Once in Paris (11 page)

She sat wide-eyed, staring at them with complete shock. These men had seemed like ruffians, thugs. But they knew more about the political reality of the world than she'd ever learned.

“You are very young,” Mufti told her. “And you know very little of the ugliness of commerce or the evilness of man.”

“I know some,” she argued. She stared at them curiously. “You both seem to be intelligent men. Why do you work for Philippe Sabon?”

“I have four children,” Rashid said. “One of them has a form of cancer that is killing him. Monsieur Sabon pays for him to have expensive treatment in France.”

“And I lost my family and my home when
bombs fell while my wife prepared the meal for our two little ones.” Mufti's voice broke. He got a firmer grip on the weapon. “Monsieur Sabon heard of my loss from one of my cousins in the village on the mainland. Only recently, he came to find me and offered me work.” Mufti shifted, as if something about his situation bothered him. Odd, he seemed rather old to have small children. His hair was graying. In fact, he looked much the age Brianne's father would have been, had he lived.

“Rashid, we talk too much.” Mufti gestured with his weapon toward the door. “We should go.”

Brianne felt less threatened than ever before as she looked at the lean, dark faces and saw the harsh lines in them. Her life had been relatively carefree; at least she hadn't had to learn to use a gun and fight in wars. The lives these men had led showed in their faces, older than they should have seemed. She thought of Mufti's wife and children dying in a hail of bombs. She had to remember that there were two sides to every story, and she felt sorry for the man.

“I'm sorry. About your family, I mean,” Brianne told Mufti.

He looked sheepish and uncomfortable. “As if you had anything to do with it, Miss Martin,” he said kindly. “It is a sad world in which we live. People are driven by circumstances and misfortune and necessity to do many indecent things. I regret your capture. But it was a necessity.” He hesitated at the door. “Monsieur Sabon will not harm you,” he added surprisingly. “It was not for any immoral purpose that you were brought here.”

They nodded politely and left, locking the door behind them. Now, whatever in the world did that mean? She wondered about it long after darkness fell.

 

There were voices outside the door. She heard a familiar one and caught her breath as she recognized it. Sabon!

She got off the mattress and went to sit in the chair, stiff-backed and unyielding. She was still there when the door was unlocked and Philippe Sabon walked in. He tossed a harsh command to his two men and closed the door.

Brianne stared at his lean, scarred dark face and narrow black eyes with real fear.

He waved a hand impatiently. “No, no,” he said quickly, “I have not come for that. It was
convenient to let everyone think that I intended you for a depraved appetite, then not too many eyebrows would be raised when you vanished. It would be assumed that I took you for…nefarious purposes.”

“I b-beg your pardon?” she stammered.

He sat down on the mattress and crossed his long, elegant legs while he lit one of the small Turkish cigars he liked.

“I'm not such a monster that I enjoy ravishing innocents,” he told her calmly. “Although I do find you attractive, and if you were willing, and I were still whole, I might be tempted.”

Her eyes asked the question her lips couldn't form. He laughed coldly. “You have no idea, have you?” He leaned forward. “Since you will not leave this place for some time to come, I can answer the question you fear to ask me. I stood on a land mine in Palestine on a business trip; a leftover horror from one of many conflicts in this great region. The wounds were so terrible that I ceased to be a man,” he added harshly. “Hence the fiction that I have perverse appetites.” He made a distasteful gesture. “It was kinder than the gossip I would have attracted had the truth been known.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, and she was, in spite
of her overwhelming relief that she didn't have to worry about her own seduction now and his curious statement that she would never leave the island. “It must be…terrible for you.”

“Terrible.” He savored the word as he stared blankly at the tip of his small cigar. “Yes. It was…terrible.” His eyes lifted to her face and remained for a time, as if he were searching for mockery or sarcasm or amusement. He found none of these in that quiet, gentle face. He grimaced. “A woman like you can make a man ashamed of his baser instincts. If I had met someone like you before this, I might have been very different. As it is, the well-being of my people is all I have to substitute for any other pleasures I might lack in my life.”

“What are you going to do with Mr. Hutton's bodyguard and me?”

He shrugged. “Those decisions will have to be made later. Hutton will surely come looking for you, and that could cause me some problems. You see, your stepfather and I have concocted a way to provoke your so-protective government into sending troops to protect our oil fields while we open them to drilling in the near future.”

“Kurt?”

He nodded. He got up and paced the room, making a grimace of distaste at her surroundings. “This is uncomfortable, I know, but it was hastily arranged. I will try to improve your surroundings when I can.” He turned back to her. “Kurt has sent in a band of mercenaries to attack us, before our enemies rush to do the same thing and without pretence. We will then blame the attack on the government presently hostile to yours, and plead for American intervention to stop them before they realize how weak we are right now as a nation and rush over our borders. Kurt has a friend in the Senate who has persuasive powers, and I think that your government will not need much excuse to launch an attack against our mutual enemy.”

Brianne stood up. “You mustn't,” she said earnestly. “You could start a world war!”

He shrugged again and puffed on his cigar. “Better that than let the oil fields be captured by our enemies before we can start exploiting them for the benefit of our people. Believe me, it has not been easy persuading the sheikh that the oil our country possesses must be drawn out of the earth to save our economy from collapse. He believes that it is wrong to depend on the West, even for the development of our potential
wealth. I have argued long and hard to convince him that the benefit to our people will be worth the foreign interest here.”

“Benefit to your people…?”

He glared at her. “You have an interesting picture of me. I am a monster, yes? A vicious, perverted man who enjoys nothing more than despoiling women and making himself richer!”

She made an impotent gesture with her hands.

“My grandmother's village, the place where I was born, is a wasteland of poverty, of malnutrition and disease and ignorance. All around us, the oil-producing nations are counting their wealth while we stand at the door knocking, to be turned away by servants richer than we are.”

She was utterly speechless for a few seconds. “But there is foreign aid….”

He smiled wearily. “How naive you are,” he said. “How naive and trusting. You live in the decadent West. You have plenty to eat and drink, clothes to wear, cars to drive you, airplanes to fly you anyplace you want to go. You have no idea how most of the rest of the world lives, Miss Martin.” He puffed on his cigar. “You might find a month in my country enlightening. Unlike the metropolitan cities of our
neighbors, here in Qawi you can live in a mud hut with no indoor facilities, draw water from a sandy well, kill and dress whatever small animal you can catch to cook over an open fire, spin wool to make thread to weave cloth to make your own clothing, and watch your babies starve to death or die of dysentery and fever for lack of medicine. We have no Europeans here, and no modern cities.” He nodded at her look of consternation. “You seem stunned.”

“It sounds primitive.”

“It is primitive,” he said shortly. “Primitive and hopeless and useless! Without money there is no hope of educating my people. Without education, there is only poverty forever.”

She was at a loss to make suggestions. Astonished at what he was telling her, at the warped picture she had of him and the world he lived in, she was absolutely without the ability to debate him.

“And now we face the problem of what to do with you while Kurt bargains for me in America,” he continued.

She looked around her worriedly. “Are you going to keep me here? But, why, if you don't want me for, well, for nefarious purposes?”

He sighed. “I brought you here to ensure
Kurt's cooperation with the fiction that I wanted to marry you and bring our families into an alliance,” he said honestly. “He was most anxious to agree to my plan, which appealed to his unbridled greed. But I understand that his wife tried to talk him into backing out of the deal. He dealt with her in a way that brings no respect from me. I have no patience with men who hit their women, whatever the reason.” He held up a hand. “She is not much hurt. I made sure of it.”

Brianne's first thought was for her mother's safety. So she was relieved to hear Sabon's reassurance that Eve was all right. For now.

She jerked her mind back to the present. “You mean, I'm here so that Kurt won't try to go against you.”

“Exactly,” he replied. He smiled coolly. “Of course, he thinks I have…other plans for you, and it was convenient to let him believe so.” His eyes briefly sparkled with humor. “I believe your mother actually threatened to leave him if you are harmed. Surprising, no, such concern in such a mercenary woman?”

She caught her breath. “How do you know so much about my mother?”

“I have spies everywhere.” He studied her
soft features with real regret. “You are no conventional beauty, but you have a quality of compassion that is so rare as to be precious. I look at you and grieve for the loss of the man I once was. I would have cherished you.”

Her breathing suspended at the statement, so unexpected, and so sincere. He seemed so vulnerable then, so tormented, that her heart ached for him.

He saw that expression cross her oval face and he winced. “Child, the sight of you hurts me,” he said hoarsely, and he turned away. “I never meant to involve you in this, in any way. Kidnapping was the last thing on my mind, but it was as much for your sake as mine that I brought you here. Kurt is unpredictable, and his temper has become unmanageable. I would not have you hurt for the world,” he added huskily, glancing at her.

Unexpectedly touched by his attitude, she got up out of her chair and moved toward him. He was nothing like the monster she'd made of him in her mind. He was nothing like the man the world saw and hated. Hesitantly, she touched his arm, no longer afraid. She felt pity for him.

He looked down at the soft hand on the expensive material of his sleeve with astonish
ment. His black eyes, so different from Pierce's, so foreign, met hers.

He reached toward her in a moment of suspended time, hesitantly like a young boy alone for the first time with a girl. His lean hands gently touched her upper arms. “You will…permit?” he asked, slowly drawing her toward him.

She let him draw her into his arms and hold her. It was the most incredible experience of her life, there in the room where she was a prisoner, to stand in the circle of that man's arms and let him hold her. That was all he did. He made no move toward intimacy or violence. He touched her hair as if it fascinated him, and she could hear his breath sigh out roughly at her ear. For an instant, she felt his cheek against the top of her head and heard a soft groan pass his lips. A shiver ran the length of his tall, lean body. They called him a monster. A criminal. A beast. He trembled in her arms.

“Can't they do anything for you?” she asked quietly.

He swallowed. “Nothing.” His voice broke on the word. His hands cradled her head, and after a minute, they framed her face and lifted it to his eyes. They were wet. He was un
ashamed of his reaction as he studied her in a painful silence. He clenched his teeth as he saw the stuff of dreams so close that he could breathe it in through his nostrils, and so far away that it might have been a distant star.

Her fingers reached up to his cheek and touched it lightly. “I'm sorry,” she said.

He didn't blink. “All I had left were memory and dreams.” He managed a faint smile. “Now I will have the look in your eyes as well.” He moved away and took her hands, palms up, to his lips. “Thank you,” he said huskily, and dropped them at once.

He moved away to the door and stood there for a minute, gathering his self-control. “You will not be harmed, ever, by me or anyone close to me,” he said, glancing back at her. “I give you my word. And if you ever need help, for any reason, I am yours to command.”

She stared at him with faint wonder. “Why?”

One of his shoulders moved almost imperceptibly. “Perhaps because you have a heart more fragile than any I have ever known, a heart that can pity a monster like me.”

“You aren't a monster,” she said.

His eyes hardened. “Yes, I am,” he replied. “And I never realized it until today.”