Painted Blind (23 page)

Titus’s glance darted across the living room, and he stood. “Lock the door.”

I turned on him, suddenly furious. He spent the entire day trying to convince me I could trust him, but when it came to me bathing, I had to lock the door to keep him out. “I guess you’re not as trustworthy as you claimed to be.”

He set his hands on his hips. “I am a man, after all.”

“That you are,” I muttered before slamming the door and locking it. I was too angry to admit he’d hurt me. I wanted to believe he would be my friend and my guardian, but it turned out he was just like every other guy in the world.

While the tub filled, I watched the last rays of sunlight linger on the rooftops before the mountains stole the light and sank the buildings into shadows. When the stars began to sparkle in the sky, I drew the curtains. For awhile, I just soaked in the hot water. Then I found the switch that turned on the jets, and I let the air massage the tension out of my back and shoulders. I stayed in the tub until my hands and feet were pickled and pale. With reluctance I finally wrapped myself in one of the plush towels embroidered with the hotel’s crest.

Aeas only packed me a single change of clothes, two pair of underwear and some socks. The thought of Aeas in my underwear drawer was disturbing, but somehow my pride was being shredded on all sides since I had undertaken to win a god. I put on clean underwear and the satin nightgown from the closet. In the morning I would tell Titus I needed more clothes, but I didn’t want to see him again tonight.

Today was the easiest leg of my journey. Tomorrow would be a long drive, and each day after would grow more difficult. I had to wonder if it was all futile. I wasn’t especially strong or smart or athletic. There was nothing that uniquely qualified me to beat these tasks except my will to win and the help I received from certain, generous immortals. Were Eros’s planning and his money and his servants enough? Once I met the messenger, I was completely on my own, and that was what I feared most. Alone I was weak. If I failed, there would be no one else to blame but me.

I fluffed the pillows and pulled the blankets around me, but I couldn’t sleep. I listened for movement outside the room, but the suite had been built for privacy. It was a giant cocoon.

I thought I imagined the light
tap, tap, tap
on the door. I sat up and listened, then I heard it again, barely louder than the first.

“Titus?” I wasn’t ready to forgive him, so if he was bugging me, it had better be important. “What do you want?”

Tap, tap, tap
.

Aggravated, I climbed out of bed and pulled on the robe before opening the door. I expected to find Titus standing there. Instead, I saw the suite darkened and completely still. “Titus?” I stepped into an invisible body. A squeal of surprise escaped me before he put his fingers over my lips. The ring on his first finger brushed my nose. He held me immovable and kissed my cheek, giving me time to recognize him before he set me free. “You’re here.”

Of course, Eros didn’t reply. He fingered the satin on my arms, then touched the thin strap of the nightgown that had fallen into view at my neck.

I snorted. “It was in the closet. Don’t get any ideas.”

He backed me into the bedroom, where he gathered me into his arms and kissed me.

I was so tired of being without him. I wanted to let him lay me down and marry me right there, except it probably wouldn’t count since we were in the mortal world and we didn’t have the pendant.

Eros, too, seemed complacent about keeping the boundaries between us. His kiss was long and hungry and deep. Standing there, completely lost in him, I didn’t hear Titus approach until he switched on the light.

“Isn’t that a violation of the contract?” He leaned against the doorpost rubbing his eyes with the ball of his hand. If we had wakened him, he was one light sleeper.

I spun around. To a mortal, I would have appeared alone in the room, but Titus could see the veiled Eros with his arms around me. “Technically, no.” I forced myself to look in his face. I was supposed to be the master here, not him. “I can’t see Eros, and he never speaks.”

“Then, how do you know it’s him?”

“I know.”

“What if I said it wasn’t him?”

Eros ran his hand over my hair. He leaned closer and drew his face across my cheek. I smelled his skin and knew the contours of his arms.

“You’d be lying,” I replied.

Titus looked past me. “If you need a bed, take mine, but you’re not sharing hers. Let her sleep. Her days are only going to get harder.”

The arms around me tightened.

“You, of all people, should want what’s best for her. Let us finish this.”

My invisible love sighed, and he let me go.

“NO!” I reached for him, but my fingers found nothing but air.

Titus was jarred by a passing body and accepted the blow without flinching.

“Don’t go!” I tried to follow, but Titus caught my arm and held on until the door out of the suite opened and closed. I jerked myself free and pounded a fist into his chest. “Don’t ever send him away from me! He is
all
I want!”

Titus shook my shoulders. “Then win your bargain.” He pushed me away. “So you can have him for real, not just these games.”

Suddenly calm and so angry it turned me cold, I stepped forward. My nose grazed his chin. Though I was no physical threat to him, I felt his body tightening as I overstepped the bounds of his personal space. “Get out,” I said slowly. “I do not take orders from you.”

Titus backed away, bowing slightly. “Yes, Lady.” He returned to his room and closed the door.

When he was gone, I found the satellite phone. Eros was programmed into the contact list, so I punched out an angry text.

I don’t know why you sent him. I don’t like him. I don’t trust him. He’s worse than having my dad around.

I waited almost an hour, but he didn’t reply. Finally I relented and went to bed. By morning my head was clear. Get the map, finish the task and live with Eros, or die trying. There was no other option.

In bags near our backpacks, I found clothes intended for me—tough cargo pants, long sleeved undershirts and pretty T-shirts to go over the top. They were nice clothes and I liked them, but I was irritated that they were women’s and fit the contours of my body, especially since I was stuck lugging Titus around everywhere I went. I carefully packed Aphrodite’s box and the rest of my clothes into the metal-framed backpack, so I could leave the duffle bag in the car when we reached the climbing area.

We ordered breakfast the night before, and it arrived outside the suite promptly at seven o’clock. I had already eaten and was studying the map to the next town when Titus stumbled out of his room. “You’re late,” I said.

“We aren’t supposed to leave until nine.”

“I’m leaving now.” I gathered my things and phoned the front desk to have our car brought around. A few minutes later when the bell boys arrived to take our luggage, Titus was eating with one hand and pulling on his shoes with the other.

Before the elevator closed to take me down, Titus dashed out of the suite with his duffle bag slung over his shoulder. He caught the elevator door with his hand, and pushed his way inside. “You can’t ditch me that easily.”

“Oh, that I would be so lucky,” I muttered.

When we reached the foyer, he stayed a step behind until we passed the doorman. Then Titus sped up and tried to steer me around to the passenger side.

Instead I went to the valet. “The keys, please?” I held out my hand.

The valet handed over the keys and wished me good day.

I climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Titus was gritting his teeth when he climbed in next to me. Ignoring him, I programmed the location of our next lodging into the GPS. There was no way I could navigate the streets of Kathmandu without it.

“Would you please let me drive?” Titus said as I ground the gears pulling out of the parking lot. Shifting left-handed was harder than I thought it would be.

“When I get tired, I’ll let you drive.” I put on the blinker and turned left as I was instructed by the navigation system. A car in another lane honked, but let me in. “Why don’t you just crawl into the back seat and disappear?”

Titus let out an angry breath. “If I thought for one moment that the two of you wouldn’t have completely violated the contract, I would have left you alone.”

“We’ve been alone dozens of times, Titus, without you babysitting, so just step down from that high, self-righteous horse you’re riding.”

He turned his face toward the window. It was going to be a very long day stuck in the car together.

Chapter 23

There was a single highway from Kathmandu to India, upon which nearly all goods travelled. The term “highway” was generous. It was a narrow, unmarked road that accommodated traffic in both directions without laws of right of way, passing zones or crosswalks. Traffic consisted of everything from busses to hand carts, yaks and burros.

It took over an hour just to get out of Kathmandu. Unconsciously, I had anticipated a grand exit from the city and the speedometer suddenly climbing the way it does when you pull onto the freeway back home. This did not happen. We were stuck behind one slow-moving truck after another, inching our way west. We might have been faster on foot. When we finally reached a more rural area, I learned that if I honked as I came up behind slower traffic, they would let me through.

I thought I was driving fast when the speedometer said I was going a hundred, but Titus informed me with a grin that it was only about sixty miles an hour. The road was full of potholes and the pavement was warped. My dad would have harassed me about beating the shocks to death if we had been in my car, but I didn’t care if the old SUV was worse for wear after this trip.

Titus did finally climb into the back seat and prop his feet up on the window. He fell asleep using our bags as a pillow. Somewhere in his dreams he disappeared, but I could still hear him breathing.

The GPS signaled me to turn right, but when I arrived at the road, it was little more than a dirt trail. I hit the brakes and felt the unseen body slam into the back of my seat. Awake now, Titus reappeared. “What’s the matter?”

“I think we’re supposed to turn here, but it doesn’t look like a road.”

He looked at the navigation system, then pulled out the map. Roads were not clearly marked, and neither were towns for that matter. One looked very much like the next. “I would trust the satellite. It’s only supposed to be thirty miles to the village where we’re staying the night.”

“You can drive,” I answered. I wasn’t tired; I was starving. After he took the wheel, I found a bag of food and put it in between us on the front seat. The SUV was stuffy. With the windows down we gathered a lot of dust. I pulled my hair back as tightly as possible, but strands still whipped at my face. After peeling an orange, I offered half to my bodyguard.

He accepted it tentatively. “Does this mean I’m forgiven?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t good at holding grudges. There was no one else to talk to for the next five days, so it was hard to keep ignoring him. “I don’t think we should stop at the next village.”

The orange gone, he opened a granola bar with his teeth. “Why not?”

“This schedule says it’s another hundred miles to the village where we’re getting the yak. From there we’re on foot.” I squinted into the sun, which was still high overhead. “There’s no sense wasting an afternoon. We should go as far as we can tonight. It gives us more time to climb.”

“You’re the boss. I can’t guarantee suitable lodging if you skip the village. You may end up in a barn with livestock.”

“We’ve got camping gear. If worse comes to worse, we just pitch our tents.” I was more concerned about finding suitable food. Would the villagers feed a couple of strangers a hot meal? I doubted there was going to be a restaurant, and I was getting tired of fruit and packaged snacks.

The road worsened with every mile, until I was clutching the window frame to keep from having my brain jarred loose. Titus navigated the rocky terrain well, and since he had spent more time in Europe, he was better with the left-handed gear shift. In all honesty, we probably would have made better time if I’d let him drive the whole way, but I would not admit it to him.

We were way beyond the popular tourist areas, and we were climbing fast. Steep, jagged peaks rose all around us. The road meandered between them. Outside the temperature dropped rapidly. Whereas in the city and on the lower roads, it had been warm, now the air carried a chill. Soon we would be in the lands of eternal winter.

The village, where we were supposed to stay, was made up of nearly a hundred buildings, mostly built of stone and mortar. The road cut right through a valley, and the town rose up in terraced steps on either side. We stopped for gas, which I wasn’t sure we’d find. However, the village needed supplies, and the delivery trucks needed gas, so we did manage to find a working fuel pump. While I paid for gas, I sent Titus for food. If we could at least find some fresh vegetables and meat, we could build a cooking fire at the next stop.

He returned looking triumphant. “Fresh meat from the butcher,” he announced. “And vegetables from the market.”

“What kind of meat?” I eyed the package suspiciously. It was wrapped in newspaper.

“I didn’t ask. It’s red, though, so I figured you’d like it.” He eyed one of the taller buildings longingly. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay?”

“It’s only two o’clock in the afternoon. We should keep moving.”

He packed the food with our other supplies then climbed into the driver’s seat.

I was probably making a mistake. Eros’s men scouted the area and decided we should stay here, but Eros would also break up the journey as much as possible. I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time once we reached the mountain.

The road narrowed terribly. In places I wasn’t sure we could pass between the jagged mountain walls, but Titus kept going while I held my breath. Eventually we passed into a wider valley, where the shrubbery had lost its leaves, and the grass was spotted with snow. Trees became scarce.

“Can we get there before dark?” I asked.

“I’ll do my best,” Titus replied. The road was pocked and rough, but he kept us climbing. Fortunately, it had been awhile since the last snow, so the roadway was partially clear.

We rounded a sharp corner with the SUV hugging the mountain wall. On my side the rocks fell away into oblivion. I gasped without meaning to and buried my face in the seatback.

Titus threw me a momentary glance. “Are you…? You’re afraid of heights?”

That one glance over the cliff made me nauseous. I turned my eyes toward him and the nice, solid mountain on his side. “Yeah.”

“Great,” he replied flatly.

“I can climb. I just can’t look down.”

The road bounced us a few inches closer to the cliff, and I grabbed Titus’s arm. He told me to put my head down and close my eyes. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

I did as I was told because I was too terrified to pretend I could sit there like a normal person. I climbed into the back seat, ducked below the windows and closed my eyes.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty, you’re going to miss the ball.” Titus shook my shoulder.

I sat up. We were stopped. There were streaks of daylight in the distant sky, but mountains on all sides blocked the rays. “We made it?” Here, at least, it felt like December. Ice was caked into the hubs of the SUV, and my breath showed in white puffs as I climbed out of the SUV and pulled on my parka.

“Only one person in town speaks English. He told me there is a small inn at the edge of town. We’re lucky. It has indoor plumbing.”

“And the yaks?”

Titus chuckled. “They’re everywhere.” Opening the back, he offered me a backpack, which I pulled onto my shoulders. He shouldered the other one, and we each carried a bag of food. “Ah, there is one thing.”

“What?”

“We have to share a room.”

“They don’t have two rooms?” I doubted the inn was hosting many guests this time of year.

“They have rooms, but only one comes with beds. It has two cots. There is a toilet and sink in a partitioned corner. It’s primitive, but at least there is a fireplace and plenty of firewood.”

“Fine.” I threw him a glance. “If you behave. You are a man, after all.”

At this he laughed. “I’m not the reason I made you lock the door.” We reached the inn, and Titus opened the door to our room.

Primitive was putting it mildly. The room had stone walls and a dirt floor. The window had a single thin pane and would have drafted terribly if it hadn’t been shuttered from the outside. One thing in the room made up for its other deficiencies. There was a black kettle on a swing arm over the fireplace. As soon as we had a fire blazing, we dumped our meat into the kettle and let it brown before adding vegetables and two bottles of water.

Titus dug through the rest of our supplies trying to see if there was something else to flavor our stew. He made a stack of plastic bags which held foil pouches.

“Hey,” I said, recognizing the MRE packets we were carrying for our climb, “those packages should have salt and utensils. Each meal has one.”

“You’ve eaten these before?”

“My dad used to take me camping.” One night when a storm hit before we could get a solid fire going, we were stuck in the tent with no way to heat the packets. Dad told me to put it in my armpit. When I refused, he offered to put it in his. I couldn’t help cracking a smile at the memory. Even at nine, I preferred a cold dinner to one that had been in an armpit. “You’ll hate the spaghetti,” I told Titus. “You’d better stick with the beef stroganoff or chicken and vegetables.” I took one of the packages and opened the plastic wrapper. It contained a foil pouch, fork and salt packet. “They don’t need salt. There’s enough sodium in these things to give you high-blood pressure.” I opened three more packages and poured the salt into our soup, then repacked the MREs into the backpack.

Titus looked at me curiously. “So, you’re used to roughing it, but you’re afraid of heights?” When I nodded, he chuckled and shook his head, “And I can climb just about anything…”

“…but you’re used to a palace,” I finished for him. “Well, if the cot gives you fleas, I’ll take you to a vet.”

Now there was serious alarm in his eyes. “Maybe the floor is better.”

“Oh, I seriously doubt that. Who knows what crawls around here at night?”

He shivered visibly. “Fleas,” he muttered to himself.

“Just put your sleeping bag down. You’ll be fine.”

We lit a kerosene lamp and spread our travel papers on a cot. The itinerary said we were supposed to set up a base camp in a valley at roughly 10,000 feet. It was our destination tomorrow. We could take the yak that far. A villager would walk with us to the location and bring the yak back down.

“It’s not going to take us all day to set up camp. Why is that the only thing on the itinerary for tomorrow?”

“We have to acclimate,” Titus replied. “The instructions are very specific on this point. We need to spend an entire day and night at the base camp before moving on.”

I found a climbing pamphlet among the papers. It was government issued and in English. “It looks like we can still have a campfire at base camp if we haul in our own wood.” That was good news. The best thing about camping was getting warm by the fire.

We were carrying three tents. The largest was for base camp. It was large enough to sleep six and had two zip-down partitions. That way Titus and I could share a single tent and have separate rooms. The two lighter tents were for higher elevations. They were small, but tough. If a storm hit while we were on the face of the mountain, winds could gust over seventy miles an hour, and the temperature could easily drop to thirty below zero. Up there we would not have a fire. There was no dry ground upon which to build one, and it was too dangerous to build a fire on a glacier. We might have carried a kerosene stove, but we were traveling light from the base camp up. We had a small, battery-operated pot to boil water. This we would use to heat our food. Above base camp was a leave no trace area. That meant that everything we carried in, we had to carry out.

We counted our food packets and rationed them out, so we knew we would have enough without digging into our packs later to check. Eros had equipped us well. Most of our meals had a full MRE entrée, side dish and dessert, each packaged separately. Titus and I decided to stash the side dishes and desserts into the outer pockets of the packs in case we wanted them for snacks or light meals during the day. We also had dried fruit, nuts, jerky, water bottles and lots of energy drink powder.

By the time we packed it all away, even Titus was satisfied that we both had the maps memorized. Our GPS system would help us to stay on the trail, but if it failed, we knew the way.

The last item I repacked was the wooden box. Titus noticed it, and ran his finger over the carved rose. “This is what you’re taking to the messenger?”

“Yes. At the final destination, a woman will have the key.” I turned the box around so he could see the gold lock.

Titus lifted it with his finger, and his eyes turned worried. I wondered if he knew something about the lock that he wasn’t telling me. The look lasted only a moment. “We’ll make sure it’s well cushioned on the climb, so it won’t get broken if we take a spill.” Reluctantly, he rolled his sleeping bag onto the filthy cot. “I sent a text to Eros this afternoon.”

“To tell him I didn’t stay where I was supposed to?”

“And that you tried to ditch me at the hotel.” He offered his satellite phone to me. “I thought you might want to see the reply.”

She infiltrated the Fortress, faced Theron, was beaten nearly to death and still completed two tasks. Did you think for one moment a woman like that would take orders from you? Remember your place, Titus. And give her my love.