Desert Ice Daddy by Marton, Dana (best motivational novels .txt) 📗

said. “He had four wives, each with their own kids in their own tent.”

“Didn’t you think that was strange when you were there?”

“Everything was strange. The wives were the least of it. I was born and raised in Houston. Not much here prepared me for the Bedu of the desert.”

She hadn’t known him back then. Neither had Flint. But he’d told her the few stories he’d heard from Akeem, back in the days when she had her first serious crush on him and had endlessly nagged her brother for every bit of information about his mysterious friend.

Akeem was fourteen when his mother died, no other relatives in the States. He would have gone into the foster-care system if not for his grandfather, the sheik, who had sent for him. He’d told Flint once that he had almost refused to go. It’d been hard for him to swallow that the old sheik had cast out his mother.

“Was it like this?” She nodded toward the barren land that surrounded them.

“Much bigger. In some places it’s all stones, other places it’s brush like this, even grass, then there are vast areas with nothing but sand. No TV, no video games. It was a shock to my fourteen-year-old system at first.”

“And then?”

“And then I started to see the beauty of it, the honor of the men of the desert. I’d never seen the place before, but I still felt a connection.” He shook his head. “Can’t explain it. It was like…The best I can explain is collective memory.”

“But you came back.”

“First chance I got.” He gave a lopsided smile. “I’m American.”

He was unlike any man she had ever known: strong, honorable, carried himself with dignity, had always been there for the others. Flint considered him his brother, more so than the half brother they shared and hated discussing. Like Flint, Akeem had achieved great success. But sometimes she wondered if he ever felt at home anywhere.

She hadn’t. Not in a long time. Not even at the ranch, despite the best efforts of Flint and Lora Leigh and Lucinda.

They walked on in silence, stopping only to drink. Akeem had brought along several bottles. Hopefully enough to last them until tomorrow.

Tomorrow, she would get Christopher back. She had to believe that.

They sat out the noon heat under a group of acacia trees and talked about his business. When the temperature cooled to bearable, they resumed walking again. They stopped for the night early, could have walked more given the light but decided it was better to save some energy for the next day. Who knew what it would require of them?

She helped him pitch the tent. They ate cold rations of smoked meat, bread and apples, courtesy of Lucinda, then drank sparingly.

“Should we light a fire?” she asked, not that it was that cold yet, but might get chilly toward dawn. Unless, by some miracle, Flint found them. He would be looking if they didn’t get back to the ranch in a couple of hours.

“Better not.”

Which meant, heaven help her, that they were going to have to snuggle for heat. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that.

Okay, so she’d thought she’d been ready back when she was seventeen, when Akeem had first come home from Aggie, Texas A&M University, with Flint on a visit. He’d starred in the overwhelming majority of her girlhood fantasies. Which culminated on that fateful night at nineteen when she’d been so summarily rejected.

The whirling sound of a helicopter interrupted the flow of memories before they could have made her blush.

AKEEM WATCHED AS TAYLOR cocked her head, her blond hair falling in waves over her shoulder.

“Police?” she asked.

“Either that or one of Jackson’s choppers, or Flint’s Falcon. We shouldn’t call attention to ourselves until we know for sure.”

The tent was small and a nondescript beige color that blended into the desert like camouflage. There were bushes around that were bigger. They had a fair chance that they might be mistaken for another boulder from a distance.

But as the chopper dipped low to scan the flat land, it did come to hover right on top of them. Akeem looked through the mosquito netting of the window. “Cops.”

“Oh, man.”

He waited for them to set down, trying to figure out what to say. They were about to catch some serious trouble for not telling the authorities about the ransom demand, for coming here alone. And they’d be summarily taken out of Hell’s Porch, questioned for as long as the cops saw fit. When the next call could come at any second.

Akeem swore under his breath and got up. He would grab one of Flint’s pickups and bring Taylor back here as soon as they were let go again. It was the best they could do; no point in wasting energy on what-ifs.

But after a moment of lingering in place, the chopper banked to the left and took off. His instincts prickled.

“Why didn’t they stop to pick us up?” She came over to the window to look after the helicopter.

He ran his tongue over his teeth. Good question. Plenty of flat land to put the bird down. Why hadn’t there been a more concentrated rescue effort, for that matter? And back at the boulders, why had the choppers attacked without waiting for ground support to get there?

It’d looked almost as if their purpose had been to bust up the exchange rather than to capture anyone or save Christopher. Just like right now their purpose seemed to be to locate Taylor and him, but not actually rescue them. Odd.

“You think they’ll come back?”

Damned if he knew. If they had wanted to help or harm, they could have done it already.

“Let’s move on.” He was picking up the sleeping bag, not wanting to waste time.

“We just got settled in.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I don’t want to move.”

He could more than understand. She had to be sore and exhausted.

“Just a couple of miles. We’ll find someplace where we can spend the night without being visible from above.”

“What if we