“It’s beautiful.” She exhaled, then could no longer keep herself from blurting out, “So is she here?”
He looked at her blankly. “Who?”
“Bree.” She furrowed her brow. “You said she was here!”
“I never said that. I said I had a slight suspicion of where she might be.”
“Do you think she’s in Morocco?”
His lips twisted. “Unlikely.”
Josie glared at him. “Then why on earth did we come all the way here?”
“Hawaii was getting tiresome,” he said coldly. “I wanted to leave. And I told you. This is where I do business…”
“Business!” she cried. “Your only business is finding Bree!”
“Yes.” He tilted his head. “Once I have your land.”
She gasped. “You said as soon as we were married, you’d save her!”
“No.” He looked at her. “I said I’d save her after we got married. When I had possession of your land.”
She shook her head helplessly. “You can’t intend to wait for some stupid legal formalities…”
“Can’t I?” Kasimir said sharply. “It would be easy for you to decide, after your sister is safely home, that you’d prefer not to transfer your land to me at all. Or to suddenly insist that I pay you, say, a hundred million dollars for it.”
“A hundred million…” She couldn’t even finish the number. “For six hundred acres?”
“You know what the land means to me,” he said tightly. “You could use my feelings against me.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“I know you won’t. Because you won’t have the chance.”
“Getting the land could take months!”
“I have the best lawyers in the country working on it. I expect to have it in my possession within a few weeks.”
A few weeks? She forced herself to take a deep breath, to calm the frantic beating of her heart, so she could say reasonably, “I can’t wait that long.”
His lips pursed. “You have no choice.”
“But my sister’s in danger!” she exploded.
“Danger?” He looked at her incredulously. “If anyone’s in danger, it’s Vladimir.”
Josie frowned. “What do you mean by that?”
He blinked. “She’s always been his weakness, that’s all,” he muttered. He reached for her hand. “Come inside. I want to show you something.”
/> He led her through the exotic green garden towards the palace, and as they walked past the soaring Moorish arches, she looked up in amazement. The foyer was painted with intertwined flowers and vines and geometric motifs in gold leaf and bright colors. Raised Arabic calligraphy was embedded into the plaster on the walls. She’d never seen anything quite so beautiful, or so foreign.
Josie’s lips parted as, in the next room, she saw the ornamental stucco pattern of the soaring ceiling, which seemed to drip stalactites in perfect symmetry. “Are those muqarnas?” she breathed.
He looked at her with raised eyebrows.
“I love architecture coffee-table books,” she said, rather defensively.