Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  He followed, scooting the other chair into place across from her. He sank down and lounged back, squinting up at the sky, peering at the stars or the moon or mulling over life, who knew? It seemed like he was really allowing a companionable silence to settle between them, being non-sexually-aggressive-Jason and letting her off the hook. Again.

  Tears pricked her eyes, tears of tenderness, exhaustion, confounding, muddling desire. Would she ever figure out what to do with her new impulses?

  Sweat droplets falling off Jason’s kameez went pat…pat…pat in the sand. A squealing, warbling recorded voice cut through the dusky hush of the early evening. “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar…” It was a tape of a muezzin calling the fourth prayer of the day, or the Maghrib—since the sun had just set—from a nearby mosque. It was a sound she and Jason had lived with five times a day in Pakistan for the past week.

  Lifting her chin, she automatically faced the east, gazing over the top of the fence at the upper arms of a cactus, held up in a game of cops and robbers.

  “You’re a Muslim,” Jason murmured at the sky, “aren’t you?”

  She whipped her focus back over to him, feeling a small clutch in her belly. Her protections instantly came up. She opened her mouth…

  So where are you from?

  Michigan.

  No, I mean originally.

  I’m an American!

  …closed her mouth, then dropped her attention to her lap. If she truly wanted a deeper level of intimacy with Jason, she would have to open up to him. She owed him a turn after he’d bared guarded pieces of himself to her by talking about his falling-out-with-Shane story. Intimacy was a two-way street.

  She rubbed at a sore spot sitting behind her sternum, and said, “Yes,” quietly. “Or I used to be. Since escaping from Iran eighteen years ago and coming to live in the United States, I’ve widened my religious views.” She still thought of God in terms of Allah, but she no longer followed many Muslim dictates.

  Jason lifted his head and looked at her. “What do you mean by ‘escaped Iran’?”

  The memories surged to the surface, constricting the veins in her head like a hijab tied on too tight. Why hadn’t anyone ever invented a brain-compressor able to squeeze all unwanted thoughts from a person’s mind forever? “It’s a bit of a long story, but it has to do with a marriage my parents arranged for me.”

  He straightened all the way. “You were married before?”

  “I was.” She reached over to a potted cactus and lightly touched the tip of a forefinger to one of its spikes. “To a government official, a powerful and wealthy man. A good match.” She smiled dimly. “Everyone told me it was a good match.”

  “You didn’t think so,” he said, either a statement, a question, or a guess.

  “No,” she confirmed. “I was fifteen and he was sixty.”

  Jason’s eyebrows soared. “Whoa. That’s…quite an age difference. Are such unions common in Iran?”

  “Arranged marriages, yes. Ones with such a vast age difference, no. But…I still shouldn’t have hated my relationship with Raham as much as I did.” A familiar sting of guilt heated the back of her neck. “I mean, after I found out who he really was, yes, but before, no.”

  “Why not?”

  She lifted a single shoulder. Words she’d told herself a thousand times marched doggedly out of her mouth. “Raham was good to me. He deserved a wife who would try harder to love him, and who would keep her nose out of his business affairs. If I’d done that, then I wouldn’t have had to give up my family, my culture, and my country.” A June bug—or some other buzzing beetle—flew into the backyard, clunked into the fence, then continued on in wobbly flight. She watched it buzz off, staring in search of it long after it was gone. “But I was selfish. I wanted a young, virile husband. So I inflated everything about Raham to be worse than it was. I allowed…” She paused to swallow. “I allowed a certain aspect of my marriage to bother me when it shouldn’t have.”

  “Especially when it wasn’t all that bad.”

  She darted her eyes over to Jason.

  He was watching her with an intense, probing scrutiny. “At least that’s what you tried to tell me in the horse barn our first night in Pakistan.”

  Her blood ran hot, then cold. Anxiety iced the inside of her stomach, like she’d just been caught eating a pork chop when she’d said it was beefsteak.

  “The thing that happened to you in the dark a long time ago,” he said. “Your husband did it to you, didn’t he?”

  She slammed her lashes down and pressed her teeth together to prevent them from their sudden need to chatter. Her molars burned from the pressure. “It was nothing,” she insisted.

  Jason made a contradictory noise in his throat. “I saw how upset you got when the cave went black.”

  She refused to look at him. “The thing that happened to me in the dark was only sex. Nothing strange or bad. Raham and I had perfectly legal, marital relations.”

  “Did you? Well, yippee.”

  She swung her gaze over to him now and knitted her brow.

  He leaned forward. “Do you know why sex with that old man bothered you, Farrin? Because you instinctively knew your husband was a creepy little fuck who should’ve been screwing a woman his own age.” He sat back. “I’m not saying your ex was a pedophile. I’m sure you had a woman’s body. But, seriously? Come on. What sixty-year-old man marries a fifteen-year-old girl?”

  She started to shake her head, then stopped. She had always been put off by Raham’s obsession with her innocence. She’d never felt right about all the things he’d done to her—making her dress youthfully then showing her off to his friends, and other things—but she’d never dared admit it bluntly, not even to herself. She’d been fifteen; what did she know? But now…

  Sweet flower…sweet flower…

  A breath sputtered out of her as half-memories and panicky sensations submerged her into her nightmare world. Her throat pumped and wrenched, the rhythmic spasms suffocating her even more powerfully than five hours in a dirt cellar. “H-he used to call me ‘sweet flower,’ over and over, while he was doing…uh, you know, to me.” She pressed a hand over her ear. It was wrong. “I hated it. I wanted to scream and cry and tear at Raham with my nails! But there was nothing I could do. I had to be agreeable.”

  Jason didn’t speak through several tics of a muscle in his whiskered jaw. “It seems to me,” he said with extra-taut calm, “that it was all that bad for you, and you did have every right to be bothered by it. Even worse than your husband being a creepy little fuck, you had to be passive and take it. I totally get why you’d want to escape.”

  Something caught deep in her chest. Jason understood. Nobody else ever had. “Well, you’re the only one.” Maybe her adoptive parents would have, but they’d never known. “To my Iranian family, I’m an awful wife, an awful daughter, an awful Muslim.” A landslide of emotions crashed over her. She wasn’t sure what they were; just raw, painful, horrible things.

  Jason’s penetrating stare deepened. “That blaming rhetoric sounds like a bill of goods your mother tried to sell you—the parent you said you didn’t see eye-to-eye with, right?”

  Farrin swept her lashes down. That doesn’t make it untrue. “You don’t understand because you’re an American. In the United States, everyone is autonomous—it’s expected, not frowned upon. In Iranian culture, everything is about the family. Acting independently is selfish.”

  He slouched back in his seat, shaking his head. “Put a hundred different people in the exact same situation, and you’ll get a hundred different feelings about it. None of those feelings are right or wrong, Farrin. They just are. If you were unhappy in your marriage, then you were. Judging yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts isn’t useful or productive. You were merely being human. Not only that, but”—he shrugged—“why did your mother deserve to be happy and you didn’t?”

  She stared—no, gaped—at him, her lips slipping apart. She’d never thought of it that way be
fore. In the years following her escape from Iran, she’d done nothing but criticize herself for putting her parents at risk by not accepting the life properly set out for her. It didn’t matter that Raham hadn’t ended up ruining them; Farrin hadn’t known that on her way out of the country. But she’d endangered them anyway. Eighteen long years of guilt! And now, here was Jason suggesting there wasn’t any point to self-blame, saying, in effect, she couldn’t help wanting to be happy. It was only human, and how could she avoid being that?

  She drew in a quick breath as something lifted off her. It wasn’t her entire burden, but it was…something. A single tear rippled down her cheek. She dashed it aside. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m the one who needs to apologize.” He stood and gently caught her by the elbows, urging her to her feet, too. “Because you are going to get this grossness all over you.” With an easy smile, he pulled her into an embrace.

  The presence of his warm, solid, bare, dirty, smelly body was curiously the best thing she’d ever felt. With a soft sigh, she wrapped her arms around his waist and let her cheek come to rest on his chest. “You feel a lot better than you look.”

  A low chuckle rumbled against her ear.

  “And what do you know?” she murmured, “no erection this time.”

  A full laugh exploded out of him. “Just say the word, honey.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Jason arranged with Usman and Afia—via Farrin’s translations—for the three of them to stay for two more days. Two days for Doctor Farrin to make sure the injured boy was securely on the road to recovery, and for Shane to eat, rest, and recoup, which he did. For room and board, Jason gifted the kind couple with all the local money from his ditch bag, happily contributing everything he had for them to restock their hidden food cellar. During their two-day stopover, none of the three of them ventured beyond the house, except for the small backyard. This was to avoid putting Usman and Afia at risk by possibly exposing the presence of three Americans to a neighbor.

  “Raat ka khaana,” Farrin sang out, calling them to the evening meal in Urdu.

  Jason headed in from the backyard, where he’d been having a hand-signal-only conversation with Usman and the recovering kid, who was now walking with only a slight limp. He aimed for the kitchen to help distribute plates of food.

  A stern look from Farrin sent him changing course and navigating for the front room instead.

  Men in the kitchen went contrary to Muslim custom, and every time Jason tried to help with traditional “woman’s work,” Farrin had shooed him away. He supposed she was just trying to help him not look like a complete idiot in front of Usman.

  In the front room, Shane was seated in his usual threadbare chair—his regular spot for sacking out. In the last two days, Shane could be found either sleeping or outside in one of the wooden folding chairs catching some rays. Recently he’d been engaging in a few light stretches. Jason had given the man the space he’d needed to heal.

  “You’re looking almost bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Jason commented, coming to a stop in front of his friend and setting his hands on his hips. Amazing how much and how fast a SEAL’s body could recover once he was allowed regular food and rest.

  Shane grunted. “Getting to be a carnivore again helped.”

  Jason nodded. Shane had graduated to meat after keeping down the first few bowls of plain rice. “Our two-day vacation here has ended, Mad Dog. After dinner, I’m going to head into Islamabad and steal a car. I’d like to get back on the road tonight, if you think you’re up for it.” Reaching someplace safe was still a huge goal, but also just getting into plain old contact with someone to let the world know they were still alive. He and Shane had now been “missing” for a full week, making it wholly likely that their “presumed dead” status had been upped to “KIA.” Jason could only imagine the hell their families were going through.

  “I’m good to go,” Shane said. “We still heading to the Kunar Province?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Then I should warn you a car will only get us so far. The paths leading to the SEAL outpost are no more than goat trails. For the last leg of the trip, we’ll need horses again.”

  Shit. Jason had promised to get Farrin home soon, and equestrian transportation did not equal soon. Also, strangely, he felt a tugging devotion toward Little Shit. Riding another beast would feel oddly disloyal, which was, yeah, very strange—for a man who professed to hate horses, he sure did miss that cranky gray butthead.

  “We got worse problems to worry about before then, anyway,” Shane added. “The trip from Islamabad to Kunar is around two hundred fifty miles—mega ground to cover with bad guys still on our asses.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Jason blasted air from his nose. On his own list of simple pleasures, he would love to wake up in the morning and not feel like a hunted man, be able to walk across a stretch of land without a target tacked between his shoulder blades, and live secure in the knowledge that the people he cared about were tucked all snug-a-bug in their beds. Oh, and something to eat he could get both fists around, like a double-decker cheeseburger on a Kaiser roll, medium-rare, half-drowning in melted cheddar, heavy on the ketchup, and stacked high with lettuce and tomatoes, served with a beer so cold a guy’s fingers would stick to the frosty glass for a second when he picked it up. That would be awesome—not that he was complaining about Afia’s cooking.

  He dropped into the tattered tequila chair. “By the way, with all the shit going on, and you half out of it, I never got the chance to thank you for saving my life in the cave. That tango had me in his sights, Mad Dog. If you hadn’t smoked him, I’d be dead.”

  Shane shrugged. “You can consider it payback for saving my skin when we were egressing the downed helo and also with that scrote-bag laundryman.” He winced, probably from the shrug. Shane’s shoulder wound was still paining him, though it’d played second fiddle to his infected butt muscle for most of last week. “You know, for two men who hate each other, we’ve done a lot of pulling each other’s asses out of the stew.”

  Heat flash-charged up the back of Jason’s neck, and he rounded on Shane. “Why the hell do you persist in thinking I hate you? It’s utter bullshit. I never wanted to end our friendship, Shane, and I’ve never understood why you mutated what happened into something way worse than it was.” The muscles in his throat contracted, tightening up his next words. “I took a different job. That’s all I did.”

  The scar on Shane’s face writhed. “It wasn’t the job so much as how you took it. You just announced it to me. I know I wasn’t your fucking wife, but back then we ran everything by each other.” He picked up a grubby teacup from the table set between the two chairs and drank out of it. “You also acted really fucking eager to go.”

  “I was pumped to be an aviator.”

  “You wanted to bail on me,” Shane shot back, bamming the teacup down. “So I let you.”

  “I don’t know what the—” Jason broke off. Too damned much… They’d just ended up relying on each other too damned much… “Hell.” He pushed a hand through his dirty hair. “I don’t know… Maybe you’re right. I think at some point I just couldn’t be everyone’s big brother anymore.”

  Shane gave him a dark look. “I was there for you as much as you were for me, Jace.”

  Yeah, extremely true. “You were. I don’t know how to explain it. I just…got tired.” And couldn’t wear the uniform of protector anymore.

  Farrin strolled into the front room, holding two plates of food: basmati rice, roasted red peppers, and chicken kebabs. Over her shoulder, Jason saw Afia bringing food out to her husband and son in the backyard. Farrin handed Jason a plate and grinned at him, the warm, intimate smile reaching her eyes.

  Her expression lifted off all the heavy stuff that’d just landed on his back. He grinned back.

  That’s how it’d been between them for the last two days: warm smiles, small touches, affectionate glances, time spent together in the small g
arden backyard, talking easily. It was like they were a couple of middle schoolers: girlfriend and boyfriend without any sex. Not that he was complaining about the platonic part. He was too busy enjoying everything about Farrin to care.

  She headed back to the kitchen, and he watched her leave, his focus drifting down to the sway of her hips. Okay, yeah. One small, nitpicky detail: he wouldn’t mind adding some sex to the equation. Even though he and Farrin weren’t in a committed relationship, all the reasons he’d ever needed to be in a relationship to have sex—familiarity, a minimum level of affection—he already had with her…and then some. Not to mention that, you know, it’d been a three-year dry spell for him. Not since Penny the Slimeball had he gotten his wick wet.

  But it was all wishful thinking. He and Farrin would remain platonic friends. She might claim to have expanded her religious views, but he could tell she was still very conservative. She would definitely need a relationship, but the logistics of making that happen were complicated. He was stationed in San Diego, she worked thousands of miles away at various aid stations, and while long-distance relationships weren’t entirely undo-able, they were very unappealing, and generally, over the long haul, unworkable.

  So he forced himself to stop leering at her, pushing aside all thoughts of seeing her naked, and forked into the rice on his plate.

  “So how are you going to blow it?” Shane asked him.

  Chewing, he glanced over. “What?”

  Shane jerked his chin in the direction of the kitchen. “Just wondering how you’re going to blow it with Doc Barr.” He picked up his kebab. “She’s nice, and smart, and you obviously dig her.”

  Jason set his fork down. “I can’t like a woman who’s nice?”

  Shane gnashed a chunk of chicken off the skewer. “Unless you’ve changed since I knew you, the only women you date are ones you can hate.” He ripped off more chicken. “You and I would walk into a bar,” he said around a mouthful of food, “or wherever, with plenty of nice chicks around, and you’d always zero in on the one woman who was way fucking wrong for you. I would’ve been impressed by how good you were at it, if it wasn’t so hosed up. But since Doc Barr isn’t a woman you can hate, you’ll have to blow it some other way.” He licked some grease from the corner of his mouth. “Just wondering how you’re going to do it.”