LITMIR.BIZ

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said, “but it is not.”

      That, at least, was true. Al Ankhara might look like something out of the Arabian Nights, with its minarets and Moorish arches, but it wasn’t. What had happened to her in the past few days proved it.

      But she had not let herself think about that tonight.

      Instead, she had concentrated on escaping. The question was, how?

      She and her so-called servants were in a separate part of the palace. It must have been beautiful once. Now the marble floors were dulled by age, the silk carpets were threadbare and the walls were grimy. The windows, looking out on an empty stretch of beach, were barred with decorative ironwork. The door that led into the palace was securely bolted; the lock on the door that gave onto the beach looked as if it hadn’t been opened in the last century.

      In other words, Layla was trapped.

      Then, just before sunset, her luck changed.

      A ship appeared. A yacht, if you wanted to be specific. It anchored off the beach. Two hundred, three hundred yards, maybe further out than that, but what did such a distance mean to a woman who was desperate?

      How could she get to it? Not twenty minutes later, she had the answer.

      She found a hairpin.

      It wasn’t the kind of little thing sold in drugstores. This pin was enormous, made of brass or copper. Or gold, for all she knew. What mattered was its size, its strength…

      And that she could use it to jimmy the lock on the outside door as soon as her captors settled in for the night. Watching all those old movies about plucky heroines turning hatpins into tools might end up being the best thing she’d ever done.

      She tucked the hairpin into a crack in the wall and waited.

      The women brought her a plate of food, then waddled off to join Ahmet. Layla pushed the food around but didn’t eat it. Soon, the women returned. She let them draw her a bath, let them dry her and powder her, but when they reached for a nightgown, she shook her head and mimed that she was cold.

      The women snorted with laughter. Well, why not? Everything about her amused them. Her blond hair. Her blue eyes. Her pale skin and bony—in their eyes—body. That she should feel chilly when the temperature was probably just a few degrees short of spontaneous combustion was just one more thing that made them guffaw.

      Instead of the gown, they’d dressed her in a djellebah.

      “You sleep now,” one had commanded, and Layla had dutifully gone to the alcove they’d designated as hers.

      She’d waited until she heard a chorus of earth-shattering snores. Then she’d tiptoed to the locked door.

      Minutes later, after some adept hairpin jiggling in the lock, Layla was free.

      She’d wanted to race down to the sea, but what if someone was looking out the windows of the palace? She had to look casual, so she’d walked slowly along the sand. When she reached the water, she’d debated shucking off the djellebah, reminded herself she had no way of knowing who she’d find on that boat, still rocking gently at anchor. She’d just started into the water—

      Something barreled into her.

      Something big. Something powerful.

      A man.

      Strong arms closed around her from behind. Lifted her off her feet. She cried out, as much with fury as with fear. How could Ahmet have caught her this quickly?

      Except, it wasn’t Ahmet.

      The feel of the body pressed to hers was hard and lean, not layered with fat. The arms encircling her were taut with muscle. Even the man’s smell was not Ahmet’s. Her horrible guard stunk of sweat and grease. The man who’d hoisted her in the air, who was grunting as she fought him, smelled of nothing but the sea and a hint of expensive cologne.

      She was not going to be handed over to a fat bandit seeking a wife, Layla thought in disbelief, she was going to be raped by a hard-bodied, clean-smelling stranger!

      Then she stopped thinking and screamed.

      * * *

      The scream damn near pierced Khalil’s eardrums.

      A woman? The creature fighting him like a wild thing wasn’t a boy; it was a woman.

      Very much a woman.

      Holding her this way, tilted back against his body, there was no doubt about her sex. The hood of the djellebah had fallen back; her wild, silken hair was in his face, her backside was in his groin, her breasts…

      Her breasts were damn near cupped in his hands.

      By Ishtar, what was going on?

      He was sure of only one thing. This was not the time to try and find out. She was doing her best to get loose. Well, fine. He would let her go as soon as she stopped trying to kill him. Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration, but her elbows were sharp as she slammed them into his gut, her heels were tattooing against his shins…

      And that backside.

      Small. Firm. Elegant. She was grinding it into his groin and, damn it, his perfidious body was starting to react.

      “Bass,” he snarled. “Bass!”

      He might as well have said “stop” to a tiger. Khalil grunted, jerked her harder against him and put his mouth to her ear. “Shismak!” he demanded.

      She didn’t answer, but then, who would respond to such a question at a moment like this? Still, it was logical to ask who she was, what was her name.

      Never mind.

      What mattered was that they were still dancing in the surf, she fighting like a wildcat, he trying to subdue her…

      Trying not to react to the bump of her backside, the fullness of her breasts…

      Had he lost his mind? Who cared about any oft hat? The woman was an intruder. What was she doing here? How had she made her way past the gates and the guards? Had she come for a midnight swim? Was she trying to kill herself?

      Footsteps were pounding along the sand. Khalil looked back, saw two heavyset women and an enormous man lumbering toward them.

      The man had a blade in his hand.

      “Drop it,” Khalil snarled in Arabic.

      The man skidded to a stop, stared, turned pale and fell to his knees. So did the women.

      For a moment, no one moved, not even the woman in his arms. Good, Khalil thought grimly, and he spun her toward him, then dropped her onto her feet.

      Hands on his hips, he let loose a string of words Layla couldn’t possibly understand. She couldn’t understand any of this. Why were her captors lying facedown in the sand, prostrating themselves before the madman who’d attacked her?

      Gasping for breath, she tossed her wet hair back from her face and dredged up two of the three insults she knew. Well, she knew how to say them, if not what they meant, but what did that matter at a moment like this?

      “Ibn Al-Himar,” she panted. “Inta khaywan!”

      One of the women gave a muffled shriek; the other one groaned. Ahmet rose to his knees, but the man who’d attacked her held up one hand.

      He used the other to grab her by the wrist and wrench her arm behind her back.

      “Shismak,” he barked, lowering his face until his eyes were almost level with hers.

      What did that mean? She was almost out of Arabic. The best she could do was lift her chin and toss out the one final insult in her pathetic vocabulary.

      “Shismak,” she said through her teeth and added, for good measure, “Yakhreb beytak!”

      Whatever

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