Megan Rasmussen was, to all appearance, a perfectly ordinary girl of twenty two. Her soft brown hair fell halfway down her back, with her thick, habitually too-long bangs spilling down across her forehead and oftentimes across the tops of her black rimmed glasses, as well.

As a teaching assistant to professor Peters she taught early Egyptian history at the University of Pennsylvania while studying for her Master's degree. Her dress was thus normally quite conservative, and generally in dull colored, largely shapeless clothes which were easy to care for and did not draw annoying attention from annoying people - namely male students.

Megan was a serious academic, intent on her studies and teaching duties, and had no time for the carousing, not to mention obsessively sexual behavior of young men. She had as much interest in sports as young men generally had in early Egyptian history, which was a further point of divergence.

But Megan was also an extremely intelligent and imaginative girl who read quite a lot. This produced an active fantasy life which was nobody's business but her own, of course, and certainly didn't affect or impact her day to day life or behavior.

Or at least, it didn't used to...

Some months previously she had gone to Egypt during summer break. She had some hopes of experiencing a more historic Egypt, off the beaten path from the tourist traps, and had, to an unusual degree, succeeded, though she hadn't told anyone about it.

She had encountered Hassan bin Tariq in a market jewelry store. He was a tall, powerfully built older man who had sensed in her something no one else had to that point in time. In short order she had found herself in a tent in the desert, naked and bound, at his mercy and subject to his very skillful sexual attention.

It had been - eye opening, to say the least.

It had, perhaps coincidentally, struck a chord within her, appealing to dark inner fantasies of being a slave girl, captured by Arab princes, or taken by long ago Arab pirates on the Barbary Coast. She had done wicked, shocking, and appallingly sluttish things there in that tent, and in the desert outside, things which could make her flush even to think upon them.

She had done things which had aroused her to heights of passion and exquisite pleasure she had not known were even possible. And they had very abruptly yanked her out of her state of asexual unconcern with men into a realization that she was, in fact, a very sexual person, with sexual desires which had been heavily influenced by that single day of 'slavery' in the desert with Hassan.

Of course, any hint of what she'd done there would be scandalous to anyone she knew, and so she had spoken of it to no one. But the memories bubbled away inside her, and she felt an intense desire to once again experience that wild, dark thrill of sexual pleasure.

The university, unfortunately, was full of boys, not men. Even the adults, that was to say, the teachers, were, for the most part, mere shadows of the seething machismo Hassan had possessed. He had been a large, powerfully built man in a society which believed men of strength and strong will ought to act the part.

It was simply impossible to imagine any of the men she encountered around campus, to say nothing of the 'boys', manhandling her the way Hassan had, nor ordering her about with such a stern sense of command. Hassan was a strong man with a sense of authority and command, used to giving orders and having them instantly obeyed. Where did one find that on a campus ruled by human resources policies on gender equality, bullying and harassment?

She had dabbled somewhat with men in Philadelphia, non-academics, searching for that dark heat she'd felt during the summer, but without success. Oh, men were happy enough to get their hands on her body, for beneath the drab clothes Megan was a lithe young college student with a fit, slender body, but they had particular interest in anything behind the most obvious.

Nor was it really possible for her to be explicit in making her interests known. She was a product of her environment, after all, and simply could not bring herself to confess to some stranger that she wanted to be tied up and ... and used roughly!

Besides, that night in the desert, bound naked, stumbling along at the end of a rope led by Hassan on his camel, and fetching up by a campfire at night, had been like being dragged back into her dark romantic fantasies of Egypt's distant past.

No, if she was to experience that glorious heat again, it would have to be in the desert. And there were no deserts in Pennsylvania.

And while she could not confess her innermost desires to strangers, or indeed to anyone she knew around campus lest her reputation be ruined, she could take a chance and confess them to Hassan by email. He owned multiple jewelry stores in Cairo and was a world-traveler, after all, and after that wild day together she felt she could tell him almost anything.

She suspected he was merely a sophisticated man who had taken a chance with a somewhat naïve American tourist and gotten a good time out of it, and that he probably thought her a slut for not screaming and running. But for some reason that didn't matter. He had demonstrated a sensitivity to her needs, a keen insight into her fantasies, and a quite artful ability to rouse a sexual fever in her.

She doubted he would ever marry someone like her, but on the other hand, he did not seem to feel any great sense of contempt for her sexual immorality, as she was fairly sure most Arab men would have.

Of course, talking to Hassan was still difficult, and one of the difficulties was that she didn't entirely know herself what she wanted. It wasn't simply a repeat of what had happened in the summer. She knew that much. Ever since she'd gotten home she'd had fantasies about 'what if', about what would have happened if Hassan had kept her, or, had done as he had teasingly threatened to do, sold her at the Kasbah as a sex slave!

She was not so naïve to believe she wanted to be a sex slave for real, of course. She had her career ahead of her, after all, and generally speaking liked doing what she felt like doing, not what someone else ordered her to do. All she wanted was a ... a further taste... of her wicked dark fantasies brought to life, somewhere they wouldn't harm her reputation.

And the Christmas break was coming up.

Even with Hassan, she found it difficult to be explicit.

What I really want is an adventure, she wrote him, an adventure into Egypt's wild, dark past.

To which he reminded her that ...women had little freedom and much cruel treatment in those times. And furthermore that ...captured European women of such exquisite beauty as you were like to be used most enthusiastically by the rough men of the desert. Their bodies belonged to their captors, after all, and little interest was shown for their modesty or dignity.

Megan didn't care. The thought filled her with a dark hunger, and she trusted Hassan - to a degree - to ensure she was not harmed.