“I believe what you promised Mr. Phelps was you’d do as I asked.” He raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you?”
She nodded. She had made Mr. Phelps that promise, that she’d take one for the team. But did he mean skipping town with Kellen during the investigation? Actually, yeah. He’d known about that, and insisted. Still, it left her worrying. “Come on, Kellen. This is Arizona. A serious desert. This isn’t a joke. We’d be in violation of federal orders during an investigation of a major art theft. I’d look like I’d fled the area.” And Kellen would look like he’d stolen the painting and was leaving with his complicit partner in the inside job.
“Please.” She whispered, looking up into his eyes, pleading. “I am a good girl.”
A smile spread across his face. He leaned down and kissed her, first a little, and then a lot. Pretty soon she forgot they were standing on a tarmac and imagined herself standing in a rainbow-bedazzled waterfall in Hawaii, just the two of them in a warm shower of droplets and pekoe flowers floating in the pool below.
“Yes, you’re a good girl, but you don’t kiss like one.” Kellen pulled back and rested the back of his hand over his mouth. Ava got that prickly heat in her face and knew she’d gone red as a beet. He did bring out a side of her she didn’t recognize.
“Fine. If I promise to comply with the letter of your wishes—if not Agent Ford’s, on principle—will you come with me in my plane?”
Ava’s knees and her will were too weak to deny him this. Plus, it would give her a chance to see if he was a man true to his word. Break that promise, and he’d get the heave-ho.
“So you promise to not take me out of the state.” She needed to extract that, at the very least, but she was weakening.
He nodded and a grin spread.
Heat rose from the tarmac, even though the sun had gone down hours ago. The soles of her sandals might melt onto the concrete and cement her in place if they weren’t wood. She walked fast. Plus, Kellen had mentioned food. Her body needed some—and she was starved enough she’d get on a dangerous airplane with a semi-dangerous man if it meant a guaranteed meal at this point. After her weight loss, she didn’t have the fat reserves she used to depend on.
Within minutes they were in the air, and Kellen had disappeared behind a curtain, presumably making her some food. He might be an excellent cook, right? After last night’s adventure with the so-called chips and salsa, she knew he was a guy who appreciated deliciousness. She settled into the soft, brown leather of the seat and hoped he would come before she got too drowsy.
“I hope you like Italian.”
Oh, no. Not Italian. Her heart sank, and so did her stomach. He’d cooked the noodles quickly, though. That she’d give him. Maybe she could choke it down.
When she sat up, she saw a bowl of a comfortingly familiar sight.
“Oh! Chef Boyardee canned ravioli.” That was her kind of Italian right now. Non-Italian Italian. “You’ve been to the same culinary school I attended, I see.” Ava baked like Julia Child, but she cooked like an eleven year-old child.
“The school of cans and frozen dinners.” He put the bowl on the mahogany table in front of her and handed her a napkin and a large spoon. The bowl steamed, and her stomach growled again. Her mouth even watered. The sauce they put on this stuff had just the right amount of sugar and cheese in it. Heaven. “Some of it is surprisingly edible.”
“You’re understating the edibility of ravioli. I could eat the family-sized can.” She stuffed her mouth with two squares. They were mini-raviolis, after all. “Mmm. Just what the stomach ordered.” She closed her eyes and savored the bite.
Kellen had his own heaping bowl and dug in, sitting in the chair facing hers. “That’s what I like about you, Ava Young.” He placed a hand on her knee. “You’re the best of all worlds. The Albert Bierstadt world and the Andy Warhol world. The prime rib and the canned ravioli. The upscale and the everyday. It doesn’t matter if you’re in faded jeans and a sweater or a silk ball gown, you’ve got this…comfortable air. I could keep you around for weekdays and Saturday nights both.”
Oh, he was so sweet. She smiled her best at him, hoping no marinara sauce was on her teeth. “You bring it out in me, Kellen.” She pressed her hand over where he rested his on her knee.
“It’s amazing how different you are from other girls I meet. They’re all either giggling party girls or super nervous and trying to impress me all the time. There’s nothing more unimpressive than someone trying to be impressive, you know?”
Ava had never had anyone try to impress her before, so she couldn’t say. But it did make her wonder if she’d been her real self with him, or if she’d been her “makeover” self. It unsettled her for a moment and she frowned. He drew a finger over her frown.
“What’s wrong?”
She gave him a shrug as an answer. The truth was, the makeover self was and her previous self had kind of merged now. She wasn’t sure which one had won in vying for dominance. Maybe I’ve just become a sweet version of my old self, peeled back some layers to expose the real woman inside.
Kellen sat back. “Haha. I should take my own advice, though. Ever since I met you, heard that husky voice on the phone, I’ve been doubling every effort to impress you. No wonder you keep looking at me like I’m a dorky kid.”
“I don’t think you’re a dorky kid, Kellen.”
“But I am a dorky kid. At least I have been. Don’t tell me you haven’t see the photos in the tabloids. Dorky. Kid. Extraordinaire. It’s like I majored in Dork in college.”
The tabloids certainly didn’t paint a glowing picture of him. And he owned up to the frat-boy-type behavior. It never ceased to amaze Ava that the guy hadn’t squandered his inheritance entirely yet. Buying stuff like Aston Martins and planes. The fortune couldn’t last long. Another reason she couldn’t take anything he said seriously. He was a bankruptcy waiting to happen. And then that would be splashed on the tabloids in shame. She almost pitied him.
Almost. He was too good looking to climb to the level of full-on pity. She gave him a once-over. Kellen wore dark jeans, and he had an impressively narrow waist, in contrast with his impressively broad shoulders. She couldn’t help noticing a couple of particular muscles in his upper arms tonight. Such definition. As an art student, she’d like to take some time to paint those. Well, study them at least. For a long time. He’d had a haircut since she saw him last, and a close shave. Ava did admire a close shave. And while the dark haired stranger always held an appeal for her, this sandy hair on Kellen really suited, especially with his blazing blue eyes. Mmm. Not a bad feast for her eyes, now that her stomach had been satisfied.
It was kind of nice that her professional responsibility in this whole stolen-art-fiasco required her to fly on private jets and eat canned ravioli made by a handsome man with broad shoulders.
“And another thing,” he said, setting his empty bowl to the side. “You’re not a bad belly dancer.”
At this, she laughed, and leaned over and planted a kiss on his soft lips.
* * *
When Ava opened her eyes, she was lying on the bench seat of the plane.
“You fell asleep and I carried you over here.” Kellen knelt beside her. “It’s time to go, though.” He ran a caress across her forehead and hair. It awakened her gently.
“Go?” It was still dark outside, as far as Ava could see out the porthole windows. Maybe a finger of dawn’s light glowed, but not much more. Stars shone. “What time is it?”
“It’s four. It was only an hour flight. Less, probably. I let you sleep a little while longer so you’d be ready for what I have planned.” He gave two thumbs up. Ava rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up. Kellen’s excitement infected her.
“Where are we?”
“I brought you some hiking clothes. Not that you don’t look stellar in the sundress, but here.” He handed her a bundle of clothes neatly folded. Jeans, a t-shirt, socks, a pair of hiking shoes, clean underwear—lacy. He’d thought of everything. “There are
toiletries and things in the bathroom. The shower is a little narrow, but it was the biggest I could buy for a plane.”
A plane with a shower. What would she experience next? Her heart skipped a little. This was someone else’s life. It couldn’t be hers. In that shower, hot water beaded on her back, and the dust of last night’s unfortunate walk in the desert washed down the drain. She wished she could forget that episode forever, and the threat that forced her to be dishonest with a federal official.
A bit later, she emerged, after doing the fastest version of her personal makeover on herself she’d ever done. The emergency make-up kit in her purse had come in handy, although it didn’t contain an eyelash curler or a shade of lipstick that would perfectly match the t-shirt he’d given her. It was a cute black one, fitted perhaps a little tighter than even New Ava would have dared go, with a V-neck and a pink graphic print of a band Ava hadn’t heard of, possibly invented just for the t-shirt design. And the jeans were a brand so expensive she’d never dare try them on.
They fit like a glove.
“You are a good clothes-picker-outer.”
“I consider it my superpower.”
“So do I. You’ve got a gift.” The clothes fit even better than the things from Zoe’s hand-me-down packages. And they were much more her comfort zone. The shoes had good traction, something everything else she’d worn in the last month or so severely lacked, and something she could have used a lot of last night when she bashed her ankle.
Ouch. It had a blue bruise about the size of a chocolate chip cookie.
Not that she was thinking about chocolate chip cookies. Not when she had to wear form-fitting t-shirts like this.
Ava braided her hair across her forehead and pulled the rest into a cute ponytail. It wasn’t the usual glamour she’d forced herself into lately, but she didn’t look half bad, considering.
“Now are you going to tell me where we are?”
“I can’t believe you can look that good in that short of an amount of time.”
“It’s twice as long as I used to take.” She clapped her hand over her mouth. Kellen McMullen, of all people, should not know about her recent makeover. She fumbled for a cover. “I mean, when I was in school, I’d just be as low maintenance as possible. But it was a trend at the time, I think. There were a few girls who showed up to early classes in sweats and bedroom slippers.”
“Who even owns bedroom slippers in Arizona?” Kellen helped her down the metal stairs and off the plane into the starlit morning. “It’s just a perfect place for a scorpion to hang out and wait to sting your toe.”
Kellen understood about dumping scorpions out of his shoes too? Huh.
Ava’s eyes came into focus. The small airport had an illuminated sign, “South Rim.” Across the runway from Kellen’s plane sat a line of Cessnas and three helicopters. She scanned the landscape in the purple glow of the desert night.
“Oh. We’re at the Grand Canyon.” She adored the Grand Canyon. Its stratified rocks, its … grandeur. She loved living in the Grand Canyon State, and knowing that people from all over the world considered her home one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. It had to be experienced to be believed. Ava made a pilgrimage to the South Rim at least once a year, and had gone around and experienced the North Rim a few times as well. Someday she’d take off enough days of work and get up the courage to ride a donkey down to the bottom and look at it from the inside up.
“You’ve been here before.” Kellen looked disappointed. “I guess I counted on you being like all the other people on earth who take vacations to other places but never see the amazing stuff in their own backyards.”
“I love it here. It’s my favorite place. Have you seen the paintings of it by Thomas Moran that hang in the National Gallery of American Art?”
“Love them. Have a reproduction hanging in my den.”
He had a den? Who had a den anymore? Guys had man caves, not dens. Kellen caught her off guard. She’d imagined his house to be a total bachelor pad, with a fridge right next to the couch (if not built into the couch) and big screen TVs covering the walls of every room so he could watch the Suns play and feel like he was on the court with them and the cheerleaders.
“What else is in your den?” She couldn’t help asking.
“Books. Mostly books. Lamps. A good recliner.” He shrugged, like he knew it sounded boring. It sounded anything but boring. “Oh, and an awesome bear skin rug.”
Ew. “Is it on the wall or on the floor? And did you shoot it yourself?”
“Yep. And ate the meat. Bear isn’t top-drawer delicious. Pretty greasy. But as jerky it’s not bad, especially if you hickory smoke it.”
“Tell me you didn’t butcher it and smoke it yourself.”
He shrugged again, and there was a twinkle in his eye. “Come on.” He took her not to the airport building, but across the runway. To a helicopter. “If we take off now, we’ll make it to the falls for sunrise.”
“The falls? Wait. Do you mean the falls? Havasupai Falls?” Ava’s heart jumped in her chest. She’d never been down to the bottom of the canyon, the hike being far too intimidating. Fit men had heart attacks on that hike. People trained harder for that hike than they trained for marathons. “For sunrise?”
He grinned and pulled out his cell phone while taking her by the hand toward a waiting chopper. Kellen’s pilot started the engine, and they climbed aboard.
When the chopper lifted off, Ava’s stomach did flips. She was floating, under the power of nothing more than a spinning blade! And she was going to Havasupai. For sunrise!
The journey took longer than she would have thought. It was a long way down, but they landed before the sky had greyed up. Kellen lifted a cooler from the rear and helped her outside into the morning light. Whew! Chilly. She rubbed her arms against the morning cold.
“It’ll warm up when the sun rises, but wait a sec.” He jogged back through the landing wind of the helicopter and grabbed her a jacket. She pulled the soft fleece over her arms. It smelled like Kellen—a blend of Irish Spring and peppermint.
The trail was dark, but not so dark she’d stumble. Kellen guided her, a hand on her waist, as he walked behind. Then, when it widened, he took her hand in his. It was so large it nearly swallowed hers up. Here in the dark and the wilderness land, he seemed pretty manly for a billionaire playboy.
“Tell me how you shot the bear.”
“I wasn’t out hunting bear, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She hadn’t meant to ask it, but that made it even more intriguing.
“It attacked my tent when I was working in Alaska. I shouldn’t have left food in there, but it’d been a couple of months with no incidents, and I guess I got lazy.”
He’d lived in a tent in Alaska, while working, for a couple of months? This too was unexpected.
“I was in my truck at the time, thank goodness, writing a letter home by the light of the dome light in the truck. My lantern batteries in my tent had run out, and it was just that hour during the midnight sun that it was too grey to see well.”
He wrote letters home? In the middle of the night?
“But you kept your gun in your truck, and when the bear attacked, so did you?”
“I wouldn’t have. Didn’t intend to, really. But when he went after my dog, Yeller, I had to. A man’s best friend is his dog, you know.”
At a fork in the path, Kellen steered her to the right, and they continued. He helped her over a fallen tree limb, and disentangled her when she snagged her jacket on a cat-claw bush.
“Did you save the dog?”
“He wasn’t ever the same. But I got the bear for it.”
“So it was a crime of passion.”
“I guess you could say that.” Kellen sobered. “I hated having to put that dog down. After that, Alaska wasn’t the same. I packed it all up there.” He squeezed her hand. “But not until after I’d skinned that bear and turned him into jerky.” A laugh rang out from him. “I rememb
er my visceral yell at that grizzly when I was shooting him possibly too many times. I’ll tan your hide and hang you on my wall, you evil, dog killing— I won’t use the word I used on him, not to a lady.”
“How old were you when this happened?” The crime of passion did seem a bit disturbing. But then again, if the bear would kill his dog, it wouldn’t hesitate to go after Kellen next time he slept. Self-defense was a good enough excuse for her.
“Sixteen. It was right after my parents were killed in that wreck.”
“What wreck?”
“The plane wreck.”
“Wait. Your parents died in a plane wreck, and you bought a plane.”
“Gotta face up to your fears until you beat them.” He stopped for a moment and pulled out a bottle of water for her to sip. “It’s a principle in Behavioral Psychology, called ‘flooding.’ The subject is given repeated and excessive exposure to the problem substance until it dulls the emotion associated with the substance. It’s why I fly everywhere I can.”
“Are you flooded yet?”
“Almost.”
For a billionaire playboy, there sure was a lot more to Kellen McMullen than Ava expected.
“So I guess you came into your inheritance a lot younger, and in a much sadder way, than most heirs.” How tough to be sixteen and parentless and alone. The money probably helped soften the blow, though.
“Inheritance? Ha. They had zilch-a-rama. Nada. Why do you think I was living in a tent in Alaska working sixteen hours a day at age sixteen and writing letters in the middle of the night? I had to survive.” He growled this last statement, like a mountain man. “Oh, they did leave me the truck. So there was that.”
“What about whoever you were writing letters to? Surely, they’d have taken you in.”
“The insurance company? Not so warm and fuzzy as you might think. They didn’t come through on the life insurance payout for a couple of years.”
“But it must have been a heck of a payout for you to buy a plane.”
Kellen stopped walking. Then he started again. “I think you’re the first woman I’ve met who hasn’t trolled the internet gossip columns and read my whole life story.” He laughed, and it rang in the trees, making a bird who’d likely been sleeping, flitter away. “Thank you for that, Ava Young.”
The Lost Art: A Romantic Comedy Page 18