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Now, when she shivered, it was not from cold, but from tendrils of heat, curling and sinuous and dancing down to dark places where a pulse beat out a slow, blossoming need.
The voices around her were calming down, the crowd losing interest and filtering away, and even though she was in trouble, in danger of being charged with some kind of crime in a language she didn’t understand, somehow she felt strangely reassured by the presence of this man beside her—the very man she’d fled from minutes earlier. And whatever trouble she was in, somehow he had made it so that it was no longer fear that was uppermost in her mind, but desire.
Something was decided. An officer handed back her passport and nodded to them both before the old man was led away between the pair.
‘We must go to the station,’ he told her, removing his hand from her shoulder to retrieve his phone and make a short, sharp call as the disappointed crowd around them shrugged and wandered away, the show over, ‘so you can make a statement.’
‘What happened?’ she asked, missing the heat of his hand and the stroke of his thumb on her shoulder and that pooling heat between her thighs. ‘What did you tell them?’
He glanced around, over her head, as if he was searching for something beyond the crowd. ‘Only what I saw, that the old man approached you with the coins and let you pick them up when he dropped them.’
‘He had a walking stick,’ she explained. ‘I thought it would be easier for me.’
‘Of course. You were supposed to think that so that you could not pretend they were not yours or that you were not going to buy.’
‘But I was going to buy them,’ she said glumly. ‘I was about to when the polis arrived.’
‘I know that too,’ he said tersely, his mouth tight. He spotted a movement beyond the crowd. ‘Ah, here is my car,’ he said, taking her elbow. ‘Come.’
If his voice had sounded more an invitation than an order—if she had seen his hand coming and been warned of its approach... If either of those had happened, she might have been prepared. She might have steeled herself. But as he gave his command, and took her arm with his strong and certain fingers, it was as if he were not only claiming possession, but also taking control of her, and she knew that if she got into that car with this man her life would never be the same. Something jolted deep inside her then, a fusion of heat and desire and rebellion and fear, and the bag of bread spilled from shaking fingers onto the ground.
He must have felt that jolt move through her, even before she dropped the bread, because his feet paused, and he looked down at her. ‘Are you all right?’
She could hardly tell him the reason why her lungs had squeezed so tight in her chest. ‘I...’ she started, searching for some kind of excuse. ‘I don’t even know your name.’
He inclined his head. ‘I apologise. We seem to have skipped the usual formalities. My name is Kadar Soheil Amirmoez, at your service.’
She blinked, still shaken. ‘I’m hopeless with names. I’m never going to remember that,’ she admitted, and then wished she had never opened her mouth. He already thought her a naive tourist. Why give him reason to think even less of her?
But instead of the rebuke she was expecting, he smiled a little, the first time she had witnessed him smile, and shadowed planes shifted and angles found curves and his dark eyes found a spark, and where before he’d been merely striking with his strong dark looks, now he tipped over into truly dangerous. Her heart gave a tiny lurch.
She had reason to feel fear.
And still, she was glad he’d found her again.
‘A simple Kadar will suffice. And you are?’
‘Amber. Plain old Amber Jones.’
‘Never plain,’ he said in that rich, deep voice, taking her hand, and probably her last shred of resistance along with it. ‘It is a pleasure to meet you.’
He knelt down before her and retrieved the bread, now half spilled from its bag onto the pavement scattering sesame seeds and already being eyed by a dozen opportunistic birds. ‘You cannot eat this now,’ he declared, tossing bread and bag into a nearby rubbish bin, setting birds flapping and squawking desperately in pursuit. ‘Come. After you have made your statement, I will take you to lunch.’
And after lunch?
Would he whisk her away and make good on the promise she’d witnessed in his eyes?
Or was she so overwhelmed by all that had happened that she was spinning fantasies out of thin air?
‘You really don’t need to do that,’ she said, testing him. Because she’d seen the tightness in his expression when she’d admitted how close she’d come to buying the coins. He was duty-bound to deliver her to the police station, sure, but he might already be regretting coming to her aid. ‘I’ve taken enough of your time.’
