“You think of everything.”
“Use your manners and you’ll be fine. Wait.” He got off the bike, opened a saddlebag and removed an empty backpack. He also drew out a cap and a pair of reading glasses with thick black rims. “Here. Just a precaution. If they have to describe you later, they’ll remember the cap and glasses first, though there’s not much we can do about your hair. I’d give you the fake beard, but that’d make you memorable.”
“Are you saying I’m not memorable?”
“In my experience, that’s an advantage.”
“Huh.” She shoved the cap onto her head. “You travel everywhere with costumes and party tricks?”
“For my PI work. Tailing, surveillance…”
“How do you do stakeouts—if that’s what you call them—on a motorcycle?”
“I also have a car—not an Aston Martin. It’s so forgettable it’s practically invisible.”
“Just like me!”
“No, not like you,” he said, laughing. “It’s an urban camo car. Looks like every other car in the supermarket parking lot. Sometimes even I lose it.”
Alice came back ten minutes later with the groceries in the backpack, the slight magnification in the lenses messing with her distance vision. “I didn’t get a whole lot, since we’re carrying everyth?—”
She stopped still. The bike was there, but he was gone.
“Holt?” she said, her voice squeaky. “Holt?” she repeated, a little louder. There was a rustling in the scrub beside the bike and he emerged, buttoning his fly. “Oh, thank goodness.”
“What did you call me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You called me Holt.”
“Uh, did I? Sorry, it’s just—I’ve known you so long as Anderson Holt.” He cocked an eyebrow as he reached for thebackpack. “Yes, I know I only met you a few hours ago, but Holt was real to me, okay? You spend enough time with a character and you start thinking you see him at the store or the dry cleaners.”
“So how do I shape up in reality?” he said, as he slipped the backpack on.
“You’re more … 3D than I’d imagined.”
“Just the compliment every man wants to hear. I was pretty kickass in the book. Even I was a little turned on. Jesus, how wrong is that?”
“So very wrong.”
“No more so than you thinking he was real.”
“But it turned out I was right, so…”
“And if you’d seen real me at the dry cleaners, would you have recognized me?”
“Possibly. There are certain similarities.”
“Thehoneypot allure?”
“The main difference between you and Anderson Holt is that his ego would never need to be stroked. He wouldn’t fish for a compliment.”
“Who says I expected a compliment? Holt wasn’t perfect—maybe I expected criticism.” He grinned in that cheeky way that was becoming oh so familiar.
“Sure you did.”
He raised his eyebrows, deepening the lines in his forehead.
