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As their trucks wound deeper into the city, the streets grew even more congested and turned to cobblestone, which was incredibly uncomfortable, even in a rubber-tired vehicle with modern shock absorbers. The medieval buildings were taller here, made of stone and crowded in closely upon them, creating deep, mysterious shadows all around. Music drifted out of an open doorway—drums and a whiny, nasal horn of some kind. Katy half expected a camel caravan carrying a sultan and his harem to overtake them any second.
She felt like a well-shaken martini by the time the trucks wound through the ancient streets up to the foot of the great fortress of Il Leone. Chains clanked, and she risked lifting the canvas side of the truck to peek at the source of the noise. She saw a gigantic drawbridge ponderously folding down to admit them to the palace, its chains unwinding from great spools on either side of the cavernous entrance. The truck lurched forward, and she watched in awe as they passed over a no-kidding, murky, water-filled moat and drove into a palace courtyard. The place teemed with soldiers, and she quickly dropped the canvas flap lest she get chewed out for indecorous peeking or some such dire crime.
A soldier’s face appeared abruptly at the back of the truck. In Arabic he ordered her and the other women to get out. These Baraqis were certainly not long on courtesy. Fearing a broken neck, she groped blindly for the steps with her feet and climbed down out of the truck wielding great armfuls of black fabric.
The castle walls rose around her, dark and ancient, with tiny leaded-glass windows here and there, the only relief to the stone facades. No wonder Nikolas Ramsey had preferred to run around on the French Riviera and party in London’s wild and wacky West End rather than stay home and learn how to be king—if the tabloids were accurate. This place was depressing her, and she’d been here less than two minutes. Of course, he’d paid for shirking his duty in blood. And in the loss of his country.
An Army officer strode up to the InterAid team and said arrogantly in excellent French, “I am Major Moubayed. You will begin cataloging the prisoners and casualties immediately and report to me the names of every one of them.” His sharp condescension reminded her of her brother Travis when a reporter was being a moron around him.
The team leader stepped forward and replied evenly, “I am Don Ford, and we will proceed according to international protocol. In due time we will, indeed, give you a complete list of casualties from both sides of the conflict, in addition to notifying the families of said casualties. We will also interview all of your prisoners and wounded to ascertain their status and treatment within the Geneva Conventions.”
The major scowled, his black eyes narrow and menacing. Ford stared right back at the guy. Patience, Don. Patience, Katy urged silently. Finally the Baraqi officer looked away. Nicely done, Don.
The major growled, “Do your work quickly and be gone with you, then.”
Ford nodded pleasantly and turned to face his team. “You heard the man. Let’s get to work. We still have a couple hours of daylight left.”
Larry Grayson materialized beside her and shoved a leather satchel into her surprised hands. “Med kit,” he announced. “We’re allowed to render minor first aid. Clipboard, paper and pens are in there, too, along with a spreadsheet I worked up for recording vital stats on each prisoner.” She had to give the guy credit—he was organized.
“Come with me,” he threw over his shoulder as he strode forward and approached Major Moubayed.
Katy hurried to catch up with her partner and reached him just in time to hear him tell the major imperiously in English, “Show me to your prisoners.”
She flinched. Not the best way to handle a pissed-off authority figure like Moubayed. Sure enough, the major scowled and threw a spate of angry French at Grayson.
“Do you understand what this guy’s saying?” Larry asked her, thinly veiled contempt in his voice.
She cleared her throat and said delicately, “Let’s just say he’s commenting on the state of American etiquette.” She’d swear the Army major understood what she said, because she was sure a ghost of a grin flickered across his face.
She spoke hesitantly to Moubayed in French, being sure to look down at his shoes all the while. “Please forgive my colleague for his abruptness. He is eager to get started on the work you have requested of us. Perhaps one of your men can show us the way to any prisoners you might be holding here?”
Apparently mollified by her humble attitude, the major signaled to a soldier, who stepped forward silently. Moubayed told the guy to take them to…someplace…a quickly uttered Arabic word she didn’t recognize. The soldier nodded briskly and gestured them to follow him.
The soldier stopped in front of a bulky wooden door with a curved top, banded by iron hinges and set low in the base of a round stone tower. It looked like something straight out of the Dark Ages.
“What is this place?” she tried in French to the soldier.
“Le cachot,” he replied. The dungeon.
Get out! A real, live, honest-to-goodness dungeon? This country was like some sort of weird time warp. She took a deep breath. Here went nothing. Her first mission as a relief worker.
The reality of standing in a tiny country halfway around the world from home, about to visit actual prisoners of war, hit her. Dauntingly. The scowling soldier beside her, casually toting a machine gun, was a whole different ball of wax than the smiling and grateful faces of hungry children she’d envisioned when she signed up for this job. A creeping sense of being an impostor stole over her. Maybe she was just a spoiled little rich girl playing at being a social activist, assuaging her conscience over the advantages life had granted her.
“Come on, girl!” Larry snapped. “You don’t want to make these guys mad, especially since you’re a female.”
Like he was anyone to talk. She jumped and followed her partner hastily. Her black abaya flapped around her like an unruly sail, and she batted at the billowing fabric. How did Muslim women function in these stupid things, anyway? And she couldn’t see squat out the veil swathing her head and covering most of her face. No wonder women weren’t allowed to drive in this part of the world! In these getups they were half-blind.
She and Larry followed their escort into a round room with a desk and a couple chairs, all occupied by lounging soldiers. Their escort stepped across the space to another iron-studded door and knocked on it. A peephole slid open. Fluid words of Arabic were exchanged, and the door squeaked open ponderously. She followed Larry inside. A second soldier fell in behind them.
The sense of walking into a time warp intensified.
The passageway stretching away into blackness before them was dark and dank, lit only by torches in iron sconces on the walls. Straw littered the stone floors, and shiny black water dripped down the rock walls, its noise the only sound interrupting the heavy silence. The hallway looked carved out of the bowels of the earth itself. Katy swore she saw a rodent of some kind scurry off into the dark. Huge ancient padlocks adorned rows of ironbound doors that wound away into the gloom. An otherworldly chill skittered down her spine. This was the kind of place that touched souls. Changed them. Crushed them.
Larry glanced over his shoulder at her, grinning. “Some cool dungeon, huh? You take the doors on the right and I’ll take the doors on the left. It’ll go faster that way. Holler if you run into an injury you can’t handle. I’m a trained trauma first responder.”
“Uh, okay,” Katy mumbled. She had to go solo right from the start? She gulped. This would be just like her work at the homeless shelter back in Washington, D.C., where she took care of minor bumps and bruises and lent a sympathetic ear as needed. The only difference here was that she was dressed like a mummy and standing in a medieval den of torture.
The first soldier peeled off with Larry, and the second guard went with her. She gestured at the first door, and the guy unlocked it.
She stepped forward, but the guard blocked her way. “Infidel bitch,” he snarled. “Do not pollute a son of God with your filth.”
She blinked, startled. Now what was that supposed to mean? That she wasn’t supposed to recruit the prisoner to become Christian? Or she wasn’t supposed to touch him, maybe? But she had to touch these guys to treat any injuries they might have. Crud. She’d just have to brazen it out. She had a job to do, and if this solider didn’t like it, he could just lump it.
She stepped around the guard and into the tiny cell. And then she turned and shut the door in the guard’s face. She took deep satisfaction from the look of surprise she glimpsed right before she all but whacked him in the nose.
Alone. Thank God. The prisoner—part of the house guard of Il Leone, judging by his khaki uniform—had a minor concussion and some minor blunt-injury trauma. She wrote down his name on Larry’s spreadsheet and took note of his injuries, describing them in detail. Nothing to write home about.
At the second door, her soldier escort drew a breath to say something to her again, but she held up a hand, surprising him into silence. In resolute French she told him, “I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell me how to do my job.” To soften her words, she added, “And in return, I will not tell you how to do yours.”
He seemed so offended by the idea of her even suggesting what he do, that he appeared unable to come up with a snappy comeback. She slipped into the second cell alone. This prisoner had a broken finger that needed splinting.
Apparently she’d achieved a hostile but silent truce with her escort guard, for he merely opened doors for her now—still glaring at her, of course, lest she think she’d won. By the fifth prisoner or so, her nerves calmed down and she fell into a groove of treating minor injuries while the men babbled out their fears, mostly over dying at the hands of their Baraqi Army captors. She couldn’t blame them for the sentiment.
And then she stood in front of the sixth cell. Her escort unlocked the door and stepped aside while she entered. The padlock clicked shut behind her.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as she squinted into the semidarkness. The small cell was just like all the others, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot cube carved out of stone. The single tiny window high on the back wall must open onto some sort of air shaft, for indirect light filtered through it. A bucket of drinking water stood in one corner, and another bucket in the opposite corner served as a restroom facility, from the smell of it. She made out the shape of a man lying on the hip-high stone ledge that passed for a bed. He looked asleep.
The torch in her hand guttered as a cool finger of air whisked down her spine. Premonition roared through her, nearly knocking her off her feet. This prisoner is different.
Chapter 2
He looked much the same as the others, dirty and exhausted, wearing the beige uniform of a soldier from the royal guard. As her eyes adjusted fully to the gloom, she saw his face was badly battered and swollen. Black eyes, a gashed and broken nose, a split lip and a bad cut on the jaw were all in need of attention. Honestly his face looked like hamburger. A swollen, painful hamburger.
She spoke softly in French so she wouldn’t startle him out of his sleep. “Bonjour, je suis avec InterAid. Je suis ici pour vous aider.” Hello, I’m with InterAid. I’m here to help you.
The man’s eyes flew open—as much as two puffy slits could open—staring at her, alert and wary. No panic hovered close to the surface in this guy’s steady gaze. If anything, fury swirled in them. Great. Another chauvinist who felt her breathing the same air as him was an affront to his manhood.
Still, the instinctive sense of pull in her gut toward this man was unmistakable.
Shock rendered Nick speechless. Merciful God. She was gaping at him as if she recognized him. She couldn’t. She mustn’t!
He was supposed to pass himself off as a common soldier. Nobody was supposed to find out who he was. Kareem had broken Nick’s nose and blackened his eyes himself and had assured him when he came to that he didn’t look one bit like a king.
“Êtes vous Américaine?” Are you American, he asked. Although, how could those big, round cornflower-blue eyes in a tiny patch of lightly tanned skin revealed by her veil be anything but American?
She nodded. “Oui.”
He switched into English, a language his guards were much less likely to know than French, and asked low and urgently, “How did InterAid get into Baraq?”
The woman shrugged. “That’s way above my pay grade to know. As far as I know, we were invited.”
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. Sharaf was up to no good letting these people in so soon after the coup. What was the bastard planning now?
“We’re here to render humanitarian aid and monitor the treatment of prisoners.”
Sharaf must be making a run at legitimizing his control of Baraq. Dammit. The country mustn’t fall into the general’s bloodthirsty hands. Chagrin at his helplessness to protect his people from the madman burned in his gut.
“Would you mind if I had a look at your nose? It could use some attention.”
Nick flinched as the aid worker reached for him. She still wore a strange expression as though she half recognized him. Frantic to get her to stop looking at him like that, he stilled himself and answered smoothly, “Be my guest.”
She stepped closer. The first thing he noticed was that she smelled like lavender. The scent reminded him of cottage gardens in the English countryside—enchanting and gentle. The second thing he noticed was the expression in her incredibly blue eyes. Complete disbelief about summed it up.
Either he looked a whole lot worse than he realized or she had a darn good idea of precisely who he was. Damn! He had to distract her. But how? His mind went completely blank. “You smell like lavender,” he announced for lack of anything else intelligent to say.
She laughed as she reached for his nose. “I don’t see how. I think the Army got this robe off some goat herder’s wife who’s never heard of bathing.”
Her fingers lightly probed the swelling, and his grin turned into a grimace as shards of glass-sharp pain shot through his face. He shifted carefully and made room for her on the ledge beside him. The woman sat, her black robe billowing against his hip in a seductive slide of smooth fabric. An urge to put his hands on her, to feel the curves beneath her flowing robes, made his palms itch. He fisted his hands at his sides. So not the time for that. Must be some sort of primitive survival reaction kicking in because, damn, she was attractive—and all he could see of her was her eyes.
Her touch was gentle on his skin. The peroxide she used to clean his cuts stung like crazy, but he managed not to wince too much. However, when she carefully probed his broken nose again, he couldn’t help but suck in a sharp breath.
She said cheerfully, “Underneath the swelling, your bones are actually aligned fairly well. You shouldn’t come out of this with a crooked nose.”
As if he had a prayer of living long enough for his nose to actually heal? Not bloody likely.
She asked, “Is all that blood on your shirt yours or someone else’s?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you’ll take off your shirt, I’ll find out for you,” she suggested.
He shrugged out of the filthy Army blouse, amused when she stared at his muscular chest. At least Kareem’s hasty beating to his face hadn’t cost him all his charms with the ladies.
“You’re covered in blood. I’ll have to wash it off to see if there are any wounds beneath it,” she mumbled. There was a noticeable hitch in her voice. As if she was nervous about touching him. The idea amused him. Women he barely knew draped themselves all over him constantly as though he were their personal play toy.
He scrutinized the young woman before him, for surely she was young to react the way she did to him. She groped in her medical bag and eventually emerged with a package of antiseptic towelettes she fumbled clumsily at opening.
He leaned back against the cold stone wall and raised his arms, resting his hands on the back of his neck. His posture, suggestive of reclining in bed, seemed to fluster her even more. For some perverse reason, he was enjoying discomfiting this poor girl.
Slowly she leaned toward him. Her chest rose and fell faster under her dark robe, and her pupils dilated to black, limpid pools.
Blast him if she wasn’t having the same effect on him. On full alert, he watched as she drew close. Close enough for him to see that her eyelashes were light brown. A blonde, maybe? His nostrils flared. There were only a few tiny laugh wrinkles by her eyes. Definitely young, then. Those eyes of hers were extraordinary, as clear and bright as the sky on a summer day.
Her hands settled lightly on his rib cage. They felt like an angel’s kiss against his skin; featherlight, exquisitely sweet. So incongruous in this cold, hard prison.
Her gaze jerked up to meet his, surprised. For an instant, they looked directly into each other’s souls. A connection leaped between them. An almost psychic knowing that went far beyond sexual awareness. Synchronicity.
Her gaze faltered, while he blinked in surprise. Who was this girl?
Slowly she washed him, the intimacy of the act curling around them like strands of silk, drawing them into a web that bound them inexorably to one another. Almost painfully sharp electricity shot through him at the seduction of her hands soothing his bare flesh. She petted him as she might a magnificent lion. Her touch lacked the finesse of an experienced lover, but that didn’t stop it from arousing him to a stupidly feverish pitch. What the hell was wrong with him?
He supposed it had to do with her offering him solace. She didn’t exactly know how to do it, but her naive sincerity made the gesture all the more appealing. He caught another tantalizing whiff of lavender and glimpsed a few strands of golden hair escaping her head scarf. An intense desire to see the face beneath the veil surged through him.
Her compassion made him want to put his arms around her and hug her in gratitude. She was a priceless reminder of the sane, normal world that existed somewhere beyond the walls of his prison. He closed his eyes in sudden pain. He hadn’t realized just how isolated he felt until she had arrived.
Her fingers lightly probed his ribs, looking for broken bones. “If you’ll lean forward,” she murmured, “I’ll check the ribs in your back.”
He bent toward her, his arms coming up to surround her lightly. She jumped like a frightened doe in his arms.
“Uh, not exactly what I had in mind, but I suppose it works,” she mumbled in consternation.
It felt as if he’d captured a rainbow, all light and air and fragile color. He held her delicately while a powerful protective impulse slammed into him. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d reacted to a woman like this. It must have something to do with that whole business of being about to die.
He didn’t go for fragile females. The women he generally ran with could take perfectly fine care of themselves, thank you very much. But then, given that this young woman was here in the middle of an ongoing war, she probably could, too.
He smiled into the folds of her veil as her hands traced the ribs in his back, checking for broken bones. Her fingers trembled against his skin. And something inside him trembled in response.
Surprise coursed through him. He didn’t know which one of them was more flustered at the moment.
“Poking you like this hurts, doesn’t it? I’m sorry,” she breathed.
He opened his eyes and gazed down at her intently. Her eyes had tiny flecks of silver within the palette of vivid blue. “Don’t be sorry,” he murmured. “It’s a nice change from guards pounding the hell out of me.”
She met his gaze for several candid seconds. Their faces would be in kissing range were it not for the black silk covering her mouth and nose. She meant him no harm. Wanted to help him. He saw it in her eyes. The weird electricity surged anew between them.
Was it possible? Was there a chance that help might reach him from the outside? If someone like this were to be sympathetic to him, maybe pass a message to a few supporters of his in the city—
It could work.
Maybe his death wasn’t so inevitable after all!
But first he would have to convince her to help him.
Alarmed at her totally inappropriate reaction to this anonymous Baraqi man, Katy slipped out of the loose circle of his arms to reach into her medical bag, relieved to be out of such proximity to the strangely attractive prisoner.
She fumbled for her clipboard and placed it squarely between them, lest he get any frisky ideas in the meantime.
“What’s your full name?” she asked in as businesslike a fashion as she could muster.
He didn’t answer right away. She looked up, her pen poised over the right box on Larry’s spreadsheet.
He was frowning at her. Intently.
She commented lightly, “It’s not that hard a question. I just need to write your name down for our records. It’s required by the Geneva Convention for you to give your captors your name anyway.”
Still no answer.
“Are you having trouble remembering your name?”
