Mad Gold (Providence Gold 2)

Even the occasional nights out here and there that I’d had hadn’t let me properly relax. The last one, New Year’s Eve, had been a total bust. I’d been well on my way to ‘comfortable intoxication’ – that drunk level before you became sloppy – when this chick had bumped into me and spilled a red drink all over my white shirt. One trip to the bathroom where she’d doused me in water in her drunken efforts to help clean me up, one friggin’ phenomenal make-out session up against the door (and a door to the forehead because we’d forgotten to lock it) later and the chick that I couldn’t get out of my mind was gone.

I wasn’t sure if I couldn’t stop thinking about her because she was as amazing as I imagined, or if it was just a drunken obsession. But, it was three months on, and I was now at the point where I had to accept that I would only ever have that one memory with her.

With the acceptance of that reality, I’d booked a flight to New York to see my buddy. I wanted to let my hair down, literally seeing as how it had grown longer since I’d quit the police force, and to just relax for a spell.

It had been just what I’d needed, and I’d felt refreshed and recharged - until I’d gotten to the airport to fly back home. Then it all went to shit.

The guy in front of me at security, a hinky looking fucker, refused to take his shoes off. Then he refused to take his jacket off, or his belt. This meant that things got heated and because I’d been on autopilot and had put my shit on the belt to go through the scanner, I was stuck.

That also meant that I literally just made my flight, running up to the gate just as they were about to close the door.

It might have been my height or the fact they would know from their radios that there had been an incident back at security which had held people up, but for whatever reason, they let me board the plane. At my height, I was used to people being wary of a reaction from me, so it wasn’t unusual for people to acquiesce like that. I was also used to women staring at me for whatever reason. Luna said that it was an evolutionary reaction, an animal instinct – the bigger the man, the better he could look after you and whatever other shit. I had no idea, but it made me uncomfortable which was why I deliberately didn’t make eye contact with the two cabin crew who ran their hands over my arm as I put my bag in the overhead storage compartment to see if I needed any help. I was over a foot taller than them and eye level with the bin I was putting my bag in…what kind of help could I need with it?

What also made me uncomfortable was the lack of space on planes. Rows and rows of seats, and not one of them was made for someone my height. This meant I had quite a few hours ahead of me on the flight back to Texas where my knees would be at an angle against the seat in front of me while my hips made their way back into my pelvis. Fucking awesome!

I could read to try to distract myself from the discomfort. I could also try to sleep. Instead, what I did was stare at the attractive woman a few rows ahead who looked like she was in pain, and who kept sticking her tongue out and fanning the air around it with her hand.

She looked familiar, but with only brief glimpses of her side profile, I was stumped where I’d seen her before. Initially, I’d wondered if she was having an allergic reaction, but she was fine aside from the weird actions and begging the flight attendant for iced water – ‘heavy on the ice’. At least, that’s what I was sure she was saying, but it came out much more convoluted than that with the ice sounding like ‘dithe’.

As a former cop, I knew that this could be a sign of drug use, or maybe she’d swallowed some and was a mule? It could also be an attempt at distraction if she was a terrorist or working with other terrorists onboard.

Was her name on one of the look-out briefs we’d had? I just couldn’t place her.

I’d clocked the air marshal when I’d gotten on, and he was watching her too. His angle from where he was sitting in front of me, in a row between mine and the woman’s seats, had obviously put his mind at ease over the problem though, because he was sitting with a small smile on his face at whatever she was doing.