“Thanks, Clara. Guess I should call someone to fix my car. I’ll be right back. I left my phone underneath the front seat.”

Wearing the neatly stacked pajama top and bottoms she had found on the floor beside the bed, she stepped outside and looked around. Her car was gone. She ran to the side of the house where she had often parked her car when she was a teenager but it was not there. Calling Clara’s name as she ran back to the house, she was frantic.

“My car is gone!”

“I believe Adal took it to the mechanic to be fixed. Our prophet is very kind.”

Clara didn’t look at Olivia as she spoke. She hated to lie, but she had no idea what had happened to Olivia’s car. She had a suspicion, though, that Adal had taken it. A car as nice as Olivia’s would bring a pretty penny which would go far in caring for the prophet’s flock.

Olivia spent the time waiting for Adal to return going through her childhood things. She sat down on the floor and sifted through old photographs of happy times at her house in the mountains of Utah. The old home had been a sanctuary for her during her awkward teenage years. She had broken her arm when she fell out of the huge tree on the front lawn, but it hadn’t stopped her from climbing it again. She wiped away a tear when she thought about the years she had spent here. It was all she had known until she signed with a modeling agency and moved to New York. Now this place was all she had left of her parents.

She lay down on her childhood bed and closed her eyes. Her mind drifted back to the night before and to the soup dinner and the wine that had tasted so good she drank it one gulp. Then she remembered feeling odd, with every one of her senses heightened, and the most wonderful man making love to her all night long. But he was gone when she woke up. Who was he? As Olivia lay there, she thought that maybe she could be in love, or at least lust. She drifted in and out of sleep, with hazy snapshots of her mystery man fading and slowly coming into view. He was a man with dark hair and dark eyes, but she couldn’t quite see his face. She remembered his naked body and how he felt inside of her. He was as good as the billionaire lovers she had known while modeling. In fact, she had thought it was one of her billionaire lovers at first, but then… Olivia sat straight up. “It was Adal.” Olivia’s heart was racing. She hated that man.




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