Her Kind of Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

unexpected.
    That's why it worked.
    With a startled cry, the man jumped back. I surged up onto one knee, capturing my gauzy skirt with my free hand, and swung again while he was still off balance. It forced him back a few inches, which was all I wanted.
    Before he could stop me, I ducked under his weapons, right past him and toward the front of the shop, no longer trapped.
    He lunged, and I practically floated backward on the surge of energy before him. One step. Two steps. I reached my hand back for the door.
    "Do you really plan to take this into the street?" I asked. "With all these nice bystanders and policemen?"
    The policemen around here carried automatic weaponry, after all.
    He scowled, and the air around him seemed to crackle with a most annoying version of alpha-male condescension. "You have no business here."
    But I lived outside the whole male pecking order, thank heavens. I stood my ground and channeled a per-sonal power that was uniquely feminine. "You just made sure I do."
    When I heard the door behind me open, I deliberately ignored it. This stranger and I were in a staring contest, with nothing childish about it.
    Then I heard Rhys's distinctly Welsh voice. "
Uffach cols
!" he swore. "What's this? Aren't you that fellow—"
    "From the airport," I said, not looking back. "Yeah. Now he thinks he's Sinbad."
    The door opened again, and Rhys shouted, "
Shorta! Shorta
!"
    I hoped that meant
police
.
    My opponent and I continued to glare. Then in a single smooth movement, he spun and vanished through the curtained doorway into the back.
    I slowly lowered my sword, my breath resuming for real. Now I felt even less guilty about using a weapon.
    "What the hell was
that
all about?"
    "I only knew I was coming to Egypt last night… I guess that's night before last, now," I said, accepting the bottle of icy cold water Rhys had bought for me. "How the hell is it this guy was waiting for me?
At the airport
!"
    "I didn't tell many people." Rhys hadn't lost the crease of concern between his blue eyes. Not while I talked to the police, and not while I bargained the merchant down to a third of his asking price for the sword that had protected me.
    Normally I'm a wimpy barterer, but after the merchant's earlier vanishing act, I was in a combative mood.
    Now I wore the sword's wooden scabbard slung innocently over my shoulder, a recent tourist's purchase. I hadn't decided on a name for the blade, yet. I would worry about concealing it later.
    "It's not your fault," I assured Rhys.
    "I told the hotel, to get you a bed. I told my friend Niko, when I asked to borrow the car. A group of people working on the project own it together, so it is possible one of the others know."
    "I never said to keep it a secret."
    "I told Tala, the woman I wish you to meet—"
    "
Rhys
." I stopped and fixed him with my best scowl, swordfight-proven. "Let's not empower fear. The man didn't even use my name. He may not have even known who I really am."
    "Then how is it that, so soon after the airport, he found you here?"
    I looked around us, at a rope of guitars hanging outside one
souk
and a rainbow of glittering material draped before another, at the press and flow of people all around us. "Well… we wouldn't have noticed anyone following us around here, that's for sure."
    "But how is it the man
could
have followed us in this crowd, and in Cairo traffic? And Maggi,
why
would he?"
    Yeah, that one had me stumped, as well.
    "Rings for rings," called the veiled woman working at the jewelry counter nearby, which made me look down at my left hand.
    My breath caught in my throat, stopping as surely as it had when Sinbad shoved his elbow into me. "Unless… "
    I could barely form the words. But the sudden rush of possibility was too horrible to keep to myself. "Unless I'm wearing some kind of tracking device."
    "But who could possibly—" Rhys apparently saw how I was staring at the wedding ring.
    The one Lex had given me.
    Lex, one of the lead members of the