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.’
‘I have ruined your lunch,’ he said solemnly as he ushered her to the kerbside where his car sat idling, waiting for them. He opened the back door for her to precede him inside. ‘I owe you that much at least, Amber Jones.’
The way she saw it, he owed her nothing, but she wasn’t about to argue. Neither was she planning on running again. He might have made taking her to lunch sound more like duty than pleasure, but she remembered the way he’d looked at her across the market with eyes as dark as midnight and lit with red hot coals and she remembered too the warm weight of his hand on her shoulder and the promise his touch conveyed.
And maybe the new brave Amber wasn’t so far away from her as she’d feared.
Because she wanted more.
* * *
It was more than two hours before they emerged from the police department into the crisp outside air. A shower of rain had been and gone and the air was fresh and clear after the overheated offices and because it wasn’t far to the restaurant, he’d suggested they walk.
Trams dinged and rumbled along the centre of a road forbidden to private vehicles and taxis, making room to hear the call of seabirds wheeling above, and the sound of a dozen different languages on the air around. And then, over it all came a sound she was slowly getting used to, the call of the Imam calling the faithful to prayer, and huge flocks of birds rose as one from the many-domed roof of the Blue Mosque and found comfort in each other from their shared fright, forming an endless circling ribbon of white in the sky.
And it struck Amber in that moment how lucky she was that she was free to enjoy the sight. ‘They could have charged me,’ she reflected, the shock of her narrow escape setting in as she remembered the stern expressions of the police who’d questioned her and taken her statement. She’d imagined when the police had let her travel with Kadar to the police station that completing a statement was nothing more than five minutes’ work, telling them how the old man had approached her, offering coins. A mere formality. She’d been wrong. Dealing in antiquities was clearly not a crime they took lightly in Turkey. ‘I thought they were going to charge me.’
‘You sound almost disappointed.’ He raised an eyebrow as he glanced briefly at her.
Disappointed? Not likely. She wouldn’t be here now, watching the birds swirl and wheel to the Imam’s prayers. Relieved was what she was. Not to mention a little confused. ‘I just don’t understand why at first it seemed not such a big deal and then they made such a fuss of it at the station.’
He shrugged. ‘What you did was foolish. Of course they needed to make you appreciate the severity of what you were doing.’
Foolish? The judgement stung, threatening to topple all the secret fantasies she’d been harbouring about how this day might progress. She didn’t want him to think of her as foolish.
Desirable or sexy, like the way he’d made her feel when she’d found his eyes on her across the marketplace, sure, he could think that. She wanted him to think that.
Not foolish.
‘I didn’t know there was a law against buying old coins.’
‘Surely you do research before you enter a country as a visitor? Surely, if you are any kind of responsible tourist, you find out about their customs and laws before you leave home.’
Well, yes, there was that, then again... ‘But they might just as easily have been fake!’
‘And you would have been happy exchanging good money for fakes?’
She sniffed. She hated that she sounded so defensive and she hated him because what he said was true. She had been hoping the coins were genuine and of course she would never have considered spending the money if she’d thought them no better than rubbish.
And she would have done her research. Normally. But the decision to come to Turkey hadn’t come twelve or even six months ago, and so giving her lashings of time to check out every traveller site going. The decision had been made barely two weeks ago, when she’d had to work out what to do about a cancelled holiday to Bali: stay at home or use whatever credits she could get for her cancelled flights and accommodation towards a trip somewhere she really wanted to go.
Turkey had been a no-brainer. The seed had been planted when she’d come across her great-great-great-grandmother’s diary ten years before when she’d been helping her mum sort out her gran’s old house back in England, the house her mum had grown up in before she’d moved to Australia. The diary that told of a young girl’s excitement about her upcoming trip to Constantinople and beyond,
