'Til the End of Time by Iris Johansen Page B

emotion, it had shocked her.
    “No?” He smiled crookedly. “I felt as if I were shouting. The intent was there.” He lifted her legs and swung them in a half circle, until they were dangling off the bank. “What do you say I do penance by seeing what I can do to relieve you of some of your ‘discomfort’?” He moved to sit beside her on the bank. “By the way, remind me to tell you sometime how much I dislike euphemisms.”
    “As much as you dislike women who won’t trust you?” She hadn’t known she was going to ask that question. It had just tumbled out of the confusion and guilt his accusation had aroused in her.
    “I thought I had made it clear I was way past being able to generalize about you.” He didn’t look at her as he bent over and carefully rolled up the legs of her jeans. “I can’t force you to trust me. It has to come from you, and I don’t dislike your lack of trust. It only … hurts me.” He put first her left foot and then the right into the icy water of the stream. “Stay like this for a while. It will reduce the swelling and relieve the pain. Better?”
    “Much better.” She spoke abstractedly, her thoughts still on Sandor’s words. She was barely conscious of the cool water running soothingly over her feet. She had
hurt
him. The knowledge appalled her. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. She had wanted to protect him. Yet had the desire to protect been her only motive? He could be right.The instinct to safeguard her privacy and independence had been a part of her so long, she often reacted without thinking.
    But Sandor hadn’t been afraid. He had the same warrior instincts she possessed, and still he had confessed his ability to be hurt by her. He had trusted her as she hadn’t been able to trust him. “It happened in Said Ababa,” she said abruptly.
    “What?” His gaze lifted swiftly to her face.
    “The scars.” Her gaze was fixed on the darkening patch of sky she could see through the top of the pines. “It happened sixteen years ago in Said Ababa.”
    He became very still. “Sixteen years ago you would have been only twelve or thirteen years old. The wounds must have been very deep to create scar tissue like that.” He tried to keep his tone expressionless, desperately afraid she would close up again.
    “They were deep. They became infected. I was lucky I didn’t get gangrene. Antibiotics were practically nonexistent at the camp.” She moistened her lower lip with her tongue. “I probably would have died if it hadn’t been for Dimitri.”
    “Camp?”
    “I was in a displaced-persons’ camp for two years in Said Ababa.” The words were halting, and corroded with the years of repression. “After the overthrow of the government, the revolutionaries took power. They were even more oppressive than the tyrants they’d replaced.”
    “So I’ve heard.” Horror stories had emerged by the hundreds after the revolution, Sandor remembered. And Alessandra had been in the center of that relentless reign of terror. “You’re anAmerican. How did you come to be in a displaced-persons’ camp?”
    “I didn’t say I was an American. I said I hold an American passport. I didn’t have any passport or any identification at all after the revolution. I could have been any nationality. James said there was a good possibility I was an American, because one of the government officials who ran the camp said he thought he remembered seeing me wandering in the streets of the company town near the American oil refinery.” She shrugged. “There was some doubt. The town was several hundred miles from where they picked me up. I was barefoot and out of my head with fever, lying by the side of the road. James says walking that distance through the mountains and desert could have been the cause of my lacerated feet.”
    “James ‘says,’ ” he repeated slowly. “Don’t you know?”
    “No. I don’t remember anything before I woke up in the camp. That was why it was difficult to