Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Before heading to the airport, they picked up Tom so he’d be able to drive the Jeep home, and the three of them rode off into the night in comfortable silence.
At the airstrip, Tom got out, took a long inhale. “Smoke’s down already.” He came around and took Lyndie’s hands. His wizened face creased into an easy smile, his long ponytail of silver hair gleaming in the moonlight. “Thank you.”
“For what? Using up all the gas in your Jeep?”
“For lots of things. For not taking Nina.”
She knew how much Tom still loved this old village as if he’d been born here, knew how he thought everyone loved it as much as he did. “I didn’t want her to run away from here because she’s getting antsy,” she said. “I wanted her to work it out with you.”
“She’s going to stay.”
“Tom.” She shook her head, cupped his jaw.
“We all know, you’re meant to be here. You love the slower, laid-back lifestyle, the isolation, the wilderness…
but it’s not for everyone. There’s not much available to Nina.
She’s young, she wants to get out, she wants excitement, she wants to spread her wings. ”
“I just want her to spread those wings close to me.”
“Yeah, well, she has other ideas, and my not taking her isn’t going to stop her.”
“What could she possibly want that’s not right here?” he asked, baffled, lifting his hand and gesturing around him in the dark night to the mountains, the quaint town they couldn’t see…everything.
Lyndie lifted a shoulder. “She might not know until she finds it. You had to go find it, remember?”
Tom let out a sad smile. “You know, she said the same damn thing. And I’m still not ready to hear it.” Turning away, he reached into the back of the Jeep to help Griffin with his bags.
Lyndie left them there to go see to her plane. She’d paid Julio to fuel her up and watch over her favorite piece of steel on earth. She’d added his favorite bottle of booze to guarantee he’d done just that.
He must have liked the booze, because he’d also washed the plane until the white wings gleamed.
“Hey, baby.” She patted the bottom of the wing as she opened the door.
She didn’t like that the plane hadn’t been locked up, and would mention it to Julio, but since there wasn’t anyone around who could pilot it out of here anyway, she supposed there wasn’t much to worry about.
She climbed in and looked with pleasure at the clean floor, the shiny windows. At the pilot’s seat…and the small ball of fluff curled up there.
“You take.”
Lyndie turned and found Julio looking at her from beneath his low cap.
In his dark, dark bloodshot eyes was an expectant expression.
She laughed, at both the expectation and the way he insisted on using broken English simply because he liked the language.
“No. No way. Even if I had more booze for you, I’m not taking a damn cat. ”
He got the gist of that statement whether he understood every word or not. No was no in both their languages. So was the emphatic shake of her head that she added.
Julio merely lifted a shoulder and walked slowly away, vanishing into the night.
Without taking the kitten.
“Hey!” she called out to him. “Come back here, I can’t just take this flea-ball—”
“Mew.”
She let out a long breath and stared at the thing. It was all white except for a black spot on its nose and one ear. Well, not white exactly, more like the color of a white T-shirt freshly washed with a dark sock. “Shoo.”
The kitten blinked the bluest eyes she’d ever seen—with the exception of one Griffin Moore—and didn’t budge.
“Shoo,” she repeated, and added a little wave of her hand.
The tiny kitten hunched into the furthest corner of the seat, looking terrified even as it hissed at her.
Ah, hell. “Look, I’m not the bad guy here. I just don’t take stowaways.”
Griffin climbed aboard. “What’s this? Yours?”
“Nope.” Hands on her hips, she stared at the kitten, who was beginning to resemble a pain in her ass. “I’ve got to give this thing back to Julio before we go.”
“He just left in the oldest truck on the planet.”
“Then Tom can take it—” Scooping up the kitten, she jumped out of the plane and strode toward the Jeep. Tom was leaning against it, and when he saw her, he straightened.
“Lyndie, have I told you that you were a godsend this weekend?”
“I was. And now you owe me. I need you to take this kitten—”
“Whoa—” Tom lifted both his hands and flattened himself against the Jeep. “Allergic. Deathly allergic.”
“You are kidding me.”
He sneezed dramatically, then three more times in quick succession.
“Okay, okay,” she muttered, pulling the kitten back against her. “Damn it.”
Tom sneezed once more, then slid into his Jeep. “Sorry. See you next week, with that dentist for the kids, right?”
“Right.” She stared down at the kitten.
The kitten with the laser-beam eyes stared right back.
Tom roared off into the night, and she sighed. “I don’t like cats.”
The kitten showed her tiny teeth and hissed again. For added measure, the little thing displayed its brand-spanking-new and needlelike claws, right before she dug them into Lyndie’s chest.
“Hey!” She tried to pry the thing loose but the kitten had quite a grip on her tank top and didn’t appear to have any inclination to let go.
She pulled harder, and beneath her fingers, she could feel the ribs of the kitten, which went a long way toward squelching her urge to toss it into the air.
“You’re starving,” she said, and felt her heart sink.
“You’re not going to leave it here, are you?”
She stared into those light blue feline eyes and then turned to look into another pair of blue eyes, these filled with complicated human emotions she didn’t know what to do with. “But how can I just take it?”
“I don’t know.” Griffin stroked the kitten beneath its chin. “But it’s going to be interesting to watch you decide, either way.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you, Lyndie Anderson, have a little commitment issue.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He looked amused. “Are you telling me you’re not reserved to an extreme? That you don’t like to pretend you have no one in your life, when in fact you’re close to—and loved—by several people that I know of?”
Rolling her eyes, Lyndie brushed past Griffin and got into the plane. She set the kitten down on a seat, and was hissed at again for her trouble. “Okay, listen up,” she told it. “I’m the boss here. Rip those seats with your claws and you’re Dead Kitty Walking.”
“That’s so adorable,” Griffin said. “You’re bonding already.”
“Shut up.”
With a grin, he brushed against her back as he came closer. For a beat he settled his big hands on her shoulders, his mouth at her ear. “I love it when you sweet talk.”
At his touch, she shivered, but kept staring at the cat. “It’s half starving, you know.”
“Yes.”
“It’s just begging to be eaten by some nosy coyote the moment I take off.”
“If you were going to leave it here, yes.”
“Fine.” She tossed up her hands. “It can come. But don’t tell Nina, she’ll be even more pissed I said no to her and yes to this fleabag.”
“Ah. Too many strings on your heart.” He nodded. “That’s what you’re worried about. You might have to talk, laugh, have a good time, even…open up.”
“I laugh plenty, not that it’s any of your business. And I don’t know what you’re griping about, I’m taking you, aren’t I?”
“You’re getting paid to take me.”
She stared at him. “You make it sound so…so mercenary.”
“No, you do that all on your own.”
His eyes were fathomless now, revealing nothing, and that he could do that at all made her mad, made her want to reach him, want to know what he was thinking. “Yes, this is my job. Some of us don’t have the luxury of not working for an entire year,” she said.
Turning away at that, he scooped up the kitten she’d dumped. “We’d better go.”
Right. She started to pass him but he was holding the silly little kitten against his big body, stroking it until the thing had closed its eyes in ecstasy, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“What?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re thinking something.”
Yeah, she was thinking. She was thinking a lot of things, starting with the fact that he did something to her insides.
In fact, he turned her inside out.
Deciding that was a bad thing, she plopped into her seat, slammed on her headphones, and sent him a cool glance. “I was thinking this is where I come on and say ‘have a nice flight.’”
“It is going to be nice, isn’t it?”
At the slight unease in his voice, she smiled grimly. “Nervous?”
“When you smile like that, hell yeah. Who taught you to fly?”
“My grandfather. Army lifer. He taught me everything I know.”
“Is that why you’re such a softie?”
Her smile widened. “You know it. I’m a living example of what happens when a girl gets raised by a tough officer.”
He didn’t smile back. “What happened to the rest of your family, Lyndie?”
She shrugged. “My parents died when I was four. My grandfather took me on. And flying was how we bonded. Do check your seat belt. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
“Lyndie—”
“Just going over procedure.”
“You’re trying to avoid talking serious.”
“Yep.”
“All right.” He looked at her for a long moment. “How about we forget procedure and I come over there and kiss you stupid?”
She laughed. “What?”
“Because you’re always really nice to me after I kiss you stupid.”
“You have never kissed me stupid.”
He lifted a brow.
“You haven’t.”
“Is that a dare?”
“No.” God, no. “Look, Ace, no one…kisses me like that.”
“No one?”
“No one.”
She ignored his knowing expression and submitted a flight plan and confirmed they were allowed to land at the port of entry before she began her takeoff.
Always she’d been able to clear her mind, but now she found herself thinking about what he’d just said.
About how good his mouth was, how he could indeed render her idiotic with just a kiss.
Damn him.
“Lyndie—”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it.” Shifting in her seat a little, the silent sexual current between them making her itchy, she told herself it was all in her imagination.
She told herself that every time she glimpsed at him during the flight; every time he sent her one of those Griffin Moore looks, making her itch all over again.