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“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”
He touches me then, one hand on the side of my face...my neck. His eyes are like fire. I feel them burning me as he lowers his face closer to mine, and I hold my breath but don’t move away.
Closer...closer, his mouth comes to mine, almost but not quite touching, hovering there, giving me time to stop what’s coming. My held breath fills my chest and throat, almost choking me. My heartbeat rocks me. His breath on my lips is like a powerful drug, clouding my brain. I put my hand up to his where it lies against my cheek, but not to pull it away.
When his lips touch mine at last, it’s as if a torch has been laid to dry tinder. There is no stopping it. And no going back.
* * *
The alley they were following opened onto a wider dirt street, this one crowded and noisy with pedestrians, mostly men, some pushing handcarts or leading donkeys. There were bicycles maneuvering through the crowd, and several cars were parked alongside the street, huddling as close as they could to the mud-brick buildings.
Hunt motioned for Yancy and Laila to stay back while he stepped into the street. Yancy watched as he surveyed it for several minutes in both directions, eyes touching on every pedestrian, every vehicle, every detail with the intensity of a trained sniper. Apparently satisfied nothing there represented any immediate danger to them, he gestured for Yancy and Laila to join him.
As she followed Hunt through the throngs of people, Yancy kept her head bowed, clutched her scarf beneath her chin and held tightly to her daughter’s hand. She couldn’t help but think how they must appear: Afghan man with his wife and child meekly following behind. The thought made her vaguely queasy.
They hadn’t gone far—Laila hadn’t begun complaining again about her tired feet—when Hunt paused beside a dusty Mercedes of indeterminate color and vintage. He produced a set of keys from the folds of his tunic, unlocked the car and opened the back door.
“Get in and keep down,” he said tersely. “Don’t get up until I tell you.”
Yancy had never been good at taking orders, but because she was mindful of Laila’s own contrary nature, and in the interests of leading by example, she chose to do as Hunt told her. She stayed down, hunched over Laila to keep her from popping up to look, as well, while he got in the front, started the motor and inched the car into the flow of traffic. But as soon as the smoothness of the road and the change of traffic noise from pedestrian to vehicular told her they were on a busy city street, she sat up and looked around. After a moment, she said, “Where are we going?”
Hunt snorted. His eagle’s glare met hers in the rearview mirror. “Thought I told you to stay down.”
“This isn’t the way to our hotel,” Yancy pointed out, ignoring that. “Where are you taking us?”
Lashes shuttered his gaze as he shifted it back to the street ahead. “To my place.”
Yancy considered that for a moment, while her heartbeat ticked a notch faster. She glanced at Laila, who had apparently tuned them out and was peering through the window with avid interest. She hitched herself forward and leaned her arms on the back of the front seat. “Is this a rescue,” she inquired in a low voice, but with a light, almost musical tone, “or another abduction?”
Although her view of the side of his face was mostly beard, she noted the subtle change in its shape and caught the flash of teeth as he smiled. His eyes clashed briefly with hers in the mirror. “I’m taking you someplace I know she’ll be safe.”
Safe.
Laila knew she wasn’t supposed to be listening, but she heard that word and knew they were talking about her, about wanting her to be safe, which was really funny because she didn’t feel safe at all right now. She felt jumbled and mixed up and kind of scared, maybe a little bit happy—the part about Akaa Hunt being here—but mostly she wanted to close her eyes and ears and make the dreams go away.
At least, she’d always thought they were dreams.
I used to have them a lot, when I was little and first came to live with my new mom. I dreamed about being in a cave in the dark with a big dog who kept me warm and safe from the demons who screamed and wailed outside, and then Akaa Hunt was there, reaching for me, and I thought at first he was a demon, too, but then he wrapped me in his coat and held me close to him, and I felt safe again, with him.
But then Akaa Hunt told me in a hard voice that Ammi—my first mother—was gone and he was taking me to someone who would keep me safe, and we traveled through the dark and the cold, and somewhere along the journey Akaa Hunt left me and went away.
She used to cry after she dreamed those dreams, when she was little.
Then Yancy became her new mom, and she felt happy and safe and didn’t have the dreams anymore.
Now, seeing Akaa Hunt again, she remembered the dreams and they seemed much more real than before. But she wasn’t little now. She was eight years old and she was too old to cry. Crying was for babies.
Laila pressed her lips together and clutched the car windowsill as she stared blindly through the glass and tried not to listen as Mom and Akaa Hunt went on talking.
“Wouldn’t we be safer at the hotel?”
Hunt’s eyebrows lifted into the shadow of his turban. “Think so? How did they know where to find you?” He paused. “Who knew you were going to the bazaar today? Who did you tell?”
“Nobody,” she stated with certainty, then felt herself go cold. With growing realization she added in a whisper, “The hotel concierge. The doorman...the cabdriver...”
Hunt was nodding. “I know, because I heard you. So could anybody else who might have been in the immediate vicinity.”
“You...were there? But how did you—”
Once again his beard telegraphed his smile, and his eyes denied it. “Let’s just say I have an interest in your comings and goings.” His voice hardened and so did his eyes. “Evidently, so does someone else.”
Yancy sat in stony silence while her heart raced and her mind whirled. She was both furious and frightened, so full of questions she felt she might explode, but acutely aware of all the reasons she couldn’t ask them. Not yet.
There was Laila, of course, whose hearing was keen and her mind busy even when she appeared to have her attention focused elsewhere.
But also, there was Hunt, who never answered questions. She thought of all the times...all the questions he’d never let her ask...
“Where have you—” I would always begin.
And his mouth would come down on mine, hard and hungry, his beard stubble rough on my face and his skin smelling of gunpowder, smoke and dust, shutting off the rest.
And I would close my eyes and my mind, letting it be enough that it was to me he came to forget, that it was my clean, female body he turned to, to erase the horrors he’d seen. The ugly things he’d done.
She eased slowly back in her seat, shaken by the sure and certain knowledge that this time was going to be different. It had to be. Too much had changed. This time she was going to ask the questions, and this time she would not be denied the answers.
She stared through the dusty windows, and as her emotions settled and her gaze focused, once again she realized she knew approximately where they were. This was another part of Old Town Kabul, only a few kilometers but worlds apart from both the poor section they’d just left and the bustling and modern downtown.
She slid forward again.
“You live here?” She dipped her head, indicating the aged trees shading the quiet street ahead, the high walls of houses with intricately carved wood window screens just visible through leafy branches. She waited for acknowledgment that didn’t come, then went on in a conversational tone. “I did a feature here a few years back. These houses are a couple hundred years old, at least, and most of them are owned by Kabul’s oldest families, families that trace back to the days of the Silk Road. How—”
“A friend of a friend,” he said, in a way that stated clearly, And that’s all I’m going to tell you.
She must have made some sound of vexation, because he exhaled through his nose and spoke under his breath. “This isn’t the time. Or the place.” The slight movement of his head recalled her attention to the other pair of ears present.
His eyes met hers and she realized with a small sense of shock that there was anger in them, mirroring her own.
She pushed back into her seat again, silently seething.
He’s angry? He’s angry? He pops in and out of my life—my bed!—without warning, as he pleases, dumps a child on my doorstep, tells me she’s his, then vanishes from the face of the earth for three years, and he’s angry? Really?
In a quick-as-lightning change of mood, fear returned.
Why? What is he angry with me about? It can only be something to do with Laila. Is it the adoption? The fact that I brought her here?
What business is it of his? He has no right—
A panicky shiver rippled through her. Did he have the right? If he was, in fact, Laila’s biological father—and she had only his word on that, after all. That, and those eyes.
Might he have a legal claim to her?
Could he take her away from me?
It was a new question, and it joined the others whirling in her mind.
Out of the maelstrom, once again one coherent thought emerged: I have to hold it together...put on a calm face...for Laila.
* * *
“Here we are,” Akaa Hunt said.
Laila ducked her head to look out the car window. She didn’t know why she felt funny about getting out of the car and going into the house with the carved patterns over the windows, but she did. Not scared, exactly, although she did have butterflies in her stomach and her heart was beating very, very fast. It was more like the way she remembered feeling on her first day in the new school after Yancy became her new mother, because she knew something big and exciting was going to happen and she wasn’t sure whether it would be good or bad.
“It’s okay, honey,” her mother whispered, and Laila nodded and reached for her hand. She felt like she might throw up or wet her pants, but that was so babyish she didn’t want to say so.
Just inside the door, she stopped suddenly and couldn’t keep from making a sound. It wasn’t very loud, but her mother and Akaa Hunt both heard. They stopped and looked at her.
“What is it, sweetie?” her mother asked.
Laila frowned and wrinkled her nose. “I smell something.”
“That would be supper,” Akaa Hunt said. “I hope.”
“It smells delicious,” Laila’s mother said and squeezed her hand in a way that meant remember your manners! “Doesn’t it?”
“It smells like...something I remember,” Laila said and added with a shrug, “but I don’t know exactly what.” She took a deep breath, let go of her mother’s hand and walked into the room. “I remember this, too. We used to sit on pillows when I lived with Ammi, when I was little.”
Behind her she heard her mother let out a breath and laugh a little bit. “Yes, I guess you did,” she said.
But her voice sounded quivery, and Laila wondered if maybe her mother’s stomach had butterflies, too.
* * *
“I think,” Yancy said, taking a deep breath, “Laila and I both could use a bathroom, if you—”
“Of course.” Hunt’s voice and manner were crisply formal. “Just go through there, into the courtyard. Second door down on the left is the women’s quarters. You should find everything you need. If not, let me know and I’ll have Mehri get it for you.”
“Mehri?”
“My housekeeper.”
“Oh—of course. Laila? Shall we wash up before supper?”
Laila looked up at her, then reached for her hand in a way that felt oddly as though she were offering reassurance and guidance to Yancy, rather than the other way around.
In the magnificently tiled bathroom, Yancy watched her daughter slowly and methodically wash her hands, arms and face, carefully rubbing the soap into foam, squishing the foam between her fingers, rubbing it over her forearms...
How silent she is. She should be chattering away, nonstop, asking one question after another, chirping like a little bird...
She cleared her throat. “Honey, how are you doing? Are you okay?”
Laila watched her hands, washing, washing. “Yes,” she said, but it lacked conviction.
“We had a pretty exciting day, didn’t we?” Yancy said carefully, wanting to go to her, wanting to touch her, though something held her back. “When those men...um. When they tried to...” When they tried to...do what? What did they want with us? I still don’t know. She caught another breath. “I was a little scared. Were you scared?”
“Well, I was...” Laila clasped her hands together and appeared to be fascinated by the foam squishing between her interlaced fingers. “But then I saw Akaa Hunt and I wasn’t scared anymore.”
Yancy felt a chill shiver through her. Breathless, she said, “Really? Why not?”
Laila’s shoulders lifted...fell. “Because I knew he would keep us safe. Like always.”
* * *
It was evening, which in recent times had become one of Hunt’s favorite times of the day. In his experience, most bad things seemed to happen at dawn. By nightfall, whatever was going to happen had happened, for better or worse. The world was shutting down, taking a breather. Even the wind stopped for dusk.
There was that, and the fact that lately it had begun to remind him of evenings when he was growing up, when the chores had all been done and the animals were quiet, well fed and bedding themselves down for the night. Dad would be out on the front porch having a smoke and surveying his kingdom while he waited to be called in to supper, and Mom banging things around in the kitchen, and good smells drifting through the windows. He remembered watching his dad and wishing he could be more like him, knowing he wasn’t and never would be as good a man as Charles Grainger, and all he really wanted was to be someplace far, far away from the farm and the whole state of Nebraska.
As an adult he’d worked hard to make sure the wish came true, and he had no regrets. Except maybe that—having no regrets—was something he regretted.
Here in the courtyard in Old Kabul, the air smelled of cooking—the meal they’d just eaten—and of flowers rather than hay or freshly turned earth or manure, and some kind of bird was singing a twilight song in one of the trees. Unlike his father, Hunt didn’t smoke—never had—and they’d already had supper. And the tiny kingdom he surveyed wasn’t his. But he was waiting. Waiting, not to be called in, but maybe—almost certainly—to be called to account.
He’d counted down the minutes before life-and-death missions with less trepidation.
He owed Yancy big-time, he knew, an explanation being the least of it. Explaining the facts wouldn’t be that hard, but he had a feeling “just the facts” wasn’t going to be enough for her, not this time. She was going to want to know what was going on with him, the why of it all, and how was he going to explain that when he wasn’t sure he knew himself. And even if he did know, he wasn’t clear on how much he was willing to tell her. Reticence was a hard habit to break. Knowledge was power, and giving that up to anyone, even the woman raising his child... He wasn’t sure he was ready for that. Or if he ever would be.
That realization made him inexpressibly sad.
The carved door behind him opened and his skin shivered with awareness. He turned and watched without comment as Yancy came into the courtyard from the part of the house that had traditionally been the women’s quarters. She was clutching a shawl around her shoulders. Because of the coolness of the evening, he wondered, or merely a case of nerves?
It surprised him a little that he felt the same purely physical, gut-tightening attraction to her he’d had almost from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her—not during the rescue, naturally, but later, back at the base. Sitting across from her at that table, looking into her eyes, the whole world around him fading away until it was just him and her... He’d known then he’d have her, eventually. He’d never doubted it. Just as he’d never doubted she’d be there whenever he came in off a mission, needing her.
He hadn’t looked too far ahead, back then. Never given much thought to a time when she wouldn’t be there. Then he’d put his daughter in her care, and everything had changed.
He’d thought he knew her pretty well, well enough at least to know she had nerves of steel. Ordinarily. But she’d been silent and withdrawn during the meal—with him, anyway—and he had an idea there was a lot churning around in that red head of hers. Because silence wasn’t a normal state for Yancy Malone.
“She’s asleep,” she said, and he nodded.
She glanced at him as she walked past him, deeper into the shadowed courtyard, where she lifted a hand to touch a blossom hanging from a vine. “It’s nice out here.”
“Yes,” he said, watching her. Waiting.
She turned to fully face him—as if squaring for battle. He couldn’t help but think how beautiful she was with that fierceness about her.
“Dinner was wonderful. Please tell... Mehri, wasn’t it?” He nodded. “Please tell her how much we—Laila and I—enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or tasted so many different rice dishes. And the qorma was fabulous. I’m going to have to ask her for the recipe.”
Seriously? It sounded as if she’d rehearsed it.
He answered with a stilted nod. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to share it with you. Afghan people are justifiably proud of their cuisine, as well as their hospitality.”
