Girl Trade - full length erotic adventure novel (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) (23 page)

They circled the house. The men in masks followed like demons rattling their voodoo sticks. The twin beams of a vehicle lit the undergrowth as it came towards us. It skidded to a halt. The doors swung open. Umah laid me in the back, Samir climbed in and wrapped me in a blanket. Umah sat in the centre at the front beside Mohammed. Azar let off a volley of shots in the air before climbing in beside him.

Mo put his foot down. We bumped and swerved over the track to the highway, over the long bridge, and we reached Samir’s hotel in the Arab quarter in Lagos as the sun rose over the sea, the jungle, the glass buildings and brown brick slums.

S
O, MY STORY ENDS.
.

In the coming days I was given a new passport by the
chargé d’affaires
at the British Consulate. He didn’t doubt who I was. There had been a massive search for the missing diplomat’s daughter. Anyway, he knew Daddy. They all know each other.

I spoke to Mummy on the phone. No, I didn’t want her to come and get me. I would fly home alone.

Samir had escaped the day after his father had sent me to the slave market. With his loyal crew, he followed my route, hiring small planes and cars, always one day behind. They reached Timbuktu the day after the auction and arrived in Lagos a day after me.

It had taken Samir those five days and a king’s ransom to learn through a web of petrified but greedy informers that I had been acquired by
aristos
; not primitive tribesmen, but men of power, politicians, lawmakers, oil lords. The blood ritual is an initiation into their ranks, a guarantee that, as accomplices in murder, they will protect the other members and themselves be protected. It is a cabal, a mafia. Vote rigging. The way power works behind third-world democracy, primitive and unbreakable.

The
aristos
take prostitutes from the streets for their human sacrifices. Why exactly I had been brought from Mali to play this role I do not know. But I did learn that the ceremony in the bush beyond the Third Mainland Bridge, the longest bridge in Africa, had taken place on All Soul’s Night; the one time in the year when, they believe, the portals between the living and dead open, the most important date on the Pagan Calendar, the time to give the devil what he really wants.

The scar below my left breast will remind me always that my lover had arrived in the nick of time. He had defied his father. He had taken his treasury in gold bars and it was just too sad that we would not be together. He would return home to the red fort. He would be punished, as would Mo, Azar and Umah; it was the way of the tribe and they would accept it. If I were to return with Samir, his father would have had me killed.

I remembered dreaming once that I was walking through Knightsbridge with Samir and lots of children. It was only a dream. His first loyalty was to the family and the extended family, to Maysoon, his men, to his labour delivering weary boat people to the frontiers of Europe. One day, his father would die and he would become the Emir.

The incredible thing about love is that it happens at all. It appears. It endures. I will wait.

I kissed Mo, Azar and Umah on their cheeks. Fascinating for the people on the airport concourse; a bald, tattooed white girl in a white kaftan kissing these scruffy Arabs she had come to love and had come to believe they loved her, too, each in their own way.

My sheikh came to the gate. He bowed. He touched his heart. Tears coursed over my cheeks.

‘Habibi,’ he said.

‘Come with me,’ I implored.

‘I cannot.’ He clenched his fist and held it against his heart. ‘You are here.’

‘I will wait, Samir.’

We turned away. I didn’t look back and I’m sure Samir didn’t look back, either. We had said our goodbyes in the big bed at the Arab hotel. We had made love as if there were no tomorrow and for some that will be true, for us all, in our own time.

I entered a long tunnel that whispered and listened as if for a message from the future.

At home in Fulham I swim every day. There were journalists at my door for a few weeks but, with the wisdom of the East, I never said a word and without a word being said the story of my being lost and found went away.

I run the razor over my mount every morning. Slowly a bonnet of baby curls covered my bald head. Bobby wears my clothes and the spider gorges on his pretty pink cock. At Christmas we are going to the famous costume party in Chelsea. I shall dress as an Arab sheikh. Bobby will finally take Roberta out into the world. Progress. Change. I am trying to move on and wonder, just wonder, when summer comes and the sky is blue if I might take my holiday where Columbus restocked his ships before sailing into the unknown.

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