“Are you hurt?”
Kris looked up at the edge in that voice.
She was tall at five feet, ten inches. He was taller, with long dark hair that curled over the collar of the jacket, dark eyes, and lean features, beard-roughened face, good-looking even with the frown.
“They use the crowd to their advantage.” He brushed off the sleeve of her jacket, and settled the strap of her bag back at her shoulder. “It could have been worse. You should have let go.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Kris fired back, irritated more than anything. “My passport, credit cards, and papers are in that bag.”
She pushed back the irritation. She wasn’t ignorant about street crime or crowded airports. Living in a city like New York, you learned to be careful and alert. But at the moment, she just wanted to get out of the airport.
“Thank you.”
Gratitude? Maybe. But the dismissal was obvious, that blue gaze dropping the temperature around them a good thirty degrees. He reached around her and seized the handle of her carry-on.
She stared after him as he walked off with her bag in tow. It was there in the accent that was pure Scots and slipped through with more than a little irritation, before walking off.
James Morgan.
There was no mistaking that dark gaze, the dark hair, or the resemblance to one of Cate’s friends—Anne Morgan. She was supposed to meet Anne, and they were to drive up together to Inverness.
It was Anne who had found the Tavern for Cate when she made the decision to retire and write that first book.
“Some place quiet, tucked away, green. I’m done with deserts,” Cate had said.
There were several pictures of James Morgan at Anne’s office, his arm draped around her shoulders, the uniform, his hair cut military-short, handsome in a reckless sort of way, far different from the man who suddenly stopped, turned, and gave her a long look.
He was older than the young man in that photograph. There were lines that hadn’t been there before, and a leanness had replaced the muscular build of the twenty-five-year-old who had been into body-building at the time. The reckless expression was gone too, replaced by something else, something dark and closed.
“I’m not after your passport or your credit cards, so you can lose the attitude,” he said by way of explanation.
“Anne had a problem with a client at the last minute. I had to be here anyway taking care of some things, and I’m headed back. It was her idea that we drive up together. She sent you a text.” He shrugged with indifference and headed for the exit.
Kris followed him and her carry-on. “I have a reservation for a rental car.”
He let stopped, let go of the handle of her bag, and headed out the exit.
“Suit yourself.”
She grabbed the handle of the carry-on and followed him out to the line of parked rental cars.
“It probably doesn’t make sense to rent two cars for the same trip,” she conceded. There was that look again, as he hit the remote trunk release of a white economy model in the near parking space.
“No, it doesn’t.”
There was a duffle bag in the trunk, jacket, but no garment bag.
“No uniform?” she commented, with more of an edge than she intended, after that ‘suit yourself’ indifference.
He grabbed her carry-on and threw it into the trunk.
“A uniform makes an easy target.”
Blunt, and another hard reality of the world they lived in.
There had been too many terrorist attacks around the world. And anyone in a military uniform was a particularly inviting target.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...” she started to apologize.
