Ryshia Kennie - Desire In The Desert

“Was Tara around when the plumber was here?”

“Yes, I believe she was. I don’t remember her coming out of her quarters, though,” Emir said. “The plumber had done work for me on numerous occasions. We’ve contracted him for years—in fact, I believe he worked for my father, too. Anyway, he didn’t stay long. I decided against the repair. I hadn’t planned to be here for this long.”

“By here, you mean Marrakech?”

“Morocco, actually,” he said. “If all this hadn’t happened, I might have met you in Wyoming. I’d planned to go there. A recent case involving the Wyoming secretary of state’s brother piqued my interest.”

“Faisal will have his hands full. It’s high-profile,” Kate said. “So, plumbing is minor considering everything that’s come down in the last week.”

“You could say that.” He shrugged as if it were all of no consequence while the tension around his eyes and mouth made him look almost feral, like a man who would protect anyone or anything whose heart belonged to him. She had to force her thoughts back to what he was saying.

“I promised Tara that when she was home for summer vacation, I’d have the fountain up and working. She finds it soothing.”

“Was anything else happening that day or any day after?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

The Hummer stopped in front of the mansion with its huge columns and sprawling white-tiled front entrance.

She glanced back at Emir as she stepped out. She wondered if he felt like he’d been interrogated, for, without meaning to, she knew that was what she had done.

He stepped ahead of her to open the massive wood-and-brass door. In the seconds that it took, her gaze ran the length of his muscular back and she had to pull her eyes away from the lush, seductive curl of his dark hair as it flirted with the edge of his collar.

Get a grip, she told herself as she walked past him and into a vast tile-and-marble area that stretched beyond the colossal entrance doors, eclipsing them in opulence. For a moment her reason for being here was clouded by her feeling of disbelief. Her life, her two-bedroom apartment, compared to this? The juxtaposition of the two realities wasn’t even fathomable. This was a fantasyland, a different world that she’d known of but of which she couldn’t have imagined until now. It was laughable, really, eight hundred square feet that she lived in compared to this. The comparison was as unstoppable as it was fleeting, rather like looking at a magazine rack and seeing one on budget travel lined up beside another that was geared to luxury resorts.

She pushed the thoughts out of her mind and instead considered everything this wealth brought—including the case she was now assigned to. She knew fortune such as this did not come without responsibilities. She also knew there were expectations here and duties Emir had inherited from his father, and even from his grandfather—a responsibility to the people, to give back. She knew Emir took his responsibilities seriously; she’d heard Adam speak of it. It explained why Emir seemed so contained, controlled—older than the thirty-one years she knew him to be.

She looked around, taking in the length and width of the area even from the entrance. The hallway seemed to stretch indefinitely and, rather than the chill one would expect from such a large space, the air was warm.

As they moved down the corridor she couldn’t get over the size. The estate was massive, more imposing than she’d expected, both inside and out. There had been no available pictures, even of the grounds; nothing she could get from the internet. Oddly, even the area outside the gates hadn’t been Google-mapped. She guessed that had been Emir’s doing.

But it was the pictures some yards from the entrance that made her pause; they were the only decor in the hallway that stretched easily a half a city block. She stopped for a minute as she looked at a picture of a man and a woman, middle-aged—the woman looking younger and very much like the photos she’d seen of his sister, Tara.

It was odd that the pictures were here in this luxurious but barren corridor with the only other decor, the oval, brass entranceway doors facing them not ten feet away. “These are your parents?”

“Yes, taken only months before their accident. Of course,” he added, “that was a long time ago.”

Six years wasn’t a long time ago. Was he distancing himself from the trauma of the loss? She supposed it didn’t matter either way. What was important were the facts. She’d read about the traffic accident on a treacherous, isolated mountain road and the resulting fire that had tragically taken both Emir’s parents.

“Tara looks very much like her mother.” Kate stared at the picture as if the answer to saving Tara was somehow in the dark eyes of the beautiful woman who stared back at her.

For a moment she was caught by the woman’s image. Her eyes reflected the same rich ebony as her eldest son. Her smile was the same as Tara’s picture in the file she carried. But whatever answers or secrets those eyes might hold wouldn’t be forthcoming from a picture.

“Kate.”

Her name was a command as he waited for her to catch up. She was reminded of how few people called her that. Allowing Emir to call her by her given name had surprised even her. She’d gone by her initials since she was a child. She couldn’t tell when or why it had begun, but the initials had served her well in the profession she’d chosen as an adult. Now, K.J. just was and it was odd that Emir had become one of the exceptions. At another time she’d have analyzed what that might mean.

She walked beside him, her pace matching his. White columns ran from the tiled floor to a ceiling that soared over twenty feet above them. Their footsteps echoed on the ceramic tile as they turned left and into another corridor as vast as the first. This one brought them to within fifty feet of another massive door not quite as large as the entrance and this time without the brass. Instead these doors were wooden with gold glittering in a heart design over both panels.

“Tara’s apartment,” Emir announced. “This was the women’s area centuries ago,” Emir said as if he’d seen the disbelief in her look and wanted to confirm what she already knew. “Tara thought it laughable to claim for herself this area that, a hundred or so years ago, was a harem.” He shook his head. “She’s always about being contrary.”

“Contrary?” Kate frowned.

“I didn’t mean that,” Emir said. “We are all more Western in our thoughts—the family, I mean—but Tara wanted to change the thinking, the old ways, that exist elsewhere. Chauvinism that still hasn’t disappeared. She wasn’t content to let modern ideas remain within the walls of this compound or within the boundaries of Marrakech, for that matter.”

The pain in his voice was palpable.

“We’ll get her home.” She met the troubled look in his eyes and hesitated, feeling the need to comfort. She dropped the thought when she saw the anger in his eyes. Anger was not something she could change with simple words or a touch and, at this stage, she suspected it would be unwelcome.

As they entered Tara’s quarters, it was as if facts were his safety net as he commentated as they walked. “Built almost two hundred years ago, this area is pretty much impenetrable to outsiders. Always has been. We’ve upgraded, of course. This section was built in the mid-1800s. We’ve put in a computer-monitored surveillance system in the last few years, added motion detectors and thermal laser-heat detectors. It was all we needed without going overboard. At least, so we thought...” He shook his head, lines bracketing his mouth.

“You couldn’t have known.”