Forever And A Baby. Margot Early

He closed his lips on Timbuktu. “We’ve been to Cape Hatteras and Key West and Greenwich—”

      She held up her hand, stopping the recitation. Forget the problems of a woman traveling alone in Muslim countries. Greenwich had been a mistake, much too close to home. In her recklessness, she’d approached a lone and handsome man in the bar at the yacht club and said, I’m horny. I want to get laid. His mouth had tilted up on one side while he checked her out. Then he’d smiled tautly and edged away.

      She’d realized she’d wanted him to, had said so with every word to the contrary.

      Omar had provided a witness to her adventures, the one thing he’d promised not to do! She’d told him she couldn’t bear to have a bodyguard. Not for this.

      She’d married him because she would have a bodyguard.

      She’d married him for many reasons. And loved him because he was safe. And kept her safe.

      Dru wasn’t going to ask Ben all he’d seen. “Well, your job is over, cousin.”

      “You don’t remember me.”

      “I do. How could anyone forget?” She shifted deliberately from the allusion to their past and what had happened in the Sudan. Everything that had happened. “My husband calls you ‘our young sheikh.”’

      His mouth slanted.

      Of course, that was an inherited title, wasn’t it?

      “Maybe he thinks your father was a sheikh.” Flippant. Robert Hall was as unforgettable as the Sudan. And dead less than two years. “I’m sorry for your loss. Truly. And goodbye.”

      He fell in step beside her. Faded jeans and running shoes. “I’ll stick close. Part of the job description.”

      “I’ll bet talking to me wasn’t. It never is.” He was tall. Looking out for her. Maybe what bothered her was his face.

      This unforgiving gray light had nothing to forgive in him.

      A hot flush went through her, a stupid pheromone reaction.

      She was scared. Scared.

      The Sudan. The boy he’d been sometimes appeared in her dreams, although never in her nightmares of abduction.

      And never as a man.

      Comfort came because he was beside her. Comfort. But heat spread at the juncture of her legs. Flushing. Riding through her.

      It was too stupid and too impossible. Forget it, Dru, she muttered, even as she calculated how distantly they were related, the same consanguinity of Keziah, too far to mention. He was handsome. He resembled Omar slightly—dark eyes, oak skin, black hair. But the jaw was different, the long rugged lines of his face, and the aloofness that could turn wholly present in a moment with the sorcery of an interviewer, a seeker of truth. He’s sexy. Why did Omar send someone so sexy?

      Why had Omar sent Ben?

      Brown eyes fixed on her, while wind whipped her hair in front of her and one cool drop, wetness, hit her wrist. Then another. Rain.

      She turned, but his hand caught her arm, bringing her around. The warmth through her sweatshirt made her shiver. Pulling away, she saw that his chin was hard, his eyes piercing. He kissed her mouth.

      Dru put her hands up and shoved.

      Her palms had barely connected with his chest when she flew backward. He caught her. Other than that, he hadn’t moved at all.

      “Don’t,” she said. She was glad of her shoes, trail shoes for running the dogs on gravel, because she ran through the moisture and the rain and the smell of fish, good and bad, and the smell of this centuries-old port. She ran, wondering if Omar had told Ben to try this as a last resort. Omar, who had avoided meetings with her, the days—and nights—they’d promised to spend together. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. Wouldn’t avoid her. Wouldn’t want her to choose Ben, his own nephew.

      She ran behind buildings and found an alley and hurdled its fish scales and grease, sprinting until she reached the docks again. Alone, unseen, she wandered until dark, searching for the gray-haired man with the beak nose and her blue eyes and Tristan’s hollow cheeks and the cowlick on the right side. The man she believed, in the wetness rising from the sea, was her father. Her father, who had somehow never died.

      EARLY IN HER MARRIAGE, Dru had fallen in love with anonymity. She liked to travel, to be on the move. She found a way to be unknown and close to the memories she loved, to her twin’s existence, to her father’s grave. To the ocean. In port cities, she bought boats with Omar’s money and registered them to her loved ones. Keziah’s Sunshine Daydream hailed from Portland, Maine. Her mother’s Hot Babe was berthed in Key West. Tristan’s trawler, Cup of Gold, in Gloucester. And so on. The boats floated but did not always run. They were low on conveniences. Floating hovels. They were refuge. Her hostels and hotels.

      When darkness came, she returned to the thirty-foot trawler. Somewhere, Ben Hall, journalist and trained observer, must be watching. But not for a story. She knew better, knew the quality of her family’s ties. Still—I don’t want to be followed. Why hadn’t she ordered him to stop?

      Because he was Omar’s employee.

      Below deck in the trawler Cup of Gold, she cooked the simplest of meals, ate and wished for a phone. She’d have to walk to the pay phone to call Omar. 53 telephone conversations. 311 calls.

      She washed dishes.

      Yes, she must walk, in the dark, to call her husband.

      312.

      She worked up to it as she dressed. A thick sweater, Nantucket wool. A wool cap that had been her father’s, moth holes mended with her own hands. Her wet trail shoes, in case she had to run. Water licked the boat. Dru hugged herself and slipped out of the cabin into the wet cold and the silver-lit night. Security lights. Snow air.

      “It occurred to me a few times that I should give you some pointers.”

      Dru banged her shoulder on the door frame. She locked the cabin door behind her. She liked him no better as a shadow. “Do you need some pointers? Let’s see, in Arabic, it’s ‘Ma’assalama.’ In Tamashek, it’s ‘Harsad.’ In English, we say goodbye.”

      He shifted on the aft seat. “Let me start over.”

      “You could leave. That would be a start. Of the end.”

      “I had an idea that if you were set on this plan Omar told me about, I could—”

      “Procure? Is that the word you’re looking for?” What was it about harbors that made everything echo?

      He cleared his throat. “Help. Was the word.”

      In the milk-black light, misty and heavy, Dru raked his jaw with her eyes. I want my husband. I want to have Omar’s baby, and it’s impossible, and maybe he’s become indifferent to me because of this, our infertility. I’m not going to discuss it with Ben Hall. She must get to a phone and hear Omar’s voice, his love for her. She must go home. Maybe before the Sarah Lynnda docked with thousands of pounds of swordfish in her hold.

      Dru bundled her heavy sweater about her.

      “Want to share a bottle of wine?”

      Beside him in a paper bag. Big enough for glasses, too. The sea rolled beneath them, lifting the boats and the dock, everything singing. “Why?”

      “Because, through the medium of conversation, you may find me irresistible.”

      Wood and floatation bending and straining, stays pinging masts. A fish jumped nearby, invisible.

      “I find my husband irresistible. And you are one of his employees.” She had never spoken to anyone this way. Family, no less. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

      “You know, twenty years ago, in a Rashaida camp, besides failing to conceal your—”

      “Shut