A Gift For The Groom

She peeled the wrapper off a candy bar. “Picked the lock. I learned how to do it in college.”

“You learned to pick locks in college? Where did you go? Burglar U?”

She lifted an eyebrow at his absurd question. “I went to school in Austin. I dated a guy who taught me to pick locks, among other things.”

“Other things?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear those other things, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“We ran together, five miles a day. Physical fitness. Then there was scaling six-foot fences, playing poker and blackjack, dealing off the bottom of the deck, shooting a .38 revolver—”

“Shooting a-you dated a criminal?”

“Of course not! Richard was an undercover cop. Would you like a candy bar? I have plenty.”

“No, thank you,” he muttered. His neck muscles had tied themselves into tight knots again, and he could feel a headache building behind his eyes.

He tried to focus on the things he loved about flying, especially flying at night—the sense of freedom, of isolation and serenity. For the next hundred or so miles, the land below would be totally dark except for the occasional car or house. No city lights. Nothing around anywhere...north, south, east, west, up or down.

Nothing but Analise Brewster with her lush, generous lips wrapped around a candy bar, her long legs tucked demurely to one side and looking anything but demure. Analise Brewster sitting inches away from him, touching him with the combined, oddly compelling scents of honeysuckle and chocolate.

“Put your legs down and fasten your seat belt,” he barked.

She complied so hastily he felt a little guilty for snapping at her.

He taxied to the run-up area and went through his instrument check then took up the microphone to announce his intention to take off to any planes that might be within radio range.

This was going to be a long, long flight

Analise took a large, desperate bite out of her candy bar as she felt the plane lift off the ground, and her stomach gave a corresponding lurch right into her throat. This was the scariest and most exciting part of flying, that moment of actually going up into the air, unsupported by anything but magic. She understood how butterflies flew and how it was impossible for bumblebees to fly even though they did. But the unlikelihood of a bumblebee’s flight didn’t even come close to the impossibility that tons of metal with wings that couldn’t flap should be able to stay aloft.

She ate more of her candy bar, ignored those butterflies . that had taken up residence in her lurching stomach and resisted the urge to chatter, something she was prone to do when she was nervous. Nick had indicated he needed silence while he got everything going and she certainly didn’t want to cause him to do something wrong, something that would break the magic spell and send them plummeting to earth.

She’d done enough chattering tonight, anyway. By the time he’d arrived, she’d been pretty nervous, had begun to think she was going to have to spend the night in the plane. In fact, from the time she’d walked into the airport, her rented plane already on its way back to Tyler, only to find that Nick wasn’t waiting for her, she’d been getting progressively more concerned.

This latest impulsive act, charging across the country a week before her wedding, might not prove to be one of her better ideas. In fact, it would probably go down in the column of incidents that reinforced her parents’ incessant worries about her. It seemed the harder she tried to be the perfect daughter, the worse things got.

Her parents weren’t happy that she’d taken so long to make up her mind about marrying Lucas Daniels. Their wedding was wedged in next Saturday between morning and evening ceremonies and their rehearsal was scheduled for today, a week early, the only time they could get the church.

And the closer it got to that rehearsal, the edgier and more claustrophobic she got. Somewhere around four o’clock this morning, she’d decided that what she really needed to do was come to Wyoming to be certain Nick was able to garner enough evidence to clear Lucas’s father’s name before the wedding so his parents would come. Her concern over that issue had doubtless been causing her distress.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now Nick’s pointed questions made her wonder about her motivation. It wasn’t exactly logical.

One foul-up after another. The story of her well-intentioned, ill-fated life.

As she desperately devoured her candy bar, she stole a glance at Nick. The shadowy, uneven light from the instrument panel accented the craggy planes of his face, giving him an even more intriguing, dangerous look than when she’d first met him. His shaggy brown hair, just a little too long, touched the collar of his faded denim shirt. The top buttons of that shirt were undone, allowing springy tufts of that same hair to escape.

She twisted the diamond ring on her finger and thought of how lucky she was to be engaged to a nice man like Lucas Daniels. She pictured his handsome face with his kind smile, his immaculately cut and styled black hair that told of his Native American heritage. Lucas was her best friend, her parents’ best friend. When she and Lucas were married, her parents would finally have to admit that she’d done something right. They could stop worrying about her every minute of every day.

She was glad she’d made the last-minute decision to marry him. This antsy, trapped feeling was probably normal for a bride-to-be.

In six and a half days she’d marry Lucas and that would at least keep her out of one brand of trouble. Never again would she run the risk of becoming involved with a man because he had that aura of danger and defiance.

The aura Nick exuded from every pore.

He set the automatic pilot and leaned back.

Analise crumpled the empty candy-bar wrapper and pulled out a bag of chocolate sandwich cookies.

“No wonder you’re so hyper, eating all that sugar,” Nick grumbled.

“I told you, flying makes me nervous.”

“Why do you fly if it makes you nervous?”

“Because it’s the fastest way to get places, of course. Anyway, I have a theory. If you’re afraid of something, you have to do it and then you won’t be afraid of it. Since my parents have made a career out of worrying about me, I could be afraid of everything if I didn’t make an effort to do all the things they think I shouldn’t do.” She offered him the bag of cookies. “Here. You could stand to relax a little, too. Surely you’re not nervous about flying. Although, if you go along with my theory, becoming a pilot would be the logical thing to do to overcome that fear.”

“I love to fly.” He accepted a couple of cookies. “But I didn’t have any dinner.”

That was a good sign. Eating cookies together was always a bonding experience.

“So,” she said brightly, hoping to inspire a bit of brightness in her cranky pilot, “tell me what you discovered today about Abbie Prather.” He didn’t respond immediately. His jaw muscle twitched. Maybe he was still chewing on that cookie. “You can just give me your report verbally instead of faxing it to me since I’m not home to receive the fax,” she encouraged, giving him plenty of time to swallow.

His lips compressed as if the cookie tasted bad or he didn’t want to comply with anything she asked. She knew there was nothing wrong with the cookie.

“I searched the records in Casper,” he finally said, “and talked to people who live in the area where Abbie Prather lived, and I found out two things. She moved to Nebraska in about 1976, and she had a little girl with her.”

Analise stopped with her cookie halfway to her mouth. “A little girl? Where did she get a little girl?”

“I would imagine she got her in the usual way.”

“But she didn’t have a baby when she left Briar Creek! And you didn’t mention any baby in South Dakota, or any husband!”

“No evidence of a husband. My guess would be that she either had the child right before or right after she left Texas. The people I talked to today figured the kid to be about two when she moved here and four when she left.”

“But where was this baby when she was in South Dakota?”

“In South Dakota she lived out away from people, just like she did in Wyoming. If she’d had a baby with her in South Dakota, it would have been easy to hide her. A toddler’s another story, and the people who saw this little girl said she was a pistol. Very visible. Had red hair and was always getting into something. Every time they saw her, the kid was charging around and Abbie was yelling at her, though they said by the time she left. the kid was getting kind of cowed by all that yelling.”

Analise touched her own curls, sadness sweeping over her at the thought of Abbie’s daughter being cowed. “A little red-haired girl, four years old. She’d be about my age. If Abbie hadn’t stolen that money and left town, her daughter and I might have been friends. That’s terrible that Abbie yelled so much at her that she broke her spirit But at least now we know why she stole the money.”

“You think stealing the money to take care of her kid justifies her actions?”

“No, of course not! But it explains why she did it. She must have been pregnant in Briar Creek and the father wouldn’t marry her so she had to leave in shame—”

“Leave in shame? This was 1972, not 1872.”

“Briar Creek can be pretty provincial. Anyway, she managed to hide her pregnancy, but she knew she couldn’t hide the baby ... they make too much noise...so she stole the money and left town. If she’d stayed in Briar Creek and given her child up for adoption, my parents might have taken her and I’d have had a sister. They wanted another child.”

The idea brought an eerie sense of déjà vu, doubtless because she’d always wanted a sister, had even invented one when she was a child, a red-haired sister who looked like her and was named Sara. How sad that she’d missed the possibility. Sad for her and the other little girl. Abbie didn’t sound like an ideal mother, while her own parents were practically perfect...unlike their changeling daughter.