Bound to Her Desert Captor

Jag sat down at his desk, touching the mouse pad on his computer to awaken the screen. Quickly he found the relevant email, scanned it, and opened the attachment. It was a dossier of sorts.

Name: Regan James

Age: Twenty-five

Height, weight and social security number were all there. Her eyes were brown, her hair brown, and she worked at some posh-sounding school as a teacher. According to the report, she lived alone in Brooklyn, and volunteered at a bereavement centre for kids. No pets and no known convictions or outstanding warrants for her arrest. Parents deceased.

Which Jag already knew from the file that had been compiled on her brother. She also had a photography website. Jaeger flicked to the next page. On it was a photo of Regan James. It was a half-body shot of her standing on a beach somewhere, her hair tied back in a low ponytail, wisps of it caught by the breeze on the day and flattering her oval-shaped face, her hand raised as if to keep it back. She was smiling, a full-faced smile, showing even white teeth. A camera hung around her slender neck, resting between her breasts. It was a photo of a beautiful woman who didn’t look as if she would hurt a fly. And her hair wasn’t brown. Not in this photo. It was more auburn. Or russet. And her eyes weren’t just brown either, they were...they were... Jag frowned, caught his train of thought and shut it down. They were brown, just as the report said.

‘Where is she now?’

‘She booked into the Santara International. That’s all we know.’

Jag stared at the photo that shimmered on his screen. This woman’s brother had taken his sister somewhere and he would move heaven and earth to find them and bring Milena home.

He only hoped Chad James had an army to help him when he finally got his hands around the bastard’s scrawny neck, because nothing else would be able to.

‘Have her followed,’ Jag ordered. ‘I want to know where she goes, who she talks to, what she eats and how often she goes to the bathroom. If the woman so much as buys a packet of gum I want to know about it. Is that clear?’

‘Crystal, Your Majesty.’

* * *

Regan knew as soon as she walked into the shisha bar that she should turn right back around and walk out again. All day she’d trudged around the city of Aran looking for information on Chad, but the only thing she’d learned was that there was hot and then there was desert hot.

Despite that, she knew that she would have fallen in love with the ancient walled city if she were here for any other reason than to find out what had happened to her brother. Unfortunately the more she had searched the city for him the more worried she had become. Which was why she couldn’t follow her instinct now and leave the small, dimly lit bar Chad had frequented, no matter how tempting that might be.

The dinky little bar was dressed with various-sized wooden tables and chairs that looked to be filled with mostly local men playing cards or smoking a hookah. Sometimes both. Lilting Arabic music played from some unknown source and the air seemed to be perfumed with a fruity scent she couldn’t place. Not wanting to be caught staring, she straightened the scarf she had draped over her head and shoulders in deference to the local custom, and wound her way to the scarred wooden bar lined with faded red leather stools.

The truth was this place was almost her last resort. All day she’d been stymied either by her own sense of inadequacy in trying to navigate the confusing streets of Aran, or by the local people she met who were nowhere near as approachable as the travel-friendly propaganda would suggest. Especially Chad’s weasel-like landlord, who had flicked her with a dismissive gaze and informed her that he would not open the apartment without permission from the tenant himself. Having just come from GlobalTech Industries, where she couldn’t get anyone at all to answer her questions, Regan hadn’t been in the mood to be told no. She’d threatened to sue the shifty little man and when he’d responded by informing her that he would call the police she had said not to bother—she’d go there herself.

Unfortunately the officer on duty had told her that Chad hadn’t been missing long enough to warrant an investigation and that she should come back the next day. Everything in Santara functioned at a much slower pace than she was used to. She remembered it was one of the things Chad enjoyed most about the country, but when you were desperate it was hard to appreciate.

Utterly spent and weighed down by both jet lag and worry, she’d nearly cried all over the unhelpful officer. Then she’d remembered Chad mentioning this shisha bar so after a quick shower she had asked for directions from one of the hotel staff. Usually when she went out in New York it was with Penny, and right now she wished she’d persuaded Penny to come with her because she didn’t feel completely comfortable arriving at an unknown bar alone. She felt as though everyone was watching her and, truth be told, she’d felt like that all day.

Most likely she was being overly dramatic because she was weighed down by a deep-seated sense of dread that something awful had happened to her brother. She’d felt it as soon as she’d received his off-the-cuff email a week ago warning her not to try and contact him over the next little while because he would be unreachable.

For a man who was so attached to his phone that she often joked it was his ‘best friend’, that was enough to raise a number of red flags in her head and, try as she might, she hadn’t been able to dispel them. A spill-over effect, no doubt, from when she’d had to take over parenting him when he was fourteen. Still, she might have been able to set her worry aside if it hadn’t been for her friend and work colleague, Penny, who had regaled her with every morbid story she could remember about how travellers and foreign workers went missing in faraway lands, never to be heard from again.

For two days Regan had ignored her growing fear and tried to contact Chad, but when she’d continued to have no luck Penny had almost bought her t

he plane ticket to Santara herself. ‘Go and make sure everything is okay,’ Penny had insisted. ‘You won’t be any good to the kids here until you do. Plus, you’ve never been on a decent holiday in the whole time I’ve known you. At best you’ll have a great adventure, at worst...’ She’d left the statement unfinished other than to say ‘And for God’s sake be careful,’ which hadn’t exactly filled Regan with a lot of confidence.

As she cast a quick glance around the bar as if she knew exactly what she was doing, her gaze was momentarily snagged by a shadowy figure in the far right corner. He was dressed all in black with a keffiyeh or shemagh of some sort on his head, his wide-shouldered frame relaxed and unmoving in a rickety wooden chair, his long legs extending out from beneath the table. She wasn’t sure what it was about him that gave her pause but nor could she shake the feeling that he was dangerous.

A shiver raced down her spine and she told herself not to be paranoid. Still, she felt for the can of mace in her handbag and, satisfied that it was there, pinned a smile on her face and turned towards the bar. A man as big as a fridge stood behind the counter, drying a glass, his expression one of utter boredom.

‘What’ll it be?’ he asked, his voice as rough as chipped cement. As far as greetings went it fell far short of the welcome mark.

‘I don’t need anything,’ Regan began politely. ‘I’m looking for a man.’

The bartender’s brow rose slowly over black beetled eyes. ‘Many men here.’

‘Oh, no.’ Regan fumbled in her pocket when she realised how that had sounded and pulled out a recent photo of Chad. ‘I’m looking for this man.’

The bartender eyed the photo. ‘Never seen him before.’

‘Are you sure?’ She frowned. ‘I know he comes here. He said so.’