The Pleasure of Your Kiss (24 page)

“It nearly gave me one,” Poppy said, finally daring to lower her hand.

“What were you saying before you were distracted by the … um … rutabaga?”

Dragging her gaze away from the easel, Poppy plopped down on the end of the couch, her eyes sparkling as they always did when she had gleaned a particularly delicious snippet of gossip. “Have you heard what Captain Burke did?”

“That depends,” Clarinda replied, blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Are you talking about wrestling a full-grown lion, warding off a horde of black-robed assassins who scaled the palace walls and stormed the courtyard, or dispatching an angry crocodile with his bare hands? Because according to the women in the harem, he’s done all of that and more in the course of a single afternoon.”

Clarinda hated to admit it, but it was even more grating to have every woman in the harem gushing over Ash’s latest feats of derring-do than it was to read about them between the pages of some silly scandal sheet.

Poppy’s face fell. “So you’ve already heard?”

“Oh, Poppy, surely you don’t believe such ridiculous drivel. Why, it’s utterly absurd to think—” Clarinda paused in midsentence, noting for the first time that Poppy’s spectacles had returned to their usual perch on the tip of her nose. “Where did you find your spectacles?”

“Right where I lost them.” Poppy nervously nudged the spectacles back up to the bridge of her nose, avoiding Clarinda’s eyes. “And you may scoff if you like, but I heard Captain Burke risked both life and limb to save the sultan from being crushed to death by a stone as big as a camel.”

“Given how exaggerated the tales of his exploits always are, isn’t it more likely that he simply removed a piece of gravel from the sultan’s boot before it could bruise his heel?”

“I have it on the
highest
authority that this particular tale is true. One of the workers left his stone unsecured when he climbed down from the wall. When I think what might have happened to the sultan had Captain Burke not been there … ” Poppy shuddered, the color draining from her usually rosy cheeks.

“I’m glad Farouk was spared,” Clarinda admitted. “I might not want to spend the rest of my life imprisoned in his harem, but I don’t wish him any harm, either. And I’m sure the captain was only too eager for another chance to play the hero.”

Ash always seemed to be around when someone needed him, Clarinda thought. Unless that someone happened to be her.

Both Poppy’s color and her smile returned. “Tonight Farouk—I mean
His Majesty
—is throwing an extravagant celebration in the captain’s honor. There will be dancing girls, jugglers, acrobats, snake charmers, magicians … even a full-grown tiger!”

“Which Captain Burke will no doubt wrestle into submission in front of all the guests. If he’s not too busy wrestling with the dancing girls, that is,” Clarinda added under her breath.

It had not escaped her notice that Ash’s efforts to resist the considerable charms of the sultan’s women had only made him more irresistible in their eyes. Each night at supper the dancing girls would wind their scarves around his neck like silky nooses and thrust their jiggling breasts into his face while Clarinda was forced to calmly sip her wine and feign interest in what Farouk was saying.

Just yesterday she had wandered through the hall of the harem to find several of the concubines wagering their favorite baubles and hair combs over which of them would be the first to lure the handsome Englishman into her bed. At the moment Yasmin seemed to be the favorite.

“I hadn’t realized how late it was getting!” Poppy exclaimed, eyeing the deepening slant of the sun through the latticed window. “I must go and find something suitable to wear to the party.”

“Farouk invited
you
?” Clarinda blurted out before she realized how rude it sounded.

Usually Farouk avoided Poppy’s company like the proverbial plague. Clarinda had been begging him to let her friend join them for supper from her first day at the palace, but it was the one boon he had refused to grant her.

A fresh blush tinted Poppy’s cheeks. “Perhaps the sultan’s close brush with death has put him in a magnanimous mood.”

“Perhaps,” Clarinda murmured, eyeing her friend thoughtfully. Poppy was usually as transparent as a pane of glass, but she had been behaving in an increasingly odd manner for the past week.

Clarinda retrieved the scroll she had been reading and lifted it to hide her expression, already feeling less than magnanimous herself at the prospect of spending yet another evening hailing the dashing and debonair Captain Burke as a hero.

P
oppy might be given to flights of fancy when it came to many things, but her description of the sultan’s upcoming celebration in Captain Burke’s honor had failed to do the reality justice.

The fete was being held in a hall twice as spacious as the one they had occupied on the night Farouk had first welcomed Ash and Luca to the palace. Towering marble columns supported the lofty ceiling of the long, rectangular chamber. The walls had been festooned with flowing drapes of crimson and purple silk shot through with threads of silver and gold. Jasmine and jacaranda blooms had been scattered across the colorful squares of the tiled floor, flooding the room with their intoxicating scent. Plush cushions and tasseled bolsters had been artfully arranged in a smaller rectangle as seating for the sultan’s guests, leaving the open area in the center of the floor to serve as a stage for his after-supper entertainments.

And what magnificent entertainments they were! Acrobats flipped and tumbled across the tiled floor, while contortionists flexed their rubbery limbs into positions that should have been impossible for the human body to attain. A man in a silver half mask elicited gasps from the crowd when he doused a sword in oil and set it afire, then appeared to swallow the entire blade. The guests watched in breathless anticipation as a magician in a towering turban wheeled a large, painted box into their midst, secured one of the dancing girls inside it, then drove a scimitar right through the center of the box with lusty glee. Several of the guests screamed, but their horror rapidly shifted to relieved applause when the woman emerged unscathed from the opposite end of the box to take her bow alongside the magician.

Four soldiers of Farouk’s guard flanked each of the massive bronze doors at opposite ends of the hall, while others were stationed at precise intervals around the outskirts of the walls. Even their impassive faces softened as they fought to hide their smiles.

The only sour face in the hall belonged to Farouk’s uncle. Tarik kept muttering to anyone who would listen that his nephew was going to bankrupt his treasury with his extravagance and cast disgrace upon the very throne of El Jadida—and all to honor an infidel.

Poppy had been misinformed about only one thing. Farouk’s feline guest wasn’t a full-grown tiger but a litter of tiger cubs. Each of the charming little cats wore a gold collar adorned with a priceless fortune in sapphires, rubies, and emeralds to set off their dramatic black markings. They frolicked and bounded among the guests, earning the loudest shouts of delight whenever they engaged in mock battle with one another, hissing savagely and rearing back on their hind legs to bare their razor-sharp little claws.

Clarinda sat at Farouk’s side, cradling the smallest of the tiger cubs in her lap. The little fellow showed no desire to romp with his littermates but seemed perfectly content to loll across her legs while she gently raked her fingers through his thick fur.

Caressing her nape as if she, too, were a wild feline to be tamed, Farouk leaned closer to her, his voice a deep rumble in her ear. “If he pleases you, you may keep him for your own.”

“As always, you are far too generous, Your Majesty.” Clarinda’s fond smile was beginning to feel like a mask that no longer fit her face.

She stole a glance across the hall at Ash, only to discover his mask had slipped away entirely. Through narrowed eyes he was giving Farouk a look that could only be described as murderous. Fortunately, Farouk’s attention had already been recaptured by the magician, who had just made one of the tiger cubs vanish in a puff of smoke. The sorcerer whipped off his immense turban with a flourish, thrust his hand into it, and fished around until his hand reemerged clutching the squirming tiger cub by the loose skin at its nape. Farouk’s booming laughter nearly drowned out the delighted oohs and aahs of his guests.

When Clarinda risked another look at Ash, he was leaning over to converse with Luca, the flash of his easy grin leaving her to wonder if she had imagined the whole thing. He looked as at home in the native robes of El Jadida as any tribal warlord. Their dazzling white folds deepened the bronze tones in his skin and sharpened the glitter of gold in his amber eyes. A hint of razor stubble a shade darker than his hair shadowed the clearly defined planes of his lean jaw, making Clarinda wonder how it would feel beneath the caress of her lips.

“Oh, Clarinda, isn’t it just about the most marvelous thing you’ve ever seen?” Poppy, seated on the other side of her, burst into wild applause as the magician drew a seemingly endless array of colorful scarves out of his own ear before taking another bow.

“Indeed it is, Poppy,” Clarinda replied absently, her gaze still locked on Ash.

“I’ve been reading about such wonders my entire life but never dreamed they truly existed! Why, Lady Ellerbee would be green with envy! I doubt even she has ever thrown a house party that could compare to
this
!”

Poppy’s blue eyes sparkled behind the thick lenses of her spectacles, and her full cheeks were positively aglow. Clarinda had never really noticed how pretty Poppy could be when she wasn’t trying to cram her voluptuous figure into a rigid corset or bodice so tight it pinched all the color from her face. The flowing garments the women wore in this place actually seemed to suit her. Instead of pinning the springy clusters of corkscrew curls up over her ears, she had let one of the older women from the harem dress her hair into loose curls that spilled down her back in glossy waves.

“Your friend flatters me, Clarinda,” Farouk said, leaning around Clarinda to pin Poppy with a teasing stare. “Perhaps she is implying that there are those who might even call my palace a ‘stately pleasure-dome.’”

Poppy giggled. “I prefer to think of it as a ‘savage place, holy and enchanted.’ And what is the next entertainment you have planned for us, Your Majesty? A ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ perhaps?”

Farouk wagged his eyebrows at her in a forbidding manner. “Cease your wailing, woman, lest I summon a ‘demon-lover’ to carry you away.”

They both broke into hearty gales of laughter. Clarinda gave her wine a sniff, wondering if perhaps someone had drugged it and she was beginning to hallucinate. She’d never seen Poppy quite so animated, not even when in the company of that dreadful windbag Mr. Huntington-Smythe. And she’d certainly never heard Farouk quote Coleridge or seen him directly address Poppy without being browbeaten into it.

As the magician rounded up the rest of the tiger cubs, including the one in Clarinda’s lap, and took his leave, the musicians seated in the corner between two columns struck up a sinuous melody on flute, lyre, and drum. This was the moment Clarinda had been secretly dreading. The moment when Farouk would clap his hands to summon the dancing girls.

But it seemed on this night Farouk had other plans.

He rose to his feet, silencing both the musicians and his guests with nothing more than a masterful wave of one hand. His flowing robes were even more ornate than usual, adorned with embroidered stars and crescent moons. “As most of you know, I have summoned you here tonight to honor a man with the soul of a warrior and the heart of a tiger. Not once, but twice, he has risked his own life so that mine might be spared.” Farouk turned his grave smile on Ash before lifting his golden goblet. “To Burke the Younger! You came to this place as a stranger, but on this night I am honored to call you both friend … and brother.”

The other guests lifted their goblets in unison while Tarik made a great show of
not
lifting his.

Ash acknowledged the tribute with a wary smile and a gracious nod, while Luca tossed back the contents of his goblet in a single swallow.

Lowering his own goblet, Farouk said, “It is not within my nature to let such bravery go unrewarded. Every great warrior deserves a weapon equal to his skills, so tonight I would like to present to you a dagger used by my father, the Lion of El Jadida, to dispatch one of his most worthy enemies.”

One of Farouk’s guards came marching across the floor, bearing a tasseled pillow with a dagger resting on top of it. The rubies and emeralds encrusted in its gold hilt sparkled in the warm glow of the lamplight.

Luca’s low-pitched whistle of appreciation perfectly echoed Clarinda’s amazement. The thing must be worth a small fortune.

The guard paused briefly in the middle of the floor so the rapt guests could admire the sultan’s offering before proceeding to where Ash was sitting. The man extended the cushion and Ash accepted the dagger, handling it with the reverence such an exquisite piece of craftsmanship deserved.

“You are far too generous, Your Majesty,” Ash said, modestly inclining his head.

Luca inched his hand toward the dagger, but Ash slipped the weapon into the far side of his belt before Luca could touch it, ignoring his friend’s pout.

“There is one other gift I would seek to bestow upon you,” Farouk said. “I am sure it has not escaped your notice that I am a man who possesses many priceless treasures.”

Luca perked up, his dark eyes glinting with avarice.

“But I have discovered there is a treasure worth far more than silver or gold.”

Rolling his eyes, Luca slumped back down on his cushion.

“And tonight it is my great honor to share that treasure with you.”

Farouk clapped his hands, just as he did every night to summon the dancing girls.

The bronze doors at the west end of the hall came swinging open. As the guests craned their necks to see what new wonder might appear, an odd little frisson of foreboding danced down Clarinda’s spine. She stole a glance at Ash to find him looking equally wary.