Chapter 21 #2
“None at all,” Delia said. “I doubt anyone even noticed I was gone.”
Except maybe nosy Mrs. Gallina, her next-door neighbor. But even if she’d butted in enough to reach out to Delia’s mother to see what was going on with her daughter, she would have only learned that Delia was away on business in Laughlin, and that would have been the end of that.
Business. She supposed that was one way to look at reining in a crazed demon who wanted to open a portal to the underworld.
“Good,” Caleb replied. “Same here.” Another pause, and when he spoke again, something in his tone sounded subtly different, even if Delia couldn’t have said exactly how. “You’re not going to work tomorrow, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “I figured it was probably better to take a mental health day, especially since my mother doesn’t expect me to be in the office until Friday morning.”
“Perfect. Would you be up for a little outing?”
She felt her eyebrows lifting. “I was just going to hang out and relax — ”
“This would be relaxing,” he cut in. “Someplace to go and decompress for the afternoon.”
Come to think of it, a change of scenery might be a good idea. Yes, she’d been in Laughlin for a few days, but it wasn’t as if she’d done any decompressing while she was there.
Pretty much the opposite, really.
“All right,” she said. “As long as it’s not rock climbing or whitewater rafting or something like that. I don’t think I have it in me right now.
He made an amused sound. “No, I don’t expect anything like that from you. But wear something comfortable, maybe some hiking shoes if you’ve got them.”
She did…mostly because Bill Meyers, her ex-fiancé, had loved hiking.
And although she’d appreciated the opportunity to get out of the city and breathe some fresh air — and often go someplace that sat at a higher elevation, where it was much cooler than it was in Las Vegas — on the weekends, she sometimes wanted to just hang out at home and relax.
Well, when she didn’t have an open house to run.
“Where exactly are you taking me, Caleb?” she asked.
“It’s a surprise. But we’re not going too far, I promise. And it’s nothing strenuous.”
Okay, that sounded a little better.
And obviously, she’d much rather spend the day with him than sit around the house watching TV.
“All right,” she said. “What time?”
“Eleven-thirty? I want to make sure you have plenty of time to get all the sleep you need.”
Even though it was past eleven now, Delia knew she’d be up and about long before then. She could have a nice, leisurely morning, and then Caleb could come pick her up and take her…somewhere.
“That works. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow at eleven-thirty.”
“You sleep well, Delia.”
“You too.”
They ended the call there, and she returned the phone to her purse. A moment to pour herself the promised glass of water, and then she slung the purse over her shoulder and headed back to the main suite.
She was going to sleep like the dead tonight.
The idea had come to Caleb as he was driving home the night before.
He didn’t think he’d been imagining things when he’d intercepted some of the glances Delia had sent his way while they were doing their post-mortem in the suite at Harrah’s.
She might have just been through one hell of an ordeal, but at the same time, there had been something almost like hunger in her eyes.
Those were the sorts of looks a woman didn’t send in your direction unless she was ready to be a little more than merely friends.
Unless he’d misinterpreted the whole thing and was just flattering himself.
Still, he needed to know where they stood.
Maybe this was crazy and all he’d accomplish was blowing up the friendship they’d cultivated over the past four or so months, but still, he didn’t want the situation to continue in this uncomfortable liminal state indefinitely.
He wasn’t used to feeling this way, had always been the one women pursued, rather than the other way around.
All right, it had been a little different with Rosemary McGuire when he was in Southern California chasing down the Project Demon Hunters footage, but even then, her interest had been clear from almost the moment they’d met.
Everything had been fine…until her angelic blood recognized the demon in him and she’d recoiled.
So now he was pulling into the driveway of Delia’s house and hoping he wasn’t making a huge mistake.
He got out of the Range Rover and went to the front door. Almost as soon as he rang the bell, she was there, smiling out at him.
“Just let me get my purse,” she said.
She’d taken his advice about her attire to heart, since she was wearing a pair of army green cargo pants, an off-white scoop-neck T-shirt, and some pretty serious-looking brown hiking boots.
Her long red hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and a baseball cap with a hummingbird embroidered on it completed the ensemble.
Caleb wasn’t sure if a purse was the best accessory for where they were going, but he didn’t say anything. She could always leave it in the car if necessary.
“Sure,” he said, and waited while she disappeared somewhere in the house to fetch her bag.
When she came back, though, he saw she wasn’t carrying her usual oversized purse, one that could fit her phone and her tablet and the little case she used for cleansing houses of any unwanted spiritual presences, but had a tiny thing slung bandolier-style across her chest, one made of canvas and looking as if it could fit her cell phone and some credit cards and not much else.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” she asked as she climbed into the passenger seat and then fastened her seatbelt.
“What would be the fun in that?”
She smiled…but she also shook her head, as if she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised by his reply.
And this morning she seemed all business, friendly but neutral, and he wondered if he’d been imagining those loaded glances the night before.
Well, if that turned out to be the case, this would be…interesting.
He backed out of the driveway and made his way through her neighborhood of large, tidy, Mediterranean-style houses until he reached the freeway.
Delia didn’t say much of anything, but when he turned off onto the 157 west toward Mount Charleston, a knowing smile touched her lips, one that seemed to indicate she knew exactly where they were heading.
“You’ve been here before?” he asked, a little surprised. Her footwear seemed to be a clue that she’d done some hiking in her life, but she still didn’t strike him as much of an outdoor person.
“Yes,” she replied, then paused for a second. “My ex-fiancé was into all the outdoorsy stuff, so we hiked pretty much all the places that were within an hour drive of Las Vegas.”
She’d never talked about the man, so Caleb guessed he’d been in the past for a while. Still….
“The guy who left the UNLV sweats behind?” he asked, mentioning the clothes she’d given him to wear after he’d been attacked by demons at his old house.
Her expression now seemed a little startled, as if she was surprised he’d even cared about that one small detail.
“Yeah, him. We got engaged about two years ago — he worked at one of the title companies we sometimes did business with. But after that, every time I tried to sit down with him and plan the wedding, he found some excuse for why it wasn’t the right time.
About a year after we announced our engagement, he broke it off. ”
Clearly, her ex-fiancé was an utter moron.
“I’m sorry,” Caleb said, doing his best to sound neutral.
“Don’t be,” she replied, and her mouth lifted a little at the corners. “Better that he figured it out then and not after we got married. We would never have been compatible in the long run. Also, he hated Las Vegas. Last I heard, he’d moved to Reno.”
Caleb wasn’t sure if that was much of an improvement, but if the guy wasn’t a desert sort of person, then Vegas definitely wouldn’t have been the right place for him.
“Anyway,” she continued, “he loved to hike, and I went with him when I could. I’ll admit it was nice to get out of the city and see some actual nature, even though I was never going to be the rock-climbing type.”
“No rocks today,” Caleb promised her. “Just…a picnic lunch.”
He’d gone to a deli by his house and gotten a nice spread of meats and cheeses, and then picked up some fruit at Sprouts. And even though the day-use area at Kyle Canyon was supposed to be dry, he’d brought along a bottle of pinot noir, figuring what the park rangers didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.
“That sounds good.”
They fell silent as he guided the Range Rover along the sometimes twisting highway. Already the landscape around them had changed dramatically, dry desert scrub giving way to junipers and ponderosa pines, the sky above somehow much bluer and clearer than it was back in Las Vegas.
Up ahead to the left was one of the familiar brown and tan Forest Service signs signaling the turn-off to the day-use area, so Caleb guided the SUV there.
On this particular Thursday morning, a few cars were parked in the lot, but he guessed the people they belonged to had probably headed off to hike the Acastus trail, which began not too far from their destination, and wouldn’t be anywhere near the picnic areas.
At least, he hoped he and Delia would have the place to themselves. This wasn’t the sort of conversation where he wanted an audience.
He parked as close to the exit that led to the picnic areas as he could, then turned off the engine. “I have to get a couple of things out of the back,” he told her as he unbuckled his seatbelt.
“Need any help?”
There wasn’t that much, just a picnic basket and one of those hard-case totes that had storage space for a wine bottle and a couple of wine glasses. “No, I’m good,” he said. “You can wait by the entrance.”