Page 60 of Harrison Hyde and the Runaway Bride

“I’ll steer left-handed.”

He drove from the private air strip onto the nearest road, and then he stopped and looked at the GPS to figure out where they were, and to enter his dad’s address.

“You don’t want to go to your sister’s first?” Maria asked.

“I do,” he said. “I want to check things out, but then I figured, if whoever is after me already knows about her, they might be watching her place. Even if they already took her?—”

“Don’t think that,” she said quickly. “But I think you’re right. If someoneiswatching, they could follow us straight to your dad’s. Good call.”

He nodded and drove faster once they were on the road. They had a twenty-five-minute drive. And he ought to say something about what had happened between them, right?

He rolled his eyes at his inner turmoil. “That was some airplane, right?”

“Whoneedssomething like that?” she asked.

“Well, today, we did.”

“I s’pose that’s a solid point.” She made a face, and said, “I wish I’d taken a few snacks from the galley for the road.”

“Dad always has food, and he gets his feelings hurt if people don’t eat. He was a short order cook for twenty years, before he took over as manager of the same diner. But he wanted to be a real chef and started taking classes late in life. He even spent a month training in Paris while I was still an undergrad.”

“That’s amazing,” she said.

“He was always putting some experimental new dish on the menu, only to have his heart broken when the locals just wanted their burgers and fries.” He shook a finger her way. “But he didn’t give up. He had to go slow. Keep all the stuff they were used to on the menu, and just introduce one new dish every couple of weeks. The ones that worked, he would keep in the rotation, the ones that didn’t, he’d leave out. By the time he soldthe place and retired, he had twenty-one different dishes taking turns on the menu.”

“He found a way,” Maria said.

“He still loves to cook.” Harrison thought it was a good start at conversation. He should keep it going. “So, about what happened?—”

“I chose to make love with you, Harry. It didn’t come with strings.”

“I know. I just want you to know that it… it meant something to me.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. This was going well.

“What?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“You said it meant something to you. So, what did it mean?”

“I…” He looked across at her, then back at the road. “I don’t know, it just meant something.”

She nodded, heaved a sigh. “It meant somethin’ to me, too,” she said.

He had the feeling that if he asked her “What?” she’d have a well-thought out and compelling answer. So he didn’t ask her.

Instead, he glanced at the in-dash system and said, “Want to try to find us some music?”

She did, hitting the voice control, and saying, “Contemporary Country.”

A smooth female twang came from the speakers with a catchy guitar riff behind it. It wasn’t what he would have picked, but he liked it.

It kind of made him want to put that cowboy hat back on.

There was a security gate, with a round, smiling guard in a booth at the entrance to the apartment complex. He wore navy-blue trousers with an impressive crease, shiny black shoes, a white button-down shirt. Harry showed his ID, and Maria handed hers over, too. The guard checked them against their faces, handed them back, then walked away while speaking on a walkie-talkie. All Maria could hear was murmurs and static. He returned to his booth, hit a button, and the gate opened. Harry drove them through.

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