Undercover Sultan

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.