“No. Not yet. You leave me like this, I may keel over.”

But he understood that reality had hit her. She’d let him kiss her. More, she’d kissed him back. Kissed the first man who was not her husband.

“It was only a kiss, Jess,” he reminded her gently. “An amazing kiss. But that’s all it was.”

She didn’t make an attempt to move again, but she didn’t say anything, either. So he gave her something else to think about.

“I have to fly back to Florida tomorrow.”

He sensed a slight tensing of her shoulders.

“I didn’t know what to plan for. You could have sent me away. We could have ‘remembered big’ and realized there was nothing here to hang on to.” He chuckled softly. “I don’t know about you, but I think we put that notion to bed.”

He finally pulled back, cupped her shoulders in his palms, and flexed his knees so they were at eye level. “And as much as I’d like to take you to bed, right now, I’m not going to. I want you to think about it, though. I want you to think about us.”

Oh, he could see she was doing a lot of thinking.

“I need to go back. I need to take care of some things at work so I can clear my schedule. That is, if you want me to clear my schedule. Tell me it’s all right for me to come back.”

He didn’t know who was more surprised when she moved back in to him, kissed him softly, and whispered against his lips. “If you don’t come back and finish this, I might have to hunt you down and hurt you.”

Chapter 9

Afghanistan, August


TORTURED MOANS WOKE RABIA, JERKING her straight up in bed. She should be prepared for them by now, yet she never was.

Heart pounding, she rushed out of the small room that was her sleeping place and into the room that by day was a gathering area and by night was a sleeping space for her father and now this American soldier. As she had done many nights since she’d brought him down from the cave, she knelt beside the pallet on the floor, where he thrashed in his sleep. She dipped a cloth in a bowl of water she’d left nearby, quickly wrung it out, then placed it over his forehead. The coolness sometimes soothed and settled him.

But nothing stopped the nightmares. They grew stronger and more frequent. They also held the answers, she suspected, to the past he could not remember.

She glanced over her shoulder to where her father still slept soundly. His old ears no longer heard as sharply. Tonight that was a good thing. Relieved that he had not awakened, she sat quietly, alone with her thoughts, waiting for the worst to pass, conflicted over the unexpected things she felt for the man she had found by the side of the road more than a month ago.

In the beginning, she had been determined to be unaffected by his suffering. He represented a liability and an obligation, no more. She had resented having to care for him. Determination, however, was no match for human suffering. Time had passed, and she had weakened… and eventually grown to pity him.

Even more, she found herself wondering about him, as she wondered while she sat with him tonight. Where had he come from? What horrors had he endured? His body told part of the story. His flesh was colored and marred by old scars and new. His mind had also been abused. And he had been nearly starved to death when she found him.

She gently held the cloth to his forehead. Extremists would condemn her for the reluctant compassion she now showed this American soldier. This infidel who stood for things the Taliban warlords proclaimed Islam did not tolerate. This man and men like him who professed to be saviors yet dropped bombs on her country.

Weary, she leaned back against the wall. She was a Muslim, and the Koran was the primary source of her faith. The Koran dealt with the subjects that concerned all human beings: wisdom, beliefs, worship, and law. It focused on the relationship between Allah and his creatures, provided guidelines for a just society, for proper human relationships and equal divisions of power.

The Taliban preached the Koran and twisted the intent for its own purpose. Under Taliban rule, women were powerless. Under the Taliban, there was only pain. Since its fall from power almost a decade ago, women now held seats in parliament. Girls went to school in many provinces without fear of having acid thrown in their faces, or worse, of death. Women had rights. Women had jobs.

All, in part, because of the Americans. And yet the Americans had brought more war to a country that had seen too much destruction and dying.

She rewet the cloth and applied it again to his brow, reminding herself of a truth she had taken a long time to see. This was but one man, not an army of men. This was a lost man. Lost and in pain. Physical, emotional, spiritual.

“Perhaps you should pray to your God,” she had suggested one day when she had found him in the cave huddled and weeping and beyond his endurance.

“My God?” Wild, angry eyes had met hers. “There is no God.”

She had been so shocked her breath had caught. “You must not say that.”

“For fear of bringing down his wrath? What else could he do to me? Strike me dead? Bring it. I’m past ready. It would solve both of our problems.”

“Your injuries have darkened your spirit.”

Bitter laughter degraded to tears. “My spirit left with my memory. I am not a man. I don’t exist. Why can’t you let me die?”

She thought of the despair on his face and in his voice that day as she watched him now. Thought of how the next time she had come to him, he had found the inner strength to pull himself together. To endure. As he endured these nightmares. How could she not admire him for that?

She had learned not to wake him. Once she had tried and ended up ducking his wild, swinging fists and covering her ears against his animal-like screams. Those screams could awaken the village. Or, worse, attract a Taliban patrol and create a bigger nightmare for all of them.

Always, she lived with the fear of Taliban discovery.

So she waited in the dark with him, hoping to keep him quiet, and wrestled with both compassion and resentment for the danger he had placed her and her father in.

His eyes moved rapidly behind his lids, his legs jerking restlessly. Yet the weight of his despair held him to the bed. He might not have believed it, but he was a creation of God. They all were. The Koran said so. It also encouraged kindness to others… while the Taliban killed and tortured in the name of Islam. Stoned women for showing their faces to the sun, beheaded them for seeking an education, tortured them on a mere suspicion that they did not obey sharia law.

She bathed his forehead and temples, wondering how her faith could be so divergent in interpretation. These were the things she struggled with every day. But in one thing, she was certain: it was right to honor her father’s wishes. And her father’s wishes had been to honor this man’s request for Pashtunwali.

“He asked for refuge, daughter. Pashtun law demands that if a person asks for asylum, it must be given.”

If she had picked any other day to come home from Kabul, she would not be in this position. She would not have found him by the side of the road. Bleeding, dazed, clearly sentenced to death if he were found by whoever hunted him.

Dressed as he had been—in tattered clothes traditional of her tribe, his long hair and beard matted with blood and grime, his skin darkened by the sun—she had not immediately recognized him for what he was. She saw only a man in distress. A man who had whispered, “Pashtunwali,” and begged her in Pashto to help him. To hide him.