watched as the old man shook that hand and spilled whatever was in it to the ground, and he watched the way those red jeans stretched lovingly over her behind as she quickly bent over and dived down to retrieve what had fallen. Coins, he figured, frowning. In which case, she’d better be careful. She held them almost reverentially in her hand before attempting to return them to the old man.
He made no move to accept, clearly determined to finalise the sale. Kadar’s frown deepened as she shrugged and juggled coins and paper bag and dug around in her satchel for her wallet.
Foolish girl.
He spied his car weaving through the traffic towards him.
Just before he spied the two uniformed men pouncing on the old man and the girl.
‘HEY,’ AMBER PROTESTED as someone took her arm, only to look up and find herself staring at a younger man, this one wearing a dark blue uniform of the polis. One of two, she realised, the other officer holding the arm of the old man, who smiled thinly while his eyes were laced with fear.
Fear that leached into her bones and made her blood run cold as the coins were taken from her hand and inspected and a nod given in judgement before they disappeared into a small plastic bag.
What the hell was going on?
One officer barked out something in Turkish at the old man and he pointed at her, tripping over his words in his rush to answer.
‘Is this true?’ The officer’s head snapped around to her, his voice as stern as his expression, but at least he had figured enough to address her in English. ‘Did you ask this man where you could buy more coins like these?’
What? ‘No...’
‘Then what were you doing in possession of them?’
‘No. I wasn’t. He approached me—’
The old man cut her off. ‘She lies!’ he shouted before following with a torrent of Turkish, angry now and spluttering out his words, pointing ferociously some more at her with his free hand, that caused the polis to scowl at her again.
And even though she couldn’t understand the language, she knew enough to know it didn’t look good. ‘You have to believe me,’ she pleaded, her eyes darting from one officer to the other, conscious of the crowd that was gathering around them, and she had never felt more vulnerable. She was less than twenty-four hours in a foreign country so very far from home and where she didn’t speak the language and fear was coiling tight in her gut. She was the stranger here. What if nobody believed her? They had to believe her.
One of the officers asked to see her passport and she scrabbled around in her bag with fingers like toes and her heart thumping frantically in her chest until she managed to unzip the pocket secreting the document. ‘You do realise it is illegal to possess Turkish antiquities? It is a very serious offence,’ he stated, inspecting the passport.
Illegal.
Antiquities.
Serious offence.
The words collided and mashed in her brain. Why was he telling her this? She’d only picked them up because it was easier for her than for the old man with his walking stick. ‘But they weren’t mine.’
‘Likewise it is illegal to buy and sell them.’
Oh, God. She felt the blood drain from her face. She’d had the coins in her hand. She had been about to buy them.
I didn’t know, she wanted to say. I didn’t even know they were real. And while she struggled for the words to answer, words that might not implicate her further, a new voice emerged from the crowd and joined the fray, a deep and authoritative voice.
No, not just someone, she realised with a jolt as she looked around. Not just a voice.
Him. The man who had been watching her across the market.
He put a hand to her shoulder as he talked, and, breathless and blindsided all over again, she stood there, under the warm weight of his hand, feeling almost— insanely—as if the man had laid claim to her.
The old man interrupted at one stage, arguing with him in words she couldn’t understand, but the stranger answered back with a blistering attack of his own that had the old man visibly shrinking, eyes fearful as the polis scowled.
And even with her heart beating like a drum, even in the depths of panic, it was impossible not to notice how perfectly the stranger’s voice fitted him. She hadn’t imagined his power before. His voice was rich and deep and spoke of an authority that needed no uniform or weapon to give it weight. He wore authority as easily as he wore his black cashmere coat. And now his thumb was stroking her shoulder. Did he even realise, she wondered, as he continued to make his case, how much her skin tingled at this stranger’s touch?
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
