Restoring The Castle Ch 01

[Restoring the Castle is a mostly nonerotic mystery romance. Brief sex scenes will be found in chapters 1, 4, and 6. It will post in eight chapters, at an approximate interval of one week, and will be completed within two months of the posting of the first chapter]

*

Khaki green was perhaps her least favorite color. So, why was her world swimming in it? "Swimming" was the word for the sensation, too. It seemed like she'd been swimming around in heavy water that was keeping her just below the surface despite all of her attempts to propel herself upward. The sensation felt like it had been going on forever.

Her eyes must be open. She wouldn't create a dream of various shades of khaki if her eyes were closed. The walls were a light khaki. The blanket was a darker khaki. The ceiling was . . . well it was sort of white. Those spongy tiles with the holes all over them. Like you would have found in a school or a hospital years ago.

A hospital. She felt it now. The pain and the heaviness were coming on in a slow wave. It seemed like her whole left side was weighted down by bandages. Those were white too. So, the whole world wasn't khaki after all. And the slender silver stand with the bottles and tubing hanging from it at her right side wasn't khaki either. Wondering where they were going, those tubes. But then thinking that was stupid. They were attached by needles to the veins in her hand and who knew where else? Coming increasingly close to the surface in her fight to get there through the pressure of whatever was holding her back. Hesitating, because there was increasing pain on the left side. Her whole left side. Her head too. A moment ago she hadn't realized it. But now she knew her head was pounding with pain. The left side of her head had bandaging around it too.

"Ally? Ally? Nurse! Nurse! Please, here. I think she's conscious."

"Mary?" Her eyes were focusing on the face of the woman hovering over hers. Well, her right eye was. There was some sort of bandage over the left eye. But who was Mary? Why had she said that when she'd seen the face?

"It's OK, Ally. I've called for the nurse. Someone will be here in a moment. Are you in pain? Can you hear me? Are you back with us?"

Of course. Mary. From the embassy. Mary Hendricks, the deputy chief of mission—the DCM. But why the concern? Mary had said no more than three sentences to Ally since the junior officer arrived at the embassy. Frigid, dismissive expressions. As if Ally wasn't even there, as if she was too peripheral to the business of the embassy to care about. What? Why? This wasn't the embassy—no room like she'd ever seen in the embassy.

"No, don't try to move yet, Ally. The nurses are coming. It's OK. You're going to be fine. The care here is great. You're in the military hospital in Landstuhl. The U.S. military hospital. In Germany. It's where they bring the American servicemen from Afghanistan and Iraq. They are great with bombing wounds. You're in exactly the right place."

Exactly the right place? For bomb victims?

The name she was trying to force out wasn't "Mary." It was a man's name. "Chad."

"Chad?" It was the first word she'd uttered in over a week.

Her eye was honing in on Mary Hendricks's face. She saw the intensification of the look of concern. The hardening of the edges around the mouth. Not noncommittally frigid today. She must really be worried about something.

"No excitement, Ally. You'll be fine. Here, the nurses are here now. Just take it slow."

The face of the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, disappeared from view to be replaced by those of two nurses, one female and one male—in khaki—bustling around her bed, checking this, adjusting that, and emitting clucking noises.

God how she hated the color khaki. But then that thought was replaced by something more urgent, more shocking. Remembering what Mary had said about her being in the right place. "Bomb," Mary Hendricks had said. Bomb wounds. Her left side.

"Chad," she said again, this time more as a moaned statement than a question.

And once again, none of the khaki-clad figures hovering about her gave her an answer.

* * * *

"It's a pity we have to rush back to Amman," Ally cried out to Chad over the noise of the Miata convertible's whining wheels. The road between the capital city of Jordan and the ancient city known to the Romans as Gerasa was a dusty, ill-maintained one. It had been known as Gerasa when it was one of the Decapolis cities—the ten cities across the Levant that served as the beads in the necklace of Rome's trading route into Asia proper. Now, as Jerash, it was sometimes incorrectly called the Pompeii of the Middle East because of how extensive and well preserved its ruins were. It was incorrectly called that because Pompeii was ruined by a volcanic eruption and Jerash by an earthquake in the eighth century.

Because of its ruins and because so much is still standing, Jerash exists as a major tourist destination in Jordan. And Alice, known by all as Ally, Templeton, the recently arrived cultural affairs officer at the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, had just been given her first visit to the site by her newly minted fiancé, Chad Huntley, a political officer at the embassy. The trip was official, because Ally had a responsibility to master the cultural attractions of the country she was posted to. The two-night stay at the Hadrian's Gate Hotel, immediately across from that same-named victory arch gate marking the entrance into the ancient city ruins, was not official. But so smitten had the two become with each other, and so quickly, that few at the embassy were surprised they were running off together for intimate weekends. At least they had made their intentions official before leaving for this weekend jaunt when Chad had given Ally a ring at an embassy cocktail party.

"What's that you said?" Chad yelled back over the road noise. And then, when Ally couldn't make herself better heard, he said. "It's time for a stop anyway. There's a roadside restaurant up ahead. We'll stop for something to drink and a chance to shake the dust off."

"What did you try to tell me back on the road?" Chad asked when they were settled with bottles of beer under a vine-covered trellis on the roof veranda of the roadside restaurant.

"I said it's too bad we have to be back in Amman this afternoon. I haven't seen all of Jerash that I wanted to explore."

"There will be other visits to Jerash. Next you must see Petra in the south, though. That's the ultimate tourist destination in Jordan. But if I don't get you back for the Fulbright scholarship interviews this afternoon, the ambassador will have my hide—or the DCM will. Mary Hendricks cracks the whip harder than the ambassador does."

"She's certainly a dragon lady, isn't she? Wish she'd crack a smile now and again."

It was only when they were away from the embassy that they felt comfortable enough to talk of the second in command, the deputy chief of mission, like this.

"It's you who needs to be back for those interviews," Ally continued. "You've done them before; I haven't."

"But you have to chair the session, Ally. Besides Fulbright House needs your radiance. The interviewees will come in all nervous and trying to remember what their rich parents coached them to say about how indigent their family is."

"You're such a cynic," Ally said. But that's not what she was thinking when she was looking at him across the small table between them. She was thinking how lucky she was to land him. He was by far the best catch in the whole region of embassies—and she'd done a round of U.S. embassies in the Middle East in connection with her assignment in Amman. And the irony was that she hadn't been looking to catch anything.

He was suave without exuding conceit, and he had the strong, blond American athlete good looks that would justify conceit. She didn't know what he saw in her, but she hoped it would be enough to keep him. She'd been as far as the ring part of relationships before, but they had never worked out. More than one suitor had ended up saying that she was too much like her mother—too reserved and independent. An ice maiden. And her mother hadn't been a help there either. She'd been frosty with any man Ally had introduced her to.

She could see that any of the men who had been interested in her had been intimidated by Miranda, her mother. She could see it in her mother herself. But none of them knew the life her mother had had to face and the choices she had to make. Not that Ally knew it all herself; there were some discussions her mother refused to have.

Ally certainly wasn't being an ice maiden with Chad. She had never gone away for a weekend with a man before. She had sensed early on that this was the one—no one had both given her the space she needed and drawn her close when that was what she needed like Chad Huntley had done. He made her feel like a million dollars and like this posting to Amman was a fairy tale—a fairy tale dream she never wanted to wake up from.

She had resisted at first, thinking that both an attraction to and a connection with him were moving too fast. They had only known each other for a couple of months. But her best friend at the embassy, the economic officer, had taken her aside one day and had said, "Why are you ignoring Chad? All of the other women here envy you—and they hate you for seeming to be indifferent to his interest. You do know he's interested in you, don't you, Ally?"

"Not any more interested in me than I in him, Julie," Ally had responded. "But what will everyone think of me going head over heels for him in just a couple of months?"

"This is your first embassy assignment," Julie had said. "You just don't get the culture in the Foreign Service. We act decisively and move fast. The service is full of quick courtships and marriages."

"Oh," Ally had answered. It was only weeks later, though, after Chad and she were already a couple, that Julie added that the culture was just as quick to divorce. But by then Ally was completely lost to Chad.

"You'll be fine," Julie had said. "He's a catch in every way, and even if it doesn't work out, you'll have had fun that most of the other women here would die to enjoy. I've heard he's divine in bed. He may be just what you need."

You don't know half of it, Ally had thought, blushing. She already knew how Chad was in bed—far more of an expert and attentive lover than the fumbling and "all about me" men of her youth. Ally had enough of her mother in her that, having tasted it and finding it stuck somewhere at the intersection of silly and humiliating, she had simply voluntarily done without a man for a decade.

And then there was Chad. Conquering her first with his face pressed into her and his tongue driving her crazy while his strong arms trapped her hips so that she was helpless to his unheeding relentlessness. Then when she was already spent and exhausted, entering her thickly and holding, deep, embracing her so closely, the muscles inside her rippling over the invading, throbbing shaft, that all control was his. Waiting for her to approach the zenith again. Kissing her lips and hair and breast, moving only when, shuddering, she begged for it—and then as vigorous and demanding as any of the young men before him. But lasting longer—longer than her first explosion from him being inside her. Revisiting when she thought there would be no more for him to give. Complete and far more attentive than any of the men of her youth, pulling explosion after explosion after explosion out of her. Still holding her close, nuzzling her nipples, going flaccid inside her, as they both drifted off into an exhausted sleep.

The memory flashed by in an instant. Julie was still speaking, not aware that Ally was trembling.

"The Fulbright program breeds cynicism, Ally," Chad responded to the question that Ally, in her reverie had already forgotten she'd asked, although she felt guilty that she'd just been having sensual thoughts herself that she hadn't shared with Julie, that she had covered with a cynical façade. "You'll see. On paper we are supposed to award scholarships to universities in the States on merit and need—and on the probability that the students will return home and make a big difference in the well-being of their country. But those applying for the scholarships play the system right under our eyes. They try to hide their family wealth in the paperwork and they roll up in Mercedes and BMWs for the interview. They don't try to hide any of it too hard, knowing that what we really want in a Fulbright scholar is someone from influence who is going to return to influence, plus having been Americanized and grateful to Uncle Sam. I can't fault them much. For a student in the Middle East to be competitive for a Fulbright scholarship, money-financed preparation is a given need. I don't think they realize that at home. There aren't too many poor people getting into national universities in the region and also able to do what it takes to stand out above the rich and privileged."

Chad looked up and smiled that radiant smile of his. "I've been prattling, haven't I?"

"Yes, but I love you when you are this intense about something. Your 'serious stuff' look is so cute. And I'm not really that turned off by the process. It's American money; I think we should get a good return on our investment. I think that we need our friends in positions of power worldwide and that this is a constructive way to achieve that—for everyone. I also rather think that they do understand the real dynamic at play back in Washington; they just find it politic to mouth the idealism of the Fulbright foundational documents."

"Ever the hardheaded, practical type, aren't you, Ally?"

"I think it makes us a good team," she answered.

"And I think you're right. But speaking of being practical—and I hate to return to it—but we really must make a decision on where the ceremony is to be. I hear you about your mother's delicate health. I'm perfectly willing to go to Virginia to marry. And I'm anxious to see the mother of the woman I'm going to marry."

Ally turned her head so that Chad couldn't see the expression on her face. Thinking of Chad meeting her mother had been the worst aspect of all of this—and not one she was willing to face before she absolutely had to. She had exaggerated the "delicate health" excuse, unless her mother being generally contemptuous of men qualified.

"I continue to say we do it right here, among the mutual friends we have in the embassy, local, and expatriate community," she countered. "My mother's a recluse in the mountains. I've told you that. It isn't just that her condition is . . . unstable. I don't know how we could even scrape two witnesses together in Virginia. You've never been there, and I haven't been there in years. Not since I went into training for the Foreign Service."

"You make it sound all so mysterious," Chad said. "If I didn't know better, I'd think that you and your mother are estranged. Yet I know you call her occasionally—even from Jordan."

"Yes, we're close enough—from a distance. But she would hate all of the fuss; I know she would. I've talked to her. She wants us to marry here and get all of the pomp and circumstance over with and then visit her, just you and me. That's just the way she is. She was even that way when she was Recevich's secretary with the National Symphony. She was the calm in the storm with everything going on around her—efficiently getting what needed to be done but by being able to get away with pushing around all of the spoiled prima donnas who go along with the musical world."

"Ah, yes, I never can quite fathom that—the childhood you describe of traveling the world with your mother and symphony orchestras, knowing all those famous people and being homeschooled by your mother with the backdrop of all the great cities of the world as your schoolhouse."

"I never knew any other child was having a different kind of life, Chad. I didn't grow up around children."

"And it's why you seem to know everyone in the musical world—which makes you the ideal cultural affairs officer. All to the good."

"Yes, but I sometimes wonder what I missed by not having a normal childhood."

"And so you want to marry a child to see what it was like."

Ally turned and looked at him. He had such an "oh, gosh" lopsided grin on his face, that she had to laugh. "You've been anything but a child with me, you handsome devil. And that too is all to the good." She meant it, of course, but still, she had to admit that it was the carefree, childlike qualities in Chad that had attracted her to him in the first place. She fully realized she was a couple of years older than he was, but he had said that didn't make any difference to him—they even joked about it now. She had come to the diplomatic corps a few years later than most, as she had worked on Broadway for a few years after taking her masters degree.

They made good time back to Amman and each had time to go to their offices in the embassy to check their messages and the work piled on their respective desks before they met again in the embassy car pool to be driven over to Fulbright House. The base for the Fulbright program was in a villa in the quiet residential area of Shmeiseni. Much of the cultural and education program interaction with the Jordanians was conducted in this villa. All of the embassy's cultural and educational activities came under Ally's cultural affairs officer hat.

They kissed and cuddled in the backseat of the embassy car on the way over to the interviews and Chad whispered in Ally's ear what uses they could make of the plush interior of the tinted window sedan if they wanted to be naughty. Ally wanted to be naughty, but she knew they couldn't do so now and here. She knew that Chad was aware of that too. So, she contented herself with watching the exotic scenes of the crowded Arab street beyond the tinted windows of their official air conditioned sedan while fantasizing what she and Chad could be doing—some of which they

had

been doing the previous weekend in the Hadrian's Gate hotel room.

The local administrator of the semiannual Fulbright scholarship interviews ushered Ally to her seat at the head of the interview table, Chad slid into the seat to her left, and the other three official members of the program found seats around them.

The third interviewee who came in was a surprise to her. He was significantly more nervous than the others, had given an exclamation of panic when he almost dropped his briefcase upon entering the room, and seemed distracted and singularly unprepared to talk about his engineering interests during the interview. He placed his briefcase down on the floor at his right side as he sat down at the table facing Ally, but he never opened and delved into the briefcase to respond to any of the questions the interviewers posed to him.

Ally didn't think of any significance there could be to that until more than two weeks later, but she distinctly remembered Chad murmuring as they were waiting for the next candidate to enter the room that the young man obviously wasn't up to the quality of prospective Fulbright scholars they were interviewing, which, he said, surprised him. According to the records on the student, the young man's family was prominent in Jordan and his academic and activities background were stellar. Ally hadn't been able to hear what Chad had said in sotto voce at first, and he'd leaned forward on the table and turned to her so that he could speak without any of the others hearing him.

Thus focused on each other, neither saw the student rise and hurry from the room.

Ally, having never been involved in Fulbright scholarship interviews before, turned into Chad to listen to what he was saying and to query him further on the obviously botched interview when she both heard and felt the explosion and her world evaporated into an intense white-hot light.