Marina’s long-legged body slid beneath mine, one of the brightly colored pillows supporting the small of her back. She clasped her smooth thighs around my waist and welcomed me with a biting cry of pleasure, a gasp of unsuppressed joy, a cry of desire set free at last.
She moved beneath me, setting her own frenzied rhythm, and I felt the tips of her breasts enlarge and rise up in hunger.
My lips eagerly sought their softness, my tongue tracing gentle paths of pleasure around each eager circle as Marina moaned and murmured and whispered wild words of desire into the night.
Suddenly, I moved from her and for a split second she lay still, her gorgeous body held in suspended animation, and then she exploded against me in a frenzy of hungry passion.
“Oh, no, no,” she gasped. “Oh, God, you can’t stop... oh, no.”
She grabbed at me, pulling me over her, writhing her hips feverishly, and now she was crying little sobs.
When I returned to her she screamed in a glorious mixture of relief and desire, and her hunger was insatiable.
Her mouth found my lips, my chest, as she arched her back, thrusting upward in her feverish desire to enjoy every possible part of me.
I stayed with her this time, moving faster and faster until there were only mountain peaks, each one a little higher than the preceding one, and Marina gasped and cried out in overwhelming pleasure.
I felt her suddenly stiffen, her body grow tight around me and though her lips opened wide there was no sound from her and her deep eyes were in some other world all her own.
Only the quivering stiffness of her body told me what was happening and then, finally, she sighed, a long drawn sigh from the very depths of her innermost being, and she lay there, a limp, spent rag doll, a beautiful rag doll.
I moved beside her, laid my lips against one lovely, upturned breast, and she cradled my head against her.
“It’s been too long,” she whispered, hardly breathing. “And you knew. Somehow, you knew.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer, not for certain. Had I known, had I sensed her desires, her needs, in some subconscious way? Or had it been the reverse? Had she sensed, in me, someone with whom all that had been held back could be released?
It had then, for her, been both a surrender and a victory. It was that victory she spoke of later, when she held me close.
“We know so little about each other,” she said. “But this had to be. I knew that from the moment we met.”
Her victory, for her, had been complete but her surrender was equally so, and I knew it in the deep softness of her eyes.
I moved quickly, almost brutally so, knowing that she could no longer hold back.
“Where is Karminian?” I asked softly.
She just shook her head helplessly.
“All right,” I pressed. “Who might know where he is?”
She spoke with her eyes closed, held tightly shut, as though she didn’t want to hear her own words. “There is a man,” she said, “called Rashid the Rif. He lives in the Arab quarter. Anton spoke of having important dealings with him.”
I pressed my lips against one soft, pear-shaped breast.
“It is good you have told me, Marina,” I said, breathing softly against the pink tip. “Believe me.”
She stirred and lifted my head with her hands, gazing deeply into my eyes. “Who are you?” she asked, almost pleadingly.
“A friend,” I answered.
It was true, as far as it went. I would be a friend, and a good friend, so long as it did not conflict with my mission. Friendship, in this business, like love, had its clearly defined limits.
Marina had made me promise to return soon. It was a promise she needn’t have extracted. I had to push thoughts of her out of my mind.
The memory of her milk-white skin against the blackness of her hair, her beautifully formed breasts, her long, slender thighs, lingered in my mind, distracting, bothersome visions. Her hunger, so long denied, had not been satisfied this one time, I knew.
It was an exciting prospect to contemplate, but now I had other matters, ugly, dangerous matters.
Rashid the Rif, she had told me, and I headed for the little rug dealer in the
I searched my memory for what I knew of the Rifs. Little, long-buried facts began to sift their way up into my conscious mind.
The Rif was the fortress of Morocco, the mountainous stretch of inhospitable land in North Africa, from the tip of Morocco where it faces Spain, along the Mediterranean, to the Algerian border.
As conqueror after conqueror found out, the people of the Rif were fierce fighters, quick to anger, feeling themselves more than a little apart from the rest of their countrymen. The Romans could never conquer or subdue the Rifs in their natural stronghold. Neither could the Spaniards nor the French. The only Berber or Arab chiefs who made headway among the Rifs were those who came in peace and not to conquer.
