Kincaid’s Dangerous Game

the little airplane’s engines caught and the seat beneath her began to vibrate, as Tony donned headphones and muttered into a radio microphone, inside her chest she quivered with excitement and apprehension and anticipation, and something that felt-impossibly-like joy.

At the same moment, on the floor behind her seat, strapped uncomfortably to the wall of the passenger compartment, Holt was wishing he’d never gotten Billie to take off her sunglasses. Those eyes of hers…he’d never seen anything quite like them. And as the Piper Cherokee shot down the runway and lifted into the cloudless Nevada sky, he knew the hollow feeling in his stomach had nothing to do with the abrupt change in altitude.

No use kidding himself-it wouldn’t change the fact that the unthinkable had happened. He was in grave danger of falling in love with his client’s baby sister. Falling in love with a woman with two names and more complications than anybody he’d ever met. A woman he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to completely understand. How was that even possible?

Not that he knew much about it-falling in love-from personal experience, anyway. It hadn’t ever happened to him before, and he’d come to believe, with pretty much equal parts regret and relief, that it never would.

Right now, with his backside growing numb from its contact with the floor of a vintage Piper Cherokee, he couldn’t even recall exactly when it had happened. Looking back, it almost seemed as if it had been that very first moment, when he’d first caught a glimpse of her face on his TV screen, half hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and there’d been that electric shiver across his skin. He’d been carrying her picture around in his pocket for weeks, but the sense of recognition was more than that.

But he doubted that was true. It only seemed like he’d known her, or at least had been looking for her, all his life.

Fanciful stuff, and he was not a fanciful man. Nor did he believe in things like fate and destiny. No, he told himself, this was just biology, a simple matter of chemistry, which was maybe even harder to explain.

With her face pressed against the side-window glass, Billie watched the strangely colorful desert terrain give way to the curving avenues of Reno’s suburbs. She’s down there…somewhere, she thought. Hannah Grace. My daughter.

Why did I ever ask him to find her? What was I thinking?

Why don’t I feel anything?

It was as if her subconscious mind had thrown up a firewall around her emotions. Self-preservation?

But I want to feel something. I should feel something…shouldn’t I? What’s wrong with me? I’m going to see my child. My baby. She was a part of me, and I gave her away. And I can’t feel anything!

She could remember feeling. She remembered that day…remembered the awfulness of it. But it was only a memory of pain, not the feeling of it.

“She had dark hair,” she said, and was vaguely surprised to discover she’d spoken aloud. Tony looked over at her, and his warm-whiskey eyes were hidden behind aviator’s sunglasses. “I remember being surprised by that,” she told him, not really knowing why she did. “That she could have dark hair, you know? Because I don’t.”

“Lots of babies have dark hair when they’re born,” Tony said. “Then it falls out and grows in a whole different color. So you can’t tell anything by that. She could have blond hair now. You never know.”

She gave a laugh that hurt, then drew a shaky breath. After a moment she looked over at him and said, “You sound like you know a lot about babies. Do you have kids?”

He shook his head, but smiled. “Not yet. I’ve just got a whole bunch of sisters with kids-lotsa nieces and nephews. I’m planning to, though.” And his smile seemed to glow with warmth and promises and secret intimacies.

“So you’re married?” Billie asked, wondering why the smile of a man so obviously in love should make her feel wistful.

Tony chuckled, a sound that matched his smile. “Not yet. Planning to be, though.”

She drew another uneven breath and forced a smile. “She must be somebody special,” she murmured, wishing it didn’t sound so trite when she meant it with all her heart.

She wondered why he laughed, then, as if he knew a delicious secret.

The airfield north of Reno was much larger than the dirt airstrip in the desert near Las Vegas. Since it had once been an air force base and now served as home to the air tankers used in fighting forest fires in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, its runways were long, wide and smooth-a factor for which Holt’s backside gave thanks. Tony guided the Cherokee to a flawless landing, then taxied onto the expanse of tarmac where they were to park. Before leaving Las Vegas, Holt had called and arranged for a taxi to meet them, and he could see it waiting for them in the parking lot next to the airport office building.

Tony cut the engine and turned to give Billie a thumbs-up and a smile. “See? Told you I’d get you here.”

Holt managed to get himself straightened out and limbered up enough to open the door and exit the plane first, Tony being occupied with the unknown details involved in concluding a flight and buttoning down his aircraft. While Billie was slowly unbuckling herself from her seat harness, he gingerly stretched his legs and aching back, then turned to give her a hand climbing down, if she needed it.

But she was still crouched in the doorway of the plane, poised as if for a leap off a high diving board, and her face was bleached to the color of desert sand.

“Airsick?” he said gently, even though the gnawing sensation in the pit of his own stomach told him that wasn’t her problem, not by a long shot. He held out his hand to her and added, “You’ll feel better once your feet are on the ground.”

She gave him a withering look as she crept onto the wing, then hopped, with a nimbleness he envied, to the ground. “I’ve changed my mind,” she announced, glaring at a point somewhere off to his right. “This is stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. Take me home.”

Her teeth were chattering. Holt took the jacket she was carrying folded over one arm and, while she transferred her glare to his face, slipped it around her shoulders. Her eyes seemed too big, too fiery for such a small, pixieish face, as if the heat and turmoil that fed them was trying to consume her from the inside out. He wanted so badly to take her face in his hands, hold it, protect it like some fragile, delicate blossom, soothe the burning with his kisses. He could barely contain himself, she touched him so.

“You’ll be fine,” he said in what he’d meant to be a murmur but sounded instead like a growl. To emphasize his words, he tugged the two sides of her jacket he was holding, giving her a little shake. Her sunglasses slipped out of one of the jacket pockets and fell onto the tarmac. He bent down and picked them up, unfolded and slid them onto her face. It was like closing a door on a roaring furnace.

He couldn’t resist stroking the spikey feathers of her hair behind her ears as he settled the earpieces in place, and his voice held more gravel as he said, “Better now?”

The lenses held steady for a long moment, and then she gave him the ghost of a smile. He let out a silent breath and hooked his arm around her shoulders, and as he did he cast one quick look back at Tony Whitehall, crouched in the doorway of the Piper Cherokee, giving him the thumbs-up sign.

She didn’t speak a word on the twenty-minute ride into Reno, just kept looking out of the window of the cab, keeping her face turned away from him.

When they turned into the residential neighborhood of curving streets and stucco houses of the northwest part of the city, Holt said in tentative encouragement, “Looks nice-nice trees…nice houses.”

She nodded but didn’t reply or look at him.

“Nice place to raise a kid,” he offered, and she didn’t reply to that, either.

He checked his watch, then leaned forward to tap on the cab driver’s shoulder. “This is okay-pull over right here.”

“You sure? The address you gave me is a couple houses farther on down.”

“Yeah, I know. This is fine. Might be a few minutes…keep the meter running.” He’d explained their mission to the cabbie before they’d left the airport, not wanting to alarm him when they might appear to be stalking a child.

“No problem,” the cabbie drawled as he pulled in to the curb and shifted into park. “Long as you’re payin’ me, I got all day.”

Around them the neighborhood was stirring to life. Cars pulled into and out of driveways and came and went along the street. Two boys on bicycles whizzed by the waiting cab; children’s voices mingled with the slap of running footsteps on sidewalks and pavement. Doors slammed.