Highlander - Donna Lettow [108]
Chapter Twenty-one
Paris: The Present
“Duncan, I’m all right. Stop fussing over me, you’re worse than my grandfather.” While ordinarily Maral didn’t mind being fussed over a little bit—it had been a while since anyone had—after three days in the hospital as the constant center of attention of nurses, doctors, technicians, and a host of security personnel, she’d reached her saturation point. “I can walk, you know.”
“‘Hospital policy, Madame,’” MacLeod mimicked Maral’s doctor as he pushed her wheelchair down the corridor. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.” He had become her stalwart protector, standing in for poor Assad, who had made the ultimate sacrifice so that she might live. More than once she had awakened in the middle of the night breathless and shaking as the dead had come to claim her in her dreams, to find MacLeod in the chair beside her, awake and ready to comfort her. Sometimes, when he thought she was sleeping, she would watch him through slitted eyes. He would be far away in his thoughts. Dark thoughts, she could tell. Thoughts that seemed to haunt him, to make him angry yet sad. She wished he would share his thoughts with her, but as soon as he knew she was awake, he was all smiles and pleasant conversation again, banishing the dark thoughts and refusing to speak of them.
Farid led their way to a service elevator. The bulk of his men were downstairs, controlling the members of the press gathered at the main entrance to the hospital, awaiting Maral’s release. An elite team guarded the hospital kitchen, where the service elevator let out, and MacLeod’s car, parked around the back of the hospital next to the kitchen door. Together, MacLeod and Farid managed to spirit Maral out of the building and away from the prying attention of the media.
“Where are we going?” Maral asked once they were safely free of the hospital. “I’ll need to freshen up and change before the signing this evening.” The Israelis and the remaining Palestinian delegates, spurred on by their anger at the act of terrorism at the Lutëtia, had worked diligently to nail down an agreement that both their cabinets would approve.
“You’re sure you want to go? You know you don’t have to.”
“I have to,” Maral protested. “I can’t let them think they can scare me away. I have to be there—for Assad.”
MacLeod nodded. He had known that would be her answer before he even asked. “Your things are at the Jordanian Ambassador’s residence. Your delegation has moved there. More secure.”
Maral was looking tired already. “I don’t think anything can ever be secure enough.”
A convoy of police and security vehicles ferried the Palestinians from the secure compound of the Jordanian Embassy to the even more heavily armed and gated Israeli Embassy, where the leaders of the opposing sides would meet to sign the East Jerusalem agreement. In the back of one of the cars, Maral was uncharacteristically quiet. The somber suit that she wore only enhanced the pallor of her usually vibrant complexion. The strain of the event was already beginning to tell on her, and it hadn’t even begun. She opened up her handbag and checked her hair in a small mirror for the third time.
“Maral, you look fine,” MacLeod, sitting next to her, reassured her.
She put the mirror away self-consciously. “I just need something to do with my hands,” she explained. He reached out and took her hand in his.
“How’s this?” he asked, and she smiled gratefully at him, sitting there so calmly, strong and handsome in his own dark suit. She ran her free hand up his forearm. “These are beautiful,” she said, admiring the golden studs securing the cuffs of his hand-tailored shirt. “Are you going to tell me they were made by some quaint East African tribe?”
“Would you believe West African?” MacLeod said with a grin, content to make small talk with her all night, if it would help relax her. “Aborigine?”
The car slowed at the gate to the Israeli Embassy, and the driver showed their credentials to the gate guard. As they were stopped. MacLeod noticed Maral shiver from a sudden chill.