The Bride's Protector

by Gayle Wilson

  Thinking about that, she took the local paper out of the grocery sack and laid it on the table before she put the few things she’d bought into the refrigerator. There had to be some job she could do listed in the want ads, even if the position was only temporary. Until she could find something better.

  And there was a junior college less than fifteen miles away. She might be the oldest freshman on campus, but she liked the idea of going to school. Of picking out classes. Of studying for them. She had always wanted to go to college, but there had never been time. Now there was time for a lot of things.

  She had already invited Cammie for a visit. Which meant, she supposed, that she needed to do something about making this place a little more inviting. Guest worthy. An update was definitely in order, she thought, looking around the kitchen.

  Fresh paint would help. Some inexpensive fabric she could make into curtains, using Aunt Martha’s old pedal machine. They’d be pretty simple, given her level of skill, but they would be bright and clean. And a coat of wax on the floors would cost her nothing but elbow grease. Maybe a wallpaper border at the top of the freshly painted walls. Yellow for in here, she thought, and for the bedrooms...

  Her eyes dropped from the border she was envisioning just below the old-fashioned acoustic tiles and found a man standing in the door that led into the house from the porch. Just where the robed men had stood the night Hawk had rescued her.

  This one wasn’t wearing a robe. He had on a business suit and white shirt, but he was one of Amir’s bodyguards. One of the two who had been in the hotel room that day. One of the two who had, according to Steiner, been sent home to stand trial for the assassination. She recognized him immediately, and in his dark eyes was a mocking acknowledgment that he had known she would.

  He was holding an automatic weapon, holding it loosely and with a great deal of confidence. She thought it was the same kind that had cut the wall above her head to ribbons that night. She watched it swing away from her as he turned, allowing Amir to brush past him and walk into the kitchen.

  “You have certainly proven to be a most unsatisfactory fiancée, my darling,” he said. “An enormous amount of trouble.”

  There were several men behind him, Tyler realized. More of his omnipresent bodyguards. However, they were all in Western dress today, which would be much less noticeable here than the dishdashas. With them was the other guard she had seen in Amir’s suite that day. The day his father had been murdered.

  “They told me you were going home. That it was all over,” she said.

  Amir’s dark head tilted, questioning. “Over?” he repeated.

  “The CIA told me about Malcolm.”

  “They bought into the idea of Malcolm as the mastermind?” he asked, his voice amused. “That’s rather entertaining, isn’t it?”

  She had been right all along. She had known in her heart it was Amir. But Steiner had seemed so sure, and now it was too late, she thought, a layer of ice forming around her heart, seeping outward to chill the blood in her veins.

  “You, on the other hand, didn’t buy into that, did you?” Amir suggested, still smiling. “That’s all right, my beloved. It really doesn’t matter what you believe. Or what you say. It never mattered, I suppose, but it might have been a bit awkward—at least socially—to have my fiancée suggesting I had killed my own father. I really don’t like things that are awkward or unpleasant. You know me that well, I think.”

  “I won’t say anything,” she promised, her voice soft with fear. She hoped he could read her sincerity. She had done the right thing. She had gone to the authorities and had told them what she’d seen. Even what she suspected. No one had been interested in listening to her.

  “Oh, I’m sure you mean that. Just as I’m sure Malcolm meant well when he stupidly gave you that passkey. But you see, that wasn’t what I had told him to do. And I also don’t like people who don’t do what they’re told. Exactly what they’re told. You, however, always did. So you have one last job to perform, Tyler, and then...” Amir paused, his smile widening beneath the soft dark mustache “...then, my darling, it really will be all over.”

  “What do you want?” she asked, wondering what that phrase implied. Afraid that she knew. She could feel the paralyzing force of her fear, but she fought it, trying to think.

  She had run from them that night. There had seemed to be a chance then that she might be able to get away in the concealing darkness. But now, in the daylight, running seemed pointless. And she remembered the bullets hitting the frame of the door, the pain in her arm and a gun, such as the ones they now held, totally destroying the wall above her head. She had survived that night only because of Hawk’s intervention. And now there was no Hawk to help her. There was no one to help her.

  “A final appearance,” Amir said. “It will be just another performance for the cameras, Tyler. You’ve done a lot of those. And all you have to do this time, my darling, is smile.”

  WHEN THEY REACHED IT, the little house was empty. The door was unlocked, and Tyler’s suitcase was on the bed in the bedroom. There was some food in the refrigerator and the local paper was spread out on the kitchen table. The windows in the bedroom were open, the heated air filled with the scent of honeysuckle that climbed, wild and unrestrained, over a hedge just outside.

  “Maybe she’s at a neighbor’s,” Jordan said. “Out to eat. Something harmless.”

  Hawk knew what had prompted that remark. It seemed too peaceful for anything to be really wrong. There was nothing here but the distant sounds of children playing. The scent of honeysuckle drifting in at the open windows. Age-yellowed lace curtains occasionally moving in the heavy air. An old house set under the shade of a big oak. Peaceful. As long as you didn’t notice the scars that pocked the bedroom wall.

  “Call Jake,” Hawk ordered. “Tell him we need to know exactly where al-Ahmad is right now. And we need his itinerary.”

  IT HAD FELT STRANGE to be dressed again in these clothes. They were some of the things Amir had chose for her trousseau. Tyler was aware of that as they put them on her, but the whole time it felt as if they were dressing a mannequin.

  They had even brought someone in to fix her hair and her makeup. The hairdresser had tried to talk to her, but what they had given her was so strong she hadn’t been able to formulate any answers. After a while he had simply done what he had been instructed to do and had left. She was still sitting in the chair where they had placed her, looking into the minor. Looking at someone who was a stranger.

  Since they had given her the shot everything seemed to be happening to someone else. It was as if she were in someone else’s body, watching these things being done. She closed her eyes, fighting the nausea she had experienced ever since Amir’s physician had plunged that needle into her arm. She had fought them, as long as she was able, but it hadn’t done any good, of course. She hadn’t been strong enough to win.

  Hawk could have. He would have fought them for her. But Hawk wasn’t here, she remembered. He had left, like everyone else, and she would never see him again. The sense of his loss was strong enough to push into her consciousness, past the effects of the drug.

  Amir was saying something, she realized. His voice came from a long way away, distant and hollow, echoing in her head like the voices in dreams. He wasn’t speaking English, she finally realized, so surely he didn’t expect her to answer.

  Then someone else responded. Someone nearby. The doctor, she recognized, turning her head toward the sound of his voice. He was standing at her elbow, shaking his head. Amir gestured, and the doctor helped her stand.

  When she was upright, her head swam, and she swallowed hard, denying the building nausea. She swayed a little and one of the bodyguards put his hand under her other arm. Amir crossed the distance between them and caught her chin in his fingers, turning her head to make her look into his eyes.

  “You will smile,” he said loudly, his tone menacing, despite the fact that he sounded as if he were talking to a not-
very-bright child, “when and if I tell you to.”

  She tried to make her eyes defiant, but the sickness pushed into her throat and her knees were so weak. She was cold and spasms of shivers racked her body. If he turned her loose, she was sure she’d fall.

  “Do you understand me?” he demanded, still speaking too loudly, his voice echoing in her head. She should say no, but she couldn’t remember why. And it was so much easier to agree. Then maybe he would leave her alone and stop shouting at her.

  The doctor said something else, the unfamiliar words fluttering at the edge of her fogged mind. Amir answered him with an expletive from his own language that she had heard him use before. Then he leaned close to her face, close enough that she could see the pores in his skin, the individual hairs in his black mustache. He spoke very distinctly.

  “You will smile and wave when I tell you. Do you understand me, Tyler? Because, my darling, if you don’t, the doctor will give you another shot, which he says might stop your heart. And you don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  She shook her head slowly, moving it against the hard pressure his fingers were exerting on her chin. She didn’t want her heart to stop. She didn’t want to die. Hawk, she thought again, and felt the burn of tears.

  The fingers holding her chin tightened painfully. “You will not cry. I do not want them to see tears. I want them to see a very happy woman, smiling and waving as she departs for what will be her new country. Do you understand me, Tyler?”

  Smile, Tyler. She had known all along that’s what Amir would tell her. Smile at them, but don’t open your mouth. Just smile, and it will all be over. If you smile at them, everything will be all right. It always had been.

  And after all, she thought, she knew how to smile. For the cameras. For everyone who was watching. Smile and it will all be over. Slowly, watching his cold black eyes for approval, Tyler nodded.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The metal steps to the private jet seemed miles away from the limousine, but she had realized when they helped her from the hotel and into the car that her depth perception was distorted by whatever they had given her.

  She closed her eyes against the late afternoon glare and swallowed, trying to produce some moisture in her dry mouth. At least the nausea was a little better, and she wondered if that meant the drug was wearing off.

  She knew what Amir wanted her to do. He had explained it several times during the ride over from the hotel. They would go up the steps to the jet together, turn at the top and wave and smile for the assembled media. “Smile, Tyler” drifted through her head again, seeming so familiar. And...distasteful.

  Someone opened the door on her side of the car, and Amir was there, holding out his hand. She wondered what would happen if she refused to get out. If she refused to walk with him up those steps. Refused to get on the plane.

  Almost as if he had read her mind, Amir said, his voice low and angry, “I’ll have you carried on board if I have to. I’ll tell them some story about stress and exhaustion. But if you force me to do that, Tyler, you’ll be very sorry. Do you understand me? I promise you’ll be very sorry,” he warned.

  She believed him. His eyes, as cold and as black as she knew his heart to be, told her to believe him. She wondered why she had thought Hawk’s eyes were cold. They weren’t, not compared to these, but she obeyed Amir because she knew she had no choice. She put out her hand, and he pulled her from the car.

  She swayed against him, fighting vertigo, nausea, an inability to move or to think. He put his arm around her, his left hand cupping her left elbow.

  “Walk,” he ordered. “And smile, damn you. Smile, my darling, or I promise you you’ll be sorry you were ever born. Very sorry you ever stuck your nose into things you don’t understand. Things that don’t concern you.”

  She wanted to argue. Wanted to deny that she had done anything wrong, but the words wouldn’t form. It was all she could do to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, even with his supportive arm around her waist.

  The journey to the foot of the metal steps was endless. He had given her sunglasses in the car, to cover the too-wide dilation of her pupils. To hide the effects of whatever they had injected. But still the glare and the heat reflecting off the tarmac were making her sick.

  “I can’t,” she whispered, looking up from the foot of the stairs to the open door of the plane. She couldn’t climb those steps, no matter what Amir did to her or threatened to do. And she was beginning to realize that once she was on board the jet, he could do anything he wanted to her. No one would ever know what had happened. No one would ever see her again. She would simply disappear into that unfamiliar world she had feared from the beginning. The world where Amir’s word was literally the law.

  “I can’t,” she said again, trying desperately to think what she could do.

  Amir turned around to face the crowd, carrying her with him, almost lifting her and propelling her at the same time with his grip on her arm. She could see the muscle jumping in his jaw as it clenched. He was furious, but she knew she couldn’t get on that plane.

  They were facing the assembled throng of reporters, too many for this location normally. He must have arranged for some of them to be here in this small Mississippi city. Arranged for them to come out on a hot afternoon to see this performance.

  “Smile, damn you,” he demanded, the words hissed under his breath. His own smile was broad and obviously false. Obvious at least to her. His right hand, the one that was not gripping her arm hard enough to bruise, lifted to wave at the crowd.

  That gesture provoked a flurry of flashes from the cameras. Their lights seemed to explode in Tyler’s eyes, blinding her, even with the protection of the glasses. It was all too much for her sensitized senses to deal with. The heat and glare. The noise. The smell of jet fuel. All of it too much.

  The pressure on her arm increased. She whimpered with the pain, but the sound was lost in the roar of the jet engines behind her. No one heard her. No one would hear her if she cried out for help. He had planned it this way, of course.

  So it was up to her. She had to get away from him. Break his grip on her arm and run toward the crowd. Surely he wouldn’t shoot her in front of all these people.

  After all, Amir was safe. He had nothing to fear from her. Someone had told her that. Nothing to fear. But if he shot her, then they would know what he had done. On some level she realized that the effects of the drug were wearing off. She could think again. Form words. Take some action. And she had to. It was her only chance.

  She struggled, trying to pull her arm from his hold, but she seemed to be powerless against that relentless grip. Her struggle had no effect, except to cause Amir to pull her body closer to his, holding her tightly against his side. To the watching reporters, it must have appeared to be a spontaneous and loving embrace, because he continued to wave at them with his other hand and the cameras continued to flash.

  He said something. Not to her, she knew, because it wasn’t in English. She didn’t understand until the doctor moved into her field of vision, the sun glinting off his wire-frame glasses. He carried his bag in one hand, and even as she watched, he reached inside with his other hand. His back to the crowd as he walked, he took a syringe from his case. It was full of the colorless liquid with which they had injected her before.

  For a moment her heart stopped, just as Amir had promised, but then she realized that was only her fear. He hadn’t touched her. The doctor was walking toward them from the limousine, and Amir was still crushing her against his side, waving to the crowd. The noise of the engines was deafening. And the glare of the sun blinded her.

  What was happening seemed to be occurring in slow motion. Like a nightmare, she thought. The final one. Because when he reached her, Amir’s doctor would put that needle into her arm, using his body to shield what he was doing from the cameras. Then somehow, probably with the doctor’s help, Amir would get her on that plane. And it would be over. Everything, all the d
reams, would finally be over.

  Hawk, she thought. All the dreams, including that one. But Hawk had left her, just like everyone else in her life had left her. Because she wouldn’t stand on her own two feet. Because she went along with what everyone told her. Because he thought she wasn’t strong. And now she would never get the chance to prove to him that he was wrong.

  Last chance, she thought. My last chance.

  Maybe because she had stopped struggling or maybe because the doctor was so close, Amir’s grip on her body loosened minutely. She looked up at him, eyes narrowed against the sun. He was looking out into the crowd, still waving. Still pretending this was what he wanted them to believe it was—a gloriously happy couple on their way to begin a new life together.

  She turned away from his false smile and realized the doctor was almost there, the syringe he held concealed in the palm of his hand. Amir’s men were standing by the limousine, their white robes billowing in the hot air, blown by the jet engines. And there was another guard, she knew, waiting at the top of the stairs. That was always the way they did it. He would have a weapon hidden in the plane beside him, ready to protect Amir in case of trouble.

  She remembered the heat and fire of the bullet that had hit her arm and the devastation on the bedroom wall, but she blocked those fears from her mind. Last chance echoed in her head, and gathering every ounce of resistance in her drugged body, she shifted her weight to her left leg and kicked Amir as hard as she could in the shin with her right foot.

  The blow seemed without force to her, but he reacted with surprise, just as she’d prayed he would. His hold on her body slackened even more. She twisted free and staggered past the doctor, who grabbed at her. She managed to sidestep him, but she stumbled as she did. She somehow regained her precarious balance and began to run toward the cameras. Smile, Tyler floated through her head, but she wasn’t smiling, of course. She was running for her life.

  Her legs kept refusing to obey the commands of her brain. She staggered drunkenly across the tarmac, the crowd wavering in and out of her vision. They looked distorted, their mouths opening and closing like beached fish, but she ran toward them, fighting to stay upright. Fighting to stay alive. Fighting to stay on her own two feet.