To Catch a Bride Read Free Page B

sweaty, hot, and crumpled the way Englishmen new to the country usually did. This man looked cool and unruffled. Hard.
    She couldn’t help but stare at the buff-colored breeches molded to long, hard-muscled, masculine legs and tucked into high, gleaming black boots. They were very . . . revealing.
    The men Ayisha saw every day wore loose, flowing robes or baggy pants and loose, long shirts. Their clothes didn’t show the shape of the body. Not like this, almost shamelessly: every hard masculine angle revealed. She swallowed.
    If they had, she would never have been able to pass herself off as a boy called Azhar all these years.
    She watched the flex and pull of muscles as the Englishman strode through the dust and chaos of the marketplace with the lithe power of a lion.
    She felt suddenly hotter, even though she stood in the cool shade.
    Rameses. The name suited the man.
    “He has a drawing of the girl he wants,” Ali went on. “A Frankish girl. He showed it to many people in the marketplace yesterday. Gadi saw it. He says it could be your little sister, if you had one.”
    Ayisha stilled. Gadi said what? Gadi could see a resemblance between a sketch of a young Frankish girl and Azhar, the wily young Egyptian street boy?
    Her thoughts flew at once to a sketch made more than six years ago by an English visitor who’d stayed with them once. He could draw to make a person come alive. She still remembered the wonder of it, watching his pencil flying over a page, and then, her own thirteen-year-old face staring back at her from a sheet of white paper.
    It couldn’t possibly be that drawing . . . could it?
    No, that Englishman had taken the sketch with him when he left Egypt, heading for China. She’d been too shy to ask him for it.
    How could that drawing have fallen into the hands of this Englishman? And even if it had, why would he bring it to Egypt?
    Why would he show it around? And offer money for the girl in the picture?
    It could be your little sister . . .
    That sketch could ruin her life.
    She stared across at the tall foreigner, trying to read the answers somehow in his face. Behind her in the spice souk, a spice seller was roasting sesame, coriander, and cumin seeds with nuts to make dukkah . Her stomach rumbled at the delicious aroma, but she did not take her eyes off the Englishman. As if he sensed her interest, he changed direction and walked toward the alley where she was hiding.
    The crowd split before him like the parting of the waves, and not just because he was tall and foreign. It was something about the man himself. He moved like a pasha, like a sultan, like a king—not swaggering, but with an unconscious air of assurance, of command bred in the bone—and the crowd responded instinctively.
    He was a man accustomed to going wherever he wished.
    A man accustomed to getting whatever—or whoever—he wanted.
    Not this time, she vowed silently. Not her.
    “They say he’s an English milord,” Ali said. “They say he has gold to buy whatever he wants and spends it like water. But why come all this way to buy a girl? Don’t they have girls in England?”
    Ayisha sniffed. “Yes, of course. A fool and his gold are soon parted.” Brave words. They belied the cold shifting in the pit of her stomach.
    “Gadi said if you were younger, he would dress you as a girl and sell you to this Rameses and make his fortune.” Ali laughed heartily at the joke—the private and the public joke. In all of Cairo, only he and Laila knew Ayisha was a girl.
    Ayisha’s throat tightened. She had to get that picture, get it and destroy it. Gadi thought she resembled the girl in the drawing . . . Gadi was a stupid young man. He knew nothing. But if he kept making that joke to everyone who would listen . . .
    Bile welled up in her throat.
    Gadi’s uncle had been one of those who had pursued her, all those years before. If he saw the picture now . . . if Gadi made his joke to his uncle . . .
    Gadi’s uncle was a lot smarter