Jamming a long-handled spoon into the water, she stirred, her gaze skipping from worker to worker until it landed on a lone serviceman with his head stuck in the pantry. Military. Air Force. She would have to establish a connection with someone. Certainly she could not be lucky enough to settle the issue with her first try.
Women made their own luck.
Wearing a wrinkled desert-tan flight suit, the man backed out of the pantry empty-handed and frowning. Her mind categorized him.
Messy. Careless even? But no, sharp intelligence lurked beneath his uncombed hair. As if he sensed her evaluation, he shoved a hand along his head. His wedding ring flashed. Ah, a safer male to approach, perhaps.
Except not all men honored vows.
And she most definitely did not want to fend off questing hands. So she tested him. With just a shy smile.
Not interested, his eyes broadcast.
The wedding ring seemed to glow brighter. She sighed her relief. Maybe he would be a safe contact after all, even if he was a man. And the fact that she did not find his boyish looks attractive only added to his appeal as a potential target.
No formal name scrolled across the name tag on his flight suit, just one of those irreverent call signs Americans seemed to enjoy so. Crusty.
Crusty? Yasmine resisted the urge to roll her eyes. His poor wife.
He stepped closer. Close enough for her to look past the easy smile, deeper into his eyes to find...anger. Hatred. The desire for vengeance.
She backed against the stove. Steam soaked her dress, but she did not dare move.
He reached past to select a sugared fig off the counter beside her. "Do you speak English?"
Not that she would be admitting just yet. Why should she make it easier for him to trap her?
She frowned, feigning dim-witted confusion.
"All right, we can speak this way, then." He switched to Arabic with too much ease.
This one would bear watching. She discounted him as an option for contact. But who? Already her mind scanned for possibilities while time trickled away.
She spun to stir her pot and gave him her back.
The man, Crusty, eased into her line of sight for another fig. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about this place." His tone left no room for negotiation.
"May I ask for what reason, sir?" she answered in her native tongue. Dim-witted humility did not sit well with her. But she had learned to curb her temper and mouth in the year since her parents' deaths in a flu epidemic had thrust her from pampered protection into a nightmare. Selecting a peppermill from the shelf above, she speckled the sheen of fat bubbling to the top of the pot.
"It's standard procedure for a representative from military intelligence to interface with locals during a deployment."
Military intelligence? Nerves churned like the roiling stew. She reassessed her assumption that he was merely one of those arrogant fliers and searched for a convenient kitchen accident that would take her away. "I have bread to make."
And she pitied the people who would eat it.
"Well, the thing is, if I don't talk to you, you might not get to stay on. That is if you want to continue working here."
Her eyes flew to the bubbling goat. "Of course."
Yet, if he was truly military intelligence, then he would have already seen her falsified papers—and could catch her in a misstep.
"What was your name again?"
"Bahijah Faris." A lie.
"And your parents?"
"Dead." Truth. Pain sliced in clean, relentless swipes, but she would not let it win. She rolled through her borrowed identity. "I live with my brother and his wives. Money is very limited, so I must help."