lot.
“Why do you say that?”
“You act like the consummate businessman,” she told him without looking up. “I expect you’re in town on some huge project that involves all sorts of important people.”
“I was,” he said. “But the deal rather fell through before I got off the plane. I am working on another, however, which I expect will be even more successful.”
She didn’t notice that he was watching her covertly as he spoke, and that his eyes were brimming over with humor.
She looked around as they started to get back into the hotel’s car, and she caught her breath. “It’s nothing like I expected when we left Texas,” she confided. “It’s so exciting, and the people are all friendly and courteous—it’s almost like being at home, except for the way people dress and the sound of Arabic and Berber being spoken.” She turned to him with the car door standing open.
“Don’t you know anything about Morocco?” he asked gently.
She laughed. “All our television reporters talk about are scandals and political issues and the latest tragedy. They don’t tell us one thing about other countries unless somebody important is murdered in one.”
“So I have seen,” he mused.
She grinned. “That’s why Maggie and I came to Morocco, to see what it was really like. And now that we’ve been properly introduced,” she added, smiling as she extended her hand, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Monsieur Souverain.”
“I can return the compliment, Gretchen.” He brought her hand, palm up, to his hard mouth and looked straight into her eyes as his lips brushed it with a strangely sensuous motion. He made her name sound foreign, mysterious, exciting. The feel of his mouth on her skin made her uneasy, although not in any bad way. Faintly unnerved by the sensations the caress caused in her body, she pulled her fingers away a little too quickly, laughing nervously to cover the action.
He didn’t say a word until they were comfortably seated and the car was moving again, but his eyes were even more curious. She looked hunted for a moment, and that would never do. He smiled carelessly. “Would you like to hear something of the history of Tangier?” he asked.
“I’d love to,” she replied.
He crossed his long legs. “The Berbers were the first to arrive here,” he began, warming to his subject.
They passed cork factories and olive groves along the highway that led down the coast to Asilah, and Gretchen laughed as she watched camels playing in the surf at the ocean’s edge.
“They like to swim and sun themselves,” Philippe told her pleasantly, “much like tourists on holiday.”
“They’re very soft, but they aren’t as big as I expected them to be. I guess they look different in movies.”
“You saw The Wind and the Lion with Sean Connery?” he asked at once.
“Why, yes, several times,” she confessed.
“The palace of the Raissouli is in Asilah.”
She gasped. “He was a real person?”
“A revolutionary,” he agreed, “who tried to overthrow the monarchy. He failed,” he added dryly.
“My goodness, I thought it was all fiction.”
“Most of it was,” he told her. “But I also enjoyed it. In my country, foreign films are a large part of our entertainment.”
His country. France, she was certain. She smiled. “I’ve never been to France,” she mused. “I’ll bet it’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful,” he agreed, deliberately encouraging her mistaken idea of his background. “And old. Like most of Europe. The kasbah of Tangier dates back to Roman conquest and even earlier.”
“I love all of it,” she said fervently. “Every cobblestone and villa, every little shop, the people who meander through those narrow walled streets. It’s like a fairyland.”
His black eyes narrowed. “You enjoy foreign places.”
She looked over at him. “I’ve never even been out of Texas before,” she confessed. “Not even to the Mexican border. I’ve never been…well, anywhere. And to get to see Africa, of all places.” Her heart was in her eyes. “I feel as if I’m living a dream.”
“Do you know,” he murmured absently, “that is exactly how I feel.” Then he smiled, and the intensity of his gaze turned to the passing coastline.
Chapter Three
Asilah was bustling with activity. Before 1972, Bojo the guide told them, the whole city was inside the ancient walls. Now there were shops outside as well, and new construction underway. As they searched for a parking space in the crowded city, they saw small donkey-drawn carts carrying people from one side of town to the other, and just outside the kasbah on a tree-lined street near the bay, there were sidewalk cafés. But first the guide indicated that they should go away from the old walled city toward the highway, because that was where the once-weekly open air market was held.
“Market day,” Philippe told Gretchen, gently taking her arm to guide her across the busy street which was packed with cars as well as carts. “This will be an adventure.”
It was. She saw beautiful fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, all presented in beautiful order and not one blemish on any of it. There were exotic spices, potions, clothing and hats. There were leather goods and even live chickens and rabbits for sale. Outside the ramshackle order of small tents teeming with people, donkeys and camels lay in the shade waiting for the return trip to their small villages.
“The produce is just beautiful,” she exclaimed. “My goodness, this is even prettier than in our supermarkets back home, but it isn’t refrigerated.”
He chuckled. “Yes, and on this market day, much of it gets sold to city dwellers.”
He acquainted her with the various spices and the displays of olives before the guide led them back into the city.
“Are you thirsty?” Philippe asked her.
“I could drink a gallon of water all by myself,” she panted, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a tissue from her pocket.
He grinned. “So could I.”
He and the guide led her to a small café where he ordered bottled water for her and mint tea for himself. He offered her some tea, but she declined, nervous about trying anything that didn’t come out of a bottle.
“You must try the mint tea before you leave Morocco,” he told her. “It is famous here.”
“I will. Right now cold water sounds better.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
He handed her chilled bottled water and took his mint tea to a small group of tables under a spreading tree near the walls of the old city. Their guide remained behind to speak to a shop owner he knew. “The café owns this small space,” Philippe told her, “and patrons pay at the counter and eat here.”
“This is very nice,” she said, looking around her at comfortably dressed people wandering about. “There are lots of tourists here.”
“Yes. The city is the site of an arts festival which is going on even now. The shops in the old walled city are brimming over, and Asilah has put on its brightest face for the festival. It draws people from around Europe and Africa and from all over the world.”
“You said the revolutionary’s palace was here?” she asked.
He nodded. He sipped his mint tea, finished it, and excused himself to return the china cup and saucer to the stand. She was curious about that, because most of the tourists had disposable containers