LEGEND Read online

  “A few,” Kady said modestly, looking down at her coffee cup. He had hand-ground the beans and hadn’t allowed her to touch a thing as he’d made buckwheat pancakes.

  “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “Let’s both take the day off.”

  As Kady looked up at him, a chill went down her spine, as it was the gesture she had seen a thousand times in her dreams. Right now shade darkened the lower half of his face, but a shaft of sunlight came through the leaves and highlighted his eyes.

  “Come, habibbi,” he whispered, and she knew it was an endearment from another language. “This time you can reach me.”

  Kady’s heart and her common sense warred with each other, but she remembered all the times in her dreams that she had tried to take his hand and had been unable to reach it. Now she extended her hand, tentatively at first; then as she neared his fingertips, she smiled up at him and slipped her hand into his.

  Tarik gave a great laugh, then on impulse picked Kady up and twirled her about, and for a moment they both laughed together, Kady’s hair swirling about them as he turned her round and round.

  It was Kady who came to her senses first and began to push away from him. “Mr. Jordan,” she said, “I think we should—”

  Still smiling, he set her down, but he kept his hands on her shoulders. “I think that for today we can dispense with thinking,” he said, smiling warmly at her.

  Kady wanted to retain her animosity toward this man, but he was making it difficult. Remember that he is a cold fish, she told herself. Remember that he is about to marry someone else. Remember that he is rich and famous and you are a means for him to get his money back, and that’s all.

  “I think I should go to Legend,” she said. “I have to do things there, and I have business to attend to. And, besides, I do need a job and potential employers won’t wait forever.” She was backing away from him.

  “Damn the employers! I’ll buy you a restaurant, and you can—”

  “Is that what you think I’m after? That I want you to buy something for me? Do you—”

  “I want to spend the day with a pretty girl,” he said softly. “I want a day away from business and family tragedies and all the other worries, I’d like to show you a place I found when I was a kid. I’ve never shown it to another living soul, but I’d like to show it to you.”

  “Why?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Because I’ve never met anyone like you, that’s why,” he said with a look of exasperation. “And maybe I’d like to give you a better impression of me. I’m not what or who you seem to think I am, and I’d like you to know that before we . . . before we part.” Again he held out his hand to her. “Will you go with me?”

  Kady started to protest, started to say no, but then she thought, What the heck? Why not? Could anything stranger or worse happen to her than what already had? “Okay,” she said with a grin, then took his hand in hers. “But on one condition.”

  “Which is?”

  “We don’t talk of money and you don’t try to make me tell you what happened in Legend. I would like a day off from the past.”

  “Done! We’ll just talk about ourselves.”

  “Great. And later I’ll sell the story of the rich, elusive C. T. Jordan to the tabloids and make enough to open my restaurant.”

  He didn’t hesitate as he lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. “Any woman who would return a fortune as you did isn’t going to do something so low-down rotten and slimy as that.”

  Maybe it was his confidence in her or maybe it was his big hand holding hers as she looked up at him, but she was beginning to feel the heaviness of the last weeks lift from her heart. Stressful did not begin to describe the last weeks of her life. “Are you saying that I’m boring? That I’m too good to do something treacherous?”

  “No, of course not. What was it that Alice Toklas said about the eggs?”

  Kady laughed. “That she’d scramble the man’s eggs rather than make him an omelet because it took less butter and he’d know the insult. Yes, I might do that.”

  “Ah, but have you?”

  He dropped her hand as he efficiently and quickly began to remove items from the campsite while Kady stood there and watched. He certainly was self-sufficient, she thought.

  “Have you?” he asked again.

  “Have I what?”

  He was bent over, putting out the fire as he turned to look at her. “Have you done anything truly rotten to another human being?”

  “I screamed at Mrs. Norman,” she said with guilt in her voice. “She’s—”

  “Gregory’s interfering mother. From what I was told about her, it’s a wonder you didn’t take a meat cleaver to her.”

  “You know, it’s odd, but she never bothered me until after I met Cole. Something seemed to happen inside me after I met him.”

  He was stuffing things into an aluminum-framed backpack. “Maybe you began to get an idea of how much you were worth.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about money.”

  As he took water bottles from inside the Jeep, he grinned. “I’m not talking about money. Doesn’t the Bible say that a virtuous woman is worth her weight in pearls? Or something like that.”

  “I’m not virtuous,” Kady said with a grimace. “In my lifetime three men have told me they love me, Cole, Gregory, and a boy at college, and I went to bed with two of them. I seem to go to bed with most of the men who tell me they love me.”

  At that he leaned toward her until his nose was nearly touching hers. “In that case, Kady, I love you, love you, love you.”

  “Get out of here!” she said, laughing as she pushed at his chest.

  He stepped away, but he still looked at her with such teasing eyes that she blushed. “If you don’t stop it, I won’t go with you,” she said, but even she could hear the lie in her voice. It would be wonderful to have a day off from worry and anxiety. To have a day without ghosts directing her life.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try to go to Legend alone?” he asked, a mock look of horror on his dark, handsome face. “You could try to get past Uncle Hannibal by yourself.” At that he gave such an exaggerated shiver of fear that she smiled. “You haven’t seen him. Frightening man. When I was a kid, I thought he was Blackbeard.”

  “He’s a thief!” Kady said. “He destroyed the lovely Range Rover Mr. Fowler bought for me.”

  “Ahem,” Tarik said as he hoisted the pack onto his back and hooked the straps over his chest.

  “Oh. I guess you bought it for me. Was it insured?”

  “No money talk, remember? You ready to go? How are your feet? This is a bit of a walk.”

  “My feet are fine,” she said, looking down at the trainers she wore. She spent most of every day on her feet and got restless if she had to sit down too long.

  “Then, come, habibbi, and follow me.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked as she followed him through the brush. Within minutes they reached a narrow trail leading upward. “What language is it?”

  “Arabic, the language of Ruth’s lover. You don’t know why she jumped into bed with him, do you? Other than lust, that is? Didn’t she spend even a minute grieving over her dead husband?”

  “It wasn’t like that at all!” Kady said vehemently. “It was because Ruth was in such pain and grieving so much that she turned to Gamal, and—” She halted. “Oh, very clever. But it’s not going to work. You said this was a day off, and that’s what it’s going to be. No more Jordans!”

  “Too late,” he said, looking at her over his shoulder and around the big pack, and Kady giggled because for a moment she’d completely forgotten that he was a Jordan.

  She was still laughing as he turned back toward the trail, and they started the long, slow climb upward. And Kady soon found that walking back and forth between counters in a restaurant kitchen was not the same as climbing a mountain at about nine thousand feet altitude. Her ankles often twisted to the side and she