Outlaw Carson (16 page)

And damn it all, she needed him. No amount
of panache could change what she felt. No amount of confusion could
smother the hurt.

She’d talk to him, Kristine decided. That
was what she’d do. She’d talk to him and explain how she felt.

No, she wouldn’t. Only a fool would expose
herself.

She threw another handful of party trash
into her garbage bag and bent down to pick a napkin up off the
floor. If he loved her, if he was everything he’d led her to
believe, he wouldn’t have disappeared into the garage after Shepard
and Stein had left. He would have read her mind and come back
inside, come back to her with reassurances on his lips and comfort
in his touch.

She’d be cool. That’s what she’d be. Cool,
calm, and collected. Mature. Sophisticated.

She knelt down to retrieve a cashew from
under the coffee table. She’d be so cool, he’d need a polar jacket
to keep his blood above freezing.

No, she wouldn’t. Too much cool was
overkill, a dead giveaway, even supposing she could pull it off.
She’d be reasonable, she told herself, scooting farther under the
table after a cracker crumb. Reasonableness would drive him
crazy.

No, it wouldn’t. She sighed. Nothing could
drive him crazy. The man had serenity down to a fine art, and she
was a mass of doubts and conflicting emotions without an ounce of
serenity in sight.

But he hadn’t been serene when he made love
with her. He’d been warm and wild, as hungry as she for the
pleasure they’d created. Of course, making love with him again
couldn’t exactly be construed as a strategic move, not by anyone’s
standards, not even with her most convoluted logic.

Too bad
. The regret whispered
across her mind. She immediately squelched the wayward thought.
Making love with him again, indeed. What did she think she was made
of? Steel? How much did she think her heart could take? She already
felt a little mangled around the edges.

He’d given her one thing, though. He’d
proven John Garraty wrong. Lord, what a painful lesson it might
turn out to be.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught
sight of a flickering shadow crossing the deck, and she quickly
backed out from under the table. The last place she wanted him to
find her was crawling on the floor. She had to avoid such an abject
display of her feelings for as long as she could hold out.

Anger was what she needed, unbridled anger,
fiery with the cause of justice. He’d made a promise.

So where was it? she thought in disgust,
waiting for even a spark of rage to light up her misery. There
wasn’t any rage to be found, only the heartache she felt in
anticipation of his leaving. How in the world could she have done
something as stupid as fall in love with him?

Ah, there it was, the first flame of fury,
and in the nick of time. She heard the outside door to her office
open, and fleetingly wondered why he hadn’t used the front door or
the back. Both were closer to the garage than the office door.

She studiously ignored his approach, busying
herself with tidying up. If his tread sounded a mite heavier, and
if his presence seemed a shade darker behind her, she discounted it
for one moment before he grabbed her.

With the first touch of his hand she knew it
wasn’t Kit, but as that hand was firmly clapped over her mouth, and
an iron-hard arm was squeezing the very breath out of her, she
could do little more than struggle in silence and pray she didn’t
faint.

* * *

In the end Kit had compromised with Shepard
and Stein. He’d promised to give them the exact location before
they exhibited the pieces, which bought him a year, maybe two, to
get himself back into Nepal, a year to soothe ruffled, officious
feathers, a year to find a way into Tibet and return to Chatren-Ma.
One glimpse had not been nearly enough. More than the
Kāh-gyur
rested under those stones. He’d felt something
ancient and powerful.

There would be no compromise with Kristine,
though. He’d made a promise to her, and he planned on making many
more, all the promises of a lifetime shared.

A soft smile curved his mouth. He’d waited
throughout the rest of the day for the night to come, for the moon
to rise and chase the sun from the sky. Then she would be his
again.

He lifted the lid on the trunk by his bed
and slipped his skinning knife into his palm. With care, he pried a
thin block of wood from the side panel, and with equal care caught
an edge of parchment with the blade and pulled the paper into the
light. His first gift to her would fulfill his first promise, the
only map known to man with the location of Chatren-Ma. Her distress
over Lois’s discovery had touched him from across the room. He’d
underestimated the older woman’s talents, or he would have taken
the time to reassure Kristine beforehand.

He lowered the lid and spread the map over
the top of the trunk, his hands smoothing out the folds—then fear,
stark and chaotic and distinctly Kristine’s, rushed in at him from
all sides.

Too late
. The truth hit him cold
and hard even as he raced from the room. He grabbed his
khukri
from where it hung by the door and vaulted over the
side railing, landing lightly on the ground and taking off
again.

He passed the backdoor, loosing Mancos with
a quick flick of his fingers. “Go!” he ordered.

But neither he nor the dog was fast enough.
The house was empty, and so would Kit’s heart have been if not for
the rage boiling up from the very bottom of his soul. It seeped
into his pores from a resting place he’d long denied, consuming
him. It blinded him and yanked his muscles into tight, tight
knots.

Careless!
The word seared his
conscience. He’d grown soft, dangerously soft, in the luxury of her
company.

Forcing his mind to blankness, he retraced
his footsteps, swearing vengeance with every pace. He swore
vengeance for her fear. He swore vengeance for the violation of her
home, and if need be, he swore death for her life.

He found the office door ajar and rattled it
off its hinges with a vicious kick. He whirled around and stormed
out of the room, still searching.

In the living room, tossed among the clutter
of napkins and glasses on the coffee table, he found what he had
searched for. A bronze panther coiled flat on a three-inch disc,
the Turk’s calling card; and beneath the metal plaque, his own
likeness sketched on a wanted poster from Xizang, formerly the
country of Tibet.

The price beneath the face left no doubts in
Kit’s mind about the Turk’s motivation or his destination. The
Chinese wanted him more than they wanted the
Kāh-gyur
. Much
more.

“This they shall have,” he vowed in a low
growl, pricking the poster with the tip of his blade. “And they
shall pay dearly for the pleasure of my company.”

With deadly, lightninglike grace, he turned
on the balls of his feet, releasing the knife at the apex of his
rising swing. The blade landed with a thudding twang, impaling the
poster to a solid oak cupboard door.

The Turk would be moving fast, a stranger in
an unwelcoming land. He’d avoid the embassies. The Chinese didn’t
want a hostage, they wanted Kautilya Carson. The Turk would run for
home, but he’d find no refuge there. He’d find he had no place left
to run.

Kit packed light, taking only his chamois
bag. He stopped once more at the house, levering his knife out of
the cupboard door and stuffing the wanted poster in his pocket. In
the laundry room, he used the blade to slash open a fifty-pound bag
of dog food.

“Pace yourself, Mancos,” he suggested to the
dog who followed him from room to room. “Kreestine will be back
within two weeks. You know where the reservoir is. Straight down
and straight back, no fooling around.”

At the front door, he knelt down to unlatch
the dog door, then turned and laid his hand on the dog’s huge head,
scratching him behind the ears. “Lay low during the day. Drink at
night. Sleep in your own bed, and if you eat the furniture,
there’ll be hell to pay. Understand?”

The dog whined, his jowls quivering.

“Don’t worry, Mancos. I’ll send her home.
One way or the other, I’ll get her back where she belongs.” He
slowly rose and sheathed his knife.
And if the Turk denies me
this, I’ll know it on his last breath. You have my
promise.

* * *

Let’s see, Kristine thought, fighting
through a veil of disorientation. First you were in the living
room, then slung over a shoulder, then nothing, then a little
airplane noise, then another bigger nothing, then a whole lot of
airplane noise.

And now this place. If she hadn’t been
scared senseless, the smell definitely would have offended her. The
dark, windowless room reeked of old fish, lots of old, dead,
decaying fish. The concrete floor was wet and slimy with stuff she
didn’t want to identify. She was almost glad it was too dark to
see.

Voices from outside pierced the veil more
clearly than her own feeble thoughts. She concentrated on them, but
after a minute or two wished she hadn’t. She could read and write
Chinese, a spattering of Tibetan, a little less Nepali, and
understood very little of the spoken word in any of them.

But the voices told her she was somewhere in
Asia, somewhere on the coast if the smell were any clue, which
effectively eliminated Tibet and Nepal.

Great. She’d always loved to travel, though
she usually saw a few more of the sights.

Rising on shaky legs, she tried to take
stock of her surroundings and her situation. The surroundings were
simple—that smell. She approached her situation a little more
thoroughly.

No one in their right mind would drag her
halfway around the world just to kill her. Of course, she had no
reason whatsoever to believe her abductors were in their right
minds, but she’d accept the point out of necessity. It was either
that or sink into panic.

They’d drugged her. Nothing else explained
the blanks in her memory, and that fact pushed her closer to the
panic she was trying to avoid. At home she was known to have a beer
or two, or a glass of wine, but that was the extent of her
substance abuse. Anything else smacked highly of idiocy in her
book.

And this was all Kit Carson’s fault, of that
she had no doubts. He and his
Kāh-gyur
had gotten her into
this fix. She didn’t know exactly why. Shepard and Stein had taken
the artifacts, and wasn’t that what everyone had been after?

“Right,” she whispered, and discovered she
liked the sound of her own voice. So she whispered some more. “They
want the
Kāh-gyur
, not me, and all that guy with the big
shoulders has to do is ask, and I’ll tell him everything I know.
I’ll get him an engraved invitation to the Natural History Museum
of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, California.” She squeezed her
eyes shut and forced her mind to think, finally coming up with a
ZIP code she’d typed about a hundred times in the last few
days.

“Nine, zero, zero, zero, seven. I’ll call
Lois personally and put her kidnapper on the phone, let him deal
with an expert instead of a nobody history professor from some
obscure western university.” She paused and mentally backtracked.
“Okay, okay, a not-so-obscure western university, but no ivy
leaguer either. Damn you, Kit.” She edged along the wall, hoping to
run into a door, an unlocked door, and maybe a car outside. A car
with keys in the ignition and a map on the front seat.

“And a plane ticket in the glove
compartment, a plane ticket anywhere, and food, something light,
nongreasy.” Her wish list grew and grew, until she had herself set
up in a Ritz Carlton with a sunken tub, expensive soap, and room
service where everyone spoke English, preferably American
English.

A rattling sound off to her right abruptly
burst her bubble. The door she’d been nowhere close to finding
swung open on rusty hinges, flooding the fishhouse with painfully
bright sunshine.

Cringing against the wall, she peaked
through the slits she made with her fingers, and a very unladylike
expletive lodged in her throat.

The man who had broken into her house, the
man she’d caught a glimpse of during one of her moments of
consciousness, was more than shoulders. He was arms, huge arms, and
long, muscular legs, and a barrel chest, and for the life of her
she couldn’t imagine why he’d attempted to take Kit’s plait, for
his own hung to his waist in a corded ebony swath.

“I am the Turk.” He smiled, a slow,
barbarous smile that lit a face of indeterminate origin, making
Kristine wonder just how many cultural half-breeds were running
around loose on the Tibetan Plateau. “And you are mine.”

Perfect,
she thought.
Absolutely, grade-A perfect. Damn you, Kit Carson. I’m not sure
how long I’ve been gone, but if you’re not at least halfway over
the Pacific by now, somebody is going to be in a whole lot of
trouble . . . probably me
.

* * *

Kit slid off the mare’s back and let the
reins fall to the ground. He’d traveled the width of the Pacific
Ocean and almost half as far again in four days, putting himself
deep inside the forbidden land and closer to the Turk’s stronghold
than he’d ever wanted to be again. His own home lay over two
hundred miles to the south, past the Tsangpo River and the wall of
the Himalayas.

He hadn’t come back to go home. He’d come
for Kristine and the Turk’s throat. He’d missed them in Shanghai,
and had been slipping and sliding through the authorities’ fingers
since his first step on Chinese soil. Now he was beyond their reach
in Tibet, long gone in the shadow of the mountains where the land
stretched for mile after mile of emptiness, touched but unchanged
by man.

Light played across the terrain in ever
deepening shades of twilight blue and rosy pink, turning to purple
and black in the net of canyons spread out before him. The ground
shifted in a colored patchwork of red iron, grays, and ocher, down
to the tawny dust of the canyon floors.