He burst out laughing. “So what you’re actually saying is,” he murmured, “that you would prefer if I came, so you don’t have to go fishing.”
“I really do enjoy it,” she said. “I’m just not nuts about it.”
He grinned. “Well, I’m not either, but it would be nice to get back out on the lake.”
“Good,” she said, “it’s a date.”
“If you say so,” he said. “Maybe you want to check with your father first.”
“Nope,” she said, “he’ll be delighted.” She gazed at him thoughtfully. “Honestly he’ll be really delighted. So will my brother.”
“Ah, don’t tell me. He’s trying to make sure that you’re taken care of.”
“I think he’d be happy if I wasn’t alone, put it that way.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“Well, when I was having all those lovely thoughts about having lost my future, as I had hoped it to be,” she said, “I had to wonder again if he wasn’t right. Being alone like that, it’s not the most comfortable place to be in your life.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said, “but I don’t know that we can force a relationship to occur, just because we’re ready for it.”
“No, I don’t think so, but I don’t want to force anything either. I’d like to think it would happen naturally.”
“And it probably would,” he said. “I think it’s just about giving it time. Maybe now that your focus won’t be quite so heavily on your job, maybe there’ll be room for other things.”
She nodded. “I think I agree with that.” She twisted to look across the ocean.
He murmured, “Still hours yet.”
“Are you taking over the driving of the boat?” she asked, pointing up at Jerricho.
He shook his head. “No, Jerricho really loves this,” he said, “so I’m on babysitting duty.” But he said it with such a gentle chuckle that he hoped that she didn’t take offense.
She sank back against him. “He seems nice,” she said, “but I don’t feel the same connection with him.”
“Good,” he said. “He is really nice. He’s a good guy, and he’ll be there and look after you every step of the way.” He added, “And, if anything happens to me, you listen to him. Do you hear me?”
She looked up at him in horror. He shook his head and placed a finger across her lips and said, “I’m not saying something will, but, in this job, we never know, and I want to make sure that you do follow what he tells you to do. Got it?”
She wrinkled up her nose. “I got it, but I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it,” he said smoothly, “you just have to listen to me.”
“Okay, fine,” she said. Then she shot him a look. “You know something? For somebody who doesn’t handle a whole lot of change, this has already been enough for me. I’d like a nice clean, safe ride home.”
“And we’ll get it,” he said, “but now it’s a little bit more of an up-and-down journey.”
“Fast?”
“No, we took speed, … the requirement for speed, out of it,” he said, “once we realized that the airport was closed.”
“Do you think that was connected to us?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It might have been absolutely nothing at all, but it was that little instinctive warning system of mine that wouldn’t let me forget it.”
“Well, I’m okay to be here right now,” she said. She opened her mouth and yawned.
“Sleep if you can,” he urged. “It’ll be a long couple days.”
She winced. “I was actually hoping to have food.”
“Not yet,” he said, “when we get to the ship.”
“Okay,” she said, “maybe I’ll try to sleep.” And she snuggled in deeper.
Diesel shifted, so he could lean back in place, tucked her up a little closer, wrapped his open jacket around her to keep her back from the wind a bit, and just held her. It wasn’t long before her slow even breathing was obvious. He looked up to see Jerricho watching him.
Jerricho nodded at the sleeping beauty in his arms. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s better,” he said. “A little rattled, a little nervous, still dealing with the kidnapping and the scenarios that could have gone wrong. But she’s working on it.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said. “Every time we deal with somebody saved in these missions, the issues are slightly different, yet, in some ways, they’re all the same.”
“Well, it’s a shock and a loss of innocence that everybody has to deal with, one way or another,” he murmured. He kept his voice low to ensure she couldn’t hear him.
“You two seem to be getting along just fine.” Of course Jerricho’s grin was wide and wolfish.
“We are,” Diesel said in a neutral voice.
“I told you.”
“Not too interested in hearing that you told me so,” he said.
“Well, I still think I’m right.”
“Maybe, but we are not going there right now.”
“That works for me too,” Jerricho said. “I’m not seeing any boogeyman around this corner,” he said, “so that’s a good trip so far.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have any. We made enough preparations to slide out quietly.”
“Doesn’t mean that somebody didn’t see our vehicle as we pulled up to the boat.”
“The team should have picked up our vehicle by now,” Diesel said.
“I’m sure it was,” he said. “It still doesn’t change the fact that somebody could have seen us park and get on board.”
“That’s possible. We don’t … she doesn’t have any tracking on her, right?”
“The navy checked for it on the destroyer,” he said, “and nothing was found.”
“The question is whether the Chinese have a technology that we don’t know how to track.”
“I was thinking of that too,” he said. “But, if she ingested something or was injected with something, the farther away we get, it should be more difficult to track her.”
“Agreed, and we are quite a distance now from Shanghai.”
“It would still be easier if we knew.”
“But how to find out?” he said.
“That’s always the problem, isn’t it? How long ago was it planted? How many days now?” he
