“Like I said, some of the details weren’t available, at least not then. I wanted an agent on the first flight here. I couldn’t wait to fill in the blanks.”
Nor could he wait to ensure the sex of the agent, either, she thought dryly, admonishing herself.
To be fair, after the opposition at the airport, he now seemed to have accepted her for what she could do and had at least stopped talking about sending her back because of her sex. It appeared that she was the only one who had yet to get over that faux pas, but in her mind it had been a big error. Enough, she told herself. She needed to focus on the key elements of the case.
“The security seems airtight. Explains why they didn’t take her here,” Kate said as they walked through the massive entrance that led to the Al-Nassar family home.
She glanced at Emir as he ran a hand down the dark stubble that covered his chin and jaw. He was an extremely good-looking man, but then, she’d known that. Now he looked agonized, worry lines creasing his forehead. She wanted to say something to comfort him but there was nothing that would help until his sister was home—safe. No matter what he thought, it hadn’t been his error. It had been Tara’s. His sister had made an error by ditching her security and that could cost her her life.
Still over a quarter of a mile away, she took in the scope of the house, more aptly a mansion, and its surrounding grounds and thought there was some irony in its sweeping size when only half the family lived here at any given time. She knew the majority of the family spent a great deal of time overseas. On most days she imagined that Emir was vastly outnumbered, not by family, but by the staff necessary to maintain such an estate.
“Emir?”
He looked at her as if he had been somewhere else. And she imagined he was fighting his own fear—fear for his sister’s well-being and for her very life. He was too close emotionally and that was why he needed her. Her ability to move ahead without emotional attachment to the victim, his sister, whom she’d never met, was critical.
“And yet none of this security kept Tara safe,” Emir said and both of them could hear the irony in his voice.
“You couldn’t protect her night and day.” She touched the back of his arm, the heat of his skin seeming oddly intimate. He tensed and she dropped her hand. “She’s a grown woman.”
From the corner of her eye she saw Rashad approaching.
“I’ll run you up to the main house,” Rashad said as he walked with them the remaining few feet to the guardhouse. He opened the door to the Hummer that Dell had so recently left, for Kate. His dark eyes were full of questions and yet he asked nothing.
Within minutes they were driving around a circular drive that had been hidden behind massive palm trees. They skirted a white-marble fountain that was devoid of water.
“Maintenance issues?” she asked Emir. “Your estate is immaculate and yet the fountain isn’t working?”
“The plumber was called but I put the repair on hold.”
She turned. “Anyone else who’s been here recently? Aside from staff, I mean.”
“No one, except the plumber two days ago,” he said.
“Was Tara around when the plumber was here?”
“Yes, I believe she was. I don’t remember her coming out of her quarters, though,” Emir said. “The plumber had done work for me on numerous occasions. We’ve contracted him for years—in fact, I believe he worked for my father, too. Anyway, he didn’t stay long. I decided against the repair. I hadn’t planned to be here for this long.”
“By here, you mean Marrakech?”
“Morocco, actually,” he said. “If all this hadn’t happened, I might have met you in Wyoming. I’d planned to go there. A recent case involving the Wyoming secretary of state’s brother piqued my interest.”
“Faisal will have his hands full. It’s high-profile,” Kate said. “So, plumbing is minor considering everything that’s come down in the last week.”
“You could say that.” He shrugged as if it were all of no consequence while the tension around his eyes and mouth made him look almost feral, like a man who would protect anyone or anything whose heart belonged to him. She had to force her thoughts back to what he was saying.
“I promised Tara that when she was home for summer vacation, I’d have the fountain up and working. She finds it soothing.”
“Was anything else happening that day or any day after?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
The Hummer stopped in front of the mansion with its huge columns and sprawling white-tiled front entrance.
She glanced back at Emir as she stepped out. She wondered if he felt like he’d been interrogated, for, without meaning to, she knew that was what she had done.
He stepped ahead of her to open the massive wood-and-brass door. In the seconds that it took, her gaze ran the length of his muscular back and she had to pull her eyes away from the lush, seductive curl of his dark hair as it flirted with the edge of his collar.
Get a grip, she told herself as she walked past him and into a vast tile-and-marble area that stretched beyond the colossal entrance doors, eclipsing them in opulence. For a moment her reason for being here was clouded by her feeling of disbelief. Her life, her two-bedroom apartment, compared to this? The juxtaposition of the two realities wasn’t even fathomable. This was a fantasyland, a different world that she’d known of but of which she couldn’t have imagined until now. It was laughable, really, eight hundred square feet that she lived in compared to this. The comparison was as unstoppable as it was fleeting, rather like looking at a magazine rack and seeing one on budget travel lined up beside another that was geared to luxury resorts.
She pushed the thoughts out of her mind and instead considered everything this wealth brought—including the case she was now assigned to. She knew fortune such as this did not come without responsibilities. She also knew there were expectations here and duties Emir had inherited from his father, and even from his grandfather—a responsibility to the people, to give back. She knew Emir took his responsibilities seriously; she’d heard Adam speak of it. It explained why Emir seemed so contained, controlled—older than the thirty-one years she knew him to be.
She looked around, taking in the length and width of the area even from the entrance. The hallway seemed to stretch indefinitely and, rather than the chill one would expect from such a large space, the air was warm.
As they moved down the corridor she couldn’t get over the size. The estate was massive, more imposing than she’d expected, both inside and out. There had been no available pictures, even of the grounds; nothing she could get from the internet. Oddly, even the area outside the gates hadn’t been Google-mapped. She guessed that had been Emir’s doing.
But it was the pictures some yards from the entrance that made her pause; they were the only decor in the hallway that stretched easily a half a city block. She stopped for a minute as she looked at a picture of a man and a woman, middle-aged—the woman looking younger and very much like the photos she’d seen of his sister, Tara.
It was odd that the pictures were here in this luxurious but barren corridor with the only other decor, the oval, brass entranceway doors facing them not ten feet away. “These are your parents?”
“Yes, taken only months before their accident. Of course,” he added, “that was a long time ago.”
Six years wasn’t a long time ago. Was he distancing himself from the trauma of the loss? She supposed it didn’t matter either way. What was important were the facts. She’d read about the traffic accident on a treacherous, isolated mountain road and the resulting fire that had tragically taken both Emir’s parents.
“Tara looks very much like her mother.” Kate stared at the