She spun like a deer that's heard the safety come off.
I stopped where I was and put my hands up, palms out, the universal sign forI'm not the thing you're running from.
And here's where the day stopped making any sense at all.
Because she pulled herself together faster than men I've served with under fire. One breath she was prey; the next she'd squared up, lifted that stubborn chin, and looked me dead in the eye like I was a problem on a list she was working through.
"Do you have a car?" she asked.
I blinked behind the sunglasses. "...Yeah. Parked around the corner."
"Can you give me a ride?"
"Where?"
"I don't know yet." She said it like it was a reasonable answer. LikeI don't know yetwas a destination.
I should've walked. Every instinct I'd spent twenty years sharpening said walk—that this was a complication with a wedding dress on it, that it had nothing to do with Tommy or whatever was waiting for me, that a smart man does not load an unknown female fleeing a church into a rental car under an alias an hour after landing. I knew all that.
"Sure," I heard myself say. "You want me to bring the car here?"
"Yes. That's best." She threw another glance back the way we'd come. "Can you hurry?"
And I grinned. Couldn't help it. First real one in I didn't know how long, pulled right out of me against my will.
Because this was one of three things. It was a setup—the most colorful damn piece of entrapment anybody had ever run on me. It was one of those hidden-camera shows, and somewhere a kid with a clipboard was about to jump out and ruin my year. Or it was the universe, which had a sense of humor I'd never trusted, deciding to throw me the single biggest curveball of my life on a sidewalk in a city I'd been in for ninety minutes.
"Give me one minute," I said.
I jogged back for the car.
When I came around the corner, the church had emptied out into the street—a knot of people in spring colors, milling, heads turning, that stir a crowd makes when something's gone wrong and nobody'll say so. A woman's voice carried over the rest of it, high and cracking at the edges.
"Mary Catherine!"
I slowed.
That was the moment to do the right thing. The decent thing. Point a thumb over my shoulder, sayshe went thataway,let these good people collect their runaway and sort out their own mess, and go drink the rest of my coffee. The decent man's road was right there, lit up and easy.
I got in the rental and drove back to the bride.
She was waiting in the slot of the alley, half in shadow, and she came out and got in the second I stopped—no hesitation. She pulled the door shut. But before she reached for the belt, she turned in the seat and looked at me, full-on, those eyes steady now and dead serious.
"Are you a pervert or something?"
It knocked the words clean out of me.
I've been asked a lot of questions in my life. By men with badges and men with guns, in rooms with no windows, in languages I had to be taught the threats in. I've always had ananswer, even when the answer was a lie. This stumped me cold. I sat there with my mouth half open like the dumbest recruit on the range.
She nodded, slow, like that was the answer she'd expected. Like my having no answer was somehow the right one.
"Good enough," she said. "Now, drive."
So, I drove.
She reached up and pulled the veil off her dark hair, dropped it in her lap like it had been bothering her for hours, and let out a breath that seemed to come from the soles of her feet.
I pulled us out onto the lane and away from the church and the crowd and the bells that were finally, mercifully, going quiet—a stranger in a stolen name driving a runaway bride to a destination neither of us knew, and not one piece of it making sense.
