Silver Basilisk (Silver Shifters 4)

Call this weird feeling . . . prospective intimacy. Even the words made her feel off-balance. If she was honest, it was because she wasn’t repelled or disgusted at the idea of him possibly, under some distantly dated circumstance, seeing these lacy nothings. Across a vast room. . . In dim light. . .

“Separate rooms,” she muttered.

Anyway, she didn’t own any granny panties, so it was either pack these or go commando. And she wasn’t going to sit for hours in a car without wearing undies.

So she stuffed a fistful of frilly undies into the side pocket of the roller and zipped it tight. Toiletries case last, then she rolled to her study to hesitate over her laptop. She’d established that they would not drive straight through, horrible thought, so . . . when they parked for the night, what then? She’d always traveled alone, taking books to read and a notebook and pen to write with. In this technical age, it was even easier, because she could pack her e-reader and her laptop. The question was, would she be closed in her room for the evening, to write or read?

Or . . .?

“Take the laptop,” she told herself. It didn’t add much weight.

The pair of sandals she was wearing would do for the entire trip—she was even less interested in shoes than she was in clothes . . . though she looked down at her feet, aware of a sneaky sense of satisfaction that she’d gotten that recent pedicure.

She glanced at her canes in the corner. She had a fancy carved one, a plain one, and a folding one. She didn’t expect to be hiking steep hills, but who knew? Anyway, his car was large.

So she grabbed the plainest cane, then turned to the desk. She hadn’t asked Alejo when last he’d checked, or asked someone to check, the post office box. Her agent went twice a year, and they were about four months into her last check.

On impulse—she couldn’t say exactly what she was testing—she yanked from the pages from the reading she hadn’t done at the writers’ group out of the recyclable trash. She selected two pages, folded them, and stuffed them into an envelope. Then she addressed it to Alejo Cordova, added the post office box address, put a stamp on, and tucked it into her purse.

She was done.

Fifteen minutes to go.

She grabbed her sun hat, then rolled back out to the living room.

Wendy came out of the kitchen, holding a silver thermos. “Here’s a water bottle. Always good on a road trip.”

“I didn’t think of that,” Godiva exclaimed. “And I would have, fifteen minutes after departing. Or so it went in my Greyhound bus days. Thanks!” She slid the thermos into her purse. “Time to jet.”

The other two emerged from the kitchen, which was nice of them, but hastened Godiva toward the door. She hated long goodbyes—long being anything over “See ya!”

She hustled right out the door, leaving that subject behind her the way a puppy leaves a mess on the carpet.

She shut the front door, and let out a deep breath as she took the letter out of her purse and clipped it to the mailbox. There was still Saturday pickup; as long as the mail hadn’t been delivered yet, the mail carrier would take this away after delivering the day’s mail.

She turned away, and looked up. The day was lovely, so she’d just wait in the driveway.

But when she got there, she found Rigo’s elegant car waiting, the engine humming quietly. It looked like he was texting on his phone. She was halfway to it when he looked up saw her, and smiled. He popped the trunk, then got out to offer to put her suitcase in it. She waved him off, and with a grunt of effort chucked it and the cane in beside his gear bag. Another spurt of that unsettling sense of intimacy there.

They got into the car.

She said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. You could have banged on the door. I promise, no hidden cannon to blast the random arrival.”

Rigo said easily, “I was about to text you. I just got the map up and ready. Southern California is really a spaghetti of freeways, isn’t it?”

Godiva felt some of the tension in her neck give way. One of her many roommates over the years had been the queen of passive-aggressive, all “Let’s go with the flow” beforehand, then a martyr afterward if you hadn’t guessed what she’d really wanted. That one had been the worst, but Godiva had lived with a wide variety of people since those long-ago days with Rigo.

He responded with an easy smile, but she wasn’t going to let herself relax. So, time to take hold of the conversation before he did. “Which reminds me. How old are you, anyway? I don’t think you ever told me—” when we were dating “—in the old days.”

He grinned over at her as he drove down the street. “I’m not even going to ask how you got from freeways to my age. I was born in 1900.”

“So you’re way over a hundred, but still driving California freeways.”

“Ah, I see the connection now,” he said. “Yep. But in a sense, I wasn’t much older than you when we met. I told you shifters age slowly.”

“Understatement,” she said, and then the writer brain took hold. “What was it like, being a kid when cars were still the latest thing?”

“I didn’t even see a car until I was a teenager,” he said as he smoothly merged into the traffic on the freeway. “My first glimpses were a couple steam-powered jalopies. I didn’t see my first gas-burning car until somewhere in the twenties. My first thought was how bad it stank. You wouldn’t believe the blue clouds of grit, then the noise. Put-put-put-BANG! Every horse bolted. Dogs howled. Nobody believed they would ever be a thing. I didn’t ride in a car—didn’t even want to—until years after that. But of course trains had been around for decades. I liked those. They stayed on their tracks, and so long as you stayed off those tracks, you, and your horse, and the train, got along just fine.”