Taming Charlotte (2 page)

E
VEN AT THAT MIDMORNING HOUR, THE AIR OF THE MARKET
place, or
souk,
shimmered and undulated with heat. Chickens squawked, vendors shouted and argued, monkeys wearing little vests and fezzes shrieked for attention, and strange, incessant music curled among the stalls in place of a breeze. The smells of spices and unwashed flesh competed with pungent smoke from cooking fires, and the bright silken folds of Charlotte’s borrowed robe and veils clung to the moistness of her skin.

She was enthralled.

Her companion, Bettina Richardson, who was a few years younger than Charlotte and clad in a similar disguise, did not share this enthusiasm.

“Papa will
murder
us if he finds out we’ve come to this dreadful place!” she hissed, the veil covering her pretty face swelling with the rush of her breath. “Why, we could end up being carried off to the desert by some sheikh!”

Charlotte sighed. “We won’t, more’s the pity,” she said, just to annoy Bettina.

“Charlotte!” Bettina cried, shocked.

Charlotte smiled behind her veils. The Richardsons had sailed to the island kingdom of Riz, which lay between Spain and the coast of Morocco, to visit old friends, wealthy merchants they had originally known in Boston. Bettina had wanted to stay in Paris until it was time to sail for London and then the United States, but Charlotte had campaigned against the idea. She wasn’t about to miss a chance to visit such an exotic place as Riz, since there was at least
some
potential for adventure.

That, of course, was exactly what vexed Bettina so much. She’d had to be coerced into borrowing the robes and veils from their hostess’s wardrobe, sneaking out by way of a side gate, and venturing through the narrow, dusty streets, following the odors and the cacophony of sounds to the
souk.

Standing in front of one of the market stalls, Charlotte touched a crudely made basket tentatively. She would remember this day all her life, and out of desperate boredom, she would no doubt embellish it at some point. She might add a grand sheikh mounted on a fine Arabian stallion, riding to the marketplace to buy slaves, or perhaps even a band of marauding pirates, scattering chickens and merchants in every direction with their swords…

A stir at the end of the row of tawdry little booths and crevices in the ancient walls interrupted her colorful musings. Bettina grabbed Charlotte’s forearm with surprising strength and whispered, “Let’s go back to the Vincents’ house, Charlotte,
please!”

Charlotte stood staring at the tall man striding through the crowd, barely able to believe her eyes. For a few breathless moments, she was thirteen again and back in Seattle. She’d climbed up into the rigging of a sailing ship, the
Enchantress,
and high off the deck her courage had fled. She’d clung to the ropes, too terrified to climb down on her own.

Patrick Trevarren had come up to fetch her.

Bettina gave her a little shake. “Charlotte!” she pleaded balefully. “I don’t like the looks of that man! He’s probably a brigand!”

Charlotte couldn’t move, and she was especially grateful
for her veils because she knew the fluttery smile trembling on her mouth would be an idiotic one. Patrick hadn’t changed a great deal in ten years, though he was broader through the chest and shoulders, and the angles of his face were sharper; he still wore his dark hair a little too long, caught back at his nape with a thin black ribbon, and his indigo gaze was as incisive as before. He walked with an arrogant assurance that infuriated Charlotte, and yet her heart was hammering in her throat and it was all she could do not to run to him and inquire if he remembered her.

He wouldn’t, of course, and even if he did, she had been only a girl when they’d met last. She had dreamed about him all these ten years, weaving fantasy after fantasy around the young seaman, but he’d probably never given her so much as a second thought.

He drew nearer, and even though there was a smile on his darkly tanned, aristocratic face, his eyes were cold. He plucked a ripe orange from a fruit stand, using the point of a dagger drawn from his belt, and flipped a coin to the crouching vendor.

Charlotte neither moved nor made a sound, except to breathe, but something about her must have given him pause. He came and towered over her and the trembling Bettina, staring down into Charlotte’s amber eyes with an expression of bemusement.

Say something,
Charlotte ordered herself frantically, but she couldn’t. Her throat was shut tight.

Patrick pondered her for another moment, ran his gaze over the clinging robes she wore, and then proceeded around her with a shrug. He peeled the orange as he went, tossing the parings to one of the chattering monkeys.

“That’s it,” Bettina said firmly. “We’re leaving, Charlotte Quade,
this very minute.
That was a pirate if I’ve ever seen one!”

Charlotte watched as Patrick stopped to look up at a veiled and shapely creature dancing on a board stretched between two large barrels, and felt a jealousy so intense that her throat opened and her lungs started drawing air again. “And we all know you’ve seen your share of pirates,” she retorted, with unusual sarcasm. Instantly she felt a twinge of
remorse for her sharpness. For all that Bettina and she were not perfectly matched as friends, Bettina was a decent sort and quite fragile, undeserving of such treatment.

Tears had already welled in Bettina’s green eyes. She was an only child, gently raised, and it had not been easy for her to disobey her parents by sneaking out of the Vincents’ home to explore a foreign marketplace.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said gently, feeling broken as she watched a smiling Patrick lift the dancer down from her improvised stage and toss a coin to a robed man slumping nearby. “We’ll—we’ll go now.”

Determined not to look back again, Charlotte squared her shoulders and started off in the direction of the Vincent compound. Her senses were in a riot of shock at seeing Patrick Trevarren so unexpectedly, and she couldn’t bear even to consider where he might be taking the dancer.

She was distracted, and conscious of Bettina’s rising anxiety, and finding the path they’d blazed only an hour earlier proved difficult, without the noise and flurry of the marketplace to guide her. All the impossibly narrow streets looked the same, and any one of a dozen might have led
to
the quiet residential area she had left so boldly.

Bettina was sniffling, and she dried her eyes with her veil. “I knew it,” she fretted, “we’re lost!”

“Hush,” Charlotte snapped, impatient. “We’ll just go back to the marketplace and ask directions.”

“We don’t speak the language,” Bettina reminded her, with maddening accuracy.

“Then we’ll simply start out again, trying every route until we find the right one,” Charlotte answered. She sounded a great deal more confident than she felt.

Bettina mewled in alarm. “I shouldn’t have listened to you,” she cried angrily. “I
knew
something terrible would happen if we disobeyed Papa, and I was right!”

Charlotte bit her lower lip to keep from telling Bettina to shut up. “We will get back safely,” she said, in a purposefully gentle voice, when she had her impatience in check. “I promise we will. But you must be calm, Bettina.”

The younger girl drew a deep, tremulous breath and
looked around at the empty street. It was eerie, how quiet the place was, after the clamor and excitement of the
souk.

“I shall have to drink poison if we are taken captive and forced to live in a harem,” Bettina warned, quite matter-of-factly, when she’d recovered a little of her composure.

Charlotte might have laughed, under less trying circumstances. The fact was, they probably
were
in grave danger, wandering unprotected in a city where the culture was so profoundly different from their own.

There was nothing to do now but return to the marketplace, try to find Mr. Trevarren, and prevail upon him to rescue her a second time. It would be an exquisite humiliation, especially since he was bound to be occupied in a most scandalous fashion with the dancer, if he was around at all, but Charlotte could see no alternative. She and Patrick had not parted on particularly cordial terms that long-ago day in Seattle, but he was probably the only person in the
souk
who spoke English.

She linked her arm with Bettina’s. “Come along. We’ll be back where we belong, sipping tea and eating chocolates, before your mother and father even miss us.”

The marketplace, crowded before, was swelling with people and donkeys now. Charlotte stood on tiptoe, searching for Mr. Trevarren’s bare head among the covered ones of the merchants and customers, but there was no sign of him.

Bettina let out a strangled whimper, and Charlotte controlled her irritation.

It was then that the crush of men pressed around them. A dirty cloth, pungent with some chemical, was placed over Charlotte’s mouth and nose, and her arms were crushed to her sides. She heard Bettina screaming hysterically, and then the world receded to a pinpoint, disappeared. There was nothing except for an endless, throbbing void.

Patrick Trevarren laid his hands to the sides of the dancer’s trim waist and hoisted her back up onto the board. Feeling especially generous, he favored her with a grin and a surreptitious coin, and in that moment a shrill female scream punctured the thick atmosphere of the
souk.

In Riz, as well as the rest of the Arab world, women were a commodity, but Patrick had grown up in Boston and studied in England. As a result, he was cursed with a strain of chivalry, and even though he sensed that responding to the damsel’s noisy distress would be a mistake, he could not stop trying to find her.

He made his way through the crowd and found one of the two foreign women he’d encountered earlier. Her veil had slipped, and by the nasal quality of her continuous, snuffling wails, Patrick identified her as an American.

Exasperated, he took her shoulders in his hands and gave her a shake. “Stop that sniveling and tell me what’s the matter!”

The curious Arabs retreated a little.

“My f-friend!” the girl sobbed. “M-My friend has been k-kidnapped by pirates!”

Patrick clamped his jaw down tight as he remembered looking into the other woman’s wide amber eyes earlier. There had been something disturbingly familiar about her. “Where did this happen?” he asked, struggling for patience. “How many men were there? Did you see which direction they went?”

The girl made another loud lament. “There were at least a
hundred
of them,” she eventually managed to choke out. Her green eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, and the end of her nose already looked raw. “And how should I know which way they went? I can’t even find my way back to the Vincents’ compound!”

Patrick picked a familiar face from the crowd, an earnest little boy who sometimes ran errands for him, and gave him a few pieces of silver. He knew the Vincents and had visited them on several occasions.

In quick Arabic, he instructed the boy to take the lady home—she would obviously be no help at all in finding her friend. Then he began questioning bystanders.

Despite Patrick’s easy command of the local language and the fact that he was well-known in the kingdom and received in homes on all levels of the social scale, he was still an outsider. The men frequenting the marketplace would sympathize with the kidnappers, not the girl. To them, the
selling of innocent young women into virtual slavery was honest commerce.

Still, Patrick searched the alleyways that snaked away from the
souk
in every direction, a feeling of panic rising in him as he struggled to accept the hopelessness of his pursuit. The girl was lost; there would be no saving her from the fate that awaited her.

In the late afternoon, when the sun glared mercilessly down on the ancient, dusty city, Patrick returned to the harbor, where his ship, the
Enchantress,
was at anchor.

She was in a dark, cramped hole, a place that smelled of rats, mildew, and spoilage. Her head ached as though she’d been felled with a club, and nausea roiled in her stomach. Patches of tenderness all over her body told her she was black and blue, and where there wasn’t a bruise, her skin stung with abrasions.

Charlotte wanted to throw up, but she was gagged, and when she moved to uncover her mouth, she discovered that her hands were bound as well. Tears of frustration and fear burned her eyes.

You wanted an adventure,
she scolded herself.
Here it is.

Hysteria threatened, but Charlotte would not surrender. She knew it was crucial not to panic; she had to think calmly and come up with a plan of escape.

Instead of strategy, however, she thought of Bettina. Had the kidnappers taken her, too? Charlotte shuddered to think how terrified the girl would be if that was true, and guilt lanced through her spirit. If Bettina came to harm, it would be Charlotte’s own fault and no one else’s. She had literally browbeaten her companion into visiting the
souk,
and the result might well be tragic.

Another rush of bile seared Charlotte’s throat, and she swallowed. If she kept her wits about her, she might be able to find Bettina, and the two of them could flee their captors together. On the other hand, she might never see her friend again.

Colorful and patently horrifying pictures filled Charlotte’s mind. She’d often pretended, in the privacy of her mind, to be a harem girl, with Patrick Trevarren as her
sultan. It had been an innocent game, heating her loins and bringing a frustrated blush to her cheeks, but the reality of facing a life of white slavery was no schoolgirl fantasy. Of course, she wouldn’t be sold to the man she’d dreamed about all these years—oh, no. She would surely become the property of some whoremaster, or a concubine to some sweaty, slobbering wretch who valued her no more than he would a dog or a horse.

Charlotte thought of her home in Quade’s Harbor, on the green shores of Puget Sound, where her father owned and operated one of the largest timber operations in Washington Territory. Brigham Quade was a man of very firm opinions, with no inclination at all toward nonsense, but Charlotte had never doubted his love for a moment. She and her sister, Millie, had always known he would give up his own life before letting anything happen to either one of them, and because of this certainty, they’d grown up to be confident and secure.