Uncut Bundle

Not that it helped.

He phoned the American consul in Dubai. The consul was on vacation and his clerk said she’d love to be of help but did Mr. Knight have any idea how many Americans traipsed in and out of the embassy every week?

“The thing is, sir…” Thousands of miles separated Cam and the clerk, but Cam could almost see the woman’s raised eyebrows. “If you knew the lady’s name…”

“I don’t,” Cam snapped.

“Are you sure she came to the embassy?”

Cam had to admit that he wasn’t. Salome was without her passport but that didn’t necessarily mean she’d have gone to the embassy. Maybe she’d just called someone. Someone in her dance troupe. Someone who was still in the place where she’d been kidnapped.

And he didn’t know the name of the troupe, didn’t know where she’d been when she was taken.

Damn it to hell, he didn’t know anything!

I love you, she’d said.

Yeah, but if she loved him, she’d have come to him. Phoned. Damn it, she knew his name, knew he was from Dallas. She could have found him in a heartbeat. Why hadn’t she?

Because you were right, a voice inside him said coldly. It was sex and danger gave her that high, not you.

Cam clenched his fists and stared at the ceiling over his hospital bed.

It that was true, fine. He’d known it all along. But he’d saved her life. Didn’t she even want to find out if he’d lived or died?

She doesn’t owe you a thing, Knight, the voice said, even more coldly.

She didn’t. She didn’t. She—

The hell she didn’t. He had the right to see her one last time, hear her admit that what she’d thought she felt for him had evaporated as soon as she’d reached safety.

Then he could forget all about her.

The doctors said he’d be hospitalized another couple of weeks. He had to build his strength. Eat the baby-slop they served him, get up with an aide’s help and walk the hall for fifteen minutes, three times a day. Then, the doctors added, then, maybe he could go home, move in with Matt or Alex or his father for a while.

“Right,” Cam said, and made his own plans.

He phoned out for his meals. Steak. Pasta. Protein and carbs. He got up on his own every hour, walked for twenty minutes, then forty, then got out of bed and stayed out. A day later, he asked for his clothes, changed the polite request to a demand when a nurse tried to bully him with what she said was a rule about wearing hospital garments that left a man walking around with his ass hanging out.

He was standing at the window wearing jeans, sneakers and a sweatshirt when the pulmonologist who’d treated his collapsed lung and the thoracic surgeon who’d removed the bullet that had missed his heart by an eighth of an inch showed up.

“Being up and dressed makes me feel human again,” he said, and waited for one of them to have the balls to ask if he’d confirmed that by looking in a mirror.

Later that afternoon, Cam checked himself out and went to the Turtle Creek condo he called home.

He was done wasting precious time. The longer it took him to start looking for Salome, the longer it would take to find her.

He was entitled to answers, damn it. And he was going to get them.

He flew to Dubai but he learned nothing. He flew home angrier than before, angry at the world, at Salome, at himself for giving a damn.

He contacted a private investigator who handled work for the firm and told him all he knew. Salome was a dancer. What kind? He ran their conversations through his mind. She’d talked about Las Vegas. About tap dancing. The P.I. nodded and made notes. Oh, and she had three brothers who were cops. The P.I. nodded, as if that really was useful information, and made more notes.

“A picture would help,” the P.I. said, and arranged for Cam to meet with a woman do did sketches for the police. Three hours later, they had a passable drawing of Salome.

The P.I. ran off a few hundred copies and left for Vegas. Cam gave it a little thought and got on the next plane. Duplication of effort, the P.I. said, but so what? Cam trudged from hotel to hotel, club to club. Nothing. Nobody recognized the sketch; nobody knew Salome.

Home again in Dallas one Friday night, his brothers dragged him to the bar they frequented. He knew they wanted to talk, so he let them do it.