Since then, I’d had a date, met a woman so interesting that I’d almost lost myself in talking to her, and conducted a kidnapping, complete with actually carrying said woman down a staircase while she fought me like a wildcat. I was running out of calories quickly. And I was willing to bet that Alice was too.
After all, she’d had the same afternoon and evening I had. Only she hadn’t done any carrying of people down staircases. Still, she had to have spent a lot of energy fighting me. And she was also smaller than me. All that making out had probably taken more out of her than it had me.
We also hadn’t talked in the last twenty minutes or so—not after she’d gone through that phase of grilling me and trying to get a feel for who I actually was. Asking whether kidnapping paid better than an office job, like she was actually considering making a career change. I snorted at the thought that came with that, of her in black leather and wielding a whip—obviously, because you needed a whip when you kidnapped people—and she shifted.
“Something funny?” she asked.
I shook my head, but then nodded. “I was thinking about you asking how much kidnapping paid, and picturing you as a kidnapper. And for some reason, I pictured you wearing a black leather catsuit and carrying a whip. Like you were a superhero villain or a dominatrix or something.”
“As all good kidnappers are,” she noted wryly.
“I mean, yeah. How else are you going to catch people?”
She laughed softly. “Picking them up in a rose garden and pretending to go on a date, then physically picking them up and shoving them into a van seems to work pretty well.”
And at that, the soft humor we’d been building went right out the window and I started feeling guilty again. About all of it. The meeting in the rose garden, which had looked so casual. The moment I’d caught her when she tripped—which had actually been pure instinct, but probably now looked like it was completely planned. Me saying I’d had a bad day, then pretending to be interested in her. All the kissing. The questions and conversation over the drinks in the bar…
The handcuffs. The carrying her down the stairs, praying that the neighbors would put her screaming down to a couple having a fight rather than a woman actually being kidnapped right under their noses. The shoving her into a van.
God, you’d think this was my first time or something, and that I was still trying to get used to how it felt to kidnap someone. All the guilt and anxiety that came with it, until you figured out how to shut that part of your brain down and just go through the motions without thinking too much. You’d think I had never figured that part out. When the sad truth was that I’d done it more than I’d liked. More than I’d ever wanted to.
“You hungry?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Starving,” she said. “Does this little field trip include meal stops? For some reason I’d thought that kidnappers didn’t like to feed their victims.”
“You’re not my victim,” I said defensively.
“And yet you’re the one who shoved me into a van and kidnapped me,” she replied quietly.
I sealed my mouth shut, unsure of how to respond to that statement—which was both entirely right and so, so wrong—and she seemed to take my silence for capitulation.
“So, food,” she said. “Where? When? I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and it’s been an eventful hour or two. I require sustenance.”
Instead of answering, I shoved my phone at her. “I’m driving, which means it’s your job to find stops,” I said. “Find a place where we can eat in the car.”
“It’s my job to find stops?” she asked, a smile in her voice. “Is that in the official kidnapping rule book?”
I shot a glance at her, smiling myself. “No, the official kidnapping rule book would have me tossed out of the club for having you free in the van and then handing you my phone. But I’m pretty sure it’s in the official road trip rule book.”
She made an ‘O’ with her mouth. “So you’re not a very good kidnapper, then,” she said knowingly. “Kicked out of the club, tsk tsk.”
I grinned at that. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did it anyhow.
The truth was, she was more right than she knew, because I was breaking just about every personal rule I had when it came to her. And I was putting the entire operation—and my own life, if I was being honest—at risk by doing so. Because if my clients found out how lax I’d been with her, they were going to have a field day with me. And I wasn’t just talking about cutting my payment short.
The problem was, I didn’t feel bad about it. Not even a little bit.
That didn’t, of course, make any of it a good idea.
“Chinese?” Alice asked, having flipped through what seemed like several pages of options.
“Drive-through Chinese?” I asked. “No, thank you. Next.”
I could practically feel her pouting about that, and I spoke before she had a chance to make any more suggestions. “No Thai, either. I don’t even think Thai has drive-through options. Not good Thai, in any case.”
“But they do have takeout options,” she noted, her voice sounding as if she thought this was perfectly rational. “And all you said was that we had to eat in the car.”
“Eat in the car quickly,” I clarified. “We are not going to a sit-down restaurant and ordering food. We’re not hanging out in their waiting area, chatting while we wait for the food to be prepared. This isn’t a date.”
There was a pause that grew awkward quickly.
“You’re right,” she finally said. “This is a kidnapping. Thai food would be too classy for this situation. I should have known better.”
Another minute passed, during which I kept my mouth shut, knowing that I wasn’t going to win that particular argument, and she finally gave a little shout of triumph.
“A fifties-style diner,” she said, sounding excited. “One of those places where they skate the food out to you. I haven’t eaten at one of those in years. And it’ll be quick, I bet. They only have burgers and fries. Plus, we eat in the car. You game?”
Well, it wasn’t exactly fast food… but it also wasn’t really a sit-down dinner. It wasn’t breaking the rules by that much. And a burger and fries sounded heavenly. I wondered if they had milkshakes.
“Definitely,” I said. “Call out the directions.”
Neither one of us said anything about the fact that we’d basically just had a conversation that generally took place between married couples on Saturday nights. I didn’t think it had escaped either of our notice. I also didn’t think either of us wanted to address it. Because that would have called attention to the big old kidnapping elephant in the van.
And I didn’t know about her, but I was definitely trying not to think about that.
The restaurant was closer than I expected, and we were there about ten minutes later, driving into a brightly lit parking lot full of spaced-out parking places with ordering booths next to them. The restaurant was done in bright red and chrome, the way all fifties-themed things were done, and I could see several old-fashioned jukeboxes inside the restaurant itself.