Captive of Kadar

by Trish Morey

  Wasn’t there?

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, when they turned right instead of left where she was expecting.

  ‘To visit a friend.’

  ‘I need to call my insurance company.’

  ‘It can wait half an hour, can’t it?’

  She licked her lips, the spark of an idea flaring into life in her mind. ‘But do I need to come with you? Why can’t I just go back to your apartment and start the ball rolling? Surely the sooner I notify them, the better?’

  He thought about that for a moment. He’d promised to see Mehmet and he’d already put it off once, because of this woman. He’d waited because he’d figured he’d be done with her by now. And he’d much prefer to see his old friend without this woman in tow. Mehmet might be blind, but he had a way of imagining things that weren’t there.

  He had to admit, her offer was appealing.

  ‘You remember where the apartment is?’

  She shrugged. ‘Of course. It’s not far.’ She pointed down the street to their left where she’d been expecting him to turn. ‘Right at that next corner and left at the carpet shop.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘All right,’ he said, reaching for his keys. I’ll meet you back there, then.’

  She took the key and turned to go, her eyes so bright that the restless alarm bells in his mind rang out loud and clear. This was a woman who should never venture anywhere near a poker game.

  She stopped dead when he grabbed hold of her pack. ‘But I’ll take this. Save you carrying it.’

  Her face bleached of colour. She looked at the bag. Looked up at him, a war going on behind her eyes. Finally she glanced down at her cross-body bag and seemed to make a decision. ‘Okay,’ she whispered, and slipped the pack from her shoulders.

  ‘Oh,’ he added, because that had been too easy. ‘And your passport. I think I’ll take that too.’

  Her chin kicked up. ‘Why on earth would you want that?’

  ‘If you’re just going to the apartment, it’s not like you’ll be needing it.’

  ‘You don’t trust your own niece, Uncle Kadar?’

  ‘That’s just it, my recalcitrant niece,’ he said as he hauled her pack over his shoulder and took back the key from her hand. ‘I don’t.’

  * * *

  Mehmet lived in a ground-floor apartment tucked away behind the lift lobby of a nineteenth-century apartment building. If the noise and grind and endless pinging of the single lift had ever bothered him, he didn’t let on. Kadar suspected he liked to hear the comings and going of his neighbours, even if he couldn’t see much of them.

  He had the dates he’d bought in the Spice Market in his pocket. The trouble was he had an unwilling and sulking visitor to accompany him too.

  ‘Mehmet is old and mostly blind,’ he said, ‘and may or may not choose to speak English, although he understands it perfectly.’

  ‘It’s okay. I won’t say anything.’

  ‘He’ll know you’re there, even if you say nothing. He sees more blind than most seeing people see with their eyes. He’ll be curious why you are with me. I will tell him the truth, that it is only because your tour was cancelled while we make alternative arrangements.’

  Amber had no issue with that. ‘Tell him what you like. It makes no difference to me.’

  He turned his head to her. ‘In that case, I will tell him we spent a night of unbridled passion in my bed and that in the morning you begged me not to let you go.’

  She snorted and didn’t care in the least if she sounded unladylike. ‘Dream on,’ she said. ‘If he can see so much, he’ll know that’s a lie.’

  He stopped halfway across the tiled lobby and turned to her. ‘Where do you get this from, this bravado? You are inexperienced sexually, in no way could it be said you are worldly-wise, and you bolt at a stranger’s glance, and yet you have this streak of defiance that comes from nowhere.’

  She didn’t know herself. But maybe after playing it safe her entire life and the disaster that was Cameron and being bossed around by this man who insisted on babysitting her, she was starting to discover what she actually wanted.

  ‘Maybe I’m just sick of being pushed around.’

  He put the fingers of one hand to her chin and lifted it even higher, her chin rigid, her eyes sending him daggers. ‘Save your passion for bed. We may be forced into each other’s company for longer than either of us desire, but we need not waste the nights.’

  He let go of her chin and turned and headed for the door on the other side of the lifts and Amber was left breathless and floundering in his wake, his words not a threat so much as a promise. How had he taken the heat from her anger and directed it into another kind of heat so easily?

  Damn him. He would not control her that easily. She would not let him. He might not be Cameron, but she was done with men who expected her to fall in with their wants and their demands.

  When she looked up, he was holding a door open for her. ‘I think I hate you,’ she said as she passed to step inside the small apartment.

  ‘Good,’ he answered. ‘I’m counting on it.’

  It was no lie. He needed her to hate him. They could have great sex over the next few days, but if she hated him, that was all it would ever be. That was all it could ever be.

  He heard the impatient tap of a cane against the floor and Mehmet, who he’d already told that he was here, was asking who he had brought along with him.

  ‘A friend,’ he said in Turkish. ‘Someone I need to look after until she can join her tour group.’

  Across the room, the old man smiled. ‘You have never brought a friend to visit me before, Kadar.’

  ‘She’s not that kind of friend.’

  ‘And yet still, she is here. Where is she?’

  He gestured to Amber to come closer. ‘He wants to meet you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘He is old,’ Kadar said softly. ‘Bear with him.’

  ‘I may be blind, my young friend,’ the old man said with a gappy smile, ‘but I am not deaf.’

  Amber crossed the small room. It was barely big enough for a few chairs around a Turkish carpet in faded colours that was probably as old as the man sitting in the chair behind, if not older. And what light there was came from the windows lining one wall. She guessed he had no need for lamps.

  He was old and shrivelled and the skin on his hands resting on his chair arms resembled parchment. Around him was wrapped a robe of maroon velvet with gold trim and over his legs sat a throw, richly embroidered in shades of orange and blue with a border of stylised tulips she was already beginning to recognise as distinctly Turkish.

  ‘Mehmet,’ she said, ‘my name is Amber. Amber Jones.’

  His head twitched. He frowned and the lines on his face deepened. ‘Amber is an unusual name,’ he said, in halting, but very formal English.

  ‘A family name,’ she said.

  ‘But you are—Australian?’

  She smiled. ‘My mother and her mother before her were English.’

  ‘Come closer.’ He beckoned with a crooked finger.

  She glanced behind her at Kadar and he sent her a look that said I told you so, and she went. Mehmet’s hands reached out and she sensed that closer was not enough and that he needed to see her and so she knelt as the old man reached out craggy fingers and touched them to her head, patting her hair, finding her forehead. Old fingers. Their nails hard, their skin leathery, and yet their touch so sensitive as he skimmed her features, her forehead, the line of her jaw and chin, the pads of his fingers tracing the line of her nose and lips.

  His fingers stilled, and he said something to Kadar over her head. Something she couldn’t understand.

  Kadar barked something back, and, although she couldn’t understand the words, the meaning was plain. A denia
l.

  Mehmet fired a response straight back and Kadar had the final word, even more emphatic this time.

  She looked from one man to the other, a prickle crawling up her spine. One thing she knew for sure—they weren’t talking about the weather. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Kadar. ‘I told him it is your first visit to Istanbul, that is all.’

  Was it all? Why would he have to point that out? She looked back to Mehmet, peered into his grizzled face. ‘Mehmet?’

  ‘Forgive an old man. It is rude to speak in a language you do not understand. Are you a thief, as Kadar says?’

  ‘What?’ Her head swung around to glare at the man standing behind her. ‘No. I am not a thief.’

  The old man nodded. ‘I believe you. And what will you do now your tour is no more?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m hoping to find something else.’

  ‘Have Kadar take you to the Pavilion of the Moon. I insist.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a problem to anyone.’

  The old man snorted. ‘Kadar has businesses near there. It will not be a problem.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so, old man,’ Kadar said, but his voice told her he was smiling and the old man smiled and gave a wistful sigh. ‘I only wish I could come with you. It has been a long time. Now, Amber Jones, give me your hand.’

  Amber placed one hand upon his upturned palm on his lap, and he covered it with his other.

  ‘Look after Kadar,’ he said. ‘He is a good man, but he has walked alone too long.’

  ‘Mehmet!’ he growled.

  ‘It will not be easy, of course. He will not make it easy. You will need to be strong.’

  ‘Mehmet,’ Kadar said again, unleashing a torrent of Turkish in its wake, with not a smile in his words in sight.

  ‘You see? I told you, he will not make it easy. Can you be strong?’

  She smiled. ‘I love that you care for your young friend, Mehmet, but I’m just a tourist. I can’t stay. I have to go home.’

  He shook his head. ‘What we have to do, and what we do, sometimes they are not the same. Sometimes the way is not so clear as we think.’

  ‘That’s enough, Mehmet,’ Kadar said again, his voice gruff. ‘It is time for us to leave.’

  ‘So soon? Ah, I think I have frightened off my young friend.’ He gave Amber’s hand a squeeze and screwed his face up with it as if deep in thought. ‘Amber. Such an uncommon name, and yet, so familiar. Thank you for coming and brightening an old man’s day. Come and visit me again, won’t you?’

  * * *

  ‘You told him I was a thief.’ Neither of them had said anything after making their farewells and they were halfway back to the apartment along grey, rain-slicked streets, both of them with hands jammed in pockets, gazing steely at the wet pavement ahead, when the niggling nagging knowledge got too much to bottle up any longer. ‘Why did you tell him that?’

  ‘Because he was talking madness. Making up stories in his head. I had to show him how wrong he was.’

  ‘By telling him I was a thief?’

  ‘Isn’t that why the polis took you in?’

  ‘I wasn’t charged.’

  ‘Only because I interceded.’

  ‘I am not a thief.’

  ‘And you tried to run away.’

  ‘Only to get away from you.’

  ‘There is no getting away from me. Not while I am responsible for your actions.’

  ‘Look, this is pointless. There’s no need to babysit me. I’m not going to get into trouble again.’

  ‘No. Not on my watch, you’re not. But where exactly did you think you were going to run to? Back to that fleapit of a hostel?’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad!’

  ‘No?’

  She grumped into silence. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that good either. And maybe she’d been crazy to think she could run away or that she even had anywhere to run away to. But she’d never been a party to the deal he’d cut with the polis, so that was his problem. She’d gone along with him for one night but be damned if she’d have him looking over her shoulder and watching her every move, waiting for her to transgress for the rest of her trip, whatever she ended up doing. He was too intense. Too sure of himself.

  Even if he was the best lover she’d even known.

  And there was another reason right there to get the hell away from him as fast as she could. Too many nights of passion like that and a girl wouldn’t want to go home. A girl might start making noises about wanting to hang around. A girl might end up looking sad and getting evicted.

  She didn’t want to be that girl.

  She wanted to draw a line under their one-night encounter and walk away, while she still could.

  ‘I thought as much.’

  Amber blinked, rewinding the conversation until she found where he was at. Still back at the hostel. Well, she’d moved on. ‘I don’t care what you say. It still doesn’t mean I’m a thief.’

  ‘If it is any consolation, Mehmet believes you.’ He snorted. ‘I think my old friend is finally losing his mind.’

  ‘I thought he was very cogent. He’s worried about you, that’s all.’

  ‘He would be better off worrying about himself.’

  ‘So why have you never married? Is it because of your scars?’

  His head snapped around. ‘What is it to you?’

  ‘You must have been very young when it happened.’

  He shook his head. Maybe it would have been better for them both if he had let her run away. ‘Why did you let an old man touch your face?’

  The abrupt change of topic threw her. ‘What?’

  ‘To most people—most Anglophiles—having a stranger in their personal space would be foreign to them. Discomfiting at least, if not abhorrent. But you offered your face to Mehmet’s fingers without even a trace of hesitation.’

  ‘He’s blind. How else was he expected to see me?’

  ‘But how would you know that?’

  ‘Maybe because it’s my job to know such things.’

  ‘Why? What do you do?’

  She smiled and tossed her head back as she marched down the street, stepping out of the way of an old woman towing a trolley full of groceries out of a small supermarket.

  ‘Well?’ he said, when they had come together on the other side.

  She looked across at him. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, surely what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Why should I tell you anything?’

  He sniffed. ‘It is hardly the same thing.’

  ‘I understand you see it that way. You want to know the answers to your questions but you don’t want to give the answers to mine.’

  ‘That is not what I meant.’

  ‘No. Then you meant that your questions were somehow more important than mine. Well, pardon me if I disagree.’

  ‘You are an infuriating woman.’

  She smiled. ‘Thank you.’ And marched on, dodging pedestrians, both local and tourists.

  ‘That was not meant to be a compliment.’

  ‘I’m taking it as one. Let me know when you’ve had enough of infuriation and I’ll gladly leave you in peace.’

  ‘You know that can’t happen. Not unless a miracle happens and your tour agency suddenly reopens.’

  ‘Is there any chance of that?’

  ‘That’s where the miracle would come in. Until then, it appears you are stuck with me and I am stuck with you.’

  ‘Lucky us.’

  He ground his teeth together before he could answer. ‘Lucky is not exactly the way I would put it.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHE WAS MORE than infuriating. She was
exasperating. You’d think she could be grateful that she wasn’t left on the streets with nowhere to go and no roof over her head. You’d think she’d show a little bit of gratitude.

  Oh no.

  He let her precede him into the apartment and watched the wiggle and roll of her hips as she walked past and added another adjective to describe her.

  Maddening.

  He must have been mad to have ever got himself involved. But those red jeans and those blue eyes and that smile that had lit up a marketplace—yes, it was a kind of madness. There was no other excuse.

  And now, unless her insurance company could do something quickly—and realistically what chance of that was there when she would have to submit claims and no doubt wait weeks before she could expect any kind of pay-out?—he was stuck with her red jeans and blue eyes and electric smile.

  Stuck with having her in his bed every night and waking to her every morning.

  Madness.

  He didn’t do every night and every morning with any woman.

  He watched her put her bag down and strip off her leather jacket, liking the way her sweater hugged her breasts exactly the way he wanted to.

  So maybe it wasn’t all bad. Last night had been too short, and it was only a few nights.

  A few nights and he would be more than happy to let her go.

  A few nights shouldn’t cause any problems.

  Because she was still a tourist.

  She still had her return flights booked.

  She was still temporary, just not as temporary as he’d first thought.

  So maybe it wasn’t perfect, but at least it wouldn’t be a complete loss.

  * * *

  There was no joy for Amber when she called the travel insurance emergency line from the bedroom of Kadar’s apartment. No joy at all. Only more grief.

  She sat on the edge of the bed as she terminated the connection and swallowed back on an unfamiliar urge to cry. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. Certainly not after she’d walked in on Cameron and Chanille. She’d been too shocked and white hot with rage to cry then.

  But now the prick of tears was all too close.

  She’d thought the insurance company might be able to offer some emergency assistance as their policy had advertised. Maybe a little cash to go on with. Maybe even help her find an alternative tour company that might offer her credit pending her insurance claim pay-out.