"Almost three."
"How do you like it?"
"Fine."
"Fine? That's an odd answer. This is a love-it-or-hate-it business." He leaned forward, put his elbows on the table. "Do you have a passion for it?"
That word again: the one that separated her and Tully as cleanly as wheat from chaff.
"Y-yes."
He studied her, then smiled knowingly. She wondered how deeply into her soul that blue gaze had seen. "Tully certainly does."
"Yes."
He tried to sound casual as he asked, "Is she seeing anyone?"
Kate considered it a personal triumph that she didn't flinch or frown. Now, at least, she knew why he'd asked her out for lunch. She should have known. She wanted to say,Yes;she's been with the same man for years,but she didn't dare. Tully might not hide Chad anymore, but she didn't flaunt him, either. "What do you think?"
"I think she sees a lot of men."
Thankfully, the waitress returned with their orders and she pretended to be fascinated by her plate. "What about you? I get the feeling you're not exactly passionate about your job."
He looked up sharply. "What makes you say that?"
She shrugged and kept eating, but she was watching him now.
"Maybe not," he said quietly.
She felt herself go still; her fork stayed in midair. For the first time they weren't making idle chitchat. He'd just revealed something important; she was somehow certain of that. "Tell me about El Salvador."
"You know what went on down there? The massacre? It was a bloodbath. Things have been getting worse lately, too. The death squads are killing civilians, priests, nuns."
Kate hadn't known all of that, or any of it, really, but she nodded anyway, watching the play of emotions cross his face. She'd never seen him so animated, so passionate. Again there was an unreadable emotion in his eyes, too. "You sound as if you loved it. Why did you leave?"
"I don't talk about this." He finished his beer and stood up. "We better get back to work."
She looked down at their barely eaten lunches. Obviously she'd gone too far, probed too much. "I got too personal, I'm sorry—"
"Don't be. It's ancient history. Let's go."
All the way back to the office, he said nothing. They walked briskly upstairs and into the quiet office.
There, she couldn't help herself, she touched his arm. "I really am sorry. I didn't mean to upset you."
"Like I said, it's old news."
"It isn't, though, is it?" she said quietly, knowing instantly that she'd overstepped again.
"Get back to work," he said brusquely, and went into his office, slamming the door shut behind him.
Yelm slept in the verdant green valley between Olympia and Tacoma. It had always been the kind of town where people dressed in flannel shirts and faded jeans and waved to one another as they passed.
All that had changed a few years ago, on the day a thirty-fivethousand-year-old warrior from Atlantis supposedly appeared in the kitchen of an otherwise ordinary housewife.
The locals, who believed in the Northwest creed of "live and let live," looked the other way for a long time. They ignored the "weirdos" who came to Yelm (many of them in expensive cars, wearing designer clothes—"Hollywood types") and paid no attention as SOLD signs started appearing on prime pieces of land.
When the whispers began that J. Z. Knight was gearing up to build some kind of compound to house a school for her followers, though, the townsfolk had had enough. According to the South Sound bureau chief at KCPO, people were picketing the Knight property.
