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She dug her keys out of her purse and handed them to Lila, since she had driven them to Clara’s. “Leave my car at your complex; I’ll come get it later,” she told her gaping face.
The smile on Jack’s face rivaled the rising sun.
“Where’d you park?” she asked him.
He pointed up the street, and she started walking.
They made it a few steps before Lila called out from behind them.
“Hey! Listen, buddy. I know your name and you better believe I’m going to get your license plate number! Iwillreport you if I don’t hear from her every fifteen minutes until she’s back!”
Gemma whirled around and shot her a teasing glare. “Oh,nowyou’re concerned?”
Lila smiled at her, and despite following a man she’d, at least to her memory, only known for half the morning to his car for a ride into the great beyond, she smiled back.
She couldn’t say why—maybe it was the psychic reading, maybe it was the sunny day, maybe it was his earnestness, which felt undeniably genuine—but Gemma knew that she could trust Jack.
CHAPTER
5
Jack followed thebraided rope of freeways leading out of the thick of Los Angeles. Gemma didn’t know much about him other than his name, but she assumed he had a well-paying job based on his car. Other than the coffee incident, which had smelled like coffee, she hadn’t yet been close enough to him to realize he smelled like what she could only describe as fresh air in the woods. Something clean and almost absent but distinctly present at the same time. The scent baked into the leather of his SUV made for a heady mix of dark notes with a crisp finish. Despite the alluring smell and the car’s smooth interior cupping her like a pair of gentle hands, she sat alert in the passenger seat as they wove their way through traffic.
“You’re awfully quiet over there,” Jack said over the soft hum of the radio.
Gemma pulled her gaze from the passing billboards and street signs and arched a brow. “Well, it’s not every day I take a road trip with someone whose solitary mission is toconvince me we’ve entered the Twilight Zone. Can’t say I’ve got any good conversation starters for that scenario.”
He softly laughed.
“And besides, it’s kind of unfair that you know all sorts of things about me, and I know nothing about you. I feel like you will have already heard anything I say.”
“You know plenty about me.”
“Not today I don’t.”
He changed lanes to loop them through a knot of intersecting freeways that spit them out heading due east. “Fair point. Well, what do you want to know?”
She had been so focused on how she fit into this equation, she hadn’t thought much about how he did. She unfolded her arms where she had been keeping them crossed over her chest and placed her hands on the cool leather of the seat beside her thighs. “What do you do for work?”
She expected an answer to roll off his tongue like any single thirtysomething; it was one of the first questions everyone asked each other. But he kept quiet.
“Are you not going to tell me?”
His face pulled into a smile. “You say that a lot.”
She stared at him, realizing what he meant. “Do you withhold information a lot?”
“Sometimes, yes. When I want to see if you can remember conversations we’ve had before and details I’ve shared.”
She kept her eyes on him, studying the straight slope of his nose and the soft swell of his lips. “You’ve told me what your job is before?”
“Many times.”
He grew quiet again. Only the radio filled the space.
“So, are you going to make me guess, then? Because I have no idea.”
He took his eyes from the road to look at her for as long as was safe in the rushing traffic. “I think you do, Gemma. Just concentrate for a second.”
