The Cowboy & The Belly Dancer (Heartbeat)

by Charlotte Maclay

  The phone rang in the other room, disrupting her concentration at a critical moment.

  With a fair amount of dread, she opened one eye.

  Her spirits plummeted. “Oh, sour figs!” she groaned.

  “Hey, Nesrin,” Parker called from the living room.

  She raced to the kitchen door to intercept him. “Yes,” she answered rather breathlessly, all the while blocking his access to the kitchen.

  “That was Rusty on the phone. He’s had a flat about halfway back from Louanne’s with the kids in the truck, and he doesn’t have a spare.”

  “Then you must assist him.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone.”

  “I am fine, Parker, and I have dinner to fix.” She also had a very large mess that needed to be cleaned up before anyone saw it.

  “I don’t know.” With his fingers, he combed a wayward lock of his hair back into place. Nesrin wished she could have done that.

  “You must go. The children will be getting hungry unless Louanne has already spoiled their appetite with too many treats.”

  “Well, okay. I guess I won’t be gone long.” His expression still troubled, he warned, “Lock the door after I’m gone.”

  Nodding, she smiled. She could only hope he would be gone long enough for her to rid the kitchen of mounds of chopped onions and celery, and buckets of soggy noodles. Just once she wished her spells would go as ordered.

  Almost as soon as Parker had left, Nesrin was elbow deep in disposing of the evidence of her faulty spell. She sorted through the mess. Eventually she piled an appropriate amount of ingredients in a dish and slid it into the oven.

  She sighed. This time no one would know of her ineptitude.

  A noise from the front of the house caused Nesrin to lift her head. Surely Parker had not returned so quickly.

  With an uneasy feeling stroking down her spine, she went into the living room. She had forgotten Parker’s warning to lock the door. She’d been so engrossed...

  Two men stood in the middle of the room, both of them wearing dark suits. One held the brass lamp in his hands.

  She gasped.

  The men turned. Instantly she recognized Rasheyd, a gaunt man with dark eyes and a curving mustache beneath a beak nose, reminding her of an evil bird of prey. A nightmare that had come alive.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The tremors started deep inside her. Rasheyd had found her at last. Except he seemed to be subtly different and much younger than she remembered.

  “Nesrin,” she admitted, puzzled. He was not nearly as frightening as the man who had cursed her. And he had not known her name.

  The second man, shorter and more stout than the first, said, “I thought we had gotten rid of everyone.”

  “You thought wrong,” Rasheyd said.

  “But the flat tire was all arranged. I planned it that way.”

  Shocked that these men had wanted the house empty, Nesrin took a step back. “Parker sent someone and he will return in a minute. And he has three other men with him. Strong men with guns,” she warned. The two strangers did not seem concerned. Clearly they knew she lied.

  Her gaze slipped to the lamp, and to the man’s thumb circled with a tattoo of a snake. Knots filled her stomach. If not the Rasheyd she remembered, one from the same clan and equally evil.

  He tracked her as she retreated toward the kitchen. “Our presence here is no concern of yours, servant girl. We only seek this lamp—” his dark eyes lit with avarice “—and the emeralds and rubies it will lead us to.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. He knew of Rasheyd’s conjuring room buried in the depths of the desert! And the elephant tusks inlaid with jewels. How was that possible after all these years?

  “What is this?” He eyed her suspiciously. “You know about the treasure?”

  She shook her head. “I know nothing, effendi. I swear it.”

  He saw through her new lie. “You do know something, lying daughter of Satan. When my cousin’s wife reported she had seen this sacred lamp told of in ancient legends being packed and shipped to America, I knew there would be others who would try to steal it from me. You are the one, are you not?”

  “No, you are wrong,” Nesrin protested. “I do not wish to steal the lamp.”

  “But you have been studying the inscriptions, have you not?” He backed her up against the wall. His breath smelled of mint and rotten teeth. “Have you learned their secrets?”

  Biting her lip, she shook her head again. Fear pelted her. “I am but an ignorant woman who cannot read, master.” That was only a slight prevarication. Few of the symbols were familiar to her.

  “Amir, find some rope,” Rasheyd ordered his associate, “We are going to take this ignorant woman with us and make her tell us what she knows.” His gaze skimmed over her in blatant hostility filled with sexual innuendo. “Forcing her to share her secrets will be my privilege. There is always room for one more in my small harem.”

  “No!” Nesrin broke away from him, but Amir caught her before she could escape. She smelled his foul body odor, and fought as he gagged and tied her.

  The last thing she saw was a black hood being pulled down over her face. She swallowed the scream that rose in her throat.

  Then all was darkness.

  A muffled voice said, “We must find a way to slow Mister Dunlap’s pursuit of this lovely young woman.”

  “More than the flat tire on his employee’s vehicle, which we had already arranged?”

  “A more challenging diversion, I think.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I believe Mister Dunlap would find it far more important to pursue his herd of fine horses, if they were to get loose, than he would in following us.”

  The second man laughed in a way that made Nesrin cringe. She feared, for all she might want to deny it, that Parker might indeed value his horses more than her.

  * * *

  “MAN, HAVE YOU EVER SEEN a tire flatter than that?” Kevin asked rhetorically. “Like a pancake.” He was trying to help Rusty and Buck heft the heavy tire away from the truck, but mostly he was in the way.

  “It wasn’t Kevin’s fault, Uncle Parker. Honest he didn’t do anything bad.”

  “I know, honey.” Parker grinned at Amy. It was hard to tell which child was more protective of the other, just like he and Marge had been. “Sometimes flats just happen. Particularly when we’re driving around on such rough roads.”

  Amy seemed satisfied her brother wasn’t going to take the blame and ambled off to investigate an outcrop of rocks tinted red with iron.

  Parker studied the flat a minute, then said to Pete, “That looks like a brand-new tire.”

  “Yep.” Pete rolled the spare into place. “We bought it jest a month or so back.”

  Parker frowned. “Hope you got a guarantee.” Idly, while the men replaced the tire, he fingered the stem on the flat. There was no sign of damage to the tire and one this new shouldn’t go flat. At least, not without reason.

  Prickles of awareness rose on the back of Parker’s neck.

  He wrenched off the stem cap. “Damn!” The stem core had been loosened, allowing for a slow leak. No way could that have happened accidentally. It was sabotage! Somebody had arranged to lure him away and leave the ranch deserted—except for Nesrin.

  “Rusty! Where’s the cell phone?” Parker was already into the truck cab, searching for the instrument used by the hands to keep in touch when they were out working the fence line. He found it and dialed.

  The phone rang. Once. Twice. He knew in his gut no one was going to answer, and still he waited through five rings.

  “Get back to the ranch as fast as you can,” Parker ordered. “Nesrin’s in trouble.”

  He raced to his own truck. Wheeling it into a sharp U-turn, he rocketed back along the rutted trail he’d just followed. Who the hell would want to sabotage Rusty’s old truck? And get him away from the house?

  He ha
dn’t come up with any good answers by the time he got back to the ranch. But he sure as hell had a fair suspicion when he saw the corral gate was open and the horses gone, Lucifer included. He swore again. Somebody was out to get him—somebody who thought he could buy saddle-trained horses cheaper down the road if Parker couldn’t make delivery on time.

  He raced into the house and knew immediately the place was empty.

  “Nesrin!” he called, heading for the kitchen where he’d last seen her.

  She wasn’t anywhere around, but there was a curl of smoke coming from the oven. He used a pot holder to retrieve the charbroiled casserole and place it on top of the stove. The place smelled of burning grease.

  Then he searched the house. Top to bottom. And the barn and outbuildings. Then he went back inside.

  When his hired hands showed up at the back door, the kids tumbling along behind them, and there was still no sign of Nesrin, Parker began having trouble keeping a panicky sensation under control. He was about to call Louanne when she arrived, too.

  “Howdy, Parker. You gonna sit in on our dancin’ lesson this afternoon?” Smiling with mock seduction, she rotated her bony hips.

  “No, I was just looking for Nesrin. I thought maybe she’d gone over to your place.” Which didn’t make any sense, but still there was a possibility...

  “She’s not here?”

  “Nope.”

  A half-dozen troubled faces turned to Parker. He flashed on Nesrin’s fears of being sent back into the brass lamp, and his gut clenched. That was impossible. He didn’t believe in curses or wizards or magic spells. But Rutherford Mildon, the horse trader, wouldn’t have any reason to snatch Nesrin along with the horses. Unless she’d seen him in the act...

  Whirling, Parker marched into the living room.

  The damn lamp was gone! The spot on the mantel where the lamp belonged was empty.

  No Nesrin. No lamp. No horses.

  None of it made sense.

  He struggled to keep his brain functioning in a logical way. Women didn’t vanish into lamps, and lamps didn’t just evaporate into thin air. Not in this century. Or any other, as far as he knew.

  On the other hand, Rutherford was a shrewd horse trader. He probably lacked much in the way of ethics, but he wasn’t a kidnapper, and certainly had no interest in an antique lamp.

  Parker’s head pounded and a muscle tightened in his jaw. His fingers flexed into fists. He had to make sense of the senseless.

  The phone rang. He heard Kevin answer and hoped to God it was Nesrin calling. From somewhere. Anywhere.

  “Uncle Parker, it’s a colonel somebody for you.”

  In two strides he was at the phone.

  “I finally came up with some information for you,” Billingsly announced without preamble.

  Better late than never. “What’ve you got?”

  “The two gentlemen in question are Arab nationals from a rather obscure emirate. A friendly enough place but not one of the major players in the Middle East.”

  “Are they legit?”

  “Nope. That’s why it took my people a little longer than usual to get a lead on them. They’re both traveling with phony passports.”

  Phony IDs, too, Parker thought, swearing under his breath. Ministry of Antiquities, my foot.

  “So far we’re sure of only one guy’s actual name—Rasheyd Sha’lan.”

  Parker felt as if his stomach had ridden an elevator in a free-fall from about twenty floors up. The impossible couldn’t be happening. He’d promised to keep Nesrin safe. My God, he berated himself, he’d left her alone when he’d promised...

  “Are you serious? The guy’s name is Rasheyd?” Parker asked.

  “That’s what I’m told. Sound familiar to you?”

  It sure did, but he wasn’t even going to try to explain about nine-hundred-year-old wizards and curses. In fact, he desperately wanted to deny there was any connection between Nesrin’s phantom Rasheyd and the very contemporary guys who had shown up at his door. Instead, he said, “It’s probably a common name over there.”

  “Maybe. At any rate, we almost didn’t manage to figure out who they were. They’re traveling by private jet. The plane took off an hour ago from a strip near you. They’ve filed a flight plan for a trip all the way back home.”

  Parker squeezed the phone tight. Nesrin was on board that plane. He knew it, dammit, he just knew it. And she wasn’t inside any old lamp, either. If there was any sorcery going on, they would have flown home on a magic carpet. “You gotta stop ‘em, Bill.” Parker Dunlap never, never went back on his promises. Not one as important as this, protecting Nesrin.

  Bill hesitated. “I don’t think we can do that. International diplomacy—”

  “Forget your damn diplomacy. They’ve got a friend of mine on board. They kidnapped her.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yeah, a woman.”

  “U.S. citizen?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “I don’t know, Parker. This is not a good time in our relationship with most of the Arab world. We’re trying very hard not to rock the boat.”

  What did Parker care about rocking boats when Nesrin’s life might be at stake? He might not be capable of loving her. But he cared! More than a little. And he had to get her back. This was one time when he damn well wasn’t going to fail. “All right, buddy. If you can’t stop ‘em then I want you to get me into their country. Clandestinely.”

  “Hell, Parker, I can’t do a thing like that. If you got caught we’d have an international incident on our hands.”

  “Bill, I’m asking you—I swear I’ll never ask another favor of you. I need to get into that country. Now.”

  Parker could almost hear the colonel weighing his options. “You know if I do this it could cost me my career.”

  “Yeah.” And if that happened, he’d have to deal with his guilt then. But not now. “It’s important, man.” He left unsaid the reminder that Bill’s career would have abruptly and fatally ended three years ago if it hadn’t been for Parker. He didn’t have to. They both knew he was asking for the debt to be repaid. In full, if need be.

  “I’ll get back to you,” Bill said.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  When Parker hung up, the kitchen was filled with the taut silence of fear. Both kids were wide-eyed. The three hired hands seemed to have aged while they’d been listening to the phone call.

  “Nesrin’s in trouble?” Louanne asked, the first to break the spell.

  “I think so,” Parker admitted. Dammit, he’d told her to lock the door. Why hadn’t she been more careful?

  “Them two men that were askin’ questions in town?”

  “Probably.”

  “Uncle Parker...me and Amy were talking last night. We miss our folks a lot, but we decided...” Kevin looked down at the scuffed toe of his shoe. His laces were untied. As usual. “If we had to lose ‘em and live with somebody else, we’re glad it was you and Nesrin.” He shrugged. “You’re both real cool. And well...” He looped his arm around Amy. “Rusty’s been telling us you might lose the ranch. If you need it, I’ve got some money you can have.”

  “You could sell my kitty,” Amy offered. Her chin puckered. “Sushan’s a real nice kitty and I bet some little girl would pay a whole bunch of money to have her.”

  “See, the most important thing,” Kevin explained, “is that you bring Nesrin back.”

  Unfamiliar tears clogged Parker’s throat so full he felt as though he’d swallowed an ostrich egg. “I’ll bring her home safe, Kevin. I promise. And somehow we’ll keep the ranch—without selling Sushan.” Tugging Amy into his arms, Parker knew he shouldn’t be making promises he couldn’t guarantee, but he was damn well going to try his best. For all of them.

  “See that you bring Nesrin home soon, young man.” Brusquely Louanne wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I haven’t finished up my belly dancing lessons and don’t intend to miss out just ‘cause you and her are gallivantin
g around somewheres. Meanwhile, these two youngsters kin stay with me.”

  “I’d be obliged,” Parker said, realizing that within Louanne’s angular body she had a heart of gold and a huge capacity for love.

  “You don’t have to worry about the ranch, boss,” Rusty said. “We’ll track down them mustangs, ‘n’ saddle-break ‘em, too. In plenty of time to meet ol’ Rutherford’s contract.”

  Parker hoped it wouldn’t be at the expense of too many broken bones on the part of his hired hands. In that case, the cost would be too high.

  He’d find some other way to save the ranch. And losing the kids to his father.

  He wished there was somewhere else he could get the money. But for now it looked as if he’d claimed the last favor anyone owed him.

  At the moment, however, he didn’t have time to give his personal problems any more thought, or his dreams for the ranch. His priorities were clear. He had to get himself to an obscure Arab country, find Nesrin and get her back home again—all without getting caught. It wasn’t likely to be an easy assignment. Particularly considering Nesrin didn’t have a passport.

  Chapter Nine

  He hadn’t cast a single spell since he had kidnapped her. No doves had appeared in a puff of smoke; no balls had danced on an invisible string.

  And Nesrin had not been cast back into the lamp.

  She thought this Rasheyd must indeed be the weakest wizard in all the land, a poor likeness of the distant ancestor Nesrin had feared. Even her skills were of a far higher order than his.

  Perhaps, over time, conjurers had lost their ability to tap into their magical powers, she mused.

  She would have been all the more grateful for this turn of events had she not been Rasheyd’s captive.

  Blowing out a sigh, she examined the women’s quarters where she was being held prisoner. Floral designs in bright shades of red and yellow decorated the floor tiles like an indoor garden. Couches and lounging pillows were covered with soft fabrics dyed in equally vivid colors. Beyond a sheer curtain that moved with the slightest breeze from the open door, there stood a real garden. Even in the heat of the day, trees provided cooling shade where captive parrots strutted and squawked on their elaborate perches.