The Defiant Hero (17 page)
“I’m having dinner with Daniel next week,” she told him. “We’re going to be talking about getting back together, so . . .”
John didn’t miss a beat. “Then you really need to have dinner tonight with a friend.”
Meg just looked at him.
“Yeah, I’m disappointed,” he admitted. “But that’s the last you’ll hear of it. If you don’t want me to, I won’t hit on you, Meg. I won’t even bring the subject up again. I can do friends. We can play it that way. We did it before, right?”
“Did we?” she had to ask.
He put on a pair of sunglasses, hiding his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Right up until the end, we were great as friends. And as far as me kissing you . . .” He shook his head as he smiled tightly. “I’ve spent about six months trying to figure out the best way to apologize, but I’m damned if I know how to do it. To be honest, I’ve had a real bitch of a week, I got into DC late last night, got up too early, and got ready for an oh-seven-hundred meeting that was postponed four times and finally—fifteen minutes ago—pushed off until the day after tomorrow. Besides you, I don’t know a soul in DC, so if you turn me down, I’ll end up having room service while I watch TV in my hotel room. Please, please, have dinner with me and let me try to apologize. I’ve missed you, Meg—I want us to be friends again.”
Meg had agreed to have dinner with him. She knew all about being lonely. She was a sucker for sincerity, too, and his had seemed off the chart.
“I’ve missed you, too,” she’d told him, and lied again. But that time her lie hadn’t been to him. Her lie had been in telling herself that she could handle friendship with this man, in convincing herself that up until that last night in Kazbekistan her feelings for him had been that of a sister. She’d let herself pretend that they could easily slip back into that safe, well-defined relationship.
She should have known better than to believe herself.
As Osman Razeen continued to snore softly from the back of the car, Meg gripped the steering wheel more tightly and headed south as swiftly as she dared.
Once again leaving John Nilsson behind.
“Nana, I’m so hungry.” Amy was trying desperately not to cry.
They’d awakened a half hour ago to the scent of eggs frying and some kind of corn bread being toasted.
The ropes that had been tied around Eve’s ankles and wrists dug into her skin. Her stomach growled and there wasn’t a single muscle in her body that didn’t ache.
Last night—with their hands tied—they’d eaten the last of the lunch they’d prepared for their picnic by the Smithsonian. The man named the Bear had brought Eve’s bag in from the van. Tossed it to them after rifling through it. The sandwiches had been smashed, but Amy hadn’t complained. Now all that was left was a pack of butterscotch candies.
The Bear came into the room with a plate of food, but then sat down in the only chair, and proceeded to eat it himself.
“Please,” Eve started to ask for something for Amy to eat, but he sharply shook his head, holding his fingers to his lips, glancing almost furtively back toward the kitchen.
The others were back there—the three men and that awful woman.
As the three other male kidnappers started talking again, arguing about God knows what, speaking in that unintelligible language over the incessantly blaring TV, the Bear leaned toward Eve, his own voice low. “We’re running low on supplies. Don’t ask for food, there’s none to spare. If you stay silent and make no demands, then killing you is far more difficult a prospect than simply letting you sit. If you start asking for food, that all changes. Don’t give us a reason to take you out into the swamp.”
He scowled then as if he regretted his words, his semikindness. He had one of those faces that was almost entirely covered with beard. The rest seemed to be all big bushy eyebrows and darkly tanned skin.
When he scowled it was not at all ineffective.
The Bear focused his glower at his plate as the woman with the dead eyes, still carrying her enormous gun, came through the dining room and stopped in the doorway to look in at them. She was silent, and the Bear didn’t even glance up at her. He just kept on eating, methodically cleaning his plate.
Eve tried not to look at her, tried to shield Amy from her soulless gaze. She tried to pretend they both were invisible, tried to look as if they weren’t even using up very much oxygen.
Finally the woman went away.
The Bear kept on eating, finishing up the last of his eggs as Amy tried not to cry.
“Nana, my hands hurt.”
“Shhh.”
Eve could hear the woman clumping up the stairs, heard her door slam shut. From the kitchen came the sound of the TV. They wouldn’t be seeing much more of the other three men until Howard Stern was over.
Abruptly the Bear stood up.
He put his empty plate down on his chair. As he came toward them, Eve tensed. But although he grabbed them roughly, he only cut their wrists free. He was still scowling as he snapped his jackknife shut and returned to his seat.
It was possible that this young man still had a bit of a soul, a morsel of conscience.
Eve rubbed Amy’s wrists as she leaned back against the wall, holding the little girl close.
“Do you want to hear more of my story?” she pretended to ask Amy, when in fact, she was asking the Bear.
But he didn’t move. He just kept on glaring at the floor.
Amy nodded yes. But then, with a glance in the Bear’s direction, she whispered, “Mommy must be worried about us.”
Eve could only imagine the panic Meg had to be feeling right now. Still, getting Amy upset about that wasn’t going to help. “I think she’d be very proud of how brave you’re being.”
Another glance at the Bear, and Amy leaned closer, lowered her voice even more. And spoke in French, God bless the child for her cleverness. “What are we going to do?”
Eve’s own French had never been particularly good. She didn’t have Meg’s or Amy’s natural gift for languages. She remembered the year that Meg was twelve, she’d invited the girl to visit her in England for the entire summer. Two weeks after she’d arrived, Eve had discovered her granddaughter carrying on a conversation in Welsh with the woman who came in daily to clean the house. Two weeks and she’d already learned enough to chat. By the end of the summer, she was speaking like a native.
However, after more than fifty years and many trips across the Channel to France, Eve’s French could be described as shaky at best.
But she knew enough to be able to communicate with Amy. “We wait,” she told Amy now, in her patchwork French. “If I tell you to do something, if I tell you to run, you don’t ask, you just do it, do you understand? You run and you don’t stop running. You go get help and let the police come back for me.”
Amy nodded, her small face so serious, her mouth a tight little line.
Children were growing up much too quickly these days. Eve thought of the sixth grade girls in Amy’s school, taunting the fifth graders because they were virgins. How the world had changed since she was a child.
“You must try very hard not to cry,” Eve continued in English. It didn’t matter that the Bear overheard this part. Besides, she’d used up most of her broken French. “Especially if that woman is around. We must be very quiet then.”
Amy nodded again. “I won’t cry.” Her lip trembled.
Please, God, help me keep this child alive. Eve glanced at the Bear. He was glowering at them again, and had been ever since Amy had first spoken in French.
“Where was I in the story?” Eve asked calmly.
“Ralph spent about a week teaching your brother to box,” Amy remembered, “while you hid from him.”
“That’s right,” Eve said. “And then it happened. The awful day I’d been dreading. Ralph finally sat down with Nick and a reading primer.”
She settled Amy more comfortably against her. “I was going into the library, thinking Ralph and Nick would be safely ensconced in the garage practicing their jabs and hooks. My plan was to take a book and lose myself up in the orchard until Ralph had gone safely back to town. But they weren’t in the garage, Nick and Ralph. They were there in the library. And as I went in, Nicky bolted out of there so fast, he knocked me over. Literally. I went flying. Arse over teakettle right there in the corridor.”
Amy only managed a wan smile at Eve’s use of the A-word.
“He didn’t stop to see if I was dead or alive,” Eve continued. “He just shouted, ‘Make him go away,’ and bolted, the little beast. But Ralph had been right on Nick’s heels, and although he managed not to step on me—which I honestly appreciated—he had to do what I’m positive was the world’s very first triple lutz. It was beautiful—or it would have been if he hadn’t skidded on a throw rug and landed hard on his butt.”
Thank God she’d been wearing her blue jeans. It would have been horrendously embarrassing if she’d been lying there with her skirt up over her head.
“Are you all right?” Ralph scrambled to his feet, sliding a little more on the throw rug as if he were part of some slapstick vaudeville act, before he managed to regain an upright position.
Eve had smacked the back of her head on the floor. It was throbbing and she felt a little queasy, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.
“Nick!” she called in the direction her brother had vanished. “Get back here, you little creep!”
“No, let him go,” Ralph said. “I mean, well, he’s already gone, and it was . . . it was entirely my fault for . . . for . . .”
As he helped her to her feet, she knew without a doubt that he’d never seen a woman in blue jeans before. He looked stunned.
“Did you call him stupid?” She glared at him. “I may be a girl, but I swear, if you called my brother stupid, I’ll throw you off this property with my bare hands and then I’ll get a gun and shoot you if you try to come back!”
“Didn’t you just call him names yourself? Something like . . . little creep, it was, I believe.”
“Please leave.” Eve could do haughty quite well. It had been one of her mother’s specialties, too, used on those rare occasions when things weren’t happily going her way.
“I didn’t call him stupid,” Ralph told her calmly. “I’d never say such a thing to a child. He was the one who used the word. And I informed him he was wrong, that I happen to think he’s uncommonly bright. He then proceeded to call me stupid and ran from the room. I’m going to go track him down and give him the rest of the day off—tell him to go find young Rupert Harrison from down the lane and spend the afternoon fishing. What are you wearing? It’s lovely but I think you might’ve misplaced your six guns and cowboy hat somewhere west of the old Chisholm trail.”
“Women wear trousers like this in California all the time,” Eve told him defiantly. That wasn’t exactly true—movie actresses like her mother had worn blue jeans at times, because they created such a stir. Eve wore them because they were comfortable. And they reminded her of home.
“I see.” Ralph nodded. “My mistake.” He cleared his throat. “Tell me, have I done something to offend you? You’ve managed to avoid me quite admirably this past week—one would think you’d trained for years with Scotland Yard. However, if there’s something I should apologize for . . . ? “
Eve felt herself blush. “I just thought it might be easier for you to do your job if I weren’t around. I was . . . trying to help.”
“That’s very kind,” he said. “But unnecessary. In fact, I think Nick was a little disappointed that you didn’t come to watch him box.”
“But I did watch,” she told him. “Nicky knows. I told him I . . .” She’d told him she didn’t want to get too close to his tutor. That her plan to get rid of him depended on her remaining something of a mystery.
Ralph smiled at her. “Well, then,” he said. “One of us was definitely disappointed. If it wasn’t Nick, it must’ve been me. Look, if you’re still keen on helping, I could use some today—some real help, that is. I need a ride into town—if you’re not in the middle of something else. Like a roundup of the herd of longhorns on the back forty.”
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“I have to confess to an addiction to American dime novels,” he admitted with a smile. “If you give me a ride, I promise I’ll make no more cowboy jokes.”
He wanted a ride. “Well,” she said. “Sure, I can drive you to town. What for?”
He didn’t seem at all put off by her less than gracious inquiry.
“It’s a long story; I’ll explain in the car.” He was already halfway down the hall. “Let me set things straight with Nick, and I’ll meet you by the garage in ten minutes. Is that long enough for you to change?”
Eve crossed her arms and lifted her chin. “Why would I change?”
He turned back to face her. “You should, of course, wear whatever you like. Of course.”
“But . . . ?” The word was there, dangling unspoken, so Eve said it for him.
Ralph cleared his throat delicately. “You will, however, cause minor traffic accidents in your, ahem, current outfit—as well as make it difficult for fifty percent of the population to concentrate on the task at hand—myself included. And no doubt the other fifty percent will spend some not small amount of time giving you thoroughly disapproving looks.”
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