Free At the Edge of the Sun by Anne Stuart Page A

to tell Holly that the reason she feared the dark went back to a black night when she was sixteen years old and her stepfather had decided to forcibly initiate his infatuated stepdaughter into the joys of womanhood. Deke Robinson had been a drunken, uncaring bastard, but his daughter Holly had loved him, and there was no need to tarnish his memory any more than his own flamboyant acts had already.
    But Holly’s beauty ritual had finally been completed, her cursing and humming had faded into silence, and she climbed into her own bed with a sigh, pulling the covers up around her silk-clad shoulders. Maggie had lain there, tense, waiting for her to extinguish the light, steeling herself against the darkness where banshees wailed over the bloody bodies that filled a shattered pub not ten miles away.
    “Good night, Maggie,” she’d said, and curled up, leaving the dim light burning.
    “Now this is more like it,” Holly said, her eyes sparkling in the blinding sunlight as she surveyed the bombed and pitted tarmac of the Beirut airport. The blackened carcasses of half a dozen bombed-out airplanes littered the runways. Not that it mattered—very few commercial flights flew in and out of Beirut nowadays. The one working runway could handle the traffic.
    “More like what?” Maggie said. “It looks like a war zone.”
    “Exactly. Everything’s been so damned civilized the last couple of days. I might as well have been on a modeling assignment.”
    Ian turned to her with his omnipresent glare. “Lady,” he said in awful tones, “haven’t you been paying attention? There are seventeen dead in a pub in Northern Ireland.Twenty-five dead in a bombed-out gambling club in London. This isn’t some damned fantasy, this is for real.”
    Holly’s bright look faded. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I wasn’t thinking …”
    “We can’t afford to have you not thinking,” he snapped. “It’s bad enough having you tagging along—at least keep your mouth shut if you can’t keep your brain active.”
    “You rotten little pig,” Holly began amiably.
    “Stop it, you two,” Maggie said, and there was a note of steel in her voice that silenced the two combatants. “Or you can both go back where you came from. How many times do I have to tell you that we can’t afford to waste our energies fighting among ourselves?”
    Randall slid an arm around her waist, and she stiffened, glaring up at him. “How many times, Maggie dear?” he said softly.
    She didn’t hesitate, pulling herself out of his unresisting arms. “Common civility is as far as we need to go,” she replied. “What next?”
    “I’m going to see a man,” Ian announced. “Alone.”
    “What man?” Maggie asked. “Don’t tell me you got his name from your wonderful informant. We keep walking into traps, Ian. Don’t you think it’s time to share the wealth, let us know who keeps giving you this magnificent information that almost gets us killed?”
    “No.”
    “Come on, Ian, don’t be a drag,” Holly said. “You owe us that much.”
    “Lady, I owe you nothing. I’d be doing a hell of a lot better if I were on my own, without the three of you tagging after me.”
    “You’d be dead in a pub in Northern Ireland,” Randall said flatly.
    “Or Flynn would.”
    Randall shrugged. “Maybe. Do what you have to do. We’ll be waiting. We might even tell you where.”
    “Does Beirut have any hotels still standing?” Maggie asked.
    “Not many,” Randall said. “And we’re not going there. We’ll be staying with a friend of mine in the Hosni section of Beirut. It’s on the outskirts of the city, as far away from the fighting as anyone could manage. At least it was a couple of weeks ago.”
    “A couple of weeks ago?” Maggie echoed.
    “Where do you think I’ve been for the last four months?”
    “I hadn’t even thought about it,” Maggie lied.
    “If I’d been in the States I would have been around you.”
    “Not if I could help