Lord of the Desert

“Very well,” he said abruptly, moving away from that light touch.

She dropped her hand as if he’d burned it. He didn’t like to be touched, she noticed. She wouldn’t forget again. She grinned at him as they approached the camel master. “Thanks!”

“You’ll fall off and break your neck, most likely,” he muttered darkly. He spoke to the camel driver in that same odd dialect she didn’t understand, smiling and gesturing with his hands as the other man did. They both looked at her, grinning from ear to ear.

“Come along,” the tall man told Gretchen, nodding her toward a small wooden block that was standing beside one of the well-groomed tan camels. The single hump was covered by a blanket and there was a tiny braided rope to hold on to.

“I’m not quite sure…ooh!”

The tall man had lifted her right up in his arms. He smiled at her shock as he put her on the camel’s back and handed her the single small braided rein. “Wrap your legs around the hump,” he instructed, “and hold tight. I’ve told our friend here to walk her slowly up the hill and back. No galloping,” he assured her.

She dug her small camera out of the fanny pack around her waist and handed it down to him. “Would you?”

He grinned. “Of course.”

She rode, laughing at the odd side to side gait of the beast. She waved at the grinning motorists who passed her as the camel’s owner led the camel up and down by the side of the small paved road. The whole way, the tall man watched them and took photos. He didn’t look much like a man of action, and she couldn’t really picture him on a camel. He seemed like a businessman, and he was probably as fastidious about dirt and camel hair as he would have been about mud. She’d dreamed of a man of action racing across the desert on a stallion. Her companion, who was charming and good company at least, was no counterpart of the daring sheikh she’d read about in the 1920’s novel from which Valentino’s movie had been made. It was a little disappointing. She had to stop living in fantasies, she reminded herself, and held on tight to the little rope as she bounced along.

When they returned, and the Moroccan had coaxed the camel onto its knees, the tall man handed him the camera and said something under his breath. He reached up and lifted Gretchen down in his strong arms, pausing to turn toward the camera. “Smile,” he instructed, and looked down into her wide, curious eyes. She smiled back, her heart whipping into her throat, her lips parted with lingering pleasure and the beginnings of an odd longing.

“Did you enjoy it?” he asked, hesitating.

“It was wonderful,” she said breathlessly. She searched his eyes slowly, aware of the smooth fabric of his jacket, where her nervous hands rested, and the narrow, unblinking scrutiny of those black eyes. She couldn’t quite breathe while he held her.

He felt her breath against his chin and again that unfamiliar stirring made him frown. He put her down abruptly and moved away to retrieve the camera. Gretchen stood watching him with nervous discomfort. She felt as if she’d done something very wrong. She had no idea what.

He was back very shortly. He handed her the camera and smiled politely, as if nothing had happened to mar the pleasure of her first camel ride. “The grotto is just down that path. Come along.”

She went first, leaving him to follow. There was a stall at the entrance to the Caves of Hercules and she hesitated with her eyes on a small, flat circle of rock with a raised dome and what looked like a fossil on it. Fascinated, she picked it up, finding it silky to the touch.

“Your first souvenir? Allow me,” he murmured, paying for it.

“But…”

He held up a hand to silence her protest. “A trifle,” he waved away the cost. He nodded toward the cave’s entrance. “Go slowly. This is a living cave. You will find limestone walls where, for centuries, men have hewn millstones from them.”

She went inside, feeling the cool dampness of the caves as she walked along the bare ground and mingled with other tourists. There was an opening toward the sea which looked very much like a map of Africa. The walls had circles carved out—the millstones, she thought. She cradled her souvenir in her small hands and took out her camera again, photographing the walls and, when he wasn’t looking, her strangely attractive companion. She was enjoying his company as she’d enjoyed little else in her life. And she didn’t even know his name!

She moved back toward him. He was watching the waves through the opening in the cavern, his hands deep in his pockets, his expression taciturn and brooding.

He turned as she joined him and the polite smile was back on his face.

“I don’t know your name,” she said softly.

His eyes twinkled. “Call me…Monsieur Souverain,” he said in a deep, soft tone.

“Do you have a first name, or is that some heavily guarded secret?” she teased.

He chuckled. “Philippe,” he said smoothly.

“Philippe.” She smiled.

The twinkle in his eyes became more pronounced. He pursed his lips. “Come along,” he said, turning. “We can go on to Asilah, if you like?”

“I’d like that very much,” she said honestly and then hesitated. “I’m not taking you away from any important business, am I?” she asked, concerned.

He laughed. “I have no important business after today and tomorrow,” he assured her. “Perhaps, like you, I am having a holiday.”

“I’ll bet you don’t have many,” she said, watching her step as they climbed the narrow, rocky path up to the parking lot.

“Why do you say that?”

“You act like the consummate businessman,” she told him without looking up. “I expect you’re in town on some huge project that involves all sorts of important people.”

“I was,” he said. “But the deal rather fell through before I got off the plane. I am working on another, however, which I expect will be even more successful.”

She didn’t notice that he was watching her covertly as he spoke, and that his eyes were brimming over with humor.

She looked around as they started to get back into the hotel’s car, and she caught her breath. “It’s nothing like I expected when we left Texas,” she confided. “It’s so exciting, and the people are all friendly and courteous—it’s almost like being at home, except for the way people dress and the sound of Arabic and Berber being spoken.” She turned to him with the car door standing open.

“Don’t you know anything about Morocco?” he asked gently.

She laughed. “All our television reporters talk about are scandals and political issues and the latest tragedy. They don’t tell us one thing about other countries unless somebody important is murdered in one.”

“So I have seen,” he mused.

She grinned. “That’s why Maggie and I came to Morocco, to see what it was really like. And now that we’ve been properly introduced,” she added, smiling as she extended her hand, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Monsieur Souverain.”

“I can return the compliment, Gretchen.” He brought her hand, palm up, to his hard mouth and looked straight into her eyes as his lips brushed it with a strangely sensuous motion. He made her name sound foreign, mysterious, exciting. The feel of his mouth on her skin made her uneasy, although not in any bad way. Faintly unnerved by the sensations the caress caused in her body, she pulled her fingers away a little too quickly, laughing nervously to cover the action.

He didn’t say a word until they were comfortably seated and the car was moving again, but his eyes were even more curious. She looked hunted for a moment, and that would never do. He smiled carelessly. “Would you like to hear something of the history of Tangier?” he asked.

“I’d love to,” she replied.

He crossed his long legs. “The Berbers were the first to arrive here,” he began, warming to his subject.

They passed cork factories and olive groves along the highway that led down the coast to Asilah, and Gretchen laughed as she watched camels playing in the surf at the ocean’s edge.

“They like to swim and sun themselves,” Philippe told her pleasantly, “much like tourists on holiday.”

“They’re very soft, but they aren’t as big as I expected them to be. I guess they look different in movies.”

“You saw The Wind and the Lion with Sean Connery?” he asked at once.

“Why, yes, several times,” she confessed.

“The palace of the Raissouli is in Asilah.”

She gasped. “He was a real person?”

“A revolutionary,” he agreed, “who tried to overthrow the monarchy. He failed,” he added dryly.

“My goodness, I thought it was all fiction.”

“Most of it was,” he told her. “But I also enjoyed it. In my country, foreign films are a large part of our entertainment.”

His country. France, she was certain. She smiled. “I’ve never been to France,” she mused. “I’ll bet it’s beautiful.”

“Beautiful,” he agreed, deliberately encouraging her mistaken idea of his background. “And old. Like most of Europe. The kasbah of Tangier dates back to Roman conquest and even earlier.”

“I love all of it,” she said fervently. “Every cobblestone and villa, every little shop, the people who meander through those narrow walled streets. It’s like a fairyland.”

His black eyes narrowed. “You enjoy foreign places.”

She looked over at him. “I’ve never even been out of Texas before,” she confessed. “Not even to the Mexican border. I’ve never been…well, anywhere. And to get to see Africa, of all places.” Her heart was in her eyes. “I feel as if I’m living a dream.”

“Do you know,” he murmured absently, “that is exactly how I feel.” Then he smiled, and the intensity of his gaze turned to the passing coastline.

Chapter Three

Asilah was bustling with activity. Before 1972, Bojo the guide told them, the whole city was inside the ancient walls. Now there were shops outside as well, and new construction underway. As they searched for a parking space in the crowded city, they saw small donkey-drawn carts carrying people from one side of town to the other, and just outside the kasbah on a tree-lined street near the bay, there were sidewalk cafés. But first the guide indicated that they should go away from the old walled city toward the highway, because that was where the once-weekly open air market was held.

“Market day,” Philippe told Gretchen, gently taking her arm to guide her across the busy street which was packed with cars as well as carts. “This will be an adventure.”

It was. She saw beautiful fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, all presented in beautiful order and not one blemish on any of it. There were exotic spices, potions, clothing and hats. There were leather goods and even live chickens and rabbits for sale. Outside the ramshackle order of small tents teeming with people, donkeys and camels lay in the shade waiting for the return trip to their small villages.

“The produce is just beautiful,” she exclaimed. “My goodness, this is even prettier than in our supermarkets back home, but it isn’t refrigerated.”

He chuckled. “Yes, and on this market day, much of it gets sold to city dwellers.”

He acquainted her with the various spices and the displays of olives before the guide led them back into the city.

“Are you thirsty?” Philippe asked her.

“I could drink a gallon of water all by myself,” she panted, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a tissue from her pocket.

He grinned. “So could I.”

He and the guide led her to a small café where he ordered bottled water for her and mint tea for himself. He offered her some tea, but she declined, nervous about trying anything that didn’t come out of a bottle.

“You must try the mint tea before you leave Morocco,” he told her. “It is famous here.”

“I will. Right now cold water sounds better.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

He handed her chilled bottled water and took his mint tea to a small group of tables under a spreading tree near the walls of the old city. Their guide remained behind to speak to a shop owner he knew. “The café owns this small space,” Philippe told her, “and patrons pay at the counter and eat here.”

“This is very nice,” she said, looking around her at comfortably dressed people wandering about. “There are lots of tourists here.”

“Yes. The city is the site of an arts festival which is going on even now. The shops in the old walled city are brimming over, and Asilah has put on its brightest face for the festival. It draws people from around Europe and Africa and from all over the world.”

“You said the revolutionary’s palace was here?” she asked.

He nodded. He sipped his mint tea, finished it, and excused himself to return the china cup and saucer to the stand. She was curious about that, because most of the tourists had disposable containers like hers. Following Philippe with her eyes, she saw the extreme courtesy with which the shop owner treated him. While she was observing that, she noticed something else—foreign men in sunglasses and dark suits standing nearby. They’d parked behind them when they arrived. She wondered why they were here. Whimsically she wondered if they were shadowing some important foreign dignitary who was in disguise. When she got home, she’d have to ask her brother about foreign security. Then she remembered that she was going to Qawi, not home. It made her nervous and a little sad.

Philippe came back and studied her from his great height. “You’re worried,” he said abruptly.

“Sorry.” She pinned a smile to her face as she got to her feet, clutching her half-finished bottle of water. “I was thinking about my new job, if I get it.”

“And worrying,” he persisted.

She grimaced. “I don’t like using a plane ticket in someone else’s name and pretending I’m her, even if he does eventually hire me anyway.”

He smiled. “I think you have very little to worry about in that respect. As for the plane ticket, the concierge will change it for you, into the right name, and Mustapha or Bojo there—” he indicated their tall driver and guide still lingering at the shop counter “—will even take you to the airport and wait with you.”

“They will?”

He grinned at her shocked expression. “Isn’t this done in your country?”

“No, it isn’t,” she said flatly.

“To each his own,” he said tolerantly. “You will find life a little different in this part of the world.”

“I already have,” she said. She laughed gently. “I don’t know that it’s good for me to be pampered like this. I’m just a very ordinary paralegal.”

One eye narrowed. “I think, Gretchen Brannon, that you are not very ordinary at all.”

“You don’t know much about women from Texas.”

“A gap in my education which I hope to correct in the next few days,” he said gallantly. With a twinkle in his black eyes, he added in the classic line from an old Charles Boyer movie, “Will you come with me to the kasbah?”

She laughed helplessly. “I really do watch too many movies. I only thought there was one kasbah until the cabdriver at the airport told me what they were.”

“Charles Boyer and Humphrey Bogart films,” he mused. “They portray a very different Morocco.”

“Yes. Those days are long dead.”

“The old ways, perhaps. Not the intrigue,” he informed her. He put a hand under her elbow to guide her through the gates of the old city and into the maze of narrow streets and small shops. He leaned down to her ear. “Do you see the man in the beige suit wearing sunglasses? No, don’t turn your head!”

She had a flash of vision out of the corner of her eye. “Yes.”

“Now, do you notice the gentlemen in dark suits and sunglasses nearby?”

“I saw them earlier…!”

“Bodyguards.”

“Really?” She sounded breathless with excitement. “Whose are they? Do they belong to the man in the beige suit?”

He pursed his lips amusedly. “Who knows? Perhaps he works for one of the Saudi princes who have estates outside Tangier.”

“The one the guide pointed out, with the heliport and armed guards at the gate?”

“That one. They go sightseeing from time to time. Yesterday I saw the ex-president of Spain in town.”

“So did we! I’ve never met a head of state, former or not.”

He kept his eyes carefully on the path ahead and didn’t reply.

“Those bodyguards, I guess they have guns?”

“Nine millimeter Uzis and they know how to use them.”

She gasped. “Good Lord. I hope nobody attacks him.”

“Nobody knows him,” he said lazily. “Heads of state from the Middle Eastern countries wander around here all the time and are never noticed. They blend in.”

“If you notice the Sheikh of Qawi, how about pointing him out to me?” she asked facetiously. “Maybe I can throw myself on his mercy before I arrive in his capital city like an unclaimed parcel.”

He put on his own sunglasses and grinned. “I can promise you, his own subjects wouldn’t know him in a European suit.”

“Is he…perverse?” she asked bluntly, worried in spite of Maggie’s assurances.

He stopped dead and looked down at her. His eyes, behind the dark lenses, were concealed. “What?” he asked icily.

She bit her lower lip. “My friend, Maggie, said that there were rumors about him and young women. She said they weren’t true and that he started them himself.”

“He did,” he said quietly. “I can promise you that you will be in no danger from him. In fact,” he added thoughtfully, “I think you may find yourself pampered as you never expected to be, under his protection.”

She drew in a breath. “I hope you’re right!” she said fervently. “Oh, look at those shawls!”

She rushed forward to a display over the doorway of a shop. There was a black shawl with pear-shaped fringe work that took her breath.

“A Moroccan scarf, like those the women wear around their heads when they go out in public,” he said. “In Qawi, we call a head covering a hijab. Do you fancy it?”

“I suppose it’s very expensive,” she said, glaring up at him. “But you’re not buying it. If I can afford it, I’ll buy it for myself.”

He grinned. “Ah, that American independence asserts itself! Very well.” He spoke to the man in that gutteral tongue she still didn’t recognize and laughed as he glanced down at her. “It is fifty-six dirhams,” he told her.

“Fifty-six…!”

“Seven American dollars,” he translated.

She let out her breath and smiled. “I’ll take it!”

He helped her find the coins to pay for it and let the man package it for her. He put the parcel under his arm and led her through the maze of other shops where she bargained with delight for a small pair of silver earrings and a worked silver and turquoise bracelet.

“There,” he said as they went down a long cobblestoned path, “is the palace of the Raissouli.”

It took her breath away. The tiles, in white and many shades of vibrant blue, were combined in the most beautiful mosaic pattern she could have imagined inside the white, white walls of the exterior. There was little inside to see, but she touched the ceramic tiles with utter fascination.

“All the tile work is geometric,” she murmured.

“Worshipers of Islam are forbidden from representing anything human or animal in the patterns,” he explained. “Thus the geometric designs.”

“They’re so beautiful.” She sighed with pleasure. “When I think of our concrete and steel and brick buildings back home…”

“But you have wooden ones as well,” he reminded her.

“Yes, old Victorian homes with exquisite gingerbread woodwork. I’ve seen those. In fact, our ranch house is built like that. It isn’t luxurious or anything, but it’s rather pretty when it’s freshly painted.”

He studied the gleam of her platinum hair as they went back out into the sunlight and back out the gates of the old city and onto the streets. “Do you ever wear your hair down, Gretchen?” he asked softly.

“It’s very fine and flyaway,” she said with a smile. “Besides, it gets in my face in the wind, especially the sort they have here in Morocco. It blows constantly.”

“How long is it?”

She searched his curious eyes. “It comes down a little past my waist. Why?”

“I know another woman, also an American, with hair much like yours.” He grimaced. “She cut hers. I imagine her husband encouraged her,” he added darkly. “He knows how much I admire long hair.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Her husband?”

He glared. “They have a son, almost two years old.”

“She turned you down, I gather?”

His chin went up. “I would not offer marriage,” he said evasively. “He did.”

“Why, you rake,” she teased.

He didn’t smile. If anything, he looked grim and introspective.

“Sorry,” she said at once. “I suppose she meant something to you?”

“She was my world,” he said abruptly. “But there again, fate robbed me.” He glanced beyond her and frowned.

She turned, in time to see the man in the beige suit now standing with the bodyguards. One of the two men in black suits on the side of the street was making an urgent gesture with one hand. The man in the beige suit motioned to Philippe.

“We must go at once,” he said, propelling her down the walkway to where their guide was waiting with the black-suited men. He was quite suddenly someone else, someone who exercised authority and expected instant obedience. When they reached the black-suited men, they were standing with the one in the beige suit—the man Philippe had described as an employee of a Saudi prince. But the man wasn’t behaving like royalty at all. In fact, he was acting in a totally subservient manner, almost pleading from the tone of his voice.

Philippe snapped out questions and then orders in a language that sounded different from the one he’d used in these shops. He glanced down at Gretchen with concern and guided her back toward the car, with their guide in front and the other three men behind and to the side of them.

Gretchen didn’t speak. She had a sense of urgency and danger which made her move quickly and keep quiet. She felt Philippe’s quick, approving gaze as they made their way back to the car and got inside. The suited men got into the car behind them, another Mercedes she noticed, and they pulled out into the street and quickly back onto the highway that led to Tangier.

In scant minutes, she realized that they were gaining speed and that a third car was apparently in hot pursuit.

She glanced at Philippe with visible apprehension. He had pulled a cell phone from his pocket and was speaking into it rapidly in a foreign tongue. The car behind them, apparently following orders, suddenly whirled and blocked the narrow road so that the pursuing car had to swerve or hit them. As they raced away, the sound of rapid gunfire echoed behind them. Gretchen’s hands clenched so hard on her plastic bottle of drinking water that she almost burst it.

“It is all right,” Philippe said in a soft, comforting tone, his face hard and somber. “We are perfectly safe. You react well to a crisis,” he added with gentle praise.

“That was gunfire!” she said breathlessly.

“It was not meant for us,” he said nonchalantly. “We have only helped the young man in the beige suit avert a kidnapping attempt. I assure you, the Moroccan authorities are even now on the way to apprehend the perpetrators.”

“But they were armed,” she persisted.

He waved a hand. “Armed, but hardly in the class of Ahmed and Bruno.”

“Who are they?”

He chuckled. “Bodyguards.”

“Oh, yes. The prince’s bodyguards.”

He lifted an eyebrow and smiled at some private joke. He slid back his sleeve and checked his watch. It was thin and gold, expensive-looking. “I regret having to cut short our sight-seeing tour, but we would have had to leave soon, just the same. I have a rather important business meeting later this afternoon.” He lifted his dark head and searched her eyes. “Will you have dinner with me this evening?”

Her heart skipped and she smiled whimsically. “If you…I mean, I really would like that.”

“Bien. I will call for you at a quarter till eight.”