the desert, not for the end of a sandstorm or for nightfall or shade or a drink of water or five times a day for God, but for goodness.
She had learned posture at the age of four and then how to keep her weight low and her head high, how to put grace in every gesture of her hands, every turn of her head. She had learned the dances of the Berbers and their nomadic relations, the Tuareg, of the Bedouins, of the Indians and Egyptians. There were dances for women and dances for men, dances for weddings, pregnancy and birth, sickness and death.
His dark head was bowed, and she recalled the advice of the Chinese, their remedy for lovesickness. For Omar, she must go home and dance the guedra, not the trance dance but the love dance. And then make love with him.
She did not thank Ben Hall. She said, “You should go.”
Slowly, he rose.
“I’m sorry this happened,” she said.
He nodded, lips tight. Briefly, he spoke in Arabic. He called her sister. He told her he loved her.
He told her goodbye as the Arabs do.
Which was to wish her peace.
THE KNOCKING INTERRUPTED her drowsing. She opened her eyes to light from a day she knew, without looking at the portholes beside her, was gray.
“Dru?”
The pants she’d worn the night before were heaped against the locker. She dragged them on and let her long T-shirt do as a top. Climbed from her berth and crossed the decrepit linoleum in her bare feet. To open the cabin door further and let him in.
She squinted at the object he held up.
And swallowed. “Where did you get that?”
“The hospital. The supermarket doesn’t get their turkey basters for a few weeks.” His cheeks darkened. “I told a nurse that it’s…a home project.”
If he’d blushed like that, no wonder the nurse had parted with the Tomcat catheter.
He murmured, “So…Sabah il-kheyr.” Good morning. “Let’s make a baby.”
CHAPTER THREE
Skye said she wasn’t going anywhere at gunpoint. One of the men, who were mercenaries, yanked my father from our vehicle; my father clutched his arm and chest, crying out, moaning, eyes rolling back. “He’s sick!” I said. They shrugged as he fell, threatening to shoot me when I tried to go to him. I opened my door anyhow, because of the things my father had taught me about the nature of men. The gunman yanked me back into the vehicle by the throat. While I choked and coughed and he started the car, another held a Makarov to Dru’s head. But before we left, the third man turned the green Land Rover and drove over my father’s body.
—Ben, recollections of a fall
Nantucket
One week later
October 23
The office of Daniel Mayhew, Attorney At Law
THE WORDS WERE THERE on the pertinent pages, and Daniel had given each of them a copy to read. After she’d entered the office and Ben had stood, she’d told Daniel that of course they knew each other. Good to see you, to Ben. She couldn’t say his name again.
Now she studied black text on white paper, blurred in the photocopy machine, but not enough to misread “my natural son, the son of my loins, Ben Omar Hall.” And the mention of “other issue…or my wife, Dru-Nudar Haverford Hall, if pregnant at the time of my death…”
She felt Ben’s presence as she felt the sun through the clustered window panes, paneling the maple floor and walnut furniture with light. His knees, in jeans, jutted into the slanting edge of one section, brightly lit. The rest of him was in shadow, beyond the edge of her vision unless she twisted her chair. It couldn’t matter. Daniel would repeat nothing he saw.
Ben waited, eyes on the attorney.
She could pretend, too, pretend it was no surprise. Even though she wanted to demand, Did you know? Did you know you were his son?
Omar had known. Wasn’t that bad enough?
“Tell me if I’m right, Daniel.” Her courtesy was lost, smashed by surprise. “I understand the provisions for Sergio and others. This is what I want clarified. I will receive, in any case, one hundred thousand dollars a year and the Orange Street House. But whatever is in the attic vault, which I never knew existed, and everything else that Omar didn’t give away—we’re talking about a lot—will go to…” It took a long time, seconds, to decide what to call him. She broke her indecision with a sigh. “…Ben, unless I’m pregnant right now. Since he—Omar—and I have had no child up to this point.”
“Yes.”
Her face must look like a strawberry. Daniel knew as well as everyone else, everyone who had seen the tabloids, about her and Ben. Ben would also receive the contents of a safe deposit box and some other things she’d never known her husband owned. Did we need the cloak and dagger, Omar? She held down some high terror that couldn’t come from grief. “How soon must pregnancy be determined?” Her breath sounded coarse, unladylike, heaving like a horse. A tear hung in one eye. Not about money. Oh, maybe that, too. Who cares what they think?
She hated for Ben to see.
She took a handkerchief from her purse. It bore her monogram. Sometimes she’d used Omar’s. Still did, at home. She wiped off her invalidated grief. I want some answers.
“Because of the size of the estate—” Daniel’s eyes rested on her, apologizing “—as soon as an accurate result can be obtained.”
“And if I’m pregnant, he and I split the estate?”
“Correct. And the unknown contents of the vault become yours.”
The provisions were more complex than that. If she relinquished her rights. If he did. A web engineered to manipulate. Or so it seemed.
Beside her, Ben hadn’t moved. Hands on the chair arms. Eyes on Daniel. His face frozen.
Had he known he was adopted—Omar’s natural son? If he did…
Dru choked away her fears. Nothing real but this room. The will. “I suppose I’ll need a test in a medical facility?”
“Promptly.”
She could count. A test might be accurate seven days after conception. Nine to eleven, much better. But they couldn’t have succeeded, even with Ben’s tenacious effort and repeated donations. Her face heated again as she remembered things said, the emotions of an intimacy without touch, without invasion of each other’s sexual privacy, yet throbbing and slippery and quiet with the hunger for friendship. She’d never been closer to a man—brother or lover.
And, all the time, he was Omar’s son.
Who on earth was his mother?
Trouble silenced her curiosity. This new development would reach the papers. The
