Wade (4 page)

“You had one when you came here. It's been renewed.”

“Travel requires money and I have none.”

“Your dad left you everything he owned. He wasn't exactly wealthy, but he didn't have a lot to spend his paycheck on during these past few years, and he had a knack for investments. His estate is worth half a million, give or take.”

She faced him again while stunned disbelief moved over her. The amount mentioned was a fortune in Hazaristan where men worked all year long for the equivalent of two thousand dollars and the local currency, the Hazari, was exchanged at nearly five thousand to the dollar. If Ahmad learned of this inheritance, there was no way he would ever let her go.

But he knew already, she realized a second later. Why else would he be suddenly intent on seeing her married. As long as she was single, she remained an American citizen with the right to assume control of
her father's estate and go where she pleased as soon as she had the means in her hands. Once tied to a Hazari husband, however, she would become a nonentity expected to put her financial affairs completely in his keeping. The Qur'an might prohibit a marital tie between stepchildren, but all Ahmad had to do was marry her to a Taliban brother-in-arms, one of several who were under his thumb, and the two could then divide her inheritance at their leisure.

“I appreciate your effort in coming here to tell me all this,” she said to the man who waited in such controlled silence beside her. “But I don't believe it's possible that I can leave with you.”

“Come again?” He put his hands on his hipbones as he stared at her in the darkness.

Her refusal sounded less than certain even in her own ears, possibly because she'd used the polite feminine form that she'd learned so well. She tried again. “My life is here now. I have friends and obligations that I cannot desert.”

“Looks to me as if you're up to your neck in something that could earn you a starring role in one of those productions you saw yesterday.”

He referred to her RAWA activities. Voice sharp, she asked, “How do you know that?”

“Let's say I have my ways.”

She preferred not to think what that might mean. “Then you should understand.”

“I'm trying, but it's damn hard to make out why
you'd want to stay in a place where they treat women like dirt.”

“It's not what I want to do but what I must,” she told him as irritation moved over her for his assumption that she didn't know what was best for her. “I'd have died without this cause, these women who have become a special family. They saved my life. I'm needed here, needed desperately. To teach young girls, to give them the knowledge that will save them from becoming the slaves of men because they know nothing else, is a good and powerful thing. To stand in front of them and tell them what it's like to live in a land where women are free to come and go as they please, wear what they please, say and think what they please is to reveal amazing truths. I have purpose, I have value, I have…”

“A mission?” he suggested as she stopped.

“If you must call it that.”

“And what good will it do this mission if you're dead?”

She lifted a shoulder. “Perhaps I may inspire others who can take my place.”

“Oh, well, that'll fix everything, won't it?”

She looked away as his sarcasm told her how impossible it was for him to realize the soul-killing effects of the repression she and the women around her faced every day, or how life-giving it was to fight against it. “You are a man. How can you be expected to see.”

“That's not the point.”

“But it is,” she insisted, her voice hardening. “You have never worn the burqa that smothers and stifles while it turns you into a faceless heap of cloth. You have never been beaten merely for showing an inch of skin at your wrist. You don't know what it's like to have someone destroy everything you value, to be forced to eat separately from men as if you will contaminate them, to be made invisible by being kept behind walls, to be expected to have no will, no needs, no desires, no dreams. In America, women complain of the glass ceiling that prevents their climb to success. Here, there are ceilings, walls and floors that make a prison of iron, the iron will of men. Who would not wage war against that? And how could I not feel like a coward if I ran away because of a little danger?”

“So you'll turn yourself into a martyr?”

“You demand an explanation, but don't listen when it's given! You only hear a woman when she is saying, ‘Yes, yes, you are right. I will do exactly as you command.' Like most men!”

He watched her, his gaze steady on the uncovered portion of her face as if he were trying to read her eyes in the dark. Finally he said, “You don't like us, do you?”

“My feelings are not the issue.” She didn't dislike men so much as distrust them, she thought. She'd learned the hard way to walk warily around males of any age. It was excellent programming for covert activities, especially when fear was added to the mix.

“But they are. You're an American, born of American parents on American soil, and no one can take that away from you. You don't belong here. It looks to me as if you're letting something very close to hatred blind you to your own safety.”

“You suggest this on the strength of two short encounters? You know nothing about me or of how I've been forced to live for years, almost as long as I lived in the States. The little that you do know of these things is tainted by the fact that you are a man.”

“Right,” he drawled.

“It matters.” The words were stubborn in spite of the realization that she'd just proved his point.

“Of course it does. But that doesn't change the fact that it's crazy for you to stay here when you can go back where you belong.”

“Where I belong? I have no mother, no father now. My grandparents, if they are still alive, forgot me long ago. There is no one in the States to care what becomes of me. At least I have something here.” Added to that was the fact she'd been away so long she was afraid she'd grown too different to ever fit in again.

“Well, hell, if that's all that's bothering you, I've got more than enough family to go around. The Benedict clan is so big that one more will never be noticed.”

“That's your name, Benedict?”

The man beside her took a breath that expanded his chest under the neatly tucked-in black T-shirt that he wore with his jeans and boots. “Yeah. Wade Ben
edict. Guess I should have introduced myself sooner. But I've known about you for so long, thought about you so much lately one way and another, that it's hard to realize you've never heard of me.”

“You thought of me.” Her voice was flat with disbelief.

“Night and day since I gave John Madison my word that I'd bring you home. This isn't a simple operation, you know, locating you, arranging to get you out. It's taken legwork, calling in favors and a lot of computer time. Then we had to assume that you might be held against your will since we could make no direct contact, and because I had a fairly comprehensive briefing on the situation here for women. That made it necessary to organize matters so you could be taken out of here by force if need be.”

She gave a short laugh. “You make it sound like a military campaign.”

“Close to it. What I'm trying to say is that I'm working with a tense situation and a narrow time frame. A little cooperation would be appreciated.”

“You really intend to smuggle me out of the country.” It seemed so improbable, perhaps because she'd grown used to thinking of herself as unimportant to anyone.

“If I have to. Our intelligence says your stepbrother may try to prevent your leaving. He could probably make it stick because of his position with the Taliban high command.”

“Intelligence?”

“I had the help of a good friend who used to be with diplomatic security before opening up shop on his own. And John was involved in the op up to his eyeballs until, well, until the last.”

She shook her head. “So much trouble.”

“You were John's kid, his pride and joy. He used to pass around pictures of you to everybody who'd take a look. Sometimes, especially after new ones stopped coming, he'd spread them all out and talk to you while he slowly drank himself into a stupor.”

“Don't!”

He gave a moody shrug, remaining silent for long seconds. Finally he said, “I was just trying to tell you why I'm here, how I know you. Are you sure you really never heard of me?”

She almost denied it, but hesitated as a shadow of memory flickered through her mind. “I think…it seems as if the people who owned the lake camp where I stayed with my father one summer in Louisiana may have been named Benedict.”

“You got it, sugar.” His teeth gleamed white for a second in the dim light as he smiled. “Your dad used to borrow the camp. He had no real home, just a motel room for when he was stateside between oil-field jobs.”

“It was wonderful there. And he did speak of his young friend who had loaned him the place, though you were still overseas, I think. Mostly he called you…”

“That damn Benedict kid. Right?”

The droll self-deprecation in his voice surprised her. She wasn't used to men who could laugh at themselves. “It was a cover for how much he liked you, I think.”

He shrugged as if embarrassed. “I was fresh out of college along about then and had a chip on my shoulder the size of a derrick. John made sure I stayed out of trouble when I first hit the fields. Or tried, anyway.”

“So you feel indebted, which is why you are here?”

“I wouldn't put it that way.”

His deep voice carried a drawl, as if he was intent on hiding something strongly felt but private. Curiosity stirred inside her. That was unusual since to suppress all interest in men, how they felt and what they thought, had become a way of life. She wasn't sure she liked it, especially since she would probably never see Wade Benedict again after tonight.

“What I started to tell you, anyway,” he continued, “is that I have two brothers with wives and a kid or two, plus three or four close cousins and a few dozen more that I like well enough to claim as kin. If it's family you're missing, you'll find more than you really want in my neck of the woods, around Turn-Coupe, Louisiana. Not that you're obliged to settle down there, of course. Once you find your feet, you can go anywhere that suits your fancy.”

It sounded so reasonable, so exactly what she might have wished for at one time. Now it was impossible.
“Thank you very much, but, as I'm been trying to tell you, I can't go with you.”

“You don't know what you're saying.”

“But you do? You are so superior and wise that you are better able to judge what is good for me than I, a mere woman? Go—”

He put out his hand, laying his fingertips against the scarf she still held over her face, finding her lips with amazing accuracy. Surprise stopped her voice. In the sudden quiet, she heard what had alerted him, the creak of the hinges on the house door.

Wade Benedict glanced at her with a lifted brow. At her stiff nod, he removed his hand, then swiftly changed his position so that his body with its dark clothing shielded her, especially the light blue of the blouse she wore with her long skirt. They stood motionless in the dark blotch of tree shadow.

An oblong of light fell across the garden. Ahmad's stocky shape filled the doorway. Chloe tensed, expecting to be reprimanded for staying outside so long.

It didn't happen. Instead her stepbrother stepped out to the edge of the herb bed where he unbuttoned his pants and relieved himself of the endless cups of tea he'd drunk in his role as host. It was a favorite trick of his, that defilement, because he knew the garden was her retreat.

Once done, Ahmad turned, refastening his clothes. The kitchen door closed behind him, and she was left alone again with Wade Benedict.

They didn't move or speak for long seconds. With
every sense on high alert, Chloe could feel the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead, catch the scents including night-blooming jasmine, mint and the sour mulberries that had been crushed underfoot. She could also feel the body heat of the man who stood so close. If she moved her hand just a fraction, she could touch him. The temptation to do just that lurched through her so she clenched her fingers into a fist to prevent it.

When she'd first come here, when she'd been so dismayed and unhappy, she'd daydreamed in the way of teenagers that her father would come for her. He'd whisk her away, maybe knocking Ahmad flat in the process, and the two of them would fly straight back to America. The fantasy had always run headlong into the fact that she'd have to leave her mother behind if she went away, something that had been insupportable. She was reminded of that particular fantasy now, she thought, because the daydream beckoned once more and she was still constrained by ties of duty and affection.

Wade Benedict was not a figment of her imagination, however. He was real, and it seemed that he would not be easily deflected from his purpose.

“Close call.”

Delayed reaction rippled over her so her teeth chattered a little as she opened her mouth to speak. “Yes.”

He put out a hand as if to touch her, then drew it back again. “If this Ahmad character scares you so
much I'd think you'd be dying to get away from him.”

She pressed her lips together. Explaining further would be a waste of breath. She had to get rid of this man somehow, before he ruined everything. “It's a big step, a huge change. I…need time to think about it.”

Doubt rode his voice as he asked, “How much time?”

“Thirty-six hours? I will meet you in the bazaar then.”

“Why not tomorrow?”

“I can't go out any time I please, but usually try to teach two days per week. If I can't make it the day after tomorrow, it will be the day after that. If I'm not there then, you will know that I am staying.”