Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,33
that Luke, who had muscles to spare, wasn’t short-changing her in the gentleman department. He had an amazingly heavy duffel bag over his left shoulder and his wheelie which he pulled with his left hand. His right hand was kept free at all times. He let her open doors and press elevator buttons.
She understood why. He wanted to keep one hand free to be able to pull the gun that was in his waistband.
The thing was, between schlepping all that stuff, the drooping hat, too big sunglasses, annoying wad in her sneaker that made her limp, she felt like she was walking on an alien planet. Hope played a lot of video games where she was on an alien planet, trying to survive. Instinctively, she wanted to check her environment to make sure no tentacled monsters with three rows of shark teeth sprang out of the woodwork.
Though presumably, keeping a ninja watch out was Luke’s department.
They made it down to the sub-basement parking area without incident and once she was buckled in, she could take off the awful hat and terrible sunglasses with a sigh of relief.
“Not made for a life of deceit?” Luke asked, with a sidelong glance.
“Nope. Not even that good at social engineering. Riley’s good with that, I’m not. Besides —” she turned her head away, but he could probably hear the intensity in her voice, “I hate lies and deception. Just hate them.”
Her entire life had apparently been a lie and at some level, even as a little girl, she’d understood that. And hated it.
Luke was a fast but careful driver as he drove them down unfamiliar streets. She didn’t know anything about Portland, still didn’t know anything about Portland, since she’d essentially been hiding out in a hotel room. The city center seemed to be relatively small and soon they were in the green suburbs. Not going to the international airport but the airfield.
It was overcast, a few drops falling from the sky, threatening a downpour but not delivering yet on the promise. The Pacific Northwest had a rep as a rainy part of the country. Not as cold as Boston, but wetter. Yesterday there’d been late season snow flurries in Boston. She’d checked the weather. Not that she was homesick, far from it. Now that she was here, out West, she realized she wasn’t missing Boston at all. It had never really felt like home. She realized that because she felt exactly the same in Portland as she did in Boston. Pretty city, but there was no connection. That was how she’d felt when she lived in Baltimore, too, the years she worked for the NSA.
She was … unrooted. Unconnected, unmoored. All the time. Like there was a missing piece in her head where most people held the concept of home. The hole had been there all her life. Luckily, she worked among geeks who had tenuous — if any — ties to their hometown. Tenuous ties to reality, actually. Most of them had spent their formative years in the basement on a computer, hacking. All braces and hormones. Connected to the world but not to their physical location.
They all lived in a virtual place called Nerddom.
Luke sped up and she was pressed against the back of the big, soft seat.
The large suburban homes became smaller, the lawns less well kept, the roads filled with potholes and then suddenly they were there, at the outer reaches of the airfield. She didn’t even know what it was called. Ordinarily, she’d have looked it up. Her laptop shot her cell, in encryption, its location at all times so that if she ever lost it, God forbid, she’d know where it was. And whoever stole it wouldn’t be able to find the geolocator to turn it off and would never crack the password anyway.
If she wanted to, she could find out what the airfield was called. But what would be the point?
She was going where Luke was taking her.
This was new. She wasn’t used to not calling the shots. But this whole situation was so baffling, so out of her wheelhouse, beyond her skill set, that she just yielded control to someone who very much looked like he knew what he was doing.
The skies finally opened up and rain fell in thick, rippling gray sheets. The vehicle’s windshield wipers had trouble keeping up, rain drumming on the roof, bouncing off the road. The sky was low and steel gray.