“Milla!” Julia called after her, but Milla kept climbing the stairs.
18
Catching the first flight out meant getting up at three A.M. so she would have time to drive to the airport in Kentucky, turn in her rental car, and still have plenty of time to get through security. She bought some snacks out of vending machines in the Louisville airport, because it was a safe bet the airline wasn’t going to serve anything and she was already hungry. From Louisville she flew to Chicago, then from Chicago to Salt Lake City, where she changed airlines and flew to Boise.
Diaz was waiting for her, and her heart gave a huge thump at the sight of him. He was dressed much as usual, in jeans and those rubber-soled boots, though in deference to the changing season he wore a long-sleeved denim shirt over his dark T-shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over his forearms. He stood apart from the small crowd, his expression as remote as ever. Several people darted vaguely uneasy glances at him, though he wasn’t doing anything other than just standing there.
“What did you find out?” she asked anxiously as she reached him. She’d been fretting during the entire trip, wondering who they were going to see and what he or she knew about the kidnapping.
“I’ll tell you on the way. I have two rooms booked for us at a hotel,” he said. “We’ll drop off your luggage and you can change clothes before we leave.”
“Why do I need to change clothes?” She looked down at herself. She was dressed for comfort, in slacks and a blouse, with a lightweight sweater thrown over her shoulders to keep off the chill. For someone used to El Paso’s climate, both airplanes and Idaho were too cold for her.
“You need something sturdier, like jeans and boots, since we don’t know what we’ll find. I’ve done some advance scouting and the terrain looks rough.” They collected her luggage; he took her heaviest bag and shifted it to his left hand, then used his right to guide her in the direction of the parking lot.
“How long have you been here?”
“I got here last night.”
She hadn’t seen him for three weeks, and until this moment she hadn’t realized how starved she felt. Just his physical presence sent a wave of longing through her. He was like the pain of childbirth: away from him, she remembered that almost electric aura of danger, but she didn’t feel it. Being near him made her heartbeat rev up, all her senses heighten; it was almost as if the fight-or-flight response kicked in—or maybe that was exactly what happened.
She recognized the giddy sense of euphoria, the butterflies in her stomach; she hadn’t felt this way since David. She’d loved David and she most assuredly did not love Diaz, but she had also wanted David sexually. No other man she’d met since then had gotten that reaction from her, no matter how much she might like the man himself, until Diaz. She wanted him. She needed her head examined, but she wanted him.
She was expecting a rental car, or maybe an SUV, but the vehicle he led her to was an enormous, black four-wheel-drive pickup, with the frame sitting so high she wondered how she could climb into the cab, even though she was wearing slacks.
Diaz put her bags in the bed of the truck, then unlocked the doors. “Where on earth did you get this thing?” she asked, looking up at the lights mounted on top of the cab. “I know you didn’t rent it.”
He put his hands on her waist and lifted her onto the seat. “It belongs to an acquaintance.”
When he got behind the wheel, she said, “An ‘acquaintance,’ huh? Not a friend?”
“I don’t have friends.”
The blunt statement rattled her, hit her in the chest, and made her ache inside. How could he bear to live such a solitary life? “You have me,” she said before she thought.
He froze in the act of putting the key in the ignition, and slowly turned his head to look at her. She couldn’t read the expression in his dark eyes; she knew only that they burned. “Do I?” he asked softly.
For a moment she felt off balance, as if he’d asked one thing but meant another. Was he asking if she was his on an entirely different level, or was he expressing doubt? She had no idea; he was so unreadable she was left floundering, so she instinctively went to shallow water. “If you want a friend, you do. How can you live without friendship?”
He shrugged and turned the key, firing up the big motor. “Easy.”
Yes, that was what he’d meant, that he doubted he had any real friends. She was both disappointed and relieved. However much she might want him, she wasn’t certain she’d ever have the nerve to do anything about it. That would be like stepping into a cage with a tiger, no matter how tame the handler said it was. The doubt and fear would always remain.
She sought refuge in the original subject. “This ‘acquaintance’ knows and trusts you well enough to put this monster at your disposal?”
“He trusts me.”
She noticed that he didn’t say the man knew him. This was a dead-end subject, though, and she was anxious to find out what Diaz knew and why they were in Idaho.
“Okay, we’re on the way. What did you find out?”
“Nothing, yet,” he said, and she almost wilted in disappointment.
“But I thought—”
“After we talk to this guy, we might know something more. What I heard was that his brother was the pilot of the plane that crashed.”
“You got the pilot’s name?”
“Maybe.” At her frustrated look, he said, “It’s like a string. We’ll pull on it and see if it goes anywhere. Most of the time it doesn’t, but negative knowledge is almost as good as positive knowledge.”