LITMIR.BIZ

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some information. It wasn’t all known. I learned it after your plane took off and—” he wasn’t looking at her “—I’ve filled in all the blanks.” He opened his mouth as if to say more.

      She cut him off. “I need to know what Tara was doing last night—all of it.”

      “I...”

      She met his rich, dark eyes, saw the trouble, the doubt, that lurked deep within them, and still she didn’t back down.

      “She left the restaurant alone with her security. She managed to ditch them shortly after—no one knows why.” He blinked, as if that would change the words she knew, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to admit.

      “It won’t help to hold anything back.”

      Silence ticked between them.

      “The only thing that matters now is having all the information so we can figure this thing out and find her. What aren’t you telling me?”

      “She’d been drinking,” he admitted. “That’s what her friends said.”

      “What else did her friends say?” she asked softly.

      “I didn’t want this in the report, it...”

      “Could ruin her reputation.” She paused. “Look, Emir, we’ve all gone there. A youthful mistake—a bit too much to drink. It happens. Usually it turns out well—we luck out. Let’s make this turn out well. Tell me what happened. Everything you know, including what you screened from the report.”

      She looked at him as if he were no different from any other witness.

      “You knew this before I left the States and you left the fact that she’d been drinking out of the report. You did that on purpose, thinking it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t change anything or help us find her.”

      She sank onto the luxurious softness of the leather couch and thought how she’d love such a piece for her small apartment. Then she turned her focus on Emir. “That’s where you’re wrong—and you know it. Everything matters, every piece of evidence.”

      He ran his hand along his brow and his gaze dodged hers. “I’ve never known her to overindulge. Her friends admitted it happened rarely.” He looked at her as if daring her to say otherwise.

      “A mistake that many of us have made at one time or another.”

      He shook his head.

      “Where are they, her friends?”

      “I’ve already spoken to them. They left her, from what I can determine, over an hour before she was taken. They didn’t see her after that. That part is in the report.”

      “I read it,” Kate admitted as she got up and went over to the window. She didn’t remind him of what hadn’t been in the report. Her fingers skimmed the window frame. “Bulletproof.” She glanced at the door. She’d noted the hinges earlier; the door swung out rather than in, difficult for a man to break down. Not that it mattered. The crime had happened elsewhere.

      “Let’s go back to the airport and the attack,” she said. “There’s a connection, but what is it?”

      He stood, pacing along the couch to the window and back, and then stopping a few feet from her.

      “So we have two bodies and one gives us some clues,” she said when she was met by silence. “Camel hair and his boots—the sand on them, it was caked, not something you get hanging around the city. I’d say he’d recently been in the desert. What better place to get lost in or to request a ransom and remain out of reach of detection? Even the best technology can fail against the might of the Sahara.” She looked away as if regretting having to speak the words they both knew. Extracting Tara was not going to be easy.

      “I can’t argue with any of that,” he said in his distinctly low voice. “It kills me to think of her frightened or in pain.” He ran a hand through his dark hair that, despite the short cut, curled wildly and only succeeded in giving his sun-bronzed, chiseled good looks a rakish edge.

      This was a difficult case, fraught with emotion and involving the man who was effectively her boss. And yet it was hard to think of him like that when, from the first moment she’d seen him, there had been a connection, an unseen emotion that seemed to pulse between them. She shoved the ridiculous thought from her mind. For now, he was her assigned partner and client rolled into one—nothing else.

       Chapter Five

      “So far the name Tara’s injured guard gave you—Davar—doesn’t exist. Not as a surname and a given name would be impossible to track. Even in the state he’s in, Ahmed would have known that. No, he was giving us something we could find,” Kate said. “I know we did an initial check, but I’ve gone beyond that search and been through everything. I’ve had the records of anyone who had a vaccination, a driver’s license or even stepped foot in Morocco scoured. Nothing.”

      She ran one hand through her hair, bunching it in her hand and pulling the long, silken mass back and away from her face.

      “Are you sure that was exactly right? He was mouthing the word, you said. Could you have misunderstood?”

      “It’s possible, but it’s all I can get for now and, if it’s not exact, it’s close. He’s in and out of consciousness,” Emir said as a nerve caused his jaw to twitch. Time was wasting and there was nothing they could do but wait and speculate.

      “So we use what we have. Both time and evidence,” Kate said as she perched on the edge of the massive rosewood desk that had been his father’s. They’d left Tara’s apartment and entered his office an hour ago.

      He knew she was going over the possibilities of that one word, the name the injured guard had provided—Davar. Yet his attention went to her long legs that hung over his desk and the creamy satin of her neck as she leaned her head back against the filing cabinet that butted up to the desk. She had beautiful skin and, for a second, he imagined what it would be like to caress it.

      And, as if she read his mind, Kate looked at him with determined eyes and lips that were soft, kissable. His thoughts were out of line, inappropriate and unproductive. But he couldn’t seem to dodge them for, despite his outrage that Adam had sent a woman, he’d been drawn to her since the first moment he’d met her.

      “We’ll get her, Emir. We’ll get Tara out and home safe. I promise.” There was grit in her words. It was as though her saying them somehow made them true. He only wished it was going to be that easy.

      He strode over to the window. The city sprawled out in front of him. It was the place where he’d been born and where he’d grown up—the city he’d thought to escape in his young adult years and the city that now seemed to promise the secret to saving his family.

      The second call had been long enough to be tracked by their office team to within a twenty-five-mile radius of Marrakech. They’d received that information almost immediately after the call had ended. It wasn’t enough. They were still looking for a needle in a haystack.

      Kate was now pacing the room, a pensive look on her face. He knew they both felt the passage of time and the frustration of their current inertia, but there was no getting around it. Kidnap victims had died because of ill-prepared rescue attempts. He was determined that Tara would not be one of them. Behind them the office clock ticked, the dull beat of time a passing reminder of everything they could not do.

      She looked at him, her eyes seeming to reach out to console, but he couldn’t help noticing instead the long wisp of blond hair that had again escaped the elastic band and curled down her face, caressing her chin, bringing his attention to the soft, seductive rise of her breasts—

      What was he doing? He needed to remain focused. His sister’s life was at stake and he was letting a beautiful woman distract him. Again, he was reminded why a woman should not be there,

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