Her Kind of Trouble (11 page)

Free. He accidentally hit me on the head as he raised his hands to his blindfold and gag. I felt my way down his legs to untie his ankles.

"Oh, thank heavens," gasped Rhys on stuttering breaths as I struggled with that knot. "Oh, Maggi."

"I'm here." I reached my hands in his direction, and they collided with his, and then he was pulling me down on top of him, despite his own gasp of pain.

His pain was the only thing that could possibly have kept me from throwing myself wholeheartedly into that embrace. Instead I said, "You're hurt!"

"You aren't." The words squeezed out of him like a prayer of gratitude.

"flow hurt?"

"I am not sure… " He had to stop to catch his breath, which was in itself telling. "I doubt I can walk."

Crap, crap, crap. This could mean trying to find my way out of wherever this was in the pitch dark, alone, to get help. Which would mean leaving him behind. Which I didn't want to do.

Just because Hani Rachid and his men seemed to have left didn't mean they wouldn't come back at any time.

"Where are you hurt?" I asked.

"Ribs." The Welsh rarely speak in fragments, which also worried me. "Mostly."

"Hold still." And I began to unbutton his shirt. Thank goodness he'd changed for dinner, or I might be trying to pull a T-shirt off over his head without hurting him, which I suspect is almost impossible in these situations.

Instead, I tried not to think of how intimate an act it was, unbuttoning a man's shirt, my knuckles sliding lightly along the material of it, my fingers fumbling from more than having scraped them in the climb.

I told myself that Rhys was breathing heavily from pain, nothing else.

Once I drew his shirt open, by feel alone, I ran my hands over his bare, furry chest. His breathing deepened further. So did mine. It was hard not to remember what an attractive man Rhys is.

Then my hands felt across a lump that made him gulp. I have no more medical training than standard first-aid courses, but I was pretty certain this was a broken rib…and likely not the only one.

Crap!

"What we need is a light," I muttered, tugging my wet sandals out of my fanny pack to hunt for the match-book. It, too, was soaked. "Damn. My matches aren't any good."

"Try… " Rhys struggled for a deep breath "… my pocket. Right. Rear."

Well that was closer than we'd meant to get… I'd kind of hoped that if our relationship ever progressed to my groping his butt, it would be for better reasons. But I managed to slide a dry matchbook out of his back pocket, all the same. Then I began to feel across the pebbles around my knees, hunting for the bindings we'd discarded. If only I had something to—

"Handkerchief," Rhys suggested. "Front left."

It wouldn't burn for long, but for now it was all we had. By feel, I tied his handkerchief into several knots, to slow down the burning. Then I lit a match, compliments of the "Hotle Athens," and examined his chest and ribs.

Holy…

If it weren't for the already darkening bruises, Rhys would have one hell of a fine chest, lean, partially covered with black hair. But it was horribly bruised, and unnaturally lumpy in a couple of places, and I wouldn't have light for long.

"Maybe we can turn your shirt into bandages," I murmured, sliding my hand back over the bump I'd found before…but to my relief, now that light was on it, the injury didn't seem quite so severe. Perhaps it was just swollen?

Rhys caught his breath, eyes bright in the light of our makeshift torch—bright, and focused on me. But he said nothing.

Now, the burning light hanging from my left hand, I ran my right hand over his other ribs, ascertaining that each was where it should be. I slid my palm around behind him; several times fear made me think I'd found something worse, but each time the warmth of my seeking hand reconciled his health with my hopes.

I drew my hand across his warm, dry skin beneath the ribs now, down over his tight abdomen, down to the waistband of his trousers.

His breathing deepened.

I tried to ask a question—but it only croaked out of me. I had to swallow before asking, "Any other…injuries?"

"They did not Abelard me, if that's what you mean. Though God knows what would have happened if you'd not been here." Abelard was a medieval churchman, one of a famous pair of lovers, who'd been castrated by his beloved's uncle.

I smiled, pleased by both the joke and the way Rhys's voice was gaining strength. In fact—

To my surprise, he sat up.

"Careful!" I insisted.

"I shall be. But, Maggi, I do feel somewhat better than I'd feared." He ran his own hands over his ribs—gingerly, since
better by
no means meant
well
. "You've a healing touch."

Or maybe he'd just been suckering me into feeling him up… but with Rhys, I sincerely doubted it. "Or maybe with that gag off, you've been able to catch your breath?"

"Or that. Maggi—"

He spoke with a sudden intensity that matched his expression. Maybe he would kiss me. Maybe I wouldn't protest, even though I should, since I was officially dating Lex, especially since Rhys knew it. And yet—

A pain in my fingertips distracted me—and Rhys, eyes widening, knocked the remains of our makeshift torch out of my hand. It went out on the board, leaving us in darkness again.

"We, er, still have my shirt," Rhys suggested, moment gone. "But ought we not have a plan first, before we use up that resource?"

"Good point." My words were muffled around my slightly burnt fingers. "It would help if we knew how we got here in the first place."

"They carried us," said Rhys, matter-of-fact. "But being blindfolded, that's no great help."

"What?"

"They burst into Tala's house and dragged us away, right in front of the little girl. But you know that."

"I don't know that. I thought Tala had drugged both of us."

"Drugged? Neither of us was drugged."

"Of course we were drugged. The last thing I did before I lost consciousness was take a sip of the wine Tala offered us."

Silence and darkness pushed in around us.

Then Rhys said, "Maggi, you were conscious until after Mr. Rachid and his men attacked us."

So why didn't I remember?

Chapter 7

According to Rhys, I'd gotten quiet after my first or second sip of Tala's wine. At the time, he'd chalked that up to my annoyance with the Coptic Grailkeeper.

Then I'd touched my throat and said, "Someone's here."

Just before Hani and his men burst in.

"I don't remember that," I insisted—if this hadn't been Rhys, I might have suspected him of lying. "I don't remember any of it."

"Perhaps you hit your head while they carried us here. That would explain a great deal." Rhys found my shoulder in the dark, and squeezed it gently. "Let's focus for now on finding our way out."

"It would help if we knew where
here
was."

"Actually, I suspect I know. These seem to be the cisterns of ancient
Alexandria
.
A
cistern, in any case."

He told me more as we put together a makeshift torch, harvesting his socks to burn first. Apparently,
Alexandria
was honeycombed with a series of fresh-water cisterns, created at the time of the city's foundation by its namesake, Alexander the Great, in 300 B.C.

"This cistern is clearly more recent," Rhys mused, holding up the sputtering torch we'd MacGyvered together from one of his socks wrapped around the top of one of my sandals. The uneven glimpses of columns and vaults that arched into the pressing darkness around us, at least two levels above and one level below to the reflective water, were hauntingly beautiful…and damned eerie. "Ninth century, I'd imagine."

"A thousand years and change," I murmured—then deliberately forced my attention back to the precarious issue of our footing. Even barefooted, I wasn't wholly sure of my balance, much less his. Despite that we were heading where I'd thought the lights had vanished, most of the stone braces we had to traverse, barely two feet wide, didn't have wood over them—and they were crumbling remains of their former glory. "Is that all?"

"They are positively modern, by Egyptian standards," agreed Rhys. "Look—you can tell they used ancient capitals for their pillars. Some of them are upside-down."

I reached back and caught his long hand, only partly to make sure that, in his inspection of this incredible structure, he didn't plummet off an archway. The water below us was way too shallow to risk falling into it from this height I'd been lucky. If I had landed feet first, I'd probably have broken my ankles. And if I'd landed
headfirst
…

But I hadn't.

Rhys squeezed my hand. But all he said was, "I know some archeologists who have been trying to map the cisterns for some time, now. We must take note of where we emerge, so we can direct them back to this one."

If
we emerged. But I wasn't about to give up. And okay, Hani Rachid wouldn't have bothered with his warnings, if he'd expected us to die down here.

I still felt sharp relief when we found a broken-down stone staircase pretty much where Rhys had hoped we would. Our torch had burned through the rest of our socks and started on a sleeve, torn from his shirt, by the time we reached a more modem passageway of cement, lined with concrete benches.

"It's a bomb shelter," Rhys explained. "From World War II. We must be getting close. Look—there's a ladder."

Our emergence out of a manhole cover into a dusty alley, near an outdoor café where men were smoking hookah pipes, would have garnered us stares even if Rhys
wasn't
missing one sleeve of his shirt. As it was, we smiled, waved and hailed a cab as quickly as possible.

We both exhaled twin sighs of relief as the taxi pulled back onto the street, toward the Hotel Athens.

Then Rhys surprised me. "I am sorry."

"You? What for?"

"Hani seems to believe I've behaved inappropriately with his wife—yes, his ex-wife, I know," he clarified, when I opened my mouth to argue. "I haven't, of course, not by Western standards. But here, the mere fact that I dined with them may be thorough enough insult."