The Defiant Hero (7 page)
“Everyone’s out front, Mrs. Moore,” she was told.
Abdelaziz was watching her, and she gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Okay, let’s get you upstairs. We can use my office temporarily.” She looked back at the wounded man. “Do you need help carrying him?”
One of the SEALs—a young man with a nasty scrape on his cheek that had bled down into the collar of his shirt—shook his head. “No, ma’am, we’ve got him.” He had a drawl reminiscent of James Garner’s Maverick, and eyes the color of a Texas sky.
Meg swiftly led the way up the stairs, Abdelaziz on her heels.
“Thank you,” he said, and meant it.
She glanced back at him. “I can’t believe they just left you in the lobby.”
“There’s a somewhat . . . tense situation out there. And the government’s not the only one who’s after me.”
“The way I’ve heard it is the government thinks you’re a terrorist, and the terrorists think you’re working for the government.” Meg opened the door to her office and stepped back to let him in. “Which is it, Mr. Abdelaziz?”
“The truth is never as clear as we’d like it to be,” he said cryptically, flashing her a smile.
He had beautiful teeth, an incredible smile. In combination with his too-warm eyes, the effect was impressive. Abdelaziz was an outrageously handsome man.
An outrageously handsome young man. Probably about the same age as her little sister, Bonnie—about twenty-three or four.
Much younger than Meg.
Although, ever since discovering Daniel’s infidelity, purely by accident, from a fax she wasn’t supposed to see—it wasn’t as if Daniel had wrapped up the truth and left it as a gift for her under their straggly little Christmas tree—Meg had felt about a million years old.
Her great-uncle Andrew who was pushing ninety-seven looked younger than she felt today.
The doctor arrived, and Meg locked her file cabinets and stepped back, out of her office, to give the men their privacy.
To her surprise, Abdelaziz followed, closing the door behind him.
“The SEALs trust you to wander about on your own?” she asked.
“I’m not wandering—I just stepped outside to thank you again.”
“Please stay with them,” Meg said, “until we know for sure how this situation is going to be handled. And please don’t take this personally, but I’m going to put a guard outside the door. Some people seem convinced you’re a terrorist. There are children in this compound, and—”
“You don’t have to explain or apologize.”
“I’ll call the kitchen for food and get you something hot to eat,” she told him briskly. “I’ll send for some towels and clean clothes, too—you could all use a shower. There’s a bathroom in the basement, next to the workout room. When you’re ready, I’ll have a guard escort you downstairs.”
He moved back, away from her. “I’m sorry. We must smell terrible. The past few days have been filled with . . . challenges—some more malodorous than others.”
“I can’t imagine where you’ve been or what you must’ve been doing.” She paused. “Or who you really are.”
He was even more attractive when he laughed. She wished her sister Bonnie were here to meet this man, and then, in flash, she realized she wished nothing of the sort. She wished she were Bonnie. Fresh out of college and just starting out. Free to allow herself to be charmed, even for just a moment, even by a dangerous man.
“It’s best if you don’t try to imagine anything.” He gestured to the closed office door. “I should go back and . . .”
“Good idea,” she said. “I’ll get that food.” But first the guards. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“You’ve already been more than kind, Mrs. Moore.” If he’d been clean, he would’ve bowed and kissed her hand—Meg had no doubt of that. As it was, he just gazed at her with those disconcertingly luminous light brown eyes. “The safe haven of your office is sincerely appreciated. As is your kind offer of food and a shower. I am most grateful.”
Such Kazbekistani dignity and formality coming from this ragged and bloody young man made Meg smile. “It’s my pleasure.”
“The pleasure is mine, fy siwgwr aur.” He’d slipped into another language but it wasn’t Russian or even one of the lesser known K-stani dialects, either.
Fy siwgwr aur was . . . Welsh? Yes, it was a term of endearment that translated clumsily into “my golden sugar.” For a moment, Meg was convinced she was losing it—that the stress of the past few days was getting to her. But he continued on, still speaking in Welsh, of all odd things. “Yours is the most beautiful smile I’ve seen in all my life. It makes me forget I haven’t slept in four days.”
Meg couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe this ragged Kazbekistani was speaking Welsh, couldn’t believe he actually meant those honeyed words. Beautiful smile. My golden sugar. Good grief.
Unless maybe he was the kind of man who had a good nose for sniffing out lonely, pathetic women. Maybe her current unhappiness was etched on her face. Or perhaps he was one of two or three million Kazbekistanis who knew about Daniel’s affair with Leilee. Why not? It wouldn’t surprise Meg one bit to find out she’d been the last person in all of K-stan to know what a total, lying bastard she’d married.
“You don’t see it at all when you look into a mirror, do you?” he asked her softly, still in near perfect, lyrical Welsh. “You don’t have any idea what you look like, of the power of your smile. Would you smile for me, I wonder, if I . . .”
The words were ones she didn’t know, but their meaning was more than clear. Shockingly clear.
This was ridiculous. What could he possible be thinking? He was barely out of diapers and she was an ancient and jaded thirty-one. And that was completely ignoring the fact that she was married. Although she suspected Abdelaziz wouldn’t want anything longer than a single night of passion.
And maybe, like Daniel, he just didn’t find marriage to be that big a deterrent to casual sex.
“I want to see you smile when I—”
“Oh, please,” Meg interrupted him, unable to listen to another ridiculous word. “Just go back in with the SEALs, sugar.”
He stared at her.
“I’ll cut you some slack for the lack of sleep. And you’re young, so maybe four days without sex has done something weird to your brain as well, but believe me, I do know what I look like, thank you very much.”
She looked like exactly what she was—the still somewhat pretty mother of a seven-year-old. And maybe that was part of her problem with Daniel. Maybe when he looked at her beside him in his mirror, he didn’t like what he saw anymore.
Or maybe he was just a lying, cheating son of a bitch for whom fidelity wasn’t part of his working vocabulary.
“You speak Welsh?” Abdelaziz choked out, startled back into English. Apparently she’d shocked the hell out of him.
“Yes,” she answered in that language. “That seems like a little detail you might want to check in advance next time you start waxing poetic, Romeo.”
“No one speaks Welsh. At least no one in Kazbekistan does.”
“I do. And so do you, apparently.” She had to laugh at the improbability of that. “How on earth did you—”
“My mother was Welsh.” He had the good grace to be embarrassed, his too-handsome face actually flushing beneath all that mud and grime as he realized all that he’d said to her. “I’m really sorry, ma’am. It wasn’t my intention to offend you. I never would have said any of that if I knew you could understand.”
“Oh, so it’s okay to say such things to a woman if she can’t understand?”
He was so young. And so terribly embarrassed. Still, he had guts. He didn’t run away, escaping back into the sanctuary of her office. He stood firmly in front of her, forcing himself to look her directly in the eye. “I apologize. And I beg you not to let my despicable behavior reflect upon your treatment of my men—the other men.”
“Why don’t you go inside,” she said gently, “and let the doctor check you out? I’ll get some food and some clean clothes—and I’ll also find some rooms with beds so you and your friends can get some sleep. And tomorrow we can all start over.”
He bowed, and wisely, he went into her office without uttering another word.
In the end, it was her files that were moved out of her office rather than the refugee and three SEALs.
When it was clear they were determined to stay put, Meg made arrangements for cots to be moved in. And when she stopped by in the morning to transfer some files from her computer’s hard drive onto a disk, Abdelaziz was fast asleep, spread-eagle on the floor.
He lay there as if completely boneless, in complete abandon.
It was the way a child might sleep.
Or a man who hadn’t slept for four days straight.
Still, he stirred before she finished with the computer, lifting his head and pushing himself wearily up onto his hands and knees, off the floor. “Report,” he said.
Sam, the SEAL with the Texas drawl, was awake, sitting up with his weapon held loosely in his arms. “The team commander is still asleep. I gave Mrs. Moore permission to get some information she needed from her computer.”
Abdelaziz lifted his head and looked directly at her. It was obvious that he’d been unaware that she was in the room until Sam had given him warning. He leapt to his feet—she’d never seen a man move that fast before—raking his fingers back through his sleep-mussed hair and straightening his clothes.
“As far as I know,” Sam continued, “there’s been no change in the political wind. Unless Mrs. Moore has some news she wants to share. Of course, she may not be feeling too kindly toward us, since she’s going on day two without her office.”
“The only rooms available were on the top floor, which is a far more vulnerable position than here on the second floor.” Abdelaziz’s smile was rueful. “Here I go, about to apologize to you. Again. I’m sorry for any inconvenience we’ve caused you, but I needed to sleep and I wouldn’t have slept up there.”
“As long as you don’t mind me coming in to use the computer, it’s not that big an inconvenience,” she lied.
His smile said he knew better. And he was still embarrassed about yesterday, as well. As he should be. “Have you heard anything from the front line?” he asked.
Meg hesitated, not sure what to tell him. The K-stani government had threatened to kick all the Americans—ambassador, staff, and civilians—out of their country if Abdelaziz wasn’t surrendered to them within the next twenty-four hours. The American oil companies couldn’t afford to be kicked out, so they’d added their voices to the ongoing shouting match.
The general feeling of the embassy staff—including her husband Daniel—was to placate the Kazbekistani government and secure their shaky position in this oil-rich paradise by giving up Abdelaziz.
Which would be virtually the same as putting a gun to the man’s head and pulling the trigger. If they gave him up, he would be executed.
But probably tortured horribly first.
Abdelaziz read her silence correctly. “The news is that good, is it?”
“The ambassador doesn’t have much to go on,” she told him, “since you’ve refused to answer his questions. How can he vouch for your innocence when the government accuses you of all these terrible crimes?”
“What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” he murmured.
“That might be true in America, but we’re not in America.”
As she watched, he crossed the room and looked down at the wounded man, the leader of the SEALs, Ensign John Nilsson.
“Is he all right?” she asked quietly. There was a sheen of sweat on Nilsson’s forehead and his eyes were closed. He was sleeping, but only fitfully.
“He should be in a hospital,” Sam said tightly.
Abdelaziz nodded in agreement. “We’re going to do whatever we have to, to medevac him out of here.”
“Anything short of turning yourself over to the Kazbekistani government,” she corrected him.
“Yes, that probably wouldn’t be a very good idea.”
Sam snorted. “Probably?”
Abdelaziz turned and gave Sam a long, measured look.
Meg remembered that look later that day, when she received word that the ambassador had arranged for a chopper to fly the Navy SEALs to an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. She was in the middle of translating some desperately needed document, vital for the ongoing negotiations, when she was told of their departure.
“Navy SEALs?” she asked Laney. “Plural? Are you sure? Aren’t they just flying out the one SEAL—the injured man?”
“No.” Laney was smug about having received the information first. “All three of them left. I saw them as they headed to the heliport an hour ago. They’re already gone.”
The three SEALs had left the American embassy. Had they really just walked away—and left Abdelaziz behind to face his fate alone?
An hour ago, Abdelaziz had been in the middle of a meeting with the U.S. ambassador and several key members of his staff. Meg knew that the meeting had been dragging on for hours, as the ambassador tried to convince Abdelaziz that they would do everything in their power to see that he received fair treatment and a fair trial upon his surrender to the Kazbekistani government.
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