Her Royal Protector (a Johari Crown Novel) (Entangled Indulgence)

by Alexandra Sellers

  And with that she shoved the end of the tape measure into his grip, pushed his hand into position above the center of a rough circle of marks in the sand, and set off for the nearest large upthrust of black rock. He stood bemused, watching as she knelt in the sand to make notes, then got up again, called out, “Stay there,” and headed off in another direction.

  When she had measured three different trajectories, she returned to him, drawing the tape measure into itself as she approached. “Thanks,” she said briefly, before bending over her backpack again.

  Allah, that butt. Baggy as her clothes were, her rump was well outlined when she bent over, and proved to be a much more female shape than her general demeanor would suggest. As Aly dug purposefully into the canvas backpack, Arif had to push his own hands into his pockets to resist the urge to grab those tilted hips and pull her back into his groin. She would not be so dismissive of him if he did.

  He would not be such a fool.

  Fortunately, after a few seconds of tossing things onto the sand, she straightened. In one hand she held a short stake. Now she squatted down, set the stake a few inches away from the little mound that marked the center of the nest, and gently worked it into the sand. With a practiced twist she reached into a pocket of her backpack and pulled out a rectangle of stiff red-and-white plastic. This she slid into a slot on the stake.

  “The eggs are underneath the sand there?”

  “That’s right,” she said, without looking up.

  “Won’t the stake damage them?” he asked.

  “They’re down well below this, don’t worry.”

  She had planted a little red-and-white flag. As she glided to her feet, the contrast between her smooth-flowing expertise here and her gauche awkwardness on the night of the banquet was almost like looking at two different women.

  “And what’s this for?” he asked idly, bending to pick up a little metal broom that lay on the sand.

  “That’s my Disappearing Broom.” She smiled and took it from him, then went down one line of turtle tracks, obliterating them with quick strokes all the way down to the sea and back up the return track. Now nothing remained in the way of evidence save the little flag. When he looked closer, Arif saw that the white marking was a number: A1.

  “Right,” Aly said in satisfaction, and began packing her equipment into the backpack again.

  “Why do you wipe the marks from the sand?”

  A curious expression crossed her face, but she only shrugged. “So I won’t be distracted by them next time I walk this beach,” she said.

  …

  Aly saw the seagulls as soon as they rounded the point. Swooping and diving and calling. Her heart twisted with certain knowledge, and she snatched her backpack from Arif’s hand and began to run.

  “Get out! Get out of there,” she screamed. She was too far away. She tried to dig out her broom, but the backpack was banging against her legs, slowing her down. It was more important to get there. She dropped the pack and cranked up her speed.

  Behind her Arif called something, but she had no time for explanations. She was too busy screaming at the gulls. “Get away from them, get away.” Her heart was beating ten times too fast already, but she didn’t dare stop.

  A gull swooped down with terrible precision, all the way to the sand, and rose again with something in its mouth, and knives of anguish ripped at her gut. “Off! Piss off, all of you!” she screamed in helpless fury. She was waving her arms like a living scarecrow, running and staggering over the sand, but it was another twenty yards before the gulls began to take notice of her. As she got closer they cruised higher up, but none of them actually flew off.

  She arrived at the nest and saw the flurry of tiny markings in the white sand. But not one hatchling. Her heart contracted to a tight hard knot of grief. Not one little black shape struggling to its home in the sea. She fell to her knees, her breath sobbing with the effects of her wild sprint.

  The pack over his shoulder, Arif jogged to a standstill beside her. A gull called above. The smell of the sea was strong in her nostrils.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?” Arif asked.

  “They’ve been picking off the hatchlings, damn them.” She waved a hand. “It’s been quite a feast, by the look of it.”

  He set the backpack down, and she rooted in it to find the broom, stood up, and waved it uselessly at the gulls. They circled as relentlessly as vultures over a dying man. Bile and tears rose in her throat and she swallowed hard.

  “This is a nest?”

  She nodded mutely. “A daylight hatch is unusual, but it does happen. You see how they’ve headed towards the sea? I hope some of them made it.” She led the way down to the water, examining the tracks. Too many stopped short of the water in a little scuffle of sand that told its own story.

  “They hatch at night, usually, and they’re programmed to head towards the light—moonlight or starlight on the waves. A night hatch protects them from predators and the sun. In a daylight hatch if they lose their way even a little, they’re baked before they reach the sea. Between the sun and the gulls these little ones haven’t had much of a chance, but maybe some of them made it home. And maybe there are more to come. I’ll carve them a path just in case.”

  She took out her spade and scraped a little trail in the sand down through the markings, from the nest to the water’s edge.

  “There may not be any more,” she said. “But we have to stay and stand guard and be sure.”

  Arif glanced up to where the gulls still circled, then at her face, and said nothing.

  And a few minutes later she was rewarded with the sight of sand moving at the center of the nest. “Here comes another one,” she cried. “Oh, thank God.”

  It was more than one. The nest erupted with activity as they watched, the tiny hatchlings clambering up through the sand in an energetic cluster and heading for the water, some in the track she had made, some spread over the sand, their flippers working to gain the strength they would need.

  And more and more.

  “Oh, my God, aren’t they beautiful,” she whispered. “Not that way, little one, the water’s behind you,” she murmured, bending to encourage the errant hatchling towards the sea. One by one and then in twos and threes the little turtles clambered out of the sand and headed for the sea. Twenty, thirty, forty—so by no means all had been lost. Thank God she had been here in time.

  Aly looked up. The gulls were screaming in frustration. They rose and sank on the wind, but she picked up her Disappearing Broom and shooed at them, and none dared to come nearer.

  “Fifty-two,” she counted, as a last errant hatchling surfaced and headed after its siblings down the little track she had made, towards the life-giving sea. She squatted down to add the number to her notes, then stood up and dusted her hands. “That’s probably it. I’m going to watch them into the sea.”

  She turned to shepherd the last of the miniature turtles down to the water. The gulls still hovered indignantly while she watched the hatchlings undergo the fierce struggle to get into the water. Time after time the waves washed them back, time after time they forged ahead again, determined and dedicated, until at last, one by one, the water accepted them.

  “You do not help them into the water?” Arif asked.

  “They’ve got to fight the good fight, or they’ll never survive,” she told him. “They’ve got to do it themselves.”

  When the last hatchling had been swept away into its natural home, and it was evident no more were coming up, Aly measured and marked the nest in the usual way, and then they walked on a few yards to where the beach ended in a black cliff face and Arif summoned Farhad.

  Aly could hardly contain her joy. Whoever it was at least had not got to this nest.

  “You are crying,” Arif noted in surprise, as she splashed out to the dinghy and tossed her backpack aboard.

  “Am I?” she smiled, sniffed, and pressed her lips together. “Ah well, bang goes the theory that scientists are
cold-blooded, uninvolved observers of phenomena.”

  Arif looked as though he wanted to say something, but instead merely got into the dinghy after her. Once at the yacht, Aly grabbed her bag and went lightly up the steps. Jamila appeared in the hatch opening with a tray of drinks and called a question to her boss.

  “Drinks on deck?” Arif translated for her.

  Aly glanced at the scene around and heaved a sigh. Sunset soon. Bliss.

  “Yes, please,” she said. “But I think I’ll take a swim first.”

  She stripped off in her cabin, pulled on the faded black tank suit that was her usual swim gear, ran up on deck, and dived into the cool, cool sea.

  It was delicious. She surfaced with the salt tasting on her lips and stinging her eyes, and struck out towards shore in a relaxed, easy crawl. Then the sea prickled on her skin and she turned, looking for the source. Arif was in the water a few feet away, pacing her. His strong naked chest and arms were potently muscular as they flashed through the water, and the buzz of his presence zinged all through her. Her whole body seemed to pick up an electric current coming from him through the water.

  Aly looked away and floated on her back, gazing up at the sky and trying to forget that he was right beside her. Blue, blue. “This is heaven,” she called, not to Arif, particularly. Just talking to the air, to the place, in gratitude for its beauty.

  And his. She could appreciate him without wishing for more, after all. The statue of David didn’t have to come down off his pedestal and make wild love to you before you appreciated its beauty. She would think of Arif as a living statue, or a natural phenomenon, and appreciate him the same way she did the sea. She could do that.

  After twenty minutes, the sun was near the horizon, and she swam back to the yacht and went aboard. Arif followed her up the ladder and the buzz was still there, transmitting through the bloody air now, and it was all she could do to keep walking.

  So much for statues. The man was a walking electric field.

  She scrubbed him off in the shower. She washed him out of her hair. Toweled dry. A clean pair of shorts, a polo shirt, and she was done and dusted.

  This time Arif was waiting for her, his wet hair standing up in tufts, a clean white polo shirt making him look very dark. He indicated the seat beside him on the bench facing west. Aly hesitated for only a second. To sit with her back to the sunset would be too much of a confession. She would just have to ignore the buzz.

  “Wine? Something stronger?”

  “Wine, please.”

  Arif reached to fill her glass with a chilled white from a beautiful earthen jar. “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou,” he murmured, and Aly went stiff. That was all she needed, him guessing how she felt and playing games with her.

  “Without a doubt,” she said dryly, giving him a look that invited him to stop trying to snow the snowman.

  He only laughed. “Why did you say you don’t need an assistant? We have seen today that you do. Who is going to hold the tape measure for you if I don’t?”

  She emphatically did not want him to start feeling indispensable. “I’m going to hold it down with a handy rock, what else?”

  He took a sip of what looked like scotch on the rocks, and gave her a look that shivered all the way down to her toes. Six weeks. How was she ever going to last six weeks?

  …

  Aly went to her cabin, leaving Arif to his own work. He carried his papers to the desk by the satellite phone and sat down to read Fouad’s notes before calling him. But his mind wandered to the mystery of the little scientist.

  She had gone into the water in a tired black one-piece that would flatter no one, but still it had been revealing—enough for him to see that her body did not need flattering clothes. She was not his type, of course, but a simple objective assessment proved that the lithe body, straight and firmly muscled, the slender, neatly curving legs and rounded butt wouldn’t turn any man from thoughts of how to get those legs wrapped around himself.

  Yet she presented with an air that said, “I am well aware that I am not a desirable woman and have no beauty to offer.” All her physical grace, all her natural sensuality, and she had more than her share of both, was unconscious. Whether putting in a stake or swimming in the sea, every gesture softened into a feminine, sensual flow.

  What was the cause of this contradiction? What made her so afraid to acknowledge her deeply sensual nature…and what would it take to break down her resistance to seeing herself as she was? It struck him for the first time that she was like a prisoner—of her own misconception about what she was.

  Something tapped at his memory, some connection, and he searched for it almost idly among his stores until it appeared—ah, yes. She was like the imprisoned princess in the old nursery tale. How did it go? She is locked in a fortress on an island, and the guards keep any rescuer from landing a boat. The prince sails in on a raft of reeds that sinks as soon as the guards run onto it, so they fail to realize that it has carried anyone to the island…

  At his elbow, the satellite phone rang. Fouad. Arif was not sorry to have his thoughts—about just how small a reed raft the prince might manage with—to be interrupted.

  “We will be in Solomon’s Foot in the morning,” he said, when the urgent business had been covered and Fouad was arranging for the pickup of the papers Arif had just signed. “You had better send the chopper at first light, though, because the scientist moves quickly.”

  “I will tell the pilot to watch for the yacht at anchor, and land on the nearest beach,” Fouad said.

  …

  In her cabin Aly wrote up her notes, prepared a new notebook for the island called Solomon’s Foot, and then sat thinking over the problem that was Arif.

  His presence wasn’t threatening only her peace of mind. Arif was also causing a huge problem for the turtle project. And she didn’t know how to cope with either one.

  Two years ago, when Richard had come out on a preliminary trip to examine a control group of turtle nests, he’d been appalled to discover that in some nests nothing at all had hatched, with no obvious cause. That was almost unprecedented. Usually only a few eggs in each nest were not viable. And if the problem spread, it would be catastrophic.

  Of course he’d brought home samples from the nests and had them forensically examined. The minimal tests the charity could afford had all showed negative for any known disease organisms. Was this some new disease, or perhaps caused by the female turtles ingesting some toxin in the water? Or was it something else? They had to find out—and to do that, they had to mark and monitor the nests though the season. Which was why Aly was here.

  But it was not as simple as it sounded. Because one of the darker possibilities was that the nests were being poisoned in an act of deliberate sabotage. And if that was the case, the saboteurs were on the same hunt as Aly. And they would quickly realize what the little red flags she was planting meant. She’d be doing their work for them.

  So they had planned to false mark most of the nests, leaving a third of nests correctly marked as a control group. At the end of the season, Aly would excavate the nests and examine the contents to see how viable the eggs had been. If the high failure rates were restricted to the correctly marked nests—their control group—and the false-marked nests showed more typical patterns of hatching, the circumstantial evidence for sabotage would be convincing. If there was no correlation, they could focus on other possibilities—like finding the neonicotinamide of the turtle population.

  False marking new nests was a simple maneuver, as Richard and she had devised it: all she had to do was record the exact position of the nest in her notes, as usual, but plant the marker stake two meters away.

  Cheloniidae johariae buried her eggs maybe a meter deep. The saboteurs wouldn’t have to dig down far before pouring in whatever poison it was, because it was bound to work its way down through the sand to the eggs. Their hope was that the saboteurs wouldn’t think beyond that. They would find her markers, assume the
nest was beneath, pour in their poison, and look no further.

  If she got to a nest first, they would never find the real nest—provided she had managed to false mark it. It had all seemed foolproof when they were making their plans. But they hadn’t factored in Richard’s sudden illness. They hadn’t factored in Sheikh Arif al Najimi’s one month in the mines. And they hadn’t figured that he would want to accompany her, so that she could not false mark any nest.

  She had to prevent Arif accompanying her tomorrow. Because if she didn’t false mark the nests, she was giving the saboteurs a massive advantage by marking them at all.

  Chapter Eight

  “Solomon’s Foot tomorrow,” Aly said, as they sat down to supper. The table was laid on deck again, with low soft lighting creating an intimate space in the darkness. Beyond its reach, the world was black, the island invisible. The canvas top had been removed, and overhead now was a canopy of stars, whose perfect light also sparkled from the surface of an impenetrably black sea. And from Arif’s eyes. Velvet and diamonds.

  In the darkness he was even hotter than in daylight, and it was a magical night and her guard was way down. Her stomach was fluttering as if she were a teenager meeting a rock star. All her cells were alive. But she couldn’t have him guessing her feelings, so she said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “Solomon’s Foot tomorrow. That’s mostly uninhabited, isn’t it?”

  “There is not a large population there,” Arif agreed. “The island, like many others, was depopulated in Ghasib’s time, and the people resettled or made refugees. We are engaged in rebuilding, but restoring such fractured communities takes time.”