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Escape from Cabriz
Linda Lael Miller
On the eve of her wedding to the Crown Prince of Cabriz, Kristin Meyers is having more than prewedding jitters–her childhood friend Jascha has become a cold, distant stranger.And when his palace comes under attack from angry rebels, Kristin is caught in the cross fire. Then Zach Harmon arrives and everything changes. The ex-secret service agent and Kristin had been lovers–until circumstances tore them apart.Now Zach might be able to get her out of Cabriz alive, but who will save her heart from being broken by Zach one more time?
Escape from Cabriz
New York Times Bestselling Author
Linda Lael Miller
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
On the eve of her wedding to the Crown Prince of Cabriz, Kristin Meyers is having more than prewedding jitters—her childhood friend Jascha has become a cold, distant stranger. And when his palace comes under attack from angry rebels, Kristin is caught in the cross fire.
Then Zach Harmon arrives and everything changes. The ex-secret service agent and Kristin had been lovers—until circumstances tore them apart. Now Zach might be able to get her out of Cabriz alive, but who will save her heart from being broken by Zach one more time?
Contents
Chapter One (#u79d7c1bb-24a2-56be-ae48-1549372d8c25)
Chapter Two (#u95440c5f-2527-54ad-868a-595eb113c0f9)
Chapter Three (#u058d80f9-9559-5abc-9440-4545a5664223)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
1
The roar of the ocean followed Zachary Harmon across the weathered deck and inside his beach house. Shivering with cold, he pushed the sliding glass door closed and peeled off his sodden blue sweatshirt, tossing it into the oversize closet where the washer and drier were hidden. Then he hooked his thumbs under the waistband of his orange running shorts.
He was just about to remove them and send them flying after the sweatshirt when the flickering screen of the small color TV affixed to the underside of one of the kitchen cupboards drew his attention. As usual, he’d forgotten to turn it off before going out.
The pit of Zachary’s stomach did a carnival-ride pitch-and-spin as he stood there in the middle of the kitchen floor, dripping rainwater and staring.
The voice of the TV anchorman seemed to weave in and out of his consciousness. “The political climate in the small Southeast Asian country of Cabriz is worsening by the hour as warring factions grapple for control of the government. A spokesman for the State Department says Americans in Cabriz may be in serious danger… embassies being closed…”
Zachary shut his eyes momentarily against an onslaught of memories and fears. The Cabrizian man-on-the-street was a pretty laid-back guy, mostly concerned with harvesting a few acres of rice and keeping his ox from being repossessed, but some of the rebels were into imaginative atrocities.
And Kristin was in Cabriz.
The newscaster went on to another subject, after promising regular updates on the situation in Southeast Asia, and Zachary snapped off the TV set. He stood with his hands braced against the counter, mentally sifting through all the memorized data he had on Cabriz—which was considerable, since he’d spent so much time there while he’d been with the agency.
He went to the other counter and poured a cup of coffee. There were several rebel factions in Cabriz—all made up of wild-eyed fanatics bent on overthrowing the existing dictatorship. Just twenty-four hours before, the beleaguered government had broken off diplomatic relations with the United States, Great Britain and Canada because of their refusal to step in militarily.
Kristin, by an act of supreme idiocy, had aligned herself with the royal family. Zachary raised the mug of steaming coffee to his mouth and cursed when he burned his tongue. The fact that Kristin planned to marry Jascha, the crown prince of Cabriz, was still difficult to accept.
It wounded him that their time together had meant so little to her.
Zachary set the mug down with a thump. Kristin’s position was precarious, to say the least; she would be roughly as popular in Cabriz as Marie Antoinette had been in Paris after the fall of the Bastille.
The fingers of Zachary’s right hand knotted into a fist, and he pounded the counter once, to vent some of his frustration. Kristin couldn’t really be in love with that guy; it wasn’t possible.
Because he needed something to do, he reached for the telephone receiver and punched out a number he’d never forgotten.
“Perry King’s office,” a pleasant female voice chimed.
“This is Zachary Harmon,” was the brusque reply. “Put me through.”
The secretary hesitated for only a moment, then there was a blipping sound and Perry came on the line.
“Hello, Zachary,” he said warmly.
Zachary stated his business, sparing the polite preamble. “What idiot let Kristin Meyers leave for Cabriz when the damn government is collapsing?”
Perry sighed heavily. “She went there to marry the crown prince. Besides, she’s the daughter of an ambassador turned cabinet member, in case you’ve forgotten. It probably took one phone call.”
“Any plans to go in after her?”
“God knows, the Secretary wants her out of there yesterday, but we can’t forget that Miss Meyers is in the country of her own free will. After all, she’s—er—well, like I said, she’s supposed to be getting married any day now.”
A shaft of pain speared Zachary’s middle. “Dammit, P.K., that airhead socialite probably doesn’t have the first idea of what she’s messing with. Chances are, the prince is planning to use her as leverage to get the administration to step in with military aid. And you know their position on that!”
“Zach, are you volunteering to go in?”
Zachary thought of the quiet, peaceful life he’d built for himself. No demands, no pressures, no emergency missions in the middle of the night. He didn’t even have a dog to feed.
He had things set up just the way he wanted them. He taught political science at Silver Shores Junior College, because it was easy and because it allowed him to live near the ocean, and he grew tomatoes in clay pots.
“Zachary?” his friend and former employer prompted.
“Yes, dammit,” Zachary replied, thinking of defiant green eyes and long brown hair that caught the sunlight and turned it to fire. “I want to go in and get Kristin. And don’t remind me that I resigned from the agency eighteen months ago. Nobody’s better qualified, even now.”
Perry sighed again. “That’s true. But I can’t just give you the go-ahead—I have to make a few calls before I can do that. So sit tight—you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Zachary grumbled, then hung up with a crash. He was already planning to leave within the next twenty-four hours, whether the trip was sanctioned by Washington or not. He knew a thousand ways in and out of Cabriz.
An hour later, showered and clad in blue jeans, dry sneakers and a navy sweatshirt, Zachary stood at the stove, stirring a pan of canned spaghetti and watching another update on the cable news channel. The telephone jangled, and he had the receiver in his hand before the first ring faded.
“Harmon,” he snapped.
The answering voice belonged to one of the president’s favorite men—and Zachary’s least favorite—Kristin’s father. “This is Kenyan Meyers. I’ve just spent some time on the telephone with Perry King, over at the State Department. He tells me you’re willing to go into Cabriz and bring Kristin home.”
“That’s right,” Zachary replied. He wasn’t awed by Meyers; he’d dealt with more powerful men, but he was on guard because of all that had happened between him and Kristin. And because he knew the Secretary was about as benevolent as a cobra with PMS.
Meyers paused for a moment before replying. “You’re aware, of course, that Kristin may well want to stay in Cabriz. Especially if the marriage has already taken place.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
“Fine. One of our planes will pick you up in Seattle in exactly ten hours—you know the procedure, I’m sure. You’ll be briefed on the current state of affairs during the flight.”
“Thanks.” Zachary was moving to hang up when Meyers spoke again. He put the receiver back to his ear.
“Bring my daughter home, Harmon, whether she’s agreeable or not. She has no idea what kind of situation she’s gotten herself into.”
The only thing Zachary could have promised anyone at that point was that if Kristin was still alive when he arrived in Cabriz, he was going to strangle her personally. And he wasn’t laboring under any flowery delusions that Meyers’s true concerns were for Kristin. He definitely had some important political ax to grind. “I’ll be in contact with you as soon as I can, Mr. Secretary,” Zachary replied evenly, and the call was over.
Kristin’s bravado was beginning to desert her as she stood beside a veiled servant woman at one of the windows, watching as Jascha’s troops drilled in the dusty streets of the city of Kiri, Cabriz’s capital. The place seemed so different now, so unfamiliar. It was hard to believe she’d grown up only a few blocks away, in the American embassy.
With a sigh, Kristin sank into a rattan chair, one blue-jeaned leg slung over the arm, and let her head fall back. She closed her eyes and thought of the day she’d left Cabriz, at seventeen. She’d finished her high school work, with the help of her tutor, and now it was time to return to America….
“I don’t want to leave you,” she sniffled, looking up at Jascha’s face though a blur of tears. Overhead a lemon tree blossomed, dropping delicate white petals all around them, like snow.
Jascha was a prince, in every sense of the word. With his dark hair and eyes and exquisitely tailored clothes, he could have stepped out of the pages of a storybook. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, his strong hands holding her shoulders. “Do not cry, Kristin,” he said, his voice a ragged whisper. “One day you will come back to Cabriz, and you and I will reign together.”
Kristin swallowed, hardly daring to believe the fairy tale even though she and Jascha had discussed it many times. “But your father has seven wives,” she said, echoing her mother’s pet reason why nothing could ever come of Jascha and Kristin’s bittersweet romance.
Jascha traced the line of her cheek with a smooth thumb. “You will be my only wife, little lemon flower. This I promise you.”
Kristin believed him, perhaps because she was seventeen and he was the first man she’d ever loved, and threw herself into his arms even as her father called impatiently from the other side of the embassy courtyard. Jascha kissed her soundly before stepping aside, his hands caught together behind his back, to await the ambassador’s appearance.
Almost regretfully, Kristin came back to the here and now. Her parents had looked upon her earlier relationship with Jascha as a teenage infatuation and therefore hadn’t taken it too seriously, but they were strenuously opposed to the marriage that was about to take place. Even if the political system hadn’t been in chaos, they probably wouldn’t have attended the wedding.
Kristin sighed, possessed by a strange loneliness. She loved Jascha, she insisted to herself. She had loved him since childhood, when the two of them had played on the palace lawn.
But it wasn’t Jascha’s handsome face that came into her thoughts as she rose from her chair and went to stand looking out on the courtyard. It was Zachary Harmon’s.
Just the memory made her furious. She had no business thinking about Zachary—he was nothing but a self-centered adventurer, afraid of commitment and responsibility. She’d never really cared for him.
The swift, secret sensations in Kristin’s body gave the lie to that idea. Maybe the emotional attachment had ended, but she still felt a physical response every time he invaded her mind.
Mercifully, she reflected with a lift of her chin, that didn’t happen often.
She turned from the glass door and surveyed the sumptuous bedroom that would be hers until after the wedding ceremony. There was a lovely gauzy white spread on the enormous teakwood bed, and rattan chairs with bright floral cushions were everywhere. In less than twenty-four hours Kristin would leave this room for Jascha’s.
She sank her teeth into her lower lip as she went to a nearby table and picked up her camera. She wondered what kind of lover Jascha would be, then put the thought out of her mind. She would find that out soon enough.
After attaching the telephoto lens, Kristin carried her camera back to the terrace door, focused and began taking pictures of Jascha’s troops drilling in the courtyard. “The photo-diary of a future princess,” she muttered to herself.
Kristin was so involved in picture taking that she didn’t hear the door of her room open, didn’t know Jascha was there until he turned her gently to face him.
As always, she was struck by his imperial good looks. His exiled father was Asian, but his mother had come from India, and he had her round, dark eyes. He wore slacks, a jacket and a tailored shirt, putting on his uniform only for state occasions. He took the camera from her hands—a little impatiently, it seemed to Kristin—and set it aside.
“Do you wish to go back to the United States?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the troops she’d been capturing on film. “There could be war at any moment.”
Kristin had some feelings she didn’t want to explore just then, but she’d been well trained in the art of loyalty. She smiled, laid her hands on Jascha’s broad shoulders and shook her head. The two of them had played together as children, fallen in love as teenagers, and later Jascha had persuaded his father to allow him to go to college in Massachusetts—the same one Kristin had attended. They’d dated steadily then.
Later, when Kristin had moved to California to work on an advanced degree and Jascha had returned home, they had written each other long, soul-searching letters.
Until Zachary came along, that is. Kristin had truly thought she was in love with him—it must have been the secret-agent mystique—and even moved into his apartment.
Kristin had crawled away from that relationship, emotionally speaking, not caring whether she lived or died. It had been Jascha who had made the difference; somehow he’d learned what had happened and he’d come to her. Twenty-four hours a day he’d pursued her, sending flowers and jewelry, whisking her off to other parts of the world in his private jet, promising he would never, ever hurt her.
In her vulnerable position, it had been easy to buy into the fantasy. Now, far from her friends and family, Kristin was beginning to come out of the daze induced by her breakup with Zachary, and she could no longer ignore her doubts.
Jascha bent his head and kissed her, lightly at first and then with increasing passion. Kristin waited to feel some kind of physical response, as she had in the old days, before Zachary, but nothing happened.
Still unwilling to face the growing suspicion that she’d made a disastrous mistake, Kristin marked her coolness down to prewedding jitters.
There was a certain sadness in Jascha’s dark eyes as he drew back to look at her. The edge of his thumb grazed her cheek lightly as he muttered, “Kristin. My lovely, lovely Kristin. I am afraid for you. I should not have brought you here.”
In the distance Kristin heard the ominous popping sound of gunshots, and the drilling of the troops went on. She forced herself to smile. “Whatever happens, Jascha, I want to be with you.”
He bent to nibble at the side of her neck, and one of his hands lightly cupped her breast.
To her own surprise, as much as Jascha’s, Kristin bolted backward out of his embrace.
Jascha was not without temperament, and his well-sculpted lips formed a royal pout. “You still think of him,” he accused. “The man you lived with in California.”
Kristin shook her head, acutely aware that he was right. “No. it’s just that—it’s just that I think we should wait. Until after our wedding.”
He folded his strong arms and cocked his head to one side, and for the first time, Kristin knew he was considering forcing her. Although he had always been kind, she was well aware of Jascha’s legendary temper.
“You want to keep yourself chaste,” he said evenly. “Yet for twelve months you slept in Zachary Harmon’s bed. Surely you see that we have a contradiction in terms here.”
Kristin retreated another step. Jascha had never used this tone with her before; it had to be the stresses of his precarious political situation. “The time I spent with Zachary was a mistake,” she answered evenly. “If I could go back and change it, I would.”
Jascha advanced toward her, trapping her between himself and the bed. “You will find me a more than satisfactory lover,” he said in a low voice, pulling the tails of her cotton shirt from her jeans.
Panic wrapped itself around Kristin like a lash, sudden and strange. Where once she had burned to give herself to this man, now she was frightened, even repulsed, by his touch. “Jascha, no,” she whispered, crossing her forearms in front of her chest and struggling to stay upright.
He flung her onto the bed and held her wrists together high above her head. With his free hand, he began unbuttoning her shirt.
Kristin twisted, trying vainly to break away, filled with fear and rage. The warnings she’d heard from her parents and friends screamed in her mind. He’ll have absolute control over you—in his culture, women are property—you’ve only seen the Jascha he wanted you to see….
Just as Jascha bared one of Kristin’s breasts and closed his hand over it, the door of the bedroom opened and Mai entered, carrying tea. Although her eyes were downcast, as became a lowly servant in the presence of her prince, she obviously knew what was going on. And she wasn’t about to leave.
Jascha muttered a curse and released Kristin, storming out of the room and slamming the door behind him.
Too mortified to meet Mai’s gaze, Kristin sat up, righted her bra and buttoned her shirt. Because she didn’t know what to say, she was silent.
Mai busied herself laying out the tiny bowls in which tea was served, along with the small sweet cakes she knew Kristin loved. “Weather is hot. Perhaps Miss Kristin like to bathe in swimming pool,” she said, pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Kristin felt sick. Something was wrong with Jascha—terribly wrong. In all the years she’d known him, he’d never mistreated her in any way, though she had to admit he’d been damnably arrogant on occasion. Yet only moments before, he’d been bent on raping her. Ignoring the tea, she made for the telephone at her bedside.
“I’m in no mood to swim,” she muttered, while silently cursing herself for every kind of romantic fool. She should have seen this coming. She should have known she’d only been trying to revive her old feelings for Jascha because she couldn’t bear the pain of grieving for Zachary. “I want to call my father.”
“Line’s cut,” Mai said succinctly.
Kristin felt the color drain out of her face as she lifted the ornate receiver and put it to her ear. Sure enough, there was no dial tone, only an ominous silence.
But Jascha had offered to send her home to the United States before he’d gotten so angry and thrown her onto the bed. She had to find him, tell him she’d changed her mind.
She strode to the door and wrenched it open, her rising ire lending her courage as she marched along the elegantly carpeted hallway, down the curving stairs that led to the great entryway with its glittering crystal chandeliers.
A guard was posted by the front door. “Where is the prince?” she demanded, heedless of her untucked shirt and mussed hair.
The guard’s expression didn’t change. “There,” he said in Cabrizian, pointing toward the towering double doors of Jascha’s study with the barrel of his rifle.
Kristin knocked briskly, then marched inside without waiting for an invitation. Jascha was in hushed conference with one of his generals, and his glowering expression said he did not appreciate the interruption.
“I’ve changed my mind about everything,” Kristin announced. “The wedding is off. I want to go home right now.”
For a moment she saw the old tenderness in Jascha’s eyes, but then they turned hard as ebony. “It is too late,” he bit out, while the general looked on unabashedly. “Go to your room, Kristin, and do not come out again until you are told.”
Kristin’s mouth fell open, and she stood rooted to the center of the study floor. She was twenty-seven years old, and she hadn’t been sent to her room in two decades. She wasn’t about to set a new precedent.
“Go!” Jascha said with a dismissive wave of one hand.
Instead, Kristin stepped closer to him. “What’s happened to you?” she whispered. “Why are you behaving like this?”
“This is Cabriz, not America,” Jascha pointed out. “Things are different here. Now, do as I say before I decide you must be disciplined.”
“Disciplined?” Kristin’s fury was so great that it rose into her throat and swelled, making it impossible for any more words to pass.
Jascha was livid. He called out a word Kristin couldn’t translate, and the guard from the entryway appeared. A rapid conversation passed between them, of which Kristin caught only a few words. Then the guard took her arm and dragged her roughly toward the door.
Kristin struggled, but it was no use. “Jascha!” she cried, in an angry plea for reason, as she was propelled out of the study and up the stairs.
Minutes later, Kristin was flung unceremoniously into a large room and the door was locked behind her.
Wildly, she looked around. The place was huge, and sumptuously furnished. The chairs and sofas were all upholstered in colorful silk, and heavy damask curtains surrounded the enormous bed, which stood on a dais. There was an ivory fireplace, even though the temperature in that part of Cabriz never dipped low enough for a fire, and a beautiful Louis XIV desk stood in front of the windows.
Kristin’s anger reached ferocious proportions when she realized that this was Jascha’s room, and she’d been sent here, like a mischievous concubine, to await the prince’s convenience. She hurled herself at the giant door, hammering at it with both fists and screaming, “Let me out! Damn you, Jascha, let me out!”
After a while Kristin sagged against the wood, exhausted. It was hopeless; no one in the palace, not even Mai, would dare to flout Jascha’s authority by releasing her. She was going to have to find her own means of escape.
She went to the terrace doors. For a moment Kristin had hope, but then she looked over the stone railing. It was at least a thirty-foot drop to the courtyard below, and there were no trees or trellises to climb down.
Momentarily defeated, she went back inside, out of the blazing midafternoon sun.
She searched the desk drawers for a key, but found nothing other than a stack of letters scented with some spicy perfume and written in Cabrizian. Although Kristin could understand the language if it was spoken slowly and clearly, she had never learned to read it.
Still, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the letters had been written by a woman. Feeling more a fool than ever, Kristin put the envelopes back where she’d found them and continued her exploration.
After an hour, when she’d found nothing that would aid in her escape and had exhausted herself emotionally, she collapsed in the middle of Jascha’s enormous bed. She awakened sometime later to find herself surrounded by women, all veiled, all clad in the colorful, gauzy robes worn by Cabrizian females.
Mai was not among them.
“What the hell?” Kristin gasped, bolting upright and trying to scramble off the bed, but the women wouldn’t let her pass. They gripped her arms and legs, and one of them clasped the back of her neck in strong fingers. She struggled, but there were too many of them, and they subdued her. “Who are you?” she cried. “What do you want?”
“Open mouth,” one of them ordered. Gone were the gentle, subservient tones that had always been used with her before.
“Let go of me!” Kristin ordered. “Right now!”
When the women ignored her, she threw her head back and screamed Jascha’s name.
Her right arm was wrenched behind her back and pulled painfully upward. The command was repeated.
Kristin had no choice but to obey. She parted her lips, and a bitter-tasting wine was poured onto her tongue. Not daring to spit it out, she swallowed convulsively. “Stupid,” she muttered, addressing herself, coming face-to-face with a reality she’d refused to consider before. “Stupid!”
The women were stripping her clothes away, but when Kristin moved to fight them again, she found that her muscles had turned to rice pudding. She was helpless.
Her eyes filled with tears of frustration and fear. Jascha had lied, both to her and her family. These women were his wives.
She was raised from the bed and propelled into the prince’s private bath, where an enormous tub of inlaid tiles waited, filled with steaming, scented water.
The women—she tried counting them, but could not think clearly—lowered her into the tub and, remarkably, began to bathe her. They surrounded her and their swift, firm hands were everywhere, soaping her arms and legs, lathering her hair.
After a while Kristin was lulled into a state of half consciousness. They lifted her from the tub and dried her as carefully as they’d bathed her, and then she was ushered back to the bed again.
She felt silken sheets against her bare back as they laid her down. Now, she thought dreamily, they would let her rest.
But they didn’t. They began rubbing scented oil into her skin, covering her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. Something stirred in Kristin; she felt herself drifting through space, back to another time and another place.
“Zachary,” she whispered with a soft smile.
Her skin was powdered, her hair dried and brushed. Kristin lost track of time and reality.
A familiar masculine voice disturbed her erotic dreams. “Okay, princess, wake up. We’re going home.”
Slowly, Kristin opened her eyes. For a moment she thought she was still sleeping, because Zachary’s shadowed face was looming in the darkness, only inches from hers. “Zachary?”
“That’s me,” he replied, reaching under her and lifting her off the mattress. “It’s a good thing they used powder after they greased you,” he said, holding her up with one arm and pulling rough cotton trousers onto her with the other. “Otherwise you’d be slippery as hell and I’d probably drop you right on your hard little head. Not that it would make any real difference in your thinking processes….”
The effects of the drug the wives had forced on Kristin were just beginning to wear off, but she still felt woozy and very unsteady on her feet. She shook her head. “Zachary, is that really you?”
“It’s really me, princess. And keep your voice down. If His Highness finds me in the royal boudoir, I’ll be in for a rough three or four days in the dungeon.”
He pulled a shirt over her head and forced her arms into the sleeves. Then she rested her cheek against his chest, yawning. “How did you find me?”
“That’s a long story. We’ll talk about it when we’re at least fifty miles from this place.” He caught a curved finger under her chin. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re stoned out of your mind,” he confided. “We’re about to climb down over the terrace, and there’s always a possibility one of the guards might wake up. Whatever you do, princess, hold on tight and keep that legendary mouth shut.”
Before Kristin could lodge any kind of protest, Zachary hoisted her over one shoulder and headed toward the terrace doors. It was dark and the ebony sky was littered with stars. When she saw the stone railing approaching, Kristin squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a breath.
“Now remember,” Zachary told her in a rough undertone, “be quiet.”
There was an awful jostling sensation, and Kristin caught hold of the back of Zachary’s belt and hung on with all her strength. The fact that she’d been drugged did nothing to ease her fear when she opened her eyes and saw that they were descending a thin rope into the dark courtyard.
If she hadn’t still been holding her breath, she would have screamed her lungs out.
Presently they reached the ground and Zachary set Kristin on her feet, where she teetered for a moment, to flip the grappling hook loose from the terrace railing and wind the rope around one hand. Kristin lifted her hand to her mouth to stifle another yawn. “You’ll never believe what just happened to me in there—”
Even in the thin light of an autumn moon, Kristin saw the muscle tighten in his jaw. “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he responded. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
Once they’d gained the palace wall, Zachary flung the grappling hook over the top, then wrenched on the rope to make sure it was secure.
“Not again,” Kristin protested.
“Get on my back,” Zachary ordered impatiently. “And for God’s sake, stop bitching. In case you haven’t noticed, your ladyship, I’m doing all the damn work!”
Kristin put her arms around his neck and climbed onto him piggyback style. “Think of it as just recompense for all the times I had to carry out the garbage and wash your socks,” she replied sweetly, her head clearing by the moment.
He started up the wall. “You never had to wash my socks,” he retorted, his voice sounding choked.
Kristin loosened her grip slightly. “It was a metaphor,” she whispered back.
“You know,” he grunted in response, straining to pull them both up the rope, “the prince probably deserves you. Maybe I should take you back there and let them finish the ritual.”
They’d reached the top of the wall, and Kristin could just rely make out the outline of a Jeep below.
“Jump,” Zachary instructed her. “We’re like ducks in a shooting gallery up here.”
Kristin’s heart hammered in her chest. “I’m not jumping!” she protested. “It must be ten feet to the ground!”
“Aim for the bushes,” Zachary answered, and then his hand pressed into the small of her back and she went sailing off the wall. He landed in the shrubbery only a moment after she did.
She flew at him, hands flying, bones aching from a jarring touchdown.
He caught her wrists and stayed the attack, and his perfect teeth flashed in an acid grin as he looked down at her. “No time for gratitude, princess. It won’t be long before they miss you.”
Kristin started to say that she didn’t want to go anywhere with him, but the memory of Jascha hurling her onto the bed stopped her. If Mai hadn’t come in when she had, Prince Charming would have slapped her senseless and then raped her. Anything was better than a lifetime of that. “If we hurry,” she said with a meekness she didn’t feel, “we can get to the Canadian embassy before Jascha’s servants sound the alarm. It’s just around the corner.”
Zachary thrust her into the jeep and got behind the wheel. “There isn’t any Canadian embassy,” he answered as they drove quickly away from the palace wall. “Not anymore. Hold on to your pedigree, princess—we’re leaving Cabriz the hard way.”
2
Zachary wheeled the Jeep through dark, narrow streets Kristin didn’t recognize. The city seemed strangely quiet. Empty.
“Where is everybody?” Kristin asked, raising her voice to be heard.
“Hiding. This is a military Jeep.”
Kristin swallowed and brushed her tangled hair back from her face with both hands. “You mean, people think we’re soldiers?”
“Probably.”
Uneasily, Kristin ran her hands down her thighs. She was wearing the pajamalike garb of Cabrizian peasantry, male or female. “Where did you get it?”
“I stole it,” he answered with exaggerated politeness. “Given your station in life, I tried to get an embassy limo with little flags on the hood, but they were all booked up—it must be prom night.”
Kristin’s temper rose steadily as they left the ancient city behind and started up a nearby mountain. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t any road. She folded her arms across her breasts. “Still jealous of the advantages I’ve had,” she replied. “Honestly, Zachary, envy doesn’t become you.”
The Jeep stopped with a jolt. “Let’s get one thing straight, princess. Anybody who wanted your life—” he jabbed at his temple with an angry forefinger “—would have to be one can short of a six-pack. And if you wouldn’t mind, how about a little gratitude? I didn’t have to take this job, you know!”
Kristin subsided, stung. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare for this encounter with Zachary, and the pain was intense. “You didn’t even ask if I wanted to leave,” she observed in a more moderate tone of voice.
Zachary guided the intrepid little vehicle into even more inhospitable terrain. There were towering pine trees all around, and enormous boulders. “Well, excuse me,” he replied dramatically. “I’ll drop you off at the next corner!”
“Stop yelling,” Kristin said with a sigh. Zachary hadn’t changed in the year and a half since she’d seen him. He was still bristly and uncommunicative—the dedicated agent through and through. “We’re going to be together for a few hours, so we might as well try to get along.”
The Jeep came to another lurching stop, and Zachary turned to her, smiling in amazed amusement. “A few hours?”
“Sure. There’s a helicopter hidden around here somewhere, isn’t there?”
He gave a hoot of derisive laughter.
“What’s funny?” Kristin demanded.
“You are. There isn’t any helicopter, your ladyship. We’re going to travel through the mountains on horseback. If we’re lucky—damn lucky—we’ll be over the border into Rhaos in five days.”
Kristin gulped. For a moment she actually considered turning back, going through with the marriage to Jascha. Held up alongside the prospect of five days with Zachary Harmon, under the harshest of conditions, life in the palace didn’t look so bad. “Oh,” she said.
Zachary jammed the jeep into gear, and they were moving up the mountain again. When they’d traveled for what seemed like hours to Kristin, in relative silence, he finally brought the vehicle to a stop. In the glare the headlights she could see two horses, saddled and tethered by long ropes to a tree. Nearby were canvas packs.
When Zachary shut off the lights, everything disappeared for a moment. Kristin waited for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, but her recalcitrant rescuer immediately got out of the Jeep and started moving around in the darkness.
“I don’t see why we have to take horses,” Kristin reasoned as she lowered herself delicately to the running board and then the ground, “when we have a perfectly good Jeep.”
“There are some places,” Zachary told her, untying one of the nickering, restless animals, “where only a horse can go.” He handed her the reins, and Kristin stood there looking at him, shivering. She hadn’t been in the saddle since she was five years old and staying with her mother’s parents while Alice and Kenyan put the embassy in order. Her grandfather had taken her for a pony ride at the beach.
Without her having to say she was cold, Zachary brought a fleecy jacket from one of the packs and handed it to her, along with a pair of sturdy boots and heavy socks. Only then did she realize she’d been barefoot through the escape from the palace.
With a little shake of her head, Kristin dropped the reins and sat down on a nearby stump to put on the socks and boots. Between those clodhoppers and her ill-fitting, scratchy cotton pajamas, she’d be a sight.
Zachary snatched back the reins and held them impatiently while she prepared to travel.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she told him sheepishly. She’d never even been to camp, let alone roughed it in a foreign wilderness, and all those trees were giving her the willies.
“Pick a bush,” Zachary responded.
Kristin started to protest, then stopped herself. It was clear enough that Zachary still thought she was a spoiled, immature little rich girl, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of showing weakness. “Thank you,” she said with dignity, rising to her feet and walking regally across the small clearing.
When she returned, Zachary was waiting to strap a pack on her back.
“What’s in this thing?” She frowned as she tried to hoist herself into the saddle, pack and all. The horse sidestepped nervously, and the saddle tipped. The next thing she knew, Kristin was between the animal’s legs, and it was prancing in a frantic effort to keep itself upright.
“You been gaining weight lately?” Zachary asked as he caught the horse by the bridle and then soothed it with a pat on the neck.
After scrambling back to her feet, and out of the way of the horse’s hooves, Kristin glared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
He shrugged and then made a beckoning gesture. “Come on, I’ll help you into the saddle.”
Kristin was still insulted. “If you’re sure you won’t get a hernia from the effort,” she replied stiffly.
He laughed. “It may be too late. After all, I just carried you down a rope and up the palace wall.” With a sound meant to indicate herculean effort he lifted her into the saddle, and she clung to the pommel with both hands, hoping he wouldn’t see how afraid she was.
It didn’t help that he swung into his own saddle as easily as a TV cowboy. “Relax, princess,” he said, and it was the first kindly tone he’d used since he’d awakened her in the palace. “These animals are hardly more than plow horses. They’re not going to hurt you.”
Kristin lifted her chin. “I’m aware of that,” she lied in a lofty tone of voice.
Zachary chuckled and shook his head, then spurred his horse toward a break in the trees. “Follow me, your ladyship.”
Her lips moving in silent mimicry of his remark, Kristin gave her mount a nudge with one heel. “How did you know which room I’d be in back there?” she asked when about fifteen minutes had passed. Even though she didn’t like Zachary—indeed, he was the last man in the world she would have wanted to rescue her—she was curious. Besides, five days was too long to keep quiet.
His broad shoulders stiffened in the bright moonlight. “That didn’t take a genius—you were about to marry the guy. I looked up an old friend who used to work in the palace, and he sketched the floor plan for me.”
Kristin was silent for a few moments, absorbing the fact that Zachary thought she’d been sleeping with Jascha. She didn’t know why, but it hurt.
“I did get there before the wedding, didn’t I?” he asked, glancing back at her.
Kristin sighed. “Yes. But I wouldn’t have gotten married anyway—I’d already told Jascha the ceremony was off.”
“I don’t think he was convinced,” Zachary replied.
She ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch, and her nostrils were filled with the sudden and paradoxical scent of Christmas. “Why not?”
“When I got there you were naked as hell, and you’d been powdered and perfumed for a night of pleasure, that’s why.”
Kristin blushed, remembering the strange, decadent sensuality of the experience. She’d grown up in Cabriz, but there were a great many things about its culture she didn’t understand. After all, she’d always been very sheltered, living within the embassy walls, taking her schooling from a governess. She didn’t speak.
Zachary looked back at her again, but the expression on his face was unreadable in the thin moonlight. “They were the Cabrizian equivalent of a harem, princess. It’s their job, among other things, to prepare a new bride for their husband’s enjoyment.”
Kristin had already come to that conclusion, and she was ashamed of her naïveté in believing Jascha when he’d promised she’d be his only wife. “I know that, Zachary,” she said quietly. “You can spare me the Cabrizian culture lesson.”
He reined in his horse to ride beside her, even though the path was really too narrow. “If you knew, why the hell did you agree to marry the bastard?”
She sighed and ran one hand through her hopelessly tousled hair. “I didn’t figure it out until tonight,” she confessed, unable to meet Zachary’s eyes. “Jascha promised—”
“Jascha promised,” Zachary interrupted, and his voice conveyed such contempt that Kristin began to feel defensive.
“He was there for me when I needed him, Zachary,” she said evenly.
Zachary glared at her for a moment and she saw the muscles in his throat work, then he rode ahead of her again.
Typical, Kristin thought. Whenever the conversation took a direction Zachary didn’t like, he simply clammed up. In all the time they’d been together he’d never told her anything about his childhood or his family, if he had one. All she knew for sure about his past was that he’d never been married and that he’d joined the agency right after he left the air force.
“What if I hadn’t wanted to leave Jascha?” she asked.
The path was broader there, but Zachary didn’t wait so she could ride beside him. “I wouldn’t have forced you,” he replied quietly.
“Even though your orders were to bring me back no matter what?”
She saw the broad shoulders tighten under his battered leather coat. “I’m not here under anybody’s orders,” he answered.
“Not even Dad’s?”
Zachary permitted himself a raspy chuckle. “Well, he did offer an opinion.”
“I can imagine,” Kristin replied ruefully. She and her father were certainly not close—she’d never, to her knowledge, done a single thing that pleased him—but she liked to think the man cared about her, at least a little.
The glimmer of the moon showed a rocky plateau up ahead, followed by another steep incline. “Why did you do it?” Zachary asked hoarsely. “Why did you come over here, when you knew the country was in an uproar? Did you love him that much?”
Kristin bit her lower lip, searching her mind for satisfactory answers. God knew, those were questions she’d asked herself often enough during the past few weeks as the fighting had grown worse and Cabriz’s relations with other governments had collapsed. “A year ago, when Jascha and I started seeing each other again, in New York, things weren’t so volatile over here. And there was the fairy-tale aspect of it all—we were on the covers of magazines, and Jascha sent flowers every day….” She stopped and glanced at Zachary, trying to read his reaction in the set of his frame, but he gave her no sign of his feelings. “I got swept up into the storybook-princess element of the thing, and it wasn’t until I came over here that I began to have doubts.”
For a long time the only sounds were those of night creatures prowling the nearby woods and of the horses’ hooves on the stony ground. Then the question came again.
“Did you love him?”
Kristin had been stalling, but she still wasn’t prepared. “I don’t know, Zach.”
He didn’t reply, and they began the ascent up the side of the mountain. Kristin felt as though the weight of her backpack alone would pull her over the horse’s rump and onto the ground.
Finally they reached fairly level ground again. “Where are we going to sleep tonight?” she asked, breathless from the effort of holding on to the pommel of her saddle.
Zachary gave her a sour look. “The Ramada Inn,” he answered.
Kristin felt anger swell inside her, but she was too tired, cold, hungry and frightened to give free rein to it, so she just rode quietly until her temper had deflated a little. “There’s no need to be snide,” she pointed out.
Holding the reins in one gloved hand, he bent in a mocking bow. “I beg your pardon, your ladyship. I’ll try to keep a civil tongue in my head from now on.”
Tears pressed behind Kristin’s eyes and clogged her sinuses, but she held them back. “I haven’t had my dinner, you know,” she said, keeping her chin high.
Zachary produced something from the pocket of his leather jacket and shoved it at her.
She took the item from him with trembling fingers. It was a candy bar—her favorite combination of chocolate and coconut—and though it was a little squished, it looked like a feast to Kristin. She thanked him, unwrapped it with awkward haste and indulged in a bite.
“Want some?” She felt duty bound to offer, though she hoped Zachary would decline.
He shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ll have something when we stop for the night.”
So they were stopping. Kristin was relieved to hear that. “Umm,” she said, enjoying her candy bar.
Zachary spared her a grin. “Did you think I’d forgotten what you like?”
Her throat constricted with unwanted emotion. It was just like him to remind her of old times, when they’d lived together. He’d left her favorite candy on her pillow in those days, or tucked it into her pocket, or hid it in her camera case.
She blinked several times and swallowed hard. “I doubt if you’ve given me a thought since the day I moved out of your apartment,” she said evenly.
They were moving into the trees again, and Zachary rode ahead, forcing Kristin and her horse to fall in behind. He spoke in a terse voice. “Then you’re wrong. I’ve thought about wringing your neck a million times.”
Kristin sighed. Despite the jacket Zachary had bundled her into, she was cold, and the candy bar had only taken the edge off her appetite. Worse, she was beginning to consider the reprisals Jascha might use if they were caught. “If you hate me so much, why did you come into Cabriz to get me?”
He didn’t look back. “Because I get a kick out of sneaking into countries with names that sound like a line of sportswear,” he answered tartly.
“Jascha will kill you if he catches us.”
“You’d better pray he doesn’t, princess. He’s probably not real fond of you right now, either.”
Kristin remembered the look on Jascha’s face when he’d been about to force himself on her, and she shuddered. “I don’t know what’s come over him lately. He was always so sweet, and so gentle.”
Zachary’s tone was wry. “Little things like the overthrow of a throne tend to upset a guy.”
Kristin’s weary mind had gone on to other possibilities. “What will they do to Jascha—the rebels—if they do overrun the palace?”
He waited a long time to answer, and when he spoke his voice was gruff with reluctance. “They’ll kill him, princess.”
The grief that surged through Kristin shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. Jascha had been her friend, if not her lover, for a very long time. After she’d lost Zachary, the prince had dried her tears and listened patiently while she tried to work out the things that had gone wrong.
Her shoulders hunched under the heavy load of the backpack and tears trickled down her cheeks.
Zachary must have known she was weeping—try as she might, she couldn’t seem to cry quietly—but he didn’t make any comments. He did take the reins from her and lead her horse behind his.
By the time he brought both horses to a halt in the shelter of a small circle of trees, Kristin had recovered some of her dignity.
She felt abject relief when Zachary reached out, still mounted on his horse, to unfasten and remove her backpack. “I can hardly wait till we get the fire built,” she said with a sigh, summoning up a tremulous smile.
He swung down from the saddle, carrying her backpack, and tossed it into the leaves that covered the ground. “No fire tonight, your ladyship,” he answered in clipped tones. “We’re still too close to Kiri, and there are probably patrols out looking for us right now.”
Kristin shivered and glanced around at the woods. They looked eerie in the silver glow of the stars and moon. “Do you really think so? It would make better sense if they started out in the morning.”
He shrugged out of his backpack and set it down beside hers. “Right. And if we just follow the yellow brick road, we’ll be home in Kansas by morning and Auntie Em will bake us an apple pie.”
It was a struggle, but Kristin managed not to lose her composure. She watched as Zachary took the reins of both horses and started off toward the woods, and when it was clear he wasn’t going to apologize for patronizing her, she stormed after him.
“Why do you always do that?” she demanded.
“Do what?” Zachary retorted, all innocence. A stream flowed a few yards ahead, shining like a silver ribbon in the night.
“Why do you always make me out to be so damn naive? I happen to have a degree in journalism, you know, and I’ve been all over the world on professional assignments!”
While the horses drank, Zachary turned to Kristin, his nose less than an inch from hers. “Some assignments—you took pictures of embassy parties and wrote cutesy articles to go along with them. And as for this little adventure, you came halfway around the globe to marry a prince who already has half a dozen wives, in a country that’s been teetering on the edge of disaster for ten years, and then you have the gall to stand there and ask me why I think you’re naive?”
Kristin stepped back, strung, and would have fallen if Zachary hadn’t been so quick to reach out and steady her. She blinked, unable to refute the charge that her job with Savoir Faire had amounted to little more than writing the occasional society column. “I didn’t know about the wives.”
Zachary let her go. “In fifteen minutes,” he said, “you’ll have convinced yourself there were never any wives. Well, you have it your way, your ladyship. You’ve always arranged the world to suit your perceptions, anyhow. Why should this be any different?”
“You’re being cruel, Zachary. I’m not trying to deny that I made a mistake.”
“A mistake? Sweetheart, you’ve made a dozen. Why did you think all those women were hanging around? Did you have them pegged as members of the palace sewing circle?”
Kristin’s eyes brimmed with tears and she whirled to walk away, but Zachary reached out and caught hold of her arm, turning her back to face him with surprising gentleness.
“Kristin, I’m sorry,” he said softly. Unwillingly.
Kristin bit down hard on her lower lip.
Zachary touched her cheek, brushed away a tear with the edge of his thumb. “Don’t cry, princess.”
When Kristin didn’t respond, he released her and turned back to the horses. She walked a little way upstream and knelt down to splash clear, icy water onto her face.
It restored her a little, and when she joined Zachary in the clearing she was almost her old self. He tied the horses where they could graze, then knelt beside her and took a bedroll from her backpack.
“It’s going to get cold tonight,” he said as he zipped his sleeping bag and Kristin’s together.
Kristin’s eyes widened. “You mean we’re sleeping in the same bag?”
Zachary gave her one of his impatient looks. “It’s not like we’ve never shared a bed,” he pointed out.
Kristin’s mind filled with sweet, fiery and completely unwanted memories at the prospect. “But we’re not—we were involved then.”
“Relax, your ladyship. I don’t intend to touch you.”
Chilled, not only by the night wind but by the timbre of Zachary’s voice, Kristin shivered. “I’m hungry,” she said.
He reached for one of the backpacks again. “I’ll get you something. Take your clothes off and get into the sleeping bag.”
Kristin had been unlacing one of her clunky hiking boots, but she stopped cold. “You expect me to strip? In your dreams, Zachary Harmon.”
Holding a package of something in one hand, he turned his broad and singularly imperious back. “Get undressed,” he reiterated. “If you don’t, your clothes will draw moisture and you’ll end up with pneumonia.”
Kristin studied his back, trying to decide whether he was telling the truth or not. “If you’re lying to me—”
He turned to face her, tossed the small package into her lap and took off his hat. The moonlight shimmered in his rumpled brown hair. “I’ve never lied to you in my life,” he said. And he unzipped his jacket and laid it aside, then pulled his shirt out of his jeans and began to unbutton it.
Kristin’s cheeks felt as though they’d caught fire, and she dropped her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take off my clothes. But you have to look the other way until I tell you it’s okay.”
He turned away in a leisurely fashion, and Kristin heard a slight clinking sound as he unfastened his belt buckle. “Were you this shy with the prince?”
Kristin wasn’t about to dignify that question with an answer. She took off her hiking boots and socks, then the odd, rough-spun pajamas. Beneath them she was naked, and she practically dived into the double sleeping bag, pulling the top up to her chin and huddling as far as she could to one side.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut when Zachary slid into the bag beside her, but she could feel the heat of his body, and she was awash in memories of other nights.
“I thought you were hungry,” Zachary remarked.
She opened her eyes and felt around on top of the sleeping bag for the packet he’d given her earlier. “I am,” she said. The stars seemed to crowd around the moon, determined to outshine it.
Instead of the packet she found rock-hard thigh, which she released instantly.
Zachary laughed. “Here,” he said, dangling the packet in front of her face.
Kristin snatched it out of his hand and sat up so rapidly that the sleeping bag nearly slipped down to reveal her bare breasts. She held on to her virtue with one hand and used her teeth to tear open the little bag.
Inside were roasted peanuts, and Kristin gobbled them down, thinking sadly of the spicy, scrumptious meals that were served at the palace.
When she was finished she lay down again. “I wish I could floss.”
“Thank you for sharing that,” Zachary replied in a sleepy voice.
She resisted a fundamental urge to nestle close to him, not for love but for protection. Her voice was small. “Zachary?”
“Hmm?”
“Are there wild animals in the woods?”
“Umm-hmm.”
“Suppose they come after us? I mean, since we don’t have a fire or anything—”
Zachary yawned. “Between the two of us, princess, we ought to be able fend off a squirrel attack. Now quit talking and go to sleep—tomorrow’s going to be a hard day.”
Kristin wriggled farther inside the bag. It was made of some kind of space-age material; although it was thin and light, she was perfectly warm. The ground was a little hard, though. “What do you suppose Jascha’s doing right now?”
“Planning our executions. Go to sleep, Kristin.”
She closed her eyes, but sleep was elusive. Every sound in the woods seemed to be magnified. “I left my camera at the palace,” she said with real despair.
Zachary rolled onto his side, turning his back to her. She saw the familiar mole between his shoulder blades and barely resisted the urge to touch it with the tip of one finger.
“Next time I carry you out of a prince’s bedroom,” he said between yawns, “I’ll give you a chance to pack a few things first.”
The urge to touch Zachary’s mole was replaced by one to give him a kidney punch. “I had taken some very important pictures,” she told him, struggling to keep her voice even.
His reply was a theatrical snore.
Kristin rolled onto her stomach in a vain effort to get comfortable, and burrowed down deep into the bag. She fully intended to cry, feeling she had every right after the day she’d put in, but she was too tired. In five seconds she was asleep.
She awakened hours later, in the depths of the night, to find herself cuddled close to Zachary, enfolded in his strong arms. For just a few moments she thought she was back in their apartment, that their breakup had never taken place.
She sighed softly and ran one hand along his muscular thigh; he stirred in his sleep and spread one hand over her bottom, fitting her against him. The size and power of him jolted her back to reality and she jerked away, reaching blindly for her clothes, ready to spend the night sitting bolt upright if it came to that.
But Zachary caught hold of her wrist and stayed her efforts. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said clearly.
Kristin knew she couldn’t fight him; her strength didn’t begin to compare with his. If he were to imprison her under his weight and take her, there wouldn’t be a thing she could do to stop him.
She was horrified when a thrill of pure lust moved through her, leaving her to shudder in its wake. The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. “Make love to me, Zachary.”
His reply was like a slap in the face. “Not in a million years, princess. I don’t travel in your social circles.”
Kristin didn’t know who she hated more—Zachary for cutting her to emotional ribbons or herself for inviting the intolerable, crushing pain of his rejection. To make her humiliation complete, she began to cry.
“Oh, damn,” she sobbed miserably. “Damn!”
To her utter surprise, Zachary took her into his arms and held her close. “Go ahead and cry,” he said raggedly, his lips moving against her temple. “If anybody’s earned the right, it’s you.”
“I’m not crying because you wouldn’t make love to me!” Kristin wailed, clinging to her pride even in the depths of indignity. “Don’t you dare think that I am!”
He chuckled and laid a light kiss on her hair. “Whatever you say, princess.”
She cried until her grief was spent, her head resting on Zachary’s shoulder. Then she hiccuped. “Is there somebody—are you—?”
“No,” Zachary answered. “I’m not involved with any particular woman.” He patted her bare bottom lightly.
She swallowed. She didn’t know why it was important to tell Zachary, but it was. “I never slept with Jascha,” she said softly. “In fact, there was never anybody but you.”
He didn’t reply, and Kristin couldn’t decide whether he didn’t believe her or he’d fallen asleep again. And she was afraid to find out.
Pure exhaustion rendered her unconscious in the next few moments, and she awakened, hours later, to find herself alone in the sleeping bag. Zachary was up and dressed, and he tossed her another packet the moment she sat up.
“Here’s your breakfast,” he said cheerfully.
Kristin looked at the packaged food with a baleful expression. “What is it?”
“Dried fruit. Keep your chin up, princess. Tonight we sleep in a cabin, with a real fire on the hearth.” He threw Kristin her clothes and calmly led the horses toward the stream.
3
Kristin held on grimly as her horse plodded along behind Zachary’s, scaling hillsides so steep that only scrub brush grew there. She would have given her passport for a cup of hot coffee and a powdered sugar doughnut. If she’d still had her passport—it was back at the palace, with her camera and journal and other personal possessions.
She tilted her head back, saw that the sky had turned the color of charcoal.
“Aren’t we sort of out in the open?” she called after Zachary, mainly to make conversation. She was much too tired to be alarmed.
“Yes,” he answered, “so hurry it up.”
Resentment simmered in Kristin’s cheeks as she spurred the panting horse. After all, she hadn’t been the one to pick this route. If it had been up to her, they would have left the country in an airliner, or a helicopter at the very least. Before she could frame a retort, however, a blood-freezing ping rang in the air.
Zachary yelled something, and Kristin’s horse took off at a breakneck pace with no urging from her. She very nearly fell off, and in her mind she saw herself rolling end over end down the slope, backpack and all.
They gained a grassy plateau, with trees, and once he was certain Kristin was safe Zachary leaped off his horse and crept back to the edge of the slope with a formidable pistol grasped in one hand.
“Who are they?” Kristin asked, crawling up beside him as she’d seen soldiers and cowboys do in movies.
Zachary’s eyes were narrowed as he surveyed the apparently empty countryside. “Rebels,” he speculated with a shrug of one shoulder, “or maybe bandits.”
Kristin shivered. “You mean we have to worry about crooks, besides rebels and Jascha’s soldiers?”
“Stay back,” he growled, still scanning the wooded area at the base of the steep incline they’d just climbed.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Excuse me,” was the brusque response as he checked the chamber of the pistol and then produced more bullets from his jacket pocket and thrust them into place with a practiced thumb, “but I’m a little busy at the moment. Maybe we could chat later.”
Kristin was about to accuse him of being ridiculous when a second bullet struck the ground not half a dozen feet from where they lay. She scooted closer to Zachary. “I’m scared,” she whispered.
“Smart girl,” Zachary answered, drawing a bead on something at the edge of the woods. “The good news is, these guys are either lousy shots or they don’t want to hit us. We were vulnerable as ducks in a rain barrel while we were climbing the hillside.”
Just as Kristin was about to comment, he squeezed the trigger, and the explosion seemed deafening. She covered her ears with both hands and moved closer still to Zachary’s side. “Did you hit anything?” she asked, peering toward the trees.
“Probably not. I just want them to know we’re prepared to fight back—sometimes that’s enough.”
“Don’t you have binoculars or something?” Kristin queried, watching Zachary squint. She wished she had her camera.
“That would be a great idea, princess,” he answered with a long-suffering sigh. “Then they could pinpoint us by the reflection off the glass and blow us to little quivering pieces.”
Kristin shuddered. “You don’t need to be so graphic.”
“Start moving backward, toward the horses,” Zachary ordered. “And don’t stick that sweet little rear end of yours up in the air. You’re liable to get it shot off if you do.”
She obeyed, but only because it was a matter of life and death. “I suppose this means we can’t have a fire at lunchtime,” she lamented as she wriggled along the ground like an earthworm in reverse.
“It means we may not live till lunchtime,” Zachary replied.
When they were a good thirty feet away from the edge, he rose to a crouching position, one hand splayed on Kristin’s back to keep her down. When no shots were fired, he released her.
“Stay as low as you can until you get to the trees,” he said.
Kristin was trembling, but she did as she was told. Her clothes were covered with dirt now, and her hair was all atangle around her face. She thought with yearning of her makeup case, and her toothbrush, and a big bathtub filled with steaming, scented water.
Only moments had passed when they mounted their skittish horses, but they seemed like hours to Kristin.
“Ride ahead,” Zachary told her.
She knew he was protecting her, but it was little comfort. Surely there were easier, safer ways out of the country. “Are they gone?” she asked. “The people who were shooting at us, I mean?”
“Probably,” Zachary answered. But he was obviously on the alert.
At noon they stopped by a stream to water the horses and rest. Zachary produced two more packets of food, this time little pieces of dried meat.
Kristin sat on a log and gobbled down her share, too hungry to complain. “Do they have McDonald’s in Rhaos?” she asked as Zachary, having finished his meal, rummaged through his backpack.
He chucked. “Not yet,” he answered. “But I’m sure they’re working on it.” To her wonder and delight he brought out a new toothbrush, still in its box, and a little travel-size tube of toothpaste.
Kristin accepted them eagerly. “I don’t suppose you have soap?” she asked in a hopeful voice, kneeling by the clean stream, taking the brush from its package and dipping the bristles in the water.
He grinned. “It just so happens that I do. But you won’t need it until later.”
Kristin was too busy brushing her teeth to comment. It felt glorious to have her mouth clean and fresh again. When she was finished, she put the toothbrush carefully back into its box and tucked it, along with the tube of paste, into the pocket of her jacket.
“Do you think those guys are still following us?” she asked.
Zachary shrugged. “I don’t know. They may have decided we weren’t worth the trouble.”
“So they probably weren’t soldiers.”
He shook his head. “No. Soldiers would have surrounded us—probably without firing a shot.”
Kristin shook off the horrifying thought. “How do you know they’re not going to do that, in an hour, or this afternoon, or tomorrow?”
“I don’t,” was the blunt reply.
When the horses had rested, eaten a little of the lush grass growing along the stream bank and had their fill of water, Zachary helped Kristin back into the saddle and they set out again. The two of them rode side by side, keeping to the edges of meadows and clearings. Thankfully, they didn’t encounter another hillside, but Kristin knew it was only a matter of time.
“I think it’s remarkable,” she said once in an effort to start some kind of civil interchange with Zachary, “that this part of the country is forested, while the southern section is practically all jungle.”
“It’s a weird place,” Zachary allowed, not so much as glancing in her direction. His eyes moved constantly in this direction and that, like those of a Secret Service agent protecting a high government official.
Not that Kristin thought he had any particular regard for her. He was just doing his job, that was all.
Near nightfall they came to a little hut nestled into the crook of a canyon. The place looked uninhabited, but there was wood piled along one tilting outside wall, and a crooked chimney jutted from the warped roof.
“How did you know about this place?” Kristin asked, getting down from the horse on her own even though she nearly stumbled under the weight of the backpack while doing it.
With a self-confident grin, Zachary unfastened her pack and lifted it away, setting her free. He was standing close, and Kristin felt as though her insides had suddenly been magnetized to his. Her mind gave the command to retreat, but her legs didn’t move. She simply stood there, looking up at Zachary and remembering all the times he’d turned her inside out, whether in bed or elsewhere.
He removed his own pack and tossed it aside, his wicked hazel eyes never leaving her face. There was an insolent confidence in his expression but, for the life of her, Kristin could neither move nor speak to thwart him. The old feelings had all come back in force, and it was as though no time at all had passed, as though no wounds had been dealt.
She knew that if he took her then and there, she wouldn’t have the strength to object.
It seemed the entire world had shifted to slow motion, with only Kristin’s rebellious heart beating a speedy rhythm. Zachary’s hands cupped the sides of her face, his thumbs moving gently over her skin. Then he lifted her chin.
She saw his mouth descending toward hers and gave a little whimper, but that was all the protest she could manage. Perhaps, she thought wildly, it had not been a protest at all, but eager submission.
Every subtle injury he’d done her was healed in those moments, at least temporarily, and Kristin would have given her soul to be part of him again.
Everything within Kristin focused on the sensation of his lips touching hers. She felt as if she were standing in a mud puddle, gripping an electric fence with both hands.
His tongue caressed, then parted her lips and boldly explored. Heat surged through her, and her clothes might have been aflame, she was so warm. Her hands ached to tear them off.
He lifted her, without breaking the kiss, and her legs automatically wrapped around his hips, clutching him tightly. This, too, was a part of the familiar pattern between them, one that could have stretched back over other lifetimes besides this one. She could feel the hard promise of his masculinity at the crux of her thighs.
Kristin was trembling when, without warning, Zachary tore his mouth from hers and set her roughly on her feet.
For a moment she was too dazed to react. She just stood there, bewildered, using all her energy to keep from swaying to one side. And when she did manage to speak, all that came out was one word. “Why—?”
He turned away. “I’ll take care of the horses,” he said, and then he caught hold of both sets of reins and strode off through a copse of trees, leaving Kristin to stare after him in confusion and hurt.
Automatically, her hands rose to her tangled hair. She probably looked a fright, but that didn’t explain why Zachary had rebuffed her. She’d felt his passion, burning hot enough to fuse with her own.
Not quite bold enough to brave the hut alone—it looked like the kind of place that would be filled with rats and spiders—Kristin busied herself with her pack instead. Searching through it she found, to her enormous relief, a sturdy comb, the promised soap and another set of clothes, besides packaged food, matches, her sleeping bag and a few first aid supplies.
By the time Zachary returned with the horses, she’d brought her wounded pride under control. She even managed to smile at him as though nothing had happened.
“I guess we’re going inside now,” she said cheerfully after he’d unsaddled the horses and tied them to separate stakes driven into the ground.
Zachary brushed off his hat and scratched his forehead. His rich brown hair was rumpled and damp with sweat; he needed a bath as badly as Kristin did. “You might have started the fire.”
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