Captive of Kadar. Trish Morey
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wanted more.
* * *
It was more than two hours before they emerged from the police department into the crisp outside air. A shower of rain had been and gone and the air was fresh and clear after the overheated offices and because it wasn’t far to the restaurant, he’d suggested they walk.
Trams dinged and rumbled along the centre of a road forbidden to private vehicles and taxis, making room to hear the call of seabirds wheeling above, and the sound of a dozen different languages on the air around. And then, over it all came a sound she was slowly getting used to, the call of the Imam calling the faithful to prayer, and huge flocks of birds rose as one from the many-domed roof of the Blue Mosque and found comfort in each other from their shared fright, forming an endless circling ribbon of white in the sky.
And it struck Amber in that moment how lucky she was that she was free to enjoy the sight. ‘They could have charged me,’ she reflected, the shock of her narrow escape setting in as she remembered the stern expressions of the police who’d questioned her and taken her statement. She’d imagined when the police had let her travel with Kadar to the police station that completing a statement was nothing more than five minutes’ work, telling them how the old man had approached her, offering coins. A mere formality. She’d been wrong. Dealing in antiquities was clearly not a crime they took lightly in Turkey. ‘I thought they were going to charge me.’
‘You sound almost disappointed.’ He raised an eyebrow as he glanced briefly at her.
Disappointed? Not likely. She wouldn’t be here now, watching the birds swirl and wheel to the Imam’s prayers. Relieved was what she was. Not to mention a little confused. ‘I just don’t understand why at first it seemed not such a big deal and then they made such a fuss of it at the station.’
He shrugged. ‘What you did was foolish. Of course they needed to make you appreciate the severity of what you were doing.’
Foolish? The judgement stung, threatening to topple all the secret fantasies she’d been harbouring about how this day might progress. She didn’t want him to think of her as foolish.
Desirable or sexy, like the way he’d made her feel when she’d found his eyes on her across the marketplace, sure, he could think that. She wanted him to think that.
Not foolish.
‘I didn’t know there was a law against buying old coins.’
‘Surely you do research before you enter a country as a visitor? Surely, if you are any kind of responsible tourist, you find out about their customs and laws before you leave home.’
Well, yes, there was that, then again... ‘But they might just as easily have been fake!’
‘And you would have been happy exchanging good money for fakes?’
She sniffed. She hated that she sounded so defensive and she hated him because what he said was true. She had been hoping the coins were genuine and of course she would never have considered spending the money if she’d thought them no better than rubbish.
And she would have done her research. Normally. But the decision to come to Turkey hadn’t come twelve or even six months ago, and so giving her lashings of time to check out every traveller site going. The decision had been made barely two weeks ago, when she’d had to work out what to do about a cancelled holiday to Bali: stay at home or use whatever credits she could get for her cancelled flights and accommodation towards a trip somewhere she really wanted to go.
Turkey had been a no-brainer. The seed had been planted when she’d come across her great-great-great-grandmother’s diary ten years before when she’d been helping her mum sort out her gran’s old house back in England, the house her mum had grown up in before she’d moved to Australia. The diary that told of a young girl’s excitement about her upcoming trip to Constantinople and beyond, that she’d found bundled together with a pretty bracelet in an old oilskin rag and tucked away in the bottom of a long-forgotten trunk in the dusty attic. Half the pages were missing, so there was no record of her actual travels, and what was left was barely legible, but it was the words a young woman so long ago had penned in ink on the front page—follow your heart—that had lodged in Amber’s sensible brain.
And whether it was because she shared a name with her great-great-great-grandmother, or because the young Amber Braithwaite’s anticipation was infectious, that seed had grown, until she’d known that one day she wanted to experience for herself the exotic capital that had fired up her ancestor’s imagination more than a century and a half before.
Follow your heart.
Cameron had thought she was mad to even suggest it.
‘Why would you want to go there?’ he’d asked her. ‘Bali’s much closer and it’s cheaper.’
‘But nobody goes to Bali in January,’ she’d reasoned. ‘It’s so humid.’
‘Trust me,’ he’d said, and to her eternal shame she’d not only put her dreams on hold, but she’d trusted him, all right. Right up until the time she’d come home early from work and found him shagging her supposed best friend in their bed.
A supposed best friend who’d begged for forgiveness and told her it would never happen again because Cameron wasn’t even that good in the sack.
Thanks for that.
No, it was about time she followed her heart. And she didn’t have to explain any of that to this man.
‘So maybe I didn’t have time,’ she simply said, downplaying the whirlwind of emotional fallout from the double betrayal that had accompanied that time. It had taken a week before shock and the self-pity had turned to anger, and then it was a no-brainer that she would head to the one place Cameron was never likely to go.
It wasn’t until she’d buckled herself into her seat on the plane and taken a deep breath that she’d had clear air to think. So, admittedly, there hadn’t been a lot of time to brush up on the finer points of Turkish law or the hazards she might encounter along her journey.
It had been enough to know she was finally fulfilling a dream to visit the country that had bewitched her great-great-great-grandmother more than a century ago. ‘Maybe I had other things on my mind.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he suspected she either hadn’t bothered or she didn’t give a damn what laws she might break in someone else’s country, so long as she got what she wanted.
She gritted her teeth, wondering when exactly the desire she’d witnessed in his eyes had evaporated—in the officious and overheated surrounds of the police station, or when she’d admitted she’d been intending to buy the coins? But did it matter what he thought of her? She’d probably never see him again after today—she’d probably never see him after lunch. What did she care?
Except that she did.
‘I’m surprised you’d risk being seen with me, given my propensity to commit random acts of stupidity.’
He actually had the nerve to laugh. ‘Oh, I know there’s no chance of that.’
It was the laughter more than the certainty that got her hackles up, though the certainty ran a very close second. ‘How can you be so sure? You hardly know me. You have no idea of what I might try next.’
‘It’s the reason you got out of the police station with just a warning.’
Her head snapped around. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I heard them talking—there’s been a surge in reports of coin sellers and the police are planning a crackdown. There was talk of making an example of you to deter other tourists from trying the same thing. A pretty young tourist charged with trafficking in antiquities—that would get the attention of the world press.’
She gasped. She’d felt she’d come close, but she’d been blissfully ignorant of