‘I know.’

They searched each other’s face, neither in any doubt of what was being proposed.

‘You’ll have to be quick,’ she said.

‘You’ll have to be quick. I could come right here on the sidewalk.’

‘You kiss your boss’s ass with that mouth?’

He smiled ruefully. ‘And how.’

She got out and locked the car.

True to his word, Tom didn’t waste time leading her through to the bedroom. Besides, he had a sneaking suspicion he hadn’t made the bed before leaving for South Africa. Remembering he hadn’t cleaned the kitchen for a while either, he turned to Ness the moment they got inside, and pressed her back against the front door with his mouth and hips.

His cell rang. ‘Shit.’

He and Ness locked eyes, then she looked away, leaving it up to him. There was an LA number on the display that he didn’t recognize. His hips still pressed against Ness, he answered it.

‘Tom?’

The voice was a woman’s, but very small and frightened – almost like she was about to cry. Tom couldn’t identify it but got a sinking feeling. He took a step backwards. ‘Yeah?’ he said warily.

‘It’s Lucia.’

Tom felt all the breath stop right where it was in his lungs and windpipe. Nothing moved in his frozen system for a good five seconds while his mind fired with lightning speed. How had she got his number? Then he remembered giving it to that sleazeball club manager, thinking there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell that he’d pass it on to her. People! Always coming through for you even when you wished they hadn’t …

‘Tom?’

He let his breath out. He didn’t look at Ness – aware that she was staring at him. He turned his back to her and could almost feel her gaze harden.

‘Yeah, what?’ He knew he sounded unnecessarily harsh – but what the fuck was she calling him for?

‘I think my sister just got killed in a plane crash.’

‘Oh.’

He could hear she was trying not to cry, trying to hold things together, but the cynical part of him – the large cynical part of him – shouted about mindgames and manipulation. He hadn’t heard about any plane crash! Did she even have a sister? She hadn’t mentioned one. Although, of course, family and friends were hardly common conversational currency when you were in the middle of paying for sex in a Motel 6.

A noise from Lucia brought him back. It wasn’t manipulative tears – it was the noise of her clearing her throat to try to sound more normal. That didn’t exactly match his cynical profile, did it?

‘Hold on.’

He crossed the room to the TV and surfed until he found shots of smoking wreckage.

The caption running along the bottom of the screen said the American Airlines 737 had gone down outside Tulsa, and that all seventy-eight passengers and crew were feared dead.

Tom glanced at Ness, who looked away from the TV to him.

‘Tom? I’m sorry to call you but … can you find out for me? American won’t say, and my mother …’

She tailed off and Tom listened to the taut silence.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Candice Holmes. She was with her boyfriend, Carlo Alienti.’

He glanced at the phone display. ‘You’ll be at this number?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘Thanks.’

Tom hung up and looked at the TV while he decided what to tell Ness.

‘Another 737?’ She gestured at the screen, and he realised she must think that the call had been from work. Relief washed over him.

‘Yeah.’

They watched the pictures. The sound was muted, the shots of the wreckage interspersed with eye-witnesses waving their hands at the sky and with what looked like phone-cam footage of two distant blobs falling out of the air to disappear behind a barn and a galvanized-steel windmill. Then back to the smouldering crash site.

‘They need me to work,’ he lied.

She was silent for a long moment. So long that Tom turned to look at her. She was watching the TV but he saw a struggle on her face. ‘What about the game?’ she asked.

He turned his palms up in a brief but unmistakable gesture of can’t-be-helped. ‘I’m sorry.’

Suddenly she was smiling sexily, and slid round behind him, encircling his waist with her slender golden arms. Tom felt her breath at the base of his neck. ‘I have to call the airline,’ he said. ‘Do a bunch of things.’

It was a kiss-off but Ness was apparently made of sterner stuff. Her hands brushed gently over his crotch. ‘One little game?’ She left a hand on his groin and pushed the other under his shirt, running her nails lightly across his ribs to his nipple, making him grunt. Lucia and her dead sister started to seem misty and minor as blood dropped out of his head so fast that all he could hear was a roaring like Niagara as it passed his ears.

He turned to kiss her, to touch her – but she withdrew and picked up her purse where she’d dropped it by the front door.

‘Come on, Tom. One game. Then we can come back here and I’ll take care of you.’ Her eyes dropped to his jeans as she spoke. Then she raised them and he saw the tease lighting them up.

What little sense he had left sparked into anger. Anger at her for leading him by his dick, and anger at himself for being led.

And, for Tom, anger would always beat sex when it came to his own internal version of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

As he had in the Karoo, he thought he saw an answering flash of anger in her eyes. Maybe she’d heard Lucia’s small voice on the phone; maybe she knew he was lying. Too late to do anything about that now. If she’d heard, she’d heard. If she knew he was lying, she knew. He wasn’t about to back-pedal and try to make it right with her.

Suddenly Ness just looked disappointed and he thought maybe he’d been wrong about the anger. He was no judge of emotions, especially in women.

‘I’m sorry too,’ she said.