The Soul Jar Page 4

  He completed her in every way. Like true polar opposites, they’d formed a bond stronger than anything she’d ever experienced. It had never occurred to her, from the moment of their first kiss, not to trust him. No one had ever earned that kind of instant acceptance from her before, and no one ever would again.

  Next to Chance, Gino’s steady breathing was a testament to the uselessness of the caffeine pill he’d taken. In the quiet plane, with the lights dimmed to allow passengers to sleep, Chance found he could not continue to ignore the woman sitting next to him.

  “Do you know the legend of the jar?” Chance said when he finally felt Bree begin to relax. Her shoulders drooped a little, and she lowered the book she’d purchased as a shield to help her avoid long stretches where they might have nothing to do but talk. She sighed and turned her attention to the dark sliver of window visible next to the seat in front of her. “I know some.” She picked up her book again, ready to hide behind the colorful jacket where a blond man and a redheaded woman embraced amid stylized flames of passion. Chance reached over and gently touched her arm, drawing down the barrier. He couldn’t bear the silent treatment any longer.

  “Two lovers, forbidden to be together by the rules of Egyptian society, had their souls torn from their bodies in a dark ritual. The souls were captured inside an alabaster jar and sealed for eternity, preventing them from crossing into the afterlife.”

  “I’ve heard.” Her voice was low and a little sad.

  Chance didn’t dare look over at her, but instead concentrated on the spot where his fingers caressed the warm flesh of her arm.

  “According to a scroll found buried in the tomb where the jar was unearthed, the lovers both belonged to a powerful magistrate who might have been an illegitimate brother of the Pharaoh Seti II. She was a concubine granted to the magistrate as a gift for services rendered. He was a royal guard who lost his heart to the beautiful slave. When she was given away, he couldn’t bear their separation, so he helped her flee before her new master could claim her.”

  Chance paused here. He began rubbing the pad of his thumb over the silky skin on the underside of her wrist. He felt her pulse flutter and heard her breath quicken. How many times had he kissed that sensitive spot? He thought of other places where her skin was just as smooth, places he’d claimed and ravaged with his lips and his tongue. When he spoke again, his voice was husky with desire.

  “The guard took his beloved to a small village where they hid from their master among sympathetic peasants. He claimed her there, made love to her, and he married her in his heart, since no proper religious leader would have blessed their union. By the time the magistrate found them, she carried his child.”

  Bree made a small sound in the back of her throat. When Chance casually let his knee brush against hers, she didn’t move away.

  “The magistrate was an angry, jealous man who resented what he thought was a meager gift for his considerable services to the king. A disloyal body slave was useless to him, especially one used by another man. Rather than kill the traitorous pair outright, believing their souls might somehow find eternal rest, he conscripted a wizard to prepare a punishment worse than death.”

  “But locked in the jar, they’d be together forever.” Bree’s breathless whisper touched him.

  Together forever was a promise he’d made to her so many times. Hearing the words from her lips now made him feel hollow inside. “Imprisoned forever in the jar, they’d be denied their rightful place in the next world. His plan succeeded, and years later, when the magistrate died secure in the success of his own passage to the afterlife, the jar was buried with him in his tomb, perhaps so he could boast of his accomplishment and show off his treasure to the gods.”

  “Do you believe the souls of the lovers exist in the jar?”

  The question surprised him. Bree had taught him to be sentimental, and it heartened him to think she might retain a little of the wonder she’d possessed when they’d met.

  “I don’t think souls can be captured like that. The magistrate did what he did to fuel his own wounded pride, but he didn’t have the power to keep souls from passing into the afterlife.”

  She nodded. “Either way, the lovers would have been together forever.”

  Chance faced her now, drank in the cool depths of her eyes then dropped his gaze to her mouth. “Do you think the jar is a repository for souls? Or do you think it’s just a jar?”

  “I don’t think anyone could have that kind of power, either,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion. “The jar has value because of the legend, not because the legend is true.”

  Chance nodded. The first arrow struck home. “Then, if all the jar is is an artifact, no different from any other old piece of pottery, isn’t it a fair exchange for the life of an innocent scientist?”

  Chapter Six

  Bree’s eyes fluttered closed, and she yanked her wrist from Chance’s tender grasp. “Well done, MacKenzie,” she said, annoyed with herself for the traitorous way her body had responded to his touch. She crossed her arms over her chest, praying he hadn’t noticed the raised peaks of her nipples against the front of her dress. “You played me.”

  His voice hardened, losing the sexy rumble he’d acquired during his titillating narrative. “Mallory’s life is at stake. Is an old jar really worth letting someone die?”

  One life for another, she thought. Am I wrong to want to save myself? “Why am I supposed to just believe you?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll be forced to take the jar from you. I don’t want to do that.”

  “Yeah. You’ve taken enough from me.” The sullen comment slipped out uncontrolled. Rather than regret the barb, though, she felt vindicated. Here, sitting on a packed flight to Frankfurt after two years of debilitating grief, would she finally get the chance to say all the things she’d kept bottled up inside her? She’d written letters to a dead man, a diary where she addressed him every day for months, pretending that he might one day be able to respond to her.

  She’d spent hours wandering aimlessly in the park, holding conversations with him in her head, pouring out the remnants of her broken heart to a ghost.

  She’d emptied herself to thin air time and time again, and part of her battered psyche couldn’t bear to rehash the one sided arguments again. Yet how could she pass up the opportunity to finally demand answers for the questions that had plagued her since that fateful morning in Kingston?

  His silence told her she’d struck a nerve with her words. With only a flicker of remorse, she struck again. “Why did you stage your own death?” The question rasped from her lips like a dry blade. “Why did you make me shoot you?”

  “To save your life.”

  She tossed her head in disbelief, stared at the gray ceiling of the plane and tried to calm herself with a deep breath. “Right.”

  “Really. Montague was on to me. If I wanted to get out of Kingston alive, I had to die.”

  “I would have died with you…” Bree swallowed a sob. She tamped down the rising tide of grief, biting her lower lip as a distraction.

  “It was too complicated to bring you in on the plan. I needed someone I trusted to kill me. Someone who wasn’t already suspicious.”

  “So you put blanks in the gun and threatened me so I’d shoot you in self defense?”

  “I needed you to believe I was dead. I needed you to hate me so Montague would think you did him a favor.”

  Bree let out a harsh laugh. Some of the nearby passengers stirred, and she covered her mouth with trembling fingers. “You could have called. ‘Hey, babe, it’s me. Guess what? I’m not dead. Sorry about kicking you out of bed and telling you that you meant nothing to me. Let’s do lunch.’”

  “I wanted to—a million times, but Montague investigated my death for six months. He turned over every rock in Kingston searching for me. Even after it appeared that he’d given up, I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t watching you. Odds are he may still think I escaped, but I had enough fals
e evidence planted to keep him confounded for a while. The bottom line is you got away without his interference.”

  “Yeah. He let me crawl home from Jamaica with a hole in my heart. Do you know how many times I relived that morning? When they didn’t find a body, I had hope, but months went by and there was no sign of you, so I finally had to accept the fact that you were dead. Why didn’t you figure out a way to let me know? A message in a bottle, for heaven’s sake. Anything would have been better than not knowing.”

  “After a while, I just…convinced myself you’d be better off without me. I’m sorry, luv.”

  How many times had she imagined hearing him say those words? How many times had she forgiven him? Not this time. “Sorry isn’t enough right now. What if I hadn’t fought you? What if I hadn’t accidentally fired the gun?”

  “I’d have made you do it. At the time, I thought it was the only way. I hated doing it, but I was prepared to make you want to kill me.”

  “I never wanted to. I never planned on hurting you. If only you’d told me about Montague. We could have come up with a way out together.”

  “If Montague had discovered we were together, he could have used you against me. He’d have killed you and made me watch.” Again, Chance’s voice grew rough.

  The emotion in it seeped into Bree’s soul and burned. Her eyes welled, and she brushed away the hot drops that spilled down her cheeks as he continued.

  “I could not have lived with that, Bree. If anything had happened to you, I wouldn’t have been able to go on.”

  She met his gaze then. His gray eyes were the color of fog, moist with emotion like her own. The ache in the center of her chest expanded with each shallow breath until her whole body heaved with the pain. “That’s the funny thing, Chance. When you lose someone you love that much, you think you can’t go on. You think you’ll die from it. But the cruel joke is, you don’t. You live. You go on, no matter how hard you pray not to. The sun rises the next day and it sets and rises again. The days turn into weeks and months that you don’t even notice until one day you wake up and realize you’ve been going on for years without even trying.”

  She wanted to continue, to tell him about the times she’d spent hours talking to him, wishing for him and imagining his arms around her. She wanted to tell him that about a month after she’d left Kingston, she’d begun to think she was pregnant. She’d bought a test at the pharmacy one chilly December afternoon and stared at a pale blue line that turned up on the little white stick, incredulous and oddly joyful that, despite everything, she carried a part of him inside her.

  False positive brought on by emotional stress, her ob/gyn declared a few days later. She’d cried herself sick when her period began three weeks late, grieving for a child that never was and a man who swore he’d only pretended to love her.

  That should have been enough to destroy any feelings she could ever have for him, but it wasn’t.

  Even now, her body trembling with the effort to hold back tears of rage, she still felt it. The rich scent of him, leather and musk, made her hungry to feel him against her. The sardonic twist of his mouth made her think of the times he’d kissed her speechless and laughed when she’d forgotten her train of thought. His voice gave her goose bumps, and his touch brought a fluttering pulse alive between her legs where her aching flesh remembered him so well.

  If they hadn’t been strapped into the torturously small airline seats with Gino drooling blissfully beside them, she’d have thrown herself into his arms and clung to him until the solid feel of his strong muscles soothed her and began to make up for every empty, desperate moment she’d longed for him in the last two years.

  Thank heaven for small favors. They had hours before the flight landed and by then she’d be over it. Right?

  Next to her, he sat stone silent for a long time, his head bowed and his hands clasped in his lap. She began to wonder if she’d bored him to sleep when he looked up, swiped at his eyes with his thumb and cleared his throat.

  “I don’t blame you for hating me.”

  “I don’t hate you,” she said quickly, wishing she had the strength to stay silent and let him suffer for a while longer. “I’m not sure what I feel.”

  “Maybe you’ll be able to forgive me one day.” The hopeful lilt in his voice made her heart ache.

  “Maybe. But don’t count on it. And just so we’re clear, you’re still not getting the jar.”

  Bree didn’t hate him. The woman he’d yearned for, died for, still had some feeling left for him. She hadn’t said as much, but the depth of her emotions showed in her eyes. He couldn’t have wished for more.

  Well, he might have wished she’d hand over the Soul Jar and save them both a whole lot of trouble, but at the moment, as they disembarked from the plane in Frankfurt Airport amid a river of weary international passengers, Chance MacKenzie forgot his troubles, forgot Garadeshi and Gino and even, regrettably, forgot Sam Mallory. For the space of perhaps ninety seconds, his heart soared.

  When all this was over, he might be able to get her back, to make up for every moment of grief he’d put her through out of his own foolishness.

  As they shuffled through customs, he resisted the urge to touch her, guide her through the crowds and lay subtle claim to her against the curious glances of the men they passed. He wanted everyone who saw them to know she belonged to him, but he didn’t yet have that luxury. The logical part of his brain kicked back into gear and managed to hold his protective instincts in check until they reached the open concourse between gates.

  “I’m going to the ladies’ room,” she announced when they finally broke free of the crowds at the security stations.

  “You’re not goin’ anywhere without us, dollface,” Gino said through a lion-like yawn.

  “Fine. Wait outside the ladies’ room,” she replied as she broke into a brisk trot toward the rest room areas. “I’ve been holding it for eight hours, so pardon me if I don’t wait up.”

  Chance laughed and picked up the pace to match her quick jaunt through the concourse. He only considered for a moment that she might use the opportunity to lose them. He trusted her—always had. She’d stay with him, but he’d have to work at proving himself to her.

  Gino galloped after him and grabbed his arm. “Keep an eye on her, Ozzie. She disappears and Mallory does too.”

  “I know, Gino. I’ve heard this song before.”

  “And just ’cause she’s hot doesn’t mean I won’t hurt her if she tries anything funny.”

  Chance sobered and yanked his arm out of Gino’s grasp. “You leave her to me. I’ll handle her.” A million different threats came to mind, but he didn’t dare say them. He refused to give Garadeshi any leverage, just like he’d refused to allow Montague to exploit his feelings for Bree.

  Fear of putting her back in that kind of danger dulled the euphoria he’d begun to feel at the thought of being with her again. This time he’d be smarter, though. He wasn’t going to lose her again.

  Bree stared at herself in the mirror while the dozen other occupants of the first available ladies’ room jostled for position at the sinks, hand dryers and towel dispensers. She’d never appreciated plumbing so much in her life and felt a spark of sympathy for the women still waiting in the long line to use the toilet stalls.

  At least the flight to Cairo from Germany was only half as long. It wouldn’t be easy to stay awake and keep an eye on Chance and Gino, but she’d manage. She rummaged through her bags and found her much needed hairbrush and the package of caffeine pills.

  One glance at her haggard reflection made her rethink another dose. She already looked like a zombie. The bathroom lighting made her skin look sallow, and her eyes were stark and sunken. She splashed some cool water on her face and sighed.

  “Rough flight?” asked a middle-aged woman who bellied up to the sink next to her.

  “The flight was fine. The company was rough.” Bree forced a polite smile, and the woman chuckled. She set a voluminous purse o
n the counter and zipped the bag open like a huge maw. The movement dislodged Bree’s toiletry case from the counter and sent it tumbling to the tile floor.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” The woman bent down immediately to help Bree retrieve the few objects that had spilled out.

  “Don’t worry about it. No harm.” Bree scraped up her belongings, keeping one eye on the black knapsack that still perched on the sink. Once her small case was back in order, the woman apologized again.

  “I’m not usually such a klutz.”

  “It’s okay.” Bree smiled again and leaned closer to the mirror to inspect her reflection. She really did need a complete overhaul. If Chance and Gino grew suspicious of the time she spent in the bathroom, so be it.

  The woman completed her own makeup repairs and made a disparaging sound. “I hate traveling.”

  “Me too.”

  “Honey, if I looked like you, I’d never stay home.” She nudged Bree with her elbow then gathered her bag, zipped up the cavernous interior and wandered away.

  Bree gave herself another critical once-over and decided, compliment or no, she had a lot of work to do. She gathered her things and shoehorned herself into the next available stall to change.

  “If she doesn’t hurry up, I’m goin’ in after her,” Gino complained after a quarter hour of standing outside the ladies’ room.

  Chance shrugged. “Did you see the line? Give her some time.”

  Gino patted his shirt pocket as a reminder. “She’d better get that sweet ass back out here soon.”

  “She will.” Chance had every faith in her.

  While Gino paced, checking his watch, Chance surveyed the crowd. It was just after 7:00 AM and the European business travelers were trickling along the concourse toward their domestic departure gates. Moving in the opposite direction, the international arrivals still shuffled along, squinting blearily at the complicated German directory signs.