Sarah flipped the quilt over Blaze and covered his legs even though he raised one eyebrow at her the whole time, and then she tucked herself into the bed. “It will take, what, two days to drive back to Iowa?”
“If we stop to sleep, yes.”
Sarah reached for the lamp that Blaze must’ve moved beside the bed. “And then I’ll go back to my own life, and you will go back to yours,” she sighed, a wistful note infiltrating her voice that she hadn’t meant to allow.
He lifted his head and turned to look at her, his ice-blue eyes serious as he studied her from where he leaned against the bed. “I don’t want to go back to my own life.”
She jerked the chain on the lamp, and the light fled. “Oh, come on. Your fancy pedigreed house is much better than a corn farm with one cow.”
“Better?” he asked in the dark air. “I don’t think it’s better.”
4
WESTWARD BOUND
BLAZE
The next morning, Blaze was still perturbed about their choice of destination.
He argued, “A hundred unguarded roads cross into Canada up in New Hampshire and Maine. Once we got to Montréal, Ottawa, or even Toronto, we could go to a US consulate and tell them you lost your passport.”
Sarah raised one dark eyebrow at him, the sassy little minx. “But don’t you need to have had a recent passport?” she asked. “My passport expired thirteen years ago, when I was ten.”
Damn it,yes.“How do you run around at your age without a passport? How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Jeez, that explains some things. I probably should’ve asked you that earlier. But how do you get to be twenty-three and walk around without a passport?”
She glared at him, her dark eyes fathomless pits of calling him a dumbass. “Never wanted to leave Iowa.”
“Yeah, but didn’t you ever need to—” He trailed off, looking at the cabin’s rough-hewn ceiling beams.
“Need to what?” she asked.
Exasperation wound him so much that he waved his hands near his ears. “Forwork!”
Her dry tone left no question about her disdain for how stupid he was being. “Farming doesn’t require a lot of international travel.”
“Yeah, but you have to travel to exotic locations, meet new and interesting people, and—”
“Andwhat?”
He grimaced. “—and kill them.”
She snorted a laugh. “Nope, that’s just you.”
“It’s just a joke. Well, an aphorism. Look, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.” Jack Nicholson’s speech fromA Few Good Menblasted through Blaze’s head for the millionth time. “So we can’t go anywhere where you need a passport. However, we can covertly cross the Canadian border and stay for a few weeks without detection. Hopefully, Mary Varvara Bell will have forgotten about you by then.”
Sarah rolled her eyes at Blaze, and he struggled not to think it was the cutest thing ever.
He also had the inclination to turn her over his knee.
She said, “First of all, with what money? Your friend Twisty drained both of our bank accounts, and you’ve got to be running low on cash with all thosetollson thetoll roadswhere you have topaythe governmentmoney just to drive onthe road, plus gas and food. We can’t buy our way out of the situation.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Second,my father’s family forgetsnothing.He left New York twenty years before he died, and he and his fatherneverspoke to each other again. From what I gathered, the feud had been going on before that.”
