At the airport, Elfie stood aside with their few bags while Tryp threw down a black credit card and booked them on a plane to the closest airport, Las Vegas, that left an hour later and then rented a car that was waiting for them at the airport for the two and a half hour drive to New Empyrean as soon as they claimed their luggage.
Damn. Money could move things.
On the way to New Empyrean, Elfie refrained from snorting and being derisive about the pretentiousness of the name of the settlement, but Tryp was doing an excellent job of extolling the many disgusting crimes and revolting practices that occurred there regularly, so her contribution was unnecessary.
Besides, she was too busy listening to her heart crack long, jagged chasms like clay earth parched by drought as they neared the place where Tryp was going to go all Galahad and rescue his first, one, true love.
Tryp drove the rental car off the highway onto a dirt road, and the car bumped over ruts, jarring Elfie. She clung to the panic handle on the door to keep from bouncing right out of her seatbelt.
A couple teeth-loosening miles later, Tryp killed the engine. “We should get out and walk.”
Good thing she hadn’t changed out of her work clothes. She stepped out, her steel-toed boots sliding on the gravel and loose sand. The sun overhead puddled her shadow around her feet.
They hiked through scrub brush that snagged Elfie’s clothes like angry kitten claws. Tryp dodged the shrubs better than she did. Even though he wore a soft, white tee shirt that should have been a magnet for every burr out in that desert, he skirted the thorns while Elfie was getting scratched to bits.
He must have spent a lot of time out here as a kid.
As they came over a rise, Tryp crouched in the brushes and motioned for her to get down. She crawled forward, the beige sand gritty under her palms, wishing she had her leather work gloves. She whispered, “What?”
Below them, in a small arroyo, a Spanish castle rose out of the wild scrub. Squared-off crenellations topped walls of smooth, red clay. On the first story, arrow-slit windows were cut into the walls, and the massive front door was dark wood, kind of like a drawbridge. Both upper stories had wide windows and balconies below the gables of the tile roof.
At least a hundred people milled around the house, mostly small people, like toddlers and small children, and the desert sunlight glinted golden off all the blond heads. The women’s and girls’ pastel dresses fluttered in the breeze.
“Holy shit,” she muttered. “You don’t think of a house like that out here.”
“It’s gotta be big enough for eighteen wives to each have her own room and space for dozens of children.”
“The ramifications had not occurred to me. What does your step-father do?”
“He’s an elder in the church, and he manages a construction company that builds major business projects in Salt Lake, like shopping malls, and some of the casinos in Reno and Las Vegas. He skimmed most of the money and supplies from the clients to build all this, but not a penny from the church.”
“It’s kind of impressive that he’s so devout.”
“Not devout. Too dangerous. One whiff of scandal, and he would lose it all. I didn’t say he owned the construction company. The church does. He manages it.”
“So what does he own?”
“Legally, not even the clothes he is actually wearing on his ass, because he would have bought them with the church credit card.”
“That’s nuts.”
“It keeps people in line,” Tryp whispered.
“So, what’s our plan?” Elfie asked him.
“Get Sariah and any kids that she has. Leave.”
“No. I mean how we’re going to do it.”
“Not a clue.”
Panic bubbled up like erupting lava in her throat. “What?”
“The other times, I just waited out here until she came out alone.”
“So she walks outside a lot, for exercise or to do stuff, like a couple times a day.”
“Last time, it took five days. The time before that, two.”
“We’ve got to meet the tour in a couple days.”
“Hopefully, we’ll get lucky and it won’t take as long this time.”
Elfie scowled. “Lucky died when he was a pup.”
Tryp raised one thick eyebrow, a pretty neat trick. “I don’t get it.”
“There were two puppies: Lucky and Go. Lucky sat around waiting to get lucky and have someone feed him. Go went out and got something to eat.”
“That’s morbid,” Tryp said.
“Let’s go.”
Elfie stood up and started crashing through the underbrush and the thigh-high, tinder-dry grass, striding toward the house.
“Jesus!” she heard behind her, and Tryp grabbed her arm and yanked her backward, falling on his back and pulling her down and onto his chest, hiding them in the straw and bushes. He hissed, “They will fucking shoot you!”
“Me?” Elfie grabbed the end of her braid, rolled the elastic off, and threaded her fingers through her long, sunlight-blond hair. It fell down around her shoulders and hung like gossamer around them. She’d been using that silicone stuff, and it looked glorious. “They might shoot you, but not me. I’ll just waltz in there, and they won’t be able to tell me apart from all the other wives and teenage girls.”
“Other than the fact you’re wearing carpenter’s pants and a tank top instead of a prairie dress like you rolled up here in a covered wagon.”
“So I’ll steal something off a clothesline.”
“They don’t have a clothesline. When was the last time you saw a clothesline? There’s a laundry on the third floor.”
“So I’ll mug someone. They can’t fight back in those skirts.”
“Elfie, you can’t go in there.” Their faces were so close that she could see the pupils in his dark brown eyes in the late afternoon sun. “They’re threatening to beat the shit out of Sariah to manipulate me. If anything happened to you, it would kill me.”
He reached up around the back of her neck and pulled her down for a kiss, running his lips over hers, nibbling and caressing her lips with his mouth.
Elfie kissed him back, twisting to mold her mouth and her body to his.
It might be her last time to kiss Tryp.
Tryfon. His name was Tryfon.
His arm slid around her waist, and he held her to himself there in the tall grass for a long minute. His palm rubbed the small of her back, then his fingers cupped her ass for just a moment, pressing her to his body.
His lips on hers softened, and Elfie sat up.
His bright eyes roved over her face. “You just made every one of my teenage fantasies come true.”
“That was all your teenage fantasies?”
“I didn’t know anything more. When I was seven, I knew that people who were married kissed each other, but I didn’t know any more than that until I was set out and went to L.A.”
“Quick study.”
His embarrassed grin made her laugh. “I was fourteen. Not as quick as you’d think.”
Elfie glanced toward the castle. She folded her arms on his chest and rested her chin on them, looking up at him. “So seriously, what’s the plan?”
His hand crept over the curve of her butt again. “My mind seems to have gone all fuzzy—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Let’s just drive up to the front door.”
“Are you kidding? We can’t just drive up and say, ‘Hi. Is Sariah home?’”
“Yeah, but any fiendish plan you come up with will probably involve explosives.”
“That would be cool, or we can say that we’re a married couple and we’ve received a message from God to join the community.”
Tryp rolled his dark eyes, still gorgeous even without eyelashes. “Because what they’ll want is more men around, competing for wives. And it’s not ‘God.’ You say ‘Heavenly Father.’”
“Okay, then we’ll say that we were commanded by ‘Heavenly Father’ to start our own community in—” She grasped for somewhere far enough away.
“Texas,” he said.
“—Texas, and we want to learn from them because they are the most successful polygamists on the Earth.”
“There is no way this can work.” Tryp rubbed his hand down her spine, and something in his pants moved. “I have a suit in my luggage I could wear. And we brought the stage make-up.”
Elfie grinned at him. “Watch me work these guys.”