Once in Paris

by Diana Palmer

  Two glasses of champagne later, Pierce came back to his seat.

  Brianne toasted him, sloshing a little of the fizzy liquid onto her dress. "Oops," she said. She leaned toward him. "Sorry. My hand slipped."

  He stared at her with wide eyes. "What are^ you drinking?"

  "Champagne."

  "You can't have champagne or any other alcoholic beverage," he said shortly. "You're a minor!"

  "She gave it to me," she said, indicating the stewardess halfway down the aisle behind them. "Go tell her she's breaking the law. I dare you," she added smugly, and downed another swallow.

  "Give me that."

  He took the glass away from her and finished the two swallows she'd left in the glass. "Idiot," he muttered, staring at her. "You can't hold liquor. You've got no head for it at all."

  "I can learn to drink," she told him haughtily. "I'm married." She had a sudden thought and her eyes twinkled. "So this is why married people drink!" she exclaimed. She gave him a rakish look. "See what you've done to me?"

  "I didn't do a thing," he protested.

  "You did," she returned. "You said you won't sleep with me!"

  Her voice carried and he groaned audibly. "Shut up!" he muttered. He could feel those amused looks, even if he couldn't see them.

  "I won't," she replied. "This is not a bad substitute for our wedding night,'' she told him. "At least it numbs the parts of me that ache."

  "You're too damned young to have achy parts," he remarked.

  "I have an achy heart." She smiled drowsily. "That was a song. I remember it. Want me to sing it to you?" She did, even when he started shaking his head.

  He held up his hand and the stewardess came quickly to their side.

  "Bring her some coffee, please," he told the woman. "Strong coffee. Quick!"

  "Oh, dear," the stewardess said.

  "She doesn't drink," Pierce said. "Not ever. And she's a minor."

  The stewardess made a horrible face. "They'll cut off my ears and feed them to the sharks!"

  "No, they won't. I'll say I forced you to give it to me," Brianne said helpfully.

  "How?" Pierce demanded. "I'll say I threatened to jump out a window," she replied with a smile.

  Pierce looked at the tiny window and back at her. "Oh, they'll believe that in a heartbeat."

  "I'll go get that coffee," the stewardess said quickly. "Dear, dear, I am sorry."

  "It's all right," Brianne said. "You didn't know that I'm a minor and that I just got married to a man who doesn't even like me. How could you know that he won't even take me

  to" .

  "Brianne!" Pierce growled.

  "Paris," she finished with a wicked glance at her furious husband.

  "You should take her to Paris," the stewardess told him. "It's beautiful there."

  "Coffee," Pierce repeated. "And something to eat. Now."

  "Yes, sir, right now."

  The stewardess retreated, and Brianne leaned her head back against the seat and stared dreamily at Pierce. "I can't believe you have so many hang-ups," she told him. "You're positively riddled with them."

  "I hope your head explodes," he said venomously.

  She gaped at him. "Look who's got a temper!" she exclaimed. "I only had a little drink." t

  "Two little drinks, and look at you!"

  "I look very nice," she informed him.

  "You look very sauced."

  "I'll sober up when we get back on the ground," she promised. "Meanwhile, I'm going to work on ways to seduce you. I really should buy some more books," she added thoughtfully. "Maybe a video or two."

  He cleared his throat and turned to search for the stewardess. He looked like a drowning man clutching at a life preserver.

  Brianne put a soft hand on his broad, powerfully muscled thigh. He actually jumped.

  "You prude," she whispered when he grabbed her hand and pushed it away. "We're married!"

  "No, we're not," he shot back. "We went through a paper ceremony. That's all it is, and that's all it's going to be!"

  Brianne pouted. "That's no way to treat a brand-new wife," she muttered. "Here I sit dying for love of you, and you won't even let me touch you."

  He felt as if his whole body was on fire. She was too intoxicated to realize the effect she was having on him, which was just as well. She had him so hot that all he could think of was how she'd feel in bed. He had to get her sober before he lost control of himself entirely.

  The stewardess came back with a cup of coffee and a snack meal, which Pierce took gratefully.

  "Here," he told Brianne,-putting the cup carefully in her hands. "Now, drink it!"

  "Spoilsport," she mumbled irritably. But she drank it. He opened the cellophane-covered snack meal and watched while she nibbled at it, too. The waitress came back with a second cup, and a third. The caffeine jolted her system like a battery cable, helped by the food, which seemed to absorb some of the alcohol in her stomach. She began to feel her head clearing, and it wasn't an altogether welcome trip back to terra firma. She'd said some embarrassing things to Pierce. He looked somber and glum, and she wondered if she'd done some irreparable damage to their tenuous relationship while she was in her cups.

  He buried himself in a newspaper he got from the stewardess, and he didn't surface until they landed in Freeport.

  Brianne let him lead her down the covered walkway up to the concourse. He scanned the limo drivers for a placard with his name on it. But what he found was one with Brianne's name, badly printed. The man holding it, a scrawny little dark fellow, didn't look like a limo driver to Pierce, who'd seen plenty.

  Brianne, unconscious of anything out of the ordinary, went, smiling, toward the little man. "I'm Brianne Martin," she said, forgetting that she was married and her husband was right behind her.

  "Miss Martin," the man said in thickly accented English. He smiled and took her arm. "You will come with me?"

  "Yes, wait just a minute, though," she protested, and started to turn toward Pierce.

  He'd already gathered that something was badly wrong. He moved forward quickly, with the intention of tearing his wife from the man's hard grasp, just as he felt something in the small of his back. Something round and hard.

  "You are her bodyguard, yes?" came another voice, deeper, from behind him. "You

  come along, too, then. We take no chance that you inform the Hutton man."

  Pierce was surprised at the comment, and he saw Brianne's head turn. He had just enough time for a covert jerk of his head. Fortunately, she was so attuned to him that she understood at once what he wanted her to do.

  "What are you doing with Jack?" she asked sharply, having picked the name out of midair.

  "He come along. Not take chance he talk to police," the scrawny man told her. "You cry out, my friend shoot him dead. You understand, lady?"

  "Do I ever," she said, scared. "Okay, it's your party. Where are we going, or do I get to ask?"

  "You find out. Come."

  He led her, with "Jack" and his guard in tow, out to a long black stretch limo waiting in front of the terminal. The two of them were stuffed in, and the two men came right behind, both holding automatic pistols now and sitting facing them in the interior of the long car.

  The scrawny man called something to the driver, who nodded, and pulled out into the line of traffic. But he didn't drive out of the airport. He drove, instead, right around to one of the rental hangars that stood apart from the main buildings of the terminal. The limousine pulled up beside a fancy little corporate jet, whose doors stood open and where a ladder was suspended, ready for its cargo.

  Pierce and Brianne were hustled inside, again with the two armed men sitting nearby. But there were two more armed men waiting inside, a total of four. Pierce exchanged a helpless glance with her. There was nothing either of them could do beyond accepting the reality of their situation. Against four armed men, they were powerless.

  "Where are we going?" Brianne asked again.

  Nobody
answered her. She sat back in her seat, across the aisle from Pierce, with one of their kidnappers next to her on the aisle, and closed her eyes. She might as well get a little rest while she could. She had a horrible feeling that she knew who was behind this kidnapping.

  It reeked of Philippe Sabon's style.

  Hours later, they landed on a tiny strip on a small island. Brianne had seen a small city from the air, and she remembered that Sabon had told her about the island he owned in the Persian Gulf, near the small country where he held so much political influence.

  There were two old British limousines waiting for them. Brianne was herded into one, Pierce into the other. She barely got a glimpse of his back before she was pushed inside. The cars sped away.

  "Where are we?" she asked one of the men, portly and a little less formal than the other two who had kidnapped her. "Island."

  "Yes, but which island?" she persisted. "Jameel," he replied, confirming her worst suspicions. He laid his head back against the seat and gave her an appraisal that sent cold chills through her body.

  He smiled. His teeth looked as if they hadn't been brushed in the past decade, and there was a faint odor of liquor on his breath. "Very pretty," he said.

  She glared at him. "If you work for Philippe Sabon, you'd better remember that he makes a bad enemy," she said, taking a chance.

  It was a good shot. The man sobered at once.

  The taller of the two other men, the one who'd held the gun, said something abrupt and

  sharp to the man, who murmured in a conciliatory way.

  "You not to worry," the tall man, graying at the temples, told Brianne. "Nobody hurt you." He glared at the portly man, who turned his head quickly toward the window, watching the low scrub flora of the island whiz by the tinted windows.

  Brianne felt sick to her stomach. The only way her remark .would have affected that portly man was if Sabon really was behind this kidnapping. Now she knew that he was, and she would be in his clutches soon. Pierce was as powerless as she, overwhelmed by sheer numbers and automatic weapons. The island was like a prison, from which they couldn't escape. Sabon would have her!

  She closed her eyes, fighting against the fear as she remembered what she'd heard about Sabon's perversions. How would she bear it? That man, touching her. As Pierce had once said, she didn't have the experience to fake sophistication. The perversions that Sabon would inflict on her would destroy her as a woman.

  She wondered if any of Sabon's men would recognize Pierce. If they did, he didn't stand a chance. They'd either hold him for ransom and then kill him or they'd kill him on the spot. Almost certainly, Sabon wouldn't risk a kidnapping trial involving the United States. Pierce might not be an American citizen, but Brianne was, and Sabon was counting on Kurt's congressional friends to save his oil fields.

  That brought forth another unpleasant thought When Sabon had finished with her, he couldn't risk releasing her. She stood to vanish, too, perhaps turned loose in the cruel desert of the country adjacent to this island, where Sabon was in power.

  She couldn't die like this, in such a sordid way. She had to use her brain. There must be some means of escape, if she were vigilant and kept her eyes open for opportunities.

  She wasn't going to let Sabon win without a fight. She might die in die attempt, but death was almost certain regardless of her compliance. As her beloved father had once said, it was better to go out in a blaze of glory than in an insignificant puff of smoke. A blaze it would be, somehow.

  Pierce was thinking the same thoughts, with more pessimism than Brianne might ever know. Here, on Sabon's home ground, he had no chance of escape, and neither did she. He couldn't protect her. He thought of her ongoing pleas and could have kicked himself for not giving in to them. Sabon would soil her sexuality in a way that no psychologist could fix. He would degrade and humiliate her. That delightful spontaneity she had about intimacy would be gone forever. He would mourn it. And he would forever blame himself for its loss.

  He'd spoken to Winthrop just before their flight home, and Winthrop would land shortly in Freeport to meet him. He relaxed just a little. Tate Winthrop was the best security chief he'd ever had. He could track a butterfly over concrete. He'd find Pierce and Brianne. The question was if he could do it in time.

  The old limousines pulled up at an imposing house overlooking a huge body of water probably the Persian Gulf, if Brianne remembered her geography. There was a lot of sand, and the vegetation was similar to that in the Caribbean, which this certainly wasn't. There was an Arabic flavor to the scene, and the white-garbed servants that came onto the long tiled porch along with uniformed guards looked Arabian to Brianne.

  She and Pierce were bound and prodded into the wide, airy house and along a wide hallway to a small room with one high window too small for either of them to escape from. There was a small bed frame with a single rolled-up dirty mattress and no linen, a rattan chair, a small table, a lamp and bare tiles on the floor. There was a bathroom, nothing but a tiny room with a commode and a sink. No facilities for bathing were provided. There was a thin sliver of soap on the cracked oyster-colored porcelain of the sink. The pipes were old and rusted, tike the water in the toilet.

  "You stay here," the short man told them, sticking his pistol in his belt.

  "Could you at least untie us?" Brianne asked wearily, holding out her arms. "What if I need to use the rest room? I can't do it with my hands tied."

  The guard spoke in Arabic to the taller, older man, and they seemed to be arguing. The tall one used a harsh word and pointed to the high, iron-barred window, and then to the heavy lock on the door itself, made of thick carved ebony wood. He seemed to be saying, How would they get out?

  The short man must have seen that they couldn't. Even if they stood on the chair, they couldn't possibly reach the window, which had iron bars.

  "Okay," the first man said. He untied Brianne's hands, but left Pierce bound. The men went out, closing and locking the door behind them.

  "Thank God we're alone now..." Brianne said, running to Pierce to untie him. The knots were heavy and cumbersome. She finished her task and said, "Well, lack, old boy, where do we go from here?"

  Pierce brushed the loosened ropes away and rubbed his wrists. "We stay put until they decide what to do with us," he answered.

  She sat down on the chair with a heavy sigh and glanced at her once-clean outfit, now dirt-streaked, and wrinkled beyond mention.

  Pierce was wearing slacks and a sports shirt with a white jacket. He didn't look like a millionaire today. He was dressed the way his real chauffeur often dressed, never in uniform.

  No wonder they hadn't realized who he was! But Sabon would. The minute he saw his old enemy, he'd know him. He was furious with Pierce as well as Brianne for standing between him and his plans. No doubt he'd find new ways to make them both suffer It wasn't a pleasant thought.

  "Well, this is another fine mess I've gotten you into," she told Pierce with a hint of her old vivacity.

  "We'll get out of it," he assured her with a faint smile.

  "Think so?" She glanced toward the high window. "If we only had a ladder and a sledge hammer," she said with a sigh.

  He was watching her with narrow, speculative dark eyes. His face grew harder by the minute as he contemplated what could happen to her at Philippe Sabon's hands. Her first experience of a man shouldn't be disgusting or frightening. She'd be scarred forever if Sabon had her.

  "Dream on."

  She glanced at him. "You're leering at me," she murmured and grinned. "There's a bed in here, just in case you can't restrain yourself a minute longer," she said, pointing to it "I wouldn't mind at all. In fact," she added persuasively, "you'd literally be saving me from a fate worse than death."

  "Namely Sabon," he agreed solemnly. His eyes grew narrow and hot. "I can't stand the thought of Sabon as your first lover."

  Her heart jumped up into her throat. She felt her bream catch as she met his searching eyes. "Neither can I. So while
there's still time, why don't you do something about it? We're married, you know."

  His eyebrow jerked and he chuckled softly. "We must be. You haven't stopped reminding me since the ceremony." He got up from his chair slowly, glancing idly from corner to corner. There were no surveillance cameras. He hadn't expected that there would be. The house, while beautiful, was old and had no modern fixtures that he'd noticed. He could be certain that no spying eyes would see them.

  He took the chair he'd been sitting in and propped it under the door handle so that no one could walk in without making a lot of noise.

  Then he turned to Brianne. His expression was one of resignation, but his eyes were smoldering as he considered the delights that lay ahead for both of them.