“A few,” Kady said modestly, looking down at her coffee cup. He had hand-ground the beans and hadn’t allowed her to touch a thing as he’d made buckwheat pancakes.
“Come on,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “Let’s both take the day off.”
As Kady looked up at him, a chill went down her spine, as it was the gesture she had seen a thousand times in her dreams. Right now shade darkened the lower half of his face, but a shaft of sunlight came through the leaves and highlighted his eyes.
“Come, habibbi,” he whispered, and she knew it was an endearment from another language. “This time you can reach me.”
Kady’s heart and her common sense warred with each other, but she remembered all the times in her dreams that she had tried to take his hand and had been unable to reach it. Now she extended her hand, tentatively at first; then as she neared his fingertips, she smiled up at him and slipped her hand into his.
Tarik gave a great laugh, then on impulse picked Kady up and twirled her about, and for a moment they both laughed together, Kady’s hair swirling about them as he turned her round and round.
It was Kady who came to her senses first and began to push away from him. “Mr. Jordan,” she said, “I think we should—”
Still smiling, he set her down, but he kept his hands on her shoulders. “I think that for today we can dispense with thinking,” he said, smiling warmly at her.
Kady wanted to retain her animosity toward this man, but he was making it difficult. Remember that he is a cold fish, she told herself. Remember that he is about to marry someone else. Remember that he is rich and famous and you are a means for him to get his money back, and that’s all.
“I think I should go to Legend,” she said. “I have to do things there, and I have business to attend to. And, besides, I do need a job and potential employers won’t wait forever.” She was backing away from him.
“Damn the employers! I’ll buy you a restaurant, and you can—”
“Is that what you think I’m after? That I want you to buy something for me? Do you—”
“I want to spend the day with a pretty girl,” he said softly. “I want a day away from business and family tragedies and all the other worries, I’d like to show you a place I found when I was a kid. I’ve never shown it to another living soul, but I’d like to show it to you.”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“Because I’ve never met anyone like you, that’s why,” he said with a look of exasperation. “And maybe I’d like to give you a better impression of me. I’m not what or who you seem to think I am, and I’d like you to know that before we . . . before we part.” Again he held out his hand to her. “Will you go with me?”
Kady started to protest, started to say no, but then she thought, What the heck? Why not? Could anything stranger or worse happen to her than what already had? “Okay,” she said with a grin, then took his hand in hers. “But on one condition.”
“Which is?”
“We don’t talk of money and you don’t try to make me tell you what happened in Legend. I would like a day off from the past.”
“Done! We’ll just talk about ourselves.”
“Great. And later I’ll sell the story of the rich, elusive C. T. Jordan to the tabloids and make enough to open my restaurant.”
He didn’t hesitate as he lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. “Any woman who would return a fortune as you did isn’t going to do something so low-down rotten and slimy as that.”
Maybe it was his confidence in her or maybe it was his big hand holding hers as she looked up at him, but she was beginning to feel the heaviness of the last weeks lift from her heart. Stressful did not begin to describe the last weeks of her life. “Are you saying that I’m boring? That I’m too good to do something treacherous?”
“No, of course not. What was it that Alice Toklas said about the eggs?”
Kady laughed. “That she’d scramble the man’s eggs rather than make him an omelet because it took less butter and he’d know the insult. Yes, I might do that.”
“Ah, but have you?”
He dropped her hand as he efficiently and quickly began to remove items from the campsite while Kady stood there and watched. He certainly was self-sufficient, she thought.
“Have you?” he asked again.
“Have I what?”
He was bent over, putting out the fire as he turned to look at her. “Have you done anything truly rotten to another human being?”
“I screamed at Mrs. Norman,” she said with guilt in her voice. “She’s—”
“Gregory’s interfering mother. From what I was told about her, it’s a wonder you didn’t take a meat cleaver to her.”
“You know, it’s odd, but she never bothered me until after I met Cole. Something seemed to happen inside me after I met him.”
He was stuffing things into an aluminum-framed backpack. “Maybe you began to get an idea of how much you were worth.”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about money.”
As he took water bottles from inside the Jeep, he grinned. “I’m not talking about money. Doesn’t the Bible say that a virtuous woman is worth her weight in pearls? Or something like that.”
“I’m not virtuous,” Kady said with a grimace. “In my lifetime three men have told me they love me, Cole, Gregory, and a boy at college, and I went to bed with two of them. I seem to go to bed with most of the men who tell me they love me.”
At that he leaned toward her until his nose was nearly touching hers. “In that case, Kady, I love you, love you, love you.”
“Get out of here!” she said, laughing as she pushed at his chest.
He stepped away, but he still looked at her with such teasing eyes that she blushed. “If you don’t stop it, I won’t go with you,” she said, but even she could hear the lie in her voice. It would be wonderful to have a day off from worry and anxiety. To have a day without ghosts directing her life.
“Are you sure you don’t want to try to go to Legend alone?” he asked, a mock look of horror on his dark, handsome face. “You could try to get past Uncle Hannibal by yourself.” At that he gave such an exaggerated shiver of fear that she smiled. “You haven’t seen him. Frightening man. When I was a kid, I thought he was Blackbeard.”
“He’s a thief!” Kady said. “He destroyed the lovely Range Rover Mr. Fowler bought for me.”
“Ahem,” Tarik said as he hoisted the pack onto his back and hooked the straps over his chest.
“Oh. I guess you bought it for me. Was it insured?”
“No money talk, remember? You ready to go? How are your feet? This is a bit of a walk.”
“My feet are fine,” she said, looking down at the trainers she wore. She spent most of every day on her feet and got restless if she had to sit down too long.
“Then, come, habibbi, and follow me.”
“What does that mean?” she asked as she followed him through the brush. Within minutes they reached a narrow trail leading upward. “What language is it?”
“Arabic, the language of Ruth’s lover. You don’t know why she jumped into bed with him, do you? Other than lust, that is? Didn’t she spend even a minute grieving over her dead husband?”
“It wasn’t like that at all!” Kady said vehemently. “It was because Ruth was in such pain and grieving so much that she turned to Gamal, and—” She halted. “Oh, very clever. But it’s not going to work. You said this was a day off, and that’s what it’s going to be. No more Jordans!”
“Too late,” he said, looking at her over his shoulder and around the big pack, and Kady giggled because for a moment she’d completely forgotten that he was a Jordan.
She was still laughing as he turned back toward the trail, and they started the long, slow climb upward. And Kady soon found that walking back and forth between counters in a restaurant kitchen was not the same as climbing a mountain at about nine thousand feet altitude. Her ankles often twisted to the side and she
could feel the beginning of a blister on her little toe.
But she didn’t complain. As a child, she’d learned not to complain about anything, to accept her lot and get on with life as best she could. So when Tarik turned and asked how she was doing, Kady always replied that she was doing great.
And except for her feet, she was. The air was cool and crisp, and she found that she actually could forget about the past and her uncertain future. For this one day she wanted to think about nothing but the sunlight and the herbs she was gathering and putting into her small backpack.
The hardest part of walking behind Tarik was trying not to think about him. It was difficult not to look at him and smile when he’d turn and say something to her. He seemed to know this forest as well as he knew how to handle those swords of his.
“When did you start being interested in knives?” she asked, then could have kicked herself because this was an oblique reference to Cole.
With a knowing look, he glanced back at her. “Did I inherit my hobby from someone?”
“Do magnets stick to you?”
“Sometimes,” he said, laughing. “You know, Miss Long, I’ve spent my life wondering what you were like.”
“And I never knew you or your family existed,” she said with exaggerated nonchalance. She’d give up her skillets before she told him about her dreams of him. Suddenly she thought of what Jane’s reaction would be if she were to call and say that she’d found her veiled man. Jane would no doubt say that Kady should marry him instantly because under Jane’s bossy little calculator of a heart she was a true romantic.
“I certainly knew about you. My father had a private detective on retainer, and twice a year he’d give my father a report, complete with photographs of you. By accident I found the combination to my father’s home safe, and I used to open it and read the reports.”
Kady was sure she should have been horrified at this, but instead she was fascinated. “What could the reports say about me? I have led a very boring, uninteresting life.”
He took so long to answer that Kady thought he wasn’t going to, but then he halted under a big shade tree and removed a water bottle from a hook on the side of his pack while Kady sat down on a rock and looked up at him. He handed her the bottle first, and it seemed perfectly natural when he drank after her.
“Your life was never uninteresting to me,” he said softly, looking out over the trees, as though he couldn’t bear to look at her. “I have no doubt Fowler told you all he could about me. He’s not liked me since I took away most of my business from him.”
“No, he didn’t tell me much,” Kady said. Tree branches hung down low over them and the forest was very quiet.
“I wasn’t allowed much in the way of companionship when I was a child, and there was always the threat of kidnaping, so I had to make do with what I could find in the form of companionship.” After a pause, he looked down at her. “It made me feel better about my lot in life that I knew of someone else on this planet who had to work for a living.”
Smiling, Kady tried to lighten the mood, for she could see little white lines of bitterness along the side of his mouth. “I’d have thought that a rich kid like you would have been given every toy and plaything imaginable. If you wanted playmates, couldn’t your father have bought you some?”
Tarik snorted in derision. “My father felt he had to get his money’s worth for every penny he spent. He bought me a horse, then expected me to fill the walls with prizes for riding. Martial arts was another way for him to take credit for what I achieved.”
“And did you? Did you excel in everything you tried?”
For a moment Tarik’s dark eyes were lost in memory; then as he looked at her, his smile returned. “Damn right I did! Didn’t you? If you were going to have to cook for your mother and the family you stayed with, weren’t you going to become the best damn cook in the world?”
“Yes,” Kady said, her eyes wide in wonder. “I never thought of it that way. I just thought that I learned to cook out of necessity. And need. People need food.”
“And people need money, too. They need jobs, so when my father created them, I knew he was doing a good thing. But sometimes I wished he could have allowed me to fail at something and still loved me.”
Blinking, Kady looked up at him. What he was saying was similar to what Jane had said about her family taking advantage of Kady and how Jane felt she owed Kady.
“I made you feel less alone?” she asked softly.
“Yes,” he answered, grinning at her, his dark introspection seeming to have disappeared. “I read all those reports and studied all the pictures of you until I felt that I knew you.” He clipped the bottle back onto his belt. “So, Miss Long, if I sometimes am too familiar with you, please forgive me. It feels as though I’ve known you most of my life.”
“Since you were nine years old,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said brightly as he held out his hand to help her stand. “But I don’t remember telling you that.”
“You must have, or how else would I have known it?”
“Of course,” he said, but he was looking deep into her eyes, and Kady knew that he didn’t believe her.
“Don’t you think you should call me Kady?” she said, then hesitated. “And . . . What should I call you?”
“Mr. Jordan, just like everyone else does,” he said with sparkling eyes.
“You rat!” she said as she made a lunge to smack him, but he sidestepped her, and when she stumbled, he caught her in his arms.
“Mmmmm, Kady,” he said as he pulled her close and buried his face in her hair. “What a shock you’ve been to me.”
Kady did her best to retain her senses, as it would have been easy to melt against him, so she pushed him away. “If you know me so well, how could I be a shock?”
“Lust is always a shock.”
“Oh,” she said, eyebrows raised to her hairline.
“You ready to go? It looks like it might rain, and I think we ought to get under shelter before it does.”
All Kady could do was nod and pick up her own pack. Lust, she thought. Didn’t life have some interesting little twists and turns?
They walked for what seemed to be hours, and with each passing moment Kady seemed to relax further. But still, she kept asking herself, Who was the real Tarik Jordan? Was he the man she’d met in New York or the man who had rescued her from bullets and was now making her laugh?
In the afternoon they paused to eat cheese and bread, and Kady asked him why he’d refused to see her when she went to his office. He took a while before he answered.
“I anticipated a long fight ahead of me to regain control of what my family had created. If I could refrain from seeing you until the day after the will expired, I wouldn’t have to go through any lawsuits.”
“Then why didn’t you just hide out for those last weeks? Or even on that last day? You made me wait outside your office for hours, so why didn’t you just disappear as soon as you heard I was there?”
“Curiosity, I guess. I wanted to see what you were like in the flesh, so to speak.”
“You could have met me the day after,” she said in exasperation, annoyed that he was purposely missing the point.
At that he laughed and put the remaining food back into his big pack. “I could have, but I couldn’t make myself leave. Maybe I wanted to see if you’d persist. I suspected you didn’t know about the will, but I also thought there was something else that was making you demand to see me. Claire said you were quite stubborn.”
“If Claire is that bulldog of a receptionist, could I retain interest in your company long enough to have the power to fire her? She really was quite hateful. You’d think she was the owner of the company, that she—”
Kady stopped because of the look he was giving her. “Oh,” she said, “she has designs on you. On becoming Mrs. Boss.”
“You do have a way of stating things. Ready?”
Standing, Kady picked up her own small pa
ck. “So how many of the women who work for you think there’s a chance of marrying you?”
“One or two. Jealous?”
“About as much as you are of the men in my life.”
“Then it is something that must plague you daily,” he said so softly Kady almost didn’t hear him, but she did hear, and even though she told herself she shouldn’t believe him, his words made her feel good.
The rain started at about four o’clock, and Tarik paused under a tree to pull long yellow ponchos from out of his pack, first draping Kady from head to foot, then pulling the hood over her head and tying it tightly under her chin. “Okay?” he asked as he put his nose to hers, and she nodded.
By the time he got his own poncho on, he was soaked, but he didn’t seem to notice as he started up the mountain again, and it was an hour later that he halted in front of a vine-covered rock. Kady stood to one side, rain coming down hard on her, as he pulled the vines away and exposed what looked to be a small cave. Holding the vines to one side, he motioned for her to enter.
The cave was a small place, and it was too dark to see much of anything, but within minutes Tarik had a fire going, as there seemed to have been dry firewood stored inside. Rubbing her arms for warmth, Kady looked around her, expecting to see caveman paintings, but there were just walls of sandstone and a sandy floor. Along one wall was a broken bench and what looked to be a few moldy paperbacks. Beside the books was a rusty knife.
“Spent a lot of time here, did you?” she asked, smiling, as she removed her wet poncho, then her backpack.
With a glance at the knife, he smiled back as he fanned the flames of the fire. “As much as I could. Back there along that wall is a little shelf with a wooden box. Look inside.”
She did, and when she saw pictures of herself inside the box, somehow, she wasn’t surprised. By now nothing seemed to surprise or shock her. There were grainy photos taken with a long-lens camera that showed her as a child.
“This is my favorite,” Tarik said, coming up from behind her as he reached over her shoulder and took a photo from the stack. It showed Kady at about thirteen on the playground at her school, children all about her, but Kady was leaning against the building reading a book.
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