“You rat!” she said as she made a lunge to smack him, but he sidestepped her, and when she stumbled, he caught her in his arms.
“Mmmmm, Kady,” he said as he pulled her close and buried his face in her hair. “What a shock you’ve been to me.”
Kady did her best to retain her senses, as it would have been easy to melt against him, so she pushed him away. “If you know me so well, how could I be a shock?”
“Lust is always a shock.”
“Oh,” she said, eyebrows raised to her hairline.
“You ready to go? It looks like it might rain, and I think we ought to get under shelter before it does.”
All Kady could do was nod and pick up her own pack. Lust, she thought. Didn’t life have some interesting little twists and turns?
They walked for what seemed to be hours, and with each passing moment Kady seemed to relax further. But still, she kept asking herself, Who was the real Tarik Jordan? Was he the man she’d met in New York or the man who had rescued her from bullets and was now making her laugh?
In the afternoon they paused to eat cheese and bread, and Kady asked him why he’d refused to see her when she went to his office. He took a while before he answered.
“I anticipated a long fight ahead of me to regain control of what my family had created. If I could refrain from seeing you until the day after the will expired, I wouldn’t have to go through any lawsuits.”
“Then why didn’t you just hide out for those last weeks? Or even on that last day? You made me wait outside your office for hours, so why didn’t you just disappear as soon as you heard I was there?”
“Curiosity, I guess. I wanted to see what you were like in the flesh, so to speak.”
“You could have met me the day after,” she said in exasperation, annoyed that he was purposely missing the point.
At that he laughed and put the remaining food back into his big pack. “I could have, but I couldn’t make myself leave. Maybe I wanted to see if you’d persist. I suspected you didn’t know about the will, but I also thought there was something else that was making you demand to see me. Claire said you were quite stubborn.”
“If Claire is that bulldog of a receptionist, could I retain interest in your company long enough to have the power to fire her? She really was quite hateful. You’d think she was the owner of the company, that she—”
Kady stopped because of the look he was giving her. “Oh,” she said, “she has designs on you. On becoming Mrs. Boss.”
“You do have a way of stating things. Ready?”
Standing, Kady picked up her own small pa
ck. “So how many of the women who work for you think there’s a chance of marrying you?”
“One or two. Jealous?”
“About as much as you are of the men in my life.”
“Then it is something that must plague you daily,” he said so softly Kady almost didn’t hear him, but she did hear, and even though she told herself she shouldn’t believe him, his words made her feel good.
The rain started at about four o’clock, and Tarik paused under a tree to pull long yellow ponchos from out of his pack, first draping Kady from head to foot, then pulling the hood over her head and tying it tightly under her chin. “Okay?” he asked as he put his nose to hers, and she nodded.
By the time he got his own poncho on, he was soaked, but he didn’t seem to notice as he started up the mountain again, and it was an hour later that he halted in front of a vine-covered rock. Kady stood to one side, rain coming down hard on her, as he pulled the vines away and exposed what looked to be a small cave. Holding the vines to one side, he motioned for her to enter.
The cave was a small place, and it was too dark to see much of anything, but within minutes Tarik had a fire going, as there seemed to have been dry firewood stored inside. Rubbing her arms for warmth, Kady looked around her, expecting to see caveman paintings, but there were just walls of sandstone and a sandy floor. Along one wall was a broken bench and what looked to be a few moldy paperbacks. Beside the books was a rusty knife.
“Spent a lot of time here, did you?” she asked, smiling, as she removed her wet poncho, then her backpack.
With a glance at the knife, he smiled back as he fanned the flames of the fire. “As much as I could. Back there along that wall is a little shelf with a wooden box. Look inside.”
She did, and when she saw pictures of herself inside the box, somehow, she wasn’t surprised. By now nothing seemed to surprise or shock her. There were grainy photos taken with a long-lens camera that showed her as a child.
“This is my favorite,” Tarik said, coming up from behind her as he reached over her shoulder and took a photo from the stack. It showed Kady at about thirteen on the playground at her school, children all about her, but Kady was leaning against the building reading a book.
“Probably a cookbook,” she said, smiling, then made the mistake of turning toward him and found that her face was inches from his.