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.
‘Why?’
‘I shouldn’t have pushed you. I know your job’s important to you.’ She opened the door and he joined her, putting a hand on the curve of her hip, holding her there.
‘You’re important to me, Ness.’
She looked away from him, and then at the floor. ‘Am I?’
Tom knew he shouldn’t say too much. No promises. No false expectations. He’d learned that anything he said when he had a hard-on was liable to come back to bite him in the ass.
Instead he took the safe option of bending to kiss her neck where it met her shoulder. The skin was flawless and soft and, for a fleeting moment, his blood tried to struggle into a U-turn to head south once more. He broke the contact, and let go of her.
She didn’t move away from him immediately, which he figured was a good sign. Then she gave him a small, hurt smile over her shoulder, and hurried to her Lotus. He shut the door before she drove away, not wanting to indulge in the domesticity of waving her off.
*
With his NTSB badge number, Tom was quickly able to establish contact with the American Airlines family liaison team. ‘I have two names I want to check off the record,’ he told the flustered woman, who identified herself as Sandy Arbright. ‘Candice Holmes and Carlo Alienti.’
‘Hold, please,’ said Sandy, but didn’t put him on hold so he could hear her huffing and puffing through paperwork, then checking with colleagues about seat allocations. He got the impression that Sandy was more confused than he was about the crash.
‘I don’t see … umm … I don’t see those names, sir.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Umm …’ Apparently Sandy was not sure.
‘How are you spelling Candy?’
‘Not Candy. Candice – C-A-N-D-I-C-E Holmes. That’s H-O-L-M-E-S.’
That meant Lucia was Lucia Holmes, he thought idly. Unless she came from one of those fucked-up families where all the kids had different fathers and a dumb mother. But something told him not.
‘Oh, Holmes!’ said Sandy, pronouncing the l as if Tom was an idiot to have missed it. He bit his lip. He knew how these things worked. Sometimes you had to be nice to stupid people, which he found almost impossible. But, for Lucia’s sake, he refrained from telling Sandy to fuck off back to blowing her boss between trips to the water-cooler, and agreed: ‘Holmes. Yes.’
More rustling. More whispering. If Tom had been a panic-stricken, terrified, potentially bereaved relative he’d have driven to AA corporate HQ and personally shot Sandy’s dopey head clean off her shoulders.
‘Er, yes, I do have a Candice Holmes listed. Savannah to LA.’
Or not, thought Tom. Savannah to a field in Buttfuck, Oklahoma, at five hundred miles an hour.
He kept that feeling out of his voice when he asked after the boyfriend. Sandy, who had been thrown by Holmes, was beside herself with Alienti, especially as Tom was not a hundred per cent sure how to spell it.
‘We have an Allen. A Marjorie Allen from Pittsburgh.’
Tom clenched his jaw as Sandy went through the passenger list as if it was a Sears catalogue.
‘Oh, and a Jennifer-Jo Bonetti. That’s Italian. Are you sure that’s not it?’
‘Alienti. Carlo Alienti. A man.’
‘A man,’ mused Sandy, and Tom almost screamed as he realized he’d just given her carte blanche to re-examine every man’s name as a possible match for the boyfriend.
‘Was he sitting in 22C?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’
Sandy turned from dumb to frosty in one swift second. ‘There’s no need for attitude, sir. I’m just doing my job.’
‘Well, do it better.’
