He resisted, but then he relented and stayed on the bed.

“The rest will do you good,” she said.

“I won’t rest until this is over.” In thought, he pulled on his lower lip. “Goliad shouldn’t have broken in a rookie on an errand this important. He should have taken someone he knew he could rely on.”

“Actually, Timmy was a smart choice.”

Richard gave her a sharp look.

“His tenure with us is short. Although I don’t predict that anything will go wrong, if something should, we can lay the blame on the new guy who obviously didn’t appreciate or adhere to our rigid standards.”

After a moment’s consideration, Richard gave her a canny smile. “Leaving us off the hook.” She gave him a look of prim satisfaction that made his smile widen. “Sometimes I think we share the same brain, Del.”

“A lot of you has rubbed off on me in the past fifteen years.”

“Sixteen last month, remember? You should.” He slipped his finger beneath the platinum chain at the base of her neck. “You’re wearing your anniversary gift.”

A ten-carat diamond glittered against his finger. No less brilliant were the tears that welled in her eyes. “You are my gift, Richard. You.” She kissed his lips tenderly, then left the bed and started for the door.

“Please bring me my phone.”

“I will when Goliad calls. In the meantime, take advantage of this downtime. I’ll fret for both of us.”

As soon as she had cleared the door and closed it softly behind her, she blinked back the recent tears and gave vent to supreme irritation. She checked the Cartier watch strapped to her wrist and cursed under her breath.

What was keeping Goliad from calling?

He had already been working for Richard when Delores entered the picture. The story was that Richard had found himself in need of a man to do his dirty work while keeping his own hands clean. After doing due diligence, Richard had pulled a young and hostile Goliad out of a court-mandated drug rehab program and made him an offer: If he got clean, and stayed clean, he would live lavishly and get paid handsomely to do what he’d been doing before, which, basically, amounted to being a thug.

Following their marriage, Goliad’s loyalty to Richard had expanded to include her. He had never failed to do everything he was told to do, no matter how unsavory or illegal. But he was human, and therefore fallible, and, as Richard had alluded, this endeavor was fraught with possibilities for error.

To a compulsive planner like Delores, even an nth degree of uncertainty was untenable. Once a decision was made, she acted on it. No second-guessing was allowed, and she was relentless.

But people were unpredictable. Fate was fickle. Nature played tricks. Fog—for crissake, fog—had kept their private jet grounded, so it couldn’t make a short round trip to Columbus tonight. They’d been forced to rely on another plane, another pilot, and then he had crashed! Unforeseen interferences such as that made her crazy. Chain reactions could cause a simple plan to rapidly derail. She had to trust Goliad to handle the tenuous situation, but it was hard to depend on anyone except herself.

On the end table, Richard’s cell phone vibrated. Goliad. She clicked on and said, “Tell me you’re on your way back.”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am.”

“What?” Her blood pressure spiked. “Why not? You were supposed to intercept the doctor when she left the airfield.”

“We can’t go near it. The place is crawling with cops.”

Chapter 6

2:57 a.m.

Using the phone on Brady White’s desk, Rye had called Atlanta Center to tell them that he was on the ground. He didn’t tell them the manner in which he’d gotten there. He’d save that for the FAA.

Standing in the open doorway of the office, he’d looked toward the end of the runway where he would have touched down. Whoever had shone the laser at him could have been in that very spot. The angle would have been perfect.

While waiting for the ambulance, Brynn had continued monitoring the injured man’s condition.

She’d taken his pulse every couple of minutes and periodically checked his pupils. When she’d gently parted his thinning hair and assessed the gash, she’d gotten a groan out of him, which she’d seemed to take as a good sign, because she smiled faintly and patted his shoulder.

Rye had left her to her doctoring and stayed out of her way by propping himself against the far wall under a paint-by-numbers portrait of a snarling bear. From this observation point, Rye had watched Brynn take off her coat and hang it alongside Brady’s on the rack just inside the door.

She was wearing a black sweater over skinny, dark-wash jeans tucked into tall, flat-heeled black suede boots. They all looked damn good on her. Rye couldn’t help but notice and appreciate the way the garments hugged this and molded to that.

Whenever she timed Brady’s pulse by her wristwatch, an alluring vertical dent appeared between sleek eyebrows the same dark color as her hair. By contrast, her eyes were light. Best he could tell from a safe distance, they were more gray than blue.

Her hair hung past her shoulders, and there was a hell of a lot of it. She had a habit of absently hooking strands of it behind her ears, where they never stayed for long. Too heavy, he thought. He doubted he could gather up all her hair even using both hands. He’d like to try, though.