Page 2 of The Earl That Got Away (Sirens in Silk #2)

Chapter Two

Before

Philadelphia

A re we in good company?” Auntie Majida asked Cousin Hamda in Arabic as they surveyed the couples dancing in the assembly room.

Naila tapped her foot to the beat of the music, not giving a fig whether they were in respectable company. She was thrilled to be at a party and couldn’t wait to dance.

Hamda, a brisk, no-nonsense woman, bristled. “Of course, Majida. Do you think I’d bring you around people who are lower than us?”

“Why are you getting upset?” Majida sniffed. “I was just asking. I wouldn’t want to expose Naila to bad people when her parents trusted me to bring her with me to visit you.”

Hamda’s face reddened. “You insult me by suggesting I would subject a young, unmarried girl to bad people?”

Naila barely heard the bickering between the older ladies. She was accustomed to their squabbling about the smallest perceived insult. Majida and Hamda were cousins who’d grown up together until Hamda married and moved to Philadelphia decades ago.

Naila sighed. It was warm in the hall and she was bored. She’d been in Philadelphia for three days with little entertainment. Thankfully, her cousin Eyad’s employer invited them to this amusement. But no one had asked her to dance yet.

She tried to catch Eyad’s eye across the dance floor in hopes that he’d come rescue her from the quarreling aunties. But her cousin was too busy chatting with a group of young men to notice.

“Your blood is so thick,” Hamda was saying to Majida, accusing her of being obnoxiously heavy-handed.

Majida’s eyes rounded. “That is how to talk to your guest?”

Naila’s gaze locked on the half-open door to the terrace. A cool breeze across her overheated skin would be very welcome. She edged away while the wrangling aunties were too preoccupied to notice.

Once she was close enough to the exit, she slipped outside.

Freedom! It was delicious. She hurried down the stairs into the garden where it would be harder to be detected.

The air was cool and fresh, the scent of roses wafting through the air.

The sound of masculine laughter from deep in the garden grew louder.

Naila quickly stepped behind a rose-covered lattice.

The last thing she needed was the ridiculous scandal that would surely erupt if she ended up in the garden alone with strange men.

The rich floral scent filled her nostrils as she watched the garden denizens approach. It was an older couple, the man with a shock of white hair, accompanied by a woman whose dark curls were streaked with silver. They looked around before stealing a quick kiss.

Naila smiled. She rarely saw old married couples openly dote on each other. Whenever Baba, who was naturally affectionate, tried to pull Mama in for a kiss, she blushed and pushed him away, chastising Baba for being a silly old man.

Naila tracked the couple until they disappeared into the ballroom. That’s when a match struck close by.

Very close by.

Naila froze. She was so focused on remaining out of sight that she hadn’t realized she wasn’t alone. Taking a breath, she turned toward the sound of the match. Playful dark eyes, illuminated by the flame, sparkled back at her.

“Oh!” she said.

He inhaled as he lit his cigarette. “My apologies,” he spoke in a clipped British accent. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He wasn’t American. Relief slid through her. The chances of Auntie Hamda’s family being acquainted with an Englishman were almost nil. Word of Naila’s solo garden encounter with this inglese —this very handsome-seeming inglese from what she could tell—was unlikely to reach them.

She relaxed a fraction. Even as her eyes adjusted to the low light, she could barely make out his features beyond the high forehead and aristocratic nose, the smooth, flexible lips puckering around the cigarette.

“Favor a fag?” he asked.

She tore her eyes away from his supple mouth. “A what?”

“I guess you Americans call them cigarettes.” She registered the amusement in his voice. Was he insulting her by offering her a smoke?

“Do respectable young ladies in England enjoy cigarettes?” she asked.

He chuckled. “Not in public. But I am rather certain that those who do indulge do so while hiding out in dark gardens.”

Naila had snuck a cigarette or two. Sometimes, she and her cousins crept to the rooftop to share a pilfered cigarette at the family row house on Henry Street.

That was one advantage of having a large extended family.

There were eighteen cousins on Baba’s side of the family and thirteen on Mama’s, too many bodies for the adults to notice when a handful of cousins vanished for a little while.

Naila considered the inglese ’s offer. So far, Philadelphia was completely boring and she was in the mood for adventure. “Maybe just one.”

He smiled, baring a mouthful of nice-looking teeth.

Naila felt a little warm inside. She took the proffered cigarette and watched him strike another match, this one just for her.

She placed the cigarette between her lips and noted how his eyes focused on her mouth as she inhaled long and slow, lighting the cigarette.

“Ah,” he remarked. “Not a novice then.” He pursed his lips and blew, extinguishing the flame.

Naila could barely tear her eyes away from his mouth.

His accent made him seem much more worldly and dashing than American boys with their flat intonations, even though she knew how a person sounded had nothing to do with either of those things.

“You’re a surprise,” he remarked.

“You don’t know me at all.” She blew out a smooth column of smoke, feeling very daring and grown-up. “Everything about me should come as a surprise.”

“You are quite right. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Basil. May I have the pleasure of knowing yours?”

“Could you have a more English name?”

“I could be called Sebastian, I suppose.”

He had a sense of humor. She liked that. “My name is Naila.”

“A lovely name for a lovely lady. And unusual. I cannot say I’ve heard it before.”

“Because it’s Arab. My parents emigrated from Palestine.” She waited for him to react. To look down on her, but interest lit his eyes.

“In the Levant? How fascinating.”

His voice, so elegant and debonair, slid along her skin like a velvet glove. “I’ve never been there,” she told him. “I was born in Brooklyn.”

“In New York? I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing New York as of yet. I am visiting my uncle.”

“Your uncle lives in Philadelphia?”

“Yes. He is the proprietor of a business concern here.” He tilted his head back and exhaled, smoke billowing out of his rounded lips. “I might take it over, as he has no children.”

She studied his noble profile, the defined nose and sharply hewn chin. “You would settle here? In America?”

“Why not?” His eyes sparkled when he looked at her. “I am learning there are many enticements here.”

Her cheeks heated. He was flirting with her. Naila was accustomed to boys back home in Little Syria running after her. But they were just that—boys. The inglese was a full-grown man. A thrill coursed through Naila at the realization that her feminine appeal extended beyond neighborhood youths.

“Why would you move here?” She tapped the ashes off her cigarette. “I should think an inglese like you would have a country mansion to return to.”

“ Inglese ?” he repeated, a question in his eyes.

Naila blushed. She hadn’t intended to call him that to his face. “It means Englishman in Arabic.” She dropped her gaze. “My apologies.”

“Don’t be sorry.” He blew a column of smoke toward the blue-black sky. “I’m flattered that you already have a pet name for me.”

Her cheeks burned hotter. Thank goodness it was dark so he couldn’t see how red her face surely was.

“Alas,” he continued, his teeth gleaming in the low light of the garden, “I am not a lord, nor a duke nor an earl. It is peers of the realm, or men of significant wealth, who possess the grand manor houses that you speak of. I am just an ordinary person.”

Ordinary. Ha! If this was what all men in England were like, she’d book her passage there first thing tomorrow.

It was odd to be sitting behind the trellis talking to a man she barely knew.

And yet, weirdly, Basil didn’t seem like a stranger.

Something in her recognized him, which made no sense at all.

“Why were you hiding behind the roses?” she asked, drawing on her cigarette.

“Same as you, I suspect. I didn’t want to embarrass the clandestine couple.”

“It is a relief that they did not see us.”

He eyed her billowing skirts. “It’s a wonder they missed you in that rather vivid orange gown.”

She grinned. “The dressmaker said it was tangerine. I adore bright colors. Tangerine most of all.”

“It suits you. A vibrant color for a vibrant woman.”

She wondered if that meant he thought she was too much. She shrugged. He was a stranger. What did she care what he thought of her? “How lovely was that older couple? Imagine being married that long and still sneaking kisses.”

“It would be lovely, I suppose, if they were actually wed.”

“What?”

“They are not married,” he informed her.

“How scandalous!” she returned with mock horror.

“You do not know the half of it.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. “I should clarify. They are not wed to each other.”

Now she was truly scandalized. “Are you saying—?”

“That they appear to be conducting an illicit affair? Yes. Each is married to someone else.”

She’d never encountered anything so deliciously shocking in real life. She wasn’t sure whether to believe him. “How do you know?”

He laughed. A deep rumbling sound. “The gentleman is a business associate of my uncle. I have met his wife and the woman with him this evening was not her.”

“Why would anyone sneak intimacies in the garden?”

His gaze dropped to her lips. “I can definitely see the appeal.”

Naila’s breath caught. Her blood simmered in her veins.

Something was happening. The air thickened with the heat arcing between them, sparks that had nothing to do with her cigarette.

More than a few boys back in Little Syria had tried to steal a kiss from Naila.

But this was the first time in her life that she was actually tempted to let a man take liberties.

“Are you flirting with me?” she asked, pretending to be accustomed to drawing the interest of appealing strangers.

“American girls are very direct.” His gaze dipped to her mouth yet again. “It is a very attractive trait.”

Nervous, Naila licked her lips. Wanting churned deep in her belly. She’d never understood how a girl could just throw away her reputation by getting mixed up with a boy. But now she did. It was like her body took on a mind of its own, leaving her brain with no say in the matter.

Alarm shot through her. Naila stamped out her cigarette and stood abruptly. “I must go!” she said and fled back to the safety of ballroom.