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“Do you have anything in your pockets, sir? Anything at all?”
“Just some c-cash.”
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sp; The woman shooed him in. “Put your hands up, please.” He copied the figure on the illustration in front of him, raising his hands to his forehead, palms out, elbows up. Something whirred and clunked. The other side of the pod opened up.
“Have a nice flight,” she said.
After gathering his scattered belongings, he found Katie on a bench in a spot helpfully labeled “Recombobulation Area.”
“I d-don’t know why they don’t just ask you to sstrip and bend over. It would ssave a lot of t-time.”
“Men are such whiners about airport security,” Katie said cheerfully. “Caleb hates it, too.”
“It’s d-demeaning.”
“You kind of suck at it,” she replied.
“Ssweet of you to say. My watch?”
She handed it to him. He sank down into a chair beside her and started trying to put himself together again, beginning with his belt.
“I like it,” she said. “I’m not used to seeing you suck at things.”
Tying his shoelaces put him eye-to-eye with Katie’s high-heeled ankle boots. Her legs, encased in black tights. As he sat up, he got to know her short black skirt better, and then his eyes insisted on visiting her soft, tight, bright blue shirt for longer than was strictly polite.
“Quit that,” Katie said as his eyes raked over her throat. Her neck. Her mouth. Those regal cheekbones.
“Quit what?”
“Quit looking at me like you want to do me in an airport bathroom stall.”
“Now that you m-mention it, that’s an excellent idea.”
She smacked his knee, then rubbed out the sting. Rubbed a little higher. “Ever had a sex-in-public fantasy, Sean?” she asked.
“I have now.” He checked to see that she was recombobulated, then stood and pulled her to her feet. Leaning in close, he whispered in her ear. “I’m going to find somewhere. After we land in Des Moines, I’m going to find a sspot, and then I’m going to make you c-come so hard you’ll have to bite your hand to keep from giving us away.”
She swayed a little and flattened one hand on his chest for balance. Her throat had flushed pink. “Promises, promises,” she said in a husky voice.
She wore her hair up in a ponytail. He kissed behind her ear, running light fingers over the sensitive nape of her neck.
Someone bumped his foot with a rolling suitcase, and he forced himself to remember where they were and knock off the flirting before he got too far down the road to Foreplayville. He didn’t particularly want to walk through the airport with visible wood.
When he stepped back, Katie blinked and inhaled sharply through her nose before saying, “Let’s go, Flyboy. I need to find a cup of coffee, or I’ll start to get grumpy.”
“C-can’t have that,” he agreed. They strolled toward the gate.
His phone beeped with a programmed alert. He pulled it out of his pocket, but it was only an email from Mike.
Last night, the same sound had chimed to notify him of a suspicious message sent to Judah on Twitter: Life’s short. Better get all your candy hearts in a row.
Death threat, or existential remark? No way to be certain, but it did fit the holiday theme, and it had that menacing, I’m-going-to-kill-you overtone.
He and Katie had spent hours last night crunching data, and he’d driven her home at four thirty a.m. so she could get packed before he swung by her house again at six to drive them to the airport.
The message had come through a dummy account. He hadn’t had any luck tracing it yet, though there were still a few things he planned to try.
