![]() ![]() Would she have been on Flight 29 tonight if the photos had shown Nick Hopewell's dark-blue eyes instead of Darren's mild brown ones? She didn't think so. 'Now, what were you saying when we were so rudely interrupted?' We've even got a spare if that one looks like not holding.' He sat on the edge of one of the tables and looked at Bob Jenkins. 'Trussed as neatly as Father John's Christmas turkey. Craig's elbows flapped and he uttered a strange weak scream. He wrapped the tablecloth rope twice around Craig's lower forearms and knotted it tightly. 'Easy now, my good old mate,' Nick said soothingly. Be careful what you pray for, because you just might get it. Something she had read years ago suddenly popped into Laurel's mind. And here she was, proving Tolkien right - she had stepped out of her own door last evening, just the same as always, and look where she had ended up: a strange and dreary version of Fantasyland. Well, she had wanted to have an adventure, just one adventure, before middle-age settled in for keeps. 'Is anybody dead?' Dinah asked nervously. Interesting concept, that.'ĭon returned with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth in each fist. 'You had just got to the part about Flight 29 being like the Mary Celeste. He might have been an interested lecture-goer instead of a man sitting on a table in a deserted airport restaurant with his feet planted beside a bound man lying in a pool of his own blood. Craig groaned again, louder this time, and began to struggle weakly. Nick pulled Craig's hands out from under him, then brought his wrists together at the small of his back. 'Start again, mate, and I'll stave them in,' Nick said grimly. 'Do you have to be so rough?' Laurel asked sharply. But sometimes you found yourself in one of those tiresome situations where the truth could no longer be avoided, and Laurel reckoned the truth to be this: she had chosen Darren Crosby because his pictures and letters had told her he wasn't much different from the placid boys and men she had been dating ever since she was fifteen or so, boys and men who would learn quickly to wipe their feet on the mat before they came in on rainy nights, boys and men who would grab a towel and help with the dishes without being asked, boys and men who would let you go if you told them to do it in a sharp enough tone of voice. She had boarded Flight 29 telling herself that this was her great adventure, her one extravagant tango with romance - an impulsive transcontinental dash into the arms of the tall, dark stranger. He put the center of it in his mouth, clamping his teeth on it to keep it from unwinding, and used his hands to flip Craig over like a human omelette. He took one of them and spun it quickly and expertly into a rope. 'I should have heard him sooner, but I was listening to the man who sounds like a teacher.' But the eyes had also been rather unremarkable, hadn't they? And didn't Darren's eyes have something, perhaps even a great deal, to do with why she had made this trip in the first place? Hadn't she decided, after a great deal of close study, that they were the eyes of a man who would behave himself? A man who would back off if you told him to back off? Widely spaced, clear eyes in a goodlooking - if unremarkable - face. She could not help comparing Nick Hopewell's eyes with the eyes in the pictures which Darren Crosby had sent her. Nick gazed at her for a moment, and she dropped her eyes at once. ![]() Craig uttered a pained grunt and shut up. ![]() He drove a short, hard kick into Craig's ribs. Then Nick did something that shocked all of them, even those who had seen the Englishman twist Craig's nose like the handle of a bathtub faucet. 'What?'Ĭraig cried out and his eyelids fluttered. Are you sure? a voice whispered, and Laurel shut it up at once.īob looked at him, dazed and unbelieving.
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