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He was back very shortly. He handed her the camera and smiled politely, as if nothing had happened to mar the pleasure of her first camel ride. “The grotto is just down that path. Come along.”
She went first, leaving him to follow. There was a stall at the entrance to the Caves of Hercules and she hesitated with her eyes on a small, flat circle of rock with a raised dome and what looked like a fossil on it. Fascinated, she picked it up, finding it silky to the touch.
“Your first souvenir? Allow me,” he murmured, paying for it.
“But…”
He held up a hand to silence her protest. “A trifle,” he waved away the cost. He nodded toward the cave’s entrance. “Go slowly. This is a living cave. You will find limestone walls where, for centuries, men have hewn millstones from them.”
She went inside, feeling the cool dampness of the caves as she walked along the bare ground and mingled with other tourists. There was an opening toward the sea which looked very much like a map of Africa. The walls had circles carved out—the millstones, she thought. She cradled her souvenir in her small hands and took out her camera again, photographing the walls and, when he wasn’t looking, her strangely attractive companion. She was enjoying his company as she’d enjoyed little else in her life. And she didn’t even know his name!
She moved back toward him. He was watching the waves through the opening in the cavern, his hands deep in his pockets, his expression taciturn and brooding.
He turned as she joined him and the polite smile was back on his face.
“I don’t know your name,” she said softly.
His eyes twinkled. “Call me…Monsieur Souverain,” he said in a deep, soft tone.
“Do you have a first name, or is that some heavily guarded secret?” she teased.
He chuckled. “Philippe,” he said smoothly.
“Philippe.” She smiled.
The twinkle in his eyes became more pronounced. He pursed his lips. “Come along,” he said, turning. “We can go on to Asilah, if you like?”
“I’d like that very much,” she said honestly and then hesitated. “I’m not taking you away from any important business, am I?” she asked, concerned.
He laughed. “I have no important business after today and tomorrow,” he assured her. “Perhaps, like you, I am having a holiday.”
“I’ll bet you don’t have many,” she said, watching her step as they climbed the narrow, rocky path up to the parking lot.
“Why do you say that?”
“You act like the consummate businessman,” she told him without looking up. “I expect you’re in town on some huge project that involves all sorts of important people.”
“I was,” he said. “But the deal rather fell through before I got off the plane. I am working on another, however, which I expect will be even more successful.”
She didn’t notice that he was watching her covertly as he spoke, and that his eyes were brimming over with humor.
She looked around as they started to get back into the hotel’s car, and she caught her breath. “It’s nothing like I expected when we left Texas,” she confided. “It’s so exciting, and the people are all friendly and courteous—it’s almost like being at home, except for the way people dress and the sound of Arabic and Berber being spoken.” She turned to him with the car door standing open.
“Don’t you know anything about Morocco?” he asked gently.
She laughed. “All our television reporters talk about are scandals and political issues and the latest tragedy. They don’t tell us one thing about other countries unless somebody important is murdered in one.”
“So I have seen,” he mused.
She grinned. “That’s why Maggie and I came to Morocco, to see what it was really like. And now that we’ve been properly introduced,” she added, smiling as she extended her hand, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Monsieur Souverain.”
“I can return the compliment, Gretchen.” He brought her hand, palm up, to his hard mouth and looked straight into her eyes as his lips brushed it with a strangely sensuous motion. He made her name sound foreign, mysterious, exciting. The feel of his mouth on her skin made her uneasy, although not in any bad way. Faintly unnerved by the sensations the caress caused in her body, she pulled her fingers away a little too quickly, laughing nervously to cover the action.
He didn’t say a word until they were comfortably seated and the car was moving again, but his eyes were even more curious. She looked hunted for a moment, and that would never do. He smiled carelessly. “Would you like to hear something of the history of Tangier?” he asked.
“I’d love to,” she replied.
He crossed his long legs. “The Berbers were the first to arrive here,” he began, warming to his subject.
They passed cork factories and olive groves along the highway that led down the coast to Asilah, and Gretchen laughed as she watched camels playing in the surf at the ocean’s edge.
“They like to swim and sun themselves,” Philippe told her pleasantly, “much like tourists on holiday.”
“They’re very soft, but they aren’t as big as I expected them to be. I guess they look different in movies.”
“You saw The Wind and the Lion with Sean Connery?” he asked at once.
“Why, yes, several times,” she confessed.
“The palace of the Raissouli is in Asilah.”
She gasped. “He was a real person?”
“A revolutionary,” he agreed, “who tried to overthrow the monarchy. He failed,” he added dryly.
“My goodness, I thought it was all fiction.”
“Most of it was,” he told her. “But I also enjoyed it. In my country, foreign films are a large part of our entertainment.”
His country. France, she was certain. She smiled. “I’ve never been to France,” she mused. “I’ll bet it’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” he agreed, deliberately encouraging her mistaken idea of his background. “And old. Like most of Europe. The kasbah of Tangier dates back to Roman conquest and even earlier.”
“I love all of it,” she said fervently. “Every cobblestone and villa, every little shop, the people who meander through those narrow walled streets. It’s like a fairyland.”
His black eyes narrowed. “You enjoy foreign places.”
She looked over at him. “I’ve never even been out of Texas before,” she confessed. “Not even to the Mexican border. I’ve never been…well, anywhere. And to get to see Africa, of all places.” Her heart was in her eyes. “I feel as if I’m living a dream.”
“Do you know,” he murmured absently, “that is exactly how I feel.” Then he smiled, and the intensity of his gaze turned to the passing coastline.
Chapter Three
Asilah was bustling with activity. Before 1972, Bojo the guide told them, the whole city was inside the ancient walls. Now there were shops outside as well, and new construction underway. As they searched for a parking space in the crowded city, they saw small donkey-drawn carts carrying people from one side of town to the other, and just outside the kasbah on a tree-lined street near the bay, there were sidewalk cafés. But first the guide indicated that they should go away from the old walled city toward the highway, because that was where the once-weekly open air market was held.
“Market day,” Philippe told Gretchen, gently taking her arm to guide her across the busy street which was packed with cars as well as carts. “This will be an adventure.”
It was. She saw beautiful fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, all presented in beautiful order and not one blemish on any of it. There were exotic spices, potions, clothing and hats. There were leather goods and even live chickens and rabbits for sale. Outside the ramshackle order of small tents teeming with people, donkeys and camels lay in the shade waiting for the return trip to their small villages.
“The produce is just beautiful,” she exclaimed. “My goodness, this is even prettier than in our supermarkets back home, but it isn’t refrigerated.”
He chuckled. “Yes, and on this market day, much of it gets sold to city dwellers.”
He acquainted her with the various spices and the displays of olives before the guide led them back into the city.
“Are you thirsty?” Philippe asked her.
“I could drink a gallon of water all by myself,” she panted, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a tissue from her pocket.
He grinned. “So could I.”
He and the guide led her to a small café where he ordered bottled water for her and mint tea for himself. He offered her some tea, but she declined, nervous about trying anything that didn’t come out of a bottle.
“You must try the mint tea before you leave Morocco,” he told her. “It is famous here.”
“I will. Right now cold water sounds better.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
He handed her chilled bottled water and took his mint tea to a small group of tables under a spreading tree near the walls of the old city. Their guide remained behind to speak to a shop owner he knew. “The café owns this small space,” Philippe told her, “and patrons pay at the counter and eat here.”
“This is very nice,” she said, looking around her at comfortably dressed people wandering about. “There are lots of tourists here.”
“Yes. The city is the site of an arts festival which is going on even now. The shops in the old walled city are brimming over, and Asilah has put on its brightest face for the festival. It draws people from around Europe and Africa and from all over the world.”
“You said the revolutionary’s palace was here?” she asked.
He nodded. He sipped his mint tea, finished it, and excused himself to return the china cup and saucer to the stand. She was curious about that, because most of the tourists had disposable containers like hers. Following Philippe with her eyes, she saw the extreme courtesy with which the shop owner treated him. While she was observing that, she noticed something else—foreign men in sunglasses and dark suits standing nearby. They’d parked behind them when they arrived. She wondered why they were here. Whimsically she wondered if they were shadowing some important foreign dignitary who was in disguise. When she got home, she’d have to ask her brother about foreign security. Then she remembered that she was going to Qawi, not home. It made her nervous and a little sad.
Philippe came back and studied her from his great height. “You’re worried,” he said abruptly.
“Sorry.” She pinned a smile to her face as she got to her feet, clutching her half-finished bottle of water. “I was thinking about my new job, if I get it.”
“And worrying,” he persisted.
She grimaced. “I don’t like using a plane ticket in someone else’s name and pretending I’m her, even if he does eventually hire me anyway.”
He smiled. “I think you have very little to worry about in that respect. As for the plane ticket, the concierge will change it for you, into the right name, and Mustapha or Bojo there—” he indicated their tall driver and guide still lingering at the shop counter “—will even take you to the airport and wait with you.”
“They will?”
He grinned at her shocked expression. “Isn’t this done in your country?”
“No, it isn’t,” she said flatly.
“To each his own,” he said tolerantly. “You will find life a little different in this part of the world.”
“I already have,” she said. She laughed gently. “I don’t know that it’s good for me to be pampered like this. I’m just a very ordinary paralegal.”
One eye narrowed. “I think, Gretchen Brannon, that you are not very ordinary at all.”
“You don’t know much about women from Texas.”
“A gap in my education which I hope to correct in the next few days,” he said gallantly. With a twinkle in his black eyes, he added in the classic line from an old Charles Boyer movie, “Will you come with me to the kasbah?”
She laughed helplessly. “I really do watch too many movies. I only thought there was one kasbah until the cabdriver at the airport told me what they were.”
“Charles Boyer and Humphrey Bogart films,” he mused. “They portray a very different Morocco.”
“Yes. Those days are long dead.”
“The old ways, perhaps. Not the intrigue,” he informed her. He put a hand under her elbow to guide her through the gates of the old city and into the maze of narrow streets and small shops. He leaned down to her ear. “Do you see the man in the beige suit wearing sunglasses? No, don’t turn your head!”
She had a flash of vision out of the corner of her eye. “Yes.”
“Now, do you notice the gentlemen in dark suits and sunglasses nearby?”
“I saw them earlier…!”
“Bodyguards.”
“Really?” She sounded breathless with excitement. “Whose are they? Do they belong to the man in the beige suit?”
He pursed his lips amusedly. “Who knows? Perhaps he works for one of the Saudi princes who have estates outside Tangier.”
“The one the guide pointed out, with the heliport and armed guards at the gate?”
“That one. They go sightseeing from time to time. Yesterday I saw the ex-president of Spain in town.”
“So did we! I’ve never met a head of state, former or not.”
He kept his eyes carefully on the path ahead and didn’t reply.
“Those bodyguards, I guess they have guns?”
“Nine millimeter Uzis and they know how to use them.”
She gasped. “Good Lord. I hope nobody attacks him.”
“Nobody knows him,” he said lazily. “Heads of state from the Middle Eastern countries wander around here all the time and are never noticed. They blend in.”
“If you notice the Sheikh of Qawi, how about pointing him out to me?” she asked facetiously. “Maybe I can throw myself on his mercy before I arrive in his capital city like an unclaimed parcel.”
He put on his own sunglasses and grinned. “I can promise you, his own subjects wouldn’t know him in a European suit.”
“Is he…perverse?” she asked bluntly, worried in spite of Maggie’s assurances.
He stopped dead and looked down at her. His eyes, behind the dark lenses, were concealed. “What?” he asked icily.
