Chosen (4 page)

Alexana yawned and looked at her calendar. After leaving him hanging for a moment, she finally responded. “Tomorrow, not today. I’ll meet you at Saint Stephen’s Gate at noon.” She hung up without another word.

A half-mile away in his hotel room, Ridge stared at his own telephone receiver. Alexana’s brusque manner irritated him. Yet his interest was piqued by a woman who could so easily turn him away. He went to sleep that night thinking about her and awakened with her still on his mind.

That afternoon was glorious, and the sun grew hot as Alexana and Ridge met up at the Old City’s northeastern gate. Alexana was dressed in a loose khaki skirt and a crisp white blouse that was buttoned to the neck and tucked in, showing off her slim figure. A brown leather belt was wrapped around her waist, and stylish sandals covered her feet. Ridge smiled appreciatively yet refrained from commenting.

“Dr. Roarke,” he said with a nod, still smiling as she came near.

“Mr. McIntyre,” she said, noting that his eyes were the same pale blue as the Jerusalem sky. She motioned to a Palestinian vendor who carried an elaborate dispenser made of silver on his back. After she had handed him a half-shekel, the man poured something that looked like fruit juice into a battered tin cup. Alexana drank deeply and considered Ridge over the lip. “So you want to know the city as the locals know it, huh?”

“That’s my intent, yes.”

“Tamarindy?”
she offered in a casual challenge. “All the locals drink it. I’ll buy.”

Ridge stared back at her, obviously weighing his options.

“You’ve gotta be tough if you’re going to be a correspondent in the Middle East.” She turned and paid the vendor for another serving. He poured it and handed it to her. She, in turn, handed it to Ridge.

Ridge met her gaze, then took the cup and quickly drank it. “Can we get going now?”

Alexana smiled, taking the cup and handing it to the skinny tamarindy vendor. He gave her a wide grin that showed many missing teeth. She turned back to Ridge and nodded. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“A fine local restaurant called The Green Door. You’re hungry?” Her blue eyes again held a spark of mischief, and she cocked an eyebrow innocently.

“I could eat,” he allowed doubtfully, wondering just how bad the restaurant was. “But I thought you were going to show me the town, not take me to lunch.”

Alexana stopped and looked up at him, her face uncomfortably close to his own. “Look. You’re going to have to trust me or forget this whole thing. If you want to know Jerusalem, stick with me. If you want the thirty-buck tour, sign up at the King David Hotel.”

He bit his tongue and followed her silently through the labyrinth of alleyways and streets that made up the Muslim quarter. “Men who have known persecution,” Alexana pointed out, “tend to build their cities upward. Note the narrow, winding streets and high walls—the Old City is made up of walls within more walls.” She gestured up
and around them. “You’ve noticed it too, I’m sure, in every quarter: the locked gates, bolted doors, first stories without windows.”

She said little else until they arrived at last in front of a stone building with a moss-colored door.

“Let me guess,” he quipped.

“Oh, you’re fast, Mr. McIntyre. Welcome to The Green Door.”

As they entered a dark, large room, several men looked up at them, then away as if uninterested. The blonde spoke to a young girl who then hurried to another room. Then Alexana turned back to Ridge. All around them, old mattresses were strewn about in piles and cats freely roamed the room. To Alexana’s obvious surprise, Ridge did not let any feelings of distaste show in his expression.

“Where shall we sit?” he asked calmly as a tabby cat rubbed against his legs, purring.

Alexana looked about and chose a meeting place closest to the ancient, open oven, where a man was cooking something that looked like pizzas. She smiled as Ridge watched him. “Not what you’re used to in America, and not quite what they do in Italy either. It’s somewhere in between.”

“We came here for the food?” he asked with an arched brow.

“No,” she smiled, “for the ambiance. And to see an old friend.”

After the young girl had taken their order—which Ridge trusted Alexana to place—they sat, silently observing the cook and, more discreetly, others in the room. Soon, a large Palestinian man, slightly stooped with age, walked over to greet Ridge’s guide.

“Alexana,
marahaba,”
he said.

She rose to kiss him on the cheek. “Ghasan,
salaam al eikum.
” The Arabic words, meaning “God’s peace to you,” were Alexana’s
favorite greeting, although she also used Ghasan’s word for hello on occasion. “Please, let me introduce you to my guest, Ridge McIntyre. He is an American correspondent for CNN. Ridge, this is Ghasan Khatib, proprietor of The Green Door.”

Ridge reached out to shake Ghasan’s hand, smiling warmly. There was instant dislike in Ghasan’s eyes, but Ridge held his gaze without flinching, even as he dropped his ignored, proffered hand and wiped it on his jeans as if he had never raised it in the first place.

“Please, Ghasan. If we could just have a moment.” Alexana motioned toward their “couches,” inviting him to join them.

With a sigh, the elderly man moved forward. Ridge sat down again after giving Ghasan a polite smile as if he weren’t offended, and Alexana turned before he could see her admiring grin. It took guts to look into Ghasan’s eyes and not cower.

Alexana left the men to size each another up and went to an old white Frigidaire in the corner. She helped herself to three bottled Cokes, ignoring the filthy handle and black fingerprints all over the relic’s thick door.

She returned, impishly smiling first at one man, then the other. The young girl joined them again to open the bottles.

Ghasan spoke first. “You were never one to keep company with journalists, Alexana,” he said, keeping his eyes on Ridge.

“It wasn’t my first choice.”

“Oh, no? Is this man blackmailing you?”

“In a way,” she said calmly, holding Ridge’s gaze. “But don’t worry about me. I don’t plan on keeping company with him for long.”

Ridge looked momentarily irritated, then his face was expressionless once again.

Alexana drank deeply from her bottle. “I’m showing him the real Jerusalem, Ghasan, and I’d like for you to tell him what you think of the peace process.”

“The Israelis are dogs, but we are tired,” Ghasan said without preamble, warming to his old, well-rehearsed diatribe. “We are tired of burying our women and children, so we agree to ‘peace,’ to certain borders, certain rights. Now, after the so-called peace we still bury our children and the Israelis still eat at our borders, ‘settling’ more villages while being protected by the government, for which our own soldiers are mere puppets.”

Ridge frowned as he listened to Ghasan lament the murder of friends and family members. The old Palestinian had many stories that no news correspondent had ever covered.

Ghasan excused himself twenty minutes later, rising to greet other guests.

“How reliable is he?” Ridge asked Alexana when the man was out of earshot.

“Very.”

“He did not appreciate your bringing me here.”

“Journalists are notorious these days for telling slanted stories,” Alexana said, digging into her “pizza” made of a thin crust, olive oil, eggs, and vegetables. “They denounced their pledge to report the news without bias long ago.”

Ridge raised his eyebrow. “Why do you think that?”

“I’ve seen it over and over. American dollars help fund the Israeli military, and many of those dollars belong to wealthy businessmen who have powerful friends among politicians and the media.”

“Fabulous,” Ridge said, a trace of bitterness entering his tone. “The old ‘you can’t trust the media anymore’ story.”

“Well, can you?”

“Are you suggesting that the American media has been deliberately biased in their reporting?”

“I’m saying that it is human nature to choose a side, no matter how hard you try to be impartial. And American money and emotion tend to flow toward the Israelis, not the Palestinians.”

“You speak as if you’ve been burned yourself.”

“I’ve seen friends I considered family get crucified in the media.”

“Friends like Khalil al Aitam?”

Alexana’s practiced look of nonchalance broke. Her eyebrows settled into a frown. “I don’t approve of the path Khalil has chosen, but I do understand his reasons.”

“I see.” Ridge seemed pleased to have finally pushed her offcenter.

Alexana’s mask of control was quickly reestablished. “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.”

From his minaret—a tall, thin, tower high above the limestone streets—a muezzin called the Muslims to prayer, as he did five times a day. His haunting wail echoed around them as Ridge and Alexana exited The Green Door and blinked in the bright sunlight.

“I keep thinking I need to shop for a hat, but I never have time,” Alexana said.

Ridge looked at her, appreciating her first real conversational comment. “I know just the place,” he announced, an idea taking root.

“What?” she turned toward him.

“Come on,” he said, motioning left with a nod, “we can take care of your hat needs. I passed a shop on the way to meet you.”

“No, Ridge, I was just commenting … I wasn’t asking … Ridge!”
The man was leaving without her. Sighing, she followed, stretching her long legs to catch up with him. Just outside the Old City walls was a line of high-end shops that catered to Jerusalem’s wealthy.

She reached out to grab his arm as they passed a furrier shop. “Ridge, I really don’t want a hat.”

“What? Are you kidding? You’d look great in a hat. Come on. I’m buying. You bought the drinks this morning. I’m buying you a hat.”

“Ridge, I—”

“Enough. We got off on the wrong foot, Dr. Roarke. Let me buy you a hat as a peace offering.”

His face was so earnest that Alexana faltered. Suddenly he was like a little boy on a mission. She set her lips grimly as she entered the store behind him, steeling herself for the inevitable. She had five Indiana Jones hats at home, gifts from past suitors. Why had men always wanted to put her under a masculine cap? She was an archaeologist, but still a woman.

But as Alexana looked around the hat shop, past the leather and felt fedoras, she discovered that Ridge had headed straight to a more feminine section of the store. He held a beautifully crafted, tightly woven linen hat with a broad white ribbon around its crown. He looked at her, then back to the hat again. “I saw one like it in the window,” he said proudly.

A shiver ran down her spine. Had he picked it for her?

“It’s perfect, don’t you think?” he asked, placing it on her head before she could say a word. “I looked around, and it was as if it had your name on it.”

She glanced at him quickly to make sure he wasn’t making her the target of some joke, then blushed as he looked at her in open admiration. Alexana searched for words as she looked from him to a
mirror, becoming even more tongue-tied as she realized that she did not know what to say. The brim of the hat rolled up in front and was slightly oval, making it longer in back, reminiscent of styles popular in the 1920s.

“It’s beautiful, Ridge … but I … I know it must be expensive …”

“Nonsense. I’m buying it for you. Not as an expense that I’ll submit at the office. As a gift from me to you.” He warmed to the idea as he recognized just how much she wanted the hat. “No arguments. If you don’t accept it, I’m going to buy it anyway and toss it on my bureau at home to remember the day by.”

“You’d spend this much on a memento?”

“I’d rather see the memento on a certain tour guide.”

Alexana looked back in the mirror and felt her heart soften toward the man. He might be a cocky, overly self-assured womanizer, but no man had ever made her feel so feminine by such a simple gesture. She ventured a shy look of gratitude as he paid for the hat and they left the store.

“Ridge, that was very generous. I want to reciprocate in some way …”

“No need, Doctor. I like the fact that you owe me.”

Her heart pounded at the thought. Alexana Roarke rarely let herself be indebted to anyone. “Listen, I could pay for the hat myself …”

Ridge grinned at her smugly. “But it wouldn’t be the same, would it?”

She wanted to deny it, but it was true. The simple beauty of the moment was that Ridge, a near stranger, had picked the one hat, out of a sea of options, that she would have chosen for herself.

“Yes, well, I … I could at least buy you dinner tonight at the Seven Arches.”

“You’re asking me out to dinner? Dr. Roarke, I think we had better take this slow,” Ridge said, reaching out to stroke her arm.

Alexana moved away, aware that he was trying to bait her. “I am merely proposing that we continue your crash course education on the real Jerusalem,” she protested.

“At the Seven Arches restaurant? Pretty swanky and romantic for a Jerusalem 101 class.” He was giving her a run for her money and enjoying every moment of it.

“It will balance out The Green Door,” Alexana said, allowing a tiny smile to reach the corners of her mouth.

“A smile! Your whole face lights up,” Ridge said appreciatively with a wide grin of his own. As she looked back at his handsome face, Alexana frowned at the sudden hammering of her heart.
The guy buys you the right hat, and he’s got you all aflutter. Get ahold of yourself, Sana.

“Shall I pick you up at seven?” he asked, noting the change in her expression, but letting it pass without comment.

“No,” she said firmly. “I’ll pick you up in front of your hotel at six. And Ridge …”

“Yes?”

“This is not a date,” Alexana said firmly. She turned and walked away, casually putting the hat on as she did so. She did not notice that Ridge caught her admiring her reflection in a shop window down the street.

“Not a date, huh?” Ridge muttered under his breath, still unable to stop himself from grinning. “Whatever you say, Doctor. Whatever you say.” When she had turned the corner and was out of his line of vision, Ridge turned on his heel and whistled all the way back to his hotel.