Free My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas Page A

through India; she was talking of someone else altogether.
    “I have been to Darjeeling,” he told her. “From the hills of Darjeeling, if you look north, you’ll see a wall of glacier-covered peaks—so massive that the tallest of them was once thought to be the highest summit in all the world. There is nothing like standing outside at the end of the day, a cup of tea in hand, and watching the mountains. The snowcaps are golden, and sometimes the slopes turn the color of the setting sun itself.”
    She looked down into her cup—did he see a sheen of tears in her eyes?
    “What a sight to have seen,” she said, her voice soft.
    “Come and see it for yourself,” he said impulsively.
    She laughed a little. “Darjeeling must be as far as the sky itself.”
    “About a thousand miles as the crow flies. But once we cross into India and reach lower elevation, it will be forty miles an hour by rail most of the rest of the way. I should be very surprised if it takes us more than two weeks before you are walking between rows of tea bushes.”
    A light of wonder came into her eyes, as if he had told her that the very end of the universe was within a day’s journey. But that light extinguished as quickly as it had come to be.
    She shook her head. “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    She shrugged. “I’m too poor.”
    “You can sell your horse.”
    She shook her head again. “Far better to have a horse here than to be a beggar in Darjeeling.”
    He doubted that was truly her reason, but her tone was quite closed: The matter was not one for debate. “Where are you going after Kashgar then?”
    And how long could he reasonably—or even unreasonably—follow her around?
    “Somewhere that won’t bankrupt me so thoroughly.”
    “A shame,” he said, leaning back on his elbows. “There are still places in India where the teachings of the
Kama Sutra
arepracticed. And two girls well versed in the
Kama Sutra
, my friend, will give you every taste of Paradise in a single night.”
    “Add insult to injury, why don’t y—” Her expression changed. “Don’t move an inch. And don’t speak.” He held perfectly still and silent. Something hissed softly in the grass.
    She felt on the ground about her person and made a seemingly careless flick of her fingers. He did not see anything leaving her hand, yet he heard their impact, two tiny thuds. The hissing stopped.
    Signaling him to remain motionless, she rose to her feet and came to inspect the grass just beside him.
    “You are safe now,” she said.
    He turned and saw an adder, lying dead six inches from his hand. The snake’s bite was usually not fatal, but it was definitely poisonous.
    He looked up at her. “Allah willing, my friend, you will always be by my side to save me from certain death.”
    She snorted and sauntered away. “No use wasting your prayers. We already know I won’t be.”
    T he Persian took care of Ying-ying as no one had in a very long time.
    Every time they stopped, he saw to the horses. In the evening he hunted, cooked, and did the washing up afterward. The next morning he packed everything to get them back on the road.
    All without asking for anything in return.
    She did not understand it, this giving. It made her suspicious and it made her . . . Well, not outright unhappy. But it made her think dangerous thoughts, thoughts that more often than not involved herself standing on the balcony of a house in Darjeeling, a cup of steaming tea in hand, looking northward at sunset, with him draping a warm cloak over her shoulders.
    And after the sunset, they would . . .
    Ceaseless as the waves of the sea, those thoughts were. But they always broke upon the rocky shores of reality.
    Some of her earliest memories were those of herself as a toddler, perched on a chair, peering out into the courtyard as Da-ren strode across toward her mother, who waited beneath the gallery outside her door, her eyes decorously lowered. Such authority he had exuded, such gravitas,