He ate quickly, tasting slime and something even worse on his tongue, keeping his gut from rebelling by reminding himself that he’d eaten things as bad in other places. A soldier in the field couldn’t be choosy. Bugs, lizards, snakes… Protein, he told himself, that’s all this was.
There was a perceptible murmur when he swallowed the last of the stuff. Cam smiled. Asaad didn’t smile back. His expression was ugly. The bastard had lost the first round and he didn’t like it.
“Delicious,” Cam said politely.
Asaad clapped his hands. A servant scurried in, carrying an oversize urn. “Since you enjoyed that so much, perhaps you would like to sample another of our delicacies. A drink, made from… Well, I won’t tell you the ingredients but I assure you, it is more potent than anything you’ve had before.” At his nod, the servant filled two cups with a brown liquid. Asaad took one, handed Cam the other. “Unless, of course, you’d rather not?”
It was a pissing contest. Juvenile, even pathetic, but what choice did he have except to accept the challenge? Any show of weakness and he could end up keeping his father’s rep company. Asaad needed his signature but there were ways to get it that didn’t involve pretending they were all one big, happy family.
“Mr. Knight?”
“Excellency,” Cam said, lifting the cup to his lips. The liquid smelled like rotting fish but he’d survived worse one long night in Belarus, when he’d downed endless shots of homemade vodka in a face-off with a thickheaded guerilla leader. He held his breath, tossed his head back and drank the swill in one gulp.
“Great stuff,” he said calmly, and held out his empty cup. Another murmur of approval filled the great hall. Asaad’s face grew dark as a thundercloud.
“Do you ride horses, Mr. Knight?”
Maybe the sultan was thickheaded, too. Asking a born-and-bred Texan if he rode horses was like asking a pigeon if it could fly.
“Some,” Cam said politely.
Moments later they were outside in a vast courtyard lit by torches, racing over the hardpacked sand on the backs of half-wild ponies in a game that involved sticks as thick as baseball bats, a leather ball and a looped rope hanging from a tree. Cam had no idea what the rules were but he stayed on his snorting mount, managed not to get clobbered by men wielding their bats with abandon, and whacked the ball straight through the loop.
The sultan’s men cheered. Asaad’s face turned purple. He shouted for silence.
“You are a worthy opponent,” he said in a voice that made clear the statement was a lie, “and I shall reward you.”
With what? A knife across the throat? A bullet in the head? Lose the game and you were dead. Win, and you were dead, too. Asaad was a psychopath, and capable of anything.
Cam’s muscles tensed and he fought to keep his tone calm.
“Thank you, Excellency, but the only reward I want is—”
The words caught in his throat. Two of the sultan’s men were coming toward them. They were big, bigger than the sultan…
Twice as big as the woman they all but dragged between them.
The first thing he noticed was that her hands were bound.
The second was that she was naked. No. Not naked. It was just that her skin was the palest gold and what little she wore was only a shade darker.
Gold cupped her full breasts; a gold thong rode low on her flat belly. A thin gold chain adorned her narrow waist; slender, twisted ribbons of gold hung from the chain and swayed sinuously with each thrust of her long legs.
Her feet were encased in golden sandals, the heels so spiked they could have been declared lethal weapons. Tiny bells dangled from the straps of the sandals and tinkled softly at her every step. Her hair was gold, too, and tumbled forward in silken disarray around her downcast face.
“Do you like your reward, Mr. Knight?”
“She is…” Damn it! Cam cleared his throat. He hadn’t expected anything like this golden creature and it had thrown him. The sultan knew it; he could hear it in the bastard’s oily voice. “She is an amazing sight, Excellency.”
“Indeed.” Asaad smiled. “I will have her brought closer, yes?”
The obvious answer was n
o. This woman was a trap. It didn’t take a genius to know that. Cam had been wined and dined; he’d been entertained with a crazy game of desert polo. Asaad had softened him up and now he was moving in for the kill. An hour with this houri and he’d sign the contract, no questions asked. He’d be too sated to do anything else.
At least, that was what Asaad figured.
And, damn, it was tempting. Cam could imagine what it would be like to spear his hands into that spill of hair, raise the woman’s face so that he could see if it was as perfect as the rest of her. He could imagine tasting her breasts, stripping away that gold thong…