Highlander - Donna Lettow [24]
“So you have heard of them,” Assad pressed.
MacLeod shook his head. “They died fifty years ago. And they were scholars, not fighters. It’s got to be some other group using the same name.”
“Put away the gun, Assad,” Maral said, and he complied. MacLeod retrieved the shawl and draped it over Maral’s shoulders. She pulled it eagerly around her, as if a shield, but drew no warmth from it. “Whoever they are,” she said, “this changes everything. It wasn’t just some lone fanatic listening to voices in his head. This is different. This is organized, deliberate. We don’t know anything about them—they could be anywhere, planning anything.” A shiver ran through her, and instinctively she pulled the ancient shawl, the emblem of her family and her people, more tightly to her. “Forty-three men praying is only a start for them, Duncan—my God, just think what could be next.”
Despite a murdereous look from Assad, MacLeod put an arm around her trembling shoulders and drew her to him in a comforting embrace, willing the heat and strength of his body into hers. They’d known each other such a brief time, but there was something about her—her beauty, her inner strength, her vulnerability, maybe all of the above and more—that called forth the Protector in him. “We should go back now,” he whispered. “You’ll be safe there.”
“It’s not my safety, Duncan. It’s my people.” At Assad’s signal to depart, she pulled away from the embrace, but allowed MacLeod’s arm to stay protectively across her shoulders as he escorted her to the door. “It’s the children on their way to school, women in the marketplaces. I’m not afraid for me, I’m afraid for them. And for the future. We’re so close to peace, Duncan, so close. Something like this could ruin everything.”
As he helped her into the car, MacLeod looked at her and a hint of sadness touched his heart. A beautiful but poignant mix of East and West, of the runways of Paris and the caravans of the Arabian desert. The legendary Palestine of her past and the very real Israel of her present. Maral Amina might claim she was no martyr, but he’d seen devotion like hers end in tragedy too many times. It took a very special kind of person to put the onus of three thousand years of history ahead of her own life.
As he settled next to her and Assad closed the door behind him, he pulled the gift box from his pocket. He’d hoped to give it to her at a more auspicious time, but now it appeared that such a time might never exist for them. “I’d like you to have this.” He did his best to make the tattered paper more presentable.
Maral had to laugh at his earnest attempt at the impossible. “Don’t tell me—you have a puppy?” she said, looking at the sorry wrapping. Her face brightened with anticipation as he handed it to her and although she reached for the box with studied casualness, he thought he could see peeking out the excited little girl held barely in check. He suspected Maral was a woman who could use more unexpected gifts in her life.
“A puppy named Farid. I don’t think he’s housebroken yet, either.” As they touched and he transferred the gift to her, the last traces of paper fluttered away, leaving Maral with a plain white box the size of her hand. “You can’t say he’s not thorough, though,” MacLeod said wryly.
Maral quickly pulled the top from the box and withdrew her prizes—two gazelles, intricately hand-wrought of iron, their elongated faces wise but sad. Their graceful legs had been carefully formed into combs for a lady’s hair. With a quick intake of breath, she was beaming like a ten-year-old with a new bike. “Duncan”—she held them out in front of her to admire them—”they’re breathtaking.”
“Then they’re in good company.” With Assad and his trusty sidekick in such close proximity, MacLeod resisted the temptation to reach up and remove the wooden combs binding her luscious hair. Some other time. “There once was a small tribe in a region of the grasslands of East Africa where