beside her, the dark man went still.
“Let them go past. Run for the door. I will follow,” he whispered briefly, and waited only for her answering nod before pushing her to one side.
The armed man was just turning, Michel was facing in the other direction. It was now or never, and as the stranger whipped the door open and launched a kick at the gunman’s elbow, Mariel tore out the doorway behind him and headed for the main entrance.
She heard the kick connect, a shout, and the sounds of struggle. Michel cried out in surprise. Mariel didn’t waste a moment looking back. She wrenched open the door and dashed down the hall.
Behind her there were more shouts, and pounding footsteps. She hit the button summoning the elevators as she ran by, but carried straight on past, heading for the door to the stairwell she had entered by.
She burst through it, then turned to look out. The stranger was pounding down the hall after her, giving her a chance to appreciate his athletic perfection. She opened the door further.
“Ici!” she hissed, and a second later he came bursting through to the small concrete landing. She was already halfway up the steps. “En haut!” she whispered and, not waiting to see how he responded, turned and ran harder than she had ever run in her life.
He was behind and gaining on her. They were halfway up the next flight when they heard someone crash through the door below. They froze, and listened as the others went thundering down the steps to the lower floors.
Mariel breathed a prayer of gratitude, then crept up the last steps and through the door into the fourth-floor hallway. The stranger understood that she was running to a known goal, and wasted no time on questions. She led him to the door marked Toilettes, in and past the basins, and into the last cubicle in the row.
She was up on the windowsill while Haroun was still half wondering if she had led him into a trap after all. But with a flash of thighs she leapt through the window, and he was quick to follow.
“Close it,” she hissed. “And go carefully, this thing is not very safe. Stay a few feet behind me and keep as close as you can to the wall, or it may come down.”
He slid the window down and after giving her a head start followed her along the tottery fire escape, wondering if it would hold his weight. Ahead of him she turned and went down one flight, then paused. To his amazement, though nothing amazed him anymore, she hoisted herself up onto a windowsill.
He caught up with her. “Let us get down to the ground,” he hissed.
“It doesn’t lead anywhere—it’s been destroyed lower down,” she said, swinging her entrancingly naked legs over the sill. He hesitated for a moment. Suppose he had walked into an elaborate setup?
But now he could see that she had told him the truth—the fire escape simply stopped two flights up from the ground. No way to leap that without serious damage.
She had disappeared through the window. Haroun shrugged and, with a murmured “La howlah wa la quwwata illa billah,” followed her into the unknown.
And found himself in a hotel bedroom lighted only by a night-light. She was standing by the bed. A red velour bedspread covered it. She was tossing two red velour pillows onto the floor as he entered. He watched as she tore the bedspread down to the foot of the bed, dragged back the sheets.
Her black leather skirt was slit up both sides, and revealed black lace covering a neatly rounded rump as she bent and twisted, intent on her work.
He could appreciate such insouciant dedication to business, and only regretted that he could not share it. He wanted to get the hell out of here.
But he couldn’t help smiling. He crossed towards the outer door as she straightened. “I wish I could stay,” he murmured, “but unfortunately…”
“Shhh!” she commanded. She now had the bed looking completely ruined, and pushed him out of her way as she crossed to the window. She dragged it shut and turned the little locking mechanism, then drew the curtains.
“Right,” she said. “Now, look—Henri will think you’re my client.”
“Henri?”
“Downstairs, on the desk,” she supplied impatiently. “Can you—” She looked at him, taking in his clothes fully for the first time. “My God, you look like a cat burglar!” she exclaimed.
He was dressed entirely in snug-fitting black that outlined his body almost as closely as Lycra. Mariel blinked at the muscled chest, the powerful thighs, the firm biceps….
He cocked one eyebrow. “I am a cat burglar,” he said dryly.
“I have to go down the front way, and there’s no time to show you the service entrance. You’ll just have to come out with me. Henri will think you are my client who doesn’t want to be recognized, so he won’t be surprised if you go straight out the door.”
“And then what?”
“My car is in the next street. Can I drop you, or shall we go our separate ways?”
She was so cool! Haroun reached to touch her chin, and laughed with pure admiration. “I don’t think I can leave you,” he said. “Let us change our minds and at least make use of the bed before we part.”
His words made her lips twitch into an involuntary smile. It was quite true that sex was in the air between them. How could it not be, when danger had chased so closely at their heels? For those who are truly alive, their bodies and spirits cried, a near escape from death is best celebrated through sex.
Mariel could almost have given in, too. He was so handsome, and when he was laughing he was pretty well irresistible. And she had fallen half in love just with his photo. But—
“You are ridiculous,” she said sternly, though she knew he wasn’t serious. “Anyway, we’ve been incredibly lucky so far and our luck would be sure to turn if we abused it like that.”
He was eyeing her with a grin that melted her. “I certainly don’t want the luck I’ve been having tonight to change. If we make love now, it will abandon me? You are sure of it? I think it could only improve. And perhaps it would even be wise to wait here until the search is given up.”
“No, let’s get out of here,” Mariel said, ignoring most of the speech. “We can’t be sure Michel doesn’t know about that fire escape.”
He was aware of a reluctance to leave her. He justified this with the conviction that she might be able to tell him something about Verdun that he didn’t know.
“All right. We head for your car. Where is it, exactly? What make and colour?”
She told him in an undervoice as she opened the door and led him out into the hall. He went down the stairs lightly at her side, his lithe black shape melting in and out of the shadows. She could believe he was a cat burglar, but what had he wanted from Michel? Was it possible he was stealing secrets from Michel and selling them?
Henri was too savvy to take any formal notice of the sudden appearance of Emma’s “client,” and Mariel only threw him a smile and a twinkling wave before following the stranger out into the street.
Her car was two streets away, and there was plenty of pedestrian traffic under the neon signs. Mariel walked quickly, her high-heeled boots clicking on the pavement with little erotic snaps. She resisted the impulse to look over her shoulder to be sure the stranger was following, and instead tried to concentrate on looking like a woman on the job. She slipped her fingers into the little slash pockets of her micromini and let her hips swing in invitation. She kept wanting to laugh, and she couldn’t tell whether it was the effect danger had on her, or the stranger.
At the corner she turned to cross the street and risked a glance back. Two women were offering their wares to him, jointly and severally, and they didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer. Her smile died as a totally unfamiliar jealous rage swept through her.
She had whirled instinctively, ready to charge back towards the cosy little group, almost before she realized it. Then she took a deep, surprised breath. She had never been jealous before, and here she was, furiously proprietal about a man whose photograph she had first seen less than an hour ago! Was she going crazy?
Maybe it was just the effect of the danger. Danger heightened the emotions, she had always heard that. But still she stood glaring down the street as he smiled his regrets and passed the hungry hookers by. One of them glanced up and saw Mariel staring, saw that the man was following her, and started screaming at her in very pungent street French.
“Get off my beat, putain!”
“Va-t’en, vache!” Mariel called back, partly for the hell of it, and partly to stay in character in case anyone was watching.
Perhaps a little too much in character. The two hookers erupted with fury at her show of defiance and took after her. Fortunately the light had changed. Mariel ran across the busy street, followed by the cat burglar, who was followed by the two enraged women.
People in cars began to honk encouragement as the drama unfolded in front of them. And on the opposite side of the street, a block behind, she saw Michel’s gunman turn the corner, take one look in their direction, and instantly join the chase.
Maybe she should have sacrificed a little of the character of her part, Mariel reflected. No one ever ran the four-minute mile in three-inch stilettos, she was pretty sure of that.
The cat burglar caught up with her, grabbed her arm and kept running. This caused the hookers to scream like wounded banshees, but a glance showed her they at least were losing interest in the chase. Maybe she had crossed the frontier of their territory now.
The man with the gun, which he was now obviously holding in the pocket of his sweats, wasn’t losing interest. He was pounding along, barely a block behind.
Fortunately, her car was around the next corner. Breathless, Mariel could only point wildly to the right as they approached the next street. The cat burglar understood and, keeping his grip on her arm, half dragged her into the turn.
Her car was halfway along the narrow, dark street. Mariel reached for her backpack, then gave vent to a breathless screech.
“What?” said the stranger.
“My bag!” she panted. “I left—my bag—no—no—keys!”
“Where?”
“In the—office,” Mariel croaked.
Luck, she had called it? Where was the luck in escaping if Michel knew who had been there?
Three
They had slowed their steps, but now they heard the sounds of running footsteps behind them, and the stranger grabbed her arm again and set off across the street at an angle. She just saw the shadow of the mouth of the alley before they were in it.
It was pitch-dark, and their entry was the trigger for some frantic scuffling near some piles of refuse. Mariel hoped it wasn’t rats.
The cat burglar seemed to have eyes as good as his namesake, because he led her safely through the alley past all impediments before her own eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. When they got to the other end a glance behind showed them the gunman framed at the entrance. A moment later they heard clanging and cursing, so his eyes weren’t as good as the stranger’s, either.
They crossed another narrow street and plunged into another laneway. They were in a very old part of the city, the walls all worn, dark brick, the streets twisting and narrow. But the other, though he wasn’t gaining, managed to stick on their tail.
Mariel was panting heavily when the stranger dragged her into another narrow opening. Now she could hear a pounding like thunder. The drum of doom, she thought a moment later. Because this time the lane led into a cramped courtyard, and there was no other exit.
“Oh my God!” Mariel panted. “Is there a fire esc—”
A sound from the stranger silenced her. He was staring around in the darkness, and now pressed his finger lightly to her lips. “This way,” he whispered in her ear.
It was only then that she saw the little group of teenage boys clustered around a doorway, deep in shadow, murmuring amongst themselves. The stranger’s confident hand clasped her wrist and drew her in that direction. Before Mariel had time to wonder, the door opened a crack, pushed from the inside, and music came pounding out.
The cat burglar leapt the last couple of feet and grabbed the door as the kids, glancing nervously at him, slipped through one by one. Mariel entered in their wake as the stranger held the door and prevented its closing. He followed her inside.
The music was loud and raucous, and that was nothing compared to the crowd. Mariel forgot all her troubles for a moment of wonder. Compared to what the women in here were wearing, her own outfit was a model of respectability. She had never seen so much big hair in her life, and the fingernails were longer than the skirts. And as for the eyes! Spiders were nothing to these women—most of them seemed to have tame lemurs on their lashes.
One or two of them were eyeing the stranger’s snug black get-up with extremely frank approval. “Chéri!” said one, her popping eyes rivetted to his groin.
“He’s a cat burglar!” Mariel told her waspishly. Since in French the phrase for cat burglar was mount-in-the-air, she received some wide-eyed looks of envy and approval.
“I believe you! Comme elle a de la chance!” a big, dark-eyed blonde cried, one wrist to her forehead in an excess of sensibility, faking a faint. “My dears!”
Mariel was starting to smell a rat.
But it was only when a clone from The Wild Ones, Marlon Brando from the black biker’s cap down to the chain boots, groped her own butt, crying, “My God, you are so subtle! I love subtlety!” that the penny finally dropped.
“Thank you!” she muttered, as the cat burglar grabbed her hand again and started beating a path to the entrance door across the room.
“What are you drinking?” Brando shouted over the din.
“Scotch?” Mariel called hopefully, because she sure could use a drink.
Brando looked delighted. “I’ll be right back! Wait for me! Don’t disappear!”
She smiled helplessly at him as the stranger, still ruthlessly grasping her wrist, dragged her through the crush of dancing, gyrating male bodies.
“I’m pooped! Can’t we stop for a quick drink?” she pleaded, as they arrived at the edge of the crowd a few feet from the door.
A large and burly bouncer was evicting the three blue-jeaned kids who had entered through the back door with them. “We only wanted to watch!” one was protesting.
The stranger stared at her disbelievingly. “A drink?”
“Marlon Brando over there offered me a scotch. I sure could use something. And let’s face it, the way we’re dressed, Michel would never find us in here.”
He grabbed her wrist again without answering and set off. The bouncer watched incuriously as they ran out past him and up the steps of the areaway. They emerged on a broad boulevard with plenty of traffic, where a taxi screeched to a stop almost before the stranger lifted his hand.
They scrambled in, and Mariel fell back against the upholstery, half panting, half laughing. It was only as she heard the stranger murmur “Le Charlemagne” that she realized she had missed the moment for separating. They ought to have said goodbye and each taken a separate cab.
“Is that your address?” she asked.
“But of course,” he said, so blandly she didn’t know whether to believe him.
“I think we should separate now,” she said, though her heart wasn’t in it. As the lights of Paris flickered past, light and shadow falling over their faces in a strange tempo, she gazed into his face and felt suddenly that she was in a dream. A dream she had dreamt a thousand times before without ever quite remembering.
“Separate?” he repeated, in soft protest. “Ah, no, ma petite, I cannot be separated from you yet.” He bent over her, where she lay slouched down against the cushions, his face close. Her pulse hammered a protest. She lifted a hand to his chest, whether to hold him off or draw him closer, even she didn’t know. His lips moved closer.
“Stay with me tonight,” he murmured.
This was the handsomest man in the world talking to her. Mariel’s heart did a shaky back flip. Lust struggled with common sense, which reminded her that she didn’t even know his name. And that he might well be in the enemy camp. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, her heart protested, but common sense told her she couldn’t be certain that he was Michel’s enemy.
“I think I should get out,” she murmured, half to herself. “Driver—” she called, but the stranger put his fingers to her lips to silence her.
“Where will you go?”
“Home, of course.”
He shook his head. “Without your handbag? Where are your keys?”
“The landlady will let me in, and I have a spare key hidden.”
“What besides your keys was in the bag?”
She was trying to remember where she had left the bag. She ran over those moments in the office—she had been picking up her bag when she noticed the open door of the secret office. And she had gone to close the office door. Had she left the bag on her desk, or taken it with her and dropped it in her scuffle with the stranger?
If she had left it on her desk there was just a faint possibility that Michel might think she had left her bag behind when she left for the night. If she had dropped it in his secret office…
She shook her head. “Just what you’d imagine. My credit cards, money…address book, phone numbers—everything.”
What a fool. And all because she had fallen for a face in a photograph. If she hadn’t had complete brain collapse and decided to print that photograph, none of it would have happened. She would probably have been out of the office before the man even arrived.
Haroun watched her. He was aware of too many contradictions. Why was Michel Verdun chasing a lady of the night with an armed man in tow? What had she been doing in his office if she wasn’t there at his invitation?
“And what of this man? When he finds your handbag with your address—will he make you a visit?”
Mariel shivered. Not before she had gathered her belongings and disappeared, she hoped. She had money in the flat. She would take her things to a hotel and phone Hal for instructions.
He noted the shiver. “What were you doing there?” he demanded.
She looked up at him through ridiculously long lashes, her eyes wary, challenging, but still somehow seductive and, as he expected, parried. “What were you?”
He laughed and lifted a hand, palm facing her, in a sign of surrender. “Eh bien, d’accord!” he said. “We ask no personal questions. Do you think the gun was for me or for you?”
He was looking at her with a devil-may-care glint in his eyes and tilt to his lips that made her heart kick again. She pressed her own lips together and lowered her head.
“I don’t know. You can’t have tripped the alarm, because I turned it off. Maybe he’s had something new installed I don’t know about.”
His eyebrow went up. “You are familiar with his operation?”
“No personal questions, remember?”
“When you saw me, you said, It’s you. And then, Michelle is sick, so if you don’t mind briefing me—”
He looked at her enquiringly, but she only shook her head. He frowned in thought. “Michel!” he exclaimed, looking enlightened. “Ah! I imagined Michelle was a girl you replaced, but you meant—Verdun himself. You thought I was there to meet Verdun, you were playing for time, is that right?”
She pressed her lips together and looked at him. Everything about him seemed to have a glow. His dark eyes, his waving hair, his warm skin. His whole being.
When she made no answer he went on thinking aloud. “And yet you were there to…”
He paused invitingly. They were driving further away from her own arrondissement as they talked. She came out of a kind of daze to realize she was still half lying against the upholstery and he was still bent over her in intimate closeness. Mariel pushed the stranger aside and sat up with a small tug of regret for the loss of the sensual little cocoon she had been inhabiting.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Would you mind paying…?”
“No emergency funds tucked into the top of your stocking?” he asked with a teasing smile, his finger tracing designs on her knee as she pretended not to be affected by the chills charging through her blood and reproved him with a look. “But no—no stockings at all.”
“I’ve got to go home,” she repeated. She leaned forward and murmured the name of a landmark near her apartment, and the driver pulled into a turn with an easy shrug.
It would be safe enough as long as she didn’t let the stranger know her exact address, and she wouldn’t be there past tonight anyway. The stranger wasn’t a man who would feel the loss of fifty francs, not if he was calling Le Charlemagne home.
“And are we never to see each other again?” he continued, in a tone that wrenched at her heart.
Of course he didn’t mean it. And neither did she—it had been just a crazy moment when she thought she had fallen in love with the photograph.
The photograph! Mariel bit her lip. She hadn’t thought about that….
“What is it?” he murmured, noting her sudden change of mood, the delicious way her white teeth caught her lower lip as she looked at him. “You have changed your mind? You will come with me?”
Should she warn the stranger about the fact that Michel had been sent his photograph? But she knew nothing about him or his motives, another part of her argued. She couldn’t tell him about the photo without exposing some part of her work. Suppose the stranger were actually in league with Michel, but double-crossing him? She now had to engage in damage limitation, and keep from Michel any clues as to who she was working for and how and what information she had been getting. She had to avoid anything that would confirm a suspicion that Hal Ward had got access to his top-secret computers.
For all she knew, the whole thing had been a setup. Maybe Michel had been clocking her visits for weeks. Maybe he had sent the stranger to pretend to be breaking in, too. Then followed it up with a raid, forcing her into the same camp as the stranger, making him an ally.
But still she felt guilty, not saying anything.
“Anyway,” she murmured aloud, “it’s all your fault I’m in this predicament.”
“C’est vrai,” the stranger replied, with a warm look. “So it is up to me to take care of you, no?”
And always that devil in his eyes, a look that made her shiver with delight. In a life with him you’d always be laughing, her heart suggested.
“I don’t think it works that way,” she said mildly.
“Si,” he contradicted her. “Tu verras.”
And she did see, sooner than either of them could have expected. On his way to the landmark she had named, the taxi driver took the usual route along the street where she lived, and as they passed the small, charming nineteenth-century building with blue shutters and blue wrought iron, she saw a car parked right in front of it. She sat up with a jerk, staring across the stranger’s relaxed body out the window. Michel’s car, she saw, as they drew close enough to read the plate.
A man sat at the wheel, smoking. He glanced over into the taxi just as the streetlight illumined the interior.
“Dieu!” Mariel murmured, and to recover from her unprofessional behaviour—she should never have stared out the window like that—tilted her head as if to kiss the stranger.
His arms instantly encircled her and he looked delighted. “Ah, you have had a change of heart, ma petite,” he observed, his lips close and parting hungrily.
“That’s one of Michel’s operatives in that parked car back there,” she whispered, her mouth barely an inch from his. With extreme reluctance, since she liked being right where she was, she lifted her head to peer through the back window.
“Is he following us?” the stranger asked from beneath her, amusement still threading his voice. His closeness tickled her throat and made her yearn.
The car stayed where it was. “No,” she murmured. “Do you think someone is right in my fl—?” she began, then gasped as, one hand on her back, the other on her head, the stranger pulled her down.
Suddenly he was kissing her, with an expertise that exploded into sugared sweetness all through her body. Sensation seemed to arise from nowhere to engulf her, drowning her so that she could not resist.
There had never been a kiss like it since the beginning of the world, Mariel thought dreamily, letting herself sink down against him. She thrilled as his arms tightened possessively around her, his kiss becoming hungrier, more demanding.
Her hands went to his face, her fingers slipping around his neck, as all her blood sang with delight. It was the kiss she had dreamed of, a kiss to die for, her fogged brain murmured, her body promised. It was the cake she could both have and eat.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of kiss.
“Et maintenant, mes enfants, où irions-nous? La Tour d’Eiffel?”
They surfaced to discover themselves in front of the monument Mariel had named, the driver calmly slipping a Gauloises between his lips as he tolerantly watched them over the seat back. The meter was still ticking.
The stranger smiled, touched her lips with a tender finger, and murmured, “Verdun’s car was parked at your address?”
She nodded.
“Well, then, you can’t return there, it is too dangerous. You must trust yourself to me now.”
Since for the moment she really could see no other option, Mariel was silent. The stranger lifted his head. “Le Charlemagne, s’il vous plait,” he said again.
With an expressively Gallic shrug, the driver lifted a cheap plastic lighter to his cigarette, flicked it to flame, drew deep, tossed it down onto the seat beside him, put the car in gear, and set it rolling.
“You really live in Le Charlemagne?” she asked, even more curious now about his reasons for breaking in to Michel’s office.
The stranger misunderstood. “Yes. There is little reason for Verdun to know my face, even if he saw me long enough for recognition, which I am sure he did not. The office was, in any case, nearly dark. So I think we will be safe enough there.”
The thought of the print of the photograph she had dropped somewhere surfaced in her mind. She wondered what Michel would make of it. It was proof that someone had broken in to his computers, but he must be wondering why anyone would have taken a hard copy.
“In spite of our no-questions policy it may be that the time has come for us to move on a step in intimacy,” the stranger remarked, interrupting her train of thought. “What is your name?”
She hesitated. “Emma. What’s yours?”
“Emma,” he repeated. “A charming name. And I am called…Fred.”
Four
Le Charlemagne was the name of a world-famous Rue de Rivoli shopping complex with fabulous shops on two levels. Above were seven floors of exclusive apartments. Overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries and the Seine, it was one of Paris’s very exclusive addresses.
The concierge watched with benign interest as the pair strode along the concourse towards the bank of private lifts. The lift Fred led her to gave access to the garage, main, mezzanine and ninth floors only. He used a plastic key, and when they arrived at the top they stepped into a vestibule where a guard sat in front of a small bank of TV screens. Behind him was the open door of a small kitchenette.
Mariel’s skin bumped with nerves as Fred greeted the man in Arabic, and she wondered if she had been wise to jump out of the frying pan with the stranger. He led her to the big double doors into the main apartment, while the guard’s gaze followed them with a mixture of heavy disapproval and sexual curiosity marking his face.
Catching his eye, Mariel winked at him. The man blushed and dropped his eyes. Fred, noticing his reaction, looked from the guard to Mariel with a deadly little glint in his eyes that promised to make her pay for that one, and she couldn’t stop the little expectant shiver that coursed over her skin in response.
Then they stepped across the threshold into a large, luxurious, oak-floored room, glowing with soft light, drapes open to expose a wall of glass that gave onto a wide terrace and a view of the lights along the Seine. The furnishings were in leather and a variety of rich and exotic woods polished to a gleam.
The predominant feeling was comfort. Mariel heaved a sigh and rubbed the back of her neck as some of the tension of the past couple of hours left her.
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ALEXANDRA SELLERS
Sheikh Haroun al Muntazir was honor-bound to recover a priceless family jewel…but what was lovely operative Mariel de Vouvray's mission? Until her motives were made plain, he had to keep her close - yet at a distance. But with one stolen kiss Haroun's resistance turned to air. Was Mariel's melting surrender a trap of ultimate danger…or a precious haven offered by his future beloved wife?
He Was Absolutely Devastating, Wearing Rich Black Silk That Made Him Look Like A Sultan.
Never in her life had Mariel lost her heart so thoroughly to a total stranger—or to anyone! But it would be insanity to think anything could come of it—she was a spy and he was…? She had better find a way to get her heart back.
The dark stranger slipped up silently behind her, not touching her, his hands gripping the railing on either side of her own. She felt his body warm the luscious silk she was wearing till it was a kiss on her skin, and pressed her lips together, praying for the strength to resist.
She knew nothing about him. The sooner she got away from him the better.
She would stay here tonight, but that didn’t mean she was spending the night in his bed. And yet, if he made a real move, if he tried to make love to her—she knew she would find it impossible to resist….
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the world of Silhouette Desire, where you can indulge yourself every month with romances that can only be described as passionate, powerful and provocative!
Silhouette’s beloved author Annette Broadrick returns to Desire with a MAN OF THE MONTH who is Hard To Forget. Love rings true when former high school sweethearts reunite while both are on separate undercover missions to their hometown. Bestselling writer Cait London offers you A Loving Man, when a big-city businessman meets a country girl and learns the true meaning of love.
The Desire theme promotion THE BABY BANK, about sperm-bank client heroines who find love unexpectedly, returns with Amy J. Fetzer’s Having His Child, part of her WIFE, INC. miniseries. The tantalizing Desire miniseries THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS: THE LOST HEIRS continues with Baby of Fortune by Shirley Rogers. In Undercover Sultan, the second book of Alexandra Sellers’s SONS OF THE DESERT: THE SULTANS trilogy, a handsome prince is forced to go on the run with a sexy mystery woman—who may be the enemy. And Ashley Summers writes of a Texas tycoon who comes home to find a beautiful stranger living in his mansion in Beauty in His Bedroom.
This month see inside for details about our exciting new contest “Silhouette Makes You a Star.” You’ll feel like a star when you delve into all six fantasies created in Desire books this August!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Undercover Sultan
Alexandra Sellers
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.
Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.
What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.
Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, England.
to
Steve Aylott and Colin Moult
and to
Brian, Mark, Steve, Bob and Craig
who, during the writing of this trilogy,
redecorated the house around me.
Ah, Love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire?
—Edward FitzGerald
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Prologue
“They have the Rose.”
The line was silent as Ash absorbed it. “How?” he asked.
“They got there before me,” Haroun said. “Two men. One said, ‘We’ve come for the Rose.’ She had no reason to challenge them. As she said, they looked the part.”
“What does that mean?”
“Swarthy, apparently. He walked in and she said she led him to the coffee table, where Rosalind had told her it was. He glanced at the ornaments and picked it out without much hesitation. So he knew what he was after.”
Ash muttered a curse. “Did you get a description? Apart from all-purpose Arab?”
“Not of him. His companion has a scar high on his right cheekbone. Pulls the eyelid down a bit,” Haroun said. “Now, does that sound familiar, Ash?”
“Half the veterans of the Kaljuk war have some kind of facial scar,” Ash said. “Where does that get you?”
“Well, it reminds me of someone, and it’ll come to me.”
“Let me know when it does.”
“What have your hackers found in Verdun’s computers?”
Ash grunted. “What they’ve found is the best firewall in three continents. We can’t get in.”
Haroun paused, thinking it over. “Well, we’ve got to know how he learned about the Rose so fast. I’d better get over to Paris and see what a direct assault will achieve.”
Ash hesitated. “There’s an air traffic strike brewing in France.”
“I’d take the train anyway. Faster.”
“Your predilection for faster is just what worries me. You’re too headstrong for this stuff, Harry. I don’t want you trying to break in to Verdun’s offices. A guy with that kind of firewall on his computers is going to have good protection on the physical plant, too. Go to work on one of his employees.”
Harry was shaking his head before Ash was halfway through this speech, and maybe it was fortunate Ash couldn’t see him. “That will take too long. We’ve got to risk something more direct.”
Ash groaned. “We can’t afford to risk something more direct. Michel Verdun is in it with Ghasib up to his neck. I don’t want him cornered.”
Harry said reasonably, “Ash, you’ve held me off from this for too long. We have to find out how much Verdun knows and how he is getting the information.”
“Not to the point of risking your life.”
“Why not? Your life is going to be at much greater risk in a couple of weeks,” Haroun pointed out.
“All the more reason to keep you safe.”
“Ash, we’re agreed we need to get the Rose back. At the very least we have to prevent Verdun’s agents from delivering it to Ghasib. We can’t afford to trust anyone with this. I’m on the scene. Who better than me?”
Ash hesitated, marshalling his arguments, and Haroun rushed on, “Anyway, it’s my fault we lost the Rose. If I’d been there an hour earlier it would be in my hands, not Verdun’s. So I’ve got a slightly larger interest here. Sorry, but you can’t stop me. It’s a question of pride. You asked me to get the Rose, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
He hung up while Ash was still cursing.
One
The young woman, small but shapely, her lips a rich red, her wild red-gold mane held up at one side with a jewelled comb, earrings dangly, skirt micro-short, ran lightly up the steps and into the dim lighting of the hotel foyer. She was short and very slender, with a long waist and low, curvy hips. Her dark stiletto-heel suede boots were above the knee, her neatly muscled stomach bare between the hip-hugging leather skirt and the white bolero top, revealing a neat gold ring in her navel. A delicate butterfly tattoo quivered on her stomach. A smart leather backpack was slung over one shoulder.
The concierge smiled involuntarily as he watched her. Many of the girls who used his hotel were beautiful, mostly actresses and students supplementing their incomes. This one, who called herself Emma—of course not her real name, he understood that—was not the most beautiful among them, but she had a certain something. It always cheered up his Friday night to see her.
“Bonsoir, ma petite,” he called. “Ça va?”
“Bonsoir, Henri,” she returned with a smile, crossing to where he held up the key for her. She was the one he could not place. With the others he could usually make a guess at their daytime occupation, but Emma was an unknown.
She was unusual in other ways, too. Always the same room. Always the same client. Only Friday night. Every Friday night.
Emma was not a regular in the usual sense of the word, but on Friday nights she was here at eleven, whatever the weather. Henri always saved the same room for her for two hours, and on the rare Friday night that she did not turn up, she paid him the following week.
She had arranged it this way to protect her client, who arrived separately and came in by the service entrance. Henri had never seen him. Emma had not said so, but Henri could guess that the man was a known figure—a foreigner, of course, since what Frenchman would have worried about such an arrangement becoming public? The président’s own mistress and illegitimate daughter had attended his public funeral alongside his wife, as was only natural. But foreigners were odd about practical sexual matters, there was no denying.
Henri had found himself agreeing that of course the man could come in the back way, although it wasn’t usual. Henri liked to vet the girls’ customers, so that if there was any trouble he could be as helpful as possible with the police. He ran a decent place and kept in well with the flics. His pride was that he took no money from the girls. He charged their clients for the room. The arrangement between the girls and their clients was their own business. He was an hôtelier, not a souteneur.
But Emma paid for the room herself. Now she slipped the money onto the counter and took the key, smiling that smile, and he thought it a pity that she spoiled the line of her own luscious mouth by painting it larger. Her mouth was generous enough, and he had often thought of telling her so. But she wasn’t like the other girls. She was warm, friendly, she never got above herself, but she was not confiding. He had never quite had the courage to give her the kind of avuncular advice he offered to some.
As usual, she ignored the elevator and went lightly up the wide marble stairs, and Henri watched with an absent smile till the flashing, slim brown thighs were out of sight.
Mariel put the key in the lock and slipped into the silence of room 302. A small night-light was burning. In the shadows the air of faded elegance that marked the hotel was a little softened; you could almost imagine yourself back in time. Before the war this had been a solid, respectable establishment. Then the Germans had used it as a military headquarters, and after the war it had never quite recovered its former status. It had been in steady decline ever since, but the furniture and hangings had been of good quality once, and although badly worn, still bore testament to the old respectability.
With the quickness of familiarity, Mariel locked the door behind her in the semi-darkness, leaving the key in the lock, and crossed to the window. She dragged back the curtains and slipped the bolt that secured the large sash window. When she pulled up the window, the night air blew in, the indefinable perfume that was Paris. She heaved a breath, slipped her other arm through the strap of her small backpack, sat down on the windowsill and neatly swung her legs over the edge. Then she jumped.
She landed almost silently on her toes on the ancient, slightly wobbly iron fire escape a few inches down and stood while her eyes acclimatized to night. Overhead only the stars gave any light. Below, one or two windows illumined the small, narrow courtyard.
After a moment, keeping close to the wall, she started up the steps. The courtyard, if it could be called that, was completely surrounded by the brick walls of buildings that abutted each other. The hotel was four stories high. One flight up, the fire escape, last remnant of something that had once honeycombed the space, made a right turn and ran along the wall of the adjacent building for a dozen yards. Mariel kept close to the wall all the way. At the far end it stopped against the back wall of a third building, which sat parallel to the hotel on the next street over. Here there was another window, open just a chink at the bottom. Mariel slipped expert fingers into the chink, pushed the window open, leapt up, swung her legs through. Her feet reached for the toilet seat in the darkness.
A moment later she tiptoed past the row of porcelain sinks and slowly opened the door onto the corridor. Behind her head the word Toilettes was marked in chunky italic brass letters on the grey door. Mariel glanced to right and left as she stepped through, and although the turn of her head seemed casual, her gaze and her body were alert.
The dimly lighted hallway was empty. It probably dated from the same era, but the decor of this building was very different from that of the hotel she had just left. Here there had been extensive updating—sunken lighting in the lowered ceilings, the walls neatly painted in grey, grey carpeting on the floor, and brass plates or letters announcing the names of the various companies behind the doors that lined the corridor.
Mariel went lightly and quickly to a door leading to the stairs, down two flights, and out into another identical hallway. Only the names in brass were different.
Shrugging out of her backpack, she pulled out some keys as she strode down the hall towards a door with a brass plate reading Michel Verdun et Associés, and sent up a little prayer. She didn’t start breathing again until she was inside in the darkness with the door closed, and the alarm code had worked.
She had been doing this every Friday night for weeks now. Sooner or later she was going to get caught. One day, she supposed, she might even walk in on Michel himself. She was sure he was often here at night.
If she did walk in on him, she had a story ready: she had been out for the evening, had lost her apartment keys and had come to the office because she kept a spare set in her desk.
Michel might be suspicious, but she hoped that he would be distracted by the signs that his employee led a double life, computer whiz kid by day, working girl by night. And that his confusion would buy her some time and the chance to get away. Afterwards, of course, she could not risk showing up for work again. Her usefulness as a spy would be over from that moment. But with luck Michel would never discover, among the many people he was cheating, exactly whom she had been spying for.
But tonight the office was dark. Mariel made her way aided by the light filtering in the long row of windows from the street, and the glow from half a dozen computer screens. At her own desk she tossed her bag down. First she opened the bottom drawer and pulled a few items out at random, setting them on the desk. This was set decoration. If Michel happened to come in, she hoped it would look as if she had been searching for her key.
Then she slipped into the chair and grabbed her computer mouse with one hand. The screen saver was a shot of moving clouds and sea, and was another thread in the fabricated character of Michel Verdun’s wuss of an employee. Mariel’s screen saver of choice would have been something closer to the wild starbursts on the desk next to hers—or perhaps a series of morphing faces. She liked colour and wackiness and excitement.
The serene sky dissolved, and her desktop appeared.
For a few moments Mariel typed and clicked until the window she wanted appeared. Then she grabbed up a pen and, on a bright pink Post-it note, copied the short list of letters and numbers that appeared. She carefully double-checked them, then deleted the file and exited. After a few moments the desktop would dissolve and her screen saver would reappear, leaving no evidence that she had touched the computer.
Mariel pulled a zip disk from a drawer, stood and, armed with the little pink square of paper, moved through the shadows and paused before an internal door.
Noting the first figure she had scribbled down, she keyed the code into the security keypad. She waited till she heard the click, then opened the door and slipped inside, closing it firmly behind her before reaching for the light switch. It was just possible someone in a building opposite might phone the police if they saw lights.
A few feet away, two bright squares of light showed two identical images of a naked couple deriving a great deal of apparent mutual satisfaction from the close conjunction of their rather improbably endowed bodies. After a moment the fluorescent lights flickered and settled into a bright glow.
Against the wall were two computers on a long desk. Beside it were several tall black filing cabinets. These and a chair made up the entire contents of the room. These were Michel’s top secret, dedicated computers. The room was off limits to everyone save Michel himself.
Mariel crossed to one of the computers. She dragged the wheeled chair over and sank down, dropping the pink note beside the keyboard, reaching for the mouse. The pornographic movie loop disappeared as the desktop came up on one screen, but on the other the couple moved tirelessly through their paces.
It was Michel’s favourite screen saver. Mariel hardly saw it anymore. She knew Michel did it to annoy, and it was annoying if she thought about it. Under ordinary circumstances she would have taken a stand, but these were very far from ordinary circumstances. Michel was a man whose guard went down around women whom he was successfully sexually harassing, and it was no part of Mariel’s plan to figure in his mind as a woman to reckon with. Mariel the Mouse was her role.
The real Mariel de Vouvray would have mentioned twice that she found his screen saver offensive and then would probably have kicked the screen out of the monitor the third time to make her point. The Mariel Michel knew lowered her eyes and bit her lip whenever he summoned her to some discussion while the screen saver was on. Which was something he did to all the women staff—too regularly for chance.
But that was okay. If she did her job right, she would have all the revenge she could want on Michel Verdun. And Mariel intended to do her job right.
Mariel was a corporate spy. She had ostensibly been working for Michel Verdun et Associés for four months—but in fact she was working for her American cousin, Hal Ward, of Ward Energy Systems in California.
Hal was the inventor of the world’s most efficient fuel cell technology, but he hadn’t stopped there. His work now involved research and development into a variety of energy alternatives to fossil fuel and the combustion engine.
And someone was carefully and consistently stealing the results of that research and passing it on to foreign-based companies and governments. The pipeline for the stolen material had finally been tracked last year. Michel Verdun et Associés was a “détective privé”—detective agency—based in Paris, with links all over the Middle East and, most importantly, with the country of Bagestan. It was Bagestan, and Bagestan’s unpleasant dictator, Ghasib, who benefited most from the stolen industrial secrets.
Hal wanted the leak stopped. But Michel Verdun—as might be expected—had some of the best data protection software in the world on his computers. Hal had decided to put someone right inside Michel Verdun’s organization, not only to discover the source of the leak in his own corporation, but to unravel Michel Verdun’s entire operation, from leak to end user.
Mariel de Vouvray’s father was French, and a not too distant cousin of Hal’s father. Her mother was American, and the sister of Hal’s mother. Mariel had spent every summer in California almost since she was born, many of them on Hal’s family estate. She was fluently bilingual. She had taken her university degree in computer intelligence and then had gone to work full-time for Hal. She was a natural for this job.
It had been a relatively simple matter to get her into Michel’s organization. Through one of his friends in Silicon Valley, Hal had engineered the head hunting and abrupt departure of one of Michel’s key computer people. Mariel’s fluent English and glowing references from her mythical former job (courtesy of another good friend of Hal’s), added to her willingness to start immediately, had nailed her the post left vacant by the departure.
Since then, slowly and carefully, because time was not the most important factor, Mariel had wormed her way into the most secret parts of Verdun’s organization. She had placed “moles” into his computer programming so that her own computer was e-mailed a copy of all his new passwords and codes every week. She had reconnoitred the building and found the old disused fire escape, and the hotel.
Every Friday night before she left the building at the end of the day she went up to the fourth-floor toilets, unlocked the window and opened it a crack. Then she went home, changed into her disguise and returned as Emma.
And then she checked the computers in this room for data files that had arrived during the week and sent them on to Hal Ward’s own safe computer. Even if Michel did discover that he was being spied on, he would not find out where the information had gone.
Mot de passe? demanded the screen, and Mariel consulted the little paper and keyed in that week’s password. Then she summoned up the list of everything that had arrived during the past week. Michel routinely deleted the files as he dealt with them, but Mariel had installed a mole on the computer that saved all files to a second, hidden folder. Since she had been inside his firewall when she did it, the program remained undetected.
Michel had a finger in lots of pies, most of which were rotten. He had agents, moles and hackers everywhere, stealing data and sending it to these two computers anonymously. He then sold it to his many clients.
One of the things for which she most despised him was the work he did for a Swiss bank. Michel investigated the lives of the people who were fighting to get back the money that had been deposited before the Second World War by relatives who had afterwards died in German concentration camps. The bank was hoping to blackmail vulnerable people into dropping their claims. He did the same for a multinational pharmaceutical giant, investigating the backgrounds of anyone—politicians included—who challenged them.
That was Michel Verdun. Very, very choosy about his clients—he wouldn’t touch anyone who didn’t have money.
Mariel scanned the list of received data with practised skill. Michel’s system worked on a number code. Agents sent data signed with a code. In return he paid money into anonymous bank accounts. Anyone trying to sort out his little empire would have one hell of a time.
It hadn’t taken Mariel long to learn that one code prefix always related to Ghasib. Suffixes sometimes were also apparently assigned, but she hadn’t discovered yet whether a suffix related to a particular source or a particular job.
Of course Mariel’s priority was anything with a Ghasib prefix. Tonight there were nearly a dozen. It had been a busy week for the Ghasib spies. And most carried the same suffix number.
In the past few weeks there had been a new suffix used on more and more incoming Ghasib data, but since most were encrypted she had not been able to glean much.
She opened each file before sending it, and read it if possible. Then she downloaded it onto a zip disk and deleted it from the secret folder. When she had checked and downloaded all the new files she would take the zip disk to her own computer and send the files off to Hal.
She never sent anything out from the secret computers. Michel’s firewall was extremely efficient, and he had software monitoring all traffic from this machine.
Mariel lifted her head, listening for a moment. Nothing. Listening was an automatic response, making sure you didn’t get too deep in what you were doing. She checked the clock—11:38—then clicked on the next Ghasib-prefixed e-mail. A few lines of encryption gibberish met her eyes, and she instantly exited again and clicked it to download to the zip disk. The next few were the same.
The last file had only just arrived, so Michel hadn’t seen it yet. Mariel felt a curious presentiment as she clicked it open. Maybe it would be significant. Maybe this would be the break she needed.
Another encrypted message, with an attachment this time. Mariel bit her lip as she clicked on the attachment.
It was a photograph. The image slowly formed on the screen, and Mariel blinked and opened her eyes in dumb disbelief. It was no one she recognized, but it was the most gorgeous man she had ever clapped eyes on.
In her life.
Mariel sat gazing at the handsome masculine face while her brain circuits started misfiring, one by two by four, triggering off a chain of explosions that blew reason into the void. She knew about the reality of love at first sight. Coup de foudre, it was called in French. She believed it was possible.
But she had never heard before of anyone falling head over heels in love with a face in a photograph.
Two
Waving dark hair above a broad, wide forehead. Strong square eyebrows. Eyes dark with an intensity that seemed to burn her. A mouth tilted with devilment, passion in the beautifully shaped full lips, and a kind of wildness in the expression as a whole. Like looking into a storm.
Who was he? Mariel had a deep feeling of recognition, but was that real, or just the effect the face was having on her, as if she had known him in another lifetime, was destined to love him in this one?
She shook her head, trying to re-establish a sense of reality, and glanced at the computer clock again. She had lost her sense of time. Was it really only 11:48, or had the clock frozen along with her brain? She was suddenly frightened. How long had she sat here, staring at this not-quite-stranger’s face?
It was her job to download the file, she reminded herself, like a child who had forgotten the alphabet. But she could not bear to lose the face. Without any pause for rational thought, she dragged the cursor over Print. She clicked the mouse, heard the printer whirr into life, and then bit her lip with regret. This, she told herself, was the way spies crashed in flames—letting your guard down for one fatal second.
But it was too late now.
She downloaded the file to the disk, then deleted it from the secret folder. Michel would never know it had been opened.
Two minutes later she was still standing there, the zip disk in her hand, waiting as the printer ground back and forth over the page. The colour printer printed slowly, and it printed exceeding fine. What a fool she was! She ought to be getting out of here, but now she was rivetted, waiting. Printers were not her field. She was afraid of what might happen if she tried to abort the print. Would it spew the thing out the next time it was activated?
Usually when she had finished, Mariel locked this office before returning to her own desk to send the contents of her disk. But the printer was going to take forever. So to save time she went out to her computer and slipped the zip disk into the slot.
Michel had secret software on every computer in the place, which allowed him to recap every keystroke his employees typed. She was pretty sure Michel checked each of the firm’s computers in rotation every week, reading e-mails and the history of everyone’s cyber activity. If so, he never found any evidence of her Friday-night activities. Mariel simply disabled the program whenever she wanted an activity to go unrecorded. She did that now, then fired off the contents of the disk to Hal’s safe address, and deleted all record of the transaction before restoring the monitoring software.
She wiped the zip floppy, dropped it into a drawer, and went back to the private office. The printer had finally finished.
Mariel plucked the page from its tray, and again all thought left her head as her eyes fell on the image of that perfect, masculine face. What a devil-may-care smile, what eyes! Who was he?
So entranced was the spy that she did not hear the sounds of stealthy entry in the outer office. She heaved a sigh, flicked off the light, pulled open the door, and stepped through.
The man getting his bearings in the outer office was as surprised as she was. For a moment they were silent, gaping at each other.
“It’s you!” Mariel whispered, amazed, as the world reeled and rocked and all the landmarks she knew sank without trace.
The man standing halfway across the office in the gloom, looking much more dangerous in the flesh, was the man whose picture she had just taken from the printer.
Haroun al Muntazir frowned and cursed himself for a fool. Ash was right, he was too impetuous. To break in to the office when someone was in it was the work of an ignorant amateur.
But the woman in front of him was a mystery. The brassy red wig and the black leather micromini and boots might have been enough to tell him what her profession was, even if she hadn’t been so sexually alluring that he had the urge to negotiate terms with her there and then. But what was she doing in Michel Verdun’s office?
When he managed to unfix his eyes from her, his gaze fell on the grotesque picture on the screen in the office behind her. A porn video. That went some way towards explaining her presence—did Verdun come to the office at night to indulge his extramarital passions?
Which meant he was behind her in the office? Hell! thought Haroun. Just my luck I’ve broken in on orgy night.
Then he belatedly heard what she’d said. It’s you. What did that mean? Some kind of hooker’s ploy to convince a client he was the stuff of her fantasies?
It followed that she didn’t know her client by sight. Maybe she thought he was the one who had booked her time.
With typical boldness, he decided to bluff. He could get out of this yet.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he agreed. “Have you been given the details of what’s expected?”
She nibbled at a corner of her mouth, unconsciously turning her red mouth into an exotic, inviting flower. Haroun’s blood was too quick to respond.
Mariel quietly folded the paper she held, hiding the photo. How on earth had he got in? Her brain rushed to fill the gap—had Michel given him a key? Had the photo been sent to identify him to Michel prior to a meeting? Did that mean Michel would be arriving here?
Did his question mean this man was assuming she was the contact he was due to meet? She forgot the outfit she was wearing, what she must look like to him.
“No. Um…I’m filling in at the last minute,” she stammered. “Michel—is sick. So if you don’t mind briefing me…”
Haroun breathed a quiet sigh. The fates were being kind to him tonight. So Verdun’s regular girl, Michelle, was ill, and the replacement needed briefing. Well, he certainly would enjoy briefing her, but the important thing was to get out of here before Verdun arrived.
“My car,” he said, looking at his watch so that she would understand he was a man in a hurry.
She felt a surge of sharp regret that the face she had fallen for belonged to a man connected to a villain like Michel Verdun. Then her spy’s practical brain took over. She wondered whether he bought secrets, or sold them. She might, with luck, pick up something interesting from him, and that would be the last of her usefulness to her cousin Hal. Because her work at Michel Verdun et Associés was finished as of tonight.
“All right, I—I’ll just get my bag.” She whirled to run lightly to her desk, as eager to get out of here as the stranger could want. She picked up the items she had tossed on her desk, dumped them back in the drawer.
It took only a second, time which Haroun passed in contemplation of the sloping hips, the firm bare thighs. “Let’s go,” she said, kicking the drawer shut. She had just picked up her bag when she noticed that the secret office door was hanging open. She ran lightly back across the room.
As she reached it, there was the sound of a key in the main door.
Mariel froze, her eyes flying to the stranger. In amazement she saw that he was running silently towards her. He was much bigger than she. He scooped her up in one arm and shoved her through the doorway into the secret office ahead of him. One hand clamping over her mouth, he pushed the door almost shut.
They were in darkness, the only light in the room the glow from the two horrible screen savers flickering on the computers.
His hand tightened over her mouth as the sound of the outer office door opening reached them. “If you make a sound I will strangle you,” the stranger whispered in her ear. Mariel shook her head, her eyes wide, speechlessly promising to be silent, and slowly his hand slipped down to her throat, where it rested in light warning.
A crack of illumination told her that whoever had entered the outer office had put the main light on. It had to be Michel.
Her only hope now was not to be discovered. And clearly Adonis here felt the same. But who was he, then? If he was afraid of Michel, Michel clearly hadn’t given him a key. So how had he got in? And why?
He stood beside her, his body hard, watching through the tiny crack of the door. She could smell the musky scent of him, feel the firm muscles of his arm, his thigh, his chest, as he held her.
“The alarm’s been coded,” she heard a mutter from the outer office. Michel’s voice. Who was he with? She turned in the stranger’s hold and tried to see out the crack. One finger slipped up to her lips in warning.
Probably it was the danger that transmogrified that light brushing of his finger over her mouth into the most erotic thing she had ever experienced. Mariel’s blood raced so that she felt faint. Her body seemed to melt with yearning for the hard curves of the stranger’s body.
His voice rasped in her ear again. “There is your client,” he whispered.
Michel was just coming into her line of vision, moving towards the back corner of the outer office. He hadn’t noticed that the secret office door was ajar, but he would.
“You can go out to him.”
He probably planned to take off in her wake, but the last thing Mariel could do now was walk out and greet Michel. “No,” she whispered desperately, just as another man came into view, his eyes dangerous and wary. “No.”
“No?” The stranger’s gaze narrowed, raking her face in the thread of light in a new assessment.
The second man had a gun. A small, square automatic. Mariel felt as if her eyes were glued to the neat silver barrel in his hand. Beside her, the dark man went still.
“Let them go past. Run for the door. I will follow,” he whispered briefly, and waited only for her answering nod before pushing her to one side.
The armed man was just turning, Michel was facing in the other direction. It was now or never, and as the stranger whipped the door open and launched a kick at the gunman’s elbow, Mariel tore out the doorway behind him and headed for the main entrance.
She heard the kick connect, a shout, and the sounds of struggle. Michel cried out in surprise. Mariel didn’t waste a moment looking back. She wrenched open the door and dashed down the hall.
Behind her there were more shouts, and pounding footsteps. She hit the button summoning the elevators as she ran by, but carried straight on past, heading for the door to the stairwell she had entered by.
She burst through it, then turned to look out. The stranger was pounding down the hall after her, giving her a chance to appreciate his athletic perfection. She opened the door further.
“Ici!” she hissed, and a second later he came bursting through to the small concrete landing. She was already halfway up the steps. “En haut!” she whispered and, not waiting to see how he responded, turned and ran harder than she had ever run in her life.
He was behind and gaining on her. They were halfway up the next flight when they heard someone crash through the door below. They froze, and listened as the others went thundering down the steps to the lower floors.
Mariel breathed a prayer of gratitude, then crept up the last steps and through the door into the fourth-floor hallway. The stranger understood that she was running to a known goal, and wasted no time on questions. She led him to the door marked Toilettes, in and past the basins, and into the last cubicle in the row.
She was up on the windowsill while Haroun was still half wondering if she had led him into a trap after all. But with a flash of thighs she leapt through the window, and he was quick to follow.
“Close it,” she hissed. “And go carefully, this thing is not very safe. Stay a few feet behind me and keep as close as you can to the wall, or it may come down.”
He slid the window down and after giving her a head start followed her along the tottery fire escape, wondering if it would hold his weight. Ahead of him she turned and went down one flight, then paused. To his amazement, though nothing amazed him anymore, she hoisted herself up onto a windowsill.
He caught up with her. “Let us get down to the ground,” he hissed.
“It doesn’t lead anywhere—it’s been destroyed lower down,” she said, swinging her entrancingly naked legs over the sill. He hesitated for a moment. Suppose he had walked into an elaborate setup?
But now he could see that she had told him the truth—the fire escape simply stopped two flights up from the ground. No way to leap that without serious damage.
She had disappeared through the window. Haroun shrugged and, with a murmured “La howlah wa la quwwata illa billah,” followed her into the unknown.
And found himself in a hotel bedroom lighted only by a night-light. She was standing by the bed. A red velour bedspread covered it. She was tossing two red velour pillows onto the floor as he entered. He watched as she tore the bedspread down to the foot of the bed, dragged back the sheets.
Her black leather skirt was slit up both sides, and revealed black lace covering a neatly rounded rump as she bent and twisted, intent on her work.
He could appreciate such insouciant dedication to business, and only regretted that he could not share it. He wanted to get the hell out of here.
But he couldn’t help smiling. He crossed towards the outer door as she straightened. “I wish I could stay,” he murmured, “but unfortunately…”
“Shhh!” she commanded. She now had the bed looking completely ruined, and pushed him out of her way as she crossed to the window. She dragged it shut and turned the little locking mechanism, then drew the curtains.
“Right,” she said. “Now, look—Henri will think you’re my client.”
“Henri?”
“Downstairs, on the desk,” she supplied impatiently. “Can you—” She looked at him, taking in his clothes fully for the first time. “My God, you look like a cat burglar!” she exclaimed.
He was dressed entirely in snug-fitting black that outlined his body almost as closely as Lycra. Mariel blinked at the muscled chest, the powerful thighs, the firm biceps….
He cocked one eyebrow. “I am a cat burglar,” he said dryly.
“I have to go down the front way, and there’s no time to show you the service entrance. You’ll just have to come out with me. Henri will think you are my client who doesn’t want to be recognized, so he won’t be surprised if you go straight out the door.”
“And then what?”
“My car is in the next street. Can I drop you, or shall we go our separate ways?”
She was so cool! Haroun reached to touch her chin, and laughed with pure admiration. “I don’t think I can leave you,” he said. “Let us change our minds and at least make use of the bed before we part.”
His words made her lips twitch into an involuntary smile. It was quite true that sex was in the air between them. How could it not be, when danger had chased so closely at their heels? For those who are truly alive, their bodies and spirits cried, a near escape from death is best celebrated through sex.
Mariel could almost have given in, too. He was so handsome, and when he was laughing he was pretty well irresistible. And she had fallen half in love just with his photo. But—
“You are ridiculous,” she said sternly, though she knew he wasn’t serious. “Anyway, we’ve been incredibly lucky so far and our luck would be sure to turn if we abused it like that.”
He was eyeing her with a grin that melted her. “I certainly don’t want the luck I’ve been having tonight to change. If we make love now, it will abandon me? You are sure of it? I think it could only improve. And perhaps it would even be wise to wait here until the search is given up.”
“No, let’s get out of here,” Mariel said, ignoring most of the speech. “We can’t be sure Michel doesn’t know about that fire escape.”
He was aware of a reluctance to leave her. He justified this with the conviction that she might be able to tell him something about Verdun that he didn’t know.
“All right. We head for your car. Where is it, exactly? What make and colour?”
She told him in an undervoice as she opened the door and led him out into the hall. He went down the stairs lightly at her side, his lithe black shape melting in and out of the shadows. She could believe he was a cat burglar, but what had he wanted from Michel? Was it possible he was stealing secrets from Michel and selling them?
Henri was too savvy to take any formal notice of the sudden appearance of Emma’s “client,” and Mariel only threw him a smile and a twinkling wave before following the stranger out into the street.
Her car was two streets away, and there was plenty of pedestrian traffic under the neon signs. Mariel walked quickly, her high-heeled boots clicking on the pavement with little erotic snaps. She resisted the impulse to look over her shoulder to be sure the stranger was following, and instead tried to concentrate on looking like a woman on the job. She slipped her fingers into the little slash pockets of her micromini and let her hips swing in invitation. She kept wanting to laugh, and she couldn’t tell whether it was the effect danger had on her, or the stranger.
At the corner she turned to cross the street and risked a glance back. Two women were offering their wares to him, jointly and severally, and they didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer. Her smile died as a totally unfamiliar jealous rage swept through her.
She had whirled instinctively, ready to charge back towards the cosy little group, almost before she realized it. Then she took a deep, surprised breath. She had never been jealous before, and here she was, furiously proprietal about a man whose photograph she had first seen less than an hour ago! Was she going crazy?
Maybe it was just the effect of the danger. Danger heightened the emotions, she had always heard that. But still she stood glaring down the street as he smiled his regrets and passed the hungry hookers by. One of them glanced up and saw Mariel staring, saw that the man was following her, and started screaming at her in very pungent street French.
“Get off my beat, putain!”
“Va-t’en, vache!” Mariel called back, partly for the hell of it, and partly to stay in character in case anyone was watching.
Perhaps a little too much in character. The two hookers erupted with fury at her show of defiance and took after her. Fortunately the light had changed. Mariel ran across the busy street, followed by the cat burglar, who was followed by the two enraged women.
People in cars began to honk encouragement as the drama unfolded in front of them. And on the opposite side of the street, a block behind, she saw Michel’s gunman turn the corner, take one look in their direction, and instantly join the chase.
Maybe she should have sacrificed a little of the character of her part, Mariel reflected. No one ever ran the four-minute mile in three-inch stilettos, she was pretty sure of that.
The cat burglar caught up with her, grabbed her arm and kept running. This caused the hookers to scream like wounded banshees, but a glance showed her they at least were losing interest in the chase. Maybe she had crossed the frontier of their territory now.
The man with the gun, which he was now obviously holding in the pocket of his sweats, wasn’t losing interest. He was pounding along, barely a block behind.
Fortunately, her car was around the next corner. Breathless, Mariel could only point wildly to the right as they approached the next street. The cat burglar understood and, keeping his grip on her arm, half dragged her into the turn.
Her car was halfway along the narrow, dark street. Mariel reached for her backpack, then gave vent to a breathless screech.
“What?” said the stranger.
“My bag!” she panted. “I left—my bag—no—no—keys!”
“Where?”
“In the—office,” Mariel croaked.
Luck, she had called it? Where was the luck in escaping if Michel knew who had been there?
Three
They had slowed their steps, but now they heard the sounds of running footsteps behind them, and the stranger grabbed her arm again and set off across the street at an angle. She just saw the shadow of the mouth of the alley before they were in it.
It was pitch-dark, and their entry was the trigger for some frantic scuffling near some piles of refuse. Mariel hoped it wasn’t rats.
The cat burglar seemed to have eyes as good as his namesake, because he led her safely through the alley past all impediments before her own eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. When they got to the other end a glance behind showed them the gunman framed at the entrance. A moment later they heard clanging and cursing, so his eyes weren’t as good as the stranger’s, either.
They crossed another narrow street and plunged into another laneway. They were in a very old part of the city, the walls all worn, dark brick, the streets twisting and narrow. But the other, though he wasn’t gaining, managed to stick on their tail.
Mariel was panting heavily when the stranger dragged her into another narrow opening. Now she could hear a pounding like thunder. The drum of doom, she thought a moment later. Because this time the lane led into a cramped courtyard, and there was no other exit.
“Oh my God!” Mariel panted. “Is there a fire esc—”
A sound from the stranger silenced her. He was staring around in the darkness, and now pressed his finger lightly to her lips. “This way,” he whispered in her ear.
It was only then that she saw the little group of teenage boys clustered around a doorway, deep in shadow, murmuring amongst themselves. The stranger’s confident hand clasped her wrist and drew her in that direction. Before Mariel had time to wonder, the door opened a crack, pushed from the inside, and music came pounding out.
The cat burglar leapt the last couple of feet and grabbed the door as the kids, glancing nervously at him, slipped through one by one. Mariel entered in their wake as the stranger held the door and prevented its closing. He followed her inside.
The music was loud and raucous, and that was nothing compared to the crowd. Mariel forgot all her troubles for a moment of wonder. Compared to what the women in here were wearing, her own outfit was a model of respectability. She had never seen so much big hair in her life, and the fingernails were longer than the skirts. And as for the eyes! Spiders were nothing to these women—most of them seemed to have tame lemurs on their lashes.
One or two of them were eyeing the stranger’s snug black get-up with extremely frank approval. “Chéri!” said one, her popping eyes rivetted to his groin.
“He’s a cat burglar!” Mariel told her waspishly. Since in French the phrase for cat burglar was mount-in-the-air, she received some wide-eyed looks of envy and approval.
“I believe you! Comme elle a de la chance!” a big, dark-eyed blonde cried, one wrist to her forehead in an excess of sensibility, faking a faint. “My dears!”
Mariel was starting to smell a rat.
But it was only when a clone from The Wild Ones, Marlon Brando from the black biker’s cap down to the chain boots, groped her own butt, crying, “My God, you are so subtle! I love subtlety!” that the penny finally dropped.
“Thank you!” she muttered, as the cat burglar grabbed her hand again and started beating a path to the entrance door across the room.
“What are you drinking?” Brando shouted over the din.
“Scotch?” Mariel called hopefully, because she sure could use a drink.
Brando looked delighted. “I’ll be right back! Wait for me! Don’t disappear!”
She smiled helplessly at him as the stranger, still ruthlessly grasping her wrist, dragged her through the crush of dancing, gyrating male bodies.
“I’m pooped! Can’t we stop for a quick drink?” she pleaded, as they arrived at the edge of the crowd a few feet from the door.
A large and burly bouncer was evicting the three blue-jeaned kids who had entered through the back door with them. “We only wanted to watch!” one was protesting.
The stranger stared at her disbelievingly. “A drink?”
“Marlon Brando over there offered me a scotch. I sure could use something. And let’s face it, the way we’re dressed, Michel would never find us in here.”
He grabbed her wrist again without answering and set off. The bouncer watched incuriously as they ran out past him and up the steps of the areaway. They emerged on a broad boulevard with plenty of traffic, where a taxi screeched to a stop almost before the stranger lifted his hand.
They scrambled in, and Mariel fell back against the upholstery, half panting, half laughing. It was only as she heard the stranger murmur “Le Charlemagne” that she realized she had missed the moment for separating. They ought to have said goodbye and each taken a separate cab.
“Is that your address?” she asked.
“But of course,” he said, so blandly she didn’t know whether to believe him.
“I think we should separate now,” she said, though her heart wasn’t in it. As the lights of Paris flickered past, light and shadow falling over their faces in a strange tempo, she gazed into his face and felt suddenly that she was in a dream. A dream she had dreamt a thousand times before without ever quite remembering.
“Separate?” he repeated, in soft protest. “Ah, no, ma petite, I cannot be separated from you yet.” He bent over her, where she lay slouched down against the cushions, his face close. Her pulse hammered a protest. She lifted a hand to his chest, whether to hold him off or draw him closer, even she didn’t know. His lips moved closer.
“Stay with me tonight,” he murmured.
This was the handsomest man in the world talking to her. Mariel’s heart did a shaky back flip. Lust struggled with common sense, which reminded her that she didn’t even know his name. And that he might well be in the enemy camp. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, her heart protested, but common sense told her she couldn’t be certain that he was Michel’s enemy.
“I think I should get out,” she murmured, half to herself. “Driver—” she called, but the stranger put his fingers to her lips to silence her.
“Where will you go?”
“Home, of course.”
He shook his head. “Without your handbag? Where are your keys?”
“The landlady will let me in, and I have a spare key hidden.”
“What besides your keys was in the bag?”
She was trying to remember where she had left the bag. She ran over those moments in the office—she had been picking up her bag when she noticed the open door of the secret office. And she had gone to close the office door. Had she left the bag on her desk, or taken it with her and dropped it in her scuffle with the stranger?
If she had left it on her desk there was just a faint possibility that Michel might think she had left her bag behind when she left for the night. If she had dropped it in his secret office…
She shook her head. “Just what you’d imagine. My credit cards, money…address book, phone numbers—everything.”
What a fool. And all because she had fallen for a face in a photograph. If she hadn’t had complete brain collapse and decided to print that photograph, none of it would have happened. She would probably have been out of the office before the man even arrived.
Haroun watched her. He was aware of too many contradictions. Why was Michel Verdun chasing a lady of the night with an armed man in tow? What had she been doing in his office if she wasn’t there at his invitation?
“And what of this man? When he finds your handbag with your address—will he make you a visit?”
Mariel shivered. Not before she had gathered her belongings and disappeared, she hoped. She had money in the flat. She would take her things to a hotel and phone Hal for instructions.
He noted the shiver. “What were you doing there?” he demanded.
She looked up at him through ridiculously long lashes, her eyes wary, challenging, but still somehow seductive and, as he expected, parried. “What were you?”
He laughed and lifted a hand, palm facing her, in a sign of surrender. “Eh bien, d’accord!” he said. “We ask no personal questions. Do you think the gun was for me or for you?”
He was looking at her with a devil-may-care glint in his eyes and tilt to his lips that made her heart kick again. She pressed her own lips together and lowered her head.
“I don’t know. You can’t have tripped the alarm, because I turned it off. Maybe he’s had something new installed I don’t know about.”
His eyebrow went up. “You are familiar with his operation?”
“No personal questions, remember?”
“When you saw me, you said, It’s you. And then, Michelle is sick, so if you don’t mind briefing me—”
He looked at her enquiringly, but she only shook her head. He frowned in thought. “Michel!” he exclaimed, looking enlightened. “Ah! I imagined Michelle was a girl you replaced, but you meant—Verdun himself. You thought I was there to meet Verdun, you were playing for time, is that right?”
She pressed her lips together and looked at him. Everything about him seemed to have a glow. His dark eyes, his waving hair, his warm skin. His whole being.
When she made no answer he went on thinking aloud. “And yet you were there to…”
He paused invitingly. They were driving further away from her own arrondissement as they talked. She came out of a kind of daze to realize she was still half lying against the upholstery and he was still bent over her in intimate closeness. Mariel pushed the stranger aside and sat up with a small tug of regret for the loss of the sensual little cocoon she had been inhabiting.
“I want to go home,” she said. “Would you mind paying…?”
“No emergency funds tucked into the top of your stocking?” he asked with a teasing smile, his finger tracing designs on her knee as she pretended not to be affected by the chills charging through her blood and reproved him with a look. “But no—no stockings at all.”
“I’ve got to go home,” she repeated. She leaned forward and murmured the name of a landmark near her apartment, and the driver pulled into a turn with an easy shrug.
It would be safe enough as long as she didn’t let the stranger know her exact address, and she wouldn’t be there past tonight anyway. The stranger wasn’t a man who would feel the loss of fifty francs, not if he was calling Le Charlemagne home.
“And are we never to see each other again?” he continued, in a tone that wrenched at her heart.
Of course he didn’t mean it. And neither did she—it had been just a crazy moment when she thought she had fallen in love with the photograph.
The photograph! Mariel bit her lip. She hadn’t thought about that….
“What is it?” he murmured, noting her sudden change of mood, the delicious way her white teeth caught her lower lip as she looked at him. “You have changed your mind? You will come with me?”
Should she warn the stranger about the fact that Michel had been sent his photograph? But she knew nothing about him or his motives, another part of her argued. She couldn’t tell him about the photo without exposing some part of her work. Suppose the stranger were actually in league with Michel, but double-crossing him? She now had to engage in damage limitation, and keep from Michel any clues as to who she was working for and how and what information she had been getting. She had to avoid anything that would confirm a suspicion that Hal Ward had got access to his top-secret computers.
For all she knew, the whole thing had been a setup. Maybe Michel had been clocking her visits for weeks. Maybe he had sent the stranger to pretend to be breaking in, too. Then followed it up with a raid, forcing her into the same camp as the stranger, making him an ally.
But still she felt guilty, not saying anything.
“Anyway,” she murmured aloud, “it’s all your fault I’m in this predicament.”
“C’est vrai,” the stranger replied, with a warm look. “So it is up to me to take care of you, no?”
And always that devil in his eyes, a look that made her shiver with delight. In a life with him you’d always be laughing, her heart suggested.
“I don’t think it works that way,” she said mildly.
“Si,” he contradicted her. “Tu verras.”
And she did see, sooner than either of them could have expected. On his way to the landmark she had named, the taxi driver took the usual route along the street where she lived, and as they passed the small, charming nineteenth-century building with blue shutters and blue wrought iron, she saw a car parked right in front of it. She sat up with a jerk, staring across the stranger’s relaxed body out the window. Michel’s car, she saw, as they drew close enough to read the plate.
A man sat at the wheel, smoking. He glanced over into the taxi just as the streetlight illumined the interior.
“Dieu!” Mariel murmured, and to recover from her unprofessional behaviour—she should never have stared out the window like that—tilted her head as if to kiss the stranger.
His arms instantly encircled her and he looked delighted. “Ah, you have had a change of heart, ma petite,” he observed, his lips close and parting hungrily.
“That’s one of Michel’s operatives in that parked car back there,” she whispered, her mouth barely an inch from his. With extreme reluctance, since she liked being right where she was, she lifted her head to peer through the back window.
“Is he following us?” the stranger asked from beneath her, amusement still threading his voice. His closeness tickled her throat and made her yearn.
The car stayed where it was. “No,” she murmured. “Do you think someone is right in my fl—?” she began, then gasped as, one hand on her back, the other on her head, the stranger pulled her down.
Suddenly he was kissing her, with an expertise that exploded into sugared sweetness all through her body. Sensation seemed to arise from nowhere to engulf her, drowning her so that she could not resist.
There had never been a kiss like it since the beginning of the world, Mariel thought dreamily, letting herself sink down against him. She thrilled as his arms tightened possessively around her, his kiss becoming hungrier, more demanding.
Her hands went to his face, her fingers slipping around his neck, as all her blood sang with delight. It was the kiss she had dreamed of, a kiss to die for, her fogged brain murmured, her body promised. It was the cake she could both have and eat.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of kiss.
“Et maintenant, mes enfants, où irions-nous? La Tour d’Eiffel?”
They surfaced to discover themselves in front of the monument Mariel had named, the driver calmly slipping a Gauloises between his lips as he tolerantly watched them over the seat back. The meter was still ticking.
The stranger smiled, touched her lips with a tender finger, and murmured, “Verdun’s car was parked at your address?”
She nodded.
“Well, then, you can’t return there, it is too dangerous. You must trust yourself to me now.”
Since for the moment she really could see no other option, Mariel was silent. The stranger lifted his head. “Le Charlemagne, s’il vous plait,” he said again.
With an expressively Gallic shrug, the driver lifted a cheap plastic lighter to his cigarette, flicked it to flame, drew deep, tossed it down onto the seat beside him, put the car in gear, and set it rolling.
“You really live in Le Charlemagne?” she asked, even more curious now about his reasons for breaking in to Michel’s office.
The stranger misunderstood. “Yes. There is little reason for Verdun to know my face, even if he saw me long enough for recognition, which I am sure he did not. The office was, in any case, nearly dark. So I think we will be safe enough there.”
The thought of the print of the photograph she had dropped somewhere surfaced in her mind. She wondered what Michel would make of it. It was proof that someone had broken in to his computers, but he must be wondering why anyone would have taken a hard copy.
“In spite of our no-questions policy it may be that the time has come for us to move on a step in intimacy,” the stranger remarked, interrupting her train of thought. “What is your name?”
She hesitated. “Emma. What’s yours?”
“Emma,” he repeated. “A charming name. And I am called…Fred.”
Four
Le Charlemagne was the name of a world-famous Rue de Rivoli shopping complex with fabulous shops on two levels. Above were seven floors of exclusive apartments. Overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries and the Seine, it was one of Paris’s very exclusive addresses.
The concierge watched with benign interest as the pair strode along the concourse towards the bank of private lifts. The lift Fred led her to gave access to the garage, main, mezzanine and ninth floors only. He used a plastic key, and when they arrived at the top they stepped into a vestibule where a guard sat in front of a small bank of TV screens. Behind him was the open door of a small kitchenette.
Mariel’s skin bumped with nerves as Fred greeted the man in Arabic, and she wondered if she had been wise to jump out of the frying pan with the stranger. He led her to the big double doors into the main apartment, while the guard’s gaze followed them with a mixture of heavy disapproval and sexual curiosity marking his face.
Catching his eye, Mariel winked at him. The man blushed and dropped his eyes. Fred, noticing his reaction, looked from the guard to Mariel with a deadly little glint in his eyes that promised to make her pay for that one, and she couldn’t stop the little expectant shiver that coursed over her skin in response.
Then they stepped across the threshold into a large, luxurious, oak-floored room, glowing with soft light, drapes open to expose a wall of glass that gave onto a wide terrace and a view of the lights along the Seine. The furnishings were in leather and a variety of rich and exotic woods polished to a gleam.
The predominant feeling was comfort. Mariel heaved a sigh and rubbed the back of her neck as some of the tension of the past couple of hours left her.
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ALEXANDRA SELLERS
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Sheikh Haroun al Muntazir was honor-bound to recover a priceless family jewel…but what was lovely operative Mariel de Vouvray′s mission? Until her motives were made plain, he had to keep her close – yet at a distance. But with one stolen kiss Haroun′s resistance turned to air. Was Mariel′s melting surrender a trap of ultimate danger…or a precious haven offered by his future beloved wife?