'Is there a towel somewhere?' She blinked slowly and focused her eyes on Hunter. 'You were a million miles away,' he said softly. 'You looked so contented that I almost hated to call you back.'
Blair smiled as she handed him a rough length of linen she'd found in one of the kitchen drawers.
'I was thinking how nice it is here,' she said, watching as he brought the towel to his face. 'This is a wonderful old house. These stone walls must have seen generations of life.'
Hunter peered at her over the edge of the towel. 'Wonderful old house? Last night it was a-what did you call it? A hovel, wasn't it?'
'I didn't mean it. The house just seemed ominous.'
She paused. 'So did you.' 'But not today.'
She shook her head and smiled. 'Not today,' she said. She watched as he dried himself, her eyes following the towel as he rubbed it briskly across his face and down his neck. He had a strong, well proportioned body that he accepted with a natural grace. Droplets of water gleamed in the fine, dark covering of hair on his chest.
His pectorals were well defined, as were his biceps, and his abdomen was flat and ridged with muscle. She wondered if he worked out with weights or ran to keep in shape. Everybody did, back in LA. But Hunter wasn't everybody. He was, in fact, like no one she'd ever known. He was ...
'Did I miss a spot of grease?' he asked in a soft, teasing voice.
The colour rose to her face. 'Sorry,' she said quickly, turning away from his amused expression. 'I ... I was thinking about the ... the car and what you said about not being able to use it.'
'I didn't say we couldn't use it,' he said in a voice gone suddenly cool. 'Don't worry, Blair. We're not stuck out here.'
'I didn't mean that, Hunter,' she said quickly, 'I ...' He sighed and tossed the towel across a chair. 'Forget it,' he said evenly. 'I didn't mean to bite your head off. I'm just ticked at myself for not realizing I would need something with four-wheel drive in country like this.' His voice grew muffled as he picked up his shirt and slipped it over his head. 'We can drive the Lamborghini, but damned slowly. What we'll do is take it into Florence tomorrow, bring it to a garage, and see about hiring a Land Rover or a Safari or .. .'
'Florence?' she asked, spinning around to face him. 'Really?'
Hunter laughed. 'Really.'
'Oh, that's nice,' she said happily. 'I've always wanted to see Florence.'
'Come on, Blair, you're not going to tell me you've never been there.'
She'd done it again. Of course Meryl had been to Florence. Well, she didn't know it for certain, but Meryl had been everywhere. Think, Blair, think... What had Meryl said about the Desmonds?
'The Desmonds came from Italy three generations ago,' she said with a forced smile. 'Our name was Di Simondi then. My father says ... he says they could never have afforded to live in Rome then, so now he gets a special pleasure out of reversing history. As far as he's concerned, Italy begins and ends in Rome.'
Hunter pulled a chair from the table, turned it around and straddled it. 'Yes, that sounds like something he'd say.' He folded his arms along the top of the chair back and looked at her. 'You're not anything like him, you know. In fact, sometimes, when you talk about your father, you sound as if you're talking about a stranger.'
Careful, she thought, careful... 'We're just different, that's all.'
'Yeah, but it's more than that. It's ...'
'We haven't spent much time together. You know, he's got business interests everywhere. He travels a lot.' 'And your mother died when you were just a kid.' She nodded. That, at least, was true. It was a strange bond she and Meryl shared. 'There was a car accident .. .' Her voice trailed off. The accident had taken her father from her, too, but she couldn't tell him that, although suddenly she wanted to. She wanted to tell him how lonely and frightened she'd been when Aunt Annie and Uncle Edgar came for her. 'It ... it was hard.'
Hunter nodded. 'I can imagine.'
'I know it sounds silly, but it took a long time until I stopped waiting for her to come back. Of course, I was very little .. .'
He shrugged. 'I never waited,' he said in a flat voice. 'My mother left me when I was seventeen, but I'd been expecting it for years.'
Blair looked up in surprise. It was the first personal thing he'd told her about himself.
'It wasn't an accident, you mean? Was she sick?'
His laughter was sharp. 'In a way, it was a little of each, I guess. Actually, I was the accident.'
'What do you mean?'
He gave her an artificial smile. 'I was a statistic. You know, X number of babies born to X number of unmarried, teenage mothers. And this was a lot of years ago, Blair, when having babies without benefit of wedlock wasn't something every Hollywood celebrity was doing.'
Blair slid into the chair opposite him. 'Not so many years,' she said softly.
He smiled again. 'Thirty-four years,' he said. 'And sometimes it feels more like ten times that.'
'And your mother got sick?'
'What she got was sick of being saddled with a kid which she'd never wanted in the first place,' he said gruffly. 'So she just walked out.'
Blair waited for him to say something more. 'And?' she asked finally, her eyes on his face. 'What did you do?'
Hunter's eyes met hers. 'I learned a valuable lesson,' he said flatly. 'If you don't take care of yourself, nobody else will.'
'You don't mean that!'
His lips drew back from his teeth in a mirthless smile. 'The hell I don't.'
'But you were just a kid. There must have been someone .. .'
'Yes,' he said, still smiling that strange smile, 'there was. The woman who owned the rooming house we lived in. She was all heart. She said the rent on the room was paid for the next two months, and after that ...' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Hell, I hated that damned place anyway. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer.' The smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. 'And we had a terrific view of back yards filled with clotheslines. Not exactly the style to which you're accustomed, is it?'
'No' she said, remembering the Iowa farm, 'no, I guess not.'
'Well, it was all there was ... Anyway, my mother didn’t exactly abandon me. She waited until I was in my last year of high school-I mean, hell, she'd been threatening to take off since my twelfth birthday.' He shoved back his chair and got to his feet. 'She left a note and a fifty-dollar bill in the sugar bowl. The note said she hoped I'd understand ...'
He was standing at the sink, his back to her. Blair ached to go to his side, to reach out and touch him, but there was something in the set of his spine that warned her not to do anything but listen. She waited for him to speak again; when he didn't, she cleared her throat.
'But-you were only seventeen .. .'
'Hell,' he said, letting out his breath, 'it wasn't the end of the world. I stayed until the rent was due, looking for a way to get by. There wasn't any, of course, so finally I took a bus to the nearest Army recruitment office and enlisted.'
'Don't you have to be eighteen to enlist in the Army?
What about the authorities? What ...'
Hunter laughed softly. 'There are always ways around the rules, Blair. I lied about my age-I think my recruiting officer knew, but Nam was eating up as many guys as they could send, and nobody was asking too many questions.'
'Is that where they sent you? To VietNam?' He nodded and she waited for him to say something, but he remained silent, his expression unreadable. 'Was it I've read things, heard things ... Was it bad?'
The soft sound of his laughter made the hair rise on the back of her neck. 'Bad doesn't do it justice. It was like finding yourself in the bowels of Hell.' He was facing her now but not looking at her, his eyes dark with memory, his face taut with pain. 'Did you ever have a nightmare, know you were having it, but you couldn't wake up? Well, that's what Viet Nam was like.'
'But you could have told them you were under age,' she said. 'You could have told them you'd lied. The Army shouldn't have done that to you. The
y .. .'
His head came up sharply. 'The Army took a scared, skinny kid who had nothing, and made him a man, Blair. They taught him about honour and trust, something that didn't exist in the world he came from.' A grim smile twisted his mouth. 'Hell, my honour was all I had. When you come right down to it, it's all anybody has.'
'But there were extenuating circumstances ...'
'There are no extenuating circumstances, not when it comes to integrity.'
If I trust you and you let me down. .. She remembered his words. They echoed and re-echoed through her mind.
'Hunter,' she said, 'sometimes-there are things .. .' Her voice trembled and broke. Stop it, she told herself sharply. Only her guilt had turned what he'd said into an accusation. 'I just meant that there are times you have to bend a little. Things aren't always black and white. Sometimes-sometimes there are reasons .. .'
'Reasons? Excuses, you mean. Alibis.'
He drew in his breath and turned away from her, tension knotting the muscles in his shoulders and back. 'Rhys?' she whispered.
'Jesus,' he murmured, 'it must be the heat.' He laughed uncomfortably. 'I don't usually try to bore people to death with the story of my life.'
Blair shook her head. 'It ... it wasn't boring,' she said quickly. 'I just wish ... Rhys, I wish .. .'
Hunter turned towards her. 'I like the way you say that.' His voice was suddenly soft.
'What?'
He looked into her eyes and smiled. 'Rhys,' he said. 'I've been called "Hunter" for so many years I'd almost forgotten I had another name.'
Blair took a breath. 'It's ... it's a nice name. It has a sound that I ...'
Her words tumbled into a hot silence that was accentuated by the buzzing of a honeybee as it hovered outside the window. It was Hunter who finally looked away. 'So,' he said, clearing his throat, 'what's for dinner?' 'Dinner?' she repeated foolishly. It was the last thing she'd expected him to say.
'Or don't poor little rich girls know how to cook?' 'I don't know about poor little rich girls,' Blair said softly. 'But if you're asking me if I can cook, the answer is yes.'
'Great,' he said with a tired smile, 'I'm bushed.'
He did look tired, she realized suddenly. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes, and the lines around his mouth seemed to have deepened.
'You'll feel better after some ratatouille,' she said. 'We have everything we need .. .'
'Ratawhat?' He laughed and held his hands up in surrender. 'Listen, Blair, I spent almost half my life soldiering in places where people eat things you don't even want to dream about. One simple rule got me through. I never eat anything I can't pronounce.'
The tension had eased from his face, and she breathed a silent prayer to whatever gods had made her name something like ratatouille to a man who probably thought anything but meat and potatoes was exotic.
'It's a French vegetable stew made from aubergine and tomatoes and onions and .. .' She chuckled at the expression of disbelief that spread across his face. 'Don't look that way, Rhys. It's delicious, really.'
'The French name was bad enough, but the English description is even worse. Vegetable stew?' He shuddered. 'No thanks, Miss Desmond. I'll make us some eggs and .. .'
'You'll like this,' Blair said firmly, handing him a knife. 'Just sit down and start peeling those onions.' Rhys sighed and dropped into the seat opposite her. 'Well, what the hell. I'll try anything once-where did you learn to make this stuff? The cordon bleu school?' She laughed as she sliced into a mushroom. 'The Good Housekeeping Cookbook. Slice the onions thinly, please, and put them in this bowl.'
He nodded. They worked in companionable silence for a few minutes, the only sound the faint trills of the birds outside the window and the occasional soft whisper of the hot summer breeze. Blair glanced across the table. Rhys was frowning with concentration as he sliced an onion with what seemed to be surgical precision. Just this morning, she'd been scared half to death of this man and now they were preparing a meal together. A flush of pleasure crept over her skin.
'What are you thinking?' he asked, smiling at her. 'You look like the cat that just swallowed the cream.' 'I ... I was just wondering .. .' She swallowed drily. 'How did you get into the bodyguarding business, anyway? I don't suppose they teach it in college.'
He gave her a quick smile. 'They teach it in the Army.
Some of it, anyway, especially in Special Forces.' She looked at him blankly and he shrugged. 'The Green Berets.'
Blair grinned as she popped a mushroom into' her mouth. 'John Wayne, hmm?'
Rhys laughed. 'Yeah, something like that. Anyway, Security was a growing field when I got out. So I took my back pay and sunk it into the rent on a one-room office on the Paseo del Prado in Madrid.'
Her eyebrows rose. 'Pretty exotic address for a former soldier, Mr Hunter.'
'I wasn't exactly a soldier,' he said, looking at the knife. 'Anyway, Madrid seemed as good a place as any. There was some heavy stuff going down and I had some contacts .. .' He shrugged. 'Things went well for me and, within a few years, we expanded to four countries and six offices.'
'And you're still modest and self-effacing.' He grinned. 'Actually, I'm still amazed.'
Blair sighed. 'I suppose it says something about the world we live in. Lots of people need bodyguards, don't they?'
'We're security specialists, Blair. I'm not minimizing the need for bodyguards-sometimes there's nothing that can replace that kind of thing.'
'Like now?'
'Exactly. But the field has become very sophisticated.
It ...' His eyes narrowed. 'Daddy's kept you pretty far from .the realities of life, hasn't he?'
Blair rose quickly and dumped the cut-up vegetables into a pot. 'I... I don't know much about all this, I guess.'
'Well, I can't blame him. Some of it isn't pleasant.
Still, if you knew something about the political crazies in this world, or the kind of industrial warfare that goes on, you wouldn't have treated your security so casually in the past.' He stood and crossed the room towards her. 'Here, let me get that started,' he said, taking the box of wooden matches from her hand. 'There's a knack to it ...' He bent over the stove and poked at the kindling until a tiny flame sprang up. Then he took the pot from her. 'In fact,' he said, setting it on the grate, 'if you hadn't had such a bad reputation, I wouldn't have given this job my personal attention.'
Blair smiled. 'Your personal attention? Somehow, I can't picture you seated at a desk.'
He chuckled softly. 'No, neither can I.I spend as much time as I can in the field. But I don't do much of this sort of work. My clients are mostly American corporations with European interests and a penchant for privacy. That means I get to play with some very pricey electronic toys.'
'You mean you install those cameras I see mounted in banks?'
Hunter's teeth flashed whitely. 'I mean we sweep boardrooms and bedrooms for bugs the size of pinheads. We install homing devices no bigger than that in cars. We snug sonar scanners and infra-red scanners into dark corners. We .. .'
'Good grief!' she laughed. 'It sounds like James Bond.'
'Or the CIA,' he said softly.
She looked at him in amazement. 'You're kidding.' He shook his head. 'The Company recruited some of us in Nam. I guess they decided I was ... good at what I did. Anyway, they offered me a job.' Hunter laughed softly. 'God, I'm doing it again! What is it about you that makes me open up like a bad novel?'
Blair smiled. 'Don't stop now,' she said. 'I'm fascinated. I've never known anyone who was a spy before.' He grinned at her. 'The Company frowns on the use of that word.'
'Did you really go to work for them?'
He nodded. 'Yeah, I did. At first, it was pretty heady stuff. I was still just a kid, full of idealism and some vision of the world that probably came right out of a Boy Scout manual. But after a few years ...' He looked at her and through her, seeing something that she knew had meaning only to himself.... after a few years, I knew I'd had it with taking sen
seless orders from stupid leaders. So I quit.'
Blair smiled. 'Not James Bond,' she said softly. 'Don Quixote.'
Hunter laughed. 'And just as anachronistic. There I was, twenty-seven years old, with no skills the world seemed the least bit interested in. I tried a semester at university but ...' He shrugged expressively. 'It was too far removed from reality. So I took a hard look at myself, figured out what I was good at, got in touch with some people I'd met while r worked for the Company .. .'
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