At the Edge of the Sun (12 page)

Maggie had just opened her mouth to protest his highhanded arrangements, and she shut it again. She didn’t want to be alone with Randall for another night, alone with her anger and the unwanted attraction that sprang up no matter how much she distrusted him. But she was being foolish, she told herself. She’d been safe enough last night sharing a tiny cot with him. Tonight, with both of them so tired they could barely move, she’d be as inviolate as a nun.

Five miles it might have been, but it was almost an hour before Randall pulled to a stop. The moon had risen, and with it a soft breeze, stirring the warm night air. Maggie climbed out of the Bronco, her weary muscles protesting, and peered up at the huge structure looming some distance away.

“It looks like something out of the
Arabian Nights,”
she
said, a mixture of awe and irritation in her voice. “Couldn’t you drive any closer?”

“No.” He had pulled her suitcase out of the back and tossed it to her. “Stop bitching, Maggie. It’s just a short hike. Mabib said there was even a fountain up there—you could take a bath.”

At those blessed words Maggie stopped all complaints. She had a desperate desire to be clean, to wash the blood and sweat and dust from her. “Lead on, MacDuff. First dibs on the fountain.”

He turned and looked at her for a long, silent moment, and she could see the surprise in his face. Her light-hearted words were at odds with her usual hostility, and for a moment she regretted them, casting about in her mind for some way to sharpen her momentary lapse. And then she gave it up. “Come on, Randall. Let’s call a truce.”

“Temporary or permanent?” His voice was patient.

“Only temporary,” she replied. “It’s better than nothing.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

For a palace, El Khabrim was damnably close to a hovel. To be sure, the filth and dust-covered hallways were mosaic, there were more than a hundred decaying rooms, and the view over the moon-drenched valley was magnificent. But it was still nothing more than a large-scale ruin, with the one blessed amenity of a large, clear pool of water in the midst of the tangled overgrown garden. Maggie looked at the pool and sighed.

She should have hated it. She should have turned to Randall and started bitching once more, but she was silent. There was a timeless magic to the night, the centuries flowing about them. Desperate, bloody struggles belonged to another time, to the harsh daylight and the glaring sunlight, not to the moon that silvered everything around them. Not five miles away bodies lay huddled in ignominious death, but in El Khabrim death had no place, reality had no place. The
Arabian Nights
had settled around them like a gentle blanket of silk.

“What do you think, Scheherazade?” Randall spoke beside her, and his rich voice only added to the magic. “Will it do?”

She wanted to break the spell that was weaving its insidious way around her. She wanted to lash out at the man beside her, the man whose deep voice seduced her, the man whose tall, lean body aroused her. She wanted to drive him away, but the words wouldn’t come. Her only defense was to keep her face averted, refuse to look at him, refuse to acknowledge her very intense awareness of his body so close to hers.

But not looking didn’t make her reactions go away. She wanted to turn to him in the magic night, lose herself in his arms, forget all the pain and misery and doubt that had dogged her path. But she couldn’t. “It’ll do,” she said, her voice low and expressionless.

“I’ll find someplace for us to sleep.” And then he was gone, and she was alone in the garden with only the moonlight and the soft warm breeze. For a moment she shivered, tempted to call him back to her, but one tiny part of her brain remained, warning her. If she called him back he wouldn’t leave, and she wouldn’t want him to.

Quickly, efficiently, she stripped off her clothes. The pool was shallow, cool, and wonderful, and she silently slipped into it, letting the water ripple around her. She ducked her head under, pouring the water over her face, watching it sparkle over her arms in the moonlight. She floated, mindlessly, staring up into the limitless reaches of the starry sky. She could have stayed that way forever; leaving the watery womb would mean reentering a cruel and dangerous life. But she wasn’t alone. Randall had returned from his foray into the decaying ruins of the palace and now stood there silhouetted by the moonlight, watching her.

“Go away.” This time it came out all wrong. The words were a dismissal, but the tone was a husky invitation. But it wouldn’t have mattered how she phrased it. Randall would do what he had decided to do.

He knelt by the edge of the pool a few feet from her still body, and dipped his arms into the water, sluicing it over his chest, his face, running his hands through his thick black hair, the moonlight gilding the drops of water that clung to his body. Then he looked at her and the polite Randall was gone, the one with the immaculate suits, the perfect hair, the banked emotions. The man kneeling there was the man who had fought for her in the past, who had stripped away the veneer of civilization to the savage beneath. He knelt there, waiting. Waiting.

She rose slowly, unconsciously graceful even in her state of tension. The water reached only partway up her long legs, and she stood there in the silvery moonlight, her eyes meeting his, despair and inevitability washing over her in the wake of the water that was quickly drying in the soft breeze.

“Come to me, Maggie,” he said, and his voice was husky with pain and wanting. Husky like someone else’s shattered voice. She moved toward him, mesmerized, hating herself, stopping just out of reach of his long arms.

She looked at him, wanting him so much she felt sick with it. One more step and there’d be no question, no turning back, no room for second thoughts or doubts or distrust. One more step and her betrayal of Mack Pulaski would be complete.

She stopped where she was, and the night breeze was cold and clammy on her skin. “Did you pay Bud Willis twenty thousand dollars to kill my husband?”

Everything stopped. Their heartbeats, their breathing, the wind in the trees overhead, the faint ripple of water. The universe stopped—breathless, shattered—for a long, suffocating moment.

Randall rose to his full height, his lean, wiry body outlined against the moonlight, and she couldn’t see his expression. “That’s what Bud Willis told you when he was dying.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

“Yes.”

“And you believed him.” Still not a question.

At that point she didn’t know what she believed. Everything was so wretched, so horrible that the only way to make it better would be to make it even worse. “Yes,” she said.

He sighed, a soft, despairing sound, and the wind rustled through the leaves in answer. The tension left his shoulders. “Get out of the pool and get your clothes on, Maggie,” he said, turning and walking away from her.

She stood still, unmoving. “Why?”

“We’re going to Damascus.”

“I thought it was too far—”

“Siberia isn’t too far,” he broke in, and his voice shook with a pure, clean rage. “I’m taking you to the nearest airport and dumping you. I’ll find Flynn myself.”

“The hell you will.” She quickly emerged from the water and scooped up the dusty shirt she’d discarded and pulled it around her. “You’re not dumping me anywhere, Randall. You’re going to answer my goddamned question.”

After pulling on his clothes he whirled around, and to Maggie’s disgust she found herself cowering as he stalked her, moving across the tangled garden like an angry jungle cat. “You didn’t ask me a question, Maggie,” he said in a low and furious voice. “You listened to what Bud Willis had to tell you and you passed judgment. No hesitations, no doubts.”

“The man was dying,” she cried. “Why would he lie to me?”

“So he could die the way he lived. Making people miserable. You think he was going to do you favors after you helped him fall sixty feet onto a concrete floor? You think revenge wouldn’t be any part of his motivation? You stupid, pathetic fool.” Disgust warred with the anger that shook him.

“Then tell me the truth,” she said, shivering in the night breeze, the loose shirt flapping around her body. “Did you pay Bud Willis to kill Mack?”

He moved then, coming within inches of her, and his
body radiated heat and rage and something that in a less cynical man she would have called disillusionment. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Damn you, try it!” She reached up and caught the loose folds of his damp khaki shirt, but he twisted out of her grip.

“No. I’m not going to tell you a goddamned thing,” he said bitterly. “You’re going to spend the rest of your life wondering. Now get dressed.” He turned away from her, the set of his shoulders radiating contempt, and something finally snapped.

She’d seen too much death that night, too much death in her thirty-four years. She’d lost Mack, her one real chance at happiness, and she’d lost Randall, over and over and over again. She stood there, watching him walk away, a thousand doubts unresolved, a thousand questions unanswered, and she began to shake.

With trembling hands she pulled her jeans back on and buttoned the shirt. She leaned over to pull on her sneakers, but her hands were shaking too much to manage, and she squatted there, unmoving, listening to Randall as he walked back toward her.

“Are you ready?”

His voice was heavy with contempt and something else. Was it wariness? Damn it, Maggie thought, did she deserve that fury and disgust he was showing her? Or was it all a part of an elaborate defense?

She didn’t move. Every nerve in her body was taut, screaming, ready to shatter. She stayed there on her haunches, shivering, waiting for something to break the paralysis.

It was his hand. He leaned down and caught her shoulder, and his long brown fingers were hard and painful. “Get up, Maggie,” he said in a bitter voice.

The roughness of his hand on her was the final straw. “Get your hands off me,” she screamed, but the words came out in a tortured whisper. And then she began to fight.

If she’d expected gentlemanly restraint, sympathy, or a gentle subduing of her blind rage, she’d attacked the wrong person, Randall thought. One of her strong fists grazed his cheekbone, and he caught that arm, twisting it around behind her. She kicked, and he dodged, grunting in anger and pulling her arm harder against her back. She’d bared her teeth against the pain, but her other hand was flailing around, thrashing at him. A distant part of his brain knew that she was capable of a much better effort. He could still subdue her—not only did he outweigh her, but he had years more experience. But Maggie was blinded by her fury, making mistakes that would have left her dead if she’d come up against anyone else but him.

He yanked at her arm again, hearing her muffled gasp of pain, and he told himself he was glad he hurt her. Told himself that as he loosened his grip. She responded by spinning around, driving her fist into his stomach, and bringing her knee up toward his groin.

No more mister nice guy, he thought grimly, jerking out of the way of that dangerous knee. He moved, quickly, efficiently, catching both arms, spinning her around and shoving her down into the dirt, following her down and pinning her prone body with his larger one. He caught her short-cropped hair in one large hand and yanked it upward, painfully, so that she could meet his glare.

He waited, panting, for her to start bitching. But the rage had left her body, the fight was gone from her grim mouth, and she lay there beneath him, staring up at him out of eyes
that he never wanted to see in her face. Lost, hopeless, despairing eyes that were, to his horror, starting to fill with tears.

He released his grip on her hair, and her face sank down in the dust as the first sobs began to shake her shoulders. Narrow, oddly defenseless shoulders lying beneath him. Maggie Bennett, who prided herself on being so strong, so self-sufficient, lay there in a huddle of misery so vast that it frightened him.

Damn Pulaski. And damn her for loving him so much that she was still tormented and ripe for Bud Willis’s sadistic games. And damn him for caring one way or the other.

He should leave her lying there in the dirt. He could call Mabib from Damascus and have him come fetch her later. If he were truly guiltless that was exactly what he’d do.

But there was a small, niggling part of him that wondered whether he could have stopped Mack’s death. And as long as that question haunted him, then he deserved a tiny portion of Maggie’s distrust.

For such a tall lady she was very small beneath him. Her body shook, quiet little tremors made without a sound. He had a choice—walk away and let her regain her self-possession, or take her now, when she was vulnerable. Turn her over and strip off those hastily donned clothes.

He wasn’t a teenage boy at the mercy of his hormonal urges. He wanted more from Maggie than her body. The worst thing he could do right now would be to make love to her, when she was too weak and defenseless to fight him and her own needs. She hated those needs, and he was damned if he wanted to face her one more morning with that look of condemnation in her eyes. He had to leave her alone.

The back of her neck was directly beneath his mouth. It was fragile, defenseless, with her short-cropped, wheat-color hair barely brushing it. There was something so indefinably erotic about the nape of her neck, the moonlight around them, the anguish and hatred and despair still ringing in the air. They were mere inches apart.

He stared down at her body still shaking with suppressed sobs. And without conscious volition he placed his mouth against her neck.

She grew very still beneath him. He was conscious of it, even as he was conscious of the smoothness of her skin beneath his mouth, the lingering taste of water from her sojourn in the pool, the faint saltiness of sweat brought about by her rage and near hysteria. The sobs shuddered to a sudden halt, and he half expected her to gather her remaining strength and try to roll his larger body off her.

She didn’t move. She lay there beneath him, quiet, waiting, and he knew it was too late. He wanted her too much to pull back. And she needed him too much to fight. He shifted, moving partway off her, and his hands were no longer rough and punishing. He rolled her over in the dust so that she faced him, and the look on her face shocked him. It was an expression of total, passive despair. And he knew that if he did nothing else he’d bring her back to life again, even if it meant bringing back her hatred.