“But in your world, are there not also those who believe there is only one true mate for every man? That for a man to embrace her is to embrace his destiny?”
“There are,” Ash replied. “We have a name for them as well—‘pitiable fools.’”
“So you do not ascribe to this notion yourself?”
Ash did not reply for a long moment. Long enough for Clarinda to realize she was holding her breath. When he finally spoke, it was with great reluctance. “It has been my experience that there are many women who can stir a man’s shaft.”
Clarinda closed her eyes, thankful that he couldn’t see the disappointment in them.
“But only one who can stir his heart.”
Her eyes flew open. Now it was his face she longed to see. For all she knew, he was simply trying to torment her again. He might not even be talking about her but about some other woman he had encountered in his many travels.
“You are a wise man, Burke,” Farouk proclaimed. But this time his voice was a shade too hearty. “And if I am to be equally wise, then I can only conclude Clarinda must be that woman for me. She is the destiny I must embrace.”
Ash was silent for so long Clarinda feared he was going to betray them both and destroy any chance of escape. When he finally spoke, his voice was as soft as velvet but with a steely edge only she would recognize. “It is a wise man indeed who is not afraid to embrace his destiny. Only a fool would let it slip through his fingers.”
Chapter Fifteen
He wasn’t coming back.
Poppy drew off her spectacles and gazed out over the sea, a plaintive sigh escaping her lips. Sometimes the world was more pleasing to her eyes when it was slightly out of focus. It seemed to soften the sharp edges that could be so bruising to a tender heart.
Five days had passed since Farouk had stumbled upon her garden retreat. Even though there had been no sign of him there since then, she had returned faithfully to the bench each morning, taking great care to always arrive at the exact same time with a basket of freshly baked ktefa hooked on her arm. The sultan’s behavior toward her might be a mystery, but there could be no mistaking the way he had looked at those pastries.
A gentle breeze sifted through the clusters of curls pinned over her ears, but the merciless golden orb of the sun was already climbing in the eastern sky. Soon the heat would begin to rise over the desert in shimmering waves, making even the most heavily shaded corners of the garden unbearable until nightfall, especially to a woman with Poppy’s generous curves.
Despite the oppressive heat in this place, she was growing increasingly fond of her attire. There were no corsets with their biting whalebone stays, no endless layers of petticoats, no too-tight slippers to ruthlessly pinch her toes. Without the ribbons, buttons, and hooks, she no longer felt trussed up like a Christmas turkey. She was free to draw a deep breath, to stretch her legs and wiggle her toes, to entertain silly, girlish notions such as believing the sultan had been on the brink of kissing her.
She should have known that was just another of her foolish fancies, like believing Mr. Huntington-Smythe was infatuated with her just because he had retrieved her parasol when a gust of wind had turned it inside out and whisked it from her hand. Why would such a magnificent man as Farouk ever look twice at a plain, plump girl like her, much less kiss her, when he had a bevy of exotic beauties fawning all over him? Why, he was probably languishing in his bed with one of them at that very moment!
Swallowing her disappointment, she pushed her spectacles back up the bridge of her nose and opened the book in her lap. There was no point in letting her melancholy musings spoil a perfectly fine morning.
She had just begun to read when a forbidding shadow fell over the pages of the book.
She glanced up to find Farouk scowling down at her, his stern visage blocking the sun as surely as a thundercloud.
She could not stop a delighted smile from spreading over her own face. “Why, good morning, Your Majesty! What a wonderful surprise to see you here!”
“It is my garden, you know.”
“Of course I do. The entire palace is yours. Why, one might even venture that the entire province belongs to you!”
He continued to glower down at her from beneath the thick, raven wings of his brows, not even bothering to blink. Poppy knew the man could smile. He positively oozed charm every time he looked at Clarinda. Or at any woman, for that matter.
Any woman except her.
The awkward silence stretched until he said, “This has always been one of my favorite spots in the garden.”
“Mine, too,” she replied eagerly.
“I like to come here early in the morning. To be alone,” he added pointedly.
“Oh!” Suddenly it became much more of an effort for Poppy to keep the smile pasted on her lips. She reached for the handle of the basket resting next to her on the bench. “I didn’t mean to intrude. Perhaps I should go.”
“No!” Farouk snapped with such ferocity that she jumped a little. The book slid off her lap and tumbled to the ground. “What are you reading?” he demanded as she scrambled to retrieve it.
Her confusion growing, she turned the volume toward him so he could read the gilt lettering embossed into its leatherbound cover. As he squinted down at it, looking even more fierce than before, a flush slowly made its way up the corded tendons of his throat.
“Oh, dear!” Poppy exclaimed, her own cheeks coloring as realization dawned. “You can’t read English! I’m so terribly sorry. I just assumed since you’d spent all those years at Eton …”
“I can read. I just can’t see.”
“Pardon?”
To her surprise, he reached out and gently tapped the nosepiece of her wire-rimmed spectacles with his forefinger. “When I was in England, I was fitted with a pair of those so I could complete my lessons. But when I returned to El Jadida to become sultan, my uncle insisted that being seen in them would be considered a sign of weakness by my enemies.”
Poppy couldn’t imagine being deprived of her beloved books and scandal sheets because she couldn’t see to read. She would never have survived Miss Throckmorton’s if she hadn’t been able to escape between their pages for a few precious hours each evening after the other girls had fallen asleep. She’d come close to burning down the school more than once by sneaking a lamp beneath her sheets.
“It sounds to me as if your uncle is the shortsighted one. I should think not being able to see your enemies when they’re creeping up on you would be a far greater sign of weakness.” Growing ever more indignant on his behalf, she whipped off her spectacles and held them out to him.
He gazed down at them for a long moment before reluctantly reaching for them. Their fingers brushed as he did so, the heat of his skin a marked contrast to the cool wire rims of the spectacles.
As he hooked the earpieces over his ears, Poppy bit back a smile. He was far too handsome to resemble any professor she had ever seen, but there was no denying the spectacles gave him a dignified air more suited to a barrister or a member of Parliament than a lusty Moroccan sultan.
She knew it was wrong to gawk but she couldn’t resist letting her eyes drink their fill of him. If Captain Burke had his way, they would be gone from this place soon enough and she would never see him again.
“Here,” she said, absently holding out the book.
But he wasn’t looking at the book. He was looking at her.
“What is it?” she asked softly, afraid his newly restored eyesight had revealed some dreadful flaw in her. Had she forgotten to apply rice powder to her nose that morning? Was her native garment on backward? Or was he just now realizing she was no slender sylph like Clarinda but a woman who had always had a difficult time turning down an extra portion of chocolate syllabub at supper?
“Your eyes.”
She blinked up at him. “Yes?”
“They are lavender.”
Relieved to discover there wasn’t a bit of pastry stuck between her two front teeth
after all, she waved away his observation. “Don’t be silly. They’re a perfectly ordinary shade of periwinkle. My granny in the Cotswolds used to grow periwinkles in her garden. That’s how I know.”
This time when she offered him the book, he took it, perusing the cover with unabashed interest. “Coleridge, eh?”
She nodded. “I do love Christabel, but somehow ‘Kubla Khan’ seems far more suited to this place. Your garden reminds me of Xanadu. And one could certainly call your palace a ‘pleasure-dome’ of sorts,” she added, unable to resist giving him a mischievous smile.
He arched one eyebrow, warning her that he wasn’t completely oblivious to her mockery. “So tell me, Miss Montmorency—do you fancy yourself a ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ or a ‘woman wailing for her demon-lover’?”
Just hearing the word lover on lips as beautifully sculpted as his was somehow dangerously provocative. She laughed to hide its effect on her. “I am naught but the daughter of a humble country squire and I’m afraid I haven’t any lovers at all, neither demon nor mortal.”
Farouk drew off the spectacles with painstaking care, handling them as if they were made of gold instead of wire and common glass, and handed both them and the book back to her. “Read to me.”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary! If you’d like to borrow the spectacles for a while, you can read to yourself.”
“I prefer the sound of your voice.”
Poppy was taken aback by his words. Given her tendency to prattle on about nothing at all, especially when she was trying to hide her innate shyness, she was more accustomed to people excusing themselves from her company while feigning a headache. Or the Black Plague.
She was even more shocked when Farouk reclined on the seat of the bench, stretched out his long legs in their loose trousers, crossing them at the ankle, and rested his head in her lap. For a moment, she couldn’t even breathe, much less remember how to read.
“You may proceed,” he commanded with a haughty wave of his hand.
She cleared her throat. Perhaps this was the customary position in which one read to a sultan. She dug her fingers into the cover of the book, terrified one of her hands would accidentally stray down to gently stroke the thick, ebony curls away from his brow.
For some reason the book fell open to the last lines of Coleridge’s poem:
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Her nervous gaze darted to the basket of pastries sitting on the other side of her. “Would you care to try a ktefa while I’m reading, Your Majesty? I believe they’re still a trifle bit warm.”
Farouk frowned, pondering the question as if she had asked him to solve some impossibly complicated mathematical equation upon which the entire fate of the universe rested. “I do believe I would.”
Delving beneath the crimson kerchief covering the basket, she broke off a generous piece of one of the flaky pastries and offered it to him. He took it from her sugary fingers and popped it into his mouth, chewing with great relish. Then he did something she never thought she would see him do.
He smiled at her.
* * *
The next afternoon Clarinda was reclining on a chaise longue in one of the spacious chambers off the main hall of the harem, having her toenails buffed to a pearly sheen by an old woman with more hair on her chin than Farouk, when Poppy came wandering in.
Rather than circumventing the low-slung table in her path, Poppy barked her shin on it with enough force to make Clarinda wince in sympathy. Still rubbing her shin, Poppy limped over to the brightly brocaded ottoman next to the chaise. Instead of sitting in the middle of it, she plopped down on its edge, nearly upending both herself and the ottoman.
Clarinda might have attributed her friend’s odd behavior to her dazed expression if she hadn’t noticed something else was amiss. “Poppy, where on earth are your spectacles?”
Looking even more self-conscious than usual, Poppy touched a forefinger to the bridge of her nose as if expecting to find them there. “I’m not sure. I must have mislaid them. You know what an addlepated goose I can be. Why, only this morning I nearly set my box of rice powder afire when I mistook it for a lamp.”
“Probably because you weren’t wearing your spectacles.” Ignoring the old woman’s chattered protest, Clarinda started to swing her legs over the edge of the chaise. “I’m on the verge of perishing from boredom. Why don’t you let me help you find them?”
“No!”
Startled by Poppy’s violent response, Clarinda gave her friend a puzzled look.
Poppy’s wide-eyed panic was quickly replaced by a conciliatory smile. “There’s no need for you to trouble yourself. I’m sure they’ll turn up in time. They always do.” As if eager to cast about for another topic, Poppy leaned forward on the ottoman. “So tell me—have you had any word from Captain Burke about his plan for our rescue?”
Clarinda settled back on the chaise, earning a toothless grin of approval from the old woman. Since Farouk did not require his slaves to learn English, Clarinda knew it was safe to speak freely in front of her.
While the woman went back to buffing her toenails, Clarinda shook her head. “I’ve managed to coax Farouk into letting me join them for supper every night, but we’re under constant scrutiny from that vulture of an uncle of his. There hasn’t been a single opportunity for him to slip me a note, much less for us to exchange anything more than the vaguest of pleasantries.”
She and Ash hadn’t been alone since that morning in the hammam. Given what had transpired there, perhaps that was just as well. Clarinda was still dismayed that it had only taken one kiss to dismantle all of the defenses she had spent the last nine years constructing around her heart. One very long, very wet, very hot …
She shook her head, snapping herself out of her reverie. Her passions had betrayed her once before with grave consequences. She had no intention of letting it happen again. “I’m afraid our time is running out, Poppy. We only have a few more days before Farouk intends to make me his wife.” A despairing little laugh escaped her. “Or at least one of them.”
Poppy looked positively stricken. Clarinda should have known better than to confess her fears to Poppy. Poppy had always been more tender of heart than those around her. She was probably sick with worry on Clarinda’s behalf.
“Don’t abandon hope, darling.” Clarinda reached over and gave Poppy’s hand a comforting squeeze. “Regardless of my personal feelings toward him, Captain Burke is a man of tremendous resources. He won’t give up until he finds a way to rescue us. Then we shall leave this place and never think of it again.”
And Ash would return her to Maximillian, collect what was owed him, and vanish back into the mists of her past, a bittersweet reminder of everything that might have been.
Poppy didn’t appear to be any more consoled by Clarinda’s words than Clarinda was. Without the spectacles to shield her eyes, the sudden shimmer of tears in them was impossible for her to hide.
Before Clarinda could ask her what was wrong, Solomon came padding into the chamber, a large woven basket cradled in his massive arms. A mouthwatering aroma quickly filled the room.
He rested the basket on the table, then plucked a scroll of parchment from the crimson kerchief draped over the top of it and handed it to Clarinda, inclining his head in a gracious bow as he did so.
The note was penned in the precise hand of a man who had learned English as a second language. “Farouk thought we might enjoy an afternoon repast so he sent us some freshly baked ktefa from the kitchens.” Bemused by the extravagant size of the basket, Clarinda shook her head. “It’s no wonder the man has a dozen wives and twice that many concubines. He may never give his own heart to just one woman, but he certainly knows how to woo a woman’s heart.”
Farouk’s fanciful offering seemed to have accomplished what Clarinda could not. She should have known that all it would take to banish Poppy’s worried tears and bring a smile to her face was a basket of pastries.
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Ash leaned against a post in the outer courtyard of the palace, waiting for his host to appear. Farouk had promised him a tour of his stables, and Ash was eager for any diversion that did not make him want to strangle the sultan with his own kaffiyeh. Especially when that diversion would include working out a plan to steal some horses so they’d have a way across the desert when the right moment came to make their escape.
Ash’s casual posture did nothing to betray the dangerous tension roiling through him. He was beginning to wish he’d let the assassins finish Farouk off in the desert. If he had to spend one more interminable evening watching the sultan paw Clarinda right in front of him, Ash was afraid he was going to strangle the man with his bare hands.
Only last night he had been forced to calmly sip his wine while the sultan tugged Clarinda into his lap and fed her plump, juicy grapes, popping each one between her luscious lips with a languid care that made the hair on the back of Ash’s neck bristle. When she had giggled and given Farouk’s finger a teasing nip with her little white teeth, Ash had risen halfway to his feet without realizing it before being jerked back to reason—and into his seat—by Luca’s hand tugging on the back of his robes.
“Take care, my friend,” Luca had whispered. “There is more at stake here than just your pride.”
Farouk’s attentions to Clarinda might be more tolerable if she wasn’t such a consummate little actress herself. Based on how skillfully she batted her lashes and twirled her hair while hanging breathlessly on the sultan’s every word, even the most astute observer would have sworn she was a woman in love, desperately devoted to the man who would soon become her husband.
As he watched her wrap Farouk around her graceful pinkie, Ash couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t been every bit as gullible as the sultan when it came to being deceived by her charms. Despite the swaggering bravado affected by all young males desperate to impress the girls they desire, he had been little more than a callow lad before that morning with Clarinda in the meadow. What if his passion for her had been so all-consuming he had fooled himself into believing she felt the same way about him? Perhaps that’s why she had been so quick to accept Darby’s suit after he had left.