LEGEND

by Jude Deveraux

  “Probably a cookbook,” she said, smiling, then made the mistake of turning toward him and found that her face was inches from his.

  For a moment Kady was sure he was going to kiss her, but instead, he turned away, leaving Kady feeling relieved but also annoyed. But then, what did she expect? He was engaged to be married to someone else.

  Involuntarily, she thought, Just like you were engaged to Gregory even though you didn’t love him.

  “So tell me all about Leonie,” she said as she walked back to the fire.

  He didn’t respond to her request. “Sit down here. I want to look at your feet.”

  She didn’t bother asking how he knew there was something wrong with her feet; he seemed to know many things about her. Sitting on a rock that had obviously been meant to be used as a chair, she started to untie her laces, but Tarik brushed her hands away. In seconds he had her foot bare, the wet sock peeled away.

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous a blister like this is?” he asked with anger. “Look at this! You have two blisters on this foot and how many on the other foot?” He didn’t wait for an answer before he pulled her other wet shoe off, then gave her a look of reprimand at the three blisters on that foot. One of them had burst, and blood had made her sock stick to her skin. Gently, he peeled the sock away.

  After retrieving medical supplies from his pack, he began to doctor her feet, putting salve on them to prevent infection.

  “You take care of everyone, but no one takes care of you, do they?” he asked, her small foot held securely in his big warm hands.

  Kady didn’t like to admit it, but there was something about the intimacy of the tender care he was giving her feet that made her feel closer to him than she’d ever felt to any other man. She’d been to bed with Gregory, but she’d never known him. She’d spent time with Cole, but she’d never felt a part of him, at least not as she was beginning to feel a part of this man. Maybe it should have been disconcerting to find that Tarik had known about her all his life, but then she had also known about him too, hadn’t she?

  “What did you play when you were here? Were you alone?” she asked.

  “Always,” he answered as he began to wrap gauze about her foot.

  “Did you play that you were a cowboy? Or did you want to be a space ranger?”

  “Neither,” he said as he took her other foot in his hand and began to warm it between his palms. “I played Arabian Nights.” With a smile he looked back up at her. “When I was a kid, I was obsessed with all things Arabian. Al el Din, not as we westerners call him, Aladdin, fascinated me. There was a year of my life when I played that I was a Berber prince and ran around in a wool cloak, half of it drawn across my face. Like a veil, I guess, to protect me from the desert sands.”

  Looking up at her, his eyes twinkled. “I had to give it up when my face broke out in a rash from the wool.”

  As Kady looked at him, she was not smiling. “What did you mean when you said, ‘This time you can reach me’?”

  “I don’t remember. When was that? There, is that better?” he asked, referring to her foot. “I think you should stay off your feet tonight. No more climbing for you. Tomorrow I may have to carry you down the mountain.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. And what did you mean?”

  “About what?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Oh. About your reaching me? I have no idea. I don’t remember saying it.”

  She could tell by his eyes that he was telling the truth. No one could fake such a blank look. “Did you think of me when you were wearing your black wool?” she blurted, her face earnest.

  “How did you know it was black?”

  Kady didn’t respond, just waited for his answer.

  As he began to take food from the pack, he seemed to think about her question. “I guess I always thought of you,” he said softly. “You were part of my childhood.”

  “Did you imagine riding a white horse across the desert and asking me to ride away with you?” she asked softly.

  “Exactly,” he said with a dazzling smile. “Now what shall we eat for dinner? I have dehydrated beef Stroganoff and dehydrated chicken à la king and dehydrated—”

  “This is a joke, isn’t it? You expect me to eat reconstituted . . . ” She couldn’t say the words of the foods, as though to even say them would make her ill.

  “Got any other suggestions?”

  “Give me that pack and let me see what’s in there,” she said, and with a smile, he motioned her to have a look inside the pack.

  Thirty minutes later Kady had cooked a seasoned rice casserole, covered with cheese, and for dessert she had made a bread pudding with trail mix and powdered milk.

  “Not bad,” Tarik said as he ate three helpings, then cleaned out the bowls. “Not bad at all.”

  Kady had to laugh because she suddenly saw all his remarks about her cooking as what they were, teasing.

  The rain still pelted outside, but inside the little cave they were cozy and warm, and as the darkness fell, Kady looked out nervously. What happened now? Was she supposed to climb into a sleeping bag with him?

  Instinctively she knew that sex with this man would be different from any other sex she’d experienced. Sex with Tarik, or making love, as she intuitively knew it would be with this man, would change her life.

  But worse, it would make her want him, and he wasn’t for her. He was going to marry someone like Leonie, with the sound of money and Ivy League schools in her voice. Men like Tarik Jordan didn’t take home cooks from Ohio to meet Mother. Especially not a mother who dedicated herself to retaining her beauty. What would she think of Kady, who never seemed able to remember to put on lipstick, much less all the rest of it?

  “And what is going on in that little mind of yours?” Tarik asked as he set a pan of rainwater down by the fire and began to wash the dishes.

  “That I would never have pegged you for a man to do the washing up.”

  “And I would never have thought you were a liar. What were you really thinking?”

  “About your mother. Does she adore your Leonie?”

  “Two of a kind. Mother picked her out for me.”

  “You mean like a set of dishes?”

  “Exactly,” Tarik answered.

  “And your father? Did he meet your . . . your . . . before he died?” She was hesitant about mentioning his father because Mr. Fowler had told her that it had only been six months since Tarik’s father had been killed in a plane crash. And she couldn’t seem to say the word fiancée.

  Tarik very politely pretended he hadn’t noticed Kady’s speech problem.

  “Oh, yes. He said I was an idiot. He said I should marry the cleaning lady’s daughter before I married one of Mother’s friends. There was no love lost between my parents.”

  “So why did they stay married all those years?”

  “If my father had divorced her, he would have had to give away some of his wealth, so he had one mistress after another. And my mother, as far as I can tell, hasn’t had sex since I was conceived, messes up the maquillage, you know.”

  Kady laughed at that. “Is Leonie like your mother?”

  “Come here,” he said, sitting on a rock, his knees wide apart. “No, don’t give me that look, as though I’m about to steal your virtue. I want you to sit here so I can brush your hair. It has so many twigs in it that I’m afraid a forest ranger will arrest you for stealing national property.”

  Smiling, Kady moved to sit on the ground between his legs, and he gently began to brush the tangles from her hair, now and then tossing a twig onto her lap. She was silent as he worked, feeling the sensuousness of his hands in her hair. It was warm now in the cave, and the firelight was lovely. She was tired, but she didn’t yet want to go to sleep because she didn’t want this day to end. Not ever.

  “No more questions for me?” he asked softly, her hair in his hands.

  “No,” she said, “none,” then paused. “But I could listen.
I’d like to listen if you’d like to tell me anything.”

  “My life story, maybe?” he asked, smiling. “But that’s what I’ve been doing, isn’t it? We got off to a bad start, so I’ve wanted to make it up to you.”

  “Why? What does it matter? Are you being nice to me because of Ruth’s codicil?”

  For a moment it was as though her hair had feeling, because she could feel his surge of anger, but she was not going to apologize.

  After a moment he grew calm and resumed brushing. “I keep myself private because I don’t want to be surrounded by people who want nothing from me except my money. I do have a life, a very private one, at my home.”

  “Oh? At your apartment in New York? Which one of those that I saw is where you live?”

  At that he chuckled. “Neither. The plastic one”—he looked at her with twinkling eyes—“the one where you walked in on my shower, is for visiting clients and the other one is Leonie’s apartment.”

  “I see. Her apartment, your building.”

  “Jealous?” he said with hope in his voice.

  She ignored the question. “Then where do you live?”

  “I have a big place in Connecticut with acres of land and an enormous house.”

  “What’s the kitchen like?”

  Tarik chuckled. “Horrible. Needs to be remodeled completely. But I can’t find anyone who’d like to do it. Hey! Maybe you know something about kitchens and—”

  “Go on,” she said, interrupting his sarcasm. “Tell me about your house and about you. You’ve always known about me, but I know nothing whatever about you.”

  As he began to talk, again Kady realized that she identified with him. During their childhoods, there had been great differences between them financially, of course, but the more she heard about his life, the more she thought it was like her own. Money had caused both of them to be raised by strangers.

  “The house in Connecticut is where you’re going to live with Leonie?” she asked quietly as he began to braid her hair.

  “I’ll live there with our children anyway. She can go wherever she wants, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “That’s horrible!” Kady said, turning to glare at him. “Children need a mother. Just because your mother was always gone and so was mine, that doesn’t mean that children should be raised that way. They should—” She broke off when she saw that he was laughing at her. Again.

  “Damn you!” she half shouted. “You’re as bad as Cole! He was always laughing at me and always tricking me.”

  “Oh? And how did Cole trick you?”

  He had his eyes downcast as he cleaned out the hairbrush, and his voice was innocence personified. So innocent, in fact, that Kady didn’t catch on to what he was doing.

  She’d said that she wasn’t going to talk about what happened in Legend, but in the next breath she was telling him all about how Cole had tricked her into marrying him.

  “By the time I showed up, he was so sure I’d be dying to marry him that he even had the church decorated,” she said. “Can you imagine? He starved me into marrying him.”

  “Sounds as though you asked him to marry you, not the other way around.”

  She had been bending over the fire to stir it, and she looked across it at him. “Are you taking his side? Are you saying that he was right to do what he did to me?”

  “I’m saying that I don’t blame the man for doing anything he had to to keep from losing you,” he said softly.

  Kady turned away at his tone because all of it—the close confines of the little cave, the glow of the firelight, and this man she did and did not know—were tearing at her senses. “I believe I’m rather tired,” she said, then glanced at him nervously, again wondering what the sleeping arrangements would be.

  He didn’t so much as make a move toward her, but instead unfastened one sleeping bag from the bottom of the big pack, then pulled another from deep inside it, and Kady gave an audible sigh of relief.

  Tarik gave her a one-sided grin. “Is that a sigh of relief or regret?”

  “Relief,” she answered quickly, but from the way he laughed, she didn’t think he believed her, and she turned away so he couldn’t read her eyes.

  When she turned back, he had spread the two sleeping bags out, one on either side of the fire, and she had to look away again to keep from watching him as he removed his shirt and jeans. When he was wearing only his white briefs, he put on a flannel shirt, leaving his strong, muscular legs exposed, and it was all Kady could do to make herself look away.

  As for herself, she had to force her fingers to unbutton her shirt, and for a moment she considered going to bed with all her clothes on. But when she glanced at Tarik, he was already inside his sleeping bag, the one nearest the door, and he was staring up at the ceiling, not so much as looking in her direction.

  Pretending that she didn’t have a concern in the world, Kady undressed down to her body-hugging underwear, then slipped into her bag across from him.

  For all that there was space and a fire separating them, Kady felt very close to him. And that feeling annoyed her because their relationship was so temporary. “Why do you say such things to me, about being jealous and about the men in my life?” she said without thinking. “What does my life matter to you? We’re strangers to each other.”

  “That’s not true, is it? I feel as though I’ve known you forever—and you feel it, too, don’t you?”

  “Not in the least,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “You belong to Leonie.”

  “And who do you belong to, Kady?”

  “To . . . to myself, that’s who,” she said, and even to her own ears that seemed a very lonely statement.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, and when he did, he changed the subject completely. “The kitchen in my house in Connecticut is in the oldest part of the house, and next to it is a pretty little study that looks out over a walled vegetable and herb garden. Along the south wall are grapes and espaliered apricot trees. No one has cared for the garden for years, but with work, it could be brought back to life. The study has two walls of old pine shelves that could hold probably a thousand or more books, cookbooks maybe. And as I said before, the kitchen hasn’t been remodeled, so there’s a storage pantry, a butler’s pantry, and a third room with thick brick walls. We don’t know what the third room was used for but—”

  “A larder.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a larder, used to keep meat cold. Is there a drain in the floor?”

  “Why yes, there is and an underground—”

  “A well,” she said with longing in her voice. “A spring runs under the room, and the water keeps the room cold.”

  “Leonie wants to tear the auxiliary rooms out and make them all into one big, modern kitchen with black glass cabinets and—”

  “No!” Kady said vehemently. “You can’t do that. Those small rooms have a purpose and—” She drew a breath. “It’s none of my business, of course.” She took another calming breath. “What does she want to do with the walled garden?”

  “Put in a private Jacuzzi. She wants to bring in boulders and make it a natural landscape.”

  “Apricot trees are natural.”

  “The trees will have to go, of course. Leonie says the leaves will clog the tub’s filtering system.”

  Kady lay on her back looking at the firelight flickering on the cave’s ceiling, thinking of the horror of destroying such beauty.

  “What is hyssop?” Tarik asked.

  “An herb. It’s used to flavor oily fish, and it’s what Chartreuse is made from. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. That’s what someone said was growing in the garden, but it made Leonie sneeze, so we took it out. What about you?”

  She was so involved in thinking of the desecration of the old garden that she didn’t understand him. “Me?” she asked blankly.

  “Yes. Does anything make you sneeze?”

  “Certainly not any herbs,” Kady said with her jaw c
lenched. “I’d like to go to sleep now,” she said, as she couldn’t bear to hear another word about Leonie’s planned destruction of what seemed to be a beautiful old place.

  “Oh, sure,” Tarik said, and she could hear him turning over in his sleeping bag, his back to her, but a minute later she heard, “Bricks.”

  When she didn’t ask what he was referring to, because she thought she already knew, he said, “The walls of the garden are made of old bricks, but Leonie hates them because they’re covered with lichens and green moss. She wants to tear them down and put up something modern and tidy. Leonie likes modern things.”

  “Like you!” she said with feeling.

  “You think I’m modern?”

  “You live in New York and you—”

  “I work in New York. I live in a two-hundred-year-old house in Connecticut.”

  “And you . . .” She broke off because she really couldn’t think of much else wrong with him. Except that he made her crazy, that is. One minute he was laughing at her, the next he was rescuing her, the next he was washing the dishes. “I’d like to go to sleep now,” she said again, letting him know that she wanted to stop talking. Even when he was talking about such innocent subjects as his house, he seemed able to annoy her. What did it matter to her what his wife did to their house and garden? It wasn’t any of her concern, was it?

  “Yes, of course, habibbi,” he said softly. “And may you have the most beautiful of dreams.”

  “And the same to you,” she said, pushing at the down-filled sleeping bag, trying to make it more comfortable. “Is that what you call Leonie?” she asked and then wished with all her might that she could recall the words.

  To her surprise, Tarik did not laugh at her. Instead, he said softly, “No, I have never used that endearment to anyone else. It’s just for you.”

  In spite of her good intentions, his words made her feel good, and she went to sleep smiling.

  But the next morning the sunlight burned off the rain, and Kady felt that she could see life more clearly. Tarik Jordan was paying attention to her only because of Ruth’s codicil.