Her Royal Protector (a Johari Crown Novel) (Entangled Indulgence) by Alexandra Sellers Page B

still it had been revealing—enough for him to see that her body did not need flattering clothes. She was not his type, of course, but a simple objective assessment proved that the lithe body, straight and firmly muscled, the slender, neatly curving legs and rounded butt wouldn’t turn any man from thoughts of how to get those legs wrapped around himself.
    Yet she presented with an air that said, “I am well aware that I am not a desirable woman and have no beauty to offer.” All her physical grace, all her natural sensuality, and she had more than her share of both, was unconscious. Whether putting in a stake or swimming in the sea, every gesture softened into a feminine, sensual flow.
    What was the cause of this contradiction? What made her so afraid to acknowledge her deeply sensual nature…and what would it take to break down her resistance to seeing herself as she was? It struck him for the first time that she was like a prisoner—of her own misconception about what she was.
    Something tapped at his memory, some connection, and he searched for it almost idly among his stores until it appeared—ah, yes. She was like the imprisoned princess in the old nursery tale. How did it go? She is locked in a fortress on an island, and the guards keep any rescuer from landing a boat. The prince sails in on a raft of reeds that sinks as soon as the guards run onto it, so they fail to realize that it has carried anyone to the island…
    At his elbow, the satellite phone rang. Fouad. Arif was not sorry to have his thoughts—about just how small a reed raft the prince might manage with—to be interrupted.
    “We will be in Solomon’s Foot in the morning,” he said, when the urgent business had been covered and Fouad was arranging for the pickup of the papers Arif had just signed. “You had better send the chopper at first light, though, because the scientist moves quickly.”
    “I will tell the pilot to watch for the yacht at anchor, and land on the nearest beach,” Fouad said.
    …
    In her cabin Aly wrote up her notes, prepared a new notebook for the island called Solomon’s Foot, and then sat thinking over the problem that was Arif.
    His presence wasn’t threatening only her peace of mind. Arif was also causing a huge problem for the turtle project. And she didn’t know how to cope with either one.
    Two years ago, when Richard had come out on a preliminary trip to examine a control group of turtle nests, he’d been appalled to discover that in some nests nothing at all had hatched, with no obvious cause. That was almost unprecedented. Usually only a few eggs in each nest were not viable. And if the problem spread, it would be catastrophic.
    Of course he’d brought home samples from the nests and had them forensically examined. The minimal tests the charity could afford had all showed negative for any known disease organisms. Was this some new disease, or perhaps caused by the female turtles ingesting some toxin in the water? Or was it something else? They had to find out—and to do that, they had to mark and monitor the nests though the season. Which was why Aly was here.
    But it was not as simple as it sounded. Because one of the darker possibilities was that the nests were being poisoned in an act of deliberate sabotage. And if that was the case, the saboteurs were on the same hunt as Aly. And they would quickly realize what the little red flags she was planting meant. She’d be doing their work for them.
    So they had planned to false mark most of the nests, leaving a third of nests correctly marked as a control group. At the end of the season, Aly would excavate the nests and examine the contents to see how viable the eggs had been. If the high failure rates were restricted to the correctly marked nests—their control group—and the false-marked nests showed more typical patterns of hatching, the circumstantial evidence for sabotage would be convincing. If there was no correlation, they could focus on other