Sheikh's Honor
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
Prince Jalal travels to Ontario cottage country and meets the younger sister of Princess Zara.Sheikh Jalal had been his family's darkest secret…but finally he was recognized as prince and heir. Now he would claim all that was his: land, title, throne…and a queen. Though Clio Blake, the temptress who had bewitched him, fought like a tigress, Jalal would not be denied his woman!Clio Blake was no man's prey–or any country's princess. And she would never offer her heart to a man with Jalal's tainted past. So why couldn't she resist his delicious, demanding kisses? And why did she tremble at the thought of the bandit prince claiming her, possessing her…loving her?
“You Will Never Kiss Me,”
Clio said, finding her voice.
Jalal’s hands stilled their motion. The heat was too much. She felt burned.
“Do you challenge me, Clio? When a woman challenges a man, she must beware. He may accept her challenge.”
She had no idea why Jalal’s words created such sudden torment in her, or what that torment was. Her whole body churned with feeling. She wished he would get away from her so she could breathe.
“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you hear the word no as a challenge?” she asked defiantly.
His thumb tilted her chin, bringing her face closer to his full mouth, and her heart responded with nervous, quickened pulse. He smiled quizzically at her.
“But I have not heard the word no, Clio. Did you say it?”
Dear Reader,
Twenty years ago in May, the first Silhouette romance was published, and in 2000 we’re celebrating our 20
anniversary all year long! Celebrate with us—and start with six powerful, passionate, provocative love stories from Silhouette Desire.
Elizabeth Bevarly offers a MAN OF THE MONTH so tempting that we decided to call it Dr. Irresistible! Enjoy this sexy tale about a single-mom nurse who enlists a handsome doctor to pose as her husband at her tenth high school reunion. The wonderful miniseries LONE STAR FAMILIES: THE LOGANS, by bestselling author Leanne Banks, continues with Expecting His Child, a sensual romance about a woman carrying the child of her family’s nemesis after a stolen night of passion.
Ever-talented Cindy Gerard returns to Desire with In His Loving Arms, in which a pregnant widow is reunited with the man who’s haunted her dreams for seven years. Sheikhs abound in Alexandra Sellers’ Sheikh’s Honor, a new addition to her dramatic miniseries SONS OF THE DESERT. The Desire theme promotion, THE BABY BANK, about women who find love unexpectedly when seeking sperm donors, continues with Metsy Hingle’s The Baby Bonus. And newcomer Kathie DeNosky makes her Desire debut with Did You Say Married?!, in which the heroine wakes up in Vegas next to a sexy cowboy who turns out to be her newly wed husband.
What a lineup! So this May, for Mother’s Day, why not treat your mom—and yourself—to all six of these highly sensual and emotional love stories from Silhouette Desire!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Sheikh’s Honor
Alexandra Sellers
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For my sister
Donna.
She knows why.
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.
Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.
What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.
Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, U.K., England.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
One
The green-and-white seaplane skimmed the tops of the trees, the drone of its engine loud as it headed for a landing on the next lake. Clio Blake, guiding the powerboat in hard jolts across the wake of a cruiser that had just emerged from the channel ahead of her, heard the sound first. As the plane roared over her head, she flicked a glance skyward and wished that her gaze held some magic that could make it disappear.
She did not want him here. He should not be coming. It wasn’t right.
She cut her speed sharply and guided the boat into the narrow channel that led between two lakes, where signs posting the speed limit warned boaters of the danger of their wake eroding the shoreline. Some of the cottages were still boarded up, but most showed signs of having been opened for the season. At one cottage two men were working to take down the shutters, and Clio exchanged a wave with them as she passed.
Once through the channel and emerging into the larger lake, she reluctantly booted up her speed again and headed across the water towards the airline dock. The Twin Otter was already skimming along the surface, preparing to take off again.
So he was here. No hope left that something would prevent his arrival…. Seeing where her thoughts led, Cliogrimaced self-consciously. Had she been unconsciously hoping for the plane to crash, then? Well, it only went to show how deep her opposition went.
But her parents had simply refused to listen. Her sister Zara had asked, and what Zara asked for, she still got. So Prince Jalal ibn Aziz ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi, the newly found nephew of the rulers of the Barakat Emirates, was here. For the entire summer.
She wondered if Prince Jalal was remembering their last meeting right now. It is dangerous to call a man your enemy when you do not know his strength, he had said then.
She had disdained to notice the threat, opening her eyes wide as if to say, You and whose army? But that had been a lie. She felt threatened in his presence, and who would not? He was the man who had taken her sister hostage to force his point on the princes of the Barakat Emirates.
Anything could have happened. They were all incredibly lucky that it had been resolved without bloodshed. It was enough to make him her enemy forever. That was what she had told him, that day at the fabulous, fairy-tale weddings, including Zara and Prince Rafi’s. For her the celebrations had been deeply marred by the presence of such a man…even if, in the most outrageous turnaround of all time, he did have the title prince instead of bandit now.
It is dangerous to call a man your enemy when you do not know his strength.
Clio shivered. No doubt she would get to know his strengths—and weaknesses—over this coming, terrible summer. But one thing was certain—she would never forgive him for what he had done to them, the hell he had put them through, the risk he had run.
Whatever Jalal the bandit’s strength was, he would never be anything to her but enemy.
Clio had always half-worshipped her older sister, though there were scarcely three years separating them. Zary was what Clio called her, right from her earliest speech. It was her own special nickname, and as a child she got ferociously jealous when anyone else tried to use the name.
Both girls took after their mother. Both had the black hair, the dark brown eyes, the beautiful bones…but Clio knew full well that she had always been a poor man’s version of her perfect sister. Zara’s hair fell in massed perfect curls, Clio’s own hair was thick but dead straight. Zara was a fairy princess, with her exotically slanted eyes, delicate features, and her porcelain doll body. Clio’s eyes were set straight under dark eyebrows that were wide, strong and level, giving her face a serious cast. Her eyelashes were not long, though lushly thick, and she had inherited their father’s wide, full mouth rather than the cupid’s bow that Zara had from their mother.
By the age of eleven Clio was already taller and bigger than her older sister. And in spite of being younger, she had begun to feel protective of Zara. She had always felt the urge to fight Zara’s battles for her, even though Zara was perfectly capable of fighting her own. Half the time they weren’t even battles Zara thought worth fighting.
Like now. Zara had forgiven and forgotten what Jalal had done to her. Clio knew she never could. It was Zara who had asked her family to have him for the summer, so that he could practise his spoken English before going on to a postgrad course somewhere…Clio, meanwhile, had been aghast. She had fought the idea with everything she had.
But she had lost the argument. And now here she was, picking up Jalal the bandit from his flight to the Ontario heartland, deep in the most beautiful part of cottage country, where the family lived and worked on the shore of Love Lake.
He was standing on the dock by two canvas holdalls. He had shaved off his neat beard since she last saw him. Perhaps he thought it would help him blend in, but if so, he hoped in vain. The set of his shoulders, the tilt of his chin as he took in his surroundings were indefinably different, set him apart from the men she knew.
He came out of his reverie when she hailed him, the boat sidling up to the concrete dock. The water level on the lakes was low this year, and he was above her.
“Clio!” he cried, ready to be friendly. So he was going to pretend to forget. Her jaw tightened. Well, she was not.
“Prince Jalal,” she acknowledged with a brief, cool nod. “Can you jump in? Toss your bags down first.”
He threw her one assessing look and then nodded, as if marking something to himself. She knew that the offer of friendship had been withdrawn, and was glad of it. It was good that he was so quick on the uptake. It would be best if they understood each other from the beginning.
“Thank you,” he said, and picked up his bags to toss them, one after the other, into the well of the boat.
Then he stood for a moment, frowning down at the boat riding the swell of its own wake, as if trying to work out some obscure alien art. Clio realized with a jolt that he had probably never before performed the, to her, simple action of jumping into an unmoored boat.
And this was the man who was going to be so useful to her father at the marina! That was the argument her parents had made when she protested: with Jude gone off to the city, they needed someone…
“Take my hand,” she said coolly, and, as she would with any green tourist, straightened and turned, keeping one hand steady on the wheel, while she reached her other up for his. “Step down onto the seat first.”
She half expected him to refuse the help of a mere woman, but he bent over and reached for her hand. As his fingers brushed hers, Clio gasped, feeling as if his touch delivered an electric shock, and snatched her hand away.
Jalal tried to regain his balance on the dock and failed, but now he had lost his timing. The boat sank away from him just as his weight came down. He landed awkwardly on the seat with one foot, crashed down onto the floor of the boat with the other, skidded and involuntarily reached for Clio.
Her hands automatically clasped him, too, and then there they were—Jalal down on one knee before her, with his arms around her, his cheek pressed against the rich swell of her breasts, Clio with her arms wrapped around his sun-heated back and shoulders.
It was as if they were lovers. The heat of him burned her palms. She felt the brush of his breath at her throat. For a moment the sun sparkled on the water with a brightness that hurt her eyes.
Clio stiffened. She was suddenly flooded with electric rage, her nerves buzzing and spitting like an overloaded circuit.
“Take your hands off me,” she said.
Jalal straightened, glaring at her. He was seething with anger. She could feel the wave of it hit her.
“What is it you hope to prove?” he asked through his teeth.
Flushing under the impact of his gaze, Clio cried, “It wasn’t deliberate! What do you think I am?”
He stood gazing at her. “I think you are a woman who sees things her own way. You choose to be my enemy, but you do not know what that means. If you try to make a fool of me again, you will learn what it means.”
Nervous fear zinged through her at his words, at the look in his eyes. But she was damned if she would let him see it.
“I think I know, thank you.” She had learned what it meant to be his enemy the day he had kidnapped Zara.
He shook his head once, in almost contemptuous denial, still eyeing her levelly. “If you knew, you would not play the games of a child.”
“And what does that mean?”
“You are a woman, Clio. I am a man. When a woman sets herself to be the enemy of a man, there is always another reason than she imagines.”
She opened her mouth, gasping at the implication. “Well, first prize for patriarchal, chauvinistic arrogance! And you from the modern, secular Barakat Emirates, too! You don’t seem to have—”
He smiled and lifted his palm, and she broke off. “I am of the desert,” he reminded her through his teeth.
“So I gathered!”
Three fingers gracefully folded down to his thumb, leaving the forefinger to admonish her. “In the desert a man will let a woman do much, because he is strong, and she is weak. He makes allowances.”
Her blood seemed to be rushing through her brain and body at speeds never previously attained. “Of all the—!”
“In return, Clio, a woman never speaks to a man in such a tone of voice as this that you use to me. Women have sharp tongues, men have strong bodies. We respect each other by not using our strengths against the other.”
“Are you threatening me?” she demanded.
“I only explain to you how men and women get along in a civilized country,” he told her, and though now she was sure he was laughing at her, she couldn’t stop the fury that buzzed in her.
“Well, that isn’t how it is here!” she exploded. “And maybe you haven’t noticed that, civilized or not, you aren’t in the desert now!”
His lips were twitching. “I do know. We are going to hit the boat behind us, and this is a thing that would never happen in the desert.”
Two
Clio whirled, diving instinctively for the wheel. She put the engine in gear, barely in time, and drew away from the small yacht moored at the next dock. What a racket there would have been from the anguished owner if she had collided with that expanse of perfectly polished whiteness!
It wasn’t like her to forget herself like that when she was in charge of a boat. Clio had had water safety drummed into her with her earliest memories. It just showed what a negative effect he had on her.
But the sudden change of focus had the effect of calming her wild emotions. As she guided the boat over the sparkling lake, she understood that he had been deliberately baiting her, and was annoyed with herself for reacting so violently. She needed better control than that if she was going to get through the summer in one piece.
Jalal gazed at the scene around him. “This is the first time I have seen such a landscape.” He had an expression of such deep appreciation on his face that Clio had to resist softening. She loved this land. “It is beautiful.”
She certainly would always think so. “But I guess you feel more at home in the desert,” she suggested. She had not liked what she saw of the desert when she was in the Emirates. No wonder if an environment like that produced violent men.
“I am at home nowhere.”
She stared at him. “Really? Why?”
He shook his head. “My grandfather Selim never meant me to follow in his own footsteps. When I was a little boy he told me always that something great was in store for me. I learned to feel that where I was born was not my true home. I belonged somewhere else, but I did not know where. Then my mother took me to the capital….”
“Zara told me that the palace organized your education from an early age,” she said, interested in his story in spite of herself. He had a deep, pleasant voice. He engaged her interest against her will.
“Yes, but I did not know it then. Curious things happened, but I was too young to demand an explanation. Only when I approached university, and my mother gave me a list of courses to follow in my studies. Then some suspicion I had felt became clearer. I demanded to know who controlled my life, and why. But she would tell me nothing.”
“And did you take the recommended degree?”
He laughed lightly at himself. He never told his story to strangers, and he did not understand why he was telling Clio. She had made it clear she was no friend.
“I never knew! I tore up the list, like a hothead. I said, now I am a man, I choose for myself!”
“And then?”
He shook his head, shrugging. “I graduated, I enlisted in the armed forces—and then again I felt the invisible hand of my protector. They put me into officer training. I rose more quickly than individual merit could deserve…still my mother was mute.”
She could hear the memory of frustration in his voice.
“But you did eventually find out.” Clio wondered if this story was designed to disarm her hostility by justifying his treatment of her sister. Well, let him hope. He would find out soon enough that what she said, she meant.
“Yes, I found out. It was on the day the princes came of age according to their father’s will. The Kingdom of Barakat would be no more, and in its place there would be three Emirates. There was a great coronation ceremony, televised for all the country to see. Television sets were put in the squares of the villages—a spectacle for the people, to reassure them of the power, the mystery, the majesty of their new princes.”
She was half-smiling without being aware of it, falling under his spell.
“I watched in my mother’s house. Never will I forget the moment when the camera rested on the faces of the princes, one after the other, coming last to Prince Rafi.
“Of course I knew we were alike—whenever his picture was in the paper everyone who knew me commented. But what is a photograph? True resemblance requires more than the face. That day…that day I saw Prince Rafi move, and speak, and smile, as if…as if I looked in a mirror instead of a television set.”
She murmured something.
“And then it fell into place. The mystery of my life— I knew it had some connection with my resemblance to Prince Rafi. I knew that the old man I had called my father was not my father.
“‘Who am I?’ I cried to my mother, trembling, jumping to my feet. ‘Who is Prince Rafi to me?”’
“Did she tell you?”
He nodded. “My mother could no longer refuse, in spite of the shame of what she confessed. She was disappointed that the great future that they had promised for me for so many years had not arrived on this momentous day. ‘He is your uncle,’ she told me. ‘The half brother of your father, the great Prince Aziz. You could be standing there today instead of them.”’
Jalal paused, a man hovering between present and past. “Of course I knew—every citizen knew—who Prince Aziz was, although it was over twenty-five years since he and his brother had so tragically died. Singers sang the song of King Daud’s great heartbreak.”
His eyes rested on her, but he hardly saw her. He was looking at the past.
“And this noble prince, this hero dead so young…was my father.”
Clio breathed deeply. She had been holding her breath without knowing it. “What a terrible shock it must have been.”
It would be something, a discovery like that. In a young man it might motivate…seeing where her thoughts were leading her, Clio mentally braked.
He nodded. “I was a lost man. As if I stood alone in a desert after a sandstorm. Every familiar landmark obliterated. All that I had known and believed about myself was false. I was someone else—the illegitimate son of a dead prince, grandson of the old king…how could this be? Why had I not been told?”
“What a terrible shock it must have been.”
“A shock, yes. But very soon I felt a great rage. If they did not wish to recognize me because of the illegitimacy of my birth, why had they taken me from my ordinary life, for what had they educated me…? Why had I never met my grandfather, the king, and my grandmother, his most beloved wife, in all those years when my future was being directed—and to what purpose was it all? My grandfather was dead, and I was left with no explanation of anything.”
He paused. The boat sped over the lake, and he blinked at the sun dancing off the water.
“What did you do?”
He glanced towards her, then back to the past again. “I made approaches to these new princes, my uncles. I demanded to know what my grandfather’s plans for me had been.”
“And they didn’t tell you?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. They would not speak to their own nephew. I had been taken from my mother’s home, but those who had done this thing would not let me enter my father’s.”
He turned to gaze intently at her. “Was this not injustice? Was I not right to be angered?”
“Zara told me they never knew. Your uncles, Rafi and Omar and Karim—they didn’t know who you were. Isn’t that right?”
“It is true that they themselves had never been told. They said afterwards that my letters, even, did not make the point clear. They thought me only a bandit. But someone had known, from the beginning. My grandfather himself…but he had made no provision for me in his will. No mention.”
“Isn’t that kind of weird?” It struck her as the least credible part of the whole equation.
His eyes searched her face with uncomfortable intensity.
“You would say that my uncles knew the truth, and only pretended ignorance until they were forced to admit it? Do you know this? Has your sister said something?”
She shook her head, not trusting the feelings of empathy that his story was—probably deliberately—stirring in her.
“No, I don’t know any more than you’ve told me. It’s just very hard for me to accept that a woman wouldn’t insist on meeting her only grandchild, the son of her own dead son.”
His face grew shadowed. “Perhaps—perhaps my illegitimate birth was too great a stain.”
“And so they never even met you?” Clio tried to put herself in such a position, and failed. She herself would move heaven and earth to have her grandchild near her, part of the family, whatever sin of love his parents had committed.
“Nothing. Not even a letter to be given to me after their death.”
No wonder he felt at home nowhere.
He was silent as they skimmed across the endless stretch of water, that seemed as vast as any desert.
“What did you do when your uncles refused your requests?”
He had made his way back to his “home,” the desert of his childhood. But the bonds had been severed.
“The desert could never be home to me. The tribe—so ignorant, living in another century, afraid of everything new—could not be my family.” So his determination to force his real family to recognize him grew. He had collected followers to his standard—and eventually…he had taken a hostage.
“And the rest you know,” he said, in an ironic tone.
“The rest I know,” she agreed. “And now your life has changed all over again. Thanks to Zara, you’ve proven your bloodline, you have your father’s titles and property…and you’re so trusted by your uncles they’ve made you Grand Vizier and now you’re on a mission to—”
His head snapped around, and if his dark eyes had searched her before, they now raked her ruthlessly.
“Mission? Who has told you I had a mission?”
She returned his look with surprise. “I thought the reason you were coming here was to get a better command of English so you could study political science or whatever at Harvard in the autumn. I thought a summer with the rowdy Blake family was supposed to be the perfect way to do it.”
The guarded look slowly left his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “It is true.”
Clio turned back to the water ahead of her, her mind buzzing with speculation. What on earth was that about? Did it mean he wasn’t really here to learn English at all? That it was some kind of blind? But for what? What other reason could Prince Jalal possibly have for coming here to the middle of nowhere?
Three
Jalal stood and moved towards the stern, gazing around him as they passed into yet another lake. He lifted both arms, stretching out his hands in powerful adoration. “It is magnificent! So much water!” He breathed deeply. “Smell the freshness of the water! This water is not salt! Is it?”
A loud horn startled her, and Clio whirled to discover that she had turned onto a collision course with another boat. She waved an apology to the indignant pilot as she hastily and not very gracefully adjusted her course. Jalal half lost his balance and recovered.
“Dammit, don’t distract me when I’m driving!” she cried. She had been staring over her shoulder at him. He had a huge physical charisma, but she would get over that. “No, of course it’s not salt,” she said when the danger was past. “All Canada’s lakes are freshwater.”
“Barakallah! It is a miracle. And you drink this water!” He spoke it as a fact, but still he looked for confirmation from her.
“Yes, we drink it.” She smiled, and then, realizing how much she had already let her guard down with him, steeled her heart against the tug she felt. “For now. It may end up polluted in the future, like everything else.”
But his joy would admit no contaminants. “It must be protected from pollution,” he said, as though he himself might fix this by princely decree. “This must not be allowed, to destroy such rich bounty.”
“Yes, really,” Clio agreed dryly.
“Why do they pollute such beauty?”
“Because it is cheaper to dump than to treat waste.”
Prince Jalal nodded, taking it in. Was it his grandmother’s blood in him that so called to this place?
“My mother’s mother was raised in a country of lakes and forests.” He spoke almost absently, as if to himself, and he blinked when she responded.
“Really? How did she happen to marry a desert bandit, then?”
“On a journey across the desert, she was abducted by my grandfather, Selim. She spent the rest of her life in the desert, but she never forgot her beloved land of lakes.”
The result of that union had been only one daughter, his mother. Desert-born Nusaybah had heard many longing tales of her mother’s homeland as a child, and later she had passed them on to her son. She had also passed on the information that his grandmother was a princess in her own country.
That had seemed unlikely, until the DNA tests showed that he was more closely related to Prince Rafi than to Rafi’s two half brothers. Then a search of the family tree showed that Rafi’s mother, the Princess Nargis, was the daughter of a prince whose sister had been abducted and never spoken of again.
For centuries the family had spent every summer in the highlands, just as Jalal’s grandmother had always said. So it was deep in his blood, the longing for lake and forest, though he had not felt its force until he saw these sights.
Clio frowned. “She spent the rest of her life in the desert? She was never rescued?”
He shook his head. “In those days no one would have troubled. She had no choice but to marry her abductor.”
“You mean her family knew where she was but left her there?”
“I cannot say what they knew, only what was the tradition. A woman captured by a man in this way…her family would have ignored her existence from that moment.”
She threw a look over her shoulder at him. “And you accept that?” she demanded incredulously.
“There is nothing for me to reject, Clio. It was finished, many years ago. I am here because of it. My mother Nusaybah was the child of that union. What shall I say? Maktoub. It is written.”
“So that’s in your blood too, is it—abducting women? I suppose that makes it all right! Were you expecting my family and Prince Rafi to leave my sister Zara to her fate?”
He shook his head impatiently, but did not reply.
“But no,” she supplied for him. “That wouldn’t have served your purpose! You knew Rafi had to get her back—world opinion would dictate that. You probably thought he’d refuse to marry her, but that wouldn’t have bothered you. If you spoiled their love, it would be just their bad luck, wouldn’t it? So long as you got what you wanted.”
“I did not reason in this way,” he said levelly. “I believed that he would want her back and would make her his wife when I released her unharmed.”
She had succeeded in talking herself into deep anger. She could not trust herself to make an answer.
So he was a chip off the old block. Did her parents know this about Jalal’s genes? But she didn’t suppose it would have made any difference. If they weren’t concerned about what he had done to Zara, they’d hardly worry about what his grandfather had done to a nameless princess fifty years ago.
A few minutes later they arrived at a large, rambling brick house. It was on the shore of a very pretty lake, smaller than those they had crossed to get here. There were tree-covered hills rising high around one end of the lake, as if some spirit brooded protectively over the water. Fewer houses dotted the shore.
As they approached their destination, he saw a marina clustered with boats on one side, and a pretty painted sign high on one wall of the house that advertised homemade ice cream, a crafts shop and an art gallery.
Clio guided the powerboat in, cut the engine and expertly brought it up beside the dock. Meanwhile, the door of the house exploded outward, and at least half a dozen children of all ages, four dogs and a couple of cats erupted into the morning to cries of “Is he here? Did the prince come? What does he look like?” and loud excited barks.
Everybody raced down to the dock, except for the cats, who dashed up the trunk of a large, leafy tree that over-hung the water so picturesquely he felt he was in some dream, and clung there indignantly, staring at the scene.
“Calm down, yes, he’s here and he doesn’t want to be deafened on day one! Here, Jonah, grab this,” Clio commanded lazily, tossing the mooring rope as a tall boy ran to the bow. The dock beside the boat was stuffed with children and canines, all gaping at him and all more or less panting with excitement.
“Is that him? Is that the prince?” In the babble he could pick out some sentences, but most of what they were saying was lost, as always when too many people talked at once in English.
“He isn’t weawing a cwown!” one tiny creature cried piercingly, her woebegone eyes locking onto Jalal’s with heartfelt grief.
Clio and Jalal exchanged glances. She resisted the impulse to laugh with him.
“The natives are restless,” he observed.
Then she did laugh; she couldn’t help it.
“I should have realized what the result of an hour’s wait would be. They were excited enough about you when I left. Out of the way, everybody! Prince Jalal wants to get onto the dock. He isn’t ready to go swimming yet!”
One of the dogs was, however, and leapt off into the water with a loud splash.
Meanwhile, Jalal braved the natives to step onto the dock.
“Are you Prince Jalal?” “Are you a real prince?” “Where’s—”
“Cool it!” Clio cried beside him. “What did I tell you?” Getting a general reduction in the babel, she reeled off their names. “Rosalie, Benjamin, Sandor, Alissa, Jonah, Jeremiah, Arwen and Donnelly. Everybody, this is Prince Jalal.”
“Welcome to Canada, Your Highness,” said several voices in ragged unison, and the welcome was echoed as the laggards caught up. And then Jalal watched transfixed as, to his utter astonishment, they all bowed. From the waist.
He couldn’t restrain the bursting laughter that rose up in him. Their heads tilted at him in surprise. “Thank you!” he exclaimed, when he could speak. “I am very glad to be here. But I am not used to such bowing, or this name, Your High-ness!”
“But Clio said people have to bow to princes.”
“Clio said we had to call you Your Highness.”
He flicked her a glance, as if to an awkward child. She returned the look impassively, then bent to the task of tying the stern rope.
“Clio did not know. She thought I was a tall man,” he said, his lips twitching, and she thought, He thinks I’m not a worthy enemy, but he’ll find out.
“You are tall. You’re as tall as Daddy.”
“What will we call you, then?”
“Why not call me—Jalal? That is my name, and it will make me feel very welcome if you use it. Then I will think we are friends. Shall we be friends?”
“Oh, yeah!” “Cool.” “Sure.”
“I’m your fwiend, Jalal,” said Donnelly confidingly, reaching up to put her hand in his. She had clearly taken one of her instant likes to him.
His smile down at the child would have melted Clio on the spot, if she hadn’t steeled herself.
“Don’t people bow to princes?” Arwen asked, her head cocked on one side.
“Yes, people bow to princes, unless,” he said, raising a forefinger, “unless they are given special dispensation. And since we are going to be friends, I give you all special dispensation.”
“But you are a real pwince, aren’t you?” It was the little curly-haired darling again. Jalal squatted down to face her.
“My father was the son of a king. My mother’s mother was a princess. Am I a prince?”
Her eyes were wide. “Ye-es,” she said, half asking, half telling. She looked around her, then up at that fount of wisdom, seventeen-year-old Benjamin.
“Of course he’s a prince, Donnelly, that’s how you get to be a prince—your father was one,” Ben said knowledgeably.
“But you don’t have a cwown,” she reminded Jalal. “You don’t look like the picture.”
“Do you have a picture of a prince?” he asked.
Donnelly nodded mutely. Jalal lifted his arm, and she snuggled in against him as confidingly as a kitten. “Well, I have a crown, my father’s crown, but princes don’t go swimming in crowns, do they?”
“They don’t?” Donnelly sounded disappointed, as if she had been hoping to see just that sight.
“No.” Jalal, smiling, shook his head firmly. All the children had fallen silent, listening to him, almost entranced. “Do you wear your swimsuit to school?”
Donnelly, who did not go to school, gazed at him wide-eyed, and shook her head with mute solemnity.
“Princes only wear crowns in their palaces. There is no palace here. So I left my crown at home.”
“Ohhhh.”
“But one day, I hope you’ll come and visit me in my home, and then I’ll show you my crown.”
“Oh, neat! Can I come, too?” “Do you have a palace?” “Can I come, can I come?” “Is your home in the desert?” “Is it an Arab’s tent or is it a real palace?” “Do you have camels, Jalal?” “What’s it like in the desert?” “Were you a bandit before you were a prince, Jalal?”
And then somehow, in a circle of fascinated children, the two oldest boys carrying his cases, Jalal was being led up to the house, into the kitchen. Clio stood on the dock watching the progress of the little party.
No doubt she should have realized that a man capable of drawing as many followers to his cause as Jalal was said to have had would have powerful charisma. She didn’t like the way they were all falling all over him, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.
Not right now, anyway.
Four
“Uncle Brandon dropped the guys back and went out again. He said not to save lunch for him,” Rosalie reported, when Clio entered the kitchen.
That wasn’t unusual in the run-up to the season. He had probably had to go for more creosote or something, and would grab a hamburger in the plaza. But Clio would rather her father had been here to meet Jalal.
“You’ve got lunch going already?” she asked, sniffing the air. “That’s terrific, Rosalie.”
Whenever her mother was absent on one of her buying trips among the First Nation artists she represented in the gallery, as she was this week, Clio was in charge. This year Rosalie, who had arrived in tears shortly after Christmas declaring that she hated her new stepmother, was proving to be a big help in filling the gap left by Romany. Romany was on a visit to Zara and Rafi.
“What’s cooking?”
Rosalie told her, and the two cousins began to organize the meal.
Jalal was at the table, surrounded by kids. Everyone had something to show him, a question to ask….
“You have to choose a plaque.” Sandor was informing him gravely about one of the house rituals. Sandor himself had moved in only a month ago, so he knew all about it. “It’s for the duty roster.”
They had spread the available plaques out in front of him, and Jalal was considering his choice, though she doubted if he was making sense of the garbled explanation he heard, from several sources.
“Okay, everybody, the table needs to be set!” Clio announced, not sorry to break up the group. “Sorry, your fan club has work to do,” she added dryly to Jalal.
Jalal nodded impassively, recognizing the jealousy in that.
“He has to choose a plaque first!” someone exclaimed indignantly, and of course Clio had to give in.
“What is Clio’s plaque?” Jalal asked, as he browsed among the little squares of plastic, each with a different image on it, that were reserved for the use of visitors. For the length of his stay, this plaque would represent him.
“Clio’s the pussycat,” Donnelly articulated carefully. She pointed to the duty roster on the wall. “The black-and-white one. I’m the butterfly.”
“All right. I will take this one,” Jalal said, choosing a plaque with his finger and drawing it out of the spread.
“The tiger!” they chorused. “He’s a very wild tiger!” Donnelly informed him impressively.
Clio tried, but she could not keep her eyes away.
He was watching her gravely, and something unspoken passed between them. Something that made her deeply nervous.
“Right, then! He’s chosen a plaque! Let’s clear the table!” she cried, and the children all moved to their usual mealtime tasks.
“And I,” Jalal said. “What shall I do to assist?”
She had been hoping that he would expect to be served. She had been anticipating telling him that in this kitchen, everyone did their share, male and female, bandit and nouveau prince alike. She flicked him a glance, and saw that he was watching her face as if he could read her thoughts there. He gave her an ironically amused look, and she blushed.
“You can help me, Jalal,” an adoring voice said. “I have to fold the serviettes.”
One of the boys snorted. “Princes don’t fold serviettes, Donnelly!” he began, but Jalal held up a hand.
“No job worth doing is beneath any man.” And it infuriated Clio even more to see Ben nodding in respectful agreement, as if he had just learned something profound.
Jalal smiled down at Donnelly. “I would like very much to help you,” he said. “Will you teach me to fold them just right?”
It wasn’t often that Donnelly got to pass on her wisdom to anyone; she was usually on the receiving end. At Jalal’s words, her chest expanded with a delighted intake of air.
“It’s very important to match the edges!” she informed him.
A few minutes later they all sat down, amid the usual mealtime babble. When their parents were at the table, a certain amount of order was imposed, keeping it, as their father Brandon said, to a dull roar. But when Clio was in charge, she didn’t usually bother. It didn’t hurt anyone if once in a while bedlam reigned.
But the first time someone said, “Is that true, Jalal?” and the prince replied quietly, “I am sorry, I didn’t understand. When everyone talks at the same time, I can’t follow,” a respectful hush fell on them.
After that, it was, “Shhh! Jalal can’t follow!” when anyone tried to interrupt the current speaker.
Then lunch was over, and there was the usual competition to be first to get their plates into the dishwasher. Donnelly explained the task to Jalal, and again he performed it without apparently feeling that it was any assault on his masculinity or his princely status.
Clio was almost certain that he was doing all this just to spike her guns, because he had guessed that she was waiting to tell him how unimportant his princely status was here in the democratic confines of the Blake family, or to explain that male superiority had been superseded in the West. She was even more convinced of it when, straightening from having set his utensils in just the right place under Donnelly’s tutelage, he threw her another of those glances.
“Round one to you,” she bit out, feeling driven.
“Only round one? I have counted three,” he observed mildly. “How many before we stop the match, Clio?”
The match went on, under cover of surface friendliness, for several days. Brandon showed Jalal the ropes at the marina for a couple of days, and on the following day Jalal and Ben started creosoting the marina dock while Jeremiah went with Brandon to work on one of the cottages, taking their lunch with them. Teaching at the high school had stopped, and the next three weeks was exams, but the younger children were still at school full-time.
It was a beautiful day, and when they broke at lunch the first coat was done.
“That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen the first coat go on,” Ben said. “You really know how to swing a brush.”
The youthful admiration in his tone made Clio grit her teeth.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Jalal said.
“Paint the palace a lot, do you?” Clio interjected.
Jalal gazed at her for a long moment, as if he was bored with her childish taunts.
“We’ve got another hour till the second coat can go on,” Ben said. “Want to take a boat out? I could show you around.”
“Thank you, Ben, another day. Just now, I would like to talk alone with your sister Clio.”
The hair stood up on the back of her neck, but there was nothing she could say. Within a couple of minutes, she found herself alone with him in the big friendly kitchen. Tense, and angry because she was, Clio determinedly started her usual tasks.
“You dislike me very much, Clio,” Jalal said. “Tell me why.”
Taken aback by his directness, she shook her head and bent to scoop some dishwashing powder into the dishwasher.
He caught her arm, forcing her to straighten, and the touch shivered all through her. She did not want this. She was not at all prepared to start defending her attitude to him. And he had no right to demand it.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to touch a woman not related to you,” she said coldly, staring down at where his hand clasped her bare arm, just above the elbow. She felt under threat. She did not want to have this conversation.
He ignored her comment. “Tell me,” he said. “I want to know why you alone are unwilling to be my friend.”
She wrenched her arm out of his grasp, using far more effort than was necessary for such a light hold, and staggered.
“I told you at the wedding. We will never be friends.”
“Why not?”
She was silent.
“Your sister has forgiven what I did. Your parents, too. Why cannot you?”
She turned her back on him deliberately, closed the dishwasher and set it going. He was silent, too, behind her, and her nerves didn’t seem up to the strain. Her skin shivered with awareness of him.
“Do you believe it impossible that your sister took no hurt while she was my hostage? Do you suspect me of hurting her, or allowing her to be hurt?” he asked, finally.
She was silent. Was that what she feared? She hardly knew. All she knew was that Jalal was a threat, and she wished he had never come.
“Look at me, Clio.”
His voice was seductive, almost hypnotic, though he did not seem to be doing that deliberately. Feeling driven, she turned to face him. He was too close. She thought dimly, Middle Eastern people have a smaller body territory or something—they always stand too close for Westerners’ comfort. Her heart kicked uncomfortably.
“Can you imagine that Princess Zara would have encouraged me to come here, into the home of her own family, if such a dreadful thing had happened?”
“If she was pretending to herself it hadn’t happened, she might,” she felt driven to point out. It wasn’t that she believed it, necessarily, but it was possible. He had to see that.
He stared at her, honestly startled. “Pretending to herself? How could a woman pretend such a thing? Why would she?”
Clio felt anxiety creeping up in her. “It does happen, you know! Women take the blame on themselves, or they don’t want to face what happened to them! Denial does happen!”
He was silent, watching her. Then he said softly, “Does it, Clio? Are you sure?”
“If you understood anything about psychology you wouldn’t have to ask.”
“Do you deny something? Has someone hurt you, so that it is easier to imagine I hurt your sister than to accept what happened to yourself?” he asked, proving that he understood more than somewhat about psychology.
She gasped in indignant fury and clenched her fists. Never had she so wanted to hit someone. But she looked at Jalal and saw the warning in his eyes. Gentle as he was with the children, his look warned her that he would not be gentle with her if she attacked him.
“Nothing has ever happened to me!” she exploded, her rage escaping in words. “Let’s get one thing straight, Jalal—whatever did or did not happen in your camp, we’re enemies, and it’s because of what you yourself did.”
He shook his head in flat contradiction. “We are not enemies. That is not what is between us,” he said softly.
Five
Clio opened her mouth soundlessly as shivers like a flood ran over her body.
“You make your sister an excuse to avoid what frightens you. That is all, is it not?”
He stepped closer, and she backed up against the counter. In the pit of her stomach a hard ball of fire suddenly revealed itself.
“I am not afraid!” she protested hotly.
“Good,” he whispered, and when she lifted a hand in protest his hand wrapped her wrist. Every nerve leapt at the touch. Fury seemed to come from nowhere and whip against her like wild wind.
Slowly he bent closer. He was going to kiss her.
She couldn’t allow it. She wanted to hit him. Something like a scream was in her throat and she wanted desperately to beat him off. But she couldn’t seem to work her muscles.
“Do you always just do what you want without asking?” she demanded.
“I want to kiss you,” he murmured thoughtfully, his mouth only inches from her own. “In this country, do men ask permission for such a thing?”
She tried to swallow. “Yes,” she said defiantly. Her mouth felt as dry as the desert he came from, where the rules between men and women were so different. She wanted to push him away, to get to a place where the air was clear. But the unfamiliar lassitude would not let her go.
“Then they understand nothing.” He drew closer, and she felt the heat of his arm encircle her back, his firm hand at her waist. His breath touched her cheek as his eyes challenged hers. She felt the look deep inside her, stirring the depths of her self.
He stroked the skin that she had so foolishly left bare between her short top and low-cut shorts. Sensation skittered down her body to her toes. Under the thin top, her breasts shivered.
Suddenly she was angry with herself. This was the man she had sworn only days ago would be always her enemy!
“What do men do in the desert?” she demanded cynically. “Grab whatever they see? Well, of course they do!” she told herself brightly. “You proved—”
“In the desert we first make sure that a woman longs for the kiss, and then we kiss her without asking.”
The sheer male arrogance of such a statement caused angry fire to leap in her chest and abdomen. She clamped her teeth together, because she could hardly prevent herself from shouting at him that he was an arrogant barbarian. But he had warned her….
His hand was moving against her spine. His other hand touched her neck, and his thumb traced her jawline.
Her mouth felt swollen—not that she wanted any kiss from him! But he was as mesmerizing as a snake, he really was. She flicked her eyes up to his.
The naked desire she saw there shook her to the core. She had thought him attracted, but not as powerfully as this! He looked at her like a starving man. Clio’s heart tripped into an unsteady rhythm. Feeling she didn’t recognize roared through her.
“Then you will never kiss me,” she said, finding her voice.
His hands stilled their motion. The heat was too much. She felt burned.
“Do you challenge me, Clio? When a woman challenges a man, she must beware. He may accept her challenge.”
She had no idea why his words created such sudden torment in her, or what that torment was. Her whole body churned with feeling. She felt faint, almost sick. She wished he would get away from her, so she could breathe.
“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you hear the word no as a challenge?” she asked defiantly.
His thumb tilted her chin, bringing her face closer to his full mouth, and her heart responded with nervous, quickened pulse. He smiled quizzically at her.
“But I have not heard the word no, Clio. Did you say it?”
Bee-bee-bee, bee-bee-bee.
They were both jolted by the high, piercing sound. Jalal frowned and looked around, and Clio tried to gather her wits.
“Is it a fire alarm?” he asked.
She finally identified the noise. “Oh, my God, it’s an intruder alarm!” Clio cried, and as he released her she ran to the monitor panel above her father’s desk in an alcove. A dozen lights glowed steady; one was flashing its urgent beacon. She bent down to read the tag.
“Solitaire!” she breathed. “It can’t be Dad, he wasn’t going there today.”
He watched as she opened a small cupboard and snatched up a set of keys, then stood back out of her way as she whirled and lightly ran to the screen door of the kitchen and opened it.
“Ben!” she called.
Jalal followed her as she ran along the wooden porch and down onto the dock. When she reached the boat, he was right behind her. She quickly untied the stern rope, and when Jalal bent to the bow, Clio clambered aboard and started the motor. Meanwhile Rosalie and Donnelly raced towards the dock from further along the beach.
“The intruder alarm has gone off at Solitaire! It’s probably a raccoon!” she cried, as Jalal came aboard with more grace and expertise than his first effort. Clio swung the boat in a wide arc, and as they passed the end of the dock, she continued to Ben and Rosalie, “You’d better call Dad! Tell him I’m on my way there and I’ll call him if there’s a problem.”
Rosalie stood holding Donnelly’s hand, and all three were nodding. “Be careful!” And then Clio booted up the motor and the boat obediently climbed up out of the waves and planed across the surface at top speed.
“What is Solitaire?” Jalal asked, settling beside her.
She blinked and seemed to see him for the first time. “Oh, hi!” she said. It had seemed so natural for Jalal to be there that it was only now she actively registered his presence.
“One of the rental cottages,” she said. “It’s kind of isolated.”
He knew the family owned and rented cottages on the lakes. He had visited a couple with Brandon, doing repairs. “Will your father meet us there?”
Clio shrugged. “He might not bother unless I call to say it’s something really bad. It depends where he is, I guess. Ben will tell him you’re with me.”
“What weapons are on this boat?”
Clio blinked. “What, you mean like a shotgun?” She shook her head. “Nothing that you could call a weapon. We aren’t going to kill the raccoon, just open the door and scare him out. The point is to get there before he tears the place to ribbons.”
Jalal eyed her calmly. “You are certain that it is a raccoon?”
“Well, unless a deer got frightened and jumped through the picture window. That’s been known to happen. More likely a window got broken somehow and a raccoon got the screen off. Solitaire is empty this week.”
He had a vision of a mysterious little animal with a black mask over its eyes. Take a screen off a window? Well, he would like to see that.
“And what if it is not a raccoon?”
“Well?”
“You are setting out to challenge intruders in a remote place, not knowing their numbers, without weapons of any kind?”
Clio blinked.
“And you were surprised to see that I was aboard,” he continued ruthlessly. “If I were not here, you would have gone alone on this mission?”
How to explain that she had known he was with her, but half unconsciously? How to say that, maybe because she had felt safe with him there, she forgot to stop and consider?
She hardly noticed the curious fact that her unconscious mind was so very far from considering Jalal the enemy.
“Why not?” she said, since that confession was impossible.
He was angry, she could see.
“I’m sure it’s a raccoon,” she said, half placatingly. “We have to get there fast before he wrecks the place. Raccoons can be worse than thieves half the time.” He nodded, unconvinced. “Are you afraid? People around here aren’t usually violent, they just rob.”
He shook his head. “How many times have you challenged people who are just robbing a cottage?”
She was abashed. She really had acted too quickly, but that was probably Jalal’s fault. If he hadn’t had her in such a confused state to begin with, she probably wouldn’t have been so hasty. He was right—what if it wasn’t a raccoon? She looked at the powerful shoulders under the snug-fitting polo shirt and unconsciously relaxed.
“I think Dad surprised some guys once, but they heard the boat and got away before he landed.”
He didn’t make any comment, instead began looking around him at the boat. “Where is the storage?”
“Some in lockers below, and some under the bench seat at the stern.”
He stepped to the stern, and she noticed, not for the first time, how lightly he moved. His body was muscled and well-knit, and when he shifted from one position to another all his muscles seemed to regroup and rebalance. A hunting cat, a panther, she thought, with the promise of power in every economical movement. The tiger had been an appropriate choice of plaque, though she knew he had chosen it only to irritate her.
Meanwhile he moved around, opening lockers. He found a paddle, and his fist closed around it and he hefted it testingly. Satisfied, he returned to the cockpit and slipped into the seat beside her.
No wasted effort. She felt no anxiety from him, just watchfulness. Waiting, like a cat, till the moment when effort would be needed. Then the muscles would bunch and flex, but for now they were long and easy.
She was sure she was completely safe with Jalal, whatever they might find.
“What is the position of Solitaire?” he asked.
She described it to him: an island in a narrow, shallow river, surrounded by forest. At the top end, beyond the island, the river narrowed and became an impassable creek. There was only one way out by water, the way they would go in. A picturesque wooden footbridge led over the water on one side, but only to a footpath that went for miles through the forest before you reached even another cottage.
He took it in in silence, and she could see him building a picture in his mind. She did her best to fill in the details, describing the dock, the approach, the land around the house, even though she was almost sure he was overreacting. There was something about his air of readiness that communicated the more serious possibilities.
“Here’s the river mouth,” she said at last, and he nodded. His mouth was set, his jaw firm but not clenched.
“You will stay in the boat until I make a check,” he said. “You will keep the motor running. If there is danger, you will turn the boat immediately when I tell you, and go to find your father, or the police. Do you understand?”
Clio stiffened. “You aren’t in your rebel camp now, Prince Jalal! And I am not one of your followers!”
“No,” he agreed calmly. “None of my followers would act so stupidly as this. Nevertheless, you must obey me. If someone captured you, I could do nothing. I would have to surrender if they threatened to hurt you.”
Six
It was called Bent Needle River because of its shape. A long ribbon of water looped around an island that formed the eye of the needle. The river twisted at the bottom end of the island, so that from the air its shape was like a darning needle bent sharply just before the eye. Beyond it, a few hundred yards of creek stretched like a short thread trailing from the eye of the needle.
The cottage was on the far side of the island, and the sound of their approach, she knew, would be well muffled by the trees and thick foliage until they were around the bend and almost at the dock. She approached at low speed. The channel was not marked and there were shallows on both sides.
A small motorboat bobbed against the dock, secured only by the stern rope. Goods were stacked on the dock. Clio saw the television set, the video player, a cardboard box. The front door of the wide-windowed cottage gaped open, broken on its hinges. There was more loot collected on the porch.
Not a raccoon, then. She thought of her danger if she had come here alone, and threw Jalal a look as she guided the powerboat quietly around the bend and coasted up to the dock. Just then a man stepped out onto the porch, carrying the vacuum cleaner.
Jalal seemed to take in the whole scene with one comprehensive glance and make up his mind. “Stay in the boat, keep the engine running, and be ready to go if I give you the signal,” he commanded quietly. He leapt lightly off the boat onto the dock and stood there, leaning casually on the paddle he had taken with him.
She saw the man break stride for a second, then make up his mind to brazen it out. He kept walking down towards the dock. Thin and wiry, with shoulder-length dirty brown hair, in his forties, she thought. His clothes were grubby but not really dirty—a light grey T-shirt with some kind of logo, black denims.
“Hello there! Can I help you?” he called casually, but too loudly, and she hoped Jalal had picked up the information that there was someone else in the cottage.
“Are you moving out?” she heard Jalal ask, with easy interest.
“Oh, I wish, eh?” The man was grinning self-deprecatingly when she looked again. He clearly did not want to arrive on the dock, but had no choice. He set down the vacuum cleaner and straightened warily.
In the doorway of the house a shadow moved. “Naw, I’m just the hired moving man, eh?”
Jalal nodded. “I understand. But you have the wrong address. No one is moving from this house. So why don’t you get in the boat and go?”
The man feigned indignation. “Hey, buddy, who ya think you’re talking to, eh?” But Clio could hear his essential weakness in his voice and breathed a sigh of relief. He would bluster and then obey.
Already he was inching towards where his boat was moored.
“I know very well who I am talking to. Now I tell you, you are making a mistake, and you can get in your boat and leave, and your friends, too.”
He raised his voice. “Why don’t you come out? Your friend is leaving and you may go with him.”
A figure appeared in the doorway. “What the frig’s goin’ on?” he said, and Clio’s breath hissed in between suddenly clenched teeth. This man was very different from his partner. He was big and muscled, his head shaved, his lower jaw protuberant with low intelligence and aggression. His white singlet and camouflage pants were cleaner than his partner’s clothes. He wore a wide belt and hard boots, several metal studs in one ear.
He clumped deliberately down the broad steps from the porch and strode down to the dock with a threatening swagger. Jalal’s posture, negligently leaning on the paddle, did not change. The thug stopped a few feet away from him and spat deliberately on the ground.
“Hey, a Ay-rab!” His eyes swept past Jalal and over Clio with a look that turned her stomach. “And a skirt!” But he did not say skirt. She shuddered with revulsion. He turned to Jalal again. “Thanks for bringing my dessert, Saddam! You can go now, less you wanna be the main course.
“Oooffff!” The breath seemed to explode out of his body as, almost faster than she could see, Jalal drove the paddle into his solar plexus. The thug seemed to leap into the air and fold in the middle simultaneously.
“Behind you!” Clio screamed, as the smaller man leapt for him, and somehow, instead of connecting, the thin man seemed to sail over Jalal’s shoulder as Jalal dropped the paddle, grabbed his arm and assisted his forward motion.
He landed sprawling on the big man, and screamed like an animal, a sound that sent a rush of horror over her skin. His partner threw him impatiently aside, and the reason for the scream was suddenly evident as blood spattered the thug’s hands. The thin man had landed skidding on the knife that the thug had pulled from somewhere, and his chest was sliced from shoulder to waist. His T-shirt gaped. Blood poured from the wound.
The wounded man cursed violently. “I’m hurt, man, I’m hurt!”
The thug ignored him and got to his feet. He was sweating. “Okay, Saddam, you shouldna done that. You shouldna made me mad.”
Jalal stood with his arms loose at his sides. “Your friend needs a doctor,” he said. “Get in your boat and go.”
“Jeez, man, I’m hurt bad! Let’s do what he says!”
“Drop the boat keys on the dock, Saddam, leave the skirt, get in my boat and take off, and nobody’ll get hurt,” said the thug to Jalal, as if he hadn’t heard his friend’s cry.
Jalal said nothing. She could not see his face, but from the back he looked so lightly poised he almost seemed to move with the breeze.
“You hear me, Ay-rab?” The thug began to toss the bloody knife between his two hands, bouncing his weight from foot to foot. He was inches taller than Jalal, and thirty pounds heavier. And clearly he made it his business to be menacing.
Still Jalal made no reply.
“I’m not gonna hurt her, don’t you worry none about that. I’m gonna treat her real nice. Whereas you, I’m gonna hurt you bad, if you don’t—”
As if he were dancing, Jalal stepped to the side, and his foot arced up, connecting with the thug’s right hand as it was in the act of catching the knife. The man cried out with a shriek of pain, and Clio saw with ugly shock that his forearm now bent where it should not. Stumbling forward off balance as he clutched at it with his other hand, he suddenly felt Jalal’s hand close on his wrist and his scream changed note. Jalal’s other hand fell ruthlessly on his shoulder, and, tripping over the television set, the thug was propelled forward off the dock and down into his boat with a crash.
He screamed in wild, almost demented agony, clutching his shoulder, his arm, his shoulder again, as a stream of curses spewed out of his mouth. His face was cut, his eye already swelling.
“My shoulder!” he screamed, with such a terrible cry that Clio’s stomach started to heave again. “My arm!”
Jalal turned back to the other man, who was with difficulty scrambling to his feet, trying to stop the bleeding from his chest with his hands. His eyes widened at whatever he saw in Jalal’s face.
“I’m wounded, man! Don’t hit me!”
“Get in the boat and take your friend out of here.”
Clio gasped at the deadly menace in his voice.
“I can’t, man! I can’t drive a boat! Man, I’m all cut! You gotta get me to a doctor.”
“Get out,” Jalal said softly.
The man choked off his protest and stumbled to the edge of the dock, then let go of his bleeding chest to clamber into the boat. His friend was still screaming in agony. Somehow, the thin man got the motor started on the second try.
“Jeez, the rope! Untie the rope, will ya?” he cried.
Jalal bent to pick up the bloody knife, and with one powerful stroke he chopped down against the wooden dock, severing the rope that tied the boat, as if only now he let his anger escape.
The thin man swore in fear, dragging in the remnant of the rope, and clumsily steered around the powerboat and back down the river. Clio cut her own motor, and they stood listening to the sound retreating in the distance.
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