She blinked hard, then gazed around her. Sure enough, miles of glaringly brilliant, hard, dry ground lay spread out for as far as she could see in every direction.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she murmured. Captain Walker had apparently performed a miracle and gotten her back home after all. He had let her go.
Too bad, she thought for one obviously crazy instant. On some very basic and feminine level she had been drawn to his seductive ways. She suspected she would always regret that they had never made love. His provocative caresses had held such heavenly promise.
And, at first anyway, she had been equally captivated by his promises of adventure and untold riches. She had meant to tell him that the moment she awoke. He deserved to know how tempted she had been by him and all he had offered.
But, in the end, those things weren’t what mattered, she reminded herself. Not really. There was something essential that had been missing from their relationship: respect. They could not have survived for long without it. It seemed she was doomed to meeting men who didn’t respect her wishes or her intelligence or her strength.
Oddly enough, though, it seemed that Captain Walker had respected at least one of her wishes. He had taken her at her word and sent her back to Arizona as she’d pleaded with him to do. Despite a tiny, lingering sense of regret, she told herself she should be grateful that in that, at least, he had been a man of his word.
There was no question in her mind that it was just as well that he hadn’t allowed her to stay. His pirate’s life seemed glamorous on the surface, but she suspected that waging bloody skirmishes over gold and silver, and a few bolts of lush fabrics and bottles of wine, would quickly pall. It didn’t strike her as the most sensible way to spend a lifetime.
Besides that, she hadn’t been exactly thrilled by his rolling ship and certainly not by his filthy associates. Just the thought of Blackhearted John Higgins made her shudder. She and the captain would surely have battled wits over his choice of shipmates in time.
And she would, no doubt, have been demanding a tamer existence eventually, perhaps even children. He would have been chafing at her pleas. Passion or not, it would have been no life at all.
No, this was better. Give her the desert and her independence any day. She told herself she could manage the loneliness. After all, she had had years of practice, ever since being abandoned once before by someone very dear to her.
She drew in a deep breath of the dry, clean air. She might miss her dashing pirate, might miss the wicked sensations he had stirred in her, but indeed, it was surprisingly good to be home, after all. If she couldn’t find a man who would treat her as an equal, then she might as well be here, where she could make her own way, surrounded by people who loved her, even if they didn’t totally understand her.
With a sense of satisfaction, she glanced around at the blooming cacti and dry tumbleweed. Through her clothes—a bright red silk dress that was cut in an astonishingly immodest style—she could feel the blazing intensity of the sun. It was all wonderfully familiar. Well, everything except the dress. Where that had come from didn’t bear thinking about. She would get rid of it the first chance she had. She glanced down at the revealing cut of it and grinned suddenly. Maybe she would just push it to the back of a closet, a memento from an incredible journey.
A second glance around her proved more disconcerting than her revealing dress. As far as the eye could see there were only those cacti, that tumbleweed and an enormous amount of deeply rutted, dry, flat ground. Something about her surroundings was terribly, terribly wrong.
Abby studied the distant horizon with a growing sense of dismay. Where were the familiar buildings of downtown Phoenix? Where, for that matter, were the wide, paved stretches of road? The passing cars? And why was it so terribly silent? The only sound at all seemed to be the distant howl of a coyote. The scene, which only moments before had seemed so promising, took on a bizarre, otherworldly quality that sent a chill racing down her spine.
None of the explanations that came to mind made any sense. Was this not the West at all? Was it possible she was in the Sahara? Or some other desert? Given some of the other things that had happened to her lately, she could very well turn up playing nursemaid to Cleopatra.
More likely, though, Captain Walker had whisked her back to Arizona, only to miss Phoenix entirely. On the one hand, it hardly seemed possible that anyone could make such a mistake. On the other, she recalled that she had questioned his knowledge of geography. But surely a man who could navigate open stretches of ocean by the stars couldn’t have gone so terribly awry looking at an AAA map. Or could he?
Like it or not that appeared to be just what he’d done. Of all of the possible explanations, she preferred that one. She really wanted to be in Arizona. It meant that sooner or later, she could make her way to the city where she’d grown up. It was just a matter of time and ingenuity.
And water, she admitted with some reluctance. How long could she possibly survive this far from anywhere without it? With the sun barely up in the east, the heat was moderate, but in a few short hours she knew it would be blistering hot and there wasn’t a sign of water
