Escape from Cabriz

by Linda Lael Miller

  Kristin dropped the chain and rings back down inside her shirt, and she shrugged one shoulder. “I grabbed them before I left my room this morning. I don’t really know why.”

  He took her arm, just above the elbow, in a grip just short of bruising. “Let’s keep moving.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Kristin wanted to know as she scrambled along beside him, trying to keep up with his long strides. “And don’t say ‘nothing,’ Zachary Harmon, because I saw that look in your eyes.”

  He stopped and wrenched her against his chest, but it was a gesture of anger, not passion. “It just reminded me of how little we really have in common, that’s all,” he ground out. “You’re a rich princess, and I’m just an ordinary guy. It’s been great, Kristin, and I’ll get you out of Cabriz, but after that it’s over. I’m never going to look back.”

  For several moments Kristin reeled inwardly, just as stunned as if he’d slapped her. “What?” she managed to squeak. “But I thought—”

  It was as though a veil had dropped down behind his eyes, hiding the soul Kristin had seen on more than one occasion. A bitter smile twisted his lips. “This isn’t a movie, princess. Just because we had great sex and got shot at together doesn’t mean we can make a life. It would never work.”

  Kristin started to protest that she loved him and furthermore that she damn well knew he loved her, but her pride stopped her. She just nodded and pulled free of him.

  In another half hour they reached the edge of the village Zachary had seen from the sky. The villagers proved to be curious but friendly, and they gladly accepted Kristin’s rings and chain in return for two worn-out plow horses, some blankets and a little food.

  “We’re spending the night here,” Zachary told Kristin when the animated negotiations had been completed and the transaction was made.

  “Isn’t that a risk?” Kristin asked, and she made her voice sound casual even though just looking at Zachary made her want to cry. She’d had such hopes, such dreams—and he wanted to walk away from her the moment they were safe in Rhaos and never think about her again. “You said it yourself. Jascha’s probably right behind us.”

  “There was a lot of damage to the ’copter when we landed,” Zachary answered without looking at her. “I’m hoping they’ll think it was a crash and we’re already dead.”

  Kristin felt as though that were the case. She was like a ghost, numb and cold, condemned to wander, never caring where.

  She sat with Zachary that evening, staring into the fire while he talked with the villagers in their language, and when he led her to the hut they were to share, she didn’t resist. She didn’t even argue when he enfolded her in his arms, kissed her forehead and fell asleep, still cuddling her close.

  Kristin was exhausted, emotionally and physically, and though she slept, her slumber was not restful. She awakened in the depths of the night, aching with a loneliness so profound, so hopeless, that she was sure nothing could assuage it.

  It drove her through the barrier of her pride, that need, and she raised herself to her knees and bent to kiss Zachary’s mouth softly.

  He stirred, searched her body with his hands, found her breasts. Her name came ragged from his lips, and he moved to pull her down beside him on the skins.

  “No,” she whispered. “This time is mine.” She pushed his sweater up, letting the moonlight seeping in through the roof of the hut dapple his chest. She stroked him, running her fingers through the tangled swirls of golden-brown hair, then bent to taste his nipple with the tip of her tongue.

  He moaned. “Kris—”

  She rose up again, and calmly unfastened his jeans. “Maybe this will be goodbye,” she said. “And maybe you’ll walk away without looking back, just like you said. But you’ll never forget me, Zachary—I mean to see to that.”

  Kristin bent then to nip at his belly, and she smiled when his manhood was there to meet her.

  Zachary groaned and arched his back when she touched him with her tongue. His hands entangled themselves frantically in her hair. Soon he was delirious, begging senselessly in a gravel-rough voice, and Kristin showed him no more mercy than he’d ever shown her.

  But at what must have been practically the last second, he gripped her shoulders and in one swift move wrestled her beneath him. His mouth covered hers in a consuming, fiery kiss while his hands moved under her sweatshirt to release her breasts from the restraint of her bra.

  “You’re right,” he rasped as he shoved her sweatshirt up and found one of her nipples with his warm, wet mouth. “I’m never going to forget this night. But damn you, you won’t either!”

  A whimper escaped Kristin as he took her breast, teased her with his lips and tongue. His hands gripped her wrists, pressing her hands wide of her shoulders into the depths of the skins they lay upon. She writhed under his hips, aware of his length and power in every part of her being.

  She grew wilder, more desperate as he made his way to her other breast and sampled that. He held her wrists together above her head now, in one hand, while the other unsnapped her jeans and smoothed them away. He was less patient with her panties, however.

  “So beautiful…” he told her hoarsely, nibbling his way down over her belly. His tongue moved swiftly through the silken jungle to administer sweet menace.

  “Take me,” she pleaded. “M-make love to me—please—”

  She felt the tip of his shaft at her entrance, teasing, gently prodding.

  “Zachary,” she sobbed, and he cupped his hands under her bottom and drove into her hard.

  The friction set them both afire, and Kristin grasped at Zachary’s head and dragged him into a kiss as their bodies rose and fell together in an ancient dance of wonder and need. Her moans collided with his, and their tongues mated frantically.

  Kristin felt the sky rushing toward her as despair and joy clashed inside her like great, silent cymbals. Her body convulsed wildly, once, twice, three times, and then she was in the eye of the storm.

  Zachary stiffened, gave a low warrior’s cry and spilled himself into her, and the two of them lay gasping on the skins for a long time. Kristin cuddled close to Zachary, her arms around his waist, her heart already grieving because there would not be a lifetime of nights just like that one.

  When he abruptly thrust her onto her back and loomed over her, Kristin was startled. Her eyes widened when she saw the unrestrained fury in his face, the tears shimmering along his lashes.

  “Damn you,” he grated out, his thumbs digging into her shoulders. “Why did you do it? Why did you abort my baby?”

  10

  Why did you do it? Why did you abort my baby?

  The questions demolished Kristin’s spirit like a steel wrecker’s ball, and with every strike a little more of her crumbled away.

  She opened her mouth to answer, but no sound came out. And Zachary’s thumbs were like rivets, bolting her shoulders to the floor.

  “Why?” Zachary demanded.

  Finally Kristin found her voice. “It was a miscarriage,” she croaked, her words barely audible. “I—I wanted our baby, Zachary. I wouldn’t have gotten rid of it.”

  He just stared at her for a long time, his lashes glistening, and she watched as hope and suspicion warred in his face. He thrust free of her and turned away. “You’re a liar!” he rasped, and even in the thin moonlight Kristin could see his shoulders shuddering as he struggled to regain control of his emotions. “You were scared—you didn’t think our relationship was going anywhere….”

  Kristin sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees. She was facing the most crucial conflict of her life—the battle for Zachary’s trust—and she was too exhausted to fight it. “You’re partly right—I was scared. And I didn’t want to go on just living together forever. But I wanted our baby. I meant to raise it myself, if you refused to marry me.”

  He shoved spread fingers through his hair. “Save it, Kristin. Your father told me the truth.”

  “My father?” Kristin was c
onfused. Kenyan Meyers hadn’t even known about the miscarriage until afterward; he’d been on the other side of the country when it happened.

  “He called me about twenty minutes after I came in from that last mission and found you gone.” Zachary didn’t turn to look at her, and his voice sounded haunted, bewildered; he seemed to be reliving the pain. “He said you had finally come to your senses, that there had been a ‘little problem,’ but you’d gone to the hospital and had it taken care of.”

  Kristin was reeling. She’d known all along that her father didn’t like Zachary, didn’t think he’d make a suitable husband for his only daughter, but she would never have dreamed he was capable of such cruel treachery.

  “Damn it,” Zachary breathed, whirling around to glare at her in the cold, sparse light, “he called our child a ‘little problem’!”

  “Zachary—”

  He held up one hand to silence her. “No more lies, Kristin. It’s better if we just don’t talk about this anymore.”

  Kristin had had enough. She bolted to her feet, using energy from some reserve she hadn’t known she possessed, and stormed over to Zachary. “If you think you can drop an emotional bomb like that and then pull your old trick of refusing to talk about it, Zachary Harmon, you’re full of sheep dip!”

  “Keep your voice down—you’ll wake up the whole village!”

  “I don’t give a damn if I wake up the whole country!” Kristin yelled, hands on her hips, jaw set at an obstinate angle. “We’re going to talk this out! I don’t know what he thought gave him the right—and I swear I’m going to strangle him when I get back to Virginia—but my father lied to you. Do you hear me, Zachary? He lied. I wanted that baby more than anything else in the world!”

  She saw the torment in his eyes, the struggle to believe, and at the same time she knew she’d lost.

  It was the final blow; Kristin could bear no more. She turned slowly away from Zachary, lay down on the skins, wrapped herself in one of the blankets and willed herself to die.

  “Kristin,” Zachary said raggedly. And she could feel him reaching for her, with his heart if not his hands. But what did that matter, when he’d take another person’s word over hers?

  “Leave me alone,” she whispered, too broken even to cry. She lay curled up throughout the night, caught in that hazy state between waking and sleeping.

  In the morning she ate the rice Zachary brought her, but she didn’t speak to him. She wasn’t punishing him, she wasn’t even angry anymore. She simply had nothing to say.

  They prepared the bartered plow horses for travel and set out toward the border.

  Zachary tried to talk to her again when they stopped for a midday meal of some dried meat Kristin didn’t care to categorize. “We’ll be out of Cabriz sometime tomorrow,” he said.

  Kristin just looked at him. She supposed she probably had dark circles under her eyes; she always got them when she was overtired.

  “Damn it, will you say something?” Zachary rasped.

  She shrugged. “Thank you for saving me from the bad guys,” she said. “But then, that’s what a macho-man like you is supposed to do, isn’t it? Rescue damsels in distress?”

  He was plainly annoyed—and he was going to persist in pursuing his point. “Why would your father lie to me?”

  “He didn’t like you very much,” Kristin replied with bald honesty. “I don’t suppose it was anything personal—he just thought you had a lousy job. So did I, for that matter. And if I know Dad, he probably ran a background check on you and found something he didn’t care for.”

  Zachary’s face tightened, then relaxed again. He threw down the last of his dried meat and hoisted himself upright from a crouching position. “Let’s get moving, princess,” he said, revealing no emotion at all in his tone. “The evil prince could still catch up with us.”

  There was no more mention of the lost baby, or of Kristin’s father. They traveled in silence, communicating only when necessary. Even when they stopped to make camp they avoided each other as much as possible. At five o’clock the next afternoon they reached the border station Zachary had been aiming for all along.

  The Rhaotian guards greeted them with broad grins—the Cabrizians just scowled at Zachary’s drawn pistol—and one of the friendly soldiers rushed to telephone the news to their superiors. Soon a representative of the Rhaotian government arrived in a dusty little sedan and, after giving the horses to a surprised farmer as a gift, Zachary and Kristin sped toward Isi, Rhaos’s capital city.

  Kristin sat numbly in the back seat, her shoulder touching Zachary’s, her heart lost in the farthest, loneliest reaches of the universe.

  The embassy was in an uproar when they arrived, and reporters waited at the gate, snapping pictures and shouting questions.

  Neither Kristin nor Zachary so much as looked in their direction, let alone spoke.

  Inside the embassy compound they were immediately separated and subjected to an extensive “debriefing.” Kristin told the ambassador and the man from the CIA everything that had happened—except, of course, for the lovemaking. That was private, and she wasn’t going to share it with anybody.

  “You’d better talk with the reporters, however briefly,” the ambassador’s assistant advised, after the CIA had subjected Kristin to exhaustive questioning. The aide was a woman in her middle thirties, with sleek dark hair and an air of authority about her. “The whole world has been waiting for a development of some kind.”

  Kristin’s shoulders sagged at the prospect, but before she could frame a reply, the ambassador, an old friend of her father, interceded.

  “Great Scott, Caroline, the poor girl is on the verge of collapse. She needs food, rest and perhaps even medical care. Issue some kind of statement to keep them at bay and send for a doctor.”

  Caroline looked at Kristin reproachfully, but she left the ambassador’s study and closed the door behind her.

  Mr. Binchly, an old-timer in the diplomatic corps, laid a gentle, beefy hand on Kristin’s shoulder. He was a tall man, with a shiny pate and kindly blue eyes. “Were you hurt, Kristin?” he asked, and he looked as though the answer to that question really mattered to him.

  A lump formed in Kristin’s throat. Yes, answered an inner voice, silent but nonetheless eloquent for that. Yes, I was hurt. I found the man I was meant to love, and he doesn’t want me. “I’ll be all right in a few days,” she said, and then tears welled up in her eyes.

  Mr. Binchly laid his hand lightly on the back of her head and pressed her face to his shoulder. “There, there, you’re safe now, dear. We’ll see that you get back home to your family as soon as you’re ready to travel.”

  Kristin felt a flicker of rage as she thought of her father, but she suppressed it. She would deal with Kenyan Meyers when she’d recovered her strength. “My friend, Mr. Harmon—is he all right? He was beaten once….” Her voice fell away.

  The diplomat seated Kristin in the chair she’d bolted out of after her grueling interview with the CIA and went to pour brandy into a snifter. “Here,” he said, handing her the glass. “This will brace you up a little. Harmon is fine, as far as I know. He’ll be checked over by a doctor, just as you will.”

  Kristin nodded distractedly and took a sip of the brandy. The liquor rolled like a fireball down her throat and into her stomach, and her eyes were watering when she looked up. “If I could just lie down—”

  “Surely,” Mr. Binchly said quickly, and he immediately went to his desk and used his intercom to summon another aide.

  Kristin set her brandy aside and followed the young Rhaotian man out of the room with as much dignity as she could manage. He led her up the main staircase and deposited her in a large guest room.

  After a brief exploration, Kristin started water running in the bath and asked the aide to send up tea and a platter of fresh fruit. He nodded politely and left.

  The bath Kristin took was a leisurely one. She soaked, she washed her hair, she shaved her legs and armpits. And then s
he let the water out and ran a fresh supply.

  When she reentered the bedroom sometime later, wrapped in a towel, she found a white silk robe draped over the back of a chair and a tea tray on the nightstand.

  She put on the robe and combed her hair, then sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed with a cup of tea and her journal. Although she’d never been more tired, she felt a need to set down what had happened to her in black and white. Maybe then she’d be able to grapple with the experience and make some sense of it.

  Unfortunately, all she could think about was Zachary. Kristin realized now that she’d loved him all along—the episode with Jascha had been a grand-scale attempt to forget her broken heart.

  She sighed, cupping her chin in one hand and setting her teacup aside. Zachary was not the kind of man a woman loves once; with him, it was for always. And he couldn’t have made it clearer that he wanted nothing whatever to do with her now that they were safe.

  Kristin abandoned all attempts to write about her escape from Cabriz and crawled into bed, pulling the covers over her head. She fell into an almost immediate sleep, and didn’t awaken until she felt someone pulling back the covers to prod and push at her.

  “Zachary,” she scolded with a half smile on her face. But when she opened her eyes, she was looking up at a stranger—a doctor, judging by the stethoscope hanging around his neck. He was an Asian of indeterminate age, and his expression was a kindly one.

  “I’m sorry not to be Zachary,” he said with pleasant formality. “My name is Chong. Paul Chong.”

  Kristin smiled, despite the sting of disappointment, and sat up, pulling the covers up to her waist. “I really don’t need an examination—”

  “All the same,” interrupted Dr. Chong with a shake of his finger.

  “There was a slight injury to my knee,” Kristin recalled, frowning. “But a man gave me some sort of tea, and it improved right away.”

  “Let me see, please,” the doctor urged.

  Kristin obediently laid the robe aside to reveal her knee. It was still bruised, but there was no swelling and certainly no pain. The doctor examined it with gentle fingers, then covered her.