Free A Foreign Affair by Stella Russell Page A

camel. Cheekbones as high as an Aztec king’s flanked a nose as nobly hooked as any Saudi prince’s and all his features were moulded in the sort of caramel-tinted skin one finds in the East Indies. Shining black eyes the shape of liquorice drops would not have shamed a Javan princess. Matching shiny black hair cut en brosse and a pair of, frankly, embarrassingly kissable lips only enhanced the whole. And all the aforementioned was set off to perfection, of course, by a sober grey futa , an Egyptian cotton white shirt and a pair of simple, good quality Italian leather sandals.
    South-east Asian crossed with desert Bedouin and then again with a lumberjack or ice-hockey player from somewhere in the northern hemisphere, it struck me that he was to the human race what fusion is to fashionable cuisine – sophisticated, intriguing and utterly surprising. Just one of his ingredients in the wrong place or quantity and the result could have been a repellent dog’s dinner. But who was he, and how and why had he come to involve himself in such a perilous operation to rescue a foreign stranger?
    The time was not yet right for personal introductions. For a start, Aziz needed medical attention. Thanks to a passing bullet having shaved off most of his left nostril, the pretty pink shirt and futa he’d been wearing the day before were drenched in blood. And, although our borrowed camels had survived their ordeal with hardly a scratch - fetlocks and all - it was clear that the fourth member of our little party was missing in action, presumed dead. He had toppled off his mount leaving my case securely fastened to the pommel of his saddle by an elastic bungee cord.
    Once I’d absorbed the ghastly shock that my rescue had cost a man his life, I supplied Aziz with a couple of L’Oreal wet-wipes from my case and began to explain to my companions how the baked bean deal I’d neatly struck with Abu Abdul Wahhab would actually have resulted in my being dropped off at the Aden Sheraton no later than lunch-time that day. The mysterious stranger’s admiring laughter at my action replay of the old stick insect reaching out to grab the can of beans and the tin of mustard gave me a surprisingly fine view of some golden molars though, by my reckoning, his sense of humour was a still more bankable asset. Who on earth could this man in many million be, I wondered, but it was still not the moment to enquire.
    ‘You may be interested to know Madam,’ he was saying, ‘that the person you refer to as ‘a stick insect’ is the old Sultan of the bin Husis. He was one of perhaps fifty little sultans who ruled the tribes around Aden with guidance and financial backing from the British until the end of British rule in 1967,’ he told me, filling and then offering me the battered tin cup to drink from. ‘The British sometimes sent people like him to school in England to turn them into competent administrators. But I’m surprised you were not forced to taste his bitterness against perfidious Albion for betraying the defence treaty they all signed with London in the 19th century, and for feeding them to the Marxist wolves in ‘67!’
    ‘No, no bitterness at all – quite the reverse I would say!’
    ‘Very, very interesting,’ he said, with a meaningful look at Aziz as he loosened the girth of one of the camels, ‘A wise man! Like most of us in the south he knows that we were better off under the British all those years ago than under own home-made Marxists, let alone this band of thieves in Sanaa...’
    I was about to cut short any political diatribe by seizing the opportunity to ask him to identify himself and explain his presence when Aziz interrupted to say in a distinctly aggrieved tone, ‘Madam Roza, don’t you want to know how we tracked you down so quickly?’
    He’d had a very hard night so could be forgiven some tetchiness, but I suspected that my friend was battling a powerful sexual jealousy, that his nose was not only butchered but