Murphy's Law (12 page)

She held her head high and turned back. “Is that an order, Special Agent Murphy?” She wouldn’t allow herself to acknowledge his look of remorse. He faked his emotions at will when he wanted something.

“It’s a request.”

“Request denied.” She continued into the bedroom and shut the door. In case he tried to follow, she took the small chair from the vanity and jammed it under the handle.

* * * *

Lilly’s angry grunt and the sound of her flopping onto the bed could be heard clearly from the living room.

“Leave her, Jack,” Hanan said as he started to follow. “Did she make a call?”

 
“No.” The admission should have been a relief, but instead he wished she had. Then he could excuse his obnoxious behavior.

“Did anyone notice her?”

He lowered himself in a plush chair and raised his feet onto an ottoman in front. Remembering the scene he’d caused, he tipped his head in a gesture of mock-congratulation. “Not until I decided to drag her off the street.”

“Oh, Jack,” she moaned.

“I know. I know. It was stupid. I thought … no, I didn’t think. I reacted. That’s how mistakes are made.” He groaned and raked his hand through his hair. “She’s so damned infuriating.”

Hanan giggled. “She said the same thing about you.”

He could well imagine. “What else did she say?”

“I’m not sure. What’s a hemorrhoid?”

He laughed to cover his embarrassment. “Never mind. So, how much do I owe you?”

She shook her head. “I beg your pardon?”

“How much money did she borrow from you?”

“She didn’t borrow anything. She asked me to change some American dollars for her.”

Jack sprung to his feet. She couldn’t have any money. He’d confiscated all of hers the first day. “Where did it come from?”

Hanan took his hand, halting him from demanding an explanation. “Didn’t you learn anything? Think first.”

“She doesn’t have any money.”

“There might be a logical explanation. If you go storming in there again, you won’t be able to undo the damage this time.”

“The only way she could have gotten money was by using a credit card yesterday before she arrived here. She hasn’t been out of my sight any other time.”

“Are you sure?” Hanan asked.

“Of course I’m sure. We’ve been sleeping in the same room.”

“Men!” Hanan vented her exasperation by shaking his arm. “I meant are you sure that’s the only way she could have gotten it? Women have dozens of secret hiding places. Her shoe. Her pockets. A zipper compartment in her purse.”

He paused and tried to remember. He hadn’t searched her pockets or shoes. Still, he had to know where the money came from. All her charge cards had been canceled, but one might have been missed. One in the name of another family member.

If she had used a credit card, he had to move her immediately or risk putting his friends in great jeopardy. “I have to ask her.”

“Ask, Jack. Don’t demand. If you frighten her, she might lie.” Hanan removed Mohammed from his woven baby basket on the floor and rested him on her shoulder. “I have to run to the store. Try to be charming. I know it’s difficult for you.”

He scrunched up his nose at her. “I don’t know why I like you.”

“The same reason you like Lilly. We don’t take any of your—”

“Hanan!” he exclaimed, cutting off her sentence. “Your father never should have sent you to school in England. The language you picked up there would make a sailor blush.”

“You deserve it.”

He did, and so much worse. Now he understood why terrorists never took women as hostages. The crime came with its own punishment.

Take it like a man
.

She didn’t answer his knock, so he tried the door. The handle turned but the door had been jammed shut. “Open the door, Lilly. Please.”

She ignored him.

He walked through the living room and out onto the balcony. Four floors below the rush hour traffic sped by. He smiled at the old woman hanging her wash from the balcony across the alley. To the right were the shutters that opened up to their bedroom.

She’d reduced him to climbing through windows.

The sudden noise sent Lilly rolling off the far side of the bed. She reached for the first thing she could find and turned towards him. Her hands trembled from the white-knuckle grip she had on the ivory letter opener. When she saw Jack leaning over the sill, she exhaled slowly and lowered her hand. “What do you want?”

He swung his legs over the ledge and slid down to the floor. “Would you mind?” he asked, holding his hand out for the letter opener.

She tossed it on the table and turned her back to him. He stood directly behind her and cupped his hands over her rigid shoulders. He felt her hesitate, even move back towards him before she could channel her anger and direct it at him.

“Don’t touch me.” She twisted free and stepped beyond his reach.

That his touch still had some effect on her meant she didn’t hate him all together. “Okay. But I have to talk to you. Would you look at me?”

“No. Just say what you want to say and leave me alone.”

“Where did you get the money to pay for the things today?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, Lilly, it does. I promise, I’m not going to lose my temper, but I have to know where it came from. If you used a credit card it will only take a day to trace it.”

She slipped her hands in her pockets and whirled around. “You really do think I’m an idiot, don’t you?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind. What I think is that honest people don’t think in dishonest ways.”

“You do.”

“Because it’s part of my job to deceive people. It’s become second nature to me. And it’s not something I’m particularly proud of.”

She stared at the floor. “Chantal gave it to me. She said you’d never take it from her, so she asked me to hold onto it.”

“Is that the truth?” She bristled, and he quickly added, “Sorry. Force of habit. You wouldn’t lie about it. I need the rest of it. We have to make a move by tomorrow or we’ll never make it back in time. How much is there?”

“Almost a thousand dollars, minus what I spent today.”

A thousand dollars! He never could have laid his hands on that kind of money without drawing attention to them. When they arrived safely back in the States, he would return the money to Chantal.

“I’m sorry about before. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.” As she tried to walk away, he blocked her path.

“The conversation’s over.” She stepped around him and headed for the door.

“I’m trying to apologize.”

She removed the chair from under the handle and put it back at the table. Her bottom lip quivered as she started to say something, and she bit into it, leaving a mark.

When she had herself under control again, she met his gaze. “You can’t just walk all over people and think that an apology will make it all right. It doesn’t work that way. And if you think I’m upset because you yelled, then an apology is worthless. You have no idea what you did.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“So am I. I expected too much because I’d been harboring the ridiculous notion that you actually cared about me.”

He stared at the door that had just slammed shut in his face.
That went well
. He got more encouragement that first morning when she tossed the scalding coffee at him. Damn! The woman had gotten under his skin, and he didn’t know how to handle it.

It wasn’t possible to go through the motions of chivalry to win a lady’s hand while slaying the dragons at the same time. Something they forgot to tell women when they filled their heads full of princely fairy tales.

Chapter Nine

With Lilly avoiding him at every turn, Jack gave up the idea of trying to speak to her again. Mustafa had returned, and although she played the part of the new wife in Mustafa’s presence, Jack knew she would explode if he pushed her too far.

Instead, he turned his energies to finding a safe way out of the country. He had some limited connections, but none that could supply a plane on such short notice. He’d about given up hope when he received a surprise message from Yousef through another contact. Apparently, there had been a mix-up in the time the other day.

He waited in the coffee shop, ordering a cup of coffee as a sign that he hadn’t been
 
followed.
 
He
 
sat
 
alone
 
and
 
watched
 
two
 
men
 
playing
 
a
 
game
 
of backgammon at the next table. They hurled insults back and forth, making for much amusement among the all-male patrons.

A small boy of no more than ten approached him, carrying a box covered with shoe polish stains. Without being asked, he crouched down and raised Jack’s foot onto the top of the box. Polish and cloth in hand, the boy put a shine on his shoes that his old army sergeant would have been proud of. When he finished, he held out his small hand to be paid.

“How much?” Jack asked.

“Five dollar,” the boy returned.

A boy with no formal education could speak clearly in English when it came to money. As in most countries, dollars were the preferred choice of payment. “I only have a twenty.”

“I make change.”

He paid the money and held the change in his hand until the boy disappeared from sight. Folded in the center of the money he found the note he’d been expecting. He knew Yousef wouldn’t meet him in the open. Collaborating with Americans, even towards noble causes, wasn’t wise in the Middle East, a place historically known for its distrust of foreigners.

Everything had been arranged. He would meet Yousef in his shop the following morning to pick up the travel documents. He wondered how Lilly would react to being moved on a cargo plane, but after everything else she had been through, he figured she would cope.

By the following evening, they would be back in New York. Feeling better that the plan was back on track, he returned to the house for lunch.

* * * *

Lilly busied herself in the kitchen, giving Hanan some time with her family before Mustafa had to return to sea again. Jack strolled into the room, and the temperature rose a full ten degrees. So did her temper when his arms circled her waist from behind.

“Hi, honey. I’m home.”

She tensed but didn’t shove him away with Mustafa in the next room. “I’m going to burn the food if you don’t stop, dear.”

 
“I can see that it takes all your concentration to watch a pot of water boil. Just relax. I have to talk to you for a minute.”

She might have found that easier to do without his soft breath tickling her neck. She twitched and swatted at him as if he were an annoying fly, but that only amused him. “So talk.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow morning. By evening, you’ll be back in New York. If all goes as planned, you’ll be able to call your family.”

She spun around and searched his face to make sure this wasn’t another one of his ploys. “Really?”

“Really.” She let out such a big sigh of relief that he smiled. “By next week, you’ll be back in Iowa watching the corn grow.”

She got so caught up in her excitement that she didn’t stop him from inching her closer. “How did you know my father raised corn?”

“I know everything about you. You have three older brothers and a little sister. You attended Iowa State University on a scholarship, and you have a business degree. And your father was very disappointed that you left for New York to work instead of marrying your high school sweetheart and raising a pack of youngins.” He’d done such a perfect imitation of her father’s accent that she would swear they’d met. “Do you think he’ll find me a suitable son-in-law?”

“He would get along with anyone who took me off his hands.”

“He sounds like a nice man.”

She laughed at the similarities between the two of them. “He’s a male chauvinist who lives in the Stone Age.”

“He’s a father who worries about his stubborn, opinionated, and mule-headed ‘Poppet’. What’s wrong with that?”

The use of her childhood nickname startled her. That could not have been coincidence. “You’ve spoken to him.”

“I had to. He was so distraught when you left the country that he called his congressman two times a day to have him intervene. It would have put the operation in jeopardy, so I promised to call every week to let him know you were all right if he would remain quiet.”

She marveled that he’d taken the time to pacify a worried father. “You did?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Why? Wasn’t that just as much of a risk as if I called?”