Taming Charlotte Read Free

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 andlooked 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