Undercover Sultan

“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.