Fugitive Heart - By Bonnie Dee Page 0,61
He didn’t have to flee the city now.
She blinked and looked around the Back Porch. All right, that’s enough thinking about Nick. If only work would pick up—she’d be distracted. But the morning rush had ended.
“Can’t you tell me anything about the meeting with the FBI people?” Marty hated not getting every detail.
“It was boring. And I didn’t even get to talk to the main guy in person.”
The day before, Ames been summoned to the town hall for a teleconference with Agent Giordano.
The only thing she had to offer the agent was a postcard that had appeared in her mail. It showed a beach and had a Moroccan stamp. Three words had been scrawled on the other side. I am sorry, written in Elliot’s distinctive showy handwriting. Giordano had insisted that she hand the card over to local authorities. She insisted on getting a copy first.
The whole thing had taken less than an hour. In New York, Giordano had sat at a conference table in front of his laptop and scribbled notes as Ames had answered questions about facing the four New Yorkers. It soon became clear Giordano was most interested in the package they’d found at Jake’s house. Did she recall any serial numbers on the bills? No. Did the garbage bag have any distinctive features? No. Could she remember the color of the flash drive? Gray, maybe? Marty now looked as disappointed in her as the agent had yesterday.
“You know I’m not supposed to talk about it, Marty. And anyway, you were there for the most interesting part, charging in like the cavalry.”
That made Marty smile and raise a fist.
The phone vibrated in Ames’s pocket.
“’Scuse me,” she said to Marty and moved into the kitchen to check it. A message from Nick with tomorrow’s date and nothing else. She typed out a long message, then deleted it and just went with, You’re coming back?
A single word: Yes.
Her heart hammered as hard as it would if he’d walked through the door. She drifted through the rest of her shift trying to recall details of him: his smile, the way he laughed. Wait, had he laughed? The small groan of pleasure he’d given as he’d surged into her body…
She wandered back from the kitchen.
Marty looked up from totaling an order. “You okay?”
Ames blushed and nodded, even though the answer was no, not really. She was infatuated with a man—and she’d never spent an ordinary minute with him. Would he stay in such a dull backwater? Would he want to go out dancing? There were those pictures of him in the nightclub. And he hadn’t seemed to like the woods or country. Had he? And she’d been so determined to follow him. Yeah, she still felt that wild recklessness when she thought of Nick.
She’s still go after him if she had to. The thread remained in her mind after the run-in with the Esposito guys: you can die tomorrow translated to don’t wait to live today.
She gathered up some dirty plates and plopped them in a bus tub, recalling the way Nick’s eyes softened after he kissed her.
“Stop it,” she said out loud, hoping to push herself off the obsessed-with-Nick train.
“You have it bad, hon,” Marty said, and for once Ames didn’t have a good, snarky retort, and she didn’t try to hide the truth from her friend. “I kinda think you’re right.”
After a high five and a welcome-back hug from the evening crew, Ames took off. Her plan had been to work on another web page, but the house beckoned her. She’d planned to paint one of the walls in the big bedroom a dramatic, deep red and wanted to see it as soon as possible. It might overwhelm the room, she thought as she stirred and poured.
She painted the wall and imagined a big bed in this room and Nick in it. Or Nick, naked against the red wall.
Her wall in her house.
His house.
Theirs. The thought was triumphant and joy bubbled through her as she saw her goal coming to fruition at last—plus so much more than she’d ever dreamed. For how could she have foreseen a Nick in her life, in her house?
She backed up to admire her work and stepped on the paint lid.
“Crap!”
In her attempt to clean the bottom of her sandal, she managed to get maroon stains on her hands and shirt as well.
With a dramatic groan, she slipped off the sandal and hobbled down the stairs to wash up outside.
A car made its way