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confidently his clipped, assumed upper-class accent cut through the warm July air. “But would you mind awfully shifting your car? Just a few feet should do it.”
    He wound up the window at once. Don’t wait for an
    answer. Expect to be obeyed as a matter of course. Glubb
    Pasha, he thought savagely, that’s me; Lawrence of
    ArabiaHe put the car back into neutral and prayed.
    For a moment, neither Arab stirred. Then the driver, the golden one, spoke a few words out of the side of his mouth. The other wanted to argue, but the first man cut him short with a chopping gesture. They got into the Mercedes. The driver started the engine.
    The Mercedes sat there, immobile and threatening. Seconds ticked by. Why the hell didn’t they move? The answer came to him along with a sick feeling in the base of his stomach.
The Arabs were going to ram Leila’s car.
    A choky little moan forced its way through his lips. He heard Leila swallow; then she laid a hand over the nearer
    one of his, giving it a squeeze, and Colin, overloaded with inconsistent emotions, nearly fainted. He stared at her hand. Suddenly he heard a crunch of gravel, stones flew up to strike the paintwork of Leila’s Ford, and the lot was empty.
    Colin slumped back in his seat. “Thank God,” he was saying, over and over again. “Thank God, thank God…. ”
    He saw Mark stagger to his feet, dusting himself down. Why was he doing that? For a moment Colin refused to see it; then the truth burst in on him: The driver of the Mercedes had charged straight at Mark, heedless of whether he got out of the way in time.
    Colin turned to Leila. “Care to tell me what that was all about?”
    Mark came over to join them, sliding into the back seat. His face was the color of raw pastry.
    “They were … they claimed to be friends of my father.” Her voice, in contrast, was quite even. She had long ago removed her hand from his; the intimacy of that shared moment might never have been. “And it’s true I’d seen one of them about the house in Beirut, sometimes.”
    Colin waited for her to continue. When she did not, he prompted her. “We were standing in the trees, watching you. He hit you. We saw.”
    “They … “ She trailed off, staring at the dashboard, and he sensed she was thinking up some story that would satisfy them. The perception angered him. “They wanted me to go with them,” she said finally.
    “Why?”
    “They wouldn’t say. So of course I refused. That’s when he hit me.”
    “I see.” There clearly wasn’t going to be any further explanation, so Colin put the car in gear and drove off.
    For the first part of the journey back into Oxford he concentrated on keeping the car headed straight while he tried to master an irritation he knew to be pointless. If Leila chose not to confide, no appeal lay against her decision, even though he’d saved her life. Oh, childish,
childish!
he berated himself. Saved her life, what crap!
    After a while, however, the anger faded, to be replaced by a much more interesting set of feelings.
    It dawned on him that here he was, in the presence of someone he’d wanted to be close to for months now. As soon as he dared take his eyes off the road he began to glance in her direction. The white pants she was wearing stretched across the tops of her thighs in a way that made him long to reach over and stroke them. Her skin, what he could see of it, was moist with perspiration, and he thought how nice it would be to lick that, slowly, relishing each fricative stroke. But what got to him most was her smell.
    She was wearing a fragrance of some kind, but she also had an utterly distinctive body scent, rising above the artificial perfume while somehow combining with it to produce this magnificent aroma. He struggled to find words to describe it and failed. Citrus tartness was there, something herbal as well, musk…. Colin didn’t know what musk smelled like, but he knew this had to be musk from the way he kept taking deep