Saffron Nights (20 page)

“W
hat do you want from me?” Sasha said, after a few minutes, for one moment looking as if her cold exterior had been penetrated. “You have me here—kidnapped me. What do you want?”

Blood rose to her cheeks. She had the kind of complexion that showed every emotion. She was angry.

“What did you want from me?” Maeve shot back at her.

Their eyes met.

“Okay,” Sasha said, sitting back. “I want Chef’s book. It was meant for me, not you.”

“He left it to me,” Maeve said weakly. The mention of Chef felt crass coming out of Sasha’s mouth. How dare she?

“I know that’s what Yvette told you, but that’s not exactly correct. There are two books. You have mine. I’ve just been trying to switch them—”

“By beating me up? I don’t have the fucking book!” Jackson said.

She drew a breath and licked her dry lips. “That wasn’t me. It was someone else I know. Someone who . . . is obsessed with me. He thought you and I were lovers. After I explained that I just wanted the book, they tried to get it for me. And you walked in on them. It was the wrong room. It should have been Maeve’s.”

“What about Hong Kong?” Jackson said.

“I was only in Hong Kong briefly. Your bodyguard kept me away.”

Maeve untangled herself from Jackson’s hand and sat in the chair next to Sasha, who tensed when Maeve got closer. Okay. She was frightened. Good.

“We know what’s in the book,” Maeve said.

This close, Sasha, the beautiful call girl, was not so beautiful. She’d obviously had work done. Her hair was brittle from years of dye-jobs, Maeve guessed.

“It’s mine,” Sasha said, her voice cracking. “Chef made it for me. You see, he was trying to help me. I am an addict. To make a long story short, he’d read that cutting the drug with durian and saffron would help lessen my need. And gradually he hoped to wean me off it. I’ve been to several rehab clinics and nothing helped. We were getting desperate.”

Chef. As much as Maeve hated to admit it—it sounded crazy enough and compassionate enough that it had the ring of truth.

“I never meant to hurt you,” Sasha broke into the silence, looking down at her fingers, folded in her lap, then back up at Maeve, who suddenly remembered Sasha’s voice saying:
She’s more than that. She was Paul’s partner. We can’t let anything happen to her. Out of respect for him.

Fatima whispered something outside the door and the next thing Maeve knew someone was bringing cold drinks into the room. They all seemed to be taking a moment to reflect. Sasha lifted her glass of minted water to her mouth. Jackson looked out the window, then back to Maeve. He lifted an eyebrow as if to say
what now?

Wrong place, wrong time for Maeve to be thinking about what a gorgeous ass he had. But there it was. Her mind wasn’t exactly sharp this morning. She still felt groggy—a hangover from all the drugs pumped through her system?

“So, you said there are two books?” Maeve asked.

“Yes.”

“And that Yvette gave me the wrong book by mistake?”

“No,” Sasha grimaced, her voice deepening, voluptuous lips flattening. “She knew exactly what she was doing.”

“What do you mean?”

Jackson sat down on the other end of the couch, next to Sasha.

“I mean Yvette didn’t want me to have this book. I’m certain she has the one Chef wanted you to have. It has all the same information in it—just not the other stuff.”

“Why would she do that?” Maeve asked.

“Because Paul was in love with me. He’d asked her for a divorce. She knew we’d been lovers, of course, but when he told her we wanted a more permanent arrangement, she was furious.”

“That’s hard to believe. I can’t imagine Yvette being furious,” Maeve said.

Sasha jaw hardened. “She is psychotic—made Chef’s last year a living hell.”

“What?” Jackson said. “He seemed like a pretty happy guy.”

Maeve took a drink of the water and played a bit with the mint sprig stuck in the drink. She trembled slightly. Chef. She played over the last year in her head. Had he given her any indication? No, but he’d always been a private man. One thing she knew was that hell had no fury like a woman spurned. Maybe Yvette didn’t like Sasha. Yvette was a beautiful—but aging—woman. Sasha was young, vivacious, and evidently loved her husband. Yvette had Chef’s children, had built a life with the man. Maeve’s heart ached for Yvette—but surprisingly it ached for Sasha, as well. Her lover had left her a book containing a substance he thought might help her overcome her addiction and his wife had given it to Maeve. Things were beginning to make sense—but still didn’t quite add up to two murders and a chase around half the world. Or at least not to Maeve. But these people were not like her—they had so much money they could travel anywhere, anytime, and didn’t have to report back to anybody.

Her heart flipped a bit—she had so much work to do. This was taking way too much of her time.

“Okay Sasha, let’s cut to the chase, shall we?”

Sasha nodded.

“Let’s say everything you said is true. We still have some unanswered questions. Who is this person that’s obsessed with you—and who killed Chef and Alice?”

“It’s clear to me it was Yvette who killed them both,” Sasha responded. “The police still have her in custody—so they must think so, too.”

“That’s pretty crazy,” Jackson said, whistling.

“Just crazy enough to be true,” Fatima responded.

“W
ell, whether or not Yvette killed them, someone has been trying to kill me—and Yvette is nowhere around us. And let’s not forget your drugging and kidnapping Maeve. So if you weren’t after me, who was?” Jackson said, after a few moments.

Sasha squirmed in her seat a bit, crossing the other long, thin, leg.

“I’m sure it was my ex-boyfriend and boss,” she explained. “They call him Snake. I tried to warn you, especially in Hawaii, but I couldn’t shake him. He followed me everywhere and thought you and I were having an affair.” She smiled a sweet smile at Jackson as her eyes swept over his body.

Jackson cleared his throat and looked at Maeve, who was looking at him.

“Sasha, you’re kind of pitiful to me,” Maeve said.

Sasha knitted her brows and frowned.

“Do you think sex is the only way to relate to a man?”

“Not just any man,” she said, hoarsely. “But he is . . .”

“Back off,” Maeve said.

Jackson almost choked on his drink as Sasha jumped. She was obviously afraid of Maeve, and boy, he understood that. But more interesting was that somehow Sasha was making Maeve jealous. She who said she’d never gotten jealous. She who didn’t believe in monogamy.

“So,” Fatima said. “Where do we go from here? I’d like to stay and watch this unfold, but I have a business to run. And don’t you have deadlines or something?”

“Yes, we really all need to get on with our lives,” Maeve said. “So what do we do with you, Sasha?”

She shrugged. “All I want is the book with the substance.”

“It’s not that simple,” Jackson said. “It’s illegal. And it might not matter what you want. Or at least it doesn’t to me.”

“But she cared about Chef,” Maeve interrupted. “And it might help her. Chef thought it would.”

“You are both right. It’s not so simple, and Chef believed it would help me. We were very much in love. The problem is Snake.”

“Why is he a problem for us?”

“He’s not getting anywhere near this property,” Fatima said.

“But you can’t protect all of us once we leave,” Sasha said.

“Let’s be clear about this. Snake wants you, right? Not us.”

“Snake wants the stuff. Chef died owing him a lot of money. He’s not a man who takes kindly to debtors, even when they are dead.”

“So let him have it!” Fatima raised her voice and flicked her hand. “Let go of the idea the drugs are going to help you! It’s nonsense. You’ve chased them all over the world for drugs. What is wrong with you?”

Sasha looked as if she had been slapped. Tears began to run down her cheeks. Her face colored red. “Have you ever been so in love with someone you could not see clearly? I tried to tell Paul it wouldn’t help me, that I would die an addict, that we just needed to enjoy the time we had. He wouldn’t listen. That book, that mixture, is all I have left of him. I’d like to try . . . to become the person he thought I could be.” She caught her breath and looked directly at Maeve. “I owe him at least that much.”

Maeve’s face fell and a weird sobbing noise came from her as she clutched her chest. She reached for Sasha’s hand. “We all owe Paul.”

Was Maeve saying what Jackson thought she was? That she was going to give her the drugs? Knowing how she felt about it, he found it hard to believe. And he didn’t quite trust Sasha. He’d known addicts his whole life and knew there was nothing as important to them as their next fix. Whatever Maeve had in mind, Jackson knew he’d need to keep a close eye on things. She was in deep—they all were—and for most of them it was unfamiliar territory. A terrain he knew all too well.

Sasha would go back to the hotel with them. Jackson and Maeve needed to check in with their publishers and agents and try to get things caught up. Fatima was heading to her office and promised to meet them that night.

As Jackson moved through the day—fitfully answering e-mails, talking on the phone to the book designers and stylists, editing photos and sending them off, he was only halfway present. The other half of him—which was getting more and more clear to him by the second—was in her room with Sasha, writing three days of blog posts, downing coffee, and eating anything she could have room service bring to her.

What next, Maeve? What next?

“T
hings happen when you travel? What the hell kind of answer is that?” Jennifer said, breathing into the phone. “Do you have any idea how worried we all were? You’re in Morocco, for Christ’s sake!”

“Jennifer,” Maeve said. “I’ll tell you more when I can. Just not now. Trust me on this.”

Maeve glanced at Sasha, who was sleeping quietly on her bed—after hours of frenzied activity in the room. Then she looked back to her computer screen. “I sent two blog posts and I’m almost finished with the Mexican chapter. Is there anything else you need from me?”

“Humph. You just don’t want to know,” Jennifer said and hung up. Maeve had gotten caught up on all the e-mails from the publishers and agents—but not from her brother, who was desperate to hear from her and also had some bad news for her. Spoonbread Johnson had passed away—he was a man from home who had made and sold spoonbread. She didn’t know why it surprised her—he’d been old as long as she could remember.

He lived out near the hollow at her childhood home. He was wrinkled and stooped over by the time Maeve first met him. But he still made the finest spoonbread she had ever tasted—the sweetest puff of corn in her mouth. Her mother often ordered it from him—because he had a way with it and because it was one of the few ways he earned money. He was also a musician and could scat like nobody’s business.

The trouble with spoonbread, her mother always said, is it seemed like it should be easy to make. It was easy to whip up an ordinary casserole dish of the stuff—but why settle for ordinary when you had access to Spoonbread Johnson?

Thinking about her mother and Spoonbread gave Maeve a pang in her stomach. God, she missed her. Missed him—and that spoonbread. She had often pondered what they magic ingredient was—now she was remembering it so hard she could almost taste it. Hmmm. Creamy. Delicate and sweet . . . something she’d recently had that comforted her.

Butter. If she remembered correctly—oh, but it was so many years ago it made her heart ache—the buttery flavor of the treat was so much like the butter she had in Italy.
Small world.

She glanced at the sleeping Sasha Barnes and picked up her notebook:
Note to self. Butter connection. What could it be?

She mulled over the possibility of all the connections—one of her favorite things about writing about food was the interesting ways in which cultures connect through their food. She sent a note back to Martin, asking if he could find out more.

She ran her finger through her hair. Damn, she felt greasy. A shower is exactly what she needed. She slipped her glasses off her face. Sasha wasn’t going anywhere—she appeared to be very deeply asleep.

Showered and sleepy—the caffeine from the coffee had worn off quickly—Maeve walked out of the bathroom wondering what time it was, hell, what day it was. She placed her laptop and notebooks in the room safe, as was her usual routine, when she didn’t fall asleep while working. She sat on the edge of the bed and slipped in underneath the covers, noticing that sometime during her shower, Sasha had slipped under them, too. As weariness overtook Maeve, she still felt wired. She wondered what the hell they were going to do with the woman sleeping next to her.

T
he images in Jackson’s brain were reeling, making it difficult to sleep. He’d had plenty of nights like this. Usually, he’d get up and go to the bar and get himself a woman. But tonight, the woman he wanted was across the hall, sleeping with a prostitute. He grinned. Who would have imagined?

It seemed like he’d just closed his eyes when he heard an explosion. Then the fire alarm. He shot up out of bed, grabbed his pants and his equipment bag, cameras, disks, files, and headed for his door—he reached for the doorknob and searing pain tore through his hand. Hot. He grabbed his shirttail and wrapped his hand around it and tried again. Stuck. He pushed harder. Smelling smoke, now. Pushed even harder.

The door flew open this time into a hallway of smoke. He could barely see in front of him. The smoke burned his eyes and throat. Where was Maeve?

Her door was wide open. He started for the room, but suddenly there was a firefighter there, speaking in Arabic? Spanish? What the hell?

“English!” he remembered to say, before he was shoved aside again.

“Get out!” the man said.

“My friend is in that room,” Jackson said.

“No, sir,” someone came up behind him and grabbed him. Two men had ahold of him and dragged him outside.

“What makes you think you can go in there?”

One man who Jackson recognized as the manager looked at him as he pulled him into the courtyard. “Sir, there is nobody alive in that room. That is where the fire started. A bomb, we think.”

“What? That can’t be. Maeve is in there. Sasha! Two women are in that room.”

The man shook his head grimly. “I’m sorry, sir.”

Fire trucks and ambulances swarmed the beautiful old palace. Smoke poured from its windows.

Jackson’s chest pounded. Could it be? Was Maeve lost to him? Why hadn’t she been in his bed? That is where she belonged. What was the crazy game they had been playing? Thinking they could help Sasha and ward off Snake and anybody else who was following her? Why wasn’t Maeve in his bed? Why?

He dropped his bags, fell to his knees as the world started to fade. A rescue worker came to him and placed a mask over his face.

“Breathe,” he said.

But Jackson just didn’t want to.

Then he saw the horror on the man’s face as bodies began to be carried out of the smoke. Two of them—both burned beyond badly, hard to recognize. Sasha and Maeve? Lights. Shouts. The smell of smoke and fire. It all began to meld in his mind as he felt his heart pounding in pain.

“What’s going on? What’s happening?” he heard a voice come from behind him. A woman. Familiar.

Maeve. He wanted to stand but wasn’t able. He pulled her close. “Where have you been?”

“I was having a hard time sleeping, so I went for a walk,” she said, sitting down next to him. “What’s happening? A fire? Where’s Sasha?”

His eye met hers. “I don’t think she made it out. It seems like the fire started in your room. There was an explosion and—”

Maeve sank into Jackson’s arms. He reached his face to brush away the sweat and realized it wasn’t sweat, but tears. He had Maeve with him—and he was never going to let her go.

She broke away from him, her amber eyes seeking some answer—an answer he could not give her. Not now. Not here. But he was certain that he was her answer.

 

There’s nothing like a bomb to get the attention of publishers and agents. Jackson and Maeve and all their equipment were on the very next plane for New York. No questions asked. “The project is over. At least for now. We’ve got plenty for a book or two. What we care about is your safety.”

Maeve was almost completely unresponsive on the plane. She drank water, picked at her food, stared out the window, dozed off and on in fitful bursts of sleep. Jackson listened to his music and dozed. But he held tight to Maeve’s hand—whenever he could.

“We are one hour from LaGuardia,” the pilot’s voice announced, which seemed to perk Maeve up a bit.

“Poor Sasha,” she said. “An awful ending for her—just when she thought she could get better.”

“Did she—”

Maeve shook her head. “We flushed it all, Jackson. She said after considering it, she might be strong enough to really get clean this time—without what Chef made for her.”

“Wow,” he said, rubbing her finger with his thumb. “You could have been killed. It could have been you.” Hs voice cracked. “I’m not sure I could take that.”

“One saffron night with me wasn’t enough? I’m flattered,” she said.

Her eyes pull him in closer. She leaned into him, placed her lips against his, and made his heart spin.