The hangar smelled like jet fuel and cold concrete, and Jude Westfield was already standing in it when Nadia Belmont arrived at 5:29.
She had planned an entrance. She had planned to sweep in at 5:31, one minute late on purpose, and find him checking his watch.
Instead, he was leaning against the wing strut with his hands in his coat pockets, watching the open bay door behind her the way other people watched television.
“You’re early,” she accused.
“I’m on time. You’re early.” He didn’t look at her when he said it. “There’s a gray sedan parked on the access road with a good view of this hangar. It’s been there eleven minutes.”
Nadia turned to look.
“Don’t.” His voice didn’t rise. It never had to. “It’s a maintenance supervisor eating a sandwich in his car because his wife is mad at him. But you looked, which means anyone watching now knows you were told to look.”
“You are the single most exhausting person I have ever met.”
“You brought me food again,” he observed.
She had, in fact, brought him food in a white bakery box tied with kitchen twine. She’d spent forty minutes on it that morning before her father’s wedding brunch, and she resented every one of those minutes now.
“It’s leftovers,” she lied, shoving the box at him.
“It’s warm,” he pointed out.
“It’s aggressively leftover,” she sniped.
The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile. It was the merest suspicion of one.
The Gulfstream did the hundred miles to Lubbock in twenty-two minutes, which was — Nadia had pointed out to her father approximately nine hundred times — an insane way to travel to a community college. Her father had listened, agreed, and sent the jet anyway.
Jude sat across the aisle from her, facing backward, which she’d noticed he always did.
“You’re going to tell me what’s wrong with my security,” she said.
“Everything.”
“Oh, do be specific,” she mocked.
“Your day man is competent. Your night man is a former corrections officer who has never worked a protective detail in his life and thinks the job is standing in a doorway looking large.” Jude turned the bakery box a quarter inch on the table, squaring it. “Your apartment has one exit, a courtyard gate anybody can climb, and a mailbox with your surname printed on it in vinyl letters. Belmont. In vinyl. On the street.”
Nadia opened her mouth. Okay, that was a little embarrassing and a little beneath a Belmont.
“I had it removed,” he said.
“You had my mailbox—”
“I’ve had it replaced with 316B. The post office is aware.” He finally looked at her, and she wished he hadn’t. Those near-black eyes did something to the inside of her ribcage that she was not prepared to examine at cruising altitude. “You can be angry about it. I’d rather you were angry than findable.”
She was angry about it. That was the maddening part. She was angry about it, and something underneath the anger was going warm and stupid, and she had no idea what to do with either emotion.
So, she did what she always did. She lashed back. “Is this you cashing in?”
Jude tilted his head at her.
“The favors.” She waved a hand between them, breezy, the way she’d wave off a waiter. “I still owe you two. Handshake, your office, that grim little lamp. Is this what you’re spending one on? Rearranging my mail?”
“No.”
“Because you should. Spend them, I mean.” She was talking too fast now, and she knew it. “Honestly, it’s undignified. You hoarding them like coupons. Pick something. I have a filthy rich father and no shame. Ask me for something outrageous and watch me deliver it.”
“No.”
“How about a car?”
“No.”
“A building?”
“Nadia.” He was starting to sound irritated. It was something. Not much, but something. Most days it was impossible to ruffle his feathers. She knew because she’d tried repeatedly.
“Cash one in,” she said, and heard her own voice come out thinner than she’d meant it to. “Right now. I dare you.”
The engines hummed. Below them the Panhandle was going the color of a struck match. It was a small cattle town, but no place on earth could match their sunsets.
“I’m not spending a favor,” Jude said slowly, “on something I intend to earn.”
Nadia laughed. She hated that it came out too loud in the snug, luxurious cabin. “Earn. Okay. That’s very noble of you. What exactly are you earning? A commendation? Another plaque? Because I hate to break it to you, but the mayor’s already given you the key to a town with one stoplight—”
“I made a promise,” he said. “Concerning you. I intend to keep it.”
Nadia went still, fearing she knew exactly what he meant. Of course, she did. She’d spent ten months waiting for someone to finally say it out loud, and he’d finally done it at nine thousand feet with a box of leftovers between them.
He’d promised to keep her alive.
That was what the handshake had actually cost. Not two favors. Not dirt on Damien Vance. She’d walked into a sheriff’s office in a chic jacket and fringed jeans and asked a convicted felon how to keep herself from being murdered. He had said, I’ll see what I can do. Then he’d walked into the crosshairs of a loaded gun for her, walked out of a burning building minutes later (also for her), and now he was going to spend the rest of his life quietly moving her mailbox and firing her night man and standing in hangars eleven minutes early because he had promised.
She was a job.
She was a very well-guarded, very expensive job.
“Right,” she said. “Well. You’ve already kept your promise. Damien Vance is in a cell in Amarillo eating institutional meatloaf, and I’m going back to school. You can consider yourself released from—”
“That isn’t the promise.”
“Then what—?”
“Ask me in the spring.”
“Jude!” It was cruel of him to dangle something like that in front of her, then leave her hanging.
“Ask me in the spring,” he repeated, “and I’ll tell you everything. You can throw the answer back in my face if you want to. I’d prefer you didn’t, but you can.”
The plane began its descent.
Nadia looked out the window at the runway lights coming up out of the gathering shadows and thought about the fact that she had two hearts behind her and one in her chest, and none of them had ever done anything like this before.
“You know I never thanked you,” she said — to the window, not to him. “Properly. For the heart.”
“You’ve thanked me four times.”
“I’ve joked four times.”
“I know,” said Jude. “I counted those, too.”
* * *
He watched her go down the airstairs ahead of him with her ridiculously large suitcase and her ridiculously stylish coat with her chin up. He stayed three steps behind, where he could see everything she couldn’t.
Ask me in the spring.
He’d meant to say more. He had rehearsed more on the drive to the hangar, which was a thing he had never once done during the past eight years of talking to killers, prosecutors, and men from agencies that didn’t print their names on anything.
What he had promised was this: Standing inside a small-town sheriff’s office right after agreeing to risk his life to save Nadia and her stepmother, he’d asked Ansel Belmont for the only payment he wanted. Ansel Belmont had looked at him for a long moment and said, “You must win her heart first.”
Not permission. A condition.
Jude had run the odds that night and come back with a number he didn’t like. A felon. A pardon that didn’t exist yet. A case with fourteen registered hulls and seven of them currently at sea, plus two men with weather-god aliases who would be in touch soon, without specifying a date or time.
He had recalculated four times since, assessing what his chances were of ever dating Nadia Belmont, and the number had not improved.
It didn’t matter. He had given her a heart once, quietly, through channels that had cost him more than she would ever know.
He intended to have hers in return.
A heart for a heart. He’d have said it out loud on the plane if he thought she’d hear it as anything but a joke, but she wasn’t ready to hear it any other way. Not yet. In the spring, when the pardon was signed, his record was clean, and he could stand in front of her as a man with nothing on his file, he would say it plainly and let her do whatever she was going to do with the information.
Assuming he’d make it to spring.
Jude paused at the bottom of the airstairs and let his gaze travel the fence line out of habit.
The gray sedan from the Hereford access road was parked at the far end of the Lubbock lot with its lights off.
Same car. A hundred miles away. Twenty-two minutes by air.
He’d been wrong about the guy eating a sandwich in his car because his wife was mad at him. Why were the occupants of two identical cars shadowing Nadia from a hundred miles apart? Or shadowing him? The jury was still out on their target.
“Are you coming?” Nadia called back, impatient, alive, entirely unaware. “It’s freezing.”
“Right behind you,” said Jude, and took out his phone.
