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Jascha muttered a curse and released Kristin, storming out of the room and slamming the door behind him.
Too mortified to meet Mai’s gaze, Kristin sat up, righted her bra and buttoned her shirt. Because she didn’t know what to say, she was silent.
Mai busied herself laying out the tiny bowls in which tea was served, along with the small sweet cakes she knew Kristin loved. “Weather is hot. Perhaps Miss Kristin like to bathe in swimming pool,” she said, pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Kristin felt sick. Something was wrong with Jascha—terribly wrong. In all the years she’d known him, he’d never mistreated her in any way, though she had to admit he’d been damnably arrogant on occasion. Yet only moments before, he’d been bent on raping her. Ignoring the tea, she made for the telephone at her bedside.
“I’m in no mood to swim,” she muttered, while silently cursing herself for every kind of romantic fool. She should have seen this coming. She should have known she’d only been trying to revive her old feelings for Jascha because she couldn’t bear the pain of grieving for Zachary. “I want to call my father.”
“Line’s cut,” Mai said succinctly.
Kristin felt the color drain out of her face as she lifted the ornate receiver and put it to her ear. Sure enough, there was no dial tone, only an ominous silence.
But Jascha had offered to send her home to the United States before he’d gotten so angry and thrown her onto the bed. She had to find him, tell him she’d changed her mind.
She strode to the door and wrenched it open, her rising ire lending her courage as she marched along the elegantly carpeted hallway, down the curving stairs that led to the great entryway with its glittering crystal chandeliers.
A guard was posted by the front door. “Where is the prince?” she demanded, heedless of her untucked shirt and mussed hair.
The guard’s expression didn’t change. “There,” he said in Cabrizian, pointing toward the towering double doors of Jascha’s study with the barrel of his rifle.
Kristin knocked briskly, then marched inside without waiting for an invitation. Jascha was in hushed conference with one of his generals, and his glowering expression said he did not appreciate the interruption.
“I’ve changed my mind about everything,” Kristin announced. “The wedding is off. I want to go home right now.”
For a moment she saw the old tenderness in Jascha’s eyes, but then they turned hard as ebony. “It is too late,” he bit out, while the general looked on unabashedly. “Go to your room, Kristin, and do not come out again until you are told.”
Kristin’s mouth fell open, and she stood rooted to the center of the study floor. She was twenty-seven years old, and she hadn’t been sent to her room in two decades. She wasn’t about to set a new precedent.
“Go!” Jascha said with a dismissive wave of one hand.
Instead, Kristin stepped closer to him. “What’s happened to you?” she whispered. “Why are you behaving like this?”
“This is Cabriz, not America,” Jascha pointed out. “Things are different here. Now, do as I say before I decide you must be disciplined.”
“Disciplined?” Kristin’s fury was so great that it rose into her throat and swelled, making it impossible for any more words to pass.
Jascha was livid. He called out a word Kristin couldn’t translate, and the guard from the entryway appeared. A rapid conversation passed between them, of which Kristin caught only a few words. Then the guard took her arm and dragged her roughly toward the door.
Kristin struggled, but it was no use. “Jascha!” she cried, in an angry plea for reason, as she was propelled out of the study and up the stairs.
Minutes later, Kristin was flung unceremoniously into a large room and the door was locked behind her.
Wildly, she looked around. The place was huge, and sumptuously furnished. The chairs and sofas were all upholstered in colorful silk, and heavy damask curtains surrounded the enormous bed, which stood on a dais. There was an ivory fireplace, even though the temperature in that part of Cabriz never dipped low enough for a fire, and a beautiful Louis XIV desk stood in front of the windows.
Kristin’s anger reached ferocious proportions when she realized that this was Jascha’s room, and she’d been sent here, like a mischievous concubine, to await the prince’s convenience. She hurled herself at the giant door, hammering at it with both fists and screaming, “Let me out! Damn you, Jascha, let me out!”
After a while Kristin sagged against the wood, exhausted. It was hopeless; no one in the palace, not even Mai, would dare to flout Jascha’s authority by releasing her. She was going to have to find her own means of escape.
She went to the terrace doors. For a moment Kristin had hope, but then she looked over the stone railing. It was at least a thirty-foot drop to the courtyard below, and there were no trees or trellises to climb down.
Momentarily defeated, she went back inside, out of the blazing midafternoon sun.
She searched the desk drawers for a key, but found nothing other than a stack of letters scented with some spicy perfume and written in Cabrizian. Although Kristin could understand the language if it was spoken slowly and clearly, she had never learned to read it.
Still, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the letters had been written by a woman. Feeling more a fool than ever, Kristin put the envelopes back where she’d found them and continued her exploration.
After an hour, when she’d found nothing that would aid in her escape and had exhausted herself emotionally, she collapsed in the middle of Jascha’s enormous bed. She awakened sometime later to find herself surrounded by women, all veiled, all clad in the colorful, gauzy robes worn by Cabrizian females.
Mai was not among them.
“What the hell?” Kristin gasped, bolting upright and trying to scramble off the bed, but the women wouldn’t let her pass. They gripped her arms and legs, and one of them clasped the back of her neck in strong fingers. She struggled, but there were too many of them, and they subdued her. “Who are you?” she cried. “What do you want?”
“Open mouth,” one of them ordered. Gone were the gentle, subservient tones that had always been used with her before.
“Let go of me!” Kristin ordered. “Right now!”
When the women ignored her, she threw her head back and screamed Jascha’s name.
Her right arm was wrenched behind her back and pulled painfully upward. The command was repeated.
Kristin had no choice but to obey. She parted her lips, and a bitter-tasting wine was poured onto her tongue. Not daring to spit it out, she swallowed convulsively. “Stupid,” she muttered, addressing herself, coming face-to-face with a reality she’d refused to consider before. “Stupid!”
The women were stripping her clothes away, but when Kristin moved to fight them again, she found that her muscles had turned to rice pudding. She was helpless.
Her eyes filled with tears of frustration and fear. Jascha had lied, both to her and her family. These women were his wives.
She was raised from the bed and propelled into the prince’s private bath, where an enormous tub of inlaid tiles waited, filled with steaming, scented water.
The women—she tried counting them, but could not think clearly—lowered her into the tub and, remarkably, began to bathe her. They surrounded her and their swift, firm hands were everywhere, soaping her arms and legs, lathering her hair.
After a while Kristin was lulled into a state of half consciousness. They lifted her from the tub and dried her as carefully as they’d bathed her, and then she was ushered back to the bed again.
She felt silken sheets against her bare back as they laid her down. Now, she thought dreamily, they would let her rest.
But they didn’t. They began rubbing scented oil into her skin, covering her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. Something stirred in Kristin; she felt herself drifting through space, back to another time and another place.
“Zachary,” she whispered with a soft smile.
Her skin was powdered, her hair dried and brushed. Kristin lost track of time and reality.
A familiar masculine voice disturbed her erotic dreams. “Okay, princess, wake up. We’re going home.”
Slowly, Kristin opened her eyes. For a moment she thought she was still sleeping, because Zachary’s shadowed face was looming in the darkness, only inches from hers. “Zachary?”
“That’s me,” he replied, reaching under her and lifting her off the mattress. “It’s a good thing they used powder after they greased you,” he said, holding her up with one arm and pulling rough cotton trousers onto her with the other. “Otherwise you’d be slippery as hell and I’d probably drop you right on your hard little head. Not that it would make any real difference in your thinking processes….”
The effects of the drug the wives had forced on Kristin were just beginning to wear off, but she still felt woozy and very unsteady on her feet. She shook her head. “Zachary, is that really you?”
“It’s really me, princess. And keep your voice down. If His Highness finds me in the royal boudoir, I’ll be in for a rough three or four days in the dungeon.”
He pulled a shirt over her head and forced her arms into the sleeves. Then she rested her cheek against his chest, yawning. “How did you find me?”
“That’s a long story. We’ll talk about it when we’re at least fifty miles from this place.” He caught a curved finger under her chin. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re stoned out of your mind,” he confided. “We’re about to climb down over the terrace, and there’s always a possibility one of the guards might wake up. Whatever you do, princess, hold on tight and keep that legendary mouth shut.”
Before Kristin could lodge any kind of protest, Zachary hoisted her over one shoulder and headed toward the terrace doors. It was dark and the ebony sky was littered with stars. When she saw the stone railing approaching, Kristin squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a breath.
“Now remember,” Zachary told her in a rough undertone, “be quiet.”
There was an awful jostling sensation, and Kristin caught hold of the back of Zachary’s belt and hung on with all her strength. The fact that she’d been drugged did nothing to ease her fear when she opened her eyes and saw that they were descending a thin rope into the dark courtyard.
If she hadn’t still been holding her breath, she would have screamed her lungs out.
Presently they reached the ground and Zachary set Kristin on her feet, where she teetered for a moment, to flip the grappling hook loose from the terrace railing and wind the rope around one hand. Kristin lifted her hand to her mouth to stifle another yawn. “You’ll never believe what just happened to me in there—”
Even in the thin light of an autumn moon, Kristin saw the muscle tighten in his jaw. “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he responded. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
Once they’d gained the palace wall, Zachary flung the grappling hook over the top, then wrenched on the rope to make sure it was secure.
“Not again,” Kristin protested.
“Get on my back,” Zachary ordered impatiently. “And for God’s sake, stop bitching. In case you haven’t noticed, your ladyship, I’m doing all the damn work!”
Kristin put her arms around his neck and climbed onto him piggyback style. “Think of it as just recompense for all the times I had to carry out the garbage and wash your socks,” she replied sweetly, her head clearing by the moment.
He started up the wall. “You never had to wash my socks,” he retorted, his voice sounding choked.
Kristin loosened her grip slightly. “It was a metaphor,” she whispered back.
“You know,” he grunted in response, straining to pull them both up the rope, “the prince probably deserves you. Maybe I should take you back there and let them finish the ritual.”
They’d reached the top of the wall, and Kristin could just rely make out the outline of a Jeep below.
“Jump,” Zachary instructed her. “We’re like ducks in a shooting gallery up here.”
Kristin’s heart hammered in her chest. “I’m not jumping!” she protested. “It must be ten feet to the ground!”
“Aim for the bushes,” Zachary answered, and then his hand pressed into the small of her back and she went sailing off the wall. He landed in the shrubbery only a moment after she did.
She flew at him, hands flying, bones aching from a jarring touchdown.
He caught her wrists and stayed the attack, and his perfect teeth flashed in an acid grin as he looked down at her. “No time for gratitude, princess. It won’t be long before they miss you.”
Kristin started to say that she didn’t want to go anywhere with him, but the memory of Jascha hurling her onto the bed stopped her. If Mai hadn’t come in when she had, Prince Charming would have slapped her senseless and then raped her. Anything was better than a lifetime of that. “If we hurry,” she said with a meekness she didn’t feel, “we can get to the Canadian embassy before Jascha’s servants sound the alarm. It’s just around the corner.”
Zachary thrust her into the jeep and got behind the wheel. “There isn’t any Canadian embassy,” he answered as they drove quickly away from the palace wall. “Not anymore. Hold on to your pedigree, princess—we’re leaving Cabriz the hard way.”
2
Zachary wheeled the Jeep through dark, narrow streets Kristin didn’t recognize. The city seemed strangely quiet. Empty.
“Where is everybody?” Kristin asked, raising her voice to be heard.
“Hiding. This is a military Jeep.”
Kristin swallowed and brushed her tangled hair back from her face with both hands. “You mean, people think we’re soldiers?”
“Probably.”
Uneasily, Kristin ran her hands down her thighs. She was wearing the pajamalike garb of Cabrizian peasantry, male or female. “Where did you get it?”
“I stole it,” he answered with exaggerated politeness. “Given your station in life, I tried to get an embassy limo with little flags on the hood, but they were all booked up—it must be prom night.”
Kristin’s temper rose steadily as they left the ancient city behind and started up a nearby mountain. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t any road. She folded her arms across her breasts. “Still jealous of the advantages I’ve had,” she replied. “Honestly, Zachary, envy doesn’t become you.”
The Jeep stopped with a jolt. “Let’s get one thing straight, princess. Anybody who wanted your life—” he jabbed at his temple with an angry forefinger “—would have to be one can short of a six-pack. And if you wouldn’t mind, how about a little gratitude? I didn’t have to take this job, you know!”
Kristin subsided, stung. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare for this encounter with Zachary, and the pain was intense. “You didn’t even ask if I wanted to leave,” she observed in a more moderate tone of voice.
Zachary guided the intrepid little vehicle into even more inhospitable terrain. There were towering pine trees all around, and enormous boulders. “Well, excuse me,” he replied dramatically. “I’ll drop you off at the next corner!”
“Stop yelling,” Kristin said with a sigh. Zachary hadn’t changed in the year and a half since she’d seen him. He was still bristly and uncommunicative—the dedicated agent through and through. “We’re going to be together for a few hours, so we might as well try to get along.”
The Jeep came to another lurching stop, and Zachary turned to her, smiling in amazed amusement. “A few hours?”
“Sure. There’s a helicopter hidden around here somewhere, isn’t there?”
He gave a hoot of derisive laughter.
“What’s funny?” Kristin demanded.
“You are. There isn’t any helicopter, your ladyship. We’re going to travel through the mountains on horseback. If we’re lucky—damn lucky—we’ll be over the border into Rhaos in five days.”
Kristin gulped. For a moment she actually considered turning back, going through with the marriage to Jascha. Held up alongside the prospect of five days with Zachary Harmon, under the harshest of conditions, life in the palace didn’t look so bad. “Oh,” she said.
Zachary jammed the jeep into gear, and they were moving up the mountain again. When they’d traveled for what seemed like hours to Kristin, in relative silence, he finally brought the vehicle to a stop. In the glare the headlights she could see two horses, saddled and tethered by long ropes to a tree. Nearby were canvas packs.
When Zachary shut off the lights, everything disappeared for a moment. Kristin waited for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, but her recalcitrant rescuer immediately got out of the Jeep and started moving around in the darkness.
“I don’t see why we have to take horses,” Kristin reasoned as she lowered herself delicately to the running board and then the ground, “when we have a perfectly good Jeep.”
“There are some places,” Zachary told her, untying one of the nickering, restless animals, “where only a horse can go.” He handed her the reins, and Kristin stood there looking at him, shivering. She hadn’t been in the saddle since she was five years old and staying with her mother’s parents while Alice and Kenyan put the embassy in order. Her grandfather had taken her for a pony ride at the beach.
Without her having to say she was cold, Zachary brought a fleecy jacket from one of the packs and handed it to her, along with a pair of sturdy boots and heavy socks. Only then did she realize she’d been barefoot through the escape from the palace.
With a little shake of her head, Kristin dropped the reins and sat down on a nearby stump to put on the socks and boots. Between those clodhoppers and her ill-fitting, scratchy cotton pajamas, she’d be a sight.
Zachary snatched back the reins and held them impatiently while she prepared to travel.
