Escape from Cabriz. Linda Miller LaelЧитать онлайн книгу.

      2

      Zachary wheeled the Jeep through dark, narrow streets Kristin didn’t recognize. The city seemed strangely quiet. Empty.

      “Where is everybody?” Kristin asked, raising her voice to be heard.

      “Hiding. This is a military Jeep.”

      Kristin swallowed and brushed her tangled hair back from her face with both hands. “You mean, people think we’re soldiers?”

      “Probably.”

      Uneasily, Kristin ran her hands down her thighs. She was wearing the pajamalike garb of Cabrizian peasantry, male or female. “Where did you get it?”

      “I stole it,” he answered with exaggerated politeness. “Given your station in life, I tried to get an embassy limo with little flags on the hood, but they were all booked up—it must be prom night.”

      Kristin’s temper rose steadily as they left the ancient city behind and started up a nearby mountain. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t any road. She folded her arms across her breasts. “Still jealous of the advantages I’ve had,” she replied. “Honestly, Zachary, envy doesn’t become you.”

      The Jeep stopped with a jolt. “Let’s get one thing straight, princess. Anybody who wanted your life—” he jabbed at his temple with an angry forefinger “—would have to be one can short of a six-pack. And if you wouldn’t mind, how about a little gratitude? I didn’t have to take this job, you know!”

      Kristin subsided, stung. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare for this encounter with Zachary, and the pain was intense. “You didn’t even ask if I wanted to leave,” she observed in a more moderate tone of voice.

      Zachary guided the intrepid little vehicle into even more inhospitable terrain. There were towering pine trees all around, and enormous boulders. “Well, excuse me,” he replied dramatically. “I’ll drop you off at the next corner!”

      “Stop yelling,” Kristin said with a sigh. Zachary hadn’t changed in the year and a half since she’d seen him. He was still bristly and uncommunicative—the dedicated agent through and through. “We’re going to be together for a few hours, so we might as well try to get along.”

      The Jeep came to another lurching stop, and Zachary turned to her, smiling in amazed amusement. “A few hours?”

      “Sure. There’s a helicopter hidden around here somewhere, isn’t there?”

      He gave a hoot of derisive laughter.

      “What’s funny?” Kristin demanded.

      “You are. There isn’t any helicopter, your ladyship. We’re going to travel through the mountains on horseback. If we’re lucky—damn lucky—we’ll be over the border into Rhaos in five days.”

      Kristin gulped. For a moment she actually considered turning back, going through with the marriage to Jascha. Held up alongside the prospect of five days with Zachary Harmon, under the harshest of conditions, life in the palace didn’t look so bad. “Oh,” she said.

      Zachary jammed the jeep into gear, and they were moving up the mountain again. When they’d traveled for what seemed like hours to Kristin, in relative silence, he finally brought the vehicle to a stop. In the glare the headlights she could see two horses, saddled and tethered by long ropes to a tree. Nearby were canvas packs.

      When Zachary shut off the lights, everything disappeared for a moment. Kristin waited for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, but her recalcitrant rescuer immediately got out of the Jeep and started moving around in the darkness.

      “I don’t see why we have to take horses,” Kristin reasoned as she lowered herself delicately to the running board and then the ground, “when we have a perfectly good Jeep.”

      “There are some places,” Zachary told her, untying one of the nickering, restless animals, “where only a horse can go.” He handed her the reins, and Kristin stood there looking at him, shivering. She hadn’t been in the saddle since she was five years old and staying with her mother’s parents while Alice and Kenyan put the embassy in order. Her grandfather had taken her for a pony ride at the beach.

      Without her having to say she was cold, Zachary brought a fleecy jacket from one of the packs and handed it to her, along with a pair of sturdy boots and heavy socks. Only then did she realize she’d been barefoot through the escape from the palace.

      With a little shake of her head, Kristin dropped the reins and sat down on a nearby stump to put on the socks and boots. Between those clodhoppers and her ill-fitting, scratchy cotton pajamas, she’d be a sight.

      Zachary snatched back the reins and held them impatiently while she prepared to travel.

      “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