Escape from Cabriz

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she told him sheepishly. She’d never even been to camp, let alone roughed it in a foreign wilderness, and all those trees were giving her the willies.

“Pick a bush,” Zachary responded.

Kristin started to protest, then stopped herself. It was clear enough that Zachary still thought she was a spoiled, immature little rich girl, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of showing weakness. “Thank you,” she said with dignity, rising to her feet and walking regally across the small clearing.

When she returned, Zachary was waiting to strap a pack on her back.

“What’s in this thing?” She frowned as she tried to hoist herself into the saddle, pack and all. The horse sidestepped nervously, and the saddle tipped. The next thing she knew, Kristin was between the animal’s legs, and it was prancing in a frantic effort to keep itself upright.

“You been gaining weight lately?” Zachary asked as he caught the horse by the bridle and then soothed it with a pat on the neck.

After scrambling back to her feet, and out of the way of the horse’s hooves, Kristin glared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

He shrugged and then made a beckoning gesture. “Come on, I’ll help you into the saddle.”

Kristin was still insulted. “If you’re sure you won’t get a hernia from the effort,” she replied stiffly.

He laughed. “It may be too late. After all, I just carried you down a rope and up the palace wall.” With a sound meant to indicate herculean effort he lifted her into the saddle, and she clung to the pommel with both hands, hoping he wouldn’t see how afraid she was.

It didn’t help that he swung into his own saddle as easily as a TV cowboy. “Relax, princess,” he said, and it was the first kindly tone he’d used since he’d awakened her in the palace. “These animals are hardly more than plow horses. They’re not going to hurt you.”

Kristin lifted her chin. “I’m aware of that,” she lied in a lofty tone of voice.

Zachary chuckled and shook his head, then spurred his horse toward a break in the trees. “Follow me, your ladyship.”

Her lips moving in silent mimicry of his remark, Kristin gave her mount a nudge with one heel. “How did you know which room I’d be in back there?” she asked when about fifteen minutes had passed. Even though she didn’t like Zachary—indeed, he was the last man in the world she would have wanted to rescue her—she was curious. Besides, five days was too long to keep quiet.

His broad shoulders stiffened in the bright moonlight. “That didn’t take a genius—you were about to marry the guy. I looked up an old friend who used to work in the palace, and he sketched the floor plan for me.”

Kristin was silent for a few moments, absorbing the fact that Zachary thought she’d been sleeping with Jascha. She didn’t know why, but it hurt.

“I did get there before the wedding, didn’t I?” he asked, glancing back at her.

Kristin sighed. “Yes. But I wouldn’t have gotten married anyway—I’d already told Jascha the ceremony was off.”

“I don’t think he was convinced,” Zachary replied.

She ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch, and her nostrils were filled with the sudden and paradoxical scent of Christmas. “Why not?”

“When I got there you were naked as hell, and you’d been powdered and perfumed for a night of pleasure, that’s why.”

Kristin blushed, remembering the strange, decadent sensuality of the experience. She’d grown up in Cabriz, but there were a great many things about its culture she didn’t understand. After all, she’d always been very sheltered, living within the embassy walls, taking her schooling from a governess. She didn’t speak.

Zachary looked back at her again, but the expression on his face was unreadable in the thin moonlight. “They were the Cabrizian equivalent of a harem, princess. It’s their job, among other things, to prepare a new bride for their husband’s enjoyment.”

Kristin had already come to that conclusion, and she was ashamed of her naïveté in believing Jascha when he’d promised she’d be his only wife. “I know that, Zachary,” she said quietly. “You can spare me the Cabrizian culture lesson.”

He reined in his horse to ride beside her, even though the path was really too narrow. “If you knew, why the hell did you agree to marry the bastard?”

She sighed and ran one hand through her hopelessly tousled hair. “I didn’t figure it out until tonight,” she confessed, unable to meet Zachary’s eyes. “Jascha promised—”

“Jascha promised,” Zachary interrupted, and his voice conveyed such contempt that Kristin began to feel defensive.

“He was there for me when I needed him, Zachary,” she said evenly.

Zachary glared at her for a moment and she saw the muscles in his throat work, then he rode ahead of her again.

Typical, Kristin thought. Whenever the conversation took a direction Zachary didn’t like, he simply clammed up. In all the time they’d been together he’d never told her anything about his childhood or his family, if he had one. All she knew for sure about his past was that he’d never been married and that he’d joined the agency right after he left the air force.

“What if I hadn’t wanted to leave Jascha?” she asked.

The path was broader there, but Zachary didn’t wait so she could ride beside him. “I wouldn’t have forced you,” he replied quietly.

“Even though your orders were to bring me back no matter what?”

She saw the broad shoulders tighten under his battered leather coat. “I’m not here under anybody’s orders,” he answered.

“Not even Dad’s?”

Zachary permitted himself a raspy chuckle. “Well, he did offer an opinion.”

“I can imagine,” Kristin replied ruefully. She and her father were certainly not close—she’d never, to her knowledge, done a single thing that pleased him—but she liked to think the man cared about her, at least a little.

The glimmer of the moon showed a rocky plateau up ahead, followed by another steep incline. “Why did you do it?” Zachary asked hoarsely. “Why did you come over here, when you knew the country was in an uproar? Did you love him that much?”

Kristin bit her lower lip, searching her mind for satisfactory answers. God knew, those were questions she’d asked herself often enough during the past few weeks as the fighting had grown worse and Cabriz’s relations with other governments had collapsed. “A year ago, when Jascha and I started seeing each other again, in New York, things weren’t so volatile over here. And there was the fairy-tale aspect of it all—we were on the covers of magazines, and Jascha sent flowers every day….” She stopped and glanced at Zachary, trying to read his reaction in the set of his frame, but he gave her no sign of his feelings. “I got swept up into the storybook-princess element of the thing, and it wasn’t until I came over here that I began to have doubts.”

For a long time the only sounds were those of night creatures prowling the nearby woods and of the horses’ hooves on the stony ground. Then the question came again.

“Did you love him?”

Kristin had been stalling, but she still wasn’t prepared. “I don’t know, Zach.”

He didn’t reply, and they began the ascent up the side of the mountain. Kristin felt as though the weight of her backpack alone would pull her over the horse’s rump and onto the ground.

Finally they reached fairly level ground again. “Where are we going to sleep tonight?” she asked, breathless from the effort of holding on to the pommel of her saddle.

Zachary gave her a sour look. “The Ramada Inn,” he answered.

Kristin felt anger swell inside her, but she was too tired, cold, hungry and frightened to give free rein to it, so she just rode quietly until her temper had deflated a little. “There’s no need to be snide,” she pointed out.

Holding the reins in one gloved hand, he bent in a mocking bow. “I beg your pardon, your ladyship. I’ll try to keep a civil tongue in my head from now on.”

Tears pressed behind Kristin’s eyes and clogged her sinuses, but she held them back. “I haven’t had my dinner, you know,” she said, keeping her chin high.

Zachary produced something from the pocket of his leather jacket and shoved it at her.

She took the item from him with trembling fingers. It was a candy bar—her favorite combination of chocolate and coconut—and though it was a little squished, it looked like a feast to Kristin. She thanked him, unwrapped it with awkward haste and indulged in a bite.