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CONTENTS
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
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
SHEIKH ZAGEO bin Sultan Al Farrahn was not amused. Not only had there been criminal trespassing in the walled grounds of this family property—his mother’s pleasure palace on the legendary spice island of Zanzibar—but also criminal use of the private harbour by a drug-running French yachtsman who was actually offering him a woman to warm his bed in exchange for letting him go.
Did the sleazy low-life think he was speaking to the kind of man who’d indulge in indiscriminate sex?
‘She’s very special,’ the drug-dealer pleaded with all the oiliness of a practised pimp. ‘A genuine strawberry-blonde. Hair like rippling silk, falling to the pit of her back. Beautiful, bright, blue eyes. Lush breasts…’ His hands shaped an hourglass figure. ‘Fantastic legs, long and…’
‘A virgin, as well?’ Zageo cut in mockingly, despising the man for thinking he could trade his whore for his own freedom, for thinking the trade could even be an acceptable possibility.
‘Completely untouched,’ Jacques Arnault instantly replied, a consummate liar, not so much as a flicker of an eyelash nor the twitch of a facial muscle to betray any unease with the question, despite the impossibility of there being anything virginal about a woman who had to be his partner in crime.
‘And where is this precious pearl?’ Zageo drawled, barely holding back his contempt for a man who was prepared to sell flesh to save his own skin.
‘On my yacht. If you get your security people—’ he glanced nervously at the guards who’d caught him ‘—to take me out to it, they can fetch her back to you.’
While he silently sailed away in one hell of a hurry!
Zageo gave him a blast of scepticism. ‘On your yacht? You’ve managed to sail from the Red Sea, down half the east coast of Africa to this island, without being tempted to touch this fabulous jewel of femininity?’
The Frenchman shrugged. ‘Stupid to spoil top merchandise.’
‘And where did you get this top merchandise?’
‘Picked her up from one of the resorts where she was working with a dive team. She agreed to help crew the yacht for free passage to Zanzibar.’ His mouth curved into a cynical smile. ‘A drifting traveller who could go missing indefinitely.’
‘A fool to trust you with her life.’
‘Women are fools. Particularly those with an innocent turn of mind.’
Zageo arched a challenging eyebrow. ‘You take me for a fool, as well?’
‘I’m being completely straight with you,’ came the swift and strongly assertive assurance. ‘You can have her. No problems.’ His gaze flicked around the lavishly rich and exotic Versace furnishings in the huge central atrium which had always served as the most public reception area. ‘With all you have to offer, I doubt you’d even have to force her. Unless you enjoy force, of course,’ he quickly added on second thoughts.
Anger burned. ‘You are breaking another law, monsieur. The slave trade was abolished in Zanzibar over a century ago.’
‘But a man of your standing and influence…who’s to question what you do with a woman no one knows? Even if she runs away from you…’
‘Enough!’ Zageo gestured to his security guards. ‘Put him in a holding room. Have his yacht searched for a woman. If there is one onboard, bring her to me.’
Arnault looked alarmed as two of the guards flanked him to escort him elsewhere. He spoke quickly in anxious protest. ‘You’ll see. She’s everything I said she is. Once you’re satisfied…’
‘Oh, I will be satisfied, monsieur, one way or another,’ Zageo silkily assured him, waving his men to proceed with the execution of his orders.
Zageo doubted the woman existed, certainly not with all the attributes ascribed to her by Jacques Arnault. He suspected the Frenchman had been dangling what he thought would be a tempting sexual fantasy in the hope of getting back to his yacht and somehow ditching the men escorting him. Even though the security guards carried guns, a surprise attack might have won him time to escape.
However, if there was a female accomplice, she had to be brought in and handed over to the appropriate authorities. While she might not have been actively involved in drug-dealing, there was no way she couldn’t know about it and would surely be able to supply useful information.
He relaxed back on the thronelike sofa, reached over the elaborately rolled armrest to pick up the mango cocktail he’d previously set down on the entwined monkeys table, and sipped the refreshing drink slowly as the anger stirred by the Frenchman’s attempt to use sexual currency turned onto Veronique, who had declined the invitation to accompany him on this trip.
‘Your mind will be on business, cheri,’ she had prettily complained. ‘It will not be fun.’
Was the amount of fun to be had the measure of their relationship? His three-month tour of checking the hotel chain he’d established throughout Africa could not be called a hardship on anyone’s agenda—luxurious resorts in exotic locations. How much fun did she need to feel happy and satisfied?
He understood that for the much-in-demand French-Morrocan model, pleasure was inextricably linked with exciting leisure and being taken shopping. He understood that what he provided in this context was the trade-off for having her as his mistress. He had not understood that Veronique was only prepared to give him her company on her own totally self-indulgent terms.
Intolerable!
He had indulged her far too much. It wasn’t enough recompense that the sex was good. It wasn’t enough that Veronique was invariably a splendid ornament on his arm, superbly dressed to complement her dark-skinned exotic beauty. He found it deeply insulting that she had so little respect for his wishes.
His father was right. It was time he ended this too long fascination with women of different cultures and found one of his own kind to marry. He was thirty-five years old and should be thinking of settling down, having a family. He would cut his connection with Veronique and start considering more suitable candidates for a lifelong commitment—well-educated women from other powerful families in Dubai, women whose background ensured they would share his life, not just his bed and his spending power.
None of them would have strawberry-blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin, but such factors were hardly prime requirements for marriage. They weren’t even factors to inspire a lustful dalliance. Right now the idea of trading in sex was particularly abhorrent, and Zageo found himself actually relishing the opportunity to hammer this home to Jacques Arnault’s female yachting companion.
He hoped she did exist.
He hoped his men would find her on board the illicit yacht in the private harbour that served this private palace.
He hoped she actually measured up to the Frenchman’s selling spiel.
It would give him considerable satisfaction to demonstrate that regardless of how attractive her physical assets were, they were worth nothing to him.
Absolutely nothing!
CHAPTER TWO
‘I WILL get out of this! I will!’ Emily Ross kept reciting as she struggled through the mangrove swamp.
These mutterings of fierce determination were interspersed with bursts of self-castigation. ‘What a fool I’ve been! A gullible idiot to be taken in by Jacques. I should have just paid the money to fly here. No hassle about arriving in time. All safe and sound…’
Talking blocked out the fear of having made another wrong step, of putting her life in hopeless hazard this time. Yet reason insisted that the Frenchman could not have been trusted to keep his word about anything. The only sure way of staying in Zanzibar and getting to Stone Town to meet Hannah was to jump ship while Jacques was still off in his dinghy doing his drug-running.
So, okay…she’d done the swim from the yacht to shore, dragging all her essentials in a waterproof bag behind her. No shark or fish had attacked. Her feet had not been cut to ribbons by shells or coral or sharp rocks. Now she just had to find her way out of the mangrove swamp that seemed to cover the peninsula she’d swum to.
‘It’s not going to beat me. I will get out of it.’
And she did, finally emerging from the mud and tangled tree roots onto a wide mound of firmer ground which turned out to be an embankment above a small creek. More water! But beyond it was definitely proof of civilisation—what looked like the well kept grounds of some big property. No more swamp. The worst was over.
Emily’s legs shook from sheer exhaustion. Now, with the fear of being swallowed up by the swamp receding and much easier travelling in sight, she felt like collapsing on the bank and weeping with relief at having made it this far. Nevertheless, the need to cling to some self-control persisted. She might be out of the woods but this was still far from the end of her journey.
She sat herself down on the bank and did some deep breathing, hoping to lessen the load of stress—the huge mental, emotional and physical stress attached to her decision not to cling to the relative safety of Jacques Arnault’s yacht, not to remain captive to any further devious plan he might make.
Free…
The thought gathered its own momentum, finding a burst of positive achievement.
Free of him. Free of the swamp. Free to go where I want in my own time.
It helped calm her enough to get on with assessing her current position. A high stone wall ran back into distant darkness on the other side of the creek. It gave rise to the hope it might lead to a public road.
‘If nothing else, it should give me cover until I’m right away from Jacques and his dirty business,’ she muttered, trying to whip up the energy to move again.
Through sheer force of will, Emily drove her mind into forward planning as she heaved herself onto her feet and trudged along the bank of the creek until the stone wall was directly opposite her. Once across this last body of water, she could clean herself up and dress respectably in the skirt and T-shirt she’d placed at the top of the waterproof bag. Wearing a bikini at this time of night was hardly appropriate for meeting local people and sooner or later she had to confront someone in order to ask directions to Stone Town.
Waist-deep in water and hating every second of wading through it, Emily was concentrating on her footing when a commanding voice rang out.
‘Arretez!’
The French verb to stop certainly stopped her!
She almost tripped in sheer shock.
Her heart jerked into a fearful hammering as her gaze whipped up to fix on two men pointing highly menacing rifles at her. They wore white shirts and trousers with black gun-belts, giving them more the appearance of official policemen than drug-running gangsters, but Emily wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. If they’d caught Jacques and were connecting her to his criminal activities—which the use of French language suggested—she might end up in prison.
One of the men clapped a small mobile telephone to his ear and spoke at speed in what sounded like Arabic. The other motioned her to continue moving to their side of the creek bank. Having a rifle waved at her did not incline Emily towards disobedience. She could only hope these people were representatives of the law on this island and that the law would be reasonable in listening to her.
A giant fig tree on her left had obviously provided an effective hiding place for them to watch for her emergence from the mangroves. She wondered if other patrols were out looking for her. Certainly her appearance was being reported to someone. As she scrambled up their side of the creek bank, one of the men came forward and snatched the waterproof bag out of her grasp.
‘Now hold on a moment! I’ve got my life in there!’ Emily cried in panicky protest.
Having her passport, money and clothes taken from her was a very scary situation. Thinking the men might believe the bag contained contraband, she tried persuading them to check its contents.
‘Look for yourself.’ Her hands flew out in a gesture of open-palmed innocence. ‘It’s just personal stuff.’
No response. The men completely ignored her frantic attempt to communicate with them both in English and in her very limited tourist French. She was grabbed at the elbows and briskly marched across quite an expanse of mown grass to a path which eventually led to a massive three-storey white building.
At least it didn’t look like a prison, Emily thought, desperately trying to calm her wildly leaping apprehension. The many columned verandahs on each level, with their elaborate wrought-iron lace balustrades, gave the impression of British colonial architecture serving some important government purpose.
Maybe a courthouse?
But why on earth would Jacques do his drug-running right under the nose of legal officialdom?
Could it be terribly corrupt officialdom?
This thought frayed her strung-out nerves even further. She was a lone foreign woman, scantily dressed, and her only tool of protection was her passport which she no longer had in her possession. It took all her willpower not to give way to absolute panic when she was escorted up the steps to the front verandah and was faced with horribly intimidating entrance doors.
These were about four metres high, ominously black, intricately carved around the edges, and featuring rows of big pointed brass studs. They were definitely the kind of doors that would deter anyone from gate-crashing a party. As they were slowly swung open Emily instinctively decided that a bowed head and downcast eyes might get her into less trouble in this place.
The first sight she had of the huge foyer was of a gorgeous Tree of Life Persian rug dominating a dark wooden floor. As she was forced forward onto this carpet her side vision picked up the kind of splendid urns one might see in an art museum, which suggested this could be a safe environment.
A burst of hope prodded her into lifting her gaze to check out where she was being taken. Her mind absolutely boggled at the scene rolling out in vivid Technicolor right in front of her. She was being led straight towards a huge central atrium, richly and exotically furnished in the style of a palatial reception area.
A walkway to the rest of the rooms on the ground floor surrounded the two-steps-down sunken floor of this incredible area, which was also overlooked by the balconies which ran around the second and third floors. Above it was a domed roof and from the circumference of the dome hung fantastic chandeliers of multicoloured glass that cascaded down in wonderful shapes and sizes.
As amazing as all this was, Emily’s gaze almost instantly zeroed in on the man who was certainly the focal centrepiece of this totally decadent and fabulous luxury. He rose with majestic dignity from a thronelike sofa which was upholstered in red and gold. His clothes—a long white undertunic and a sleeveless over-robe in royal purple edged in gold braid—seemed to embrace Arabian culture but he didn’t look like an Arab, more aristocratic Spanish. What wasn’t in any doubt was that Emily was faced with the most stunningly beautiful man she had ever seen in her life.
Beautiful…
Strange word to apply to a man yet handsome somehow wasn’t enough. The cast of his features was perfectly boned and balanced as though he was the creation of a mastor sculptor. A thick mane of straight black hair was swept back from his forehead, falling in shaggy layers to below his ears but not to shoulder-length. It was a bold and dramatic frame for a face that comprised brows which kicked up at a wicked angle, lending an emphatic effect to riveting dark eyes; a classically straight nose ending in a flare of nostrils that suggested a passionate temperament; a mouth whose upper lip was rather thin and sharply delineated while the lower lip was full and sensual.
The man fascinated, mesmerised, and although she thought of him as beautiful, there was an innate arrogant maleness to him that kicked a stream of primal fear through her highly agitated bloodstream. He was fabulous but also very foreign, and he was unmistakably assessing her female assets as he strolled forward, apparently for a closer examination.
Because he was at a lower floor level, Emily had the weird sense of catapulting back in time to the days when Zanzibar was the largest slave trading centre of the world, with herself being held captive on a platform for the buyers’ appraisal.
He lifted a hand to seemingly flick a hair back from his forehead as he spoke in Arabic to one of the guards holding her. The scarf she’d tied around her head was suddenly snatched away, the rough movement dislodging the pins which had kept her hair in a twisted coil around her crown. The sheer weight of the untethered mass brought it tumbling down, spilling over her shoulders and down her back.
‘Hey!’ Emily cried in frightened protest, her imagination rioting towards being stripped of her bikini, as well. She was suddenly feeling extremely vulnerable, terrified of what his next command might be.
A burst of fluent French came from the Spaniard/Arab. It was accompanied by a cynical flash of his eyes and finished with a sardonic curl of his mouth. While Emily had picked up a smattering of quite a few languages on her travels, she was not up to comprehending this rush of foreign words and she didn’t care for the expression that went with them, either.
‘Look, I’m not French. Okay?’ she pleaded. ‘Any chance you speak English?’
‘So—’ one black eyebrow lifted in sceptical challenge ‘—you are English?’
‘Well, no actually. I’m Australian. My name is Emily Ross.’ She nodded to the waterproof bag still being held by one of her guards. ‘My passport will prove…’
‘Nothing of pertinent interest, madamoiselle,’ he cut in drily.
Emily took a deep breath, pulling her wits together enough to address the real situation here. ‘Then may I ask what is of pertinent interest to you, monsieur?’
He made an oddly graceful gesture suggesting a rather careless bit of interest he was just as happy to dismiss. ‘Jacques Arnault gave a description of you which I find surprisingly accurate.’ He spoke in a slow drawl, laced with irony, his eyes definitely mocking as he added, ‘This has piqued my curiosity enough to inquire if he spoke more truth than I anticipated.’
‘What did he claim?’ Emily asked, her teeth clenching as she anticipated hearing a string of lies.
‘That you are a virgin.’
A virgin!
Emily shut her eyes as her mind exploded with the shocking implications behind her promised virginity.
It could mean only one thing.
Jacques Arnault…who couldn’t lie straight in bed at night even if he tried, the consummate con artist who’d tricked her into crewing on his yacht, the sneaky drug-runner who had no conscience about anything, whose mind was completely bent on doing whatever served his best interests…had obviously come up with a deal to save his own skin.
She was to be traded off as a sex slave!
‘No!’ she almost spat in fierce indignation, her eyes flying open to glare at the prospective buyer. ‘Absolutely not!’
‘I did not believe it,’ he said with a dismissive shrug, the tone of his voice a very cold contrast to her heat. ‘Since the evidence points to your being a professional belly-dancer, I’m sure you’ve had many patrons.’
‘A professional belly-dancer?’ Emily’s voice climbed incredulously at this further off-the-wall claim.
He gave her an impatient look. ‘Your costumes were found onboard Arnault’s yacht, along with the other luggage you abandoned in fleeing from being associated with the Frenchman’s criminal activities. Avoiding capture.’
Capture!
So Jacques had definitely been nabbed doing his drug-dealing, and his yacht subsequently searched, leading this man to think she’d twigged that the game was up and had taken to the water to escape being caught up in the mess.
‘I was not fleeing from capture tonight, monsieur. I was fleeing from being a captive on that boat since it set sail from the Red Sea.’
‘Jacques Arnault was holding you against your will?’
‘Yes. And any belly-dancing costumes your search turned up do not belong to me, I assure you,’ she stated heatedly, resenting the implied tag of being a professional whore, as well.
The heat in her voice slid right down her entire body as he observed in mocking detail every curve of her femininity; the voluptuous fullness of her breasts, the smallness of her waist, the broad sweep of her hips, the smooth flow and shape of her thighs, calves, ankles…
‘Your physique suggests otherwise, Miss Ross,’ he commented very dryly.
Emily burned. Her arms, released by the guards who were still flanking her, flew up to fold themselves protectively across her chest. Her chin lifted in belligerent pride as she stated, ‘I’m a professional diving instructor. I have a certificate to prove it amongst my papers in the bag your men took from me.’
Her inquisitor smiled, showing a flash of very white teeth, but something about that smile told Emily he was relishing the prospect of tearing her into tasty morsels and chewing on them. ‘It’s my experience that people can be many things,’ he remarked with taunting ease.
‘Yes. Well, you’re not wrong about that,’ she snapped. ‘Jacques Arnault is a prime example. And I think it’s time you told me who you are and what right you have to detain me like this.’
Emily was steaming with the need to challenge him, having been put so much on the spot herself. The idea of bowed head and downcast eyes was long gone. She kept a very direct gaze on his, refusing to back down from her demands.
‘You were caught trespassing on property that belongs to my family and you are closely linked to a man who was engaged in criminal activity on this same property,’ he clipped out as though her complaint was completely untenable—a total waste of time and breath.
‘You have no evidence that I was engaged in criminal activity,’ Emily swiftly defended.
He rolled his eyes derisively.
‘I swear to you I wasn’t,’ she insisted. ‘In fact, the costumes you found probably belong to the woman who posed as Jacques Arnault’s wife when I was tricked into becoming the only crew member on his yacht.’
‘Tricked, Miss Ross?’
‘I needed to get to Zanzibar. Jacques said he was sailing for Madagascar and would drop me off here if I helped…’
‘With his drug-running?’
‘No. With sailing the yacht,’ she cried in exasperation. ‘I didn’t know about the drug angle until after I woke up onboard and at sea, having been drugged myself.’
‘So…’He paused, his expression one of weighing up her account of the situation. He lifted a hand to stroke his chin as though in thoughtful consideration. But there was something simmering in his eyes that sent a warning tingle through Emily’s taut nerves as he concluded, ‘…you claim to be an innocent victim.’
‘I am an innocent victim,’ Emily pounced, swiftly asserting, ‘The deal was for me to be company for his wife as well as being another crew-member for the duration of the trip.’
One wickedly derisive eyebrow arched. ‘Where is the wife?’
Emily heaved a fretful sigh. Probably her story did sound unbelievable but it was the truth. She had nothing else to offer. ‘I don’t know. She was gone when I woke up the morning after I’d gone onboard.’