Conflicting emotions warred inside Faith—relief that he was alive, that she hadn’t inadvertently killed him. But she also hated him for tracking her down. She’d been on the verge of freedom, a new future. So close in her mind that she’d been able to taste it. And as she felt the pregnancy test in her pocket pressing against her thigh, she grew terrified he’d find out.
She had to escape from him before that happened. But before she could try to wriggle out from his grasp, he leaned forward, cupped her face, and pressed his lips down hard on hers. Faith’s breath caught in her throat.
She resisted, trying to push him off, but as he forced her lips open under his, a deep, raw need swelled sudden and fierce in her, overriding logic, her desire to flee. Her eyes burned with emotion, and grabbing him around the neck she kissed him back, desperate for something she couldn’t define, desperate to block out the world, the death, the killing, the hate. His tongue found hers, tangled, and kissing her deeper, he gathered her closer in his arms. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she ached to dig even deeper, faster, harder for
something she knew she’d never reach. At the same time a need swelled in her to share with him the secret of her child. Their child. But she couldn’t. She didn’t even want to know who he really was anymore. She had to get away from him.
She pulled back suddenly, heart hammering, breathless.
His eyes were dark burning oil, his features etched with raw desire. He was her Santiago again, and Faith hurt in her heart for something she couldn’t have.
“You didn’t kill me,” he said softly.
Faith reached for his dagger, sheathed at her waist. “You shouldn’t have come after me.”
“You left me water. You left me a camel. You didn’t have to do that.”
She yanked the dagger out of the sheath, rolled onto her side and kicked up to her feet. Taking a step back, she waved the blade in front of her. “If you come one step closer I’m going to be forced to finish the job.”
He got slowly to his feet, eyes fixed on the dagger—his dagger.
“What do you really want, Faith?”
“I want you to turn around and get the hell away from me, just leave me alone.” She had to yell now, over the scream of mounting wind higher up on the ridge.
In a predatory crouch, hands out at his sides, he came toward her. “Give me my jambiya, Faith. I can help you.” He came closer.
Panic sparked through her and her mouth went dry. “I don’t know who you are,” she yelled. “Or why they want you dead, but you’re not my business anymore, so please, just turn around and walk away and nobody gets hurt!”
The wind gusted, tearing at his turban. He came even closer.
Faith felt cornered, confused, conflicted. Adrenaline pounded into her blood.
“My name is Omair,” he called out.
Something stilled inside her. She didn’t want to know this. It was easier to cut him—everything—out of her life if she’d never have a way to find him again, or even a clue to start looking. She’d decided at the wadi. It was her focus now, the drive go somewhere safe, anonymous, to have her child in peace, where she could learn to be a good mother.
“I don’t need your help.” Her voice came out wrong, and she knew he’d sensed her flailing.
“You know that your employers hung you out to dry, don’t you, Faith? That’s why you dismantled your GPS back at the wadi. That’s why you threw away your sat phone, and came northeast, isn’t it? You think they’re coming for you. You’re on the run for the Moroccan border.”
She wavered, unable to move for an instant, like a rodent trapped by a snake’s mesmerizing—and deadly—stare.
“I can get you out of Algeria,” he called out. “Without you having to cross the Atlas Mountains. Those peaks—they’ll kill you, Faith. You need to know where to find water. There are bandits out there. And if you don’t get out of the open in the next few minutes this sandstorm is going to kill you first.” He lunged suddenly for the jambiya.
But she was fast, whipping around, and coming back at him in a tackle she rammed her shoulder into his gut with all her might. He was flung sideways, the momentum of her attack sending him tumbling down the steep dune. He stretched out his arm, trying to halt his fall, but gravity sent her crashing down on top of him. They rolled to the base of the dune, coming to rest in a hot, breathless heap.
He didn’t move.
Faith pushed herself off him and her heart stalled when she saw his face—it was bloodless, his features twisted in pain.
“Oh, God,” she whispered, touching his face. “What happened?”
He groaned and tried to move onto his side, but gasped. His hand went to his shoulder. “I think it’s dislocated,” he said.
She’d probably done it by landing on his shoulder as he tried to halt his tumble down the dune with an outstretched arm, and she’d hit him in a vulnerable position, aided by gravity and momentum.
Faith placed her hand on his shoulder. Through his robe she could feel the head of his humerus bone bulging below his shoulder joint. It was an anterior dislocation and she knew this kind of injury was excruciatingly painful.
Her whole body began to shake with an overload of adrenaline. The sand was a stinging fog around them, and up higher in the dunes the wind began to screech like a tortured banshee.
“We’ve got to get some cover—” she yelled. “I need to help you reduce the dislocation before the muscles spasm!” Faith bent down, trying to help him to his feet by his good arm. He gasped in pain as he staggered to his feet. Around them the sound of the storm grew louder, the sky darker.
But just as she hooked his good arm over her shoulders taking the brunt of his weight with her back, a deep throbbing sounded over the wind, and the black silhouette of a chopper emerged over the ridge.
“Get down!” he yelled, dropping back to the sand and pulling her down with him. He covered her with his good arm as the helo thudded above the cloud of sand. It came back for a second pass, lower this time.
“It’s looking for me,” she yelled. “They must’ve got a reading from my GPS.”
“Fools,” he growled against her ear. “If they come any lower the sand will get into the engines and bring them down—” A stream of bullets suddenly riddled into the dune, passing just inches away from them.
Faith pushed to her knees, pulse racing as another barrage of bullets cut across the dune below them, spitting up a line of sand.
He grabbed her sleeve, yanking her. “Get down!”
But she jerked free and began to stumble up the soft dune toward the ridge, reaching for the rifle still on her back.
“You can’t shoot! Sand could jam it!”
Unslinging her rifle, Faith dropped to her knees halfway up the dune, just as the dark shape of the helo emerged again above the swirling sand.
Whipping the stock to shoulder, Faith squinted into the scope. Sand stung her face, and the wind tore at her robes, but she remained steady, her body going quiet, and focused as her finger curled gently around the trigger.
Omair stared in awe at the sheer beauty of this woman shutting herself down in the middle of a sandstorm, quieting her pulse in the height of pressure. The thudding grew deafening again. The helo came closer, closer, probably reading their presence with heat sensors. She fired. Then again.
The chopper banked sharply, rising above the swirling sand, and the thudding grew distant. Omair thought he heard engines sputter, then there was no sound other than the scream of the wind.
She knelt there on the dune above him, arms hanging limp at her side, rifle still clutched in her hand. And as the adrenaline ebbed, the excruciating pain returned to his shoulder. They had to find shelter. He scrambled to his feet and holding his bad arm against his torso, he staggered up the dune toward her.
“Come!” He grasped her by the arm. “You’re going to die out here,” he yelled. “If we move fast we can get to the caves in the valley before the brunt of the storm hits!”
“Not much farther,” he yelled as they reached the rockier, flintier ground of the valley.
They ducked, panting, into the first cave, a large cavernous space where the air was hot and still. Outside the storm grew to a deafening roar, and swirling sand completely blackened the sky.
Omair sunk down onto a rock, coughing as he held on to his injured arm. She touched his shoulder gently. “You need to let me reduce that dislocation, right now.”
He glanced up. In the dim light her eyes were luminous, unguarded and filled with worry.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered.
Faith’s chest clutched at the rawness, the honesty, in his voice, his features.
“It’s the pain talking,” she said crisply as she unwound his turban. “Can you stand? I need to get your robe off so I can see what’s going on.”
He struggled to his feet and she undid his belt then carefully helped him lift his robe over his head. He sucked air in sharply as his bad arm moved.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is my fault. I must have hit you at a bad angle.”
He grinned through his obvious pain. “You mean you weren’t trying to hurt me?”
A wry smile toyed with her own lips. “Sit,” she said.
“You saved my life out there, Faith,” he said as he acquiesced. “Firing on that helicopter was a dangerous move. If that rifle had been choked with sand it could have blown up in your face.”
“We both would have died if I’d done nothing,” she said. “They could see we were there—they had to have been using heat sensors. We didn’t stand a chance.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
He angled his head.
“I honestly don’t know. Now sit still.”
His torso was as buff and dusky-skinned as she remembered and Faith couldn’t stop a fleeting memory of lying naked in his arms. She swallowed, focusing on his shoulder, but she could feel her cheeks warm.
It was definitely an anterior dislocation, with the bulge of the humerus in front. This was the most common kind of shoulder dislocation and it was fairly simple to manipulate manually into place—if done quickly.
Faith knelt down in front of him, conscious of his eyes hungrily taking in her every move, of his proximity, of the way he was holding his body stiff with pain.
“Try to relax,” she said, taking his injured arm and bending it gently at the elbow.
Carefully, she rotated his arm and shoulder inward toward his chest, making an L-shape.
She took a deep breath, then laughed lightly at her own nerves. “I haven’t done this in a while. The last time was when…” She caught herself and fell silent.
“When?”
“On a job…” She began to slowly but steadily rotate the bottom of his injured arm outward, keeping the upper arm still. “Can you make a fist?”
He did. Holding on to his fist, she pushed slowly. He groaned deeply, but she continued, working against the pain and protesting muscles, carefully pushing and twisting, coaxing the bone to work back into the joint, and suddenly there was a soft popping sensation as it slid into place.
Relief washed out of him in an exhalation of breath. His eyes were watering.
She released a huge breath of her own, one she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“We need to strap up your arm, immobilize it for a while.”
“We?”
Faith met his eyes, and something shimmered in the hot, still cave air between them. She became acutely aware of her pregnancy, of the fact she could see desire in his eyes. Of the fact that she wanted him in spite of herself, and her situation.
“It’s a figure of speech,” she said quietly as she began to unwind her own turban. Her hair fell loose to her shoulders.
“This turban cloth will have to suffice as a bandage. Maybe if the camels haven’t wandered off—”
“They won’t, not in this weather. They’ll be hunkering down together.”
“Good. Then we can use a strip of blanket and some rope from the saddlebags to fashion a better sling when we find them later.”
He was silent, holding his good arm out as she bound the injured one to his torso.
Her fingers lingered, just a little too long, against his skin. It was just as she remembered—smooth and warm and supple over iron-hard muscle. Another flash of memory sliced through Faith: their bodies tangling, slick with sweat, under her mosquito net as the fan turned lazily above them and monkeys screeched in the jungle outside.
“What is it, Faith?” he asked, his voice thick. The intensity in his eyes had grown so dark it was almost unnerving.
She swallowed, her face growing hotter. “Nothing.” She tucked the loose end of the cloth into the makeshift bandage. “There, that should hold.”
But before she could move away, he reached out and touched her hair. Gently. Then he stroked his fingers down the side of her face.
Goose bumps rippled over her skin.
Omair thought she looked like an angel right now. A healing angel. Her hair was like a spun gold halo in the strange orange light filtering in from the storm. Her skin glowed from the heat. It reminded him of the heat in Colombia, of how she’d haunted his dreams ever since.
In spite of his best effort Omair had not been able to excise her from his mind. It was true that he’d sent her hair for DNA analysis partly for selfish reasons—he’d been curious. And maybe a part of him wanted to find her again, for reasons he’d not been quite ready to articulate to himself.
But now he could.
Now he wanted to get to know Faith much, much better. Trouble was, those selfish reasons were now braided inextricably into his mission because she still held secrets he wanted. The information Faith retained could change his life, alter the course of his country.
“I like your hair blond, natural,” he said quietly. “And while I loved the sensual, rich brown of Liliana’s eyes, I like your amber eyes more. They’re more open, more honest this way. Softer, more kind. Gentle.”
She glanced away sharply, pulse hammering at her neck. “Don’t do this,” she whispered. “I know you just want information.”
“Faith—”
She shook her head, held out her palm and got to her feet. She went to stand near the entrance to the cave, and she stared out at the storm.
“What did you mean, Faith, when you said I’d signed your death warrant by searching for your identity?”
She inhaled deeply and was silent for several beats, clearly struggling with how much to tell him.
Finally she spoke. “If the people who hired me think someone is investigating me for a hit they assigned, they will do everything and anything to eliminate me, to keep themselves safe, anonymous.”
“And how exactly will they find out I am investigating you?”
“They’re powerful. They have contacts.”
He frowned. This sounded bigger to him than a simple contractor. This sounded like it might even be the work of the new and exceedingly powerful Moor.
But if MagMo did actually hire her, why lie and tell her that he was MagMo? Because she might not accept the job otherwise?
“Faith, there’s no doubt in my mind now that you were framed to kill the wrong man, and die in the process.”
“I know.” She looked at him, clear and direct, a tone of resignation in her voice. “And the reason I was sent out here to be framed and killed is probably because you started searching for me.” She snorted softly. “Got to love the irony there.” She dragged her hands over her hair. “I should never have slept with you in Tagua.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She stilled, met his gaze.
“I suppose,” she said softly, her voice coming out husky, “that if I hadn’t taken you upstairs to my room you might have killed me for the note anyway.” She paused. “Maybe you should have. Then I w
ouldn’t be in this predicament now.”
He got to his feet and came to her side. With his good hand he cupped her face, tilting her chin up. “I’m pleased you’re in this predicament—for very selfish reasons, Faith.”
“Yeah, so you can find the Moor and all that, I know.”
“No,” he said darkly, lowering his mouth to hers.
Panic flared suddenly in her eyes, and she stepped back, glowering, her chest rising and falling.
“Faith, I can help you,” he said. “I can get you out of Algeria without you having to cross those Atlas Mountains alone.”
“I don’t want your help. The only reason you’re offering is because you think I still have information to offer you. I don’t.”
“You really don’t trust easy, do you?”
She laughed dryly.
“Tell me something, Faith,” he said, taking a step closer to her again. “Who is in the photo you carry with you. Your mother?”
Something flickered in her eyes, a flash of vulnerability perhaps. And then her features shuttered, and Omair felt he’d just lost her.
“Did you tear your father out of the snapshot?”
“You don’t know it was my father—you’re fishing.”
“But it was, wasn’t it?”
Silence.
“My guess is that he was in the military, perhaps still is. I could see from the sleeve of the dress jacket he was wearing.”
Anger tightened her face and energy seemed to roll off her in waves.
“What did he do to you, Faith?”
“So you found a photo and now you think you can play shrink. Go to hell, it’s none of your business.” She walked to the other side of the cave entrance. She stood there, shoulders tight, arms folded over her stomach as she watched the storm outside.
Omair came up to her, touched her shoulder gently. She tensed, but this time she did not back away.
“Faith—”
“I’m sick and tired of the head games, you know that? I’ve told you all I have to tell.”
“Faith, look at me, please.” He turned her to face him and he saw the emotion pooling in her eyes. His heart clenched. He touched her cheek softly with the palm of his hand and tears spilled suddenly down her cheeks.
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