The Stanhope Challenge - Regency Quartet - Four Regency Romances (42 page)

“Ahh,” a sound of satisfaction oozed from Hassan’s fleshy lips.

“But I have seen her face,” Ramon translated with regret to his words. “Your woman is very lovely. Different from our women. The white skin. The plump breasts. The pink nipples. Is she not the color of pomegranates when you love her?”

Mark ground his teeth at the comparison. Of course, she was.

“I would like to see her prepared in our fashion,” Ramon continued Hassan’s words. “So would my captains.”

“I forbid it.” Mark’s stomach turned over. Hassan meant to oil her, perfume her and denude her of all hair save that on her head. He would have her without any hair on her legs or under her arms, even in her nostrils. Most especially, he would order his women to massage her intimate folds with special creams to perfume her and shave off all her pubic hair. The better to inspect her. The faster to spread her out for himself or any he deemed worthy to partake of her. Mark saw only one way now to save her from Hassan’s possession. “She is mine. I will prove it to you.”

Hassan leaned forward in his chair and spread his mouth wide in anticipation. “How will you do that?” Ramon restated in English.

“Bring her here.” Prove to me she still lives. Untouched.

“Why do I not simply ask her?” Ramon pressed.

Mark arched a brow and smirked. “You know a woman does not speak of her experience with men. Is it not better to see the proof before your eyes?”

Hassan licked his lower lip, savoring the very idea. Then he spoke.

“This proof,” Ramon translated, “will be more than words.”

“Yes.”

“More than kisses.”

Mark swallowed against the outrage of what he had to do to save Sirena.

“This will be not merely for me but also for my captains to enjoy.”

Mark nodded in agreement, the urge to strangle Hassan a violent beast inside him. Why had he expected any less of Hassan? To save her from him was worth the price.

Hassan narrowed his gaze, analyzing his captive. “You were a wily man six years ago. I looked forward to enslaving you then, but your American diplomat had other ideas. Why should I trust you to tell me the truth now? I do not reign here with an idiot’s brain! So I must ask: Can this woman be worth the cost of your honor to display her for so many other men?”

“You will enjoy it,” Mark shot back with confidence.

Hassan threw back his head to chuckle. “I will! Such entertainments are rare for the English.”

“I am American. We do what we will to be free.” He prayed Sirena could say the same after what they would do here.

Ramon answered, “You are either mad or a fool, American.”

Mark ignored the jibe. “She will do as I say. You will enjoy it as you have no other woman in years. But I have my price.”

Hassan roared in laughter, clapped his hands in delight and uttered a few words. “You have no power to bargain.”

“If you wish to see the finest display of my woman’s fiery nature, you will honor my price.”

“Name it,” Ramon parroted his master.

“We will entertain you, my woman and I, for three nights. On the first night, you will outfit my ship for a journey of three weeks. Whatever you seized, you will compensate me for in gold and silver. Coin or like, I do not care.”

“You dream,” Ramon dared on his own, then told his master Mark’s demand.

Hassan stared at him, incredulous, but attentive.

“On the second morning, you will take me and my men to inspect the ship and allow my men to remain.”

“And on the final morning, what then?” Ramon asked for his master.

“You escort my woman and me to my ship and let us sail.”

“And if I do not?” Hassan challenged him. “What can you hope to do?”

“Never underestimate me.” I will do as I must to save us all from your hands. Even take our own lives, if it comes to that. “Inshallah,” Mark said the phrase that Muslims used to call on God’s will.

“Ba!” Hassan swept out a hand as if sweeping out the dirt. “Go, go!”

His two guards grabbed him up and hustled him from the presence of their leader.

Hassan’s fury rising to the stone buttresses, the pasha yelled at Mark as he was taken away.

Had he won or lost?

He could not tell as the corsairs shoved the butts of spears into his ribs, hurried down into the bowels of the palace and into a damp, dark cell to be thrown to the barren floor like so much refuse.

Shaking with cold, thirsty and hungry, then fevered in a delirium, he knew no one even suspected what had befallen the Water Witch, its captain, crew and siren.

Sirena had spent, by last count, six days in a world predominated by women. Lithe, young, lovely women. Guarded by giant, fleshy black men whose eyes slid to each other in some secret code of conduct that she suspected did include their sexual interest in the women. Sirena suspected her purpose here, though she longed to learn otherwise.

Reality killed her hopes. As a child in her nursery, Sirena had listened to stories read by her governess of a land filled with godless men who ruled the East with no regard for human life. As a young woman, she heard rumors of dissolute Ottoman pashas and their penchant for deflowering female sex slaves and keeping them behind locked walls. Those had always seemed like fables meant to embolden men to travel to exotic lands and to keep English women safely tucked away at home. While Sirena’s desire to see China or sail to Bombay had seemed more dream than possibility, she had never wished to become part of any man’s harem. And this gaggle of females imprisoned was most definitely that. What with the women who did little but eat, drink, bathe and admire themselves in numerous mirrors, Sirena assumed they were the mates of the ruler here. The presence of the men who served as guards confirmed it. And on the third day of her imprisonment, Sirena met a young Spanish woman, Valentina, who told her in broken English that the men were their jailers and to ensure the women’s purity and safety, each man had been castrated.

Sirena shuddered at the idea of such brutality done to one man by another. Yet, you will soon learn what atrocity these pirates have in store for you.

The manner of her days, however, did not presage any harm might come to her. Though she got no inkling of Mark or his men’s condition or whereabouts, she was treated like a precious gem. True, after the Barbaries had climbed aboard Mark’s Water Witch, they had seized her by the wrists, chained her and separated her from Mark and any of his sailors. None had manhandled her, although many had made snide suggestions she could not mistake in any language. But once off the corsairs’ galleon, she was put atop a camel and led through the teaming city up into a gleaming alabaster palace. Though she had asked in vain for the whereabouts of the Americans, she learned nothing in the high-walled sumptuously adorned seraglio except how to be pampered.

Each morning, Sirena was roused by an elderly maid, gnarled and wrinkled like a prune, but kindly. She’d follow her maid to a cool reception room. There, a tall, imperious older woman appeared who directed her to turn about, a doll on display. She complied. What else could she do but fume? At once, the woman led her to a large room, humid with fragrance of jasmine rising from a huge azure pool. Stripped naked by two young women, Sirena quivered in modesty and indignation. But once she was directed to step down into the soothing water, her body melted in the forgiving heat. Ordered up and out of the pool, she’d be led to yet another room, this time filled with oblong copper baths three times the size of any hipbath she’d ever seen at home. Commanded to submerge in one of those tubs, she sank, grateful once more for coverage of her person, until two different women appeared armed with soaps, towels and pumices. Scrubbed, rubbed and submerged time and again in this tub, finally she was told to rise, and without a stitch of clothes, she was told to follow her maids to yet one more room. Here, with other women on tables, stark naked as Sirena, she would lie down. For God knew how long, her body was examined, then massaged, oiled, her eyebrows plucked, her hair bathed and scented. Surrounded by dedicated servants who neither spoke nor looked her in the eye, she could not deter them from their goals, nor did she have the strength. In fact, she found herself astonished to submit to their gentle ministrations, primping her for a dreaded exhibition of the most lurid kind. Each morning, as the servants bathed her and refined her looks, she feared how she would be exposed. To whom? When? How? But as they probed into every crevice of her body, denuding her of hair, even to her most private parts which no one, save she, and Mark, had ever touched, she feared to know the answer.

Pampered more like a princess than a slave, she pondered her future each night in her own cozy private room, filled with fat feather pillows for her bed. She received pitchers of cool water, oranges, limes and lemons. Each day, she was fed a milky concoction, the consistency of pudding but tart, tasty with nuts and fat sultanas. Each morning, her nightshift of plain linen was taken away for the laundresses. Then she’d be given a garment that made her blush and gasp. Translucent pearl silk, the kaftan had a clasp of two jeweled frogs at the neck, huge sleeves flowing to her wrists, and a flowing drape to her toes.

Aghast at its suggestiveness, she knew at once its intention was to arouse and to titillate. Without any other item to cover her nakedness, she donned it, assuring herself that her appearance did not diminish her inner character. Nor did it represent her person. Only her condition.

Enslavement, she contemplated in those first few hours in the harem, was an astonishing condition for the daughter of a duke of the British Realm. She laughed bitterly at that first thought. Then sobered. She had left her rights and privileges as an aristocrat the minute she had left her home in London. Going to Dover, intent on building a new life for herself, perhaps even learning how Mark Stanhope cared for her, was a liberating stroke. That she was here, imprisoned, seemed a bitter irony.

Where was Mark? Dead? Tortured?

She caught back cries of outrage that that might be true. She had to learn where he was, how he was.

Her resolve bore fruit on the fourth day when her friend Valentina arrived in her room to share news.

“I hear the matron, there,” Valentina nodded to the older woman who was the mistress of the seraglio, “tell our Nubian eunuchs you will go before our pasha, Al Hassan.”

“When?” Her throat went dry as dust. Her stomach rolled in fear.

“After he decides what to do with your man.” Valentina’s cobalt blue eyes snapped as she spoke low to avoid detection. “Your body has been prepared for Hassan but—”

Sirena’s heart stopped. She grabbed Valentina’s hand. “What?”

“You may be given to any man he wishes.”

“As his concubine?” Sirena tried not to let her terror overcome her.

“Of course. It is why we all are here.” Her eyes circumscribed the room filled with lounging, laughing women who, it seemed, had come to terms with their servitude.

“How do you live with that?” Sirena asked, in indignation at such bondage.

“I have been taken up once to Hassan. He is impotent.”

“Thank God.”

“Do not think thus. He has other ways to make you arouse his flaccid member.”

“How so?”

“Have you ever put your mouth to a man’s tool?” Valentina put her hand to her own mons.

Sirena shook her head, her thoughts drifting to Mark and how she might gladly take him with her lips and tongue that way.

“Hassan likes that.” She waited until the masseuses passed them by with large bowls of steaming honey and creamy depilatories. “He also likes to see men take women from behind. Like animals.”

Serena’s eyes widened. “That’s appealing to men?”

The blue-eyed woman nodded. “It is forbidden, haraam, to take a woman in the ass. These pirates may say they follow the teachings of Mohammed, but they are part-Spanish and French, ex-patriots, criminals who know no law. They follow neither God nor man’s rules. Therefore, remember only one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Whatever you are asked to do? Do it and live another day.”

Sirena turned away, filled with desperation to see Mark, know he was safe and to escape this hideous existence. All the sumptuous foibles in the world could not fill the void of heartless existences without law or love.

The next morning, two bare-chested Nubians in multicolored loin cloths came to her alcove and led her through the winding corridors of the seraglio, out into a huge, brilliantly white courtyard, alive with the sounds of water tinkling in hundreds of fountains. Passing those, Sirena squinted in the sunlight as her two guards escorted her up a flight of broad tiled stairs and into a room bare of all furnishings, save for two wide beds in the center of the lushly carpeted floor. One bed was slightly smaller than the other, but nonetheless as richly appointed.

She paused to consider them.

Both beds were like no other Sirena had ever seen. A foot off the floor, each bed was covered in a vibrant silk. The smaller of the two sported a purple gauze covering. The larger was dressed in cherry silk and here, there and everywhere about that bed, stood pillows in all the colors of the rainbow. The pillows were covered in the same shimmering silks, adorned with contrasting tassels, beads and gewgaws. She knew what both beds were meant for.

Me. Making love to whom? Two men?

Her heart fluttered. Would she, could she, survive such an encounter? The shame? The torment? The betrayal of Mark, whom she loved more than life?

It was one thing to mate with the man she craved. Another to submit to a barbarian she did not know, could never care for.

The sounds of men’s voices grew in her ear. To her horror, side doors opened and in flowed white-robed men of all ages and sizes. Staring at them with growing panic, she watched them assemble in two rows on either side of the room. One hundred men, perhaps more.

Dear God.

Am I to service them all?

She flinched. Her Nubian guards seized her by the upper arms and walked her forward to the first bed.

Sirena’s mind blanked. Her mouth opened in a silent plea. Let me leave now or let me die. I can not do this. Not even to live.