The Pleasure of Your Kiss (23 page)

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.

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.

It hardly soothed his temper to know he had no more right to his jealousy than he’d had to Clarinda’s kiss that morning in the hammam. He no longer had any claim on her at all. She belonged to Max now, and he was nothing but a hired gun whose only mission was to get her out of this place and back into his brother’s arms so she could become the countess she was born to be. The sooner they both escaped this palace of sensual delights and the temptations it provided, the better off they would be.

Ash’s grim musings were interrupted when Farouk came striding into the courtyard. The sultan was always in a jovial mood but seemed to have an extra spring to his step on this sweltering afternoon. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles was perched incongruously on the tip of his strong Roman nose.

Ash squinted at them. “Aren’t those—”

“No!” Farouk yanked them off and shoved them into the pocket of his loose-fitting trousers. “They most certainly are not.”

Mystified by the man’s curious behavior, Ash fell into step beside him, matching his long strides easily. It would be so much easier to despise Farouk if he weren’t so damnably likable. He might be outwardly unrecognizable from the plump, awkward lad Ash remembered from Eton, but inwardly he was much the same—amiable, generous, eager to like and be liked. If Farouk had been wooing any other woman besides Clarinda, Ash would eagerly have given the sultan his blessing. After being wed to such a bully as Mustafa, poor battered Fatima would have probably considered herself blessed to be counted among the wives of such a man.

Ash didn’t have to be pretend to be impressed during their tour of the royal stables. The stable itself was more lavish than his own family’s town house in Belgrave Square, and Farouk’s taste in horseflesh was nearly as impeccable as his taste in both jewels and women. A king’s ransom was on display in nearly every spacious stall. While some men would have given their birthright just to be seen riding one of the equine beauties down Rotten Row in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon, Ash would have wagered every penny he had to his name to see one of them race at Newmarket.

By declaring himself an enthusiastic horseman, Ash was able to learn a great deal of useful information about the strengths and weaknesses of the various mounts, the layout of the stables, and the habits and schedules of the sultan’s numerous grooms.

Their visit culminated with a stop by the outdoor pen where a young boy was brushing the magnificent black stallion Farouk had been riding when Ash and Luca had first encountered him in the desert. As Ash watched Farouk run a loving hand down the beast’s sleek neck while murmuring tender Arabic words into its ear, all he could see was Farouk murmuring those same words in Clarinda’s ear, running his loving hands all over the sleek curves of her body.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty, but I must beg your permission to return to the palace.” Although every drop of sweat had already been sucked away by the parched air, Ash made a great show of drawing a handkerchief from his pocket and mopping his brow. “I fear I’m not as immune to the ravages of the afternoon heat as His Majesty.”

“One more stop and we shall return to the palace for some cool libations,” Farouk promised. “As a former military man, I thought you might enjoy taking a look at the improvements we are making to the fortifications.”

Although the last two words Ash wanted to hear in the same breath were
improvements
and
fortifications
, he couldn’t afford to refuse a chance to search for any chink in the palace’s defenses. Not with Clarinda’s wedding day—and night—only a few days away.

“It would be my honor,” he said with a slight bow.

The walls of the palace were already more than three feet thick, but their height was being augmented with four more rows of stones to increase their height to well over fifteen feet. Dozens of shirtless men were swarming all over the top of the wall, their bodies caked with copper-colored dust. Shading his eyes against the sun, Farouk pointed out the complicated system of ropes and pulleys they were using to lift and then lower the massive stones into place.

“Impressive,” Ash murmured, although all he saw was one more wall they might have to scale when it came time to get Clarinda out of this place.

As soon as he spotted them, a skinny overseer came running over, bowing so low the top of his snowy white turban nearly brushed the ground.

Farouk greeted him warmly, then said in Arabic in a booming voice loud enough to be heard even over the labors of the workers, “Make sure the men receive an extra portion of water and rations immediately. They have been working like dogs to bring glory to this palace and the name of Zin al-Farouk. I will not have them being starved or mistreated as their reward.”

The workers broke into a rousing cheer as the overseer bowed again, then rushed away to do his master’s bidding. Ash sighed. If Farouk had snatched up a whip and flayed a few stripes of flesh from the workers’ backs, Ash would finally have had a good excuse to draw his pistol and shoot him.

The laborers came scampering down the crude wooden ladders propped against the wall to cluster around the overseer and claim their extra rations, leaving the top of the wall deserted. Ash and Farouk resumed their stroll in the scant shade provided by its shadow.

“The improvements to the fortifications were Tarik’s idea,” Farouk admitted, his hands locked at the small of his back. “Thanks to my father’s negotiating skills, we are enjoying an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity in El Jadida. But I am afraid my uncle still sees enemies lurking behind every palm tree and sand dune.”

“It is a wise man who does not underestimate his foes,” Ash replied, feeling like the lowest of traitors.

“But does there never come a time when a foe might not choose to lay down his arms and become a friend?” Farouk asked, his dark eyes looking genuinely troubled. “Just because their ancestors drew arms against one another, does it follow that men must be forever enemies? If the two of us had met on a battlefield, we might have never broken bread together, and both of us would be poorer for the loss.”

Now Ash wanted to draw his pistol and shoot himself. Unable to meet Farouk’s earnest gaze, he studied his boots as they walked. “Unfortunately, there are more things in this world to cause strife between men than there are those that foster peace. Disagreements over religion, squabbles over territory, water, wealth … women,” he added with a sidelong glance at Farouk.

Farouk threw back his head with a laugh. “There are very few women in this world worth going to war over, my friend.” His smile slowly faded. “Although perhaps there are one or two who might be worth dying for.”

As he waited for Farouk to pronounce Clarinda just such a woman, Ash slowed his steps and rolled his eyes heavenward, praying for a lightning bolt to shoot out of the cloudless, white vault of the heavens and put him out of his misery.

A flicker of movement on the top of the wall caught his attention. Another man might have hesitated, but Ash’s instincts had been honed by years in battle when the slightest hesitation might mean the difference between living the rest of one’s life whole or as a legless cripple forced to beg on street corners for a crust of bread. He darted forward, shoving Farouk out of the way only seconds before an enormous stone block came tumbling out of the sky.

A
sh’s momentum carried both him and Farouk to the ground. They lay there for a moment, dazed and breathless from the near miss, before lifting their heads in unison to eye the rubble littering the cobblestones only a pace or two away from the exact spot where Farouk had been standing seconds before.

For a moment all was silence in the courtyard except for a telltale creak. Ash’s gaze slowly traveled from the rubble up to the frayed end of the rope dangling from a pulley far above their heads. The rope swayed back and forth in the hot wind like a hangman’s noose.

While the stunned workers looked on, the overseer rushed over to them, wringing his hands and chattering frantically in Arabic. Ash understood every syllable of what the man was saying, but even the most casual observer would have been able to tell from the man’s wild eyes and hysterical tone that he was afraid he was about to be relieved of both his position and his head.

Farouk lumbered to his feet, brushing the dust from his trousers and waving away the man’s desperate apologies and explanations. “You need not shoulder the blame. I was the one who encouraged the workers to leave their posts before the stones could be secured.”

While the overseer returned to his men, walking backward and bowing to Farouk the whole way, Ash slowly rose, studying the top of the wall through narrowed eyes. He wasn’t entirely convinced the incident could be dismissed as the result of a worker’s carelessness. In that split second before his brain had registered the threat, he would have almost sworn he’d seen a ray of sun glint off something shiny.

Something like the blade of a dagger.

He was beginning to suspect Farouk’s enemies didn’t lie outside the castle walls, but within them.

Before he could follow that thought to its grim conclusion, Farouk clapped a hand firmly on Ash’s shoulder. He reluctantly turned to face the sultan, biting back a groan as he realized exactly what he had done.

If he had let the block crush the man to a pulp, Ash would never again have been forced to watch Farouk caress Clarinda’s nape in that infuriatingly proprietary manner of his while Ash choked down supper through a throat constricted with rage.

“Thanks to the merciful grace of Allah, you have twice given me back my life.” Farouk gave Ash’s shoulder a painful squeeze with his ham of a hand, the affectionate glow in his eyes more terrifying than any assassin. “From this day forward, Burke the Younger, you are no longer my friend, but my brother!”

“Oh, Clarinda, the most extraordinary thing just happened! Have you heard—”

Poppy broke off her gushing announcement in midbreath as she burst into one of the private chambers of the harem and caught sight of the watercolor illustration propped up on the easel sitting in the corner.

Clarinda was lounging on a plush fainting couch, her face slathered with a bright green beauty mask that smelled as if it had been concocted from a mixture of brussels sprouts and eye of newt. She lowered the scroll she was studying as Poppy wandered over to the easel to squint at the detailed illustration.

“Dear heavens, what is that?”

“What do you think it is?”

Poppy turned her head first one way, then the other, stopping just shy of standing on her head. “I’m not sure. A vegetable of some sort? A rutabaga perhaps?”

Clarinda rolled her eyes before leveling a mischievous look at her friend. “Well, I’ve never heard it called a rutabaga before, but the women who have been teaching me all about its many charms do occasionally call it”—she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“a
manroot
.”

Poppy looked even more bewildered. “A man—oh! Oh my!” She clapped a hand over her eyes, then ruined the effect by peeping through her fingers. “If such things as they teach here were taught in England, I fear the cradles would soon be overflowing. Every noble family would have an heir and at least a dozen spares.”

Thankful Poppy was still peeping at the illustration instead of looking at her so she wouldn’t see the shadow of sadness in her eyes, Clarinda said softly, “The women here have ways to prevent that as well.”

“Well, all I know is that our art instructor at Miss Throckmorton’s certainly never had us paint anything like
that
.”

“Miss Throckmorton used to blush if the stamen of a watercolor lily was too rigid. This would have given the prune-faced old spinster a fatal apoplexy.”