great deal of death,” he said, “so much of it that even the sadness of losing a wife and two children did not last as long as it should have.”
“Do you have another wife? Your father had three.”
“No. No other.” He was silent for a time. “Miss Hardin, will you be returning to the Nuba?”
“I don’t know. It depends.”
“On what?”
“If my boss decides there’s work for us to do up here.”
“There is. As I told you, a great many of our people have been taken captive.”
“It’s not that simple, it’s a complicated process,” she said. “We don’t have any contacts up here. We would—”
“We could help you make these contacts. I would very much like it if—if you were to come back here.”
She couldn’t quite read that remark; his expression was likewise illegible in the wan lamplight. “May I ask why?”
“For selfish reasons. I enjoy talking to you.”
“You’d like me to bore you some more.”
With a tentative movement, he touched her knee and grinned. “Oh yes, bore me to death. No, no, of course not. It has been a long time since I’ve spoken to a woman as I do to you. My wife and I used to talk a lot. Like you, she was an educated woman.”
Quinette stifled a yelp. “Educated? Educated doesn’t describe me.”
“Compared with the women here, you are. Many of them cannot read or write.”
“By that standard, I’ve got a Ph.D.,” she said.
“I should be going,” he said abruptly.
“Do you have to? I enjoy talking to you.”
“Another time. Tomorrow.”
She leaned forward as he began to rise, intending to give him a chaste kiss good-bye; but she felt as if she’d fallen into some kind of magnetic field, for she kept leaning, her face drawn toward his, seemingly against her will. In the next moment she was on top of him, straddling his lap, clasping the back of his neck while he held her around the waist and they kissed; kissed without a pretense of tenderness, she biting the inside of his lips, his tongue darting for her throat.
They drew back from each other and into an awkward silence. To her, the surprising thing was that the kiss didn’t surprise her. It had a quality of inevitability, of something foreordained from the moment she’d first seen him, yesterday morning.
He reached out and pulled her to him, and they kissed again. His mouth broke free and roamed over her face, until they heard someone walking outside. Ulrika! In a panic, Quinette leaped up, went to the window, and saw an orderly trudging toward the casualties’ shelter, where the pressure lanterns flared.
“It’s all right, it isn’t her,” she whispered.
Michael got out of the chair. “It will be next time. I must go.”
“You could stay,” she pleaded. “We could talk a while longer.”
He silenced her with a subdued laugh. “I’m afraid that talking isn’t what we would do.”
That declaration made her feel wanted, even irresistible, but it was a poor consolation. She stood in the doorway and watched him stride across the hospital grounds, into the enveloping shadows. He didn’t look back. She shut the door, afraid that if she left it open another second, she would succumb to a reckless impulse to run after him. She got into her sleeping bag. A faint growl of thunder sounded in the distance, rousing a hope that it would rain hard all night and wash out the airstrip and strand her here indefinitely. That wasn’t likely, she couldn’t rely on circumstance, she would have to find a way to return; and looking at the roof beams, she began to scheme how to do it.
“MY MAN! COFFEE’S ON!”
Sitting on his sleeping bag under the Gulfstream’s wing, Fitzhugh ignored Douglas’s cheerful summons, although he needed some caffeinating after a night of fractured sleep and fearful dreams inspired by the previous day’s events. The contents of the nightmares had mercifully fled his mind as soon as he woke up, a quarter of an hour before sunrise. Terror lingered in him for a while longer but dissipated as the sun bulged out of the crenulated mountains, magnified to twice its high-noon size, its sharply slanting light heightening the shades of ochre and terra-cotta in the earth and rocks. Feeling like an astronaut who’d landed on some austerely beautiful planet, he gazed at the scene in blank-minded admiration until thoughts of Diana intruded and, so to speak, brought him back to earth.
The horror of seeing her covered in blood, the elation of discovering that it wasn’t hers