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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.’
