To Catch a Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

her.
    She whirled and found a huge man looming over her, his hideously scarred face bristling with a large black mustache. Ayisha recognized him at once. He was known to all who lived on the streets as the Greek, Zamil’s Greek, the fastest man with a knife in all of Cairo. And the most vicious.
    “Well, speak up! Trying to sneak a look at Zamil’s merchandise, eh?” He bent and thrust his face close to Ayisha’s, grinning through teeth that were broken and blackened. Several had been filed to points. His breath was fetid.
    Fatal to show fear in front of such a man. Ayisha jerked her head casually toward the door. “My master, the English lord, is in there.”
    “Master!” The Greek sneered. “No customer of Zamil, let alone an English lord, would keep a scrawny, ragged pup like yourself in his service. Get thee gone, whelp—unless—” His eyes ran over her and his smile turned into a leer that made Ayisha sick to her stomach. “Unless you have something to sell.”
    Her skin crawled, but she pretended not to notice his interest. “Nay, I sell only information, effendi. Who do you think guided the foreign lord to this house? Do you think his tame servant would have knowledge of Zamil’s?”
    She snorted, then gave the big man a cheeky look. “Perhaps the great Zamil—or his most excellent right-hand man—will reward me for it, eh?”
    The Greek stared a moment, then threw back his head in a roar of laughter. “I like thee, bantam,” he said and thumped Ayisha on the back.
    He bashed a meaty fist on the door and the grill opened. The Greek said, “This cheeky monkey thinks he is old enough to gaze upon Zamil’s merchandise. Let him in to join his master.” As the door swung open, he said to Ayisha, “Take care of those big eyes, bantam.”
    “My eyes?” She frowned.
    “That they do not pop out of their sockets when they see Zamil’s women,” he said, and both men roared at the joke.
    Ayisha managed a halfhearted grin and sauntered jauntily through the entrance as if her heart were not thudding like a drum. The door shut with heavy finality behind her, and she stood in another world, a world far removed from the dusty, crumbling city.
    She stood in a courtyard, paved with honey-colored stone, framed by carved arches and fluted columns. A fountain tinkled into a pond on which water lilies floated. Jasmine coiled up an elegant wrought-iron screen.
    A dozen richly dressed men waited in the courtyard, each with servants in attendance. They talked among themselves, the sort of talking strangers did while waiting for something to happen. In a shadowed doorway a tall Turk stood, giving orders to unseen people within.
    She knew what they were waiting for. Her stomach clenched. She wanted to flee, to be on the other side of that big ironbound door. The safe side.
    Servants brought refreshments to the waiting men: tea, sherbet, small exquisite dishes of food. She could smell the food, fragrant and delicious. She was hungry; she hadn’t eaten all day, but even if they offered her anything—which they would not—she couldn’t swallow a morsel. Not in this place.
    She spotted the Englishman on the far side of the courtyard. His foreign clothing drew curious and faintly hostile glances, but he stood, apparently unconcerned, looking about him with a cool, unreadable expression.
    Keeping her head down, she wandered over, taking care to remain inconspicuous, and took up position behind him, squatting humbly against the wall as the lowliest servant would, waiting for his master.
    The Englishman said something to his interpreter who moved toward a man sitting on a raised stand in the other corner of the courtyard, a plump man in flowing silken robes. Zamil.
    He was intercepted after three paces by Zamil’s men, but after a short conversation, was escorted to Zamil by his minions. A few moments later Zamil waved the Englishman forward.
    Ayisha slipped through the crowd to get closer.
    He pulled out the folder and