Page 29 of Gryphon

Taz answered. Yes, definitely stay with Miranda for a couple days if you want. I’m fine. Other than losing my mind.

??

No one warns you how your world goes completely sideways when you become Mom. I have no brain for anything beyond Child. I’ll be dead or a certified nutcase before maternity leave ends.

Jeremy had sent back a laughing face.

He had to puzzle over the emoji she sent back: gritted teeth, red cheeks, and steam shooting out its ears.

Thought you were making a joke. I was laughing WITH you.

Wasn’t!

He decided that his best tactic was a thoughtful silence for a response.

How are the others? Taz finally answered.

The plan had worked. Then he sent a short version of Holly nearly stabbing a Swedish Air Force major in a hotel restaurant along with a line of laughing smiley faces. Yet as he’d described things, he realized that something weird was going on between Mike and Holly though he couldn’t be sure what. Neither one is talking much.

Not even to each other???!?!

She was right. Mike chatted easily with anyone, but Holly rarely did more than tease anyone other than Mike. He was the only one she usually spoke to in any consistent fashion. And sometimes Miranda. But Miranda emerged from her noise-canceling headphones so rarely of late that there wasn’t much talking around her. Nope. Weird, huh?

Not weird, just totally them. Tell Holly I’ll kick her ass if she doesn’t just come to a stop and talk to Mike.

But there’s a crash.

Don’t care. Jeremy, seriously, don’t let the two of them off the plane until they’ve spoken. Oh crap! She sent a crying-baby emoji and didn’t respond again.

Make them talk? How was he supposed to do that?

24

“You all, uh, go ahead. There’s something that, you know, I need to kinda ask Mike and Holly.” Jeremy waved the others off the plane.

Mike would rather be dipped in boiling oil.

Holly didn’t look ready to be a-waltzing Matilda anytime soon either.

But since it was not a typical Jeremy-style request, he was usually more likely to just blurt out whatever entered his brain, this had to be important.

“Just a sec,” Jeremy held up a hand when it was only the three of them aboard: Holly in her sideways seat, Mike twisted around in the copilot’s seat, and Jeremy in the doorway. A chill wind sliced in through the jet’s open door. He hustled down the steps, then folded the door up to close it in their faces. The latch thunked home, sealing them in the plane together.

“What’s he doing now?” Holly asked.

Through the windscreens, Mike watch Jeremy circle around the nose and race toward the main building without looking back. “He’s hurrying after the others like his tail’s on fire.”

Holly slouched in the seat, once again stretching her legs sideways across the aisle. “What’s he doing that for?”

Mike rose, then felt like a mountain troll standing at the gap between the pilots’ seats. The ceiling of the Citation M2 was under five feet. “He’s… Aw, hell.”

Holly looked at him askance for swearing.

“A buck gets you twenty that this is his way of saying we need to talk.”

“You and me?” Holly looked up at him in utter disgust.

“No, Tad Jobson and a freaking lamppost. Yes, us.”

---