Wild Hawk (25 page)

“And your mother.”

He went very still. “What about my mother?”

“How much he loved her.”

She waited, braced for the inevitable denial. It didn’t come. No words did. She risked a glance at him, but his face was unreadable in the distorted shadows cast by the interior light of the car and the brighter streetlight behind him. But he hadn’t thrown it back at her this time. Was it possible? Had he really begun to . . . perhaps not to believe, but to at least consider the possibility?

“He told me on the day before he died,” she said, unable to pass up this chance, “how blind he’d been not to see that the price he would pay for maintaining his world was the only thing in it he loved. And that its loss had made the rest a hollow, desolate thing.”

Jason still said nothing, still didn’t move, just stayed crouched there beside the car, looking at her.

“You hoped he died hard, Jason. Well, he did. And that was the hardest part. He died knowing he’d thrown away the one thing that would have made all the difference. The one thing that would have made it all worth it. And in the end, he would have given it all away for the chance to tell your mother how sorry he was.”

“He was twenty years too late.”

Hope soared in Kendall. The words, the first he’d spoken, were typically Jason, harsh, caustic, but his voice hadn’t held the bitter tone she’d always heard when he spoke of his father.

“Aaron lost his Beth,” Kendall said softly, “and he didn’t live long enough to make things right for you. But I swear to you, Jason, if he had . . . if he had lived until we’d found you, he would have—”

“Not now.”

“I know you don’t want to hear that he—”

“Not now, Kendall. We have a bus to catch.”

She blinked, taken completely aback. “What?”

“We have a bus to catch. Grab everything out of the car and come on.”

“A . . . bus?”

Even as she said it, she heard the familiar sound of a big engine slowing to a stop and caught a whiff of the very recognizable diesel smell. She looked out to the street in time to see the huge vehicle halting at the curb. Automatically she lifted her gaze to the route sign atop the front windows. She blinked again, wondering if somehow Jason’s effect on her had slowed her thinking as it had speeded up everything else.

“We’re going to the airport?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’m the expert runaway, remember? Just move it, honey.”

He stood up then, reaching behind her to grab his coat off the back seat. For a moment Kendall couldn’t move, all she could do was think of that endearment, delivered in such a casual tone that she told herself he could just as well have called her any number of other things. Some of them no doubt less than complimentary.

He grabbed her coat, the heavy shearling she’d brought to wear over her jeans and thin silk blouse, and backed away so she could get out of the car. She gave herself a sharp mental shake, picked up the book and the box of papers they had—fortuitously it now seemed—carted along, and got out of the car. And moments later found herself seated on a bus, someplace she hadn’t been in ten years.

It brought back memories, lots of them, and she couldn’t help smiling a little.

“Something funny?”

“No,” she said, “I was just remembering. In college this was the only way I got around, but I don’t think I’ve been on one since I graduated.”

Jason leaned back in his seat. She waited for some biting observation about Aaron seeing to that. She couldn’t deny it; Aaron had needed her mobile, he’d told her, and had made a car part of her contract. But nothing came. Jason’s new gentleness seemed to hold.

“In Seattle,” he said, “you can get just about anywhere by bus, and for not much money. I rode buses a lot, after my mother died. At night, anyway.”

At night? Why at night? Kendall wondered. “Buses to where?”

He shrugged. “Anywhere that took an hour or two, and was cheap. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were heated.”

Heated. Kendall felt a sudden tightness in her chest. His mother had been killed in October. A week to the day before his sixteenth birthday. And the beginning of a string of damp, chilly months in the Pacific Northwest.

“I got real good at it,” Jason said, as if he were chatting about the weather. As, she supposed, he was, indirectly. “I knew all the routes. I slept a lot of hours on those things.”

A sixteen-year-old kid, all alone, stowing away on a bus because it was the only way for him to stay warm. The image tightened her chest even more.

“And nobody ever . . . asked what you were doing?”

“I got caught, once. They had an undercover transit guy on the bus, looking for a pickpocket. He noticed I never got off.” His brows furrowed. “I had to kick him to get away from him. I didn’t dare ride the local runs anymore after that. I figured they’d be looking for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I stuck to the ferry boats, when I had the money.” She didn’t want to think about that, about what he had done to get enough money to survive. She said nothing as he went on. “They were a lot more expensive, and I didn’t dare try to sneak on, but . . . they were better.”

“Better?”

“More comfortable. And if I got on the first boat in the morning, I was set for the day because back then you could ride back and forth all day. Then after the last boat of the day, at about one in the morning, I caught a bus for SeaTac.”

“The airport?” she asked, startled.

He nodded. “You can sleep there, and no one bothers you much. Like on the ferries. And people were always leaving food around—”

He stopped suddenly, as if uncomfortable with how much he’d told her. It was just as well, Kendall thought, any more and he’d hear her heart breaking for the scared, lonely kid he’d been. She knew he wouldn’t appreciate her sympathy, any more than his father would have. She tried for a lighter tone.

“So you took off for someplace warmer, like Alaska.”

He grinned suddenly, that flashing, brilliant grin that made her insides do a kind of silly flip that embarrassed her.

“Hey, that was a great time. Hauling nets that weighed a couple of tons, ripping your hands on fins, slipping on fish guts.”

“Gee,” she said, grinning back at him this time, unable to help it, “so that’s why cruises are so popular.”

He laughed, a genuine, lighthearted laugh, and her insides did that little flip again. God, she was acting like a teenager with a crush, and all because this man had kissed her a few times.

And planted some of the most erotic images she could ever dream of in her mind. Don’t forget that little detail, she reminded herself in chagrin. And that had been only the beginning. He’d planted the seed with those hot, suggestive words, but she’d nurtured them with her own suddenly fertile imagination, until she was picturing them together, doing those things she’d never done and had never thought about doing. Until Jason had turned her life upside down.

She was relieved when they arrived at the airport. Action, any action, was better than sitting there mulling over how confused her life had become. She followed Jason into the small terminal and up to the ticket counter of one of the commuter airlines that ran a shuttle service to Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco. She still had no idea what his plan was, but decided this was not the time or the place to ask again.

The young woman at the counter took one look at Jason and drew back a little.

“It’s okay,” Jason said to her, his tone rueful. “I’m in a much better mood tonight.”

He smiled, a sheepish, boyish smile that Kendall was sure he knew the exact effect of. Unfortunately, so did she.

“And I know,” he said to the woman in a tone that matched the smile, “I owe you an apology. I was . . . upset, and I took it out on you. Is your little girl all right?”

The change that came over the woman’s face as Jason turned on the charm was almost laughable. At least, it would have been if Kendall hadn’t been seeing a little too much of herself in the ticket agent’s reaction.

“I . . . she’s much better. Thank you.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear it. And I am sorry about the other night.”

“That’s all right,” the woman said, giving him a bright airline smile. Her gaze flicked to Kendall, then back to Jason. “Things . . . worked out for you?”

“Oh, yes,” Jason said, grinning. “Nicely, thank you.”

The woman smiled, this time including them both. Kendall watched in amazement; this Jason was the one who could charm a vulture out of its feathers, she thought, remembering George Alton’s picturesque phrase. If he’d turned this charm on her in the beginning . . . but he hadn’t. She’d seen nothing of this Jason until the past twenty-four hours. And she wasn’t sure how that made her feel.

“So, what can I do for you tonight?”

“I need two tickets. One way. One for me, to L.A., one for Ms. Chase here, to San Francisco.”

Kendall blinked. San Francisco? She had a sudden vision of her last flight into San Francisco International, coming in over the gray waters of the bay. Why on earth San Francisco? And he was going to L.A.?

“—D-A-L-L.” Jason was spelling when she snapped back to awareness of what was happening. The click of keys on a computer keyboard kept time with each letter.

“Checking baggage?”

“No.”

More clicking. Moments later Jason was taking the two ticket folders the woman held out to him. And, Kendall noticed, a silver credit card she hadn’t seen him hand over, she’d been so startled by what he was doing. He slipped it quickly into a pocket.

“Gate three for San Francisco, leaving in twenty minutes, gate five, all the way at the end, for Los Angeles, in half an hour,” the ticket agent said, smiling.

“Thank you.”

Jason gave her that winning grin again, and irritation sparked through Kendall. She waited until they were through the small security check and X-ray machine, not a problem considering they had nothing to put on the conveyor except their coats, her purse, the book, and the small box of documents. She wondered for a brief moment what the book would do under X rays, but the security checker didn’t even look twice.

Finally, as Jason urged her toward the waiting gates, she looked up at him.

“What was
that
all about?”

“Several things.” He didn’t look at her, just kept scanning the terminal, not particularly crowded at this late hour. The small airport closed down to commercial flights at ten; theirs were among the last departures.

“Such as?”

“I did owe her an apology.”

Kendall remembered the night he’d gone to the airport and missed his plane—had it only been the night before last?—and could just imagine the mood he’d been in. At least the ticket agent had gotten her apology a lot sooner than she herself had, Kendall thought wryly.

“And?” she prompted.

“I wanted the plane tickets.”

“I guessed that.” What she couldn’t figure out were the destinations, but she’d get to that. “What else?”

He glanced at her then. “I wanted to buy them from somebody who would remember it.”

“Oh, she’ll remember it, all right,” Kendall said, her voice utterly dry.

That grin flashed again. “Jealous?” Then, before she could deny it, “Good. That was one of the reasons, too.”

She gaped at him, but they were at her gate before she could respond. He stopped a few feet short of the counter, nodding toward it.

“Check in,” he said.

“But we did out front—”

“Do it anyway. Before that group gets here.”

She glanced at what appeared to be a family of five heading for the same counter. With a sigh she complied, and the man behind the counter had barely handed back her ticket stub and boarding pass before Jason was beside her again. The agent at the counter didn’t notice him; he was already hastening through checking in the family.

“Walk me to my gate,” he suggested cheerfully, the strength of his grip on her elbow stopping her observation that her plane was already boarding.

“Will you please explain to me what we’re doing? And why I’m going to San Francisco and what I’m supposed to do when I get there? And why you’re going to L.A. and what you’re going to do when you get there?”

“The key to being a fugitive is taking it one step at a time.”

She grimaced at that cryptic non-answer, and waited as he checked in, and the agent tore down his ticket. Then he led her away from the counter, just as the announcement for final boarding of the San Francisco flight came over the loudspeakers.

“All right,” Jason said, “let’s go.”

“Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll just fly to San Francisco, for no apparent reason—”

She broke off as she realized Jason was walking, not back toward her gate but toward the escalator that led down to the baggage claim area.

Kendall stopped dead. Jason took her arm, but she refused to move.

“Kendall—”

“No. I’m not taking another step until you tell me what’s going on.”

“We don’t have time for this—”

“Make time.”

He glanced around, warily, as if to see if anyone was watching them. “Not here. We can’t afford to attract any attention before those planes leave.”

She stared at him, not missing the inference that those planes might be leaving, but they weren’t.

“It’s all a trick, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“Let’s just call it a diversion. Come on, before somebody notices us enough to remember it later.”