Desert Rose (14 page)

Their pace soon matched the frantic cadence of their racing hearts. Emma splintered, spasming deep inside as a startled cry spilled out of her. David drank it in, along with her obvious pleasure. Once again, she came apart within in the safety of his embrace, clinging to him and too breathless to speak. He followed her into his own sensory oblivion, plunging deeply until a choked, almost agonized sounding groan escaped him. He stiffened as pleasure slammed into him in a series of stunning, sensation–filled waves.

They held onto each other as aftershocks rocked their still–joined bodies. It took time, but their respiration eventually slowed to normal.

Emma placed a stilling hand on his shoulder a short while later when he began to shift away from her. "Stay with me."

He snugged her against his sweat–drenched body and rolled them onto their sides. "I don’t want to crush you."

She smiled at his concern, her lips curving against his throat. "Never happen."

When he peered down at her, she felt a renewed sense of peace flowing through him.

"You’re amazing, Emma."

She pressed her cheek to his chest, needing to hold reality at bay for just a little while longer. "Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before. It was everything you said it would be, and then even more."

He eased back a few inches and tipped her chin up with his fingertips so that he could see her face. "I've never known anyone like you."

"That makes us even."

"It makes us lucky."

She smiled again, still shaken. Her eyes sparkled with unshed tears. "More than lucky."

"Much more." Lifting her hand, he brought it to his lips, pressed his mouth to her palm, and stroked the center with the tip of his tongue.

Emma released a shaken breath. Even his most playful touch aroused her. She curved her hand against the side of his face. "Rest for a while, why don’t you? It’s my turn to watch over you while you sleep."

He smiled, his fatigue still evident.

She planted a quick little kiss on his lips before she pulled herself up to a seated position beside him. "No arguments, Major. You’ll be useless later if you don’t sleep now."

He gave her a casual salute before rolling onto his back. "Yes, ma’am." David slanted a glance in her direction, as if poised to speak as he studied her.

"What?" she whispered.

"Thank you… for being you."

Emma nodded before she glanced away, restraining the impulse to tell him how deeply she loved him. This wasn’t the time, but she wondered if there would ever be a right time. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, uncertainty gnawing at her and eroding a small portion of the joy she’d found in his arms.

He reached out to trail his fingertips up and down her back. "Why so pensive all of a sudden?"

Forcing herself to smile, she managed a bright–eyed look. "Just planning my wardrobe for tonight’s expedition."

When he frowned, Emma realized he was too familiar with her to accept such a superficial explanation.

"You aren’t telling me the truth. Why?"

"I’m nervous about tonight, that’s all." She hadn’t lied, but hadn’t told him the entire truth, which made it even more difficult for her to look at him.

His expression gentled. "We’ll make it."

She caught his hand after he ran his fingers across her shoulder and down the high slope of her breast. After lacing their fingers together, she nodded and pressed the back of his hand against her cheek. "Sleep," she whispered. "I’ll wake you in a few hours."

** ** **

After donning the clean abaya and burqa she’d found in Mary’s bureau over her own now washed clothing, Emma adjusted the headpiece so that only her eyes were visible. She gave herself a critical once over as she stood before the mirror and made a few small adjustments. All in all, she was pleased that the garments fit her so well.

She hoped she’d be taken as just another native woman making her way through the streets of the war–torn capital city, in spite of her bright blue eyes. "So I’ll keep my eyes downcast or I’ll squint a lot," she muttered to herself. "I’ll just be extra careful."

David walked into the bedroom a few minutes later. He paused behind Emma. She studied his reflection in the mirror with the help of the flickering light of a nearby candle. Tall, rugged, and too sexy for words, he wore makeshift attire that made him resemble a rogue Middle East sheik. The fact that his hair had grown long enough during captivity to curl at his neck and tumble haphazardly across his forehead helped, too. A traditional Marine Corps haircut would have signaled David’s identity to the locals in short order.

Turning to face him, she carefully inspected the length of yard goods she’d arranged on him and pinned into place to conceal his flight suit and boots. Since Mary Winthrop was single and didn’t have any masculine native clothing in her closet, they’d been forced to improvise with a bolt of cream linen fabric they’d found in her sewing room.

"You’ll have to be careful when you walk," she noted as she circled around him. "All those zippered pockets on the arms and legs of your flight suit might show." She frowned. "I just wish I’d been able to fashion something to cover your head."

David curved his hands over her shoulders and drew her against his body. "No one’s going to be checking out my wardrobe. We’ll be on the move until we reach the Canadian Embassy, and my flight suit doesn’t smell as rancid as it did since you scrubbed it while I was asleep. Did I remember to thank you?"

"You did." She exhaled, the sound an echo of the apprehension she felt.

He hugged her then. "Relax, Emma."

"Sorry, I’m just nervous. We were lucky last night."

"Our luck will hold. All the usual chaos is going on outside. These people are too busy trying to bomb each other back to the Stone Age to pay much attention to us. Our real challenge is not getting caught in the crossfire."

She forced herself to step back, square her shoulders, and smile up at him. What she really wanted to do was find a cave on the other side of the planet and hide there in the safety of his arms until the world became a more peaceful place. "I’ll be alright once we’re on our way. Waiting is the difficult part."

David winked at her. "We’ll head out in a few minutes. Did you leave a note for your friend, just in case she’s not at the embassy when we get there?"

Emma nodded. "I tucked it into the cookie jar." She grinned at his startled expression, some of her tension easing. "Trust me. That’s how we left messages for each other when we were in college."

He cupped her face with his hand, the tenderness in his eyes making her heart lurch. "I trust you. You’re the only person I do trust."

In spite of her promise to herself to remain strong, she asked, "We’re going to make it, aren’t we, David?"

"Or die trying," he ground out.

Emma flinched. David didn’t seem to want to acknowledge her reaction. Instead, he slipped his arm around her shoulder, collected the candle she’d used while dressing, and nudged her in the direction of the front room.

Unwilling to avoid the truth any longer, Emma eased free of David when they reached the living room. "Whatever happens to us tonight, I want you to know that the last three weeks with you have meant everything to me."

He stepped forward, but he hesitated when she stayed his advance with an upraised hand. "Please, let me finish. I really need to say this before we leave."

His expression unreadable, David nodded. He remained motionless less than two feet from where Emma now stood.

She studied her clasped hands as she spoke. "You’re everything to me, David. Your strength and your courage, not to mention the advice you gave me that first week at the prison, have helped me more than you’ll ever know. You’ve also been very tender and more sensitive to my needs than the man I almost married." Unable to look at him until now, she lifted her gaze and whispered her truth. "I’m in love with you, David, and even if you walk away from me once we’ve made it home, I will always love you."

He seized her and jerked her against his chest, his usual gentleness absent. "I love you, too."

He kissed her then, a kiss so powerful that Emma felt the impact of it like an electrical shock to her body. When David finally released her, she realized that, whatever happened in the hours ahead, she felt more alive now than she had at any other time in her life.

"Let’s go home, babe."

Smiling through the tears flooding her eyes, Emma nodded. Once again they faced the unknown, hand in hand as they departed Mary Winthrop’s home and slipped silently into the chaos of the night.

Despite the relentless air–raid sirens, the wailing women and weeping children seeking shelter from exploding bombs, and the men armed with portable rocket launchers who seemed to be stationed on every street corner of the darkened city, Emma and David managed to blend in.

He kept a tight grip on her hand as they dodged roving bands of guerilla fighters. He feared that a grenade or a rocket explosion might kill them both, but he knew they had no choice but to take the risk of seeking refuge at the Canadian Embassy. His only worry was that they might be turned away until the dawn broke and embassy office hours began, and he doubted that either one of them would survive if that happened. Shifting political fortunes and poverty could easily prompt a local to report their presence.

They periodically hid in abandoned buildings, holding onto each other in the darkness as they waited for lulls in the street fighting. Well after midnight Emma and David arrived at the gates of the Canadian Embassy.

Greeted with understandable suspicion by the guards at the compound, David identified himself as an American military officer, and he refused their repeated attempts to turn them away. Emma’s tension escalated when her claim that she was a friend of an embassy employee was ignored.

David finally persuaded the uniformed men to summon the duty security officer, who turned out to be a balding, middle–aged fellow with a British accent. The man blinked in surprise when he spotted them. He quickly authorized their entry into the compound and hustled them into the interior of the embassy’s main building.

"Even though you’re both down a few pounds, I recognize you from the photos your State Department people forwarded to us," Mr. Winston remarked with a casualness that implied missing Americans routinely showed up on his doorstep.

"Missing, but not forgotten," David said with some satisfaction. He kept Emma in the circle of his arm as they crossed the deserted foyer of the sprawling first floor of the embassy, the street fighting beyond the embassy compound now a muted reminder of the two hours it had taken them to travel less than a mile in the war–torn city.

Winston nodded to David, his expression sober. "We’ve had heavy message traffic on you both, Major," he explained as he led the way to an upstairs suite. Throwing open the double doors, he stepped aside and waved them inside. "Make yourselves comfortable while I inform the ambassador of your arrival. He won’t believe you’re alive until he sees you for himself." He turned to Emma, smiling kindly as he gave her an appraising once–over. "You’ll both find clean clothing in the bedroom closets and toiletries in the bathrooms. Help yourselves to anything you need. And if you need medical attention, we have a physician on staff."

Shedding his disguise on a nearby chair, David felt nothing but relief to have Emma inside the relative safety of the embassy. The relationship between the United States and Canada, he knew, remained a strong one. Numerous Americans trapped in the Middle East during times of conflict had survived thanks solely to Canadian generosity and cleverness.

David kept a close watch on Emma, his worry over her state of mind momentarily displacing his concerns about how they would actually exit the country without detection by the secret police and various other government entities.

Drained by the latest leg of their journey to freedom, Emma jerked off her abaya and burqa, adding the garments to the pile David had started. She sidestepped him when he reached for her, barely registering the distress that flared in his eyes at being rebuffed.

Wandering aimlessly around the spacious sitting room, she paused briefly to slide her fingertips across the surface of an oak library table. She sighed audibly before moving on to examine a bouquet of fresh flowers on a coffee table that separated two gray linen–covered couches.

To David she appeared dangerously pale, almost fragile. Her silence distressed him, and her expression, as well as her trembling, hinted that she was remembering the violence they’d witnessed in the streets and experienced in the prison.

He doubted that either one of them would ever forget what they’d seen or endured at the prison, but he reminded himself that, as time passed, the memories would fade. He prayed he was right, especially where Emma was concerned.

As he studied her, he absently noted that the weight she’d lost in recent weeks only served to emphasize her slim–limbed frame, the delicacy of her bone structure, and the smudged shadows of fatigue and lingering fear beneath her eyes. He allowed himself the luxury of visually skimming the flaring width of her hips, her miniscule waist, and the generous shape of her breasts.

He knew this woman intimately, and yet he experienced a sudden yearning within his heart to know her with even greater intimacy. He wanted the knowledge of her first thoughts each morning and her final thoughts each night before she drifted off to sleep in his arms. He also wanted time to learn all of the facets of her personality—what made her cry, what she considered tedious, and what made her happy. He wanted to see once again the sensual smile he’d glimpsed when they’d made love. He also craved the healing passion of her embrace and the mind–shattering pleasure of sinking into the hot, wet depths of her body. Most of all, he wanted the love she’d voiced to last ten lifetimes.

David felt his body’s reaction to his fantasies, and he consciously put the brakes on his rising need. Approaching Emma, he stopped her restless pacing by stepping into her path and forcing her to acknowledge his presence. "Relax, babe. We’re halfway home."