Her Royal Protector (a Johari Crown Novel) (Entangled Indulgence) Read Online Free Page B

shape,” a woman responded.
    A couple of boats along from where she was moored, a retired couple stood together at the stern of their sailboat, watching the mega yacht through binoculars. The Red Ensign fluttered in a light breeze, and for a moment Aly smiled at the quintessential Englishness of the couple.
    “Not as big as some,” the man said. “In fact, rather modest, as mega yachts go.”
    “More than modest, as Sultans go. I wonder if Himself is aboard?”
    “Much more likely to be a banker,” said her husband. “Didn’t Maurice tell us that the Sultan now leases her by the month?”
    “So he did. Now, there’s a destination wedding for you,” said the woman dryly.
    For a moment Aly stood there, too, staring. Modest, they called it. Her mouth twisted with something like disdain. Her father had bought a mega yacht not long before the fall. He’d been trading up all her life, every year a bigger yacht, in a kind of compulsion, until his ego was finally satisfied with the mega yacht.
    None of them could have known that the millions he’d spent on such ego-enhancing luxuries had come directly out of the pockets of the friends and clients who’d trusted him, who’d believed his lies. But when he’d taken the family aboard for the virgin sail, even then Aly had been horrified by the grotesque ostentation. It seemed to her to be totally divorced from any real pleasure in sailing.
    “But you won’t even know you’re at sea,” she had said as they stood in the “main forward salon” surrounded by carpets and wainscoting and recessed lighting worthy of a Savoy Presidential Suite, for her father’s angry disapproval had never managed to quell her knack of blurting out whatever was on her mind. “What’s the point of it?”
    “The point is, it’s beautiful,” Trojan Percy had said with that undertone of malice no one ever seemed to notice but herself. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, my sweet?”
    He’d only ever called her “my sweet” in irony, when he was really furious with her.
    Aly turned away from the sight of the Sultan’s yacht and dragged another box below.
    She had discussed the journey with Richard at the hospital, and then spent the night poring over the charts, studying the curtailed trip she would make—she would visit fewer islands, and fewer beaches on each island. A modest schedule, and she was pretty sure she could keep it. Now she was stowing the last of the equipment and food, making the boat ready.
    Her heart was light, her decision made. She’d checked out of the hotel, brought her gear aboard, turned on the freezer, and now this snug little boat would be home for the next six or seven weeks. Within the hour she would check in with the harbormaster and be away.
    “Ah, they’re lowering a boat. Someone coming ashore,” she heard. But the Sultan’s mega yacht held zero interest for her.
    …
    Arif al Najimi stood on the upper aft deck training his binoculars on the small blue boat moored near the end of a jetty on the far side of the harbor. Oneira. He snorted in disbelief. Only an Englishman could propose to take a vessel like that on such a journey. An old Greek fishing boat, he guessed, and how it had made its way here to the Gulf of Barakat required too great a leap of the imagination for him to begin.
    There was movement in the cockpit, and the scientist appeared from below. He focused the binoculars more tightly. She danced along the short gangplank and leapt barefoot onto the dock with an ease that spoke of long experience with boats and docks. She was wearing loose clothing—denim cut-offs that were held up on her slender frame only by the aid of a fat leather belt, and a floppy grey t-shirt. She looked even more like a refugee waif than she had at the banquet—and he could imagine how those wide-open, hungry eyes would add to the impression.
    She bent straight legged to pick up a box, providing him with a view of a denimed butt, baggy