Selected praise for award-winning author

JINA BACARR

THE BLONDE GEISHA

“An astounding, wonderful debut novel from Jina Bacarr,

an author not to be missed!”

—The Mystic Castle

“Erotic romance fans should be prepared for lots of teasing.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A highly sensual coming-of-age story that, when read,

one should focus on Bacarr’s gift of writing.”

—Romance Reader at Heart

“Ms. Bacarr’s voice is like a songbird; many will fall under

its sensuous currents…[a] remarkable book.”

—A Romance Review

“The Blonde Geisha had me spellbound… Ms. Bacarr pens a rare work of art…an extraordinary tale.”

—Coffee Time Romance

NAUGHTY PARIS

“Rich in historical detail and dialogue, sizzling with sexual energy…

a lush and sensual novel of one woman coming into her own.”

—Erotica Romance Writers

“Ms. Bacarr once again demonstrates her talent of erotic pencrafting

that is not only titillating, but wantonly different. With a voice so

naturally sensual, Ms. Bacarr is in a class of her own. It is decadence,

superbly delivered, fresh and highly creative.”

—ParaNormal Romance

“Naughty Paris is a read that I will not soon forget… I love the touch of magic instilled in this great read.”

—The Romance Studio

“A humorous, erotic tale…a beautifully written love story…[it] will

make readers believe in love in all its major transformations.”

—Romance Junkies

“This book is fantastic! It is erotica combined with a hint of

paranormal time travel, featuring sex scenes that will run away

with your imagination. Bacarr is brilliant as she masterminds

a true tale of sexual exploration.”

—Romance Reader at Heart

“Naughty Paris is a fascinating journey…a magnificent view into a time and place that many can only imagine…breathtaking!”

—Coffee Time Romance

SPIES, LIES & NAKED THIGHS

“The talented Bacarr delivers another strikingly original, fast-paced

romp highlighted by a smoking-hot hero and a sassy heroine.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“Filled with action, [this] is a fun chick-lit thriller with a touch of

romance to add spice to a fun tale of intrigue.”

—Harriet Klausner

Cleopatra’s Perfume
An Erotic Novel
Jina Bacarr

www.spice-books.co.uk

For my husband, Len, who took the journey with me.

And never looked back.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

War is hell. Ask anyone on the front lines. The fighting, the bombing, the killing. But there was another kind of war fought during World War II. A war behind the scenes in elegant hotels, loud cabarets and dark alleys. Brave men and women standing up to Hitler’s war machine and giving everything they had to keep the world free.

A few years ago I found myself in the Latin Quarter in Paris on a cold winter night, the chilly wind whipping my coat around me, footsteps behind me seemingly coming out of nowhere. I looked up and saw a plaque on the wall of a building proclaiming that on this spot two French Resistance fighters lost their lives fighting against the Nazis in 1942. I shivered, their presence very real to me. As if it was their footsteps I heard and they still guarded this spot. I knew then in my heart I wanted to tell a story about the intrigue of that war and the lives that were changed forever.

I became fascinated with the men and women who dared to take on the dangerous job of working for the underground. I pored through first-person accounts, letters, newspapers, magazines, history books and newsreels of spies, Resistance fighters, downed pilots and ordinary people who gave up everything they held most dear to fight against the Nazi invasion. I thank them for their sacrifice and dedication to freedom.

I also wish to acknowledge the tireless efforts of my editor, Susan Swinwood, who gives me the freedom to explore my worlds and who guides me with her expertise. And finally, I wish to thank my wonderful agent, Roberta Brown, a classy lady in any era and my dear friend, for her encouragement and for staying the course with me.

1

A secluded lake outside Berlin

April 29, 1941

Blondes always did get him in trouble. This one could get him killed. Tall, statuesque, with big breasts and a seductive walk that communicated with the world in a way he’d never seen. Slow and easy, with just enough wiggle to let him know she was all woman.

This blonde also had a sharp-nosed Nazi squeezing the soft flesh of her arm in a tight grip.

“Strip her!” the German officer yelled, pushing the woman toward him.

“I don’t assault women.” Even if she is a fraud and a liar, he finished silently. A strange, hot light burned in the SS officer’s eyes, sending a driving itch up his backside. He stood his ground, his legs spread apart, his hands on his hips, though he longed to overpower the man.

“I said, strip her. Now!” The sun-bleached blond Nazi cracked his whip so close to his skin it scorched the hairs on the back of his neck with heat. He swallowed, choking on his own saliva, a rotten taste in his mouth turning his stomach but not his courage. No doubt the German fueled his obsession with power with cruel, lascivious acts, setting up a bitter rivalry between the two of them, but why? And who would win?

“Since you’re so reluctant to do what the Nazi officer asks,” she said, her voice calm and precise, “I’ll show you how to undress a woman.”

She unfastened the ornate buttons on her dress then slid her fingers across them as if wiping off the sticky sweat. Then she wiggled out of the blue silk garment, kicked off her Sunday-white pumps and removed her sheer silk stockings and garters. Underneath she wore nothing but a nude-colored slip. Her breathing ragged, her eyes squinting against an approving sun overhead, she waited for him to say something.

“You want me to fuck you,” he said, disbelieving.

“Yes.”

“Then why this silly game?”

She smiled. “It makes it more interesting.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You’re crazy if you don’t take advantage of the situation.”

“I don’t get it. After what happened in Cairo when I—”

“That’s in the past.” Her eyes warned him not to say anything more, though her lips invited his touch when she moistened them with her tongue. He reached out to grab her, but before he could wrap his hands around her waist, she raced over to the edge of the lake and climbed up on a large granite rock.

Poised on the edge like a mermaid, the platinum beauty wiggled her firm breasts and smiled, coy, teasing, as if she were about to divulge to him a hidden entry into her. He smiled. Soft and wet and smelling of the salty sea, he had no doubt he would fuck her before this strange scenario came to an end.

She stretched her arms over her head as if reaching up to rip through the dark clouds of war overhead. He was in too deep now to retreat, escape. Only by the whim of a forgotten water nymph had peace survived in this tranquil setting. But not for long.

A flash of red sparked from the huge ruby and pearl ring she wore on her forefinger, guiding his eye in his appraisal of her, up and down, in and around every curve, as if she were already nude. The slip fit so tightly around her body he swore it was a second skin.

“I must warn you,” cooed the audacious, powder-white blonde, pushing down a thin strap over her pure ivory shoulder. “Contrary to what the Nazi believes, I’ve never met a man who could satisfy me.”

“I remember the first time I heard you say those words. I proved you wrong then and I’ll prove you wrong now.”

“Will you?”

The other strap came down next, her gesture deliberate and slow, gauged to make him sweat. Tempting him like an odalisque, but every inch a female with her own mind, she pushed her breasts together to emphasize her ample cleavage. He went numb, his emotions shaken, knowing what he did about her. How she used men to satisfy her lust.

Anger rushed through his veins like quicksilver, the foul taste of her perversities lingering on his lips, but he remained silent. Instead, he let out a low whistle, making her smile. Without so much as a hint of embarrassment at the boldness of her statement or her actions, she went one step further with her challenge.

“Many men have tried to tame my hunger, including you…” She paused, the faint memory of a hot night in a smoky nightclub sparking both their imaginations, then it was gone. “But none have succeeded.”

“I don’t get it. What the hell kind of game are you playing?” He pulled in his breath, then before he could reach out and grab her she slid off the rock with the grace of a mythical water creature and, as if by fairy-tale magic, stood before him on two beautiful bare legs. She turned around, her back facing him.

“Would you mind?” she said, her voice hot and breathy. A long, delicate zipper snaked up and down her spine, tempting him. She’d issued him a challenge, knowing he couldn’t resist taking her up on it. The thought of bringing the blonde to her knees had obsessed him since the moment he saw her in Cairo two years ago. A beauty with a cold heart, he knew, and he hated her for it. She proved it to him again when they met up in London a few weeks ago. He shivered, a cool breeze rising off the lake. He remembered they weren’t alone. A pair of flickering silver-blue eyes, cold and hungry, watched everything they did, no matter how intimate. And waited.

“My pleasure,” he said, drawing down the finely sewn zipper in one pull. “And yours.”

She turned around and moved in a manner he could only describe as a shimmy. Down came the slip, sliding over her breasts then down around her hips and off, forming a satin puddle of expensive femininity at her feet. She stood tall, though she was barefoot, with shapely legs he ached to wrap around his waist. She stepped out of the slip and posed for him. Hands on her hips, legs crossed, one foot in front of the other, she pointed her right toe and dug it into the soft brownish-colored sand at the base of the rock as if drawing a line and daring him to come closer.

He held in his breath. She was nude. Big, beautiful breasts curved and round. Large nipples, pointy and brown. Slim hips, flat stomach. She tilted her head toward him in a coy manner, something she did often, he remembered, and gave him a look that said his reaction pleased her. That look aroused him more, heightened his desire in a manner he’d never experienced. He always thought of sexual desire as a summer storm, created by combustible changes in the atmosphere, and just as unpredictable.

Not this time. She could make a man stay hard. With her long wavy hair curling over the curve of her shoulder, the blonde had a seductive way of carrying herself, her gestures light and graceful, like the girls he’d seen strutting across the stage. Saucy, nude, except for the fan-blown feathers covering their breasts and buttocks, they ignited a man’s desire for the forbidden, though the woman they desired existed only in front of stage lights and soft halos.

This girl wiggled her shoulders toward him in a similar manner, and he swore a luminous essence sparkled off her pale skin, making him squint, as if an invisible spotlight popped on and made her center stage.

He prepared himself for a leisurely pursuit of his female prey. So what if they were standing next to a lake under the watchful eye of the SS? Dark woods surrounded them, no one to disturb their elaborate game of sex and deceit. The secluded area had once served as a naturist camp in the days of the Weimar Republic, before the Brownshirts and swastikas put an end to all the fun.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders. Again the huge ring on her forefinger caught his eye, reminding him of that night in Cairo, making him wonder about the poor bastard who gave it to her. He never did find out. Acting on hot-blooded impulse, indulging his hunger, had he succumbed to her challenge, only to fail? Then putting the blame for his failure on her? Did she drive all men to ruin?

Or just him?

A chance meeting had led him here. Slouched in a chair, trying to evade capture, he’d recognized her coming down the elegant stairway at the main entrance at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. When he confronted her about their liaison, she claimed to be American. Mistaken identity, she insisted and left. She had no idea he was in danger of being picked up by the Gestapo, tortured, killed. Would it have mattered to her? He doubted it. Later, he found her drinking in the bar with the SS officer. When he confronted her again, she covered herself by convincing the German he was her American lover and she must get him out of Berlin before her fiancé arrived from Stockholm and discovered her indiscretion.

Why not go to the American embassy on Pariser Platz? the SS officer wanted to know.

He can’t return to the States, she insisted, pushing out her breasts straining against the buttons on her formfitting blue silk dress. She bent over to straighten her seams, exposing a tight derriere, and explained to the Nazi it was a matter of a murder rap on his head. The SS officer turned and looked him up and down, a curious smile curving over full, pale lips. He almost believed the Nazi seemed more interested in him, but it must have been his imagination. What mattered to the German was that from what she told him her fiancé had ties to the iron-ore industry and his reputation must be protected for the sake of the Reich. Yes, he could be persuaded to use his influence as an officer from the Foreign Office to secure an exit visa for him from the Argentinean embassy if the American woman was willing to play his game.

American? She was a British subject. Why the masquerade?

Chuck Dawn knew her to be an Englishwoman with a title, a cold, calculating creature who took as many lovers as her sexual appetite could handle. All she knew about him was that he was an American flier who hated her guts. It hadn’t always been that way. She couldn’t wait to fall into his arms, naked and wanting, when he saw her in that club of supplicants hidden on a backstreet in Cairo. But all that changed when he’d been accused of the heinous crime of murder. He did it to save her, but the police didn’t see it that way. Now his own life was in jeopardy. Though his better judgment warned him to put aside his personal vendetta and get the hell out of Berlin before the Gestapo found him, he didn’t. He wanted to know more about her, and if he dared admit it, he wanted her. Again.

So he had agreed to her game. An exit visa for an afternoon of sex. The perfect way out and right under the nose of the Abwehr, German intelligence. Before he knew it, he was on his way to a secret nudist retreat nestled among the many lakes outside Berlin. Surrounded by forests, the idyllic lakeside beach with grass growing out of the water was difficult to find. Earlier they’d driven down the dirt road behind the post office of a nameless village, all the windows open, dust blowing in their faces, then they turned right at an outdoor fruit stand before the official black Mercedes with the Gestapo license plate passed under a bridge then through a barbwire fence. The SS officer ordered them out of the car and their clothes. The Nazi insisted Chuck was lucky he was so agreeable to such a diversion. Many people trying to get out of Berlin ended up in Gestapo headquarters. Not a pleasant place if one had something to hide.

Chuck examined his own motives. He must have been insane to allow his emotions to get in the way and now the charade had gone too far. Convincing the SS officer they were lovers in need of an exit visa was a daring plan and put both their lives in jeopardy. Yet his instincts told him this would turn into a suicide mission if he didn’t make love to her. His own personal philosophy had been shaken by her willingness to make them vulnerable by initiating the sex act, but he had little choice. Give up now and they’d both be shot.

Chuck needed more than luck to get him out of the situation. Though he knew her curvy fish-fin silhouette was only a shiny illusion in the hot afternoon sun, he stood imprisoned by his own fantasy, unable to move. Though she had professed to the Nazi to be indifferent to her physical needs, she was as hungry for sex as he was and just as obsessed by a driving fever to dissolve the gnawing ache that resided within her.

Edging closer toward her, he could smell her. Profound and unusual, musky, her familiar perfume affected his senses, making his head spin, as if he was impelled by a need to get lost in her sensual net from which no man escaped. Her scent was spicy and sweet and threatened to draw him deeper into her mysterious game. Was she but a mirage, an elusive creature who would escape before he could fuse both his desire and fantasy into one hell of a fuck?

An impossible illusion to hold on to, woman, elusive and at the same time wanton, moist, wet, hungry.

He anticipated the warmth of her body pressing against his, nuzzling his nose and lips into her soft platinum hair as he breathed her scent. Kissing her ear, then down to her neck, whispering explicit descriptions of what he was going to do to her, his fingers inside her increasing her wetness, her body hot and fragrant, then withdrawing his fingers and showing her the glistening juices coating them. Then he’d twist his fingers so they sparkled in the peach-golden sun before he placed them between her dry red lips then his own so they could both taste her essence.

Then, before she could lick the juices off her lips, he’d be inside her, satisfying her every desire with each thrust, pleasuring her until she burned for him, begged for him, her jaws locked, her sweat coating her nakedness with an icy crawl. When she cried out for him to stop, he wouldn’t. He’d make her pay for what she did to him. A tightness formed in his chest. Why did that bother him? Tear at his insides and drag from him a fragile part of his manhood he showed to no woman, swore he never would, yet she had exposed him for what he was?

A desperate man.

She’d ripped the peace and security from his life with one word, not knowing he was ready to sacrifice his personal needs and wants to go to war, to die if he had to, and it was that unsettling way she had of understanding him without knowing him, how since he was a kid his courage came from risking death, not living life, that made him want to grab her and fuck her so hard she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t take from any other man what she’d taken from him.

One word, that’s all she said, but it sent him into a spiraling hell. He’d escaped once. He’d do it again. For now, he ignored the ranting of his poet’s soul, concentrating instead on the brilliant ruby nestled between two large iridescent pearls. He couldn’t stop thinking about how it resembled a woman’s wet pinkness hugged by throbbing pussy lips.

She must have sensed his prurient thoughts because she pushed her lower body into his groin, making him uncomfortable. His erection strained against his pants, eliciting a moan from his lips. He didn’t protest when she stood on her tiptoes, making her breasts jut out and brush against him. He removed his jacket then unbuttoned his shirt, though he spent so much time staring at her naked body, he missed the last two buttons. Coming to his rescue, she pushed her breasts against his chest, then reached over and pulled down his zipper.

“Returning the favor,” she murmured, then she unsnapped his boxers and slid a hand along each hip, making him harder, if that was possible. He couldn’t believe this female had his pants down, then his shorts, her hands exploring him like he was a prime bull. Isn’t that what the Nazi had ordered? Play the game of seduction or they’d find themselves answering questions down at Gestapo headquarters?

Before he could stop her, she bent down and ran her slender fingers along his legs and untied his shoes. Her lips brushed his erection, and was that her tongue stinging his cock with a fleeting kiss of fire?

Pulverized into action, he shed his shirt and tie, though his eyes didn’t leave her magnificent body. Not young, over thirty, but well cared for and pampered, befitting her noble station in life, though she professed to be American. Yet he had no doubt their lives depended on his sexual performance. Not more than fifteen feet from where they stripped off each other’s clothes, the SS officer awaited his turn.

He couldn’t wait, his pants pushed down around his ankles with the beautiful woman trying to take his shoes off.

“Our audience is getting restless,” he said, nodding toward the Nazi sitting atop a large boulder and cracking his whip against the granite. Massive chest, striking blond hair cut military short, bulging arms, massive thighs, the sometime personal bodyguard to Hitler observed their sexual antics with a loud, sadistic growl. Striding around in his high boots, the black-and-silver honor ring on his left hand sparking off the naked sun behind him, swinging his whip, he made it clear what he wanted them to do. Fuck. Hard and loud, while he watched. He loosened the collar on his black uniform, but the whip crackled at his side as he struck the ground with the well-used black leather.

Chuck reached down, took her by the shoulders and pulled her up off her knees. She wiggled her hips then put her foot between his legs and stepped on his pants. Without missing a beat, she pushed her knee between his legs and wrapped her arms around him.

“Let’s give him what he wants,” she whispered, her breath hot in his ear.

“I don’t take orders from a woman,” he began, holding her tighter, his fingers pushing apart her thighs then dipping his fingers into her and circling the throbbing hard bud slick with her moisture. He knew she’d be wet. “Even one as beautiful as you.”

“I don’t have time to massage your male ego,” she dared to tell him, making him squirm, then: “I have a job to do and whether you like me or my tactics doesn’t concern me.”

Her urgent voice was anything but that of a woman in search of an orgasm. Job? This society dame? What was her game? He thought about giving her a piece of his mind, then decided he’d rather continue stroking her clit.

She smiled, but not before taking in her breath along with a whiff of her desire. Her breasts lifted, making him groan. “I’m glad we understand each other.”

“I don’t like the setup, why you strip yourself naked and allow your body to be a gift for any male who’s got a stiff dick.” He slowed down his stroking. “Are you so hungry for a man, any man to light a dark glow in the pit of your belly, make you scream for him to fuck you? Do you care so little about yourself, your body, your soul?”

Why he went off like that, he didn’t know.

“My personal needs are no concern of yours.” He thought he saw her eyes soften, the veil of illusion she was determined to keep up, which made her game bearable, torn from her pale face, then it was gone. “If you hadn’t recognized me, I would have been on my way and out of Germany. Now we may not get out of here alive.”

So she also guessed the Nazi’s game.

“If I don’t make it—” she began, then paused as if debating whether or not to continue “—retrieve my diary hidden in the false bottom of my steamer trunk at the Adlon and deliver it personally to my secretary, Mrs. Wills, in London.” She whispered her hotel-suite number in his ear, her words hot and breathy. “Tell her she must give the diary to a certain gentleman in the Foreign Office, she’ll know who I mean, before the Nazis discover the purpose of my trip to Berlin. And take the perfume with you. You may need it.”

“Perfume?”

“Cleopatra’s perfume. Please, don’t ask me any more questions.”

He stared at her, not understanding but intrigued nonetheless. Probing, he asked, “What are you involved in? The truth or I’ll—”

“Your country is not yet at war, but people you don’t know, I don’t know, are innocents in this madman’s game that threatens us all with his Final Solution.” As if on cue, she pinched her nipples, sighing as she did so. Though she took full advantage of his stroking, he sensed she attempted trying to put off climaxing until she had her say. “This is my chance to prove my life was not in vain, lived without a trace or shred of anything decent to say I was here. Please, do as I ask.”

“What won’t you tell me?” He rubbed her clit harder, making her groan.

“Oh, don’t stop…” she sighed, closing her eyes, the hard lines on her face disappearing, as if the mask she wore melted like a virgin’s resistance, this disguise she took on to fight back against the blows she suffered from an indignant world.

He applied his fingers in a circular manner to her throbbing bud faster and faster until she couldn’t hold back. She cried out, a starkness to her beauty that shook him, a fierceness in her eyes that pulsated with fear then anger then pain. Then it was gone.

She took a moment to catch her breath then became once again the quintessential blond vixen wrapped in her hunger for a man. Sweating, she threw her head back and cupped her breasts, twisting her nipples, then moaning, her eyes closed, her lips whispering, “Fuck me, now.”

Using the excuse this was no pulp-fiction plot but his life and he had no intention of losing it, he picked her up in his arms and laid her down on the soft white blanket in the sand. His heartbeat quickened when he felt her shudder underneath him. Then, teasing her, he inserted his impatient finger again and, feeling her wet, he plunged deeper, drawing his digit back and forth across the hard ridge of her clit, increasing his rhythm. He sensed she was exaggerating her emotions to impress the SS officer, gritting her teeth to avoid allowing herself to enjoy it. He moved across her pleasure bud faster, stroking it, then bending down and drawing it between his lips and sucking at it, nibbling and torturing her with the tip of his tongue. He pressed her body to his lips and she shivered uncontrollably.

He had her where he wanted her.

He inserted two fingers and she trembled, her body arching upward, riding his hand, a rapturous expression on her face giving her away. He knew that expression well, whether it was the farm girls he’d fucked in the hay when he was barnstorming cross-country in his open-cockpit biplane or the sophisticated girls behind the perfume counter with their dark red lipstick and sheer black stockings. She was different. She was a member of the British aristocracy yet she possessed the same hunger for a man inside her, cock or tongue, she didn’t care. She wanted more, craved that glow in her belly that made wetness seep between her legs so she’d be slick and easy when he entered her.

Without missing a beat, he removed his fingers then pushed apart her thighs and entered her, moving in and out, slowly at first, making her moan and begging him to go faster. He picked up his speed as her body matched his rhythm, stroke for stroke. Yet never did he take his eyes off her face, her mouth as red as the ruby ring she wore, her lips glistening with the same sparkle.

Her eyes widened when he thrust deeper into her, her body closing around him, exciting him to the point where he couldn’t stop. The deeper he thrust, the more he swore she opened up to him, yes, but not in her eyes. Cool green eyes that made him shiver in spite of the heat of passion making their bodies sweat, eyes with enough dark green in them to shade her thoughts, her soul, something he wanted to see, had to, for only then could he satisfy her and himself.

Grunting, he locked his body tighter onto hers with each thrust, his tall frame threatening to overtake her with his power. He held her by the hips, not too hard so he wouldn’t mark her skin, knowing when she reached that point of madness when neither of them could hold back, all reason would be lost. Then came pleasure, with its price to pay, for then he would also lose control and be at his most vulnerable.

The crack of the whip echoed in his ears, closer now. The SS officer also enjoyed their excitement, relished it, but would he take advantage of them? He couldn’t take the chance.

He pulled out, damn his own agony, sliding from her in one quick movement. She gasped, shook her head in denial. She was so close to that moment of release, her body shivered, her lower lip quivering, as she yelled, “You bastard!”

Yes, he was a bastard and he hated himself for it. He could smell her juices mixing with her perfume, the scent so intoxicating he felt compelled to enter her again and finish her off. What was all this nonsense about Cleopatra’s perfume? A strange request she’d made, asking him to retrieve that and her diary. Was she nothing but a selfish hedonist after all? He held back, knowing he’d taken away what had been their pleasure and turned it into their pain, but he had no choice if they were to survive.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.

“I made you hot…for him.”

With a sly glance at her beautiful face, sweating, glowing, her eyes alight with excitement, begging him for more, he peeled open her lower lips, her juices nestled in her pink folds, and exposed her without shame to the man walking toward him, cracking his whip. The impact of black leather hitting the brown sandy dirt blew a small dust wind around them like smoke. He held his breath, refusing to inhale, then:

“The woman is very beautiful and worthy of fucking an officer of the Reich,” the SS officer said in accented English, winding the whip around his hand. “If I were so inclined.”

The flier turned toward the elitist officer, his senses alert. What the hell did he mean by that?

“She would be honored to receive the cock of a member of the SS,” Chuck said, keeping his emotions in check.

“I prefer to watch you fuck her,” said the Nazi, “while I amuse myself with a different game.”

A large smooth hand slipped over his thigh, rubbing it with caution. The strong smell of Aryan maleness tinged with the spice of perversity invaded his nostrils. The game had changed and he didn’t like the smell of it.

Why he didn’t make his move during the naked silence that followed, he didn’t know. Surprise, shock, fear? Not for his own life, but hers. Something about the fervent way she looked into his eyes and begged him to understand something else was at play here made him realize this was no ordinary tryst. But what?

He looked around and caught the SS officer staring at him as he removed his black tunic jacket with its single shoulder strap and thin aluminum collar piping. It took all his strength not to rip off the cotton hand-embroidered SS armband or kick him in the balls when he dropped his black breeches. Not a smart move when he had a service weapon trained on him. He recognized the sleek Walther P-38 pistol. An excellent design. Fit the hand as smoothly as a black glove. He knew he was in deep trouble when he saw the Nazi release the safety and cock the hammer in one motion as he pulled it from his side holster under his black jacket. Unlike most Prussians he’d seen since he arrived in the land of boot clickers, this one didn’t need time to unwind. His firm, muscular body reeked of desire, sweat glistening off the twin lightning bolts tattooed on his forearm like a glaring spotlight.

He made his interest in him clear, striding around in nothing but his high boots and his hat bearing the Death’s Head badge, the Totenkopf, swinging a whip and crackling it at his side as he struck the ground with the well-used black leather.

Chuck tried not to show it but he couldn’t control his fast breathing, one hand behind his back to hide what he knew was his hand shaking. What bothered him was how he’d reacted to the warmth of the man’s hands on his skin. Damn, he was hot, ready to climax, and his touch, any touch, he told himself, would have made him explode. He wouldn’t accept any other explanation. He had no doubt if the Nazi tried to brush his skin again with that hand, he’d deck him. He’d heard rumors about the proclivity of certain members of the SS for sex with other men. They shunned the effeminate side of the equation, preferring raucous, beer-drinking sexual antics where a man’s cock found penetration of a different kind to his liking. Dark, secret places that made his skin fester as if purulent sores covered it.

He scratched at his thigh, more from the crawling dread seeping over him than from the clouds of mosquitoes hiding in the thickets of dense shrubbery surrounding the lake.

“I have a game,” said the Nazi,“one I’m certain you’ll both enjoy.”

“And what if I don’t like your game?” Chuck dared to venture.

“I’m sure we can accommodate the captain,” cried out the Englishwoman, her soft hair wisps clouding the nervous expression he’d seen in her eyes. “I’ll fuck you both!”

“No,” said the SS guard. “I will fuck you both.” He grabbed the American’s buttocks with his large, smooth hand, making his stiffen. Chuck dug his fingers into his palm so hard he swore he pierced the skin.

“I swear, if you touch me again—”

The SS officer laughed. “You will fuck her, mein herr, and I will, as you Americans say, bring up the rear.” He laughed.

“And if I refuse?”

“There will be no exit visa.” He ran his hand along Chuck’s inner thigh then he snapped the whip against his flank when he tried to grab the gun away from the Nazi. The American grunted, pulling in his gut and swallowing the pain, rather than cry out.

“I demand you take us back to Berlin,” Chuck said. “Your game has gone far enough.”

“I’ll take you back—” the Nazi shoved the gun into his ribs “—straight to Gestapo headquarters to explain your presence in Berlin.”

“I have no intention of explaining anything to you or your Nazi friends. America isn’t at war with Germany—”

“Aren’t you forgetting our agreement?” the Englishwoman interrupted, her tone cold and formal, her coquettish mannerisms gone. She glared at Chuck, silently telling him to let her take over. Her look told him she wasn’t playing games now that she knew the SS officer wasn’t interested in her.

“It’s too late for that, Fräulein.” He pointed the gun at her. Chuck clenched his fists, ignoring the cascade of frenzy invading his brain. Whatever his personal feelings were in this game, he couldn’t allow the Nazi to strike her down in a stabbing flash of gunfire, bullets slicing along her belly, her breasts, jerking her straight up, spinning in a macabre dance of death.

“No!” she cried out, the late-afternoon sun sparking off her ring and striking the Nazi in the eye, causing him to look away. Chuck gathered up a handful of gravel mixed among the sandy dirt and gripped it in his palm, waiting for the right moment to strike.

“I regret having to destroy such a lovely female body,” the SS officer said, straining to perfect his aim in the harsh glare, “a perfect example of curve and line, but in the name of the Reich—”

“Run!” Chuck cried out, then spun around and threw the handful of gravel into the Nazi’s face. The man jerked backward, his hat falling off and onto the sand. Chuck stomped on it, smashing the skull-and-crossbones SS insignia under his bare foot and ignoring the sharp pain digging into his flesh. Then, before the German could react, he kicked him in the groin so hard he screamed out, but not before his pistol fired and the bullet hit the ground, kicking up a cloud of sand.

The Englishwoman didn’t wait. He watched in horror as she raced toward the lake, her white-blond hair shimmering around her shoulders like the crests of a wave. Then for an instant she pirouetted and stood on the large boulder, her arms folded across her breasts, her ruby-and-pearl ring catching the eye of the sun and making it flutter. Her last look was at him, her eyes begging him not to forget her. Then, another shot. The Nazi. Before he could get to her, she screamed then dived into the lake. Seconds, only seconds, yet he’d never forget that look.

Had the second bullet found its mark?

Before he could go after her, the Nazi was on him like a lizard crawling up a mud bank. He struggled with the German, kicking him again and, using the sparring techniques he’d learned on his numerous trips ashore to Hong Kong ferrying the mail, forced him to drop the gun. Knowing his attacks had to be fast and accurate, he threw a right cross to the Nazi’s chin. The Aryan ducked, surprising him, then came back at him with a double punch to his gut. They exchanged blows, skin splitting open, sweat mixing in a macabre blurring of male flesh and hard muscle into one blur until the Nazi retrieved the gun. Chuck kicked it out of the man’s hand and he went down on the sand. He jumped on top of him, but the Nazi threw dirt into his face. Eyes burning like hell, he reached out blindly, withstanding the man’s punches, until his hands wrapped around the German’s neck and he pushed down on his windpipe hard, not letting up, until he went still beneath him.

He sat back on his haunches and caught his breath. Eyes wide open, shock of blond hair hanging down low over his face, the Nazi had the look of a demonic creature cast in stone. He checked his pulse. He was dead.

Wiping the sweat out of his eyes, Chuck looked toward the lake. No movement, no splashing. Nothing. What happened to the Englishwoman? A sharp pain tore at his gut, eating him up with dread. He jumped to his feet and dived into the crystalclear water, afraid of what he’d find.

An hour later—or was it two?—the dead Nazi lay in the mud on the lake bottom with two large rocks tied around his ankles. Chuck came up again to get some air, his lungs bursting. No sign of the Englishwoman. No blood, no body. Nothing. Again and again he searched the area, but it was as if she’d dived into the lake and disappeared. He almost believed she was a mermaid and had swum out to sea.

God, he was losing his mind. Nothing made sense. The platinum blonde. The SS officer. What had he stumbled into? An intricate Nazi plot to pick him up? No, that was impossible. No one could have known he’d duck into the Hotel Adlon to get some rest after he’d been shot down during a bombing mission over Berlin. He was an American flier in the RAF and he’d been on the run for two, three days, trying to escape into the human blur that swarmed through the hotels in a never-ending bustle, moving at night when the city was thrust into darkness to evade the British bombers. Living on cold pasta tossed out from Italian restaurants, since food was rationed. His crew had been captured, but he escaped into the woods, burying his uniform jacket then stealing clothes drying on a line from an unsuspecting Hausfrau.

He wiped the water from his eyes, but he couldn’t wipe away the doubts, the puzzle that eluded him. It didn’t make sense. He dived in again, searching the lake that must have been over two hundred feet deep in the middle. And cold. Still nothing. He had no choice but to give up the search and find his way back over the German lines to the Allies. Forget what she said about a diary. Why should he risk his own life to retrieve a piece of female vanity?

Dressing quickly in the dead Nazi’s silver-and-black uniform—he intended to dump it as soon as possible—he got behind the wheel of the Mercedes 260D diesel car and drove off. He found himself weaving from one lane to another, his mind troubled. A hint of her spicy fragrance wafted off the black ribbed seat and hung in the air around him, torturing him with its power. What happened to the Englishwoman? Lady Eve Marlowe of Mayfair was how he’d known her in Cairo. Where was she? Though her beauty haunted him, her death haunted him more. Nothing was left to show she’d ever been there, shivered in his arms, teased him with her beguiling smile, pleasured him when he stroked her with his cock until she cried out at the peak of her desire.

Nothing. Just the redolent scent of her perfume.

Damn her.

It took him less than five minutes to change his mind and turn the car around and head back toward Berlin. It wasn’t that he faced a nearly impossible journey in enemy territory to get to France and the underground that made him change his mind. He’d survived worse. It wasn’t that he was certain Lady Marlowe had cash in her suite he could use in his escape, since when he searched through her clothes and purse before tossing them behind some brush, he’d found nothing. No, it was something he didn’t dare put into words. A hunch that this gorgeous woman was mixed up in more than sex and decadence, that she’d begged him to help her and if he didn’t, her life would have been in vain. Whatever they’d had in Cairo, it ended here, today. He couldn’t change that. He could change course, play out this insane caper and see where it led him. He hated the feeling eating at his insides, that her death was his fault. He owed her that much.

An hour later, he parked the big, black sedan blocks away from the Adlon then ducked in under the hotel awning and strode past the doorman and into the lobby, saluting and mumbling “Heil, Hitler!” to anyone who crossed his path. He avoided the black-suited desk clerk and the admiring eyes of the uniformed bellboy wearing white gloves and made his way upstairs, then grabbed a maid and threatened her with gestures and grunts until she allowed him access to the blonde’s suite. Who would deny an SS officer? He didn’t know more than a few words of German, but it worked. He was inside.

There, in the middle of the room, was a steamer trunk. It stood three feet long and two feet high with four rollers, edged in leather with wood strapping and brass rivets. He tapped his fingers over the cracking Damier pattern, noting the tiny tears in the canvas covering the trunk—

Rrring.

He waited.

The phone rang again and again and still he did nothing. He dare not answer it, but the presence of its irritating sound filled the air between himself and the unknown caller. Then the ringing stopped and the silence became his ticking clock. He glanced at the phone then looked at the door. Whoever had called could be on their way up here.

What was he waiting for? Staring at the trunk wasn’t going to bring back the Englishwoman. He tugged on the brass lock, but it wouldn’t give. Locked.

And no key in sight.

That wouldn’t stop him. He had plenty of practice picking the lock on his father’s gun cabinet when he was a kid, so he could practice shooting tin cans with his kid brother when the old man was away. He searched through the female items on the vanity table until he found what he needed: a nail file and a long hatpin. With the hatpin in one hand and the nail file in the other, he got to work on the lock. Using the hatpin, he picked the lock by raising the pins to their so-called breaking point as a key would, then used the nail file to rotate the cylinder to operate the cam at the rear of the lock’s cylinder to unlock the mechanism. It took a few tries, but it wasn’t long until he heard the welcome click and the lock popped open. Inside, he found a blue suit, navy pumps, chemises, garters and silk stockings. Beneath the clothes, he found a square box wrapped in black velvet about the size of a small jewelry box. He felt along the bottom of the trunk until it gave way and he uncovered a red silk-bound diary, its deep lush color still as fresh as the blush of a rose. He opened the book and the scent wafting from its pages overpowered him. Her scent. Spicy and pungent, like a kaleidoscope of powerful fragrances shuffled together that emitted a slightly different aroma every time he turned a page. Florid, feminine handwriting flowed from the linen sheets, jumping out at him as though the writer had jotted her thoughts down in a hurry. Voluptuous scenes, lusty descriptions, all filled with savagery.

Fascinated by what he’d seen, he flipped back to the first entry. It was all there in her handwriting. Loneliness, pleasure, the desire to submit, the indiscretions. All the passions of a woman possessed by the secret of what she called Cleopatra’s perfume. No wonder her image, her touch, her scent held him captive and wouldn’t let him go. He no longer saw her fluffed up in feathers and jewels and he a man filled with the raw need to conquer his own demons, but two people caught up in a dangerous game of intrigue and obsession. She revealed the past to him by way of the erotic tableaux she described, while the mysterious perfume emitting from the diary pages overwhelmed his senses with an intimate and intoxicating intensity.

And so he entered her world.

2

This diary belongs to: Lady Eve Marlowe

London, Mayfair

March 31, 1941

My life is in danger, but that won’t stop me. I must go to Berlin. Yes, I know it’s dangerous, considering the country is run by a monster marching against the world order and devouring innocents like a dragon spewing fire. He’s destroying everything in his path with flames of hatred and prejudice and he may destroy me, but I have no choice. If I fail at my mission I will die, as will others, but I’ve made preparations for a way out should death come too close to me. One so unbelievable I must write it down, for if I do not, no one will ever know what happened to me and the extraordinary journey I’ve taken. No one but you, dear reader.

It all began in 1939 when I refused to slip on the somber elegance of a widow’s veil, an act I undertook with the same rebelliousness that had ruled my young life. Unwilling, unvirginal and undaunted by an empty bed I was determined would soon be filled, I set out to find adventure. I was lonely, though at twenty-nine I’d traveled the world and seen its wonders as well as its weaknesses. I’d met my late husband, Lord Marlowe, who was thirty years my senior, years earlier when I was stranded in Cairo after what the London Times society page called “an unfortunate incident with renowned archaeologist Lord Wordley’s expedition into the Valley of the Kings,” insinuating I’d been on a dig with the famed explorer and his group of posh thrill-seekers. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I will leave the reality of what happened to later telling. All you need to know is I have a history with Egypt far removed from my peerage as Lady Marlowe.

I had arrived in the Near East as a girl of twenty in a time when rebellious girls dressed in red satin trunks and short tops and sat at tables in seedy cafés, sipping highballs in squatty glasses with men seated around them, their hungry mouths drawn back in drunken smiles while someone struck the same chords over and over again on an upright piano. I’m not ashamed of what I did during those wild days of my youth, but nor do I wish to recall them here. So, dear reader, whoever you are, be assured I knew what to expect when the liner stopped for stevedoring in Port Said and I disembarked from the ship. Known as a city of sin, rice and women are its main commodities. Port Said harbors a white slave trade flourishing in its hidden places, bars and houses, where young girls languish and perish under the thumbs of men.

I also discovered another secret in this city at the entrance to the Suez Canal, how a woman can forget her loneliness and indulge in the most delicious sexual adventures, so decadent I bring myself close to orgasm thinking about it, my pen shaking as I lay it down and unbutton my white silk trousers and insert my fingers inside me and stroke myself…panting, hanging in anticipation of what I know will come if I continue rubbing the hard ridge inside me, my body gyrating in time with the movements of my fingers. I open my legs wider to allow my fingers easier access…

Excuse the abrupt interruption, dear reader, but my need overcame my reason. I’ll be embarking soon on the first leg of my journey to Berlin, but first I must continue with my story and why I returned to the Near East after my husband’s death.

I’d enjoyed many pleasant interludes with Lord Marlowe in the region during our marriage: from the polo matches at the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo, to excursions to see the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, to traveling down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan. It was also where I could escape the suffocating air distorting the reality that dominated London’s clubs. I couldn’t survive in that atmosphere of pearls and perfect vowels, where one’s place in society was bred into the bones, though from what I’d seen in many a Mayfair drawing room, they grew brittle from a lack of blood flowing through their veins.

I packed my trunk and left London.

I was familiar with the sea route, having traversed it many times over the years with my late husband. After traveling from London by train to embark on a ship at Genoa, the luxury P&O steamer went on to Port Said and would then pass through the Suez Canal to Bombay, Hong Kong and Shanghai. What should have been a tranquil journey of reflection, I must admit, turned out to be a pattern of recurring neuroses. Chatter aboard ship became more stifling than staying in London. My independence was at stake. I had no place to hide from my fellow British passengers, many of whom knew of my recent widow status and whispered among themselves about the scandal brewing when word got back to London that I was traveling alone. And wearing white wide-leg trousers and an open white blouse with ample cleavage showing.

From behind my round dark glasses, I watched the gentlemen eyeing my pointy breasts and the ladies watching them. I shaded my eyes from their stares, but I had nothing to hide. White denoted purity of heart and I had every right to wear it. During my years of marriage to Lord Marlowe, I’d remained chaste, taking no other man to my bed; but now I was alone, and companionship was not something I merely desired. I needed a man and I needed him badly.

I disembarked the ship at Port Said to idle away time shopping for tropical skirts, pants, cameras, inexpensive jewels and French perfumes. Lucky for me, the shops remained open all night to cater to travelers until the ship departed in the early-morning hours. It wasn’t long before boredom, the heat and the flies, as well as the dirty looks from my fellow passengers, drove me to explore the port city on my own.

I doubted these ladies with their noses stuck up my business would dare follow me into a seedy-looking bar that reeked of male sweat and alcohol and with cigarette smoke so thick it drifted like a seventh veil over the crowd. I sat down at a small table and ordered Egyptian beer, what Lord Marlowe called onion beer because of its strong taste.

Raising my glass, I was congratulating myself on losing the gossipy women, when a slightly built Egyptian wearing a red fez with a long black tassel half covering his face shuffled over to me and bowed, then asked to tell my fortune. I shooed him away, knowing full well this wallah would gladly dish out what British locals called pukka gen— advice to the lovelorn—to any lone female willing to listen.

But he wouldn’t give up, insisting he had a special rate for a pretty lady with hair the color of the moon. I put down my beer and smiled at him. With a line like that, how could I refuse?

I invited him to sit down, and before the air could settle underneath his sagging body, he removed the lid of a biscuit tin from inside his shabby jacket and poured fine sand into it, then shook it until the surface was even. Then, taking my hand, he instructed me to trace lines in the sand with my fingers. I did as he asked, its soft touch making my fingertips tingle with what I knew was curiosity, not magic. When I finished raking my fingers through the white specks, he gazed at the squiggles I’d made, thinking. Then he began to speak. Slowly, as if he was reciting a well-rehearsed prayer.

“Your heart is lonely since the death of your husband.” He sighed, for effect, I’m sure. “And you crave a man’s touch to soothe your pain.”

How did he know I was a widow? Did he see the hunger in my eyes for a man’s sweat to mix with mine, his hard muscles pressing against my willing flesh as he rubbed his chest against my bare breasts?

He looked at me, but I cast my eyes downward. Not giving up, he continued, “I see you are as fragile as a flower in the desert, reaching up to the sun for nourishment, but dying without the sweetness of the rain to quench your thirst.”

No doubt this fortune would fit several lonely women travelers in this port city and I told him so. He shook his head, insisting there was more. He grabbed my hand again and raked my fingers through the sand. I saw him shaking, his lower lip twitching. My hand shook as well and I swear the sand sparked against my fingertips.

“You will meet a man within a fortnight,” he insisted, “and his fire will peel the skin from your bones, making you lose all control—”

I pulled my hand away. “Sounds unpleasant.” I tried to keep my voice steady, not let him see how his prediction affected me, nurtured the elusive dream I craved, but even as I said the words, my lower belly ached and my clit throbbed from want of a man I didn’t know.

The fortune-teller continued, “With him you will find immortality.”

I pondered this, though not for long. Immortality? What nonsense. What Near Eastern alchemy he was peddling I could only guess. I doubted I could find a man to fulfill the incompleteness haunting me since my husband’s death and assuage my hunger for the pleasures long denied to me. Still—

“Where will I meet this man?” I had to ask, wanting to believe I could escape my loneliness through this predestined encounter. I held my hands together in my lap to stop them from shaking. If I found such a man in Port Said and found sexual pleasure with him, that would mean I’d crossed the line into another world. I couldn’t go back. I sensed I was at a dangerous impasse by snubbing the staid world of British royals, forcing me to face what I thought I’d left behind: my taste for the sweetest of tortures. I’ll not regale you, dear reader, with details. They will come later.

“You will take him from the arms of another woman,” the man said.

I threw my hands up into the air. “I don’t believe your silly fortune-telling.”

“Believe. It will happen.” He jumped up and put out his hand. “Five piastres.” One shilling.

I paid him, though my face dripped sweat and my lips trembled as the smoky air seemed to close in around me and hold me in its grip. I couldn’t deny the physical reaction I had to his words. Whatever excuse I wanted to use, lonely, frustrated for lack of a sexual partner, I was ready to embrace whatever erotic impulses I discovered in this city of sin, ready to surrender to emotional chaos to feed my hunger without guilt.

I turned around to order another beer and when I turned back, the man was gone.

My hand was still shaking.

The fortune-teller’s words freed my spirit. I was like a bird released from its cage, not knowing I was the bait for bigger prey. I rebelled, ravaged my past and let go of my fears. Looking. Searching. Imagining. My need for sensuality clashed with my need to be rational, and won the fight.

I elected to remain in Port Said.

I returned to the ship and made arrangements for my luggage to be transferred to a hotel. Then I sent a cable to my secretary and oft-traveling companion, Mrs. Wills, in London, telling her I was staying in Port Said. A woman whose starched back never bends, her prompt response was one of concern as well as curiosity as to why the change in my plans. Bookish with gray strands weaving through her dark hair like a melody of lost notes, she cuts a slender figure in her proper dark suits and blucher-style brown oxfords. She’s an asexual creature who neither understands nor approves of my erotic adventures, but I value her friendship and advice. She rarely if ever ventures forth with a personal opinion, believing it isn’t her place to do so, but I would have never found my way in British society as Lady Marlowe without her.

I refused to admit I was profusely affected by what the fortune-teller had told me, his prediction disturbing me in an obscure, mysterious way. Over the next two days, I went out of my way to avoid men, peering over my sunglasses in a dismissive manner whenever a gentleman spoke to me, as if I was testing the fates and their uncanny way of making things happen when we fight against it. But my resistance was as fragile as a dream and just as fleeting when I saw the man I came to know as Ramzi.

It wouldn’t have happened, I’ve since convinced myself, if I hadn’t encountered Lady Palmer fretting about the hotel lobby, looking for her daughter. The young woman had disappeared after leaving an afternoon thé dansant, a tiresome trend consisting of dancing and sipping warm weak tea that has spread around the world from Bombay to Manila to Hong Kong by way of the contingent of the smart set. Lady Palmer was a longtime family friend of Lord Marlowe’s and fancied herself his social chaperone after his first wife died. She befriended me, I believe, more out of duty than true friendship. I found her pleasant and unassuming, though her daughter, Flavia, possessed the frivolous manners of her society stepsisters hungry for wicked games, but only if played according to their rules. No wonder Lady Palmer came to my husband numerous times to ask for his assistance in getting her daughter out of trouble without creating a scandal. He always obliged her with the understated elegance I loved about him. I felt that same obligation to help her when she sought me out in Port Said and told me her daughter was missing.

Earlier she had made plans to take the girl on a picturesque tour of the city, she told me, extolling the values of “going native” in a cart drawn by two mules, riding up and down the tree-lined streets past the lighthouse, then the Victorian buildings with purple-red bougainvillea overflowing on the terraces. Flavia refused to go. She assured her mother she’d have a better time at the afternoon tea dance, insisting she’d befriended some British girls she met on the beach visiting from St. Claire’s English School. That was the last time she saw her daughter. When Lady Palmer returned from her city excursion, Flavia’s new friends informed her the girl had left the hotel.

With a man. A tall Egyptian with a charming French accent, they said. Sweeping her away into his arms as if his galabiya, indigo blue robe, was a magic carpet flying around him, the orange-hued imma on his head contrasting with his black hair, the tightly wrapped turban giving him a courtly demeanor. Bidding the British schoolgirls adieu with a grandiose gesture of his bare brown muscular arm, his large ruby ring set in pearls dazzling them, the girls sighed, speculating he must be very rich and very important.

They said his name was Ramzi.

When I asked my British circle of friends about this Ramzi, no one knew much about him, though I watched more than one spectator-pumped miss sigh with a near-rapturous want, as if she’d gladly drop her knickers for a quick poke. I knew I must find him. Was he the souteneur the fortune-teller warned me about, the man who held the key to unlocking the great waves of pleasure I so desperately sought? I shuddered, though in a pleasant manner. I intended to see for myself.

Wrapped in a black curve-smothering tunic with clasps of bright copper and gold placed between my eyes to hold my nose veil in place, I hired a local guide to take me around the port city to places where men wearing dark-colored gandourah sat under the blue-and-white striped awnings of restaurants, playing games and smoking from nargilehs, water pipes. I kept my distance, my heavy cloak trailing over dirty floors rife with crawling creatures, until—

“Asim knows of this man you seek,” my guide said.

“Which man is Asim?” I asked behind my veil, trying to read their faces.

“The man with the dagger fastened with a leather band to his left forearm. He says Ramzi took the girl to his nightclub.”

“Is he sure?”

He nodded. “Yes. The Bar Supplice.”

“Why did he take her there?” I knew the answer before I asked. The French word supplice meant torment.

His mouth twisted in a dirty grin. “In Port Said, one does not ask why. One knows.”

“Take me there. I will pay you well.” I made him an offer, knowing I straddled two worlds here in a culture that judged me as a lesser being than men, but hadn’t I overcome similar prejudice when I, a commoner, married Lord Marlowe? I couldn’t stop now.

“I get into much trouble if Mahmoud sees me bring you there—”

“Mahmoud?”

“Ramzi’s bodyguard. He can snap a man’s neck in two with his hands.” He made a gesture that left me no doubt he’d seen Mahmoud render such a punishment.

I removed the soft georgette from my face as if to remind him I wasn’t like the women of Port Said who lived in a male-imposed fear behind the veil. In a steady voice, I made him another offer. A higher one. He shook his head. I kept raising the ante, trying to persuade him. After all, money meant nothing to me. I’d inherited a vast fortune to spend freely, along with a title, when Lord Marlowe was killed in a motorcar accident. I’ve no doubt he meant for me to indulge in our secret passion after he was gone. A shiver went through me even as I sweated under the heavy robe. This could be the end of my journey to find that passion again. I repeated my offer. The guide’s answer was still no.

I raised the abaya, robe, above my ankles, then my knees, to reveal my white wide-leg trousers, as if my gesture had become a symbol of the shift in my demands that now went beyond asking questions. I must make him understand I wouldn’t go away without an answer. My own curiosity and needs had been replaced by a feeling of dread. I was certain the girl’s life was in danger. No doubt Lady Palmer’s daughter had succumbed to the allure of an exotic man with a charming accent; but after a few whiskeys, I imagined her naked and trembling on her hands and knees in front of him, then lifting his galabiya and taking his cock into her mouth. So young she was, not more than twenty, and inexperienced. What did she know about performing fellatio? Such a delicacy must be savored by a woman.

Fighting my own needs, I must do what I could to help her, if only to repay a favor to my husband’s loyal friend. A woman’s body was a distraction in the Arab world, I knew, something chewed upon, then what was left over was tossed away like scraps to the dogs. I had no doubt the man who had seduced Lady Palmer’s daughter was such a deviant.

Casting his eyes downward as if to hide his thoughts, the guide nodded at my final offer. The price was set. He led me down a street filled with multistoried houses with Greek names, as if that gave the brothels a touch of class. Inquisitive girlish faces peered at us from grimy windows, yelling to men straggling from house to house, intent on tasting as much female flesh as their bodies could endure.

At the end of the street, the guide pointed to an ornate door painted to resemble a golden orifice, though I could see chipped paint belying the possibility of any precious metal underneath. Bar Supplice, he assured me, though no sign proclaimed what kind of torment went on inside. I paid the guide, adding a generous tip. Without counting the large notes, he bolted down a side alleyway, jumping over the body of a beggar woman who had collapsed onto the dirt, her open hand asking for alms even in death. I turned my head away, the fetid smell of her rotting corpse announcing the presence of evil everywhere. I could do nothing for the unfortunate woman lying in the dirt, but I could save the girl.

Snatching up my robe to keep from stumbling, I pulled open the door. Though the hour was not yet sunset, darkness greeted me with the secret handshake known to all who entered this den of debauchery. I walked with confidence down the cool cavelike corridor as if I wore a cloak of invisibility, my feet treading over the worn path to decadence as had so many before me, my anxiety increasing with each step. Or was it my anticipation to experience something wildly erotic with its overripe sweetness and pungent aftertaste?

I wasn’t disappointed. On a small round stage surrounded by empty tables and chairs and lit by a sole spotlight, I saw a partially nude girl stretched out on a soft sand-hued rug. The white-skinned nymph wore nothing but a loose robe of coral-red silk spread out around her like a scarlet angel’s wings. A tall Nubian lapped at her pussy, licking with zest, his long tongue darting in and out of her, his giant presence dwarfing her slenderness. She threw her head back and thrashed about on the rug, groaning. A dark-haired man in an indigo blue galabiya and orange-hued imma sat cross-legged next to her, smoking a chibouk, a long Turkish pipe bound by blue silk and gold threads and studded with what appeared to be rubies.

I resisted the temptation to breathe in the sickening-sweet smell of what I recognized as hashish. I needed all my senses to save the girl. I faced one problem: I never expected the man I assumed to be Ramzi would have such an effect on me. Dark eyes, black brows with a sardonic twist that added an erotic aura to his nearly perfect features, a strong jawline, broad shoulders, he was so handsome I swore if he looked at me it would be the obliteration of whatever common sense I still possessed. He maintained a certain grandeur, nobility. Vulnerable as I was, I ached to acquiesce all control to this archseducer of women. I couldn’t take my eyes off his sensual mouth sucking on the amber mouthpiece, drawing in the fragrant smoke from a bowl of baked clay, then blowing rings around the girl’s bare breasts. How I envied her.

Lady Palmer’s runaway daughter.

I stared and stared and stared, my eyes not blinking but my hand moving upward to touch my breasts then slide down my midriff and rub my soft mound. When I saw the Nubian change position and nudge his hard cock toward her willing mouth, teasing her, arousing her, I gasped. Loudly.

The man in the long blue galabiya yelled out in Arabic, words I didn’t understand. The girl lolled her head back and forth, licking her lips, but letting nothing stop her pleasure. She reached back to grab his cock, but he pulled it away, making her angry. Before I could take a breath, the Nubian strode toward me and grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Let go of me!” I yelled in English.

“A British woman,” I heard the man I knew must be Ramzi call out. “Let me see her.”

Before I could stop him, the Nubian stripped off my abaya and threw me onto the floor, ripping my blouse and exposing my sheer brassiere underneath, my hard nipples pointing through the soft material.

“You touch me again,” I said, “and I’ll rip off your balls.”

“A most beautiful and spirited woman, I see,” Ramzi said, putting down his pipe and rising from his seated position. I pulled back to escape his spell as he approached me, but to no avail. I struggled to breathe when his robe fell open, revealing his muscular body. He was nude underneath. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. “Who are you?” he asked.

Before I could answer, the girl spat at me. “She’s a friend of my mother’s.”

“Get your clothes on, Flavia,” I demanded, noting the Egyptian did nothing to hide his nudity, as if he exploited his nakedness to produce a sexual energy between us. “Lady Palmer is frantic with worry.”

“She should be used to it by now,” the girl said.

“Get your clothes on,” I repeated, louder. “We’re getting out of here.”

“The girl stays.” Ramzi looked at me with a devious expression raising his brows up higher. “Unless you’d rather take her place.”

I choked with an emotion I couldn’t hold back, my eyes feasting on the size of his cock, the breadth of his bare chest barely covered by the robe. I trembled, knowing I could give him but one answer.

I stood under the spotlight in the Bar Supplice and unbuttoned my white slacks and let them fall. Next, I slid my torn white blouse off my shoulders before kicking off my dust-ringed brown boots. Ramzi took this opportunity to insist his bodyguard remove Lady Palmer’s daughter, dress her and send her back to her mother. Ignoring her onerous protests, the tall Nubian picked up the girl in his strong arms and appeared to walk with ease through a black wall sparkling with thousands of stars, then drew what I assumed was a curtain closed behind him.

I could hear the girl raising her voice in protest behind the curtain, but Ramzi paid her no attention as he caressed my shoulder blades with his long fingers, his touch so hot I jumped, as if a naked burning bulb made contact with my skin. He laughed, then touched me again. Teasing, I pulled away from him and, with great finesse, I plucked my cotton socks stained with brown around the toes off my feet, then stood before him, my eyes matching his stare.

“Is this what you want?” I asked, licking my lips and running my hands through my white-blond hair, then chewing on wayward strands with my teeth.

“I wish to see you nude.”

“And then?” I teased, smoothing my hands over my hips as if I were wearing red velvet, though I stood before him in my undergarments.

“I will decide if your body pleases me.”

“I’m more interested in seeing what you have to offer me.”

He tossed his head back and laughed, his white teeth catching the light, his tongue moist and inviting. “I assure you, my English lady, you won’t be disappointed.” Leaning toward me, he said, “Mahmoud will prepare you for my inspection.”

“What if I decide to skip the foreplay?” I slid the strap of my bra off one shoulder, then the other, squeezing my breasts together. I had no intention of masking my desire. My obsession with recapturing the sexual part of my being seethed with need as I performed an animalistic dance, swaying my shoulders, grinding my hips, then rubbing my hands all over my body before unhooking the sheerest of bras, no lace, no pearls, only a taut veil of nude silk hugging my breasts, my nipples pointing through like hard stones.

“I am master here,” he recounted with an evenness of words that belied the anger—or was it passion?—surging within him. “And you will obey.”

I shivered, visibly shaken by his words, though I reasoned he had no idea why. A different scene played out in my head. A scene I’d first experienced years ago when—

—leather restraints bound my wrists, tying me to the bedposts, my breasts pressed against monogrammed white silk sheets upon which a lusty king had exploded his semen into his favorite concubine, my naked buttocks quivering in anticipation of the unyielding cane striking my needy flesh. A scene played out many times in Lord Marlowe’s cottage hideaway in the English countryside near Coventry.

But this was a hole in Port Said, hot air stifling, garish spangles masking the vices living here and making everything sparkle with a ghostly brightness. And I didn’t care. I didn’t care. At that moment my need to forge again the strange but loving relationship I’d lost was so strong in me it was as if I’d injected morphine into my thigh, as girls did in Berlin during the wild days of the Weimar Republic, and the blood flowed to my labia with such intensity I was powerless to stop it.

I held my chin up, defiant. “Obey you? I don’t believe you’ve ever fucked an Englishwoman or you wouldn’t sputter such nonsense.”

“And you have never known the pleasure of an Arab cock, my English lady, though should you please me, what I can offer you goes beyond mortal pleasure.”

He was baiting me and I knew it. My curiosity had been piqued and I played along, though I had no idea then my rash act would be my undoing.

Before he could reach out and pinch my hard nubs, I seized control of the moment and pulled down my trunk-style satin knickers, inserting my finger into my pussy. While he watched, I rub my engorged clit in time to a humming rhythm vibrating within me. A familiar tune, as if I were hanging suspended and couldn’t touch the earth. Nor did I wish to do so. Back and forth in rapid movements, my eyes never leaving his, I stroked myself, then with two fingers, faster and faster until I was breathing hard, panting, gasping—

“You leave me no choice, my beautiful English rose,” he said, exhaling, “but to do as you wish and fuck you.”

Sensual, savage, Ramzi was a man who enslaved my soul with his eyes. Dark brooding eyes, seductive, and knowing.

I was the star of his erotic cabaret.

Wearing nothing but red high-heeled pumps and a choker of tiny diamonds, I didn’t protest when his bodyguard, the tall nude Nubian, tied me to a wooden chair on an empty stage, my legs spread, each ankle fastened to a smooth chair leg, my wrists held down by worn leather straps on the padded armrests, my mouth gagged with black velvet. I squirmed with delight, so stimulated was I by the compression of my wrists and ankles boosting my arousal to a feverish pitch. I arched my back when the Nubian took my bare breasts in his massive hands with such care it was as if his palms were bronze cups containing them as his fingers twisted and pinched my taut nipples. Lifting my head up, the spotlight overhead stung my eyes with a piercing sharpness, jolting me as I struggled to moan, but instead I sank my teeth into black velvet.

“Is she ready, Mahmoud?” came the voice out of the darkness with the French accent. A sensual arabesque of smoke followed, emphasizing his rounded vowels.

Mahmoud said nothing, but his ebony eyes reacted, narrowing to a sliver, though he wasn’t able to hide his thoughts. The smile on his sensuous full lips told me he enjoyed playing with my breasts, each movement alerting me this was a man filled with duty, especially when that duty gave him pleasure. Brushing the points of my breasts with his tongue, the Nubian next inserted two fingers into me, searching for the slick evidence of my excitement. I didn’t disappoint him. Moistness oozed from between my pussy lips. I made what attempt I could to lift up my hips to give him easier access, my body taut and expectant and shimmering with sweat as brightly as the diamonds circling my neck and pressing against my wildly beating pulse. Smiling in a pleasant manner, he circled my clitoris in a steady rhythm, but not fast enough to bring me to the edge. I sank my teeth again into the black velvet filling my mouth, knowing I wouldn’t find release. That wasn’t his job.

Leaving me wanting, he withdrew his fingers. “She is ready.”

“Bon. Untie her, Mahmoud, and bring her to me.”

I fell into the Nubian’s arms after he set me free, my soft nude whiteness blending with his black skin under the spotlight, making me wonder what amorous pleasures awaited me. I feared not this man of color, nor did I fear the smooth voice with the French accent coming out of the darkness, the swirl of smoke adding to his allure. A sense of the forbidden pricked at my mind, fueling my obvious need for his cock and making me take a deep breath as I pondered various fervid possibilities. Sexual organs swelling at the expectation of erotic activity, nude bodies swaying, secretions as lubricant, the white heat culminating in a frenzy, every muscle rippling and quivering, ecstatic cries, hips thrusting in a cadenced delirium…

I was not disappointed when I heard the voice ask: “Have you ever been pleasured by two men at once, my English lady?”

“No,” I whispered, closing my eyes to shield the lie behind those words, instead allowing him to imagine I was already experiencing an inner ecstasy from the mere thought of it.

“Bon, relax and allow Mahmoud and I to take you to paradise.”

Alas, dear reader, I feel certain your temperature is rising, your pulse beating faster, though you may shun such an admission out of modesty, but I pray you don’t stop reading for I have yet to reveal to you the secret of the perfume. Yet I realize I’ve brought you too far into the story without telling you what happened next when I found myself nude and willing to be stimulated by these two men when I entered the Bar Supplice. So eager am I to relive that night of temptation beyond what I’d ever experienced, I can’t deny my body a delicious quiver of anticipation before continuing with my story. But first, you must understand the effect Ramzi had on me. Half-Egyptian, half-French, he moved in a circle of people who prided themselves on possessing the typical high-class European attitude of shunning public notice. Stealthlike, as if he created his style to tease my poor feminine soul—his hand brushing against my breasts when I passed by him, or his eyes from under long veiled black lashes following me when I left the room. I found him charming in a way that appealed to my naughty side, one which Lord Marlowe knew only too well and had nurtured with a fine hand.

Now I was alone without that hand, and that raw hunger for a man’s touch made me fierce with longing. I’d do anything to assuage that need so I could again experience the delicious sensations that made me breathless.

I beg your indulgence, dear reader, for allowing my female id to overwhelm my thoughts when I should capture them and put them into a cage with bars, a cage forged with words, for such is their power to hold the mind prisoner and that is what I must do, hold you prisoner while I tell you my tale, for I dare not lose you. My obsession with Ramzi is too incredible to believe: The attraction, the seduction, the promise. Yet the hour is late and I must finish my travel preparations. I leave London tomorrow on the first part of my journey to Berlin. En route, I will set the scene so that you, too, will understand why I didn’t resist, why I couldn’t. You must allow your subconscious to let go and come with me on my journey, for without you, no one will never know about the power of the perfume.

Cleopatra’s perfume.

3

Aboard a courier flight from Leuchars, Scotland, to Stockholm

April 7, 1941

I tremble, the ink staining my fingers as I hasten to finish describing the scene in the Bar Supplice invoking such pleasure in me.

Ramzi, Mahmoud and me.

A half-caste Egyptian, a Nubian and a white woman entwined in sexual exploration. Not a dream or a fantasy, but an integration of lips, hands and fingers, legs and thighs, touching, exploring, teasing, tasting, smelling each other until that supreme moment when black hands cupped my breasts, twisting my nipples until I cried out with exquisite joy, while the mysterious Egyptian touched me, held me, watched me, delighting in the sound when I groaned deep in my throat at the intense sensations overcoming me. Not one of us paid attention to a taboo forged with prejudices so strong not even the sharpest tongue could cut through its fibers.

Yet when I entered this exotic world hidden away on a backstreet in Port Said, I chose to rip apart that taboo with refined gestures that went beyond defiance because I ached with a hunger, a challenge I could no longer ignore, no longer deny.

Seducing a man like Ramzi.

I believed then as I do now that seeking divine pleasure is not a sin. I would have no regrets afterward, for was I not fulfilling my female impulses to mate? And in doing so, were not two men better than one?

These thoughts spun through my mind, trapping me in a web of intrigue. I am a woman of the world, having tasted variety in my choice of men based more on their ability to arise within me a deep response to please them and receive pleasure, rather than on their skin color, so I was in tune to the scene in the club that followed.

I let out a plaintive sigh and concentrated on the roiling emotions tantalizing my pubic area when Mahmoud parted my thighs and inserted two fingers inside me. With nary a glance in my direction, he began to rub my clit back and forth to increase the flow of my natural lubrication. Lolling my head from side to side, I imagined my cream coating his shiny black fingers as a sweet aroma hit my nostrils. I wasn’t alone in my reverie. Mahmoud also inhaled my scent, then grunted. Noting his deep breathing, I wondered what carnal thoughts filled the Nubian’s mind. Was he savoring the fragrance of my pussy? Or was he merely following orders?

He must have sensed what I was thinking because he swooped down on my breast with his hungry lips and bit at my nipple with his teeth hard enough to make me cry out, as if to assert his power to arouse me. I threw my head back, writhing as he did it again. Would Ramzi allow him to partake in the lovemaking? I wondered.

Indulging in bilateral sex acts was common in this part of the world since women were required to undergo female circumcision and were often addicted to masturbation with bananas, candles and other large objects that stretched their organs into wide orifices. When I first arrived in Egypt with my tap shoes slung over my shoulder, I’d seen ghāzīyeh, dancing girls, performing nude in Cairo clubs, pulling red or yellow or blue veils between their thighs and buttocks to achieve orgasm because they had no clit and must rub their pussies with ecstatic vigor to produce an orgasm.

I watched them dance, my adventurous soul falling in love with the erotic world of modern Cairo, my naughty side falling in love with its carnival-like atmosphere. Ah, but I was young and wanted only to laugh and drink and forget where I came from and be free. Wild, impetuous days when I possessed nothing but the shadows of the night to cloak my sins after I, too, shed my clothes to find my fortune.

Thinking back, I remember the first time I had two men pleasuring me, one man accommodating his entrance into me to the convenience of another. Once before I dug my fingernails into the back of a man while standing and two cocks filled me up, one penetrating me in front, the other from behind. The first man, a muscular Englishman, lifted up both my thighs as high as possible for deep thrusting while the other, a Hollander, took me from behind, his strong hands gripping me around the waist. Crushed between the two men, I cared not that I’d been duped into taking on both men by my youthful enthusiasm to dine with two titled gentlemen. I was barely twenty then, unmarried, dancing in a club in Berlin when I met Lord Marlowe and his Dutch friend.

The British lord climaxed first and afterward insisted he’d won the bet and I was his alone. I balked at the idea, fleeing into the arms of other admirers, but I soon came to realize the seductive power he possessed to satisfy a woman. His dominance over me was never threatening but loving. And I, the wandering girl I’d become in my search for artistic freedom, embraced his erotic amusements as my own. The way he looked at me—straight in the eye—and touched me with lingering caresses, enhanced the sexual act between us with a heat and intensity that spoiled me for other men. We shared our fantasies, shed supple tears together and dallied in our dreams. It was eight years of madness. Glorious madness. Since his death, I found no man who could satisfy me. No man.

Until I met Ramzi.

I basked in the violet light illuminating my nude body on display as Ramzi and Mahmoud performed an erotic pantomime around me, touching, kissing, caressing me. Stroking, ah, yes, stroking me as if the two men comforted me before leading me into a pyramid maze of sensations from which I had no intention of escaping.

I could see my nude breasts, flat belly and bare thighs glowing like liquid amethyst under the soft lighting as four hands rubbed sweetsmelling oil all over me, sliding between my thighs then slipping a finger inside me and seeking out my throbbing clitoris or crawling all over my body, cupping my buttocks, squeezing them. I twisted and turned to allow them greater access, emitting powerful groans when I felt an erection grinding against my arse and powerful hands savoring the feel of my buttocks; then a second erection nestled between my breasts, two hands pushing them together so his cock rubbed back and forth against them, stimulating me. All the while the mixture of sweat and fragrant oil hung heavy in the air.

I drew in my breath, eager to allow the floral scent of the essence to add to my experience. Jasmine, roses and something I couldn’t identify, but it had the power to make my head spin. I sighed and Ramzi’s tongue brushed my lower lip then slid down my throat to my breasts. He licked all around the mauve-tinted areola of my nipples without touching the tips, making me tense. At the same time I felt Mahmoud snake a finger into my anal hole and explore the nerve-rich endings inside with such expertise I found myself swaying in time to his leisurely movements. He withdrew his finger only to increase my pleasure with his hot tongue flicking over the tight puckered hole, then sweeping down over the delicate diamondshaped area of skin leading to the wetness oozing from me.

I closed my eyes and reveled in these lingering sensations while the hypnotic plucking of what I believed was a small lyre, simsimiyya, stimulated me with a driving percussion and the steady beating of drums. Dama, devotional music and love poetry. The music played on an unseen device, numerous scratches interrupting the flow of the music and attesting to how often I imagined Ramzi indulged his sensuality.

When I thought I could stand no more, Ramzi lay down beside me and pulled me on top of him. In my enthusiasm to seek closeness to the man, I wrapped my arms around him, crushing my breasts against his chest. Before I could find my breath, he rolled me over on my back and guided his cock into me, the loud groan erupting from his throat confirming what I already knew. I was a tight fit, which made him more determined to plunge his cock into me again and again with hard thrusts that made him labor and use all his strength. I moaned again, louder, my insides stretched by the size of him, my flesh quivering with feelings too long unstirred.

Before I knew what was happening, Mahmoud knelt down in front of me, his knees so close to the sides of my head the smell of his arousal overwhelmed me. Salty, musky, a deep penetrating odor that filled my lungs. His huge cock brushed my cheeks, my lips, but it wasn’t his own gratification he sought. He leaned over and grabbed my breasts, pinching them and sending exquisite sensations through my nipples. I couldn’t stop my pleasure from building, my pubic muscles from contracting deep inside me. Ramzi sensed my release was near and as if he willed it, he renewed his thrusts with a newfound vigor as orgasm overtook us both, the drums and percussion crashing in my head, sweat pouring down my face as the contractions engulfed me, prolonged groans escaping my lips as I sucked the entire length of him into me before I lapsed into a dreamy state of unconsciousness.

I believed then no man could ever satisfy me as Ramzi did, such was the deep pleasure and satisfaction he gave me in the days that followed. He had a way of looking at me with his left eyebrow raised in such a manner I never knew what he was thinking. Lowering my gaze, I detected much to my delight his cock also stiffened. With such magnificence about him—his nude muscular body, brown well-developed shoulders and chest—I shudder thinking about how he locked his fingers in my hair and pulled me to him and smothered my face with kisses, then turned me facedown into a valley of silk so smooth I swear I shed my skin only to take on a new one. Spreading my legs, he pressed his hand between my bare thighs and opened me to his touch. I cried out when his thumb pushed inside me, his fingers teasing my clitoris with masterful stroking before he thrust into me, deeper and deeper…

Yet I chose to ignore the rational mental vibrations sparking my brain, enjoying more the pleasant sensations contracting throughout my lower groin. Sleek wetness forms now between the folds and drips down the bare skin between my thighs when I bring it to mind, my silk slip sticking to me, prompting me that silk rubbing against skin brings so much pleasure.

Thinking, writing, I concentrate on my choice of words to describe my thoughts as the British transport pitches up and down—I grab the opened bottle of black India ink before it spills—as we fly against strong tailwinds, the insistent turbulence threatening to destroy my female fantasies with the claws of war since we’re flying over enemy territory. Am I afraid? Yes. Do I wish to turn back? No. I’m on a mission and I have my orders—no, I prefer to call them instructions, for I’m not a soldier. I’m doing a favor for Sir_____, an old friend of my late husband, a man to whom I owe allegiance, though I shall not reveal his identity because of security. At his insistence, I rode in a motorcar with blacked-out windows from London to the airfield at Leuchars, Scotland, before boarding the flight to Sweden.

Unlike official agents who carry a reichsmark-laden money belt, pistol, concentrated food pack and silk map of their operating area, I’m armed with an old satchel filled with personal items (including Cleopatra’s perfume). I don’t carry a small radio receiver or an entrenching tool since I’m not being dropped into Germany behind enemy lines like agents enlisted to help local resistance movements carry out what the Foreign Office calls sabotage and subversion.

I do have forged papers to identify me.

Once I arrive in Stockholm, I shall travel to Malmö by train then across the Baltic Sea by ferry to Copenhagen. I dare not try to cross the sea from Trelleborg, Sweden, into Germany and run the risk of coming into contact with Nazi troops rumored to be crossing secretly into Norway. It’s safer to cross from the Danish capital into the small seaside town of Warnemünde in Germany and continue by train to Berlin.

My pen shakes and drops of black ink dot the page like footprints tracing my path across Europe. I fear what awaits me in the Nazi stronghold, and it’s that fear that propels me to continue to record what happened to me in Port Said. I have no idea how much time I’ll have when I reach Berlin to finish how I came to take this extraordinary journey. I’m traveling under an American passport in my maiden name, Eve Charles, prepared for me by SIS, British Secret Intelligence Services, in London with the help of the U.S. Foreign Office. Yes, dear reader, I’m an American by birth, though I’m not comfortable with revealing the details of my life before I became Lady Marlowe. The job is dangerous and, unlike other agents, I speak only English and the limited German I learned as a child. Why I’m familiar with the guttural language of the stormtroopers is not important, for to reveal all would be to place myself in greater jeopardy. All you need to know is I’m not a spy—

I struck out that last sentence before the attendant insisted I put away my writing pen and ink. We’re headed through a thunderstorm with heavy rain and lightning. Everything in the cabin not secured tumbled onto the floor of the aircraft, including my cup of coffee, along with the diary. I grabbed it before the attendant could retrieve it, breaking my nail, then I asked her if we were turning back. No, she assured me, a straight course through the storm would get us out of danger.

Danger? How strange to hear the word spoken out loud when inside I cannot quell my anxiety. I push the wisps of hair sticking to my forehead off my face, scratching my skin with a broken nail. A few weeks ago I would have Mrs. Wills ring up my manicurist for immediate repair. Now it seems so unimportant. I chew on the ragged nail. I will know nothing but danger until I complete my mission.

Trembling, I hold the red silk book flush against my breasts and grip the armrest with my other hand while I stare out the window. I see nothing but large chunks of ice pelting the glass. My pulse races as the captain maneuvers the plane to hold the altitude, but the gale pitches us about in the sky up and down with such intensity I fear we’ll be torn apart in midair. What if we crash? What if my diary falls into enemy hands? Oh, God, what was I thinking? No, I can’t reveal the nature of my mission to you. My intent in writing this diary is to record what happened to me in Port Said and Cairo and what I believe will happen to me should I fail in Berlin and a bullet finds its mark. Nothing more.

Accordingly, I hesitate to regale you with a lonely woman’s sexual obsession, though depending on who you are, dear reader, you may find pleasure in my recounting of the man I came to know only as Ramzi. So I shall continue.

After that lascivious afternoon of sexual antics in Bar Supplice with Ramzi, I allowed my heated passions to cool, though he insisted on allowing him to show me the sights of Port Said. Eyes connecting, hands reaching, fingers touching, we competed at tennis, rode Arab steeds together and walked along the beach at sunset. Dabbing on heavy red lipstick to protect my lips from the sun but not from the burning kiss of my handsome Egyptian, I allowed him to exude his charm, though underneath I sensed his excessive callousness. I can’t deny that like most lonely women, I found myself fascinated by this extreme male example of sinfulness. Sitting outdoors over tea and a game of bridge at my hotel, he explained to me how he needed money to finance an expedition to the Valley of the Queens. A friend of his, he said, was close to unearthing the tomb of Cleopatra.

I raised an eyebrow, curious. Such an expedition could only be a hoax, a ruse to get money from me. Cleopatra died long after the time of the Pyramids. I laid down my cards, losing interest in the game. I was lonely, so I continued to listen.

What proof did he have? I demanded. He insisted the entire story of how Cleopatra died clutching a snake to her breast was a myth. He didn’t mind illustrating his point by circling my breast with his fingers, my nipple hardening. His bold gesture went unnoticed. Teatime had ended an hour ago and we were the sole occupants in the hotel restaurant.

I bent closer to him, wanting to hear more. The royal tale of incest, power, greed and bloodlust had a much different ending, he assured me, one he would share with me if I financed his expedition.

I must digress here, dear reader, and remind you I am no neophyte to the ways of the Near East. I explored the ancient Pyramids of Egypt with my husband, Lord Marlowe, on our honeymoon. He was a gentleman and a scholar. And the man who encouraged me to fulfill my darkest desires. Bent over the somber-faced sarcophagus of a pharaoh, my bare breasts resting in his stone mouth, my honey juices coating the gold detailing along his stone arms, I trembled and shivered with delight as I engaged in lessons in obedience and Egyptology.

Naked save for a pair of white satin pumps, sheer stockings and red garters, I squealed in delight as Lord Marlowe pinched my quivering buttocks while he expounded on the Roman conquest of Egypt, then he struck my bare backside with the thinnest of canes designed to evoke pleasure not pain. The light stinging blows startled me at first, but soon gave way to a sensation of warmth that enveloped my lower body with an intense heat.

I let go with a loud guttural cry, squeezing my eyes shut, the muscles in my buttocks tightening and contracting again and again each time I heard the whistle of the crop, knowing the exquisite pleasure I needed so desperately was about to find its mark. I contracted my pubic muscles, anticipating his cock driving deep into me, filling me, waiting. I cried out when he parted my cheeks and entered me. I bucked with wild abandon, grinding my hips against his groin harder, harder, until I could stand no more and I inserted one, then two fingers inside me and rubbed my burning clit until a rolling wave of pleasure overtook me, the rush of its power filling my ears and drowning out my screams of delight.

Afterward, lying in his arms, he’d tell me about Caesar and Cleopatra and how the deposed queen devised a plan to smuggle herself into the palace in Alexandria wrapped in a rug, her firm young body a gift for the emperor. Naked except for ribbons of pearls encircling her neck and swung over her hips, she enticed the Roman general with a sensual dance, swaying her hips and playing with her breasts, then climaxing her performance by pulling out a string of perfect white pearls from her anus while bending over, her calf muscles straining, her long beaded black wig snapping against her cheeks. All this, he was eager to tell me while fingering my anal hole and making me squirm with delight, to enlist the Roman’s help in her struggle to control the Egyptian throne.

I was intrigued with the story and, in a quasi-serious mood, I begged my dear husband to lay his supple cane upon my naked backside again and again to hear him tell me more stories. The reality was I thirsted for both the cane and knowledge. I left school when I was sixteen, not uncommon for girls of my class. I was uneducated, but savvy enough to know how to take care of myself from my travels around Europe, when and why is not important here. All you need know is I listened intently to Lord Marlowe schooling me in the fine arts, history and the ways of the ancients while he played with my nipples, flicking them back and forth, pinching them, nipping at them, then licking them to soothe the wild sensations sparking through me. I told him I imagined his cock spiraling up like an Egyptian cobra, naja haje, while he circled my breast with his tongue. That brought a chuckle to his lips. He informed me the cobra was more than six feet long and very thick. Like your cock? I’d quip. He laughed and continued his lecture, reminding me to listen well or I would again feel the fierce kiss of his cane upon my arse.

I’ve never forgotten those days. I was a willing pupil and an apt student in the ways of the flesh as well as the mysteries of the empires of Egypt, my naked body lying in repose on eiderdown so soft I floated upon it as well as in my dreams. Behind me, an intricately woven lattice concealed me from the world outside, revealing only my silhouette, my arms up above my head, my wrists secured to serpentine-slender gold poles, my legs spread, his tongue delving into me, his sun-darkened hands massaging my parted thighs while he gave me the pleasure I craved…

So it was I listened with a schooled ear to Ramzi extolling his fabricated tale to me, though my eyes widened with respect when he insisted the Romans, including Mark Antony, believed suicide to be an honorable death. But, he said, the ancient Egyptians believed it was a sin. (Cleopatra was Greek Macedonian, I knew.) I didn’t argue his point, though I wondered, Why was he lying to me about Cleopatra? I wanted to believe him, wanted to again lie my head on his shoulder, reach into his soul and pull him to me, but I held back, waiting. Waiting to see where this game would end. I had no idea what an extraordinary adventure awaited me.

“Cleopatra was murdered,” he told me, his hand lingering on my knee under the round teakwood table. His touch lit a fire between my legs, a slow burn igniting my female urge to again experience sex with this handsome but savage man, an act condemned by the dour-faced society matrons I once craved would accept me. No longer would I bow to the demands of café society. I had allowed a man of the desert to brand my white skin with his touch, a taboo in my world. Breaking such a taboo would sully my reputation, though I didn’t care what anyone thought, so strong was the scent exuding from him. I ignored the insistent voice telling me he was a denizen of falsehoods meant to snare me in his trap. I was more interested in allowing him access to the patch of bare skin above my stockings.

“Interesting theory you have about the death of the Egyptian queen,” I said, sipping my tea, though it had too much sugar for my taste and not enough milk. Thé à la menthe. Ramzi insisted it was a local favorite. “I suppose you also know who murdered her?”

“Octavian wanted to rule over the Roman empire,” he said, “but Cleopatra stood in the way, so he ordered his men to kill her and make it look like suicide.”

“Sounds intriguing.” I finished my tea, the sweetness lingering on my lips. I licked it off with my tongue. Still, my mouth burned with its icy coolness. “But I don’t believe you.”

“You will.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He leaned over, then put his hand on my neck and whispered in my ear, “I know how to convince you.”

4

Nude. A blindfold over my eyes. Restraints made of gold rope. Hands moving over my body. Mahmoud’s. Always the perfect bodyguard, I knew his touch as well as I knew the breadth of Ramzi’s cock.

I shivered, remembering how the Egyptian’s strength overtook me the first time he’d entered me, his thrusts strong and insistent, though he wasn’t rough or abusive. No, his hands gripped each cheek of my buttocks with a firm touch both loving and passionate. Panting, gasping, my body slick with sweat dripping from my skin like a shower of penance for my past sins, I writhed under him, tilting my hips upward to allow him greater entry.

This time I would be more coy. More secretive. More seductive.

I waited. Waited. Nothing. Mahmoud removed his hands, the loss of his soothing touch fueling the violent headache I couldn’t shake. Under the blindfold, I squeezed my eyes, rimmed with fatigue, heavy and dark, the velvet mask providing a haven from the maddening pressure pushing down on my brain with unwelcome pain despite the pleasure the Nubian lavished upon me.

The tightening sensation squeezing my head started when we left the hotel, though the pressure of Ramzi’s hand against my back, then sliding down to cup my buttock outlined in my silk tailored dress, made it seem more like a nuisance. I didn’t protest when the Egyptian escorted me back to the Bar Supplice and bade Mahmoud to strip me while he watched, then tie me to the large iron rings set into the wall in the violet-hued room behind the stage.

I waited. The warmth of his breath made my nipples harden, indicating the Nubian’s mouth hovered near my breasts, the heat from his body making me tingle. Still nothing. Why?

Shifting my weight from foot to foot, I tugged on the metal rings holding my body, as well as my mind, prisoner. I couldn’t see anything, frustrating me. Was I not going to savor the probing fingers of the tall Nubian, pulling the outer lips of my pussy apart, holding me open for Ramzi’s approval before flicking his tongue into me? Moving in and out, sucking, lapping up the moistness, but not withdrawing his tongue moving across my clitoris until I arched my back in total abandon. What was he waiting for? What macabre ritual was this? Anger pumped through me, replacing the ardent desire rising in me. I was about to demand he untie me when—

“Remove the blindfold, Mahmoud.”

Ramzi’s voice. At last. My body tingled. My spirits rose. Before I could take a breath, the veil of darkness lifted, but I couldn’t see with a clear eye. Subdued lighting cast eerie shadows everywhere, but it didn’t hide the nude Nubian, his bare arms shining with his sweat. I hungered for him to touch me all over, his black fingers rubbing my hard clit…oh, damn him, I couldn’t wait any longer.

“Mahmoud, I—I…” What could I say?

Panting, I tried to catch my breath, my eyes silently pleading for him to pleasure me. I lowered my gaze to my pubic region. He shook his head, his gesture indicating no. The game has changed, his eyes told me, but I was in no mood to act coy when Mahmoud blew his breath onto my throat. He smiled, bowed, then his teeth grazed my nipples, teasing them into hard buds, then flicking them with his thumbs until I cried out. I bucked and twisted my hips, desperate to quell the rising burn building between my legs.

“Ah, my beautiful English lady wishes Mahmoud to arouse her.” Ramzi moved into the light, his magnificent bare chest hard and brown, his lower body encased in wide white satin trousers pulled in tight at the ankles, a deep red cummerbund hugging his hips. As he walked toward me, his feet bare, I noted a shimmer of light bouncing off the naked blade of a curved dagger hanging from his belt. I recognized the jambiya, a weapon native to the Arab world.

“You wish me to supplicate you to receive your cock?” I dared to ask him.

“Not tonight, my English rose.” He said something to Mahmoud in Arabic. The Nubian bowed then left the room. Turning back toward me, Ramzi kissed my nipples then pinched them, making me gasp. “When Mahmoud returns, I have a different game planned for you.”

I was mad with desire.

My body twitched and shimmied under the Nubian’s firm touch, his fingers slick with the spicy, melted perfume, the tingling sensations skipping over my skin, exquisite, and satisfying. I’d never experienced anything so pleasurable as the black man’s hands anointing my skin with this exotic perfume. Massaging my breasts, curving down over my rib cage, his hands gripping my hips, then inserting one finger inside me circling my engorged clit, then another exploring my anal hole with a dexterity that made me crave more.

Ah, dear reader, I can’t tell you what joy I experienced the first time I surrendered to the spell of Cleopatra’s perfume. Certainly there were moments of incredibility, but aren’t these moments due to the limitations we place upon ourselves to accept what we deem to be the impossible? Wasn’t it merely my civilized mind trying to override what my body hungered for?

I surrendered to my carnal needs, pushed all thoughts aside, my loneliness winning the mental game when Ramzi produced a pale golden alabaster box carved with delicate emblems outlined in black. Atop the container sat the nude, bare-breasted figure of a queen holding a scepter and perched on a throne. Cleopatra. He opened it and a powerful aroma overwhelmed me, what I’d describe as a combination of sweet, spicy and musky. The organic earthy scent sent my head into a dizzying tailspin, so strong was the smell. Tugging on the restraints, I leaned forward and sniffed again. Inside the box I saw a solid, waxlike substance also the color of pale gold nestled inside. Perfume as the Egyptians made it.

I watched Ramzi nod to Mahmoud. The Nubian removed the unguent, then, rubbing his large black hands together, the solid perfume became more viscous as it melted in his palms. With sensual strokes, he applied the perfume between my breasts, around my nipples, pinching them, then down my rib cage, massaging my pubic mound before parting my thighs and anointing my labia with the scent. I sighed over and over, letting go, not caring if I revealed to the Egyptian the intense hunger I possessed for sensual gratification.

Be aware, dear reader, though I choose to pursue a sexual life outside the ordinary, I’m cognizant of the fact I invite criticism and what can be conceived by others to be mystical and audacious. Call me a sybarite, if you will, but fate handed me a life most women only dream about in their imaginations or read in novels.

I wasn’t about to let it go.

I became aware of a tingling sensation beginning at my toes then edging up toward the inside of my bare thighs as he continued dabbing perfume behind my ears, on my throat, between my breasts, then snaking his finger into my anal hole, twisting it, then pushing deeper, deeper. I spread my legs wider, the urge to engage all my senses in this adventure dominating my will. How did he come into the possession of such an atar? I asked Ramzi. And why anoint me with its intoxicating scent?

He didn’t answer me but merely smiled, then showed me a large ruby-and-pearl ring he swore he’d taken from an antechamber said to contain Cleopatra’s personal jewelry, including the legendary pearls she wore to seduce Caesar. He eased the ring onto my forefinger then slipped his hand between my legs. The white heat singeing my flesh with his touch was so extraordinary I nearly swooned. I willed myself to remain conscious, not only to revel in the frenzied sensations shooting through me, but to listen to him reveal the mystery of the evocative scent.

I will tell you the story of Cleopatra’s perfume as Ramzi told it to me, word by word, for I’ve never forgotten it.

He came into possession of the perfume from a dragoman in Cairo, a guide and translator who had led an antique-mad American into the Valley of the Kings some months ago. Filling the man’s head with stories of mummies adorned with strings of amulets and ornaments of gold at their throats, coverings wrought with gold and silver and inlaid with precious jewels, he led the man down the lonely and desolate highland path leading into a darkened tomb. Then, in a heated whisper, his torch shining into the open sarcophagus, he expressed surprise to find it empty, its treasure pilfered by robbers.

When the disappointed tourist became angry and demanded his money returned, the guide assured him he knew of a secret tomb hewn in the wall of the rocky basin of Deir el-Bahri, a site where a mass grave of kings had recently been discovered. What he didn’t tell the American was that what had once been a sepulcher for royal mummies for three thousand years to hide them from ancient tomb robbers was now his personal cache of rare artifacts. One by one, the dragoman led unsuspecting foreigners to the hidden opening in the cliffy massif between the Valley of the Kings and Deir el-Bahri, each time “discovering” a statuette or mummy wearing a golden collar or mask. Once he’d arranged with the foreigner for the artifact to be smuggled out of Egypt for a high price, he replaced it with another artifact for the next unsuspecting modern-day robber.

What the guide didn’t know was that he wasn’t the first to discover the hole in the side of the mountain covered with stones. At the end of the nineteenth century, a British occultist and Egyptologist named Edward Thorndike stumbled onto the cache of dead Egyptian kings hidden away by high priests thousands of years ago. A desperate man, besieged by grief at the loss of his young bride killed by marauding desert tribesmen, he was in possession of a great treasure, a gift to Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, from the High Priest of Emon, her personal emissary. And a man in love with her. A perfume said to transport the body of its wearer to the safety of a secret room in the queen’s chamber in the Great Pyramid at Giza, should an act of violence culminating in death be committed upon them. There they would remain until the danger passed. Cleopatra scoffed, dismissing the existence of such a perfume, though she indulged her passion for scents by having perfumes made in her own factory on the edge of the Dead Sea. To make certain the doomed young queen would wear the perfume and, knowing Cleopatra feared losing her powers of seduction, the high priest added a powerful aphrodisiac to the original ancient formula to give her an irresistible allure to men. One whiff, he assured her, and every man was her slave…

According to the legend, Cleopatra was wearing the perfume when Octavian’s men tried to murder her. As the priest predicted, her body disappeared, never to be seen again. Some say she escaped to Greece, others to Turkey, where she lived the life of a common whore rather than return to Egypt and be killed. What happened to the perfume is uncertain. Did the priest destroy it? Or hide it?

According to Ramzi, the mystical power of the perfume was whispered about in the most elite circles throughout the centuries, from the Byzantine empire to the palazzo of the de Medicis to the court of Versailles to Napoleon. How did the perfume survive? I wanted to know. The perfume box was of calcite, he said, sealed by the natural changes in temperature and moisture over the years, causing the salts to crystallize around the lid and form a hard, protective incrustation, thereby preserving the perfume. Every hundred years or so, the perfume would resurface somewhere in the world, only to go underground again.

Thorndike was obsessed with the legend of Cleopatra’s perfume and spent his fortune following its trail to a monastery in the mountains of southern Italy, where a secret sect of monks recreated the perfume by following the ancient formula carved on the alabaster box and using the essential oils still fragrant in the container, including a godlike plant named cyperian grown only in the Himalayas.

To secure the perfume for himself, Thorndike bewitched a local girl and enticed her with marriage to help him steal the fragrance from the monastery. With the scent in his possession and determined to pilfer more ancient antiquities, he traveled with his new bride deep into the Egyptian desert. He bade the young woman to wear the perfume for her safety. She found the scent too strong for her liking and refused. Soon after, she fell victim to a savage attack on their camp by feuding tribesmen and was killed. The British occultist was devastated by her death. He was convinced her life would have been saved had she been wearing Cleopatra’s perfume.

I must pause here, dear reader, to get my bearings and prepare for landing. I feel great pressure in my ears, though the rollings of the aircraft have subsided. Raindrops and hail still strike my window, the insistent tapping keeping in rhythm with the steady strokes of my pen. I will arrive at our destination soon. Stockholm. There I will begin the final phase of my journey to Berlin where I shall fulfill my destiny.

Before I do, I must finish recounting to you the story of the perfume. I’ve no doubt you have the urge to toss the diary across the room, cursing, ranting. You feel cheated, deceived, made a fool of, believing you’ve invested your time in reading a spicy novel, not a real diary, but I assure you it’s all true.

I, too, questioned the validity of such wild imaginings until I recalled what Lord Marlowe told me about the Egyptian Book of the Dead, how the ancient papyrus purported that the priests of the Fourth Dynasty, more than two thousand years before Cleopatra’s reign, underwent a mystic ritual transforming them into gods. They would lie for three days and three nights in the pyramid while their ka, soul, left their bodies and traveled unseen through the spheres of space. Was it possible the story of Cleopatra’s perfume was true? I still wasn’t convinced.

When I expounded upon my knowledge of Egyptology to Ramzi, he grinned, his dark eyes teasing me, but he wouldn’t recant his tale. Instead, he claimed one such priest, fearing his body would be violated while in the trance, formulated a perfume that would transport his human form as well as his mind through space. It was widely assumed the Egyptians were in possession of secret chemical formulas to embalm mummies, he said in an attempt to beguile me and gain my confidence. Why not a secret compound for a perfume that promised a form of immortality?

I shivered. The words of the fortune-teller echoed in my mind. “You will meet a man within a fortnight and his fire will peel the skin from your bones, making you lose all control. With him you will find immortality.”

I pray you’re still with me, dear reader, for the most extraordinary part of my story is yet to be revealed. First, touch the pages with your fingertips, then put them to your nostrils and inhale. Yes, breathe in deeply the perfume I smeared onto the pages to seduce your spirit so you will believe me, though I dare not waste too much of its magic essence.

You can make more perfume, you say. No, the secret is lost. Thorndike, angry and grieving, broke off the piece of stone holding the final ingredient for immortality inscribed in the hieroglyphics on the alabaster box and smashed it to dust, thereby robbing the world of its power. He buried the box of perfume in the sacred tomb of the ancients along with the body of his wife, then he returned to England. He wrote about his experiences in Egypt and Cleopatra’s perfume and published his story privately for members of his occult society before dying a penniless and broken man. But the legend endured.

When the dragoman discovered the sacred tomb in the side of the mountain, Cleopatra’s perfume was among the artifacts he retrieved. Recognizing the hieroglyphics for “Cleopatra” on the box, he inquired discreetly among his contacts about the existence of such a perfume. Slowly, he uncovered the story of its power and entreated his friend Ramzi to find a buyer for the perfume.

“Why didn’t he keep it for himself?” I inquired.

Ramzi shrugged. “Like so many of my people, he’s superstitious about keeping artifacts looted from the tombs. So he sells them.”

“Then there is no expedition to the Valley of the Queens?” I asked him, my body cooling from the slow release of my passion, so involved was I listening to his story.

He gave me a charming smile. “No. I sell the perfume—” He gestured with his hands. “I receive a commission. It’s all business.”

“All business?” I had to ask, licking my lips with my tongue.

He inhaled deeply, then lifted my chin. My face was so close to his I could feel the warmth of his breath on my lips.“No. You are pleasure.”

“Then fuck me. Now.”

“You tempt me, my English lady. You possess the famed beauty of an ikbal, harem favorite, and looking at you, holding you, sets my blood on fire. You make me lose my self-restraint. I want to strip you naked and run my hands all over your body.” He clenched his fists in frustration. “I act crazy when I’m with you, like when I reach kayf, the ecstasy that grips me when I smoke hashish.” He paused. “No, before I can find pleasure in your arms, we must first agree on a price for the perfume.”

“I’m interested in you, Ramzi, not the perfume.” I refused to allow him to control me with his fabricated tale.

Talking to me softly, he ran his fingers across my check. “Don’t dismiss the power of the perfume as quickly as if it were sand falling through your fingers,” he said. “You’re a beautiful woman and Port Said is a dangerous place for beautiful women.” His lips brushed the nape of my neck. “I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”

His words chilled me, but I refused to show fear. Still defiant, I said, “What proof do I have the perfume would protect me from a violent death?”

In a low whisper, he said, “I will show you.”

I tried to hold my head up, but the dizzying effect of the perfume dulled my senses and dragged me down like a heavy weight. Fear beamed in my eyes and my pulse raced out of control when I saw Ramzi pull the dagger from his belt, the point curving away from him. His hand raised. But it was his eyes that captured my fear more than the blade he pointed at me. His eyes. Passion, madness. I saw it all, the words screaming in my head. He intends to kill me. Fool, what had I done? Allowed this man to take me on a journey of erotic pleasure, then murder me. Why, why? He can’t believe the perfume holds a mystic power to protect its wearer. He can’t. That’s insane. Too incredible to be true.

Pulling on the restraints, kicking my feet out wildly, I tried to escape what I knew was certain death, not a subliminal fantasy. Sweat poured down my body, from my armpits to my belly, my thighs, making it difficult for Mahmoud to grab my legs. He circled my ankles with his large hands and held my legs together. I twisted my torso to and fro, but I couldn’t free myself. Frustrated, I screamed, again and again. Sweat dripped into my eyes. I can’t see, can’t see. My breathing was erratic, my body trembled.

“Ramzi, please, no!”

“Don’t be afraid, fair lady, the darkness will not last—”

I tried to scream again, but the smothering acrid scent of the perfume overwhelmed me. Spicy, erotic. Making my head spin and spin. My body went numb, I couldn’t feel the restraints, I tried to speak but couldn’t, my lips were dry, my throat hoarse. I had no taste in my mouth, not even the salty taste of my own sweat dripping over my lips. My senses were depleted, gone, all except—

Smell.

The sumptuous, spicy scent filled my nostrils, the air around me, seeping into my pores—this wildly erotic invisible perfume. Groggy, I forced my eyes open. Suspended above me was the dagger, the curving point aimed at my throat. A split fraction of time left before he plunged the knife into me.

5

I’m cold. Violently cold. Teeth chattering, shoulders shaking, damn, I can’t feel anything. My fingers, toes, all numb. Am I dead?

Frantic, I open my eyes, my lashes heavy as if they’re frozen together.Amber light illuminates the red stone walls surrounding me. I see faint traces of figures painted onto the walls, a high priest wearing a panther skin and offering what I believe is an ankh, the symbol of life, to a pharaoh. Women in sweeping robes doing each other’s hair, the twist and turn of their long tresses etched with precise detail.

I keep staring at the walls. They seem to be moving closer…closer together. A sense of confinement overtakes me, but it’s not threatening, as if the painted figures protect me on my journey to—to—where? Where am I? The last thing I remember is—

Ramzi. The dagger. No, no, no. I must be dead.

Or is it—

Cleopatra’s perfume? Oh, God, does such a thing exist?

I don’t believe it.

I touch my cheek and the large ruby-and-pearl ring Ramzi gave me slides on my forefinger. Before I can lower my hand, a mist of crystalline sand spins around my bare breasts, teasing me, nipping them like icy fingers, then diving into the valley between my thighs, licking me. I move my hips, expecting to feel a slow burn rising within me. Nothing. The persistent sand swirls around me in a serpentine pattern, as if it’s weaving a protective cocoon. I raise my arms, touch the walls. No, they’re not walls. I’m lying in a giant sarcophagus similar to the polished stone sarcophagus of Pharaoh Cheops in the Great Pyramid.According to the ancients, the pyramid has a physical effect on living things. Can it also prolong life?

I relax. If so, then the legend is true.

Sand settles on top of my breasts, my belly, my legs, like a finely woven blanket…my feet getting warmer…then my fingers…I feel sleepy…exhausted. Somehow I know the danger is over.

The fear subsiding, I close my eyes and join the sleep of the pharaohs.

Do you believe such a thing happened, dear reader? I did. Drugged, overwrought, exhausted from sex, I fell prey to a scheme designed to make me believe I had escaped death by the magic of Cleopatra’s perfume. I wanted to believe it, so enamored was I by Ramzi, my hunger for him turning into an obsession. I didn’t see that then. I was living a madcap adventure, wrapped up in self-absorption and floating on the high that comes with the rush of romance, so please allow me my fondness in writing this next part of the diary like a dime novel, although I must warn you, the cast of characters is about to change. First, I imagine you’re curious to know what happened when I woke up in my hotel room, my nude body wrapped in a white satin coverlet, a sweetmeat poised between my lips, the honey taste of the sugary confection evoking a pleasant sensation in me. Very curious, I imagine.

“Good morning, my beautiful English lady.”

Ramzi. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, trying to bring his handsome face into focus. Grinning at me with nary a line of worry etched upon his features, he waited for me to speak. I looked at him with questions in my eyes, knowing my expression betrayed my confusion. Smiling, he fed me the candied delicacy, his fingers lingering on my lips. I licked them. They tasted sweet.

“What happened? I—I…” I touched my cheeks, my forehead. Cool, but my head throbbed with a persistent ache that made me wince.

Without hesitation, he said, “The perfume’s power saved you from the blade of my dagger.”

“No, no, I don’t believe it.” I tossed my head about on the fluffy pillow, trying to shake off that idea. Why did I allow myself to fall victim to such an irrational impulse? I knew the answer. The drug he put into my tea had done its work. Exploited, enslaved by this man, I’d offered no resistance when he and his bodyguard transported my unconscious body to a secret crypt and laid me in a sarcophagus brought here from Cairo or Luxor. No other explanation made sense.

Grabbing me, he shook me, his frustration apparent. “Why won’t you believe in the power of the perfume to protect you from danger?”

“What danger?” I said, naive innocence coloring my voice. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”

His emotions spent, his handsome features relaxed, he appeared young, innocent, but the devilish lift of his black eyebrows made him look fierce, determined. I sensed an underlying edge in his voice when he said, “Passion can make a man do strange things to capture the affections of a beautiful woman.”

“Like this elaborate scheme?”

His dark eyes narrowed. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word to make certain I understood. “I admit I tried to trick you with the tale about finding the tomb of the Egyptian queen, but the story of Cleopatra’s perfume is true.”

His words stung me. “Stop telling me lies. Stop it!” I reached out and beat on his bare chest with my fists. He grabbed my wrists and held them in a tight grip. I drew in my breath, relishing the pleasurable sensations his hold sparked in me. He knew it, too. Knew the effect his subtle game had on me and used it to his advantage.

“You’re going to listen to me, my English lady, if I have to—to—”

“Tie me up and fuck me?”

He shot me an indulgent smile. “You shall have your wish, but first—”

I didn’t protest when he removed a braided green cord from around his waist and tied my wrists above my head to the Europeanstyle bedpost. The remainder of my hotel room was fashioned in an Arabian decor with gilded hangings encrusted with pearls and fastened to the walls, a heavy Persian rug covering the wooden floor and a low sofa upholstered with gold embroidery and piled high with white cushions.

I tugged on the restraints. “I can’t move. Satisfied?”

He shook his head. “No. Not until you listen to what I have to say.”

I wanted him to fuck me so I listened.

“The dragoman who found the perfume saw it work its magic.”

“How?” I asked, skepticism creeping into my voice. “Did he use it himself?”

“No, the perfume saved the girl he loved from an angry mob.”

“Keep going.”

He explained how the girl dabbed the perfume on her wrists, not knowing its power. The guide and his lover were from two warring desert tribes and when the chieftains discovered their indiscretion, they began stoning the girl. Raising her arms to protect herself, she disappeared before their eyes. When they discovered the perfume had saved her, they fought over the magic scent and several men were killed in the brawl. Frightened, the dragoman spirited the perfume away and begged me to sell it for him so he and the girl could leave his village and start a new life together.”

I laughed, my breasts heaving up and down. “You tell a wonderful story, Ramzi, but I’m still not convinced.”

Smiling, his dark eyes challenging me, he removed a small amount of the solid perfume from the alabaster box sitting upon the dresser. How did it get there? Then he rubbed the unguent between his fingers and applied the perfume to his bare chest. Next, he untied my wrists and removed the dagger from his waistband and placed it in my hand, the curving edge pricking his skin until a drop of blood appeared.

“Drive the blade deep into my heart,” he said.

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“Do it.”

“No.”

“You must. If I’m threatened with a violent death I will disappear.”

“You believe the legend?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re willing to put your life in jeopardy to prove it to me?”

“Yes. Can’t you see how I worship you? Your eyes, your lips haunt me, your skin so fair. I have dared to explore your mysteries, but it’s not enough for me. I want you with me always. Whatever happens, Cleopatra’s perfume will protect you from danger.”

“You’re insane!”

“Yes, I’ve lost my senses, ignored reason, flung my soul into the sea to pay for my sins, but nothing is as important to me as you.”

“Ramzi, I—I…”

“Don’t speak. Let me show you how much I need you.”

Drawing the white satin coverlet down over my breasts, he pinched my nipples, then pulling it down farther still, he pushed my thighs apart and inserted his finger deep inside me. I lifted my hips to allow him easier access, groaning expectantly when he rubbed my clit back and forth in the steady rhythm he knew would take me to the brink. Before I could climax, he withdrew his finger. Would he use his tongue to take me where I wanted to go? Tension skirted across my neck and back, making me groan again. What was he waiting for?

I dropped the dagger and it rattled onto the rug, where I don’t know, didn’t care. I wanted him, hot and raw, inside me. Did I believe his wild tale? No. I admired his ardent performance, his show of bravura with the dagger, but I was a modern woman, capable of knowing a romantic version of the shell game when I saw it. Surely he knew I wouldn’t try to kill him. Then why the pretense?

I convinced myself he saw me as a woman of his world, sweeping black kohl upon my eyelids with the fantail of a white peacock. I imagined it pleased him to believe I retained the air of the veil about me and couldn’t make my own decisions. He wanted to be in control, so I let him.

I arched my back when he slid his cock into me, sighing with delirium as he began moving in me with a fierce urgency, harder and harder until I heard him gasp. I shuddered with a satisfying orgasm when I felt him shoot his hot semen into me. I made up my mind. I’d do as he asked and settle on a sum with him to purchase the artifact. What harm would it do to let him think I believed the story of Cleopatra’s perfume?

The next morning I wired Mrs. Wills to send me the funds.

Ramzi vanished soon after I gave him the money. When I heard the news, I found it difficult to breathe, the muscles of my stomach hardening while my emotions lapsed into depression. His disappearance struck me in the gut with the impact of something sharp ripping me apart. He’d thrust his dagger into me after all and I never saw it coming.

Hitting my fists into my palms, I cursed him, spat at him, then hurled my shoe against the wall and broke off the heel. Grabbing the box of Cleopatra’s perfume, the urge to throw it across my hotel room gripped me. Only the insistent ringing of the telephone stopped me from destroying it. Lady Palmer couldn’t wait to give me her take on the situation. She was convinced Ramzi was murdered, my money stolen; others said he disappeared into the desert; still others said he fled to Cairo to ply his trade of seduction under a different name, a different guise.

Whatever his reason for deserting me, I couldn’t stay in Port Said. During the summer of 1939, the port city was in a state of flux, flooded with Greeks, Italians, Syrians, Armenians, as well as Jewish refugees. I paid them little attention. My mind was too busy analyzing every moment I was with Ramzi, reliving every penetrating stare, every caress, every thrust of his cock in me. Always asking why, why I’d allowed myself to feel again, to dream, to let go and indulge in a dangerous obsession with this man. What did I know about him? Nothing. He knew me only as Lady Marlowe, dear reader, and that’s how it must remain. To reveal the details of my past would invite a certain scrutiny, perhaps danger as well, and I can’t take that chance. All you need to know is I was unsure of myself and harbored the doubt that no man, save my late husband, could love me for who I was and that I possessed no power within me to inspire such a deep love again.

Life in Port Said went on as usual. Tea dances, boring games of bridge, walks on the beach. A week, two, then three passed. My pain turned into a numbing feeling, then finally I rebelled against feeling sorry for myself. It accomplished nothing. As for the money I gave Ramzi, I controlled the fortunes of Lord Marlowe’s vast estate, so I dismissed the lost funds as nothing more than a bad debt. Eager to leave the city, I made plans to depart for Bombay with Lady Palmer and her wayward daughter, Flavia.

I should mention the young woman was no worse for wear for her interlude with Ramzi. Doe-eyed with brown hair longer than the current style, her silk dress hung loosely on her royal bones, belying the sensual sway of her hips and small waist underneath. She hadn’t forgiven me for interfering with her bawdy tryst. She refused to look me in the eye when we’d meet, though I hadn’t mentioned her indiscretion to her mother, merely that I’d found her drinking in a disreputable bar. I had my own secrets and prayed I would find an ally in the girl, but she disappointed me. She dismissed my offer of friendship with a toss of her head, as if I were invisible. To her, I was, for I wasn’t born with a title. Spoiled, beautiful, her flesh never poisoned by disillusionment, Flavia Palmer possessed the breeding I’d kill for, the manners I’d spent years learning and the resilience of youth to find another warm body to assuage her sexual hunger.

I, in turn, suffered from a fierce need to forget this man I knew as Ramzi, the perfume he gave me emitting from my soul as well as my body. Yes, I wore the perfume, and kept a small amount wrapped up in my handkerchief nestled between my breasts in my brassiere. Why? Why does a woman do anything when she’s suffering from the bitterness of love lost? I ask you, dear reader, do you know? I don’t.

What surprised me more was how much like Flavia I’d become.

I discovered this troubling aspect of my personality one afternoon when I strolled with Lady Palmer and her daughter through the open market in Port Said. Black women selling rich mocha coffees, the dried beans sun-golden in color, squatted on mats, the once-bright red fibers dulled by the impressions of their bare feet. Rows and rows of shiny amber beads adorned their necks and dark-skinned arms waving about as they hawked their trinkets and basked in the hot sun overhead.

A rotund woman in a black abaya and nose veil nudged Lady Palmer with her basket to better view the coffees, setting the Englishwoman’s feathered hat askew on her head. Lady Palmer was too shocked to react, but Flavia took the offense and pushed the woman, who turned and hissed at her like a cat. Laughing, the girl ignored her along with several dirty children gathering around her and holding out their hands for baksheesh, tips.

“What filthy, rude people,” she commented, lighting up a cigarette. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.” She blew smoke in my direction, her eyes challenging me when she said, “I only wish I’d had as good a time here as Lady Marlowe.”

Before I could give her a piece of my mind, Lady Palmer pulled the cigarette out of her daughter’s mouth and tossed it into the dirt. Half a dozen children leaped on it, including a bare-legged boy jumping off his donkey. “No smoking, Flavia. What will your father say?”

She shrugged. “What he always says. Nothing.”

Straightening her hat, the Englishwoman turned to me, her eyes sad. “I was hoping this trip would restore some civility to my daughter.”

“Too bad she didn’t get the spanking she deserves,” I retorted, smiling, knowing Flavia would scratch my eyes out if she could. Fortunately, my double entendre was lost on Lady Palmer, who was more interested in checking out the wares of a small shop selling scarabs reputed to be from King Tutankhamen’s tomb, strings of mummy beads and little bronze gods. All made in Paris.

Dallying at the shop proved to be my undoing. I picked up a stone statuette of a bare-breasted goddess, its smooth white chalky surface dirtying my navy gloves, my irritation at Flavia’s rudeness escalating when I called upon the shopkeeper to dust them. Bowing, apologizing, the poor man wiped my soiled gloves, but not to my satisfaction.

I stormed out of the shop, fuming. What was happening to me, acting like that? I began to question why I decided to travel with the girl and her mother to Bombay. Loneliness, I presume, but that was no excuse for putting up with that girl’s insolence. No, I could no longer exist in a world whose rhythms didn’t match my own. Whatever the outcome, I made my decision. Lady Palmer could travel to Bombay without me. I had other plans. I wasn’t leaving Port Said until I tracked down Ramzi, if only to give him a piece of my mind.

And to see his magnificent body again? Was my desire for adventure, sexual fever, wild fantasy that strong? Are you that much of a fool to expose your interest in him for everyone to criticize? I asked myself. Yes, and hell be damned what anyone thought.

Fueled with a new energy, I paid little attention to the young boy wiping the dirt off my shoes with a grimy rag or the little girl pestering me with a frayed pink rose. I reached into my purse and gave him one piastre. Her, two piastres. Then I hurried down the street past butcher shops, cobbler stalls, vendors selling squabs and onions, splitting a goat flock in two, and dragging Lady Palmer with me. It was almost teatime, though I needed something stronger to calm my nerves, especially with Flavia lamenting how bored she was, then tossing more barbs my way about how she couldn’t understand how a handsome man like Ramzi could be interested in an older woman.

“No wonder he left Port Said alone,” she said, tossing her long hair over her shoulder, “after he got what he wanted.”

“I’d watch what you say, Flavia, if you don’t want to spend the next six months touring the Orient with your mother.” I turned around to make certain Lady Palmer didn’t hear my remark, when a camel blocked her way, his handler nowhere to be seen. Before I could react, the animal grabbed Lady Palmer’s feathered hat between his teeth, pulling it off her head.

“My hat!” she yelled, her voice panicked.

I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. She was lucky the camel didn’t bite her ear.

“Lady Marlowe,” she begged, “you must retrieve my hat from that dirty creature! It’s a Bond Street original.”

Shaking my head, I said, “By all means, Lady Palmer.”

Racing down the narrow street after the camel, Lady Palmer’s hat between his teeth, the tassels on his saddle waving in the wind, I chased him down one winding lane then another, until I found myself in a seedier section of the city.

An area I knew all too well.

Across the street I saw the Bar Supplice, boarded up and deserted. My heart pounding, my lips moved without speaking in a silent prayer, recounting the mysterious awakening I discovered within those cavelike walls. The beauty, the sensual illumination, all still lived within me. Within seconds, that feeling dissipated. I sensed a tragic quality about it now, a world created for stimulation that continued to haunt me though its magic ceased when Ramzi left.

I barely noticed the camel had dropped the feathered hat until a young woman picked it up and handed it to me. Without glancing at her, I said, “Thank you. Lady Palmer will be most pleased.”

I opened my purse to give her two piastres, when she blurted out, “You’re British!”

Turning to look at her, I said, “Yes, I’m Lady Marlowe.”

“You must help me get to England,” she said, her accent foreign, “before it’s too late.” She rushed her words, as if every moment was precious.

I stood back, not wanting to get involved. “Too late for what? Who are you?”

She said her name quickly, but my ears picked up a German name, Jewish, if I wasn’t mistaken. That disturbed me for reasons I shall not explain. She grabbed my arm and begged me for help. I pulled away from her. She was a young girl, no more than eighteen, her slender form appealing but her body fragrant with the smell of fear. She was dressed in a shapeless brown-checked suit cut with a sophistication that didn’t fit her.

Eyes brimming with tears, she went on to explain how Germany’s new racial laws threatened Jews and how things had only gotten worse since Kristallnacht, when gangs of Nazis and their supporters roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows, burning synagogues and looting. Since then, no one would take in the Jews fleeing the Nazi state. No one. Both England and America had refused her entry, so she boarded the Italian ship Conte Rosso to escape persecution from Hitler’s Reich. Without a visa only one place would take her.

“Where?” I asked, more out of politeness than curiosity.

“Shanghai,” she said.

“Lovely city. Do be sure to make the rounds at the Cathay during the cocktail hour,” I said, mentioning the Chinese outpost famed for its watering hole for wealthy visitors. I rambled on about the interesting members of the literati I often found lingering at the bar. I paid no attention to the blank look on her face. I merely wanted to get rid of her. A stronger urge pulled at me as I continued to stare at the Bar Supplice and I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I still ached for Ramzi’s arms around me, his sensuous voice spinning tales. Lies, but I didn’t care.

Meanwhile, the Jewish girl rambled on, begging me to help her. I tried to ignore her. What did her problems matter to me? Surely it couldn’t be as bad as all that in Germany. Not too long ago I’d traveled to Berlin with Lord Marlowe to attend a photography show at a gallery for my friend Maxi von Brandt. We knew each other from the old days when we both worked the cabarets, me as a dancer, her as a photographer, chatting up strangers on the telephones at each table and drinking in the pleasure palaces of Berlin. Haus Vaterland and the Resi. Fun days, filled with all the wildness and proclivity and sexual abandon of the Weimar Republic.

“Lady Marlowe, please, listen to me. You don’t understand what’s happening to Jews in Germany. The nightly arrests, the forcedlabor camps—”

“Rumors, all rumors.” I avoided her eyes, not believing her theatrics. Didn’t all young girls go through a stage of dramatics? I couldn’t help her, I insisted, walking away, my eyes going again and again to the boarded-up building I’d known as Bar Supplice. I haunted the street with a vacant stare in my eyes. Hoping, dreaming it was all a mistake and Ramzi would return. I couldn’t bear the thought that the sumptuous den of decadence where I’d stripped down to my soul was dirty and crude, infested with rats, their vermin sticking to me like broken promises.

So absorbed was I in my plight, I barely listened to the mournful tale of the young Jewess following me. She implored me to tell the world what was happening to Jews, the camps, the deaths, the rape of Jewish women by the Gestapo.

“I wouldn’t have gotten out of Germany,” she said, “if a man hadn’t taken me to Genoa with him.”

“A man?” I asked, interested. “Then why are you asking me for help?”

“You don’t understand. He—he gave me a passport and said I was to tell anyone who asked I was a dressmaker.”

“A dressmaker? Why?”

“He promised me there’d be no trouble getting through customs and immigration if I did as he asked.”

“And did you?” I said, aware of the implication in my voice.

She lowered her head. “Yes. I had no choice.”

I thought about how I’d been young once and had nearly fallen for that same trick in the back alley behind a Berlin bar. In my case, the man met an untimely end when he was robbed by local thieves. And me? I ran and ran and ran, never looking back.

“Don’t you see, you must help me, Lady Marlowe,” she pleaded, her fearful eyes darting everywhere. “Without family or papers, I—I will have no way to pay for what I need in Shanghai except—”

“Yes. I understand.” I opened my purse, wrapping my hands around some bills. I was about to give her some money and be on my way, when a commotion caught my attention.

“Lady Marlowe, you’ve retrieved my hat!”

I spun around, surprised to see Lady Palmer bouncing down the dirty street hatless with both her sagging bosom and her daughter in tow. But who was that man in the dark jacket, bow tie, white pants and Panama hat behind them? His gait was uneven, as if he had a crippled leg, and his right hand was in his pocket in a way that disturbed me. Was he reaching for a gun?

“My pleasure, Lady Palmer,” I said, plopping the hat on her head and trying to smile, though I cast a wary eye toward the man observing us. I turned my back and chatted with Lady Palmer about the impudent camel who dared to pluck her designer hat off her head. Silly, infusive talk, but I was grateful to once again enter that parallel dimension I lived in whose portal was accessible to a privileged few.

When I turned around to give the Jewish girl some money, the man in the Panama hat had her by the elbow and out of my reach. Then she was gone. Off to Shanghai, I imagined.

I recounted the girl’s story over tea to Lady Palmer, if only to assuage the guilt burning in my soul. I knew what happened to white women in Shanghai. Not even a heated fainting spell from Lady Palmer kept me from telling her how disease was rampant in the miserably squalid, decadent city. And how procurers of human flesh forced women to service customers in dirty backrooms, lying in a bunk in a cloud of smoke while one, two men fondled them, opening them to the probing of fingers, mouths, with only opium to help them forget. Intense nausea gripping them from the drug, their skin turning sallow, their bodies growing thin and frail until they took their last breath and found release.

Lady Palmer dismissed the entire incident as a scheme to cheat me. The whole thing was an act, she insisted, admitting she’d also been approached with the same story the week before in the bazaar.

Later in my room, I collapsed on the bed, sobbing. I couldn’t stop shaking, fearful to face what I’d become. I had money, privilege, yet I had done nothing to help the young Jewish woman. Why did that bother me so?

No, Lady Palmer was right, I convinced myself. Her story was a fabricated tale like Ramzi’s, designed to glean money from me. I owed her nothing.

I put aside the unpleasantness in the Port Said market, reminding myself though I was faced with the rigidity of British society, I would find no shortage of gentlemen wishing to escort me to the races or to the ballet. Taking a lover would be difficult. Sexual freedom was considered a gentleman’s sport among the royals, though I often dared to join the hunt with discreet weekend affairs at country estates.

I was after bigger game now. Ramzi. Setting into motion my plan to find him obsessed me. I used my fortune to hire guides to get leads on his whereabouts, sent cables to the local authorities in Cairo to track him down and bribed bank officials to check his financial records. So consumed was I with my hunt, I forgot all about the Jewish girl. Whatever curiosity I’d experienced about her dissipated like dewdrops sucked up by the greedy tongue of the sun. I continued to hide from the problems of a world on the brink of war, dismissing them as easily as I eliminated anything in my life that didn’t please me, whether it was weak tea, cotton underwear or a snoopy maid. Little did I know I couldn’t escape. The seeds of war grew slowly, nurtured by those like myself who refused to see them sprouting under our feet, though I had personal reasons for ignoring them I dare not explain here, fearing you’ll detest my actions even more so.

I cringe now, my hand aching, cramping though I must fight through the physical pain and write down these words of truth so you can see, dear reader, what a ruthless, rapacious woman I’d become. I cared only for my own endless carnal satisfaction, seeking to possess every moment and entwine it around my senses and never let it go. My hunger was a sexual journey not ending in submission or physical satisfaction, but a yearning for the passion left unfulfilled by the death of my husband.

My whole being quivered when, after two weeks, I again picked up the scent of the man I believed would satisfy that hunger. I received a telephone call. My contact at the bank had news. Good news, he said. Ramzi had returned to Port Said.

I put the phone down, shaking, my pubic muscles tightening. I moaned as a sense of heightened anticipation took hold of me, a hot, glowing arousal making my mouth dry. I gave no further thought to the world’s problems. None at all.

Ramzi was back. But he wasn’t alone.

My excitement turned to jealousy when I found out he’d brought a woman with him.

She was dark, mysterious, with the bearing of a high priestess, her long neck unadorned, dangling earrings reaching to her shoulders. I’ll never forget the first time I saw her. I could see sexual arousal spark in her eyes every time her beaded earrings brushed her bare shoulders. I had no idea then who she was, or what part she would play in this melodrama. I sharpened my claws and arched my back like a feline in heat on the attack. I wanted Ramzi for myself. And I’d do anything to keep him.

Anything.

Slinky white gown hugging every curve of my body, my breasts barely concealed by flowing silk, beads of sweat sparkling between my cleavage like loose diamonds, the fragrance of Cleopatra’s perfume signaled my entrance as I posed like a goddess arriving on earth, knowing Ramzi and this woman called Laila watched me from their table. I was a vision in white in a room filled with intricate latticed woodwork embedded with colorful stained-glass designs niched into the walls to dazzle the eye. Blood red, emerald green, azure blue, tangy orange and golden yellow.

I stood under an archway in the Moorish hall decorated in red and maroon stripes and illuminated by lights emitting from copper lanterns punctured with tiny holes. The effect was breathtaking. The flames from the gaslights flickered on the wall behind me, elongating my silhouette and transforming it into sensual shadow play. An Erté poster come to life.

I held the pose for five minutes, a long cigarette holder poised to my red lips, blowing smoke away from my face, though I rarely took up the habit in the past several years. Now I used it as a show of power, liberation. I can do as I please, my body language said as I swayed over to the circular table where Ramzi sat with a woman, and no man controls me.

“How charming to see you again, Ramzi.” I put out my hand for him to kiss it and inhale a whiff of the perfume. I was curious to see his reaction. I noticed he raised his aristocratic eyebrows before getting up from his seat.

“I couldn’t stay away from Port Said.” He took my white-gloved hand in his and, in a sensual manner, turned my palm up so he could unbutton the three tiny pearl buttons on my glove before putting his lips to my bare skin.

“Oh? And why not?” I dared to asked.

“I missed you.” His kiss lingered, his tongue sweeping over my palm in an intimate manner. A familiar heat made me realize my show of bravado didn’t fool him.

“Liar.” I smiled. Instead of hating him, I wanted him more than ever.

“Me?”

“Yes, you, you bastard. You made love to me then disappeared with my—”

Before he could explain, the woman with the dark velvet eyes sitting at his table cleared her throat. Ramzi nodded in her direction and said,“Lady Marlowe, may I introduce Laila Al-Rashid from Cairo.”

“Cairo? How convenient, Ramzi,” I said, blowing smoke in her direction. “A girl in every port.” I turned to the woman and attempted a smile. “Do you plan to stay in Port Said long, mademoiselle?”

“Long enough to complete my business,” Laila answered, rising from her chair and positioning herself between Ramzi and me.

“I can imagine what kind of business,” I said, not backing down. I removed my long white gloves, indicating I wasn’t leaving.

She laughed. “Ramzi said you had a sense of humor, Lady Marlowe.” She looked me up and down, her eyes resting on my nearly exposed breasts. My nipples hardened under her gaze, disturbing me. “In fact, he told me a lot about you.”

“Really?” I turned away, flicking my ashes into the cigarette tray, my manner bored. “I’ve heard nothing about you.”

“I’m not surprised. My brother prefers to forget he has a sister when he’s chasing a woman. He believes it tarnishes his playboy image.”

My head shot around. “Your brother?”

“Yes, didn’t he tell you?”

“No,” I said, rounding the vowel for emphasis.

Laila took my hand in hers. “I couldn’t help but notice your long, sharp nails.”

“Yes, I engaged a local girl to give me a manicure when I heard Ramzi brought a woman back with him.” I pulled my hand away. “It seems I wasted my time.”

She smiled. “Shall we dine then? I’m famished.”

Ramzi rubbed his hand up and down my bare shoulder, making me shiver. A different hunger made me draw in my breath. “So am I.”

I don’t remember what we talked about, only that the conversation centered around Ramzi, as it always did. He ordered the wine and picked out each course, whether it was a buttery puff pastry filled with flaky fish and decorated with swirled cream sauces and shredded vegetable, or balls of seasoned minced lamb in a rich tomato sauce served over saffron rice. He ordered everything in his charming accent, passing around the silvery tray decked with the caviar, olives and cheeses, while his sister, Laila, entertained me with stories about the pasha’s harem and his wives with their gold teeth, numerous chins and fondness for sweets.

I sensed something more than familial interest between them, especially the way Laila put her hand on his arm at frequent intervals, as if she possessed an unfulfilled longing, but I chose to ignore it. He’s mine,

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