“I told you I haven’t made up my mind yet.” And I won’t, not till I get a chance to feel out the areas around town better and figure out just how safe they are. I point my spatula at him. “I’ll talk to Leo when we drop you off today.”
The impending pout immediately turns into a hopeful smile. “I still get to go hiking?”
“You still get to go hiking. After breakfast and a shower.” I toss my head toward the hall. “Food’s almost ready. Go clean up.”
I barely get the last word out before Eli’s off the stool, tablet abandoned as he zips toward the bathroom.
Oof. I miss having that kind of boyish energy.
Once he’s gone, though, I glance at Felicity and offer her a smile as I pull down a second coffee cup to add to the first I’d already put out. Then I start portioning up the food onto three plates.
I always make a little too much in case Eli needs a snack later, so I’ve got plenty for a guest. Felicity pours that amazing-smelling coffee and pulls over the tall sugar canister on the counter.
“I already know you take yours with a half-pound of sugar and a dash of heavy cream,” she teases. “In the fridge?”
“An entire carton of it. How do you take yours?”
“A half-gallon of heavy cream and a dash of sugar.” She laughs. “I’m your opposite.”
In how many ways? I wonder, when I know I should not be thinking about this woman in those frigging terms.
I shouldn’t be wanting to know her better.
I have a kid to think about.
Can’t just go throwing strange women around in my life like it’s no big deal.
That’s more of a Holt Silverton move—or it was before he met Libby and traded in his skirt-chasing days for a ranch and a wife and a whole mess of ghost town renovations.
It’s never been my game, but now that I’m Eli’s only source of stability, I’ve really got to think about my choices. I can’t go falling head over heels at first sniff just because she makes bomb-ass coffee and looks bomb-ass gorgeous doing it.
I clear my throat and load up my arms, something I got pretty good at back when I got put on galley duty in boot camp. It’s second nature slinging the plates out on the breakfast bar in a neat row.
“So,” I ask, while she sprinkles one of the cups with sugar and pours enough to choke a horse in the other, “this just a social visit? Or is there something I can help you with?” I frown. “Did the mugs cost more than you thought? I told you, I can pay more if you need me to.”
“No!” she says sharply, jolting so fast that grains of sugar spill over her hands. She sets the sugar tin down and brushes her fingers off with a shamefaced look, then snags a towel and wipes up the counter. “Sorry. I mean...no, the eight hundred was more than enough. I really couldn’t accept another dollar from you, Alaska. You’ve already done a ton for me.”
There’s something else in her voice, though.
Something in the way she hunches her body and bows her head.
She’s wearing her guilt wrapped around her like a shawl.
“Hey,” I ask. “What’s wrong?”
She stops, looking down into the cups of coffee, her hands resting lightly on the edge of the unvarnished wooden counter.
No, it’s not just guilt tangling her up in its jaws.
It’s sadness, and once again I wonder what the hell happened to hurt this girl.
“I...” She bites her lip. “You’re right. This isn’t a social visit. I came to ask you for advice, but I’m about to be awful and not even tell you what it’s for. Can we call it a theoretical thing? Would that be okay?”
My fingertips tingle with a hint of wariness.
Felicity Randall’s got secrets, all right.
Possibly bad ones.
And she’s trying hard to keep me out of them.
“Okay,” I say. “Theoretical. We’re just floating questions.”
“And um, you can’t tell anyone we had this talk. Or that I was even here at all,” she whispers, her eyes big and pleading.
From tingling fingers to toes, suspicion wells in my veins like a flood. I fold my arms and lean my side against the breakfast bar.
“I won’t tell about the conversation, but good luck explaining to Eli why you weren’t here.”
She smiles thinly, lifting her head and giving me a pensive look. “Okay. I came by because you wanted to try my new roast, so I dropped off a few bags.”
“Fair enough. What’s on your mind that makes you need a cover story then?”
She hesitates a minute longer, drumming her fingers against the edge of the counter and glancing toward the hall.
The shower hisses faintly, but steady. Eli’s erratic thumping and singing is a whole lot louder.
That’s his thing. He belts out rock ballads in the shower, and sometimes gets so into it he uses the walls like bongo drums. It says a lot for his comfort levels with Felicity that he’s not keeping quiet with her here.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “He can’t hear anything—and he’s about two octaves out of his range.”
She doesn’t laugh.
Instead, she gives me a strained look before she opens her mouth. “How would you get a plane up from the bottom of a lake?”
I blink.
Huh?
Not what I was expecting.
Not at all.
Apparently, she’s dead serious, looking at me with her eyes wide and her jaw set in a determined line. I frown, stroking my fingers through my beard, turning her puzzle over.
“What size plane are we talking about?” I ask. “Commercial passenger, military, private?”
“Small prop plane,” she says. “Cessna, I think. The kind used for personal flying and small cargo transport.”
“Depends on if you want it mostly in one piece or not and how deep the water is,” I say. “If you want it in one piece and it’s deep, you’d need a pretty big boat, possibly freighter size, with a winch on it. Someone would have to dive to hook it up, and then you’d let the machinery do the work.”
She takes a deep breath, scrubbing her hands against her thighs, leaving faintly damp marks on her jeans.
My eyes flick to her hands.
Sweaty palms. She’s nervous. So nervous she’s probably sweating down the back of her shirt, her pulse throbbing hot against her throat, fluttering and straining against pale skin.
“Okay,” she says. “So, say I don’t have access to a freighter, but it’s pretty deep. What are my other options?”
“Well...” I turn over the scenario, seriously doubting the hypothetical part. “If you had a powerful enough crane and a long enough length of steel cabling, plus a diver willing to hook it up...then as long as the plane wasn’t submerged long enough to crumble into rust, and as long as it wasn’t lodged on anything, you could probably dredge it up from the shore. You’d lose some parts, yeah, but you’d get the main cabin intact.”
Felicity folds her arms tight against her chest, chewing the knuckle on her thumb, her eyes dark and preoccupied.
“Okay,” she says, rolling her shoulders. “Okay. So we’re talking the kind of crane someone could rent from a construction supply company?”
“Or the kind of crane someone who works construction could let you ‘borrow,’” I point out. “And probably transport safely and discreetly to the site and operate for you. You know. If this wasn’t all hypothetical.”