Hired Wife. Karen Van Der Zee

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      “Hi,” she murmured, burrowing into his embrace. “I’m glad you’re back.”

      “Yes,” he whispered, and kissed her deeply.

      Outside the window, the palm fronds stirred in the sea breeze.

      “Bahibik,” he whispered, a mere breath of sound feathering against her cheek, bewitching her.

      She could not see his face, his eyes. With her hands she touched the familiar outline of his cheeks and chin and nose, traced his mouth with her fingers.

      “Who are you?” she asked.

      She could feel him smile. “You know who I am, Kimmy, you know.”

      Kim got Marcus on the phone at ten minutes before eight the next morning. He was always early at his office.

      “Kim, remember you’re always saying you want to go back to the Far East one day? To work, for artistic inspiration?”

      Kim sighed longingly. “Yes, of course.” If only she could figure out how to do it—find a job over there, inherit some money, win the lottery. The family had lived on the island of Java, Indonesia, for four years and had returned to New York when Kim had been fifteen. She had loved the Far East, loved the international school she had attended and the lush, tropical beauty of the island. She had vowed she would go back when she grew up, to study maybe.

      “I’m waiting to win the lottery,” she said to Marcus.

      “Well, maybe you won’t need to. Sam’s back in New York, getting organized for…”

      Kim’s heart turned over and she didn’t hear Marcus’s voice anymore.

      “Sam?” she echoed. “You mean Samiir?”

      CHAPTER TWO

      EVEN after all those many years, just hearing his name was enough to set Kim’s pulse racing. She amazed herself. How ridiculous could a person be? She swallowed hard. Sam, short for Samiir, the Arab sheikh of her fanciful girlish dreams. She hadn’t seen him in close to eleven years, not since she was fifteen and had been hopelessly, embarrassingly in love with him. He’d been twenty-three. Oh, Lord, she’d made such a fool of herself then.

      Sam was Marcus’s college friend and Marcus had brought him home for weekends and holidays when they’d been in graduate school. She’d been in awe of his dark, handsome looks and his calm, self-possessed manner; mesmerized by his enigmatic dark eyes that held a wealth of intriguing secrets and deep passions. He was so…mysterious.

      Sam was in reality no sheikh but a full-fledged, passport-carrying American citizen whose Jordanian father and Greek mother had emigrated to the United States when he was ten.

      “You remember Samiir, don’t you?” Marcus asked.

      She sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah, vaguely,” she said casually.

      Marcus gave a hearty laugh. “Sure, sure.”

      He wasn’t deceived, of course. Unfortunately Marcus had been keenly aware of her amorous adoration of his friend, but not, she sincerely hoped, of her secret fantasies about him.

      A hopelessly romantic girl with a fertile imagination, Kim had often envisioned Sam in long flowing white robes and a cloth covering his head. She’d made up elaborate scenarios of being lost in the desert and being rescued by Sam on a camel, who then brought her back to his tent, full of beautiful rugs and copper pots and large platters of sugary sweets and fresh figs. He always, of course, fell passionately in love with her.

      Sam, however, had assured her once, when she had asked, that he had never owned any white robes or worn a cloth on his head. He had smiled magnanimously. “I was ten when I left Jordan, Kim. I wore jeans and T-shirts.” Then he’d laughed. “Don’t look so disappointed, kiddo.”

      Kiddo. He’d called her kiddo. She’d been crushed. Well, what could she expect? She was fifteen and looked twelve. She was short and skinny and wore braces on her teeth, and she was his friend’s little sister.

      Kim relaxed her fingers around the receiver and tried to focus on the conversation at hand. What had Marcus been saying? She wished her silly heart would calm down.

      “What did you say about Sam being in New York?”

      She’d heard little about Sam in the past eleven years; Marcus had once told her that he roamed the globe working for his family’s international electronics company.

      “He’s here just for a month or so. Rasheed’s Electronics is setting up another manufacturing company on Java and he’s going to live there for who knows how long. He wants someone to get him a house and furnish it and hire servants and that sort of thing.”

      “Doesn’t he have a wife to do that?”

      “No wife,” said Marcus. “Too much trouble, I think. All the demands she’d make on his time…and then she’d want children, just imagine.” Kim heard the humor in his voice. Marcus was quite happily married himself with four-year-old twin boys, terrors, and the new baby was due soon.

      “Anyway,” he continued, “he mentioned Java and I thought of you, how you’ve always wanted to go back. You could do the job easily and you’d be really good, too. I don’t know how much time you’d have for your own artistic and professional pursuits, but you could negotiate an arrangement, I’m sure.”

      The Far East. The island of Java.

      Sam.

      Setting up house for Sam.

      Was this a fortuitous opportunity or a temptation to withstand?

      A fortuitous opportunity, surely. Kim preferred to look on the bright and positive side of things; it made life so much more exciting. And hadn’t she wondered, a couple of days ago, if she should have a change of scenery? A foreshadowing thought, of course. She believed in omens, in dreams, in intuition.

      “He’s coming to my office later this afternoon,” she heard Marcus say. “We have some business to discuss. Why don’t you come by here, say…six? I’d make it dinner, except he has to be somewhere else, so that’s out.”

      “Six,” she repeated. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

      “She’s perfect,” said Marcus, looking at Kim and then back at Sam, who stood casually by the large window of Marcus’s plush office, suit jacket open, hands in his pockets, radiating masculine appeal. He was observing her closely, seriously doubting her perfection, she was sure.

      He was even more handsome than she remembered; older, more mature, his face all hard angles, his body lean and muscled under the expensive suit. He’d briefly taken her hand and smiled politely when she’d come in. “Well, hello, Kim,” he’d said. “What a pleasant surprise to see you.”

      “It’s nice to see you, too,” she’d replied, her heart about to jump out of her chest. She was grateful he hadn’t mentioned how she was all grown-up now and not the little girl he remembered.

      “She’s absolutely perfect,” Marcus emphasized.

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