The Pleasure of Your Kiss (33 page)

After lingering just long enough to filch a third robe from the harem for Yasmin, Ash, Clarinda, and the concubine slunk through the moonlit gardens, picking their way through the shadows cast by the swaying palms. Their every step, no matter how careful, seemed to echo with the force of a gunshot. Clarinda caught herself holding her breath, waiting for someone to sound the alarm that would spell their doom.

But the peaceful hush of the night was broken only by the distant murmur of the sea and the whisper of the wind through the feathery palm fronds. After what seemed like an eternity but was in actuality only a few minutes, they finally reached the unguarded gate where Ash had arranged to meet Luca.

At first there was no sign of him, but then he came springing up from behind a lush hibiscus plant like a grinning jack-in-the-box, giving them all a terrible fright. “What took you so long?” he asked. “I nearly fell asleep.”

“We had to go back for Poppy,” Clarinda explained.

Yasmin, of course, had let the robe Clarinda had stolen for her gape open all the way down the front, exposing her voluptuous form to the kiss of the moonlight and Luca’s lascivious gaze.

Luca let out a low-pitched whistle. “That is most definitely
not
Poppy.”

“We’ve already established that,” Ash said, rubbing a weary hand over his jaw.

Although she couldn’t quite stop herself from preening beneath Luca’s appreciative gaze, Yasmin gave him a contemptuous look, her dark eyes spitting fire. “Keep your eyes in your head, you English dog, lest I claw them out.”

“I hate to disappoint a lady, but I am an Italian dog. Well, half-Romany actually.”

Yasmin’s upper lip curled in a sneer. “A loathsome cur by any name.”

Luca grinned at Ash. “Did you hear that? She hates me already. I told you I’ve always found that to be an irresistible quality in a woman.”

“Have I mentioned she’s looking for a husband?” Clarinda asked sweetly.

Luca paled beneath his tan. “A husband?”

“And if Clarinda wasn’t hogging up all the fiancés for herself, she might have found one by now. Did you get the mounts?” Ash asked Luca, enunciating each word as if he were talking to the village idiot.

Luca gave him a reproachful look. “What sort of Gypsy would I be if I couldn’t manage to rob a stable?”

He beckoned and they followed him through the gate and into the alley that bordered the curve of the garden wall.

“You can’t be serious,” Clarinda said when she saw what was waiting for them.

“That is not a horse,” Yasmin said needlessly.

“Of course it is not a horse. It is a camel. And quite the beauty he is, too.” Luca rubbed a hand over the animal’s mangy haunches, beaming proudly. “Or she. Based on the length of those eyelashes, I can’t be sure.”

The beast lifted its head and gave them a placid look, its rubbery lips still chewing on a fat bougainvillea bloom. It definitely didn’t look like the sort of beast one might ride when making a dramatic escape that would be forever immortalized between the pages of a scandal sheet.

“There are three of us,” Ash pointed out with excruciating patience.

“Four,” Clarinda corrected, giving Yasmin a baleful look.

“And only one camel,” Ash said.

Holding up a finger in a plea for their continued forbearance, Luca disappeared into the bushes on the far side of the alley. Much rustling ensued and then he reappeared, holding a leather lead studded with rubies and emeralds. “Fortunately, while I was searching for a second camel, I stumbled over this fellow.”

They all went slack-jawed with shock as a magnificent black stallion came prancing into the alley behind Luca. Moonlight poured over the creature’s powerful haunches, making them gleam like polished ebony. As Luca brought the beast to a halt, the stallion tossed its head much as Yasmin was given to do, as if to show off its flowing black mane to its best advantage.

“Now that,” Yasmin purred, “is not a camel.”

“Oh, this is just marvelous!” Ash reached up as if to snatch off a hat that wasn’t there just so he could crumple it up in disgust. “We’re already making off with two of the sultan’s most beautiful women, so why not take his most valuable horse as well? Because if you steal a woman in Morocco, they only cut off your head. If you steal a horse, do you know what they do?”

Despite the urgency of their situation, Clarinda had to bite back a smile. She had forgotten how adorable Ash was when he flew into a towering rage. There was a reason she had spent so much of her youth mercilessly goading him.

“
They cut off your head and piss down your neck!
It’s a pity there’s no time to break into the sultan’s treasury so we can stuff our pockets with a fortune in his gold before we leave.”

Luca visibly brightened at the idea.

“Oh, but wait! That won’t be necessary.” Ash snatched the stallion’s lead from Luca’s hand, thrusting it into his face. “Because I’m sure there are enough gems on this bridle and saddle to ensure that the sultan and his guard will chase us to the ends of the earth!”

“The horse alone is probably worth a hundred of me in Farouk’s eyes,” Clarinda pointed out. “Especially now.”

“Then he’s a bloody idiot,” Ash said grimly. “But once you’re safe, I’ll make sure and send it back to him. With Luca’s head and a note thanking him for his generosity.”

Still muttering under his breath, Ash swung himself astride the stallion and offered Clarinda his hand. She took it without hesitation, swinging herself up behind him.

Luca’s face fell. “No fair! Since I was the one who risked my neck stealing him, I thought I would get to ride the—”

“You thought wrong,” Ash said flatly. “We’ll follow the coastline until we’re certain there’s no one following us, then cut back to the desert.”

He gave the reins an authoritative yank, wheeling the horse around so that they faced the sea. Clarinda glanced over her shoulder to find both the camel and Yasmin giving Luca the evil eye.

“Don’t mind Yasmin, Luca,” Clarinda called out softly. “She’s just jealous because the camel has longer eyelashes than she does.”

At that moment a panicked cry went up, not from the palace but from the stables. Torches began to flare in the darkness, followed by the sound of running feet.

As Luca and Yasmin scrambled to mount the camel, Ash reached one arm around to make sure Clarinda was secure. “Hold on to me,” he ordered, his voice low and urgent. “And don’t let go no matter what.”

As he drove his heels into the stallion’s flanks, sending them plunging down the alley and into the night, Clarinda wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek to his back, finding that one command she had no desire to disobey.

Farouk sat all alone in the darkness of his throne room.

He had dismissed his guard, something he found himself doing with increasing frequency lately, preferring the solitude of his thoughts. But on this night his thoughts were as black as the shadows gathering around the throne that had once been his father’s and his father’s father’s before him. Why should he concern himself with an anonymous assassin’s blade when he was already surrounded by enemies?

By now one of those enemies would be waiting for him on his sleeping couch, her silvery blond tresses rippling across his pillow in the moonlight. He had longed for this moment for so long. All he had to do was go to her and claim what was rightfully his, what he had paid for with a fortune in gold that day in the slaver’s market.

Yet there he sat, brooding all alone in the dark.

He could still clearly see the outrage on her face when she had risen out of her chair after he had informed her she would be sharing his bed that night. He had been spoiling for a fight in that moment and had halfway hoped she was going to give it to him. But instead she had swallowed her pride and offered him a mocking curtsy.

That was when he had finally seen what had been right before his eyes all along. There could be only one reason for her reluctant surrender—she was willing to sacrifice herself to save the man she loved.

And that man was not him.

She had never truly loved him. Her heart was not hers to give because it already belonged to another. It belonged to the man Farouk had welcomed into his home with open arms, the man who had saved his life not once, but twice, the man who had pretended to be his friend while plotting all the while to steal Clarinda right out from under his unsuspecting nose.

The two of them had played him for a fool. Had made him feel like the fat, clumsy boy the English had called Frankie, the boy who had cowered on the ground while his classmates rained blows down on him with their fists and kicked him with the hard, polished toes of their boots.

When he had returned from England to assume his father’s throne, he had vowed he would never again be that boy.

If he failed to exert his mastery over Clarinda now, to punish her for her lies and her betrayal, he would prove himself to be everything his uncle believed him to be—weak, foolish, unfit to rule a province as magnificent as El Jadida.

He had a harem full of women fighting over the privilege of being summoned to his bed, women who would do anything to please him. Yet tonight he would force himself on a woman who would be counting the seconds until he was through with her. She would submit, of course. What choice did she have? Her champion had fled, leaving her at his mercy. But as he gave her even more of a reason to despise him, her face would be turned away from him, her eyes squeezed shut as she dreamed of the man she wished were touching her, taking her.

Farouk might possess her body but he would never possess her heart or her soul.

When he wearily closed his own eyes, it wasn’t Clarinda he saw but another woman, good-hearted and true. Her laughter was a merry ripple that did not humor him or mock him but soothed his restless soul. Her smile was always welcoming, her eyes always hungry for the sight of him. She did not look at him like that because he was Zin al-Farouk, the Exalted Sultan of El Jadida, but simply because she enjoyed his company. He had the strangest feeling she might have liked Frankie as well. That she might have helped him sneak into the kitchens at Eton to pilfer pastries so they might enjoy them together beneath the light of the pale English moon.

Someone sharply cleared his throat, interrupting his reverie.

He opened his eyes, expecting to find Solomon waiting in the torchlit corridor to escort him to the bed of his new concubine.

It wasn’t the hulking eunuch who stood in the doorway of the throne room but Tarik. There was no disguising the look of gloating satisfaction on his uncle’s face. Not even the nasty bruise on his jaw could dim the radiance of his wolfish smile.

“You should have never let the English infidel escape with his life,” his uncle said, a triumphant sneer curling his upper lip, “because now he has returned to take what is yours.”

“The sultan is coming! The sultan is coming!” The frantic whisper rippled through the harem, generating hope and panic in the heart of every women who heard it.

Some shot straight to their feet, frantically snatching up their robes, while others, still half-asleep, rolled off their sleeping couches, groaning and blindly fumbling for brushes and combs. After living with so many women day in and day out, very little ruffled the eunuchs who guarded them, but even they were stumbling over one another in their haste as they rushed about to light the lamps and rouse the more sluggish women.

When one of the concubines burrowed deeper beneath the sheets, dragging a colorful pillow over her head, the wife next to her gave her rump a sharp swat. “Get up! Do you want His Majesty to see you looking like the lazy cow you are?”

The concubine popped out from beneath the pillow just long enough to spit a curse at her. The wife beckoned to a younger wife, and together the two women yanked the sheets clear off the couch, dumping the sputtering concubine onto the floor.

It was rare indeed for the sultan to appear in the harem. He was far more likely to summon one of his wives or concubines to his sleeping quarters or even allow the eunuchs to choose a suitable bedmate for him. But tonight was different. Tonight he had decided to choose his companion for himself.

The women scrambled to the foot of their couches to stand at attention, desperately raking their fingers through their tangled hair, licking their lips and struggling to look sloe-eyed and seductive with eyes still dazed and puffy from sleep.

As the sultan’s towering figure appeared in the doorway, they lowered their heads, bowing as one. Farouk stalked through their ranks as if they weren’t even there, his long robes whipping around his ankles with each resolute stride. The women exchanged apprehensive looks beneath their lashes as he passed, and those who dared to steal a peek at the forbidding thundercloud of his face almost wished they hadn’t.

It wasn’t romance the sultan appeared to have on his mind that night but murder.

W
hen Farouk came barging into Poppy’s alcove, tearing the curtain clean off its hooks with one furious swipe, the look on his face made her wonder if she had made a terrible miscalculation, perhaps even a fatal one.

The book of sonnets she was reading slid from her numb fingers as he stopped just inside the door, breathing hard and gazing at her with the oddest mixture of relief and fury. It was almost as if he had expected to find her alcove—and her couch—empty.

When he lunged back into motion, she scrambled off the other side of the couch, her every instinct warning her that if she cared one jot about her survival, she needed to get as far away as possible from this man.

But it was a very small alcove.

And he was a very large man.

He walked right over the couch, leaving an impressive bootprint in the middle of her silk sheets. Capturing her shoulders in his hands, he drove her back against the wall, pinning her as handily as a collector might pin a captive butterfly. Poppy had always felt like a big, clumsy ox standing next to Clarinda, but being handled in such a masterful way made her feel positively delicate and slightly light-headed. Thinking about all the wicked things he might do to her if she swooned only made her head swim faster.