“Harmon,” he snapped.
The answering voice belonged to one of the president’s favorite men—and Zachary’s least favorite—Kristin’s father. “This is Kenyan Meyers. I’ve just spent some time on the telephone with Perry King, over at the State Department. He tells me you’re willing to go into Cabriz and bring Kristin home.”
“That’s right,” Zachary replied. He wasn’t awed by Meyers; he’d dealt with more powerful men, but he was on guard because of all that had happened between him and Kristin. And because he knew the Secretary was about as benevolent as a cobra with PMS.
Meyers paused for a moment before replying. “You’re aware, of course, that Kristin may well want to stay in Cabriz. Especially if the marriage has already taken place.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
“Fine. One of our planes will pick you up in Seattle in exactly ten hours—you know the procedure, I’m sure. You’ll be briefed on the current state of affairs during the flight.”
“Thanks.” Zachary was moving to hang up when Meyers spoke again. He put the receiver back to his ear.
“Bring my daughter home, Harmon, whether she’s agreeable or not. She has no idea what kind of situation she’s gotten herself into.”
The only thing Zachary could have promised anyone at that point was that if Kristin was still alive when he arrived in Cabriz, he was going to strangle her personally. And he wasn’t laboring under any flowery delusions that Meyers’s true concerns were for Kristin. He definitely had some important political ax to grind. “I’ll be in contact with you as soon as I can, Mr. Secretary,” Zachary replied evenly, and the call was over.
Kristin’s bravado was beginning to desert her as she stood beside a veiled servant woman at one of the windows, watching as Jascha’s troops drilled in the dusty streets of the city of Kiri, Cabriz’s capital. The place seemed so different now, so unfamiliar. It was hard to believe she’d grown up only a few blocks away, in the American embassy.
With a sigh, Kristin sank into a rattan chair, one blue-jeaned leg slung over the arm, and let her head fall back. She closed her eyes and thought of the day she’d left Cabriz, at seventeen. She’d finished her high school work, with the help of her tutor, and now it was time to return to America….
“I don’t want to leave you,” she sniffled, looking up at Jascha’s face though a blur of tears. Overhead a lemon tree blossomed, dropping delicate white petals all around them, like snow.
Jascha was a prince, in every sense of the word. With his dark hair and eyes and exquisitely tailored clothes, he could have stepped out of the pages of a storybook. He kissed her lightly on the forehead, his strong hands holding her shoulders. “Do not cry, Kristin,” he said, his voice a ragged whisper. “One day you will come back to Cabriz, and you and I will reign together.”
Kristin swallowed, hardly daring to believe the fairy tale even though she and Jascha had discussed it many times. “But your father has seven wives,” she said, echoing her mother’s pet reason why nothing could ever come of Jascha and Kristin’s bittersweet romance.
Jascha traced the line of her cheek with a smooth thumb. “You will be my only wife, little lemon flower. This I promise you.”
Kristin believed him, perhaps because she was seventeen and he was the first man she’d ever loved, and threw herself into his arms even as her father called impatiently from the other side of the embassy courtyard. Jascha kissed her soundly before stepping aside, his hands caught together behind his back, to await the ambassador’s appearance.
Almost regretfully, Kristin came back to the here and now. Her parents had looked upon her earlier relationship with Jascha as a teenage infatuation and therefore hadn’t taken it too seriously, but they were strenuously opposed to the marriage that was about to take place. Even if the political system hadn’t been in chaos, they probably wouldn’t have attended the wedding.
Kristin sighed, possessed by a strange loneliness. She loved Jascha, she insisted to herself. She had loved him since childhood, when the two of them had played on the palace lawn.
But it wasn’t Jascha’s handsome face that came into her thoughts as she rose from her chair and went to stand looking out on the courtyard. It was Zachary Harmon’s.
Just the memory made her furious. She had no business thinking about Zachary—he was nothing but a self-centered adventurer, afraid of commitment and responsibility. She’d never really cared for him.
The swift, secret sensations in Kristin’s body gave the lie to that idea. Maybe the emotional attachment had ended, but she still felt a physical response every time he invaded her mind.
Mercifully, she reflected with a lift of her chin, that didn’t happen often.
She turned from the glass door and surveyed the sumptuous bedroom that would be hers until after the wedding ceremony. There was a lovely gauzy white spread on the enormous teakwood bed, and rattan chairs with bright floral cushions were everywhere. In less than twenty-four hours Kristin would leave this room for Jascha’s.
She sank her teeth into her lower lip as she went to a nearby table and picked up her camera. She wondered what kind of lover Jascha would be, then put the thought out of her mind. She would find that out soon enough.
After attaching the telephoto lens, Kristin carried her camera back to the terrace door, focused and began taking pictures of Jascha’s troops drilling in the courtyard. “The photo-diary of a future princess,” she muttered to herself.
Kristin was so involved in picture taking that she didn’t hear the door of her room open, didn’t know Jascha was there until he turned her gently to face him.
As always, she was struck by his imperial good looks. His exiled father was Asian, but his mother had come from India, and he had her round, dark eyes. He wore slacks, a jacket and a tailored shirt, putting on his uniform only for state occasions. He took the camera from her hands—a little impatiently, it seemed to Kristin—and set it aside.
“Do you wish to go back to the United States?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the troops she’d been capturing on film. “There could be war at any moment.”
Kristin had some feelings she didn’t want to explore just then, but she’d been well trained in the art of loyalty. She smiled, laid her hands on Jascha’s broad shoulders and shook her head. The two of them had played together as children, fallen in love as teenagers, and later Jascha had persuaded his father to allow him to go to college in Massachusetts—the same one Kristin had attended. They’d dated steadily then.
Later, when Kristin had moved to California to work on an advanced degree and Jascha had returned home, they had written each other long, soul-searching letters.
Until Zachary came along, that is. Kristin had truly thought she was in love with him—it must have been the secret-agent mystique—and even moved into his apartment.
Kristin had crawled away from that relationship, emotionally speaking, not caring whether she lived or died. It had been Jascha who had made the difference; somehow he’d learned what had happened and he’d come to her. Twenty-four hours a day he’d pursued her, sending flowers and jewelry, whisking her off to other parts of the world in his private jet, promising he would never, ever hurt her.
In her vulnerable position, it had been easy to buy into the fantasy. Now, far from her friends and family, Kristin was beginning to come out of the daze induced by her breakup with Zachary, and she could no longer ignore her doubts.
Jascha bent his head and kissed her, lightly at first and then with increasing passion. Kristin waited to feel some kind of physical response, as she had in the old days, before Zachary, but nothing happened.
Still unwilling to face the growing suspicion that she’d made a disastrous mistake,