by Trish Morey
She could believe he had. His hands certainly looked as if they had endured a half-century or more of hard manual work, and his grizzled face seemed honest enough. But still... ‘And nobody minds if you dig up coins at an archaeological site? Especially like somewhere famous like Troy?’
He shrugged. ‘There are too many coins. Too many for the museums.’ He shoved his hand still closer, his brow more creased, and halved the price again. ‘Please, I need medicine for my wife. You buy?’
* * *
So the rabbit had been snared by a different kind of hunter.
Kadar had imagined her long gone, the way she’d all but fled from their brief encounter, but there she was, talking to an old man across the plaza, those red jeans like a flag and her blond hair gleaming even in winter’s thin sunlight, and he once again felt that familiar spike of heat to his groin. He’d bet that if she looked his way, he’d see a matching flare of heat in her blue eyes.
A shame she was so skittish.
He phoned his driver and told him he was ready, while he casually watched the interplay between the old man and the woman, the old man holding out his hand, the girl peering closely, asking questions.
He watched as the old man shook that hand and spilled whatever was in it to the ground, and he watched the way those red jeans stretched lovingly over her behind as she quickly bent over and dived down to retrieve what had fallen. Coins, he figured, frowning. In which case, she’d better be careful. She held them almost reverentially in her hand before attempting to return them to the old man.
He made no move to accept, clearly determined to finalise the sale. Kadar’s frown deepened as she shrugged and juggled coins and paper bag and dug around in her satchel for her wallet.
Foolish girl.
He spied his car weaving through the traffic towards him.
Just before he spied the two uniformed men pouncing on the old man and the girl.
CHAPTER TWO
‘HEY,’ AMBER PROTESTED as someone took her arm, only to look up and find herself staring at a younger man, this one wearing a dark blue uniform of the polis. One of two, she realised, the other officer holding the arm of the old man, who smiled thinly while his eyes were laced with fear.
Fear that leached into her bones and made her blood run cold as the coins were taken from her hand and inspected and a nod given in judgement before they disappeared into a small plastic bag.
What the hell was going on?
One officer barked out something in Turkish at the old man and he pointed at her, tripping over his words in his rush to answer.
‘Is this true?’ The officer’s head snapped around to her, his voice as stern as his expression, but at least he had figured enough to address her in English. ‘Did you ask this man where you could buy more coins like these?’
What? ‘No...’
‘Then what were you doing in possession of them?’
‘No. I wasn’t. He approached me—’
The old man cut her off. ‘She lies!’ he shouted before following with a torrent of Turkish, angry now and spluttering out his words, pointing ferociously some more at her with his free hand, that caused the polis to scowl at her again.
And even though she couldn’t understand the language, she knew enough to know it didn’t look good. ‘You have to believe me,’ she pleaded, her eyes darting from one officer to the other, conscious of the crowd that was gathering around them, and she had never felt more vulnerable. She was less than twenty-four hours in a foreign country so very far from home and where she didn’t speak the language and fear was coiling tight in her gut. She was the stranger here. What if nobody believed her? They had to believe her.
One of the officers asked to see her passport and she scrabbled around in her bag with fingers like toes and her heart thumping frantically in her chest until she managed to unzip the pocket secreting the document. ‘You do realise it is illegal to possess Turkish antiquities? It is a very serious offence,’ he stated, inspecting the passport.
Illegal.
Antiquities.
Serious offence.
The words collided and mashed in her brain. Why was he telling her this? She’d only picked them up because it was easier for her than for the old man with his walking stick. ‘But they weren’t mine.’
‘Likewise it is illegal to buy and sell them.’
Oh, God. She felt the blood drain from her face. She’d had the coins in her hand. She had been about to buy them.
I didn’t know, she wanted to say. I didn’t even know they were real. And while she struggled for the words to answer, words that might not implicate her further, a new voice emerged from the crowd and joined the fray, a deep and authoritative voice.
No, not just someone, she realised with a jolt as she looked around. Not just a voice.
Him. The man who had been watching her across the market.
He put a hand to her shoulder as he talked, and, breathless and blindsided all over again, she stood there, under the warm weight of his hand, feeling almost— insanely—as if the man had laid claim to her.
The old man interrupted at one stage, arguing with him in words she couldn’t understand, but the stranger answered back with a blistering attack of his own that had the old man visibly shrinking, eyes fearful as the polis scowled.
And even with her heart beating like a drum, even in the depths of panic, it was impossible not to notice how perfectly the stranger’s voice fitted him. She hadn’t imagined his power before. His voice was rich and deep and spoke of an authority that needed no uniform or weapon to give it weight. He wore authority as easily as he wore his black cashmere coat. And now his thumb was stroking her shoulder. Did he even realise, she wondered, as he continued to make his case, how much her skin tingled at this stranger’s touch?
Now, when she shivered, it was not from cold, but from tendrils of heat, curling and sinuous and dancing down to dark places where a pulse beat out a slow, blossoming need.
The voices around her were calming down, the crowd losing interest and filtering away, and even though she was in trouble, in danger of being charged with some kind of crime in a language she didn’t understand, somehow she felt strangely reassured by the presence of this man beside her—the very man she’d fled from minutes earlier. And whatever trouble she was in, somehow he had made it so that it was no longer fear that was uppermost in her mind, but desire.
Something was decided. An officer handed back her passport and nodded to them both before the old man was led away between the pair.
‘We must go to the station,’ he told her, removing his hand from her shoulder to retrieve his phone and make a short, sharp call as the disappointed crowd around them shrugged and wandered away, the show over, ‘so you can make a statement.’
‘What happened?’ she asked, missing the heat of his hand and the stroke of his thumb on her shoulder and that pooling heat between her thighs. ‘What did you tell them?’
He glanced around, over her head, as if he was searching for something beyond the crowd. ‘Only what I saw, that the old man approached you with the coins and let you pick them up when he dropped them.’
‘He had a walking stick,’ she explained. ‘I thought it would be easier for me.’
‘Of course. You were supposed to think that so that you could not pretend they were not yours or that you were not going to buy.’
‘But I was going to buy them,’ she said glumly. ‘I was about to when the polis arrived.’
‘I know that too,’ he said tersely, his mouth tight. He spotted a movement beyond the crowd. ‘Ah, here is my car,’ he said, taking her elbow. ‘Come.’
If his voice had sounded more an invitation than an order—if she had seen his hand coming and been warned of its approach... If either of those had happened, she might have been prepa
red. She might have steeled herself. But as he gave his command, and took her arm with his strong and certain fingers, it was as if he were not only claiming possession, but also taking control of her, and she knew that if she got into that car with this man her life would never be the same. Something jolted deep inside her then, a fusion of heat and desire and rebellion and fear, and the bag of bread spilled from shaking fingers onto the ground.
He must have felt that jolt move through her, even before she dropped the bread, because his feet paused, and he looked down at her. ‘Are you all right?’
She could hardly tell him the reason why her lungs had squeezed so tight in her chest. ‘I...’ she started, searching for some kind of excuse. ‘I don’t even know your name.’
He inclined his head. ‘I apologise. We seem to have skipped the usual formalities. My name is Kadar Soheil Amirmoez, at your service.’
She blinked, still shaken. ‘I’m hopeless with names. I’m never going to remember that,’ she admitted, and then wished she had never opened her mouth. He already thought her a naive tourist. Why give him reason to think even less of her?
But instead of the rebuke she was expecting, he smiled a little, the first time she had witnessed him smile, and shadowed planes shifted and angles found curves and his dark eyes found a spark, and where before he’d been merely striking with his strong dark looks, now he tipped over into truly dangerous. Her heart gave a tiny lurch.
She had reason to feel fear.
And still, she was glad he’d found her again.
‘A simple Kadar will suffice. And you are?’
‘Amber. Plain old Amber Jones.’
‘Never plain,’ he said in that rich, deep voice, taking her hand, and probably her last shred of resistance along with it. ‘It is a pleasure to meet you.’
He knelt down before her and retrieved the bread, now half spilled from its bag onto the pavement scattering sesame seeds and already being eyed by a dozen opportunistic birds. ‘You cannot eat this now,’ he declared, tossing bread and bag into a nearby rubbish bin, setting birds flapping and squawking desperately in pursuit. ‘Come. After you have made your statement, I will take you to lunch.’
And after lunch?
Would he whisk her away and make good on the promise she’d witnessed in his eyes?
Or was she so overwhelmed by all that had happened that she was spinning fantasies out of thin air?
‘You really don’t need to do that,’ she said, testing him. Because she’d seen the tightness in his expression when she’d admitted how close she’d come to buying the coins. He was duty-bound to deliver her to the police station, sure, but he might already be regretting coming to her aid. ‘I’ve taken enough of your time.’
‘I have ruined your lunch,’ he said solemnly as he ushered her to the kerbside where his car sat idling, waiting for them. He opened the back door for her to precede him inside. ‘I owe you that much at least, Amber Jones.’
The way she saw it, he owed her nothing, but she wasn’t about to argue. Neither was she planning on running again. He might have made taking her to lunch sound more like duty than pleasure, but she remembered the way he’d looked at her across the market with eyes as dark as midnight and lit with red hot coals and she remembered too the warm weight of his hand on her shoulder and the promise his touch conveyed.
And maybe the new brave Amber wasn’t so far away from her as she’d feared.
Because she wanted more.
* * *
It was more than two hours before they emerged from the police department into the crisp outside air. A shower of rain had been and gone and the air was fresh and clear after the overheated offices and because it wasn’t far to the restaurant, he’d suggested they walk.
Trams dinged and rumbled along the centre of a road forbidden to private vehicles and taxis, making room to hear the call of seabirds wheeling above, and the sound of a dozen different languages on the air around. And then, over it all came a sound she was slowly getting used to, the call of the Imam calling the faithful to prayer, and huge flocks of birds rose as one from the many-domed roof of the Blue Mosque and found comfort in each other from their shared fright, forming an endless circling ribbon of white in the sky.
And it struck Amber in that moment how lucky she was that she was free to enjoy the sight. ‘They could have charged me,’ she reflected, the shock of her narrow escape setting in as she remembered the stern expressions of the police who’d questioned her and taken her statement. She’d imagined when the police had let her travel with Kadar to the police station that completing a statement was nothing more than five minutes’ work, telling them how the old man had approached her, offering coins. A mere formality. She’d been wrong. Dealing in antiquities was clearly not a crime they took lightly in Turkey. ‘I thought they were going to charge me.’
‘You sound almost disappointed.’ He raised an eyebrow as he glanced briefly at her.
Disappointed? Not likely. She wouldn’t be here now, watching the birds swirl and wheel to the Imam’s prayers. Relieved was what she was. Not to mention a little confused. ‘I just don’t understand why at first it seemed not such a big deal and then they made such a fuss of it at the station.’
He shrugged. ‘What you did was foolish. Of course they needed to make you appreciate the severity of what you were doing.’
Foolish? The judgement stung, threatening to topple all the secret fantasies she’d been harbouring about how this day might progress. She didn’t want him to think of her as foolish.
Desirable or sexy, like the way he’d made her feel when she’d found his eyes on her across the marketplace, sure, he could think that. She wanted him to think that.
Not foolish.
‘I didn’t know there was a law against buying old coins.’
‘Surely you do research before you enter a country as a visitor? Surely, if you are any kind of responsible tourist, you find out about their customs and laws before you leave home.’
Well, yes, there was that, then again... ‘But they might just as easily have been fake!’
‘And you would have been happy exchanging good money for fakes?’
She sniffed. She hated that she sounded so defensive and she hated him because what he said was true. She had been hoping the coins were genuine and of course she would never have considered spending the money if she’d thought them no better than rubbish.
And she would have done her research. Normally. But the decision to come to Turkey hadn’t come twelve or even six months ago, and so giving her lashings of time to check out every traveller site going. The decision had been made barely two weeks ago, when she’d had to work out what to do about a cancelled holiday to Bali: stay at home or use whatever credits she could get for her cancelled flights and accommodation towards a trip somewhere she really wanted to go.
Turkey had been a no-brainer. The seed had been planted when she’d come across her great-great-great-grandmother’s diary ten years before when she’d been helping her mum sort out her gran’s old house back in England, the house her mum had grown up in before she’d moved to Australia. The diary that told of a young girl’s excitement about her upcoming trip to Constantinople and beyond, that she’d found bundled together with a pretty bracelet in an old oilskin rag and tucked away in the bottom of a long-forgotten trunk in the dusty attic. Half the pages were missing, so there was no record of her actual travels, and what was left was barely legible, but it was the words a young woman so long ago had penned in ink on the front page—follow your heart—that had lodged in Amber’s sensible brain.
And whether it was because she shared a name with her great-great-great-grandmother, or because the young Amber Braithwaite’s anticipation was infectious, that seed had grown, until she’d known that one day she wanted to experience for herself the exotic capital that had fired up her a
ncestor’s imagination more than a century and a half before.
Follow your heart.
Cameron had thought she was mad to even suggest it.
‘Why would you want to go there?’ he’d asked her. ‘Bali’s much closer and it’s cheaper.’
‘But nobody goes to Bali in January,’ she’d reasoned. ‘It’s so humid.’
‘Trust me,’ he’d said, and to her eternal shame she’d not only put her dreams on hold, but she’d trusted him, all right. Right up until the time she’d come home early from work and found him shagging her supposed best friend in their bed.
A supposed best friend who’d begged for forgiveness and told her it would never happen again because Cameron wasn’t even that good in the sack.
Thanks for that.
No, it was about time she followed her heart. And she didn’t have to explain any of that to this man.
‘So maybe I didn’t have time,’ she simply said, downplaying the whirlwind of emotional fallout from the double betrayal that had accompanied that time. It had taken a week before shock and the self-pity had turned to anger, and then it was a no-brainer that she would head to the one place Cameron was never likely to go.
It wasn’t until she’d buckled herself into her seat on the plane and taken a deep breath that she’d had clear air to think. So, admittedly, there hadn’t been a lot of time to brush up on the finer points of Turkish law or the hazards she might encounter along her journey.
It had been enough to know she was finally fulfilling a dream to visit the country that had bewitched her great-great-great-grandmother more than a century ago. ‘Maybe I had other things on my mind.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he suspected she either hadn’t bothered or she didn’t give a damn what laws she might break in someone else’s country, so long as she got what she wanted.
She gritted her teeth, wondering when exactly the desire she’d witnessed in his eyes had evaporated—in the officious and overheated surrounds of the police station, or when she’d admitted she’d been intending to buy the coins? But did it matter what he thought of her? She’d probably never see him again after today—she’d probably never see him after lunch. What did she care?