Page 10 of Guilty as Sin
“I’m a cop.”
She should have lied, but watching his expression change was pretty special. You took your entertainment where you could get it.
Six hours later, she walked out of Kalispell baggage claim wheeling not one, but two suitcases—Lily’s version of traveling light—and started looking for a fiery-red Honda SUV.
Lily had said, “It’s in long-term parking. Kind of at the back.”
“Where?” Paige had asked. “Ten o’clock? Two o’clock?”
“What?”
Paige had moved her arm in a semicircle. “Clock face as you’re coming into the lot from the terminal. It’s going to be somewhere between nine and three, because those are what’s ahead of you. So—which?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t come into the lot from the terminal. I came in from theentrance.At the back. All right—maybe ten, or eleven, or twelve. Or one or two. I walk around and look for it and press the button on my key. I go with the flow.”
“That’s how people get washed away in floods. And ‘walking around looking for it’ makes you a target. You need to walk with purpose. Eyes up.”
“Uh, Paige. It’s Montana. We have grizzlies, not gangs.”
In fact, despite the fact that she’d apparently entered The Land of the Red SUV, Paige walked straight to the car. She took a diagonal toward the left, and there it was. Which wasn’t twinship—how could she possibly have known where Lily had left it?—just two people with some thought patterns in common. And Lily was right about one thing. The Kalispell Airport wasn’t exactly LAX.
Paige pulled out of the lot, breathed a few times, and thought,Fancy underwear. Country living. Fresh air. No killer bees. You can do this.Then she headed for the mountains.
On Saturday morning, Jace took a steeper route up the mountain. His body was in sync with his mind again, which was good news. Time to push it, to move at the extreme limit of his control, keeping his steps deliberate all the same, just this side of too far. If the past couple days had showed him anything, it had been that he didn’t want to lose his edge.
Or maybe they’d shown him that he needed to be where he was, to be out of the game. He didn’t want to say that living a regular life was flat. He didn’t want to think it.
Well, maybe just a bit. Maybe so.
You could bungee jump, of course. You could skydive. But when your last jump had been into a hot zone, drifting down, much too exposed, into hostile territory under cover of darkness—well, the watered-down version didn’t really cut it. It would be like going to the Renaissance Faire aged thirty-five, fencing with your carefully blunted sword and shouting things like, “Die, scurvy knave!” while you kept an eye out in case a pretty girl noticed. Not quite the same.
On the other hand, needing to fight—and possibly to kill—in order to feel alive was a dark place to be. That was also true.
He was on his way back down the mountain now, his long legs eating up the ground. Just past the shuttered ski lodge, he saw the sign.
Coming Soon
Sinful Mountain Cross Country Ski Resort
Was that a done deal, then? He’d heard that a good-sized section of Forest Service land was up for lease to the development company, but he hadn’t heard that it had happened. He gave a mental shrug and kept going. He was far enough down the mountain for that not to affect him, other than that once it happened, winter would bring more traffic and more crowds, and before it happened, he’d see a lot more construction. He was antisocial enough to avoid the crowds.
He was flying now, past a couple empty ski cabins to left and right, his mind clicking over in the way it was supposed to do, homing in on that one ambush scene halfway through the book.
Something wrong there, because he’d rushed it. He needed to draw out the suspense more. To let the reader feel, to lethimselffeel, the hair literally rising at the back of his neck, because he saw and heard and smelled what a civilian wouldn’t, and he paid attention.
He was still rewriting in his head when he heard the commotion. Animal noise, and heaps of it, like a barnyard was revolting. Tobias started to bark, adding his voice to the mix, until Jace snapped, “Quiet.” The dog subsided, but Jace could still see the tension in him. What the hell? He ran faster.
The two of them rounded the bend in the road, and he saw the woman.
The blonde. His closest neighbor, the one who lived just up the mountain from him.
She wasn’t in her garden this morning, even though he’d have expected to see her there as usual, maybe trimming the lavender bushes that were exuberantly attempting to overhang the winding brick walk to the front porch of her storybook-perfect cottage. Or maybe doing… something, whatever a person did, to the giant pink flowers that were bent over on their stems by their own weight like drunken sailors.
Yeah. Normally, she’d be doing something garden-appropriate outdoors, and he’d nod at her, notice once again that she was pretty, wonder how many lacy items of clothing she actually owned and why he wasn’t stopping to find out, and know why.
It was that edge. That last step before the darkness, when you were flirting with going too far. He wasn’t saying it was a good thing to need, but it had to be there, or his feet didn’t stop.
She was too perfect. Even her perfect house made him itchy. She was too good for him, or he was too bad for her, and his feet knew it.
