Page 122 of Locked and Loaded

She wanted to tell him that she was grateful, that she'd never be able to repay what he'd done, that he'd given her back the one person she'd thought she'd lost forever. She wanted to tell him that she was still angry that he'd kept things from her and managed her and made decisions about her life without asking, and she didn't know how to hold that anger and that gratitude in the same hand without one of them slipping. She wanted to tell him that when he'd walked into that hidden room at the gala, she'd felt something crack open in her chest that she'd spent years keeping sealed shut.

She wanted to tell him that she was afraid. Afraid of what she felt. Feared what it would cost her to feel it. Afraid that if she let herself fall, he'd catch her and shelter her and manage her all over again, and she'd spend the rest of her life fighting to be seen as an equal in a relationship that had started with him pulling her out of danger.

Chloe shifted in the car. A small movement, just her head turning against the glass, but Lennox saw it. Felt it. Chloe needed her. Chloe needed a sister who was present and whole and not split in half by a man she couldn't figure out how to love and couldn't figure out how to leave.

"I can't," she said, and the words scraped her throat raw on the way out. "I can't do this right now. Chloe needs me. I need to get her home. I need to get her to a doctor, to the therapist Armand found. I need to be there for her, and I can't be there for her if I'm here trying to..."

She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Felt the tears building behind her eyes and refused to let them fall.

"Go," he said. "Take care of your sister. That's what matters."

"Dragan..."

"It's all right." He pushed off the archway and took a step back, putting distance between them that felt deliberate. "Go."

She wanted to hug him. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and demand that he come with her, that he not disappear into the desert like a ghost, that he stay somewhere she could find him when she was ready. But Chloe was in the car, and the jet was waiting, and she didn't have any words left that were big enough for what she was feeling.

So she turned around and walked to the car.

She didn't look back. She couldn't. If she looked back, she'd run to him, and she couldn't run to him right now. Chloe needed her. Chloe came first. That was the one thing that had been true since the day her sister disappeared, and it was still true now, even with her heart cracking open in her chest.

She climbed into the back seat beside Chloe and closed the door. Angelo pulled out of the courtyard, and the villa shrank in the rear window, and Dragan stood in the archway and watched them go.

Chloe's hand found hers in the seat between them. Lennox held on and didn't let go.

The bivouac was six hours by camel from the camp where Lennox had first learned to hate being managed.

Dragan had been there for three months. He'd told himself it was because he needed the quiet, the emptiness, the simple rhythm of days organized around nothing but the sun and the sand and the small necessary tasks of survival. He'd told himself it had nothing to do with running away. That it had been years since he’d had a real vacation.

He'd stopped believing himself sometime around day four.

The afternoon sun was beginning its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the dunes in shades of gold and copper that shifted with every breath of wind. He was sitting on a ridge about half a mile from the bivouac, his back against a rock that had been warming in the sun all day, watching the shadows stretch and deepen. It was his favorite time of day. The desert at dusk felt like the edge of the world, like you could stand on the highest dune and see all the way to wherever it was you'd come from.

He wasn't expecting the camel.

He heard it before he saw it, the soft crunch of hooves on sand, the creak of leather, the occasional grumble of an animal that was not especially interested in climbing a dune in the late afternoon heat. He turned, squinting against the sun, and saw a single rider cresting the ridge to the east.

The camel was a tall, dignified creature with an expression of profound disdain for everything in its path. Its saddle was decorated with faded red tassels that bounced with every step, and the person on its back was holding the reins with the slightly desperate grip of someone who had never ridden a camel before and was not entirely convinced she wanted to be riding one now.

She was wearing a loose white shirt and tan pants and a wide-brimmed hat that was putting up a valiant but ultimately losing battle against the desert sun. Her face was flushed. Her hair escaped from under the hat in dark red tangles. She sat on that camel like she'd been riding it for six hours and was about three minutes away from never riding anything ever again.

Dragan stood up, his heart hitching.

Lennox.

She saw him at the same moment he saw her. Even from fifty yards away, he could see the recognition hit her, the way her shoulders relaxed and her grip on the reins loosened and her mouth curved into something that was half a smile and half a prayer.

He was already moving. Down the dune, his boots sinking into the sand, his heart hammering against his ribs in a way that had nothing to do with the heat. The camel stopped at the base of the ridge and gave him a look that suggested he was not the person it had been hoping to see.

She was already swinging her leg over the saddle by the time he reached her. He caught her around the waist and lifted her down, and for a moment she just stood there with her hands on his shoulders and her feet still not quite touching the ground.

"You came," he said.

The words came out rough. He hadn't meant them to. He'd meant to be calm, controlled, the way he always was. But she was here, in the desert, on a camel, after three weeks of silence, and he couldn't remember how to be controlled anymore.

"Hassan," she said, slightly breathless. "He said he'd teach me to ride the camels. I told him I'd come back."

"Six hours on a camel for a riding lesson."