The airplane roared around them, flying toward LA.
Tristan King regarded the sylph of a girl sitting across the table from him. Colleen was perceptive, perhaps too perceptive, for him to be around for long.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Look, you’re not trapped. We’re only going to Los Angeles. The plane is going to land in about twenty minutes. When we get there, if you want to go home, I’ll buy you a first-class plane ticket on the next commercial flight heading back to Phoenix. However, I don’t think those gunshots were meant for me.” He glanced out the window at the white clouds and the crumpled barren landscape below the plane. “It’s unlikely anybody will be shooting at us whilst we’re in the air. I don’t see any MiGs out there.”
Colleen regarded him closely, scrutinizing his expression or his hair or something. “MiGs? Why MiGs? You didn’t say fighter planes. You didn’t say F-15s. Why MiGs?”
Yes, she was perceptive. “I just picked one.”
“MiGs are Russian fighter jets, or they were. Mikoyan was combined into the larger company, United Aircraft Corporation, a while back. But why would MiGs, specifically, want to shoot you out of the sky?”
“Well, if those men were shooting at me, and I still don’t think they were, it might make sense that people shooting at me might have connections to Russia or Russian oligarchs.”
She squinted at him, narrowing her warm brown eyes. “What, are you a spy or something? You said you were a coder. Do you work for the NSA?”
“No. I don’t work for any government. I don’t even live in the United States.”
She was still examining him very closely, and Tristan relaxed his arms and jaw to appear unconcerned. She said, “You sound like an American.”
Tristan dredged up his wide grin and slapped his dress shirt over his pectoral muscle, which was a little sore after a quick five a.m. workout at the hotel gym that morning. “One hundred percent corn-fed Iowa beef. Born and raised.”
Colleen tilted her head to the side, tendrils of her dark hair brushing her shoulder where they were coming loose from the bun on the back of her head. “Iowa?”
“Yep, I’m a farm boy. I was born in Iowa and raised there. When I was thirteen, I won a scholarship to a boarding school in Switzerland, where I went to high school.”
“I was wondering how you got stuck in a blizzard in New York City all by yourself as a teenager if you were from Iowa.”
He nodded and signaled to the stewardess for another drink. “I was flying home for Christmas break, but New York closed the airports due to a blizzard during my layover. I mean, they closed the whole airport. I had to leave the building. I suppose now that I could have told someone I was fifteen, but I didn’t know to do that, back then. I was already over six feet tall, so I guess they must not have known I was a junior in high school. I got on a train going into the City because that’s what everyone else was doing. When I tried to call my parents to ask them to use their credit card to get me a hotel room or something because I didn’t have any money, that was when I figured out their phone line didn’t work anymore.”
Colleen’s eyes were beginning to widen in sympathy, and her soft chin wasn’t as clenched. “Uh-oh.”
This was the part that he had to gloss over, the part where he spent the night in a Manhattan townhouse, talking to one of his friends’ black sheep of a grandfather. “When I finally made it to our farm west of Iowa City just a few days later, the house was empty. No people. No furniture. Abandoned.”
Tristan hadn’t meant to use that word, even when he was describing the house.
He continued, “When I couldn’t get inside the house, I hiked over to the Halverson farm, which was the next farm over. Even old Mrs. Halverson, who knew everything about everybody, didn’t know where they’d gone. She said she’d heard my father had gotten tired of farming, so they packed up and left. I still don’t know where they are.”
“I can’t believe your family just left you like that.” Her eyebrows lowered, and her mouth set in a harder line. “Wait. Actually, I can.”
Interesting.
She looked around the private plane, taking in the polished, burled wood and soft leather of the seats. “And you were never able to find them?”
Ah, a quick insinuation of the plane and the money to buy it. Nice. Yes, Tristan had the means to look for them, but he also knew not to waste his money. “I have at least eight brothers and sisters that I know of. They probably didn’t notice I was missing. I don’t know that they were one hundred percent sure where I went to high school, other than it was far away, somewhere. Considering how surprised Mrs. Halverson was to see me, they might’ve been telling people that I dropped out of school and ran away.”
“And you were fifteen,” she said.
“That was my first trip home in over a year, so I haven’t seen them since I was thirteen.”
“That’s so sad.”
Tristan stretched his arms out to his sides and then interlaced his fingers behind his head, returning her reference to the jet plane they were flying on. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I turned out all right.”
She nodded pensively, puckering her lips like she was sucking on her teeth. She finally said, “My family waited until I was twenty to throw me out.”
Tristan raised an eyebrow. “So, what happened to you?”
She began shredding the paper napkin her coffee was sitting on. “Family stuff. And then when college didn’t work out, I was in debt because I took out a bunch of student loans. Those loans are the reason why I can’t seem to make enough money to even eat on a regular basis.” She patted her hip and scowled. “Not that you would know it.”
“Don’t.” Tristan said.
She looked up. “Don’t what?”
He let his voice drop just a little, but she was his employee, not his plaything. However, he was trying to make a bit of a difference in her life, and she was only twenty-three. “Don’t put yourself down like that. I’m your employer, at least for a week. You can use me as a job reference when you get back to Phoenix. Tell me good things about you, things I should put in a letter of recommendation.”
She batted her brown eyes at him like a fawn lingering at the edge of a forest. “Okay.”
“Let’s hear one good thing to balance that.”
Colleen blinked again and held her breath. “I’m—reliable.”
They would have to work on that. “Good. Now proceed to tell me about your family doing what families do. You took out loans for college?”
She nodded and paused a beat, settling back into her story. “My student loans, right. I have to make the minimum payments on those loans, or else they’ll go into default. I can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from under them. You can’t declare bankruptcy on student loans.”
He replied, “Yes, that’s a problem,” to encourage her. “What happened with college, though?”
Colleen flinched and kept her gaze on her fingers decimating that napkin. “I don’t know.”
Again, Tristan was her employer, and not anything else. Even though he liked showing his littles the world, giving them new experiences they would never have been able to encounter otherwise, Colleen was a temp for his business, and that was all.
Outside the porthole window, the ground was rising under the airplane. “We’re landing. Do you want that first-class ticket back to Phoenix or not?”
She stared right at him. “Tell me the truth. Do you know if someone is after you?”
Tristan shook his head. “I have no idea who they were, and I don’t know if they were coming after me. If they were shooting at me, I could make several conjectures about who and why, because anyone in high-level businesses can make enemies or accidentally transgress. However, I don’t know anyone specific who wants to kill me. And the people who might be the kind to kill me have more of a vested interest in keeping me alive, anyway.”
She sighed and looked at the ceiling of the airplane. “It’s a lot of money. I don’t think I can walk away from that much money. That’s change-my-life kind of money.”
Tristan nodded. And damn, the paltry amount he’d offered her shouldn’t be change-her-life kind of money. It wasn’t that much.
She raised one finger in the air. “If there are any more bullets flying, I’m out of here. I will scoot around a corner and hail an Uber and go straight back to the airport.”
He smiled. “Understood.”
“And I still might. If I decide in the middle of the night that this is all too much, I will text you that I’m leaving.”
“That’s reasonable.”
“And you still have to pay me for however many days I stayed.”
“Agreed.”
“All right, then. When do we start?”
The brushed steel Rolex on his left wrist said that the time was nearing ten o’clock. “A car is picking us up at the airport. Our first meeting is at eleven, Miss Reliable. Brace yourself.”