“Colin? Are you kidding? He’d drive up the mountainside. He’s nearly always the first person to arrive if someone needs rescuing. I keep telling him what a great team he and Reede would be. My brother goes down on helicopter cables to save people. He—”
Travis was looking at her in such an odd way that she stopped talking.
“This is like the bicycle, isn’t it? You need to do it even if you fall on your face.”
He smiled at her because she understood so completely. On the other hand, her talk of what other men could do was crushing his ego.
“I’m game if you are,” she said.
“If we do this, you have to trust me,” he said, his face serious.
“Didn’t I ride on your handlebars when you rode up that dirt hill?”
He smiled at her in such a way that Kim wanted to kiss him. There was gratitude as well as pleasure in his eyes.
“All right,” he said as he glanced out the windshield, his hand on the gearshift. “Put one hand on the armrest and one here and hold on. And don’t scream. Screaming distracts me.”
At that last, Kim’s eyes widened and part of her wanted to say, Let me out of here! But she didn’t. She put her hands where he told her, braced her feet on the floor, then nodded. She was ready.
With a grin, Travis put the car in low and took off. To her shock, he started out going fast and he didn’t slow down for anything. With lightning reflexes, he went around potholes, or straddled them precisely. When a fallen tree blocked the way, Travis went up onto the side of the road. The car banked left at what Kim was sure was a forty-five-degree angle, and he was heading straight for a giant oak. Kim wanted to scream. She wanted to warn him that they were about to crash, but she held her breath—and kept her eyes open.
Travis swerved to the left and missed the tree by no more than an inch. It was so close that Kim’s intake of breath sounded like a mouse’s squeak.
He never let up speed as he put the clutch to the floor and upshifted. When he hit a hillock made by years of overgrown weeds and a rotten tree trunk, all four wheels left the ground.
As they sailed through the air, Kim thought it could be the end of her life. She glanced at Travis, the last person she’d ever see alive.
He turned his head a bit, his dark eyes wildly alight—and he winked at her.
If Kim hadn’t been terrified, she would have laughed.
When the car hit the ground, her body jolted hard—but he kept going at what seemed to be warp speed.
Travis took the car to the side again, riding on the bank, then twisting hard to the left, then to the right and back again.
Finally, before them loomed the back of the huge building that used to be a brick factory. But Travis didn’t slow down. He went around, over, and across three more big holes.
The solid wall of the brick building was straight ahead and Travis was flying toward it.
When she saw a pile of dirt in their way, Kim again had to work not to scream.
“Hold on, baby,” Travis said, then hit the hill at full speed. They went through the air and landed hard on the other side, but they were still heading toward the building.
He turned the steering wheel so hard to the left that he looked like he was about to wrench his shoulders out of their sockets. The car skidded to a halt so close to the building Kim could have put down the window and touched it. But she didn’t move. She was frozen into place. Her body was rigid from what she’d just gone through.
Travis turned off the engine. “Not bad. Not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.” He looked at her. “Kim, are you all right?”
She stayed where she was, eyes straight ahead, her hands white as they gripped the handholds. She doubted if her legs were ever going to work again.
Travis got out and went around to her side to open the door. The building was so close that the edge of the door nearly scraped. Nearly. There was about a half inch of clearance. His parking had been precisely perfect.
When he opened the door, Kim’s hand stayed on it and her arm was so stiff he couldn’t get the door open all the way. Slowly, one by one, he pried her fingers up.
When he finally got the door open, he leaned across her and loosened her other hand, then unbuckled her seat belt. But she was still rigid in the seat.
Bending, he slid one arm behind her back, the other under her knees, and lifted her out of the car. He carried her to the shade of a tree, sat down on an empty wooden spool, and held her on his lap.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said as he put her head on his shoulder. “I thought—” At the moment he didn’t know what he’d been thinking. He’d been around too many women who wanted nothing but thrills. Yet again, he’d screwed up.
Kim was beginning to thaw out. But her first thought was that she didn’t want Travis to put her down. She wanted to snuggle on his lap for as long as it took to get him to kiss her.
“Should I take you to your brother?” he asked softly.
She had no idea what he meant until she remembered that Reede was a doctor. “I’m fine,” she said.
“You don’t seem fine.” He pulled her head from his shoulder and looked at her. Her skin was pale and her eyes were wide. She looked like a shock victim—but at the same time there was something else deeper in her eyes.
He leaned back and studied her. “You enjoyed yourself, didn’t you?”
“I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said. “It was . . .”
She didn’t have to say any more. He could see it all in her face. The ride down the old road had made her feel
alive
. It’s how he’d felt that first day when he’d ridden her bicycle.
Smiling, Travis stood her on the ground. “So how do we get inside this place?” He started walking away.
Kim was still a bit dazed, her legs felt weak, and her mind was full of images of what had happened in the car. She could see the tree coming at them, then swerving just before they hit. Twice Travis had taken the car through the air, all four wheels off the ground.
“Is there an alarm system?”
She had to blink to focus on him. “What?”
“Do you know if there’s an alarm system on the building?”
“I have no idea.” As she walked toward him, she nearly fell once when her legs buckled, but she held her balance.
“I’m going to look around,” he said. His eyes were twinkling, as though he knew something she didn’t. “Stay here and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Okay,” Kim said, “but if you need help, I’m here.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Smiling, Travis went around the side of the building. He’d seen how scared she was during the drive. It was the kind of thing he’d done a hundred times in his stunt work. He had to make the star look as though he could actually
do
things. But Kim hadn’t screamed, even though he’d seen that at times she’d been terrified. If at any time he’d felt out of control he would have stopped, but he hadn’t. He liked that she’d been brave. Most of all, he liked that she’d trusted him.
Kim went back to the big wooden spool and sat down. “He seems to have learned how to do a lot of things since he rode my bike,” she said aloud.
She was sitting there, looking at the old BMW, amazed that it wasn’t in flames of protest, when a door in the building opened. She expected to see Mr. Layton, but Travis stepped outside.
“No alarm,” he said. “Come inside.”
“How’d you get in?” she asked as she went to him.
“He left a window open and I climbed in it. He needs better security.”
Kim had only been in the old building once and that had been before the rebuilding had begun. Jecca said her dad had worked the men from New Jersey in shifts 24/7. Whatever he’d done, the transformation was stunning.
They were in a big room with tall ceilings and all around them were boxes. From what was printed on the cartons they appeared to be full of equipment and tools.
“Looks like he kept some trucking companies busy.” Travis’s frown was deep.
“What’s that look for?”
He hesitated.
“We’re friends, remember? We share secrets.”
He smiled at her. “That’s not easy for me to remember, but I’ll try. My mother . . . Well, when she ran away from my father, she also took some money from him.”
“Six or seven figures?”
“Multiple seven.”
“Yeow!” Kim suddenly realized why Travis was frowning. “You think maybe Mr. Layton used your mother’s money for . . .” She waved her hand. “To buy all this?”
“What hardware store owner do you know who could afford this much?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but the truth was that Kim did know quite a bit about opening a business. Her little jewelry shop was a quarter the size of this room, and to get it she’d had to take out a mortgage, borrow from her father, and max out her credit cards. She’d only paid it all off a year ago. She’d celebrated by putting herself back into debt by buying a house that was a bit more than she could afford. At first the bank had said no to the mortgage, but then the bank president had personally called her and said they’d be happy to give her financing. No one ever said, but Kim was sure her father had arranged it.
But Kim said none of this. Jecca was her best friend and this was her father they were talking about.
She looked around the big room and noticed that way up in the top, high above the exposed steel rafters, was an open window. Everything else looked sealed shut. “Is that the window you came through?”
Travis didn’t glance up. “Yeah.” He was reading the labels on the boxes. Saws, hand tools, power equipment, garden implements. Even at wholesale prices this had cost a lot. Had his mother told this man Layton about the money she had hidden away? She knew Travis had access to her account, so maybe she’d used it as collateral to buy the man’s tools.
“Travis?” Kim asked, getting his attention. “That window is at least twenty feet up. How did you get up to it from the outside and down from the inside?”
“Climbed,” he said distractedly. “I’m going to look around.”
She followed him into a smaller room that held two large restrooms. Travis went past them but Kim stopped. She knew that Jecca had sent her dad designs that the New Jersey workmen were to follow.
In keeping with the age of Edilean and the fact that the building used to be a factory to make bricks, Jecca had used a color palette of cream and Williamsburg blue. She’d left the bricks exposed wherever she could, and trimmed them in that soft blue that the Colonials had so loved. Kim wasn’t sure, but she’d be willing to bet that Lucy Cooper had made the curtains.
Smiling, Kim went back out into the big hall to see that Travis was gone. She found him standing in the next room, which had three offices in it, with windows facing into the hall. He tried the doors, but they were locked.
“I’d like to get into his computer and see his source of income for all this.” He looked at Kim as though asking her a question.
“I don’t know how to hack into a computer.”
“Me neither,” he said, sounding as though his education were lax.
“Nice to know there’s something you can’t do,” Kim muttered. So far he’d cleaned her pool, cooked breakfast, driven like something out of an action movie, and scaled a brick wall.
She hurried after him. He was standing in a long, narrow room with windows that opened to the front. He had an expression on his face that she couldn’t read. There was nothing in the room, no boxes, no desks, just the walls on three sides, the windows on the other.
She waited, but he just kept staring, saying nothing. “Want to see the room Mr. Layton planned for Jecca to use? She likes to paint and she’s quite good at it, so he was going to make her a studio. But Jecca said she’d never get any work done if she was so near her father. She said he’d bully her into working for him because, you see, Jecca knows how to take chain saws apart. She can put them back together too.”
Travis was looking at the room as though he were in a trance and she didn’t think he’d heard a word she’d said.
“But Jecca would rather raise pink unicorns, so she didn’t take her dad up on his offer.”
“Where did she get a breeding pair?”
“What?”
“Of pink unicorns?” Travis asked.
“I thought you weren’t listening.”
“Didn’t I tell you that I’m a good listener?”
They exchanged smiles. They had been children and it had only been for two weeks, but they both remembered every minute of that time.
“Do you know what Layton plans to do with this room?” he asked.
“I have no idea. Why?”
Travis went to the windows to look out at the big parking lot. “Where do you buy your outdoor equipment around here?”
“You mean like fishing gear?”
Travis smiled. “I was thinking more of climbing paraphernalia and kayaks. Where do the local guides get their equipment?”
Kim was blinking at him. “Guides?” she said at last.
“Edilean is surrounded by some incredible wilderness. I saw online a place called Stirling Point.”
“It’s the outdoor make-out point,” Kim said, but Travis just looked at her. “The playhouse is the indoor and the—”
“I get it,” he said, his face serious. “I saw online that there’s hiking, boating, your fishing, and some climbing in the preserve. Where do people buy their gear?”
“I don’t know,” Kim said yet again in answer to his questions. “Virginia City, Norfolk, maybe Richmond. And Williamsburg must sell that stuff.”
“But nothing here in Edilean?”
“No kayak store anywhere.”
Travis didn’t smile. “Interesting. So where is your friend’s unicorn studio?”
Kim opened the connecting door to a big, airy room, this time with the windows along the back, looking out into the woods. Like the other one, the room was empty. It had been restored and the floor rebuilt. All the windows were new, some with the Pella stickers still on them.
“This is great,” Travis said softly. “Really great.”
Kim went to stand in front of him. “I want to know what’s on your mind.”
He turned away for a moment. “With every word I hear about Layton, the more concerned I am. You said he’s a bully. He—”
“No,” Kim said. “I said he bullied Jecca. That’s what parents do. They say it’s for our own good. My mother bullies me. Doesn’t your father use anything he can to make you do what he wants you to?”