Free One Way or Another: A Novel by Elizabeth Adler Page A

the gifts, the flowers, the trinkets … who knew if those women would even so much as consider him. Sexually.
    His mother found out about his affair with Fleur and her sudden mysterious death. She knew what her son was capable of and threatened to expose him unless he gave her a share of the money. The mother was as ruthless as the son, only far simpler.
    It had been so easy with Fleur that drowning was to become Ahmet’s favorite method of disposal. His mother was his second victim, after, of course, he had taken out an insurance policy on her life, not a vast amount because he did not yet have the funds to pay for anything like that, but sufficient to get him to his next goal in life. Which was away from Egypt, away from home, away from his own identity. Ahmet needed to become a new man. So he reinvented himself.
    Ahmet was intelligent and now he claimed to have attended good schools, a fact no one ever seemed to check, and certainly never challenged, taking him at his confident word. He’d become an attractive man, middle height, stockily built with olive-toned skin and eyes so deeply set and so dark they looked almost black behind the tinted lenses he always wore. Those glasses were to become a part of his “look,” along with the Savile Row suits, the floral silk pocket handkerchiefs, and the faint aroma of Violettes de Parme, a perfume made only for him in Paris.
    But it was Ahmet’s charm that brought him success. He worked hard at losing his accent and his deep soft voice acquired an almost British tone, though he was careful not to overdo it, which might have meant one of those upper-class Brits asking what school he had attended. He would have had to lie, and he knew lies had a way of coming back at you, leaving you more entangled than when you started out. He’d also learned that the hard way. Life’s experiences accounted for a lot of the way Ahmet had turned out, the man he finally became: rich, successful, admired by many, sought after by women, who mostly, he suspected, would like to get their hands on his money, but he had Greek billionaire examples to show him that was not the way to go.
    Besides, he did not like women. He used them for sex, always charming them first, of course, then later for the other, deeper pleasures. There was no longer anything rough at the edges about Ahmet. He did not want cheap hookers; he wanted women who responded to his wealth and his billionaire aura, yet somehow he still could not get along with aristocratic, wealthy women. With his hidden background and the mental issues that remained from his poverty-stricken youth and his slut of a mother, as well as the father he had never known, Ahmet needed to keep himself strictly private. Upper-class Brits knew everything about everybody else. That was how you counted in their world.
    Which is why he had so often ended up with girls like Angie. Nice, simple young women, attractive of course, that was a given, and with no background to speak of, no one to look out for them, no one to come looking for them when they disappeared. He believed no one would miss the Angies of the world, and so far they never had. Angie was the perfect target. He enjoyed her so much, enjoyed best of all seeing her long red hair floating in the wake of the Lady Marina as he’d taken off, full-speed ahead. None of the crew so much as knew she was missing, since it was none of their business where she was at any time or, in fact, who their boss was with or even if she was on the ship. Only his longtime assistant, Mehitabel, who had been with him forever and was utterly devoted, knew anything about Ahmet’s sexual proclivities, his need for violence, his ultimate fascination in death.
    Pleased, Ahmet had decided it was time to move on. And that’s when the call came through from the gulet, Zeus, that they had taken on board a badly injured young woman, an almost drowned young woman. Ahmet did not have to ask if she had red hair. There could only be one