"Why didn't you get married?" Selena asked.
He took a breath. "She died."
"I'm sorry."
"It's all right. Anyway, I haven't been involved with anyone since then."
The plane lifted into the air.
They'd gotten to the airport in plenty of time. They were both flying out, Megan to San Diego, Nick back to the East Coast.
They'd killed time in one of the airport cafes until she had to go. Nick had watched her enter the gangway to board her plane. She'd turned and smiled, waved at him, and disappeared in the stream of passengers.
He'd stood by one of the big windows looking out over the runways, waiting to see her plane take off.
In a few minutes he'd seen it. The plane picked up speed down the runway, lifted into the air, the wheels coming up. He was about to turn away when the aircraft made a strange motion, the wings dipping unevenly right and then left, the nose angling downward.
Fingers of ice wrapped around his chest.
Then the right wing turned straight down. The plane arced into the ground and exploded in a billowing fireball. The shock wave slammed against the window and shook the terminal. At the end of the runway a dense column of orange flame and black smoke boiled up into an indifferent sky.
Megan.
He shoved the memories back into their dark box.
"Have you ever been married?" he said.
"No. I was close, once. I thought I was in love. We'd had dinner and a few drinks and then we got into a big fight. I forget what it was about, some stupid thing. He hit me. It made me mad. I broke his nose, kicked him where it hurts and walked out."
"You broke his nose?"
"He asked for it. I'm good at martial arts."
She shrugged, as if to say what else could she have done?
"Since then I haven't met anyone I wanted to know better. Men are attracted by the way I look. When they find out who I am and don't get what they want, they back off. I guess I scare them away."
"Too much competition for the male ego?"
"If it is, that's not my problem."
She shifted gears. "How would those men yesterday know where I was?"
"It's not hard. You're high profile."
"Do you think they'll try again?"
"They might. Until this gets resolved you should always have people around you. Right now all you've got is me."
"That was good enough yesterday."
She looked out the window, pulled a box from under the seat.
"Hungry?"
After lunch and the mimosas, he was slowing down. He fell asleep. One thing he'd learned in the Corps was how to fall asleep anywhere. Asleep, he wasn't remembering anything, unless he was dreaming.
Chapter Ten
Selena looked over at the man sleeping next to her.
Who is he, she wondered. They let him take his gun right on the plane. He's some kind of spy or something. He lost half an ear and killed five people and never blinked an eye. All I know about him is he's got a mother and a sister, had a jerk for a father and he probably saved my life yesterday.
His fiancé died. He didn't say how. Maybe that explains the wariness I feel in him. Like he's waiting for something bad to happen. Like he thinks something is going to jump out at him.
She watched Nick twitch in his sleep.
Black hair, strong jaw, he's already got a trace of shadow. He's not handsome, but he's not bad either. Black eyebrows. And he's got those odd eyes. I've never seen eyes like that, like some kind of animal, a big cat or a wolf. He's built, but not like one of those body freaks in the gyms. I wonder how he is in bed?
Sudden heat and moisture between her legs took her by surprise. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had that thought about someone.
She shook her head. No way was she getting in bed with him. She felt too vulnerable to deal with the intimacy sex would bring up. Besides, this man was dangerous.
Selena looked out the window at a layer of white cloud passing below. She thought about her uncle and her parents.
She could remember her parents, but she couldn't quite remember their voices. The day everything changed, she'd been playing by the window at home. She wasn't supposed to. She was sick and supposed to stay in bed while her brother and her mother and father headed down Highway One toward Big Sur.
When her Uncle came into the room she'd known something bad had happened. He'd started to tell her but she wouldn't listen, drowning his words with a song she'd learned in school the week before.
The engines droned outside her window. I should have been with them in the car, she thought. If I'd been there it would have been all right. We would have stopped somewhere, to get something to eat or so I could go to the bathroom or something. Then they wouldn't have been there when the truck came around that curve.
Her fault.
She'd buried the guilt and armored herself against the world. She knew she'd done it, she wasn't unaware. Be the best in everything. Sports, dangerous hobbies, martial arts, academics. All that success, all her training, hadn't prepared her for this. She wasn't in control anymore. She couldn't make things work the way she wanted.
It scared her, and that was something new. She didn't like it.
She took a few deep breaths and glanced again at Nick. This man doesn't scare, she thought. Maybe he'll make it right, if anyone can.
Chapter Eleven
Carter watched the crowd as they walked through the airport terminal. Nothing seemed out of place. Nobody paying any attention. The shuttle dropped them in the lot and they walked over to his Silverado. A light coating of dust lay on the windshield.
He opened the door for her. "Climb in. Not like your Merc, but it's pretty comfortable."
He took them out of the airport onto I-5, then moved onto 99 North and headed for the Sierra foothills. It was a classic June California afternoon, clear and in the eighties.
"Tell me about where we're going."
"Connorsville," she said. "In Gold Rush days it had saloons, hotels, fifty bordellos and five thousand miners and Chinese living in shacks and tents."
"The Chinese again."
"They did the heavy work. There are stories that they dug secret tunnels leading away from Connorsville and the mine. They did that in Marysville and Sacramento. We never found any, though. My uncle always warned me not to go into the mine. It's not safe."
She looked out the window. "My uncle had a metal detector. We'd walk around where the town used to be and find all sorts of things. It was fun."
"Did you find gold?"
"A coin and a couple of nuggets. One was almost as big as my hand."
At Marysville they picked up Highway 20 and turned east, past flat, green rice fields and wide pastures spotted with cattle. A flight of white herons exploded into the air from one of the ponds alongside the road.
After a while, they crossed the Yuba River. A few minutes later Selena pointed ahead.
"The turnoff is up there on the left. The bridge looks bad, but it's safe to drive over. Just go slow."
He turned onto a short stretch of rough pavement and across the bridge. It looked like it was ready to collapse. Signs warned off trucks and trespassers. They bumped across and followed a gravel road in. On the right a tall, brick chimney rose from the weeds and brush, a ghost from California's golden past.
"Is that what's left of the town?"
"That was the Wells Fargo building. Follow the road down, over there."
The ground sloped away through a field of tall grass dotted with blue oaks. In the spring it would be green as Ireland, ablaze with orange poppies and wildflowers in white and yellow and purple. Now, as the heat of summer built, the flowers were gone. The grass was turning golden brown and dry.