Zachary’s eyes lit up when he saw her, and one side of his mouth lifted in a smile. He looked uncomfortable in formal clothes, and yet he was the most attractive man in the room.
Catching Kristin’s hands in his, he pulled her through the doorway and into the limited privacy of the entryway.
There Kristin flung her arms around his neck, and he picked her up and swung her around once. And then he kissed her.
It was the way it always was when they’d been apart. Kristin suffered a sweet form of cardiac arrest, and all her carefully cultivated gentility deserted her. She took Zachary’s hand when the kiss ended and pulled him up the stairs and into the library, carefully locking the door behind them.
The room was lit only by outdoor lights shining through the ever-increasing flurries, but Kristin could see the admiration in Zachary’s eyes as he held her at arm’s length, taking in her extravagant white dress.
“You look,” he said hoarsely, “like a snow fairy.”
She smiled, and the music from the ballroom seeped through the venerable floors. “I’ll have this dance, if you please.”
He grinned, and her heart turned over, as it always did. “I love you, sweetheart,” he said, and then he took her in his arms and they whirled through the darkened library, passing between the desk and the fireplace, the pool table and the leather sofa where at least one president had sat.
The dance ended when Zachary lifted Kristin off the floor, pressing her body to his even as their mouths met. Their tongues sparred, greedy for conquest, and Kristin gave a little whimper of welcome as she felt one of Zachary’s hands curve around her breast.
He set her on the edge of the pool table and nuzzled her neck with warm, moist lips.
Kristin trembled when he gently lowered her bodice, baring both her breasts. They glowed like alabaster, tipped with rose, and stood out proudly for Zachary’s caress.
“I missed you so much,” she managed.
He kissed her again, thumbs moving over her nipples, fingers supporting the sweet, plump weight of her. Finally he broke away. “God kelp me, Kristin,” he rasped, “I need you—I want you—”
Kristin laid her palms to either side of his face and pressed him to her breast, where he took suckle at a waiting nipple. With his hand he sought a pathway through the voluminous billows of Kristin’s skirts.
He circled her nipple with the tip of his tongue before raising his head and chuckling. “Darlin’, I need a little aiding and abetting here. I can’t find you under all this lace and satin.”
Kristin’s laugh caught in her throat as she felt his lips close over the pulsing tip of her breast again. She moaned as he pressed her back onto the cool felt of the pool table, and the motions of her fingers were nothing short of frantic as she raised her skirts for him.
“Yes,” he whispered, bending to nip her lightly through her panty hose.
Kristin’s breath was quick and shallow. Delicious tension coiled within her as Zachary gently rolled down her hose and tossed them aside. She gasped when he brought her heels up to rest on the edge of the pool table.
“I’m going to enjoy this a great deal, princess,” he told her, his lips moving against the satiny flesh of her inner thigh. “And so are you.”
Kristin’s first release came rapidly; it rumbled deep within her, like an earthquake, and left her shuddering in a series of mellow aftershocks.
“We’re going to have to do better than that,” Zachary said, as he proceeded to bring her to the brink of an emotional volcano. “Much better.”
“Just take me,” Kristin pleaded softly as he consumed her. “Please, Zachary—”
He lifted his head. “I’m only giving in because I’m so damn desperate,” he replied. In the next moment he was inside her, and Kristin was buoyed up on geysers of hot lava. She was a sacrifice. Her flesh was molten, she became a part of the liquid rock flowing from the center of the earth.
And Zachary swallowed her cries of passion even as he sent his own hurtling into her throat….
Kristin came out of her reverie and was disgruntled to find tears on her cheeks. She wiped them away with dusty palms and looked around.
There was no sign of Zachary, and everything was quiet. Too quiet.
She went to Zachary’s pack and rifled through it, just in case he might have another candy bar tucked away in there somewhere. Sure enough, there was one, mashed to bits but made of chocolate nevertheless. And he was hiding a well-thumbed paperback mystery as well.
Since she hadn’t read anything since she’d left the palace, Kristin was as hungry for the book as she was for the candy bar. She opened them both, and gobbled them simultaneously.
Of course, the chocolate was gone first. She was up to page seventy-four in the book when she thought she heard the nicker of a horse.
Jubilation surged within her, followed immediately by fear. The rebels definitely had horses and Jascha’s patrols would, too. Someone was approaching, but it wasn’t necessarily Zachary.
Wildly, Kristin looked around for shelter. There was nothing except for a shallow recession in the hillside, where the shadows might hide her.
She dragged both backpacks over to it and hid them, along with herself. Her knee gave silent screams of pain at the sudden exertion, and her heart thumped against her breastbone in fright. She watched with wide eyes, her breath solid as a peach pit in her throat as the sounds grew nearer.
And then Zachary rode into sight, looking none the worse for wear and leading Kristin’s horse behind his.
“You did it!” she cried, scrambling out of the indentation, ignoring the agony in her knee and brushing away the cobwebs that clung to her hair. “You got the horses back!”
Zachary grinned wearily as he dismounted.
“What did you do?” Kristin demanded eagerly. In spite of the fear she felt, she was caught up in the drama of imagining the scene. Zachary must have been magnificent.
“I gave them money.”
Kristin was momentarily deflated, but she was too glad to see the horses—and Zachary—to dwell on the fact that things hadn’t gone as they would have in an adventure movie. She went to the mare she’d come to think of as her own and patted its neck affectionately.
“We’d better get moving while there’s still some daylight left,” Zachary said, and Kristin realized that he was watching her with a peculiar expression in his eyes.
“Is something wrong?”
He shook his head. “Where are the packs?”
“In there,” Kristin answered, pointing toward the cave that wasn’t a cave. “I wasn’t sure it was you when I heard the horses, so I hid.”
Zachary nodded and went to retrieve the packs. He found the mystery, too, with page seventy-four dog-eared. “You know I hate it when people do this to my books,” he grumbled, holding the volume up as damning evidence. A moment later he carefully closed the book and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket.
Before Kristin could apologize and point out that she still had a hundred and fifty pages of the story to read, Zachary stormed over to her with his hands on his hips.
It was his standard intimidation pose, and Kristin didn’t intend to be swayed by it.
“Come to think of it,” he began, “what were you doing going through my pack?”
“I was looking for a candy bar,” Kristin responded, folding her arms. “And I found one. You lied to me, Zachary—you said you didn’t have any more!”
With a muttered curse he turned away from her, grasped her pack and practically flung it onto her back. “Since you won’t be walking, you can carry this,” he said as he fastened it.
Kristin glared at him, but it wasn’t anger that soured her expression. It was pain. “You’re doing it again,” she accused.
He practically hurled her up onto her horse’s back. “Doing what?” he snapped.
“Making a distance between us. Refusing to talk about what you’re feeling. We’re mad at each other! Why can’t we just fight, like o
ther people?”
The brim of Zachary’s hat hid his face. “We have nothing to fight about,” he muttered. And then he turned away.
“The hell we don’t!” Kristin yelled, making her horse dance nervously beneath her. She watched with grim satisfaction as Zachary’s shoulders stiffened under the worn, supple leather of his jacket. “I walked out on you. Didn’t that make you angry?”
He turned and, for just a moment, Kristin was frightened by the raw emotion she saw in his face. Then, typically, he regained the formidable control that had probably served him well as an agent. “I wasn’t surprised,” he answered in an even voice. “I knew you’d feel the pea under our mattress, like a real princess, and go looking for a softer bed.”
If Kristin had been close enough, she would have slapped him with all her might. “You bastard, are you insinuating that I left because I cared for someone else?”
His shoulders moved in an insolent shrug. “A princess needs a prince,” he replied coldly, and then he turned and mounted his horse.
Kristin felt as though he’d backhanded her. She was torn between conflicting needs to cry and to rave like a wild woman, but she did neither. She just rode along behind Zachary, her teeth sunk into her lower lip, wishing she’d never come back to Cabriz at all.
They rode for hours before they stopped in a densely forested place that sheltered the mouth of a cave.
Kristin got down from the horse before Zachary could help her, biting back a cry at the response of the muscles in her knee, and began unbuckling her pack. She’d had to go to the bathroom for a long time, but she’d suffered in silence, too proud to ask Zachary for a break.
He was making up time, undoubtedly anxious to get her into Rhaos and off his hands.
Kristin went into the woods, attended to her business and returned. “There’s a stream back there,” she said in tones she might use to address a stranger. “I washed my hands in it.”
Zachary had unsaddled the horses and tied them to separate stakes. “Fine,” he said.
It was probably her exhaustion, Kristin told herself, and her injured knee, that brought tears so close to the surface. “Are we going to have a fire?” she asked, and her voice trembled. Zachary might be unpleasant, but having him ignore her was like being alone in that vast wilderness.
He nodded and disappeared into the timber without another word.
Kristin found a stump and sat down on it, despondent and bone tired. If she survived this ordeal and made it back to the United States, she vowed she would burrow in somewhere and write one hell of a book about the experience.
Of course, she’d leave out the times Zachary had made love to her. Those memories were naturally too private to share with the world. And too precious.
Zachary returned to camp with an armload of wood, which he tossed down in front of the cave. He glanced at Kristin once or twice as he laid the fire, but he was too damn stubborn to say anything. And that left Kristin with no choice.
“I’d like to finish that mystery novel, if you don’t mind,” she said.
He pulled it from his pocket and with a flick of his wrist sent it winging toward her.
It landed close enough that she could pick it up without leaving the stump. “Thank you.”
Zachary crossed his stomach with one arm and bowed deeply, and there was no humor in the gesture, only mockery. “At your service, your ladyship.”
Kristin bolted off the stump and limped over to him. “Damn you, Zachary, stop patronizing me! All I want is a little honest conversation. Is that too much to ask?”
“Honest?” he rasped, towering over her, wrenching off his hat and flinging it aside. His hair, damp with sweat and crusted with dust, bore the impression of it. “You walked out without even giving me a chance to talk to you! Do you call that honest?”
“So you are angry.”
“You’re damn right I am! I loved you, lady! For six months after you left, I spent most of my time lying on the living-room floor, listening to somebody-done-me-wrong songs! I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think!” He leaned forward until his nose was a fraction of an inch from hers. “You, on the other hand, were probably running around with the prince!”
Kristin swallowed. She’d wanted Zachary to vent his anger, but she hadn’t guessed how intense it would be. “I wasn’t ‘running around’ with anybody,” she said quietly. “Jascha and I were old friends. When he found out I was hurting, he wanted to help.”
“You were hurting?” The question was harsh, like the rusty blade of a saw grating against metal. “Why, princess? Were your charge cards at their limits?”
Kristin stood her ground, refusing to be daunted. “I’m getting tired of your snide comments about my life-style and my background, Zachary Harmon! Maybe I’ve been a little indecisive in the past, but I’m a good person!”
She watched as the muscles in his jawline tensed, then relaxed again. After giving her a look of utter contempt, he turned and started to walk away.
Kristin caught hold of his arm and held on with all her strength. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said when he glanced back at her.
He wrenched free of her grasp and straightened his jacket with a shrugging motion. “Hurt me? Sweetheart, it would have been kinder if you’d taken a hammer to my kneecaps.” With that, he returned to the fire and Kristin hobbled back to the stump, sat down and purposefully opened the mystery novel.
She gave up trying to read it after only one attempt; the print was blurred.
Once the fire was going, Zachary took something from his pack and disappeared into the woods. Kristin watched him vanish over the top of the paperback and dragged herself over to the blaze when he was gone. The heat felt good against her knee.
She was still sitting there, dazed with heartache and plain weariness, when Zachary returned, carrying two large fish on a stick.
Her stomach rumbled at the thought of something fresh to eat, but she was careful to hide her eagerness. “I didn’t know you liked to read mysteries,” she said, almost defiant in her insistence that they carry on some sort of conversation. Actually, there were a great many things she didn’t know about Zachary.
Zachary didn’t look at her as she brought a lightweight aluminum frying pan from his pack and set it over the coals. “That’s one of my grandfather’s,” he said, his voice so low that it was barely audible.
Kristin remembered then that Zachary had been raised by his widowed grandfather. She turned the book in her hand and studied the battered cover. “A Dan Harmon mystery,” the blurb read. “I guess when you read this you feel close to him,” she ventured.
He looked at the book, then at her face. He didn’t have to say his grandfather had been the only person in the world to give a damn about him, the belief was plain in his hazel eyes.
“When did he die?” Kristin asked. She couldn’t remember Zachary sharing even that.
“The year I graduated from college,” Zachary answered somewhat to Kristin’s surprise, laying the fish he’d caught in the pan.
She put her hand on his arm; he brushed it off.
“Zachary—”
“Just leave me alone, Kristin,” he bit out, rising to his feet again and walking away.
Kristin dropped her eyes to the novel, opened it to the dedication page. “For Zachary,” it read. With a sniffle and a squaring of her shoulders, she flipped forward to page seventy-four and began reading.
The fish burned, but Kristin ate her share anyway, along with what was left of Zachary’s.
“How’s your knee?” he asked finally, as she lay propped on her elbows, reading by the light of the fire.
“It’s okay,” Kristin lied, turning a page.
“The cousin did it,” Zachary announced.
It was a moment before Kristin realized he’d just given away the ending. And she was a mere fifteen pages from the finish.
“He did not!” she cried, slapping him on the shoulder with the book.
“Wi
th a monkey wrench,” Zachary added.
Kristin looked at the last page. “That was mean-spirited,” she protested when she saw that he was right.
He smiled at her, but there was no humor in his face or in his eyes. “Maybe I feel mean,” he replied. And then he got up and laid out his sleeping bag beside the fire.
It shouldn’t have bothered Kristin that he didn’t join their two bags together, but it did. She felt a sting in her heart.
“You’re not the first person who’s ever had a hard childhood, Zachary,” she pointed out reasonably. “Or been hurt when a relationship went wrong.”
“All right, Kristin,” he invited, his tone cutting straight through her flesh to her soul. “Tell me how tough it was to be the only daughter of an ambassador.”
“Will you stop playing Oliver Twist, please? Maybe you didn’t have the privileges I did, but your grandfather was not a poor man. And my home life wasn’t so great. My father never offered me one scrap of encouragement or respect in my life!”
Zachary said nothing for a long time, but when he did speak, his words left Kristin shaken. “I called you once. After you left.”
The words stunned Kristin so much that for a long time she could only sit there, trying to absorb them. “You did?”
“Yes.” Plainly, he wasn’t going to give anything away. She would have to work for every word.
“Where was I?”
“Williamsburg. You were there with your parents and the prince—remember?”
Kristin was filled with an overwhelming sadness, and the beginnings of outrage. No one had told her about Zachary’s call. “I didn’t know,” she said, thinking about her father. If I survive this, Dad, you and I are going to war.
“I talked to the ambassador.” Zachary’s voice was calm, matter-of-fact.
Kristin squeezed her eyes shut. “He didn’t tell me.”
Zachary gave a raw, mirthless chuckle. “The ambassador never saw me as an acceptable son-in-law,” he replied, surprising Kristin. She’d expected him to accuse her of lying. “And I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right. You and I would never have made it, princess. We didn’t have anything going for us except great sex.”
Escape from Cabriz Page 9