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Nothing but sensation building upon sensation. Until he cried out behind her and with one dizzying thrust sent her hurtling, coming apart until the pieces of her shattered soul sparkled like the sun on the blue sea.
And maybe she was fickle and weak and too easily swayed by the pleasures of the flesh, but there could be worse ways to spend your days and nights, she figured as her breath steamed against the sheet of glass on her way back down to earth.
There could be much worse ways to spend your time than as a captive of Kadar.
* * *
He made good on his promise to show her Istanbul. He took her to Topkapi Palace, the old Ottoman palace, and then to Dohlmabahce Palace on the European side of the Bosphorus. She was fascinated by everything, lapping up the details and the history from the personal guides he had arranged. She oohed and aahed at the beautiful Izmir tiles of the old palace and the magnificent crystal chandeliers of the new. Like most women, she seemed fascinated by the details of the harem, but it was to the glass display cabinets that her eye was drawn and where it lingered longest.
She was like a magpie. She liked the pretty things, spending an inordinate amount of time in front of the displays, in the Treasury rooms at Topkapi Palace, and then again at Dohlmabahce, examining every coloured brooch, every jewelled scabbard and reading every typed description, a slight frown tugging her brows together.
‘What are you looking for?’ he asked, at one stage.
‘Nothing,’ she said, hastily, ‘it’s all just so beautiful.’ He wasn’t convinced by her answer. She was a woman who’d already shown herself to be partial to souvenirs and who had scant knowledge of or regard for Turkey’s laws against removing antiquities. He’d like to think she wasn’t so stupid as to think she could get away with spiriting anything like this home, but given how little he really knew of her and her motivations, how could he be sure? Given her interest, it was just as well everything was behind locked glass set with security alarms.
‘I’m sure there are some replicas for sale in the museum shop, if you’re that taken by anything.’
She gave him a tight-lipped smile. ‘I’ll take a look.’
It took hours to wend their way through the two palaces, so that the evening was already gathering, rain showers sending up the dark umbrellas, the street lighting sending ribbons of colour along the damp grey streets.
For Kadar and Amber, there was no lining up for tour buses to take them back to their hotels. Kadar’s driver arrived with his car to whisk them away no more than a moment after they’d emerged from the gates of the palace.
But while Amber’s feet were ready to fall off by the time they were through, and she’d never been more grateful than for a private car ride back to Kadar’s apartment, her mind was in overdrive.
For her great-great-great-grandmother had turned twenty and left home on her adventures in eighteen fifty-six, the same year Dohlmabahce Palace had been completed, before she had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth for five years.
What had happened to her all those missing years in a foreign country so far from home? Had she wandered the rooms of the harem as her hushed family lore liked to hint? And had her eyes witnessed any of the wonders that her descendant of five generations had witnessed today?
It was intoxicating to imagine they had. A century and a half meant nothing in the scope of such historic places.
‘You seem deep in thought.’
She looked over at him and found a smile. She might be stuck with him, but he really was trying to make up for her lost tour. ‘It was a fabulous day, thank you.’
‘You appeared to be very taken by the jewels.’
The warm bubble of gratefulness she’d been feeling burst right then and there. There was something unsaid in his words that she didn’t like. A warning.
But then, it was the jewellery that had been niggling at her. And her bracelet in particular. She’d never seen jewellery or treasures that reminded her so much of the style of her bracelet. She’d imagined it must be cheap, because it featured so many different colours all together in the one piece. But so much of what she’d seen today was strikingly similar. Different coloured gems sitting alongside each other, all of them beautiful in their own right, but together an ostentatious display of wealth.
It still didn’t mean it wasn’t a cheap replica Amber had bought in a market at the time though, just that she had been jolted by the similarity in design.
And really, the more she thought about it, the more it made sense that it was an early knock off. It was too ridiculous for words to think that something genuine could have been sitting wrapped in oilskins along with what was left of Amber’s diary, in her gran’s attic in a tiny hamlet in rural Hertfordshire for so many years.
