Loe raamatut: «Surgeon Sheik's Rescue»

Chapter 1

The late February mist rolled in thick, tattered swaths off the Atlantic as Bella DiCaprio rode her bike along the exposed cliff tops of Ile-en-Mer, one of the tiny, storm-ravaged islands off the French coast of Brittany. Water poured from the brim of a red rain hat pulled low over her brow, snaking down the matching slicker Madame Dubois had loaned her for the duration of her employment as housekeeper. The old-fashioned bicycle was on loan, too, tires slipping in black mud as she negotiated a narrow trail through the heath.

Bella had been on the island two weeks now. She was using the name Amelie Chenard and she’d taken a job in the home of Estelle Dubois, a wealthy and eccentric widow who’d once worked in theater and been married to a Parisian banker.

The fact Bella was not in possession of a work visa did not faze the colorful Madame in the slightest—she was happy to pay in cash, under the table. More than a housekeeper, Estelle Dubois seemed to want someone to amuse her two pampered Papillons, particularly the youngest, a seven-month-old pup named Kiki. Part of Bella’s job was to walk Kiki once a day, and play with her. The male dog was old and arthritic and preferred to spend his days sleeping in his basket by the fire.

The arrangement suited her fine. Now that she’d settled into a routine, Bella had plenty of free time for her real mission—to investigate the mysterious stranger who lived in an imposing stone abbey that loomed over cliffs on the bleak windward side of the island, accepting the brunt of the Atlantic storms.

Island lore claimed the foreboding structure—built in the high medieval period and renovated over the centuries—was haunted by the ghost of an abbess who’d been killed during a Breton revolt in the twelfth century. The abbess’s headless body was said to have been walled behind rock in the dungeons, her head staked outside on the monastery gates as a warning to others who might shelter rebels.

Some said in a certain slant of moonlight the abbess’s ghost could be seen floating through the arches. Others claimed they heard her screams when winter storms blew and fog swirled thick over the surrounding heath.

Whatever anyone wanted to make of it, the legend gave Bella an excuse to poke around. And, if she was right about who was living in that monastery now, she’d nail a journalistic scoop that would salvage her career, rock U.S. politics and put her name squarely back on the political news map.

If the story didn’t kill her first.

Already, she’d been attacked by three men back home in Washington, D.C. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of two cooks from a nearby Chinese restaurant, she was certain she’d be dead. She’d also been followed, her apartment ransacked and her hard drive hacked. Fearing for her life, Bella had fled the States and come in secret to this island. Fear was one of the reasons she was hiding under an assumed identity now, as she continued to track down her story.

Bella had gone looking for the Mont Noir Abbey during her first days on the island when the weather had been slightly more gracious. She’d found the black stone structure to be a startling mix of architectural periods, but predominantly gothic with spires and turrets reaching into the mist. Parts of it were still in ruin. The monastery had been constructed right at the cliff edge overlooking the Atlantic, a sharp plunge down to where waves pounded rocks far below. The extensive grounds were enclosed by an eight-foot-high stone wall topped with iron spikes. A sign in French warned trespassers to steer clear of the wrought-iron gates.

Bella had rung the bell at the gate, but no one answered.

Poking her telephoto lens through the bars she’d managed to capture some haunting architectural shots of the spires, arched windows, massive flying buttresses, gargoyles, but she’d suddenly noticed the security cameras atop the stone pillars flanking the gates tracking her motion. Then she’d detected more cameras positioned at discreet intervals between the spikes and creepers along the perimeter wall, and a frisson of unease ran through her.

Glancing slowly up, she caught sight of a dark figure in one of the mullioned windows in the upper floor window, watching her. But a shroud of mist sifted in from the sea, cloaking the abbey, and Bella had quickly returned to Madame’s to serve the afternoon coffee.

Then just yesterday, while Bella had been in the village boulangerie buying fresh pain au chocolat for Madame, through the misted windowpanes of the little bakery she’d glimpsed a tall, dark figure moving down the cobbled sidewalk, his profile hidden by the hood of his black cape. Despite a limp, his stride was swift. Two dark-complexioned men in suits flanked him closely. Wind gusted, revealing a holster under the jacket of the man closest to the window.

Bella’s pulse quickened and she spun round, trying to catch a glimpse of the hooded man’s face. In the process she fumbled and dropped the small change being handed to her by the boulangerie owner who’d smiled at Bella’s sudden distraction.

“He’s the stranger from the other side of the island,” the owner said as she helped Bella gather her coins.

“Do you know where he comes from?” she said, pocketing the change and picking up her basket of chocolate croissants.

The owner gave a Gallic shrug, pouting her lips. “Who knows?” She leaned forward, dropping her voice conspiratorially. “And we don’t ask. Important people—rich, famous people—come to our island every summer. They come because we don’t bother them. We don’t try to guess who they are and we don’t talk to paparazzi. But their estates lie on the southeast side of Ile-en-Mer where the climate is more temperate. Who would live on the west cliffs, and in winter? In a place that is haunted?” She gave a huff. “It’s beyond me.”

Bella thanked the owner and dashed out into the chill air. But the caped stranger was gone, the cobblestone streets eerily deserted.

* * *

“He goes by the name of Tahar Du Val,” Madame told her in French that afternoon as Bella served the croissants and coffee, a fire crackling in the hearth, the little dogs curled in a fur ball in front of the flames. “You are very interested in this occupant of Abbaye Mont Noir, non—this dark man with his one eye and secrets?” Madame accepted the cup and saucer from Bella as she spoke, arthritis making her movements awkward.

“I’d love to visit his abbey, ask him about the ghost—research for my novel,” she lied. “The more I know about him, the easier it’ll be to approach him.”

Madame took a sip of her coffee, her watery blue gaze fixed on Bella over the rim of her cup. And Bella reminded herself to be cautious—there was a sharp and analytical mind behind that papery skin, the powdery rouge, the red lipstick. Estelle Dubois could read people better than most.

“He moved into the abbey last August,” Madame said, her features going slack and thoughtful as she dipped her croissant into the milky coffee. “He arrived with another man—”

Bella glanced up sharply. “What man?”

“I think he might have been Monsieur Du Val’s brother,” she said, delivering the soppy croissant to her mouth. “He was younger, a little broader in the shoulder, slightly shorter. And according to the villagers who saw his face—he and the monsieur have similar features.”

Bella’s pulse quickened, but she kept her expression neutral as she crouched down, opened the fire grate and poked at the logs. “Did he stay long?”

“Long enough to organize the employees at the abbey and see to the shipping-in of furniture,” Madame said around her croissant. “And he handled the grocery shopping in the first weeks, before a chef came and took over.”

“Did this man give a name?” Bella asked.

“Non. He barely spoke beyond what was necessary to do his business in the village.”

Dryness tightened Bella’s throat. Calmly, quietly, she reached for Madame’s empty plate.

“Then one day, a private ferry came over from the mainland with gymnasium equipment,” she said. “A woman came with it.”

Bella stilled. “A dark-haired woman, exotic-looking?”

Madame’s penciled brow rose quizzically. “No, the woman was fair. I think she had something to do with the gymnasium equipment, perhaps a personal trainer. But she left very abruptly, the next day—she was angry when she boarded the ferry.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Jean-Claude, the ferryman who lives in the hut at the end of the pier. The younger man departed the island late September. He returned a few times until the end of November, but we haven’t seen him since. And when all the summer visitors were gone and the winter storms started rolling in, that’s when Monsieur Du Val started walking alone along the headland. Every day at precisely four-thirty. Always he wears his cape with the hood, and his black eye patch. His limp, it has been improving. After Christmas he began dining late every Tuesday night at Le Grotte below the hotel. He sits alone in a stone alcove in front of a window that overlooks the harbor. The maître d’ draws the curtain across the alcove for privacy, and Monsieur Du Val’s men sit close by at another table, watching the door. He orders a la carte and always a bottle of cabernet franc from the Chateau Luneau estate in the Loire Valley.”

Bella knew the winery—it all fit.

It had to be him.

She stole a quick glance at the ornate Louis XVI clock on the mantel above the fire. Almost 3:30 p.m. “You’re certain Monsieur Tahar walks along the cliffs at the same every day?” she said.

“Oui. Pierre, the sheep farmer on the other side, goes to bring in his flock before dark. He sees the Monsieur in the distance, always at the same time.”

“You talk to this farmer?”

“Everyone on this island talks, Amelie.” She held up a gnarled finger in warning. “But always, the talk stays here, on the island. It has been this way for centuries.”

The whole island felt liked it was locked in medieval time, thought Bella as her attention went back to the Louis XVI clock. Madame’s eyes followed Bella’s gaze and a smile curved along her mouth, red lipstick feathering deep into wrinkled creases.

“Go, Amelie,” she said with a dismissive wave of her veined hand. “Go see him for yourself. All this talk has exhausted me. But feed the dogs first, and don’t forget to lock the house when you go. Put the key under the mat so you don’t wake me when you return.”

* * *

Leaving Estelle Dubois nodding in front of the fire with her half-finished cup of milky coffee, Bella ran through drizzle to her separate maid’s quarters across a small courtyard strung with a washing line and trellised with grapevines thick as her arm at the bases. Moss-covered clay pots fringed the whitewashed walls, the vegetation inside them brown and tangled by winter frost.

She shrugged into a warm sweater and jacket, then on second thought shucked the jacket in favor of the red rain slicker and matching hat. Even though weather on this leeward side of the island might be mild, rainstorms could be lashing the windward coast—she’d learned this fast enough. Over her thick socks she pulled on gum boots. Bella glanced in the mirror and gave a wry smile. She looked more like a mariner in a fish commercial than a seasoned political reporter. She grabbed the bike, wheeled it through the courtyard, and began to pedal up the twisting dirt road that led to the cliffs on the far side of the little island, camera bag slung across her chest, the cold air sinking deep into her lungs.

* * *

An hour later Bella stood atop the cliffs holding her bike and breathing hard as curtains of mist swirled and rain drove in squalls. Waves boomed unseen on rocks far below the sheer cliff drop. Light began to fade, and she felt a sharp drop in temperature. She began to shiver as dampness crawled into her bones.

Then suddenly, at four-thirty, just as Madame had said, a hooded, black figure in a swirling cloak materialized from the mist, walking along the headland, fading in and out of the shifting brume like a specter.

Bella laid her bike down on the heath, removed her camera from the bag.

Zooming in with her telephoto lens she watched him stop right at the cliff edge, his back to her. He pulled back his hood, revealing thick, shoulder-length hair, black as a raven’s feathers. Face naked to the driving rain, he stared out to sea as if a sentinel watching for a lost ship, his cloak flapping at his calves.

Far below him waves crashed as the Atlantic heaved itself against the rock face, hurling icy spray up into the mist.

Something strange unfurled inside Bella.

He looked so alone, as if daring the elements to hurt him in some kind of bid for absolution. Yet in his shoulders there remained a subtle set of defiance.

Bella clicked off a few shots, zoomed in closer. Her lens was powerful, state-of-the-art. Her two-timing ex-boyfriend, Derek, had helped her choose the camera a mere two weeks before the newspaper budget cuts that saw Bella being laid off. The announcement she was being axed from the political news desk while the paper held on to the unionized deadwood had come as a gut-punching shock to Bella. One minute she was a respected, up-and-coming reporter covering the run-up to the presidential primaries and the bombing of the Al Arif royal jet at JFK. Then in the blink of an eye she was cast out on the street, unemployed, wondering how in hell she was going to make her next rent payment without cutting into her minimal severance payout.

Bella’s job, her success, defined her. And her sudden unemployment cut to the heart of her insecurities and self-esteem that came with having been abandoned as a baby. It was something she’d never been able to shake.

Oh, she’d hunted for new work, but the tide had turned on print media. Papers were hurting. And there was a glut of journalists, just like her, pounding on doors.

In desperation Bella had resorted to writing a blog for a website called Watchdog—theoretically an internet news portal, but one that had been scathingly referred to as “that conspiracy theorist site.” And because the blog gig was unpaid, she’d been forced to take housekeeping jobs to support her political writing “hobby.” It was about as low as a political sciences and journalism graduate could go.

Derek, of course, had kept his photography job at the Washington Daily, courtesy of the boss’s daughter. He’d informed Bella of his infidelity the same day as her layoff. Bella didn’t know which had hit her harder.

She’d show them, she thought as she watched her target through her lens, fingers going numb from cold, her teeth starting to chatter. This man was going to be her route back.

But she had to be careful. She still didn’t know who had tried to kill her back home, or why. Or how this man from the abbey—the subject of her investigation—might be linked to Senator Sam Etherington, the man likely to be voted next U.S. president come the November election.

Bella willed him to turn around now, show his face. Instead, he began to move farther along the cliff, making his way toward a narrow, black headland that jutted out into the sea. Bella left her bicycle lying in the heather and followed him on foot, at a distance. The mist grew thicker, the light dimmer, the air even cooler.

Right at the very tip of the headland, he stopped again. A ship’s horn boomed out at sea and through the mist came the faint, periodic pulse of a lighthouse unable to penetrate the thickening darkness and fog.

She snapped a few more frames, then stilled as he moved even closer to the edge. He stood there, as if daring gravity to take him over, suck him down into the crashing sea. She was reminded suddenly of a similar cliff, Beachy Head in England, where the suicide rate was surpassed only by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and where the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team conducted regular patrols in an attempt to spot—and stop—potential jumpers. This was a similar cliff. No patrols. Just her observing him in the darkening gloom. A chill chased over Bella’s skin. She lowered her camera, half poised to run, stop him, help him. But he remained still as a statue, coat billowing out behind him, his hair now slick with rain.

Slowly she raised her camera back to her eye, the shutter click, click, clicking as she struggled to tamp down a mounting rush of apprehension. Bella readjusted her telephoto lens, zooming in as close as she could go. But as she was about to press the button, he turned suddenly to face her.

She sucked in her breath.

For a nanosecond she was unable to move, think.

He stared at her with his good eye, black as coal. An eye patch covered his left eye and the left side of his face was marred by a violent scar that hooked from temple to jaw, drawing the left side of his mouth down into a permanent, sinister scowl. But the hawkish, arresting features, the aquiline nose, the arched brows—they were burned into her memory after staring at so many photos of him before the explosion.

It was him.

Sheik Tariq Al Arif, the famed neurosurgeon, next in line to the throne of Al Na’Jar—supposedly dead from injuries sustained by a terrorist bomb blast at JFK Airport in New York last June—was alive. And she’d found him. Living in a cold, haunted abbey in France.

Emotion flooded her chest as she clicked off a rapid succession of shots of his face. She had her story. It was right here. At least part of it. This was the beginning, the tip of the iceberg that could sink Sam Etherington’s bid for the White House—if she could just understand the rest.

He glared at her as she shot off her frames, utterly still, his face wet with rain, everything in his posture warning her not to dare take a step toward him. And suddenly, as her pulse calmed a little, Bella saw not only hostility in his features, but pain.

Slowly she lowered her camera, ashamed of her own hunger to expose him.

Fog thickened around him, turning him to a shadowy phantom and she realized with a start it would be fully dark any minute. She needed to find the path through the heather, back to her bike, make her way back down the cliff before nightfall. But she hesitated—what about him?

Did he walk back to that monastery, alone, in pitch blackness, so close to the treacherous cliff edge? Worry sparked through her.

Then, almost imperceptibly, he seemed to move toward her. At first Bella thought it was a trick of the mist, then a spark of fear shot through her—how far would he actually go to keep his secret?

How far would his powerful family go?

The memory of her attack curled through her mind, and fear fisted in her chest.

She was all alone here. If her body was found smashed and broken in waves below the cliff, it would be deemed an accident, blamed on the weather, a foolish young American caught by fog and nightfall too close to the edge.

Bella started backing away, then she turned and hurried along the path to where her bicycle lay on its side in the heather.

Picking up her bike, the chrome wet and icy in her hands, she glanced back over her shoulder, but he was gone—a ghost dissolved into mist.

* * *

Tariq stormed into the hall of his abbey, wind swirling in behind him as the great wooden doors swung shut. Fat white candles flickered in sconces along the stone wall and a dark, hot energy rolled through him.

“That woman from the village—” he barked loudly to his men in Arabic “—the one poking around the gates, taking photos of the abbey. I want to know who she is, where she comes from, what she wants with me, and then I want her gone!”

He shrugged out of his drenched cape, slung it over a high-backed chair and strode through the dark halls to his library where a fire crackled in the stone hearth, shutting the door behind him.

His library was the one room in this stone monstrosity that he preferred to inhabit. A smaller office with his desk and papers lay off it. The rest of abbey remained unlit and cold, some of it still partially in ruin, wind whistling through cracks and moaning up in the turrets like the ghost of the abbess herself. Haunted suited him fine—he was a mere ghost of himself anyway, a broken shadow, not living, not dead.

Irritably, Tariq plucked a leather-bound copy of a book by Algerian-French writer and absurdist philosopher Albert Camus from the shelves. He settled into his chair by the fire, flipped it open.

But he couldn’t concentrate.

He put on Mischa Maisky’s rendition of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1. It always soothed him. It reminded him of Julie. Of life, of power, of beautiful times.

He leaned his head back in his chair, arms flopping loosely over the armrests. The first notes of the cello washed over him. And as the music rose in crescendo, Tariq closed his eye, imagining his own fingers moving on the strings, the Pernambuco bow in his hand, the solid shape of the finely carved instrument between his knees. Whenever he’d played this piece, his whole world seemed to drop away, leaving only the moment as the harmony filled him, breathed into him, became part of him. He let his chest rise and fall to the rhythm....

But then he saw her eyes, bright like spring crocuses, staring at him through the misted boulangerie window, her dark curls tousled about her pale, heart-shaped face like some untamed thing. Tariq cursed, shutting out the image. Another flowed into his mind as the music rose—the sight of her on the heath, like a mythical Red Riding Hood, drifting in and out of curtains of fog as she followed him with her camera. He tried to block her out again.

She was too bright.

It was like shutting your eyes after staring at a lamp—the afterimage burned on your retinas.

Tariq lurched to his feet, strode to where his cello rested in a stand against the wall. With the fingertips of his right hand he caressed the sleek curves of finely grained Balkan maple, a wood of resilience and excellent tone. A cold heaviness pressed into his heart. Never again would he play this exquisitely crafted instrument. Never again would he operate. His left hand was his dominant one, and it was his left side that had been forever crippled in the series of blasts that had killed his fiancée. It had been an attack on his country, on him.

He should have been the one to die. Not her.

This war was against his family, not Julie. Falling in love with her, bringing her into the Al Arif enclave, had made her a target. And he, a doctor—a surgeon—had been unable to save her at the critical moment.

Julie’s death was his fault.

The Moor, the as yet faceless archenemy of the Al Arif dynasty, had stolen everything that mattered to Tariq, everything that had defined him, everything that made life worth living, leaving him nothing but a coarse lump of a man, an empty, cold shell who’d failed the only woman he’d ever loved. Self-hatred fisted in Tariq’s chest. His gaze was slowly, inexorably, pulled toward the floor-to-ceiling gilt mirror on the wall.

He was sickened by what he saw in that mirror. Sickened by what he’d become, inside and out. Crippled, broken. Bitter. Twisted.

That prying young woman in the red coat had pierced through the numb rhythm of his life on the island. She’d reawakened his pain. She’d gone and reminded him a world lurked out there beyond these cold stone walls—a world inhabited by a dangerous enemy who could still hurt his family and the people of his desert kingdom.

She’d made him look into that mirror—and he hated her for it.

With his right hand, Tariq snatched a bronze paperweight off the side table and hurled it across the room with all his might. It crashed into the mirror, shattering glass outward in a starburst. Shards tinkled softly to the Persian rug along with the dull thud of the paperweight.

Anger coiled in his stomach as Tariq stared at the broken glass, shimmering with light from the flames. All he had left was his privacy, the numbness of grief.

Whatever she wanted, he was not going to allow her to take that from him. Tariq was going to get his men to find out who she was, what she wanted, then he’d take action to ensure she stayed the hell away from him and his abbey.