by Amy Faye
“I’ve got a safe house on the north side. It’s a private place. No matter who our leak is, this isn’t going to be public information. We’ll be safe there. I need to get you dressed. You got a color preference?”
“For what?”
“Your outfit. We’re buying you some local clothes.”
“You sound very sure that I’m going to go for this.”
“You wear those clothes, and whoever your gunman is, he’s going to recognize you right away.”
“And if I’m wearing a new dress?”
“If you’re wearing a new veil?”
Lara blanched. “You’re kidding.”
“Oh come on. You’ll look great in one. Trust me. Absolutely great.”
“Look, I’m not trying to show my religious insensitivity here, or anything like that. But I’m just…”
“What? Not Muslim? You looked good in that hijab you were wearing when we met.”
“I had to wear that.”
“And now you’re going to have to veil.”
“I don’t know how to feel about that.”
“Just trust me. You’ll do fine, okay? Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you something.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’ll be safe where we’re going. That, you can take to the bank. And you’ll look great. I’m sure of that. Of course, you always look great, so it’s not much of a boast to claim that I know you’re going to look great in a veil.”
“And you can get one without getting spotted?”
“A man going to buy his woman some clothing? The most typical thing impossible. Doesn’t stand out in the least.”
Lara’s heart kept beating hard. She couldn’t wear a veil, not properly. Wasn’t it supposed to be some kind of purity thing? She was pregnant. Out of wedlock. It was agony not to tell him. The thought kept testing her limits. Every time that she thought that she’d reached the point where she was really under control, she found out that she’d wildly misunderstood. It wasn’t under control, she was just holding it back in the way that a parachute has a drag racer under control.
“Blake, there’s…” Lara bit her lip.
“We’re here,” he announced. If he’d heard her, he made no sign of it. Lara’s heart jumped in her chest. She needed to be more on top of herself. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”
“No,” she lied. “Sorry, just asking how long it was going to be.”
He pulled into an alley. They were like alleys back home, except that they were covered in Arabic graffiti rather than English or Spanish graffiti. The walls were yellow brick rather than brown or red brick.
A loading bay door opened and he eased into it. The moment they were through, he clicked a button attached to a door opener stuffed in his cupholder. He pulled it out and stuffed it into his pocket as the door started closing.
Was this was a ‘safe house’ looked like? It felt like a warehouse. One which was mostly empty.
“This way,” he told her. Lara forced herself to hurry. She wasn’t sure what was causing it, but she was tired. She just wanted to walk slow. Part of her hated feeling this way. Part of her told herself to get over it.
“And then what?”
“I’ll get you some clothes. Then we go in, we find the leak, and we plug it.”
“By ‘plug’ it, you mean…”
His expression was inscrutable. “Whatever means necessary.” he answered.
It wasn’t the answer that Lara had hoped for. She shuddered and followed along behind. He walked up a set of corrugated steel stairs. She followed behind. Her bare feet hurt, and she made the mistake of hissing in pain at the first step.
Blake turned on a dime and looked down at her. “You okay?”
“I’ll be fine, it’s just my feet.”
He looked down and noticed for the first time that she didn’t have any shoes on. Running through a marble tile floored hospital was no problem. The adrenaline pumped hard enough to ignore the hot concrete. But sharp steel did hurt.
“I’m sorry, you’re right.” He stepped down. She stepped back to make space. What was he doing?
He leaned down and hooked an arm under her knees, and then in a single motion she was up off the ground and he had her in his arms. It felt comforting. Good, even. She hated how much she liked it.
“There. That should do it.”
She looked into his eyes. Tell him. She forced the voice to quiet. She was so close to him now. She could smell the soft scent of cologne on him. It smelled masculine and like oiled leather. He started back up the steps, as if she weighed nothing at all.
“So you’ll need shoes, too. Stockings, as well. What are you, a Medium?”
I shrugged. “Are Arabic sizes the same as they are in the west?”
He shrugged back. “I could just say ‘she’s about this big’ if you’re worried about it.”
“And I wear a women’s seven. US sizing, at least.”
“Good to know,” he said. He smiled dimly. “Make yourself at home until I get back, alright?”
Lara smiled and nodded. She looked around the room as he walked out. She wasn’t going to be able to make herself particularly ‘at home.’ It was an austere space. It fit another puzzle piece into the picture of Blake Prince’s life. On one side of the room was a radio. Every couple of minutes, a voice said something. Dispatch orders for the soldiers, she guessed. “Galahad to Temple, I’ve reached rendezvous point A.” “Temple to Lancelot, proceed with the operation.” “Temple to Alexander, report.”
The chatter went back and forth. None of it meant anything. Lara padded over to a mini-fridge up on top of a counter top. She opened it up. It was packed full of bottled water. She pulled one out and opened the top. The tamper-proof seal was still closed until she broke it.
She settled back into her seat and stayed there, practically naked except for the gown, and thought about how things couple possibly be okay after this. Her head hurt enough that the question seemed very legitimate and very worrying.
She took a drink. The water was cool and clean, unlike almost everything she’d dealt with in the past two hours. When the radio squelched again and another transmission came through, she had to play it back twice in her head before the meaning came through clearly.
“All available units, come in. Temple Mount is under attack. Repeat, all units, we’ve been hit. Report on-site ay-sap.”
Fourteen
Blake was busily haggling with a man with beady eyes and a wide smile that never faltered even under pressure when the call came in. And whether he liked it or not, he might as well have been on the other side of the planet from the Temple.
His gut told him to go. There was work to be done. His work. His place. He picked up the radio in his pocket and stepped away from the counter. He pressed the button to talk. And then… nothing. Then he realized that he was making a mistake.
Someone had done that deliberately. They wanted him to come in. That meant, definitively, that he couldn’t. He had to think like a guerrilla fighter now. Not like a US Army soldier, as much as it pained him. Otherwise he’d be in trouble, and fast. That was what it meant to be at war with a guerrilla faction. Think like them or die. No in-between options.
So he clicked the volume knob to ‘off’ and turned back. The man’s smile had faltered, just slightly, while Blake’s back was turned. As he turned back and gave an apologetic grin, the man’s smile returned. Then Blake offered him half what the dress was worth, and the man’s smile didn’t falter for a second.
“Six thousand for the scarves, fifteen for the dress.”
Blake looked at it. One scarf might be ten dollars, US. The Syrian pound had taken a beating since the war broke out. It was always bad, but the problems had only gotten worse. If things didn’t turn around soon, they’d get worse still. Eventually, maybe Syrian businesses would start taking some other currency entirely. Who knows.
But six thousand for some scarves?
“Twenty-one thousand
pounds? Absurd!” He made a face that was only partly faked. “Couldn’t be more than seventeen for the whole thing!”
The man behind the counter’s smile didn’t fade. “Seventeen for all of it? Of course… you’re taking food off my daughter’s table, but…”
That was the cue. He wasn’t going to get cheaper. Not when he’d just named a value. That was the amount that they were going to settle on. Blake took a breath and closed his eyes. And then he counted to ten.
“Do you sell shoes, as well?”
“Shoes? Lovely shoes for your lovely wife, sir?”
“Those sound like exactly the shoes I’m looking for, yes.”
By the time Blake finally left, he carried an armload of women’s clothing draped over his left arm, and a shoe-box in his right. It wasn’t going to win any fashion shows, but he hoped that he’d done alright by Lara, at least insofar as he could, with these clothes. She wouldn’t be running around naked, at least.
He clicked the garage door opener, and it opened with a loud grinding noise. He drove in, and he closed it behind. The door closed as he stepped out, walked around the front hood, and opened the passenger door. Then he took the load of clothes again, and started up the steps.
He was halfway up when he noticed Lara, standing in the door. Her face was streaked with tears, and she looked like she’d only stopped crying a moment ago.
“I kept calling you,” she said. “On the radio. They kept telling me, this is a private channel, but I kept trying to get you.”
Blake sucked in a breath and closed his eyes and took the next step before he opened them again. She was still there, still watching him.
“I had my radio turned off.”
“I was terrified. I thought you’d gotten hurt, or killed.”
“I didn’t.”
“Don’t you ‘I didn’t’ me, Blake Prince. I was terrified and you weren’t answering me!”
She was getting hysterical. Blake took the last two steps in one long stride and wrapped his full arms around her. Her head immediately hit his chest. It made a dull thud as it fell. Then she was crying again. He could hear it. Could hear her softly weeping, even though he could hear just as clearly that she was trying to hide it from him. It wasn’t going to work, of course. He had good ears, and he was used to listening for details in the way a person was behaving.
He squeezed tighter as much as the clothes would allow him.
“I got you something to wear,” he said.
“I don’t care about that,” she answered without looking up. The feeling of the warm skin of her back under his fingers was a good one. He couldn’t help thinking about what it would feel like if he kept teasing it, kept playing with it. Couldn’t help thinking that he would like to find out.
“I know, sweetheart,” he told her instead. “I know you’re scared.”
“I want to go home now.”
“I know.” His jaw tightened all on its own. “But that’s not an option right now.”
“Not an option? You make the options, Blake. Please. Just let me go home.”
“Okay. Just give me another few hours.”
The last words were sobbed into his chest: “I just want to go home.”
“I know. But let me at least get you into some real clothes, and we’ll get you something to eat, first, okay?”
She mumbled her response, but the length was unmistakable. Two syllables: O-kay.
“Come on. Let’s go back inside.”
Even from here he could hear the radio squawking. It was a mess. Lara let him inside, and stumbled into a cheap sofa, fell back, and then immediately pulled her legs up onto it and snuggled into a corner.
Blake took just a moment to drop the shoe box on the table, and then reached over and cut the feed on the radio. The lights inside the machine died off, the needles stopped ticking, and he turned.
“Okay, Lara. I need you to get that gown off and try this dress on.”
She sat up and looked at him. Her expression was miserable. She slipped the gown off. She looked good naked. He didn’t mean to look at her the way he did. But she noticed, and her expression shifted a little bit. She laid back down in a way that accentuated her curves.
“The dress can wait,” he said, and dropped the whole bundle over the back of a chair.
Fifteen
Lara’s head was mixed up. She knew it was. She knew that it wasn’t going to change any time soon. So she did what she always did when she was in trouble, and didn’t see a way out of it. She put it out of her mind. Blake’s eyes on her felt good. She wanted to be wanted. Wanted to be needed.
He looked down at her as he stepped closer. His hand reached down to trace a line up the outside of her thigh. “The next flight out of here isn’t until tomorrow,” he said.
“And I’ll be on it?”
“If that’s what you want,” Blake said. “Yes.”
Lara let out a long breath. It was exactly what she wanted. “And until then?”
“Until then? I’m sure we can… find something to do.” He lowered himself down and pressed a kiss into her neck. His bear pressed into the sensitive skin there and teased her with the notion of the feelings that she knew would follow it. His fingers traced up her side until they almost reached her shoulder, and then started to trace back down, slowly but surely. Lara liked it.
“You want me to stop?”
“No,” she answered. “I don’t want you to stop. If it’ll keep you here, I don’t want you to ever stop.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to keep going,” he said. His voice was low and rough. His fingers traced back down her hip again.
She liked it. She liked the feeling that he left behind as his fingers drifted down her side. He kissed her neck again. Nibbled gently. She’d never described anything that Blake had done as ‘gentle’ before, but apparently something had changed, however subtly. She didn’t mind it one bit.
His hand found her breast and he palmed it. That was gentle, too. She wasn’t about to complain.
“You feel good,” he said softly into her neck.
“Fuck me.”
“I’m going to.”
“Then get to it.”
His hand left her breast and moved lower, his fingers walking across her skin. Each place where it touched tickled just a little bit. He reached her bellybutton and her stomach twitched involuntarily. He kept moving. His fingers moved lower. Lower still, until his fingers were buried in her well-manicured bush. Then they dipped lower still, until his hands pressed against her entrance.
He used his fingers to spread her lips. Lara let her legs open a little wider. His fingers took advantage of the space and moved lower. His thumb fell exactly where she wanted it to fall. It wasn’t a mistake. He moved it and sent a shiver of pleasure through her, and then he didn’t stop.
“You like that?”
“Yes,” she answered. Breathless.
He kept moving. He wasn’t too fast. Wasn’t too rough. But he wasn’t gentle, either. Whatever part of him that had decided that he needed to be gentle had gone now. He was being exactly what he needed to be, and nothing more. Nothing less.
Lara could feel her breath quickening. She wanted more. She needed more. He kept moving, though. No more than what she’d already been given. It brought her so close to the edge, and yet…
“Inside,” she gasped. “I need it inside. Finger me. Please.”
He obliged her. The feeling of his fingers inside her was good. So good. She laid her head back, her eyes closed. Her breaths came hard. His thumb kept moving, back and forth. Pressing exactly where it was needed. Giving her everything she wanted.
“Like that?”
He touched her in the right spot, right where she needed it. She bit her lip rather than answer him, trying to hold herself back. She wasn’t going to last long, though. She knew it.
“Come for me,” he whispered. The words had an immediate effect. Her body tensed up, and then…
“Fuck,” she growle
d. The words shouldn’t have meant anything. Her eyes closed tight and her body tensed up and she realized that whether she liked it or not, her body was responding.
“That’ll come later,” Blake said above her. His fingers continued to press in the right spots, driving her to greater heights. The world spiraled away from her, and her muscles tensed hard. Then, in an instant, they relaxed.
“Jesus,” she panted.
“Not quite,” he said. “Not quite.”
“Are you going to fuck me now?”
“I was thinking about it.”
She laid her head back onto the sofa cushion. Sweat was starting to bead on her forehead, even though she had barely done anything at all.
“Please,” she said. The rest of it was all jumbled up inside her, but she knew she wanted something, and she had a good idea that Blake would be able to give it to her.
“You’re so beautiful, you know that?”
Lara felt herself blush at the words. She’d already fucked him twice now, and he’d saved her life twice. He was the one responsible for this mess, too. Everything about Blake was jumbled up in her head. Everything about her entire life. But the words made her pulse speed up in spite of herself.
“Why don’t you shut up and fuck me, Romeo?”
“I can do that,” he said with a smile, and pulled himself between her thighs. Lined himself up with her entrance and eased his hardness into her. And for the second time in as many days, Lara felt herself becoming complete again. Of everything about the situation, this was what she was going to miss the most when she left.
There was going to be a future for her when she got back to the states. She just wasn’t sure that she was going to be allowed back into his future. As he started to move, she pulled him into her deeper. Wanting them to become one in truth, even if it were only once.
Because she couldn’t stay here, but she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Not before he understood her feelings. At least one of them had to.
Sixteen
Blake sat back on the sofa as Lara pulled the dress on over her head. He was fairly certain that you weren’t supposed to wear the dress without a bra. But then, who cared? It wasn’t like they were going to check. At least, he supposed they probably wouldn’t. After all, some fanatic had gotten an American-made .45 pistol onboard. A woman could probably get herself onto a plane without someone inspecting her underwear.