Alex stared, drinking in the sight of him. At the same time, her heart wept for him.
But he hadn’t been beaten yet. His face was starkly proud. Determination and an iron will were etched there. He was impossibly arresting—far more so than his mesmerizing portrait. Even across the few dozen feet separating them, Alex felt his power, his charisma, his authority, and his sexuality. She was shaken to the quick.
Seeing him was so overwhelming that for an instant Alex had to close her eyes. It was so very hard to breathe. She was shaking.
Alex’s fingernails dug into her palms. She could not stop herself from looking at him again.Look at me,she whispered silently.Oh, please, look at me. I’m here!
But he stared straight ahead. Alex knew he had put himself in a trancelike state of being impervious to the jeering crowd of spectators.
And seeing him in chains was killing her. Being so close to him yet unable to go to him, touch him, smile, talk, was impossible. They would escape. Together. Soon. Dear God, they had to.
And as Alex stood there staring at him, the entire world apart from herself and Xavier Blackwell began to fade away, and all of Tripoli, the entire crowd, the Rais Jovar, the bashaw, the soldiers, the horses and dogs, Jebal, everything, the sights and sounds dimmed, blurred, fading into nothingness. Ceasing to exist.
It was just him and her now, two captives in nineteenth-century Tripoli.
And Blackwell jerked, his eyes lifting—finding her immediately. Their gazes locked hard. Alex was riveted.
And so was he.
His dark eyes were wide, stunned.
10
XAVIER LAY ONhis back on the hard, cold stone floor of the cubicle where he had been imprisoned. He was alone. He was worried about his men and his ship, yet he found it hard to concentrate and plan. A pair of almond-shaped eyes haunted him.
His gut constricted. He was oddly breathless. He could not get those haunting eyes out of his mind. Xavier sat up.
Who was she?
He wanted to know.
She hadn’t fooled him for a moment. She had been disguised as a man, but when he had met her gaze he had felt the instant, eternal pull of male and female, more so than he had ever felt it before. Worse, she somehow seemed familiar to him. There had been an odd shock of recognition the moment their eyes had met.
But he was certain that he did not know her. He was certain that they had never met. He would never forget a pair of eyes like that, not ever.
Xavier stood up. There were no windows in his cell, there was nowhere to go. But he remained standing, staring at the rough stone wall. In the Moslem world of Tripoli, it was incredibly daring for a woman to disguise herself as a man. Clearly she belonged to some male Moslem of importance. Clearly she herself was Moslem. He might learn her identity if his stay in Tripoli was protracted, but he was a realist and he understood that he would probably never see her again.
The thought was distinctly disturbing. It made him strangely uneasy.
He wanted to see her again.
Xavier paced. His cell was four steps by six. He was no longer naked. He had been given a pair of short, loose trousers, a wide, collarless shirt, and a small cap, which he did not use. The four-pound iron fetter was still on his left ankle, attached by a thick chain to the manacles on his wrists. Both his leg and arms were chafed raw and bleeding. He ignored the pain, which he had become accustomed to and now thought of as a mere discomfort.
Rais Jovar had refused to discuss a ransom. Xavier brooded upon this. He understood that Peter Cameron wished to humiliate him and punish him for the numerous times his Tripolitan cruisers had suffered defeat at Xavier’s hands. But surely in time the rais would grow tired of this game and realize that a rich ransom for a captain and his crew was far more worthy than petty revenge. Or maybe not.
In any case, Xavier would use this interlude to his advantage. He was inside Tripoli. There was much information to be gained. He had already memorized the layout of the fortifications surrounding the harbor, analyzing the firepower of those battlements, and he had also made a rough estimate of the strength of the bashaw’s navy. From inside Tripoli, he could wreak much damage on the bashaw in this war. Xavier smiled grimly.
Being a captive was not so bad. Not when his first interest was avenging Robert’s death.
Xavier felt the familiar stabbing of pain whenever he thought of his younger brother, whom he had adored. And with the pain there was so much guilt.
He should have captained theSarahon her last journey. He should have died in Robert’s place.
And the worst of it was that they had never found his body. Robert had jumped ship along with his crew as the ship exploded. Only a quarter of the crew had been picked up by the corsairs. The rest had drowned.
Robert was never coming home. And no amount of revenge would ever change that.
A bolt was lifted from outside the heavy wooden door of Xavier’s cell, jerking him from his morbid, depressing thoughts. His body tensed. Xavier faced the door as it opened. Rais Jovar smiled at him unpleasantly. Two heavily armed janissaries stood behind him. “Come, American dog.”
