* * *
Kari's surgery turned out to be a boon for me in a lot of ways.
The next morning, instead of planning out my schedule, Maren decided she needed to spend the day with Kari. As she gathered up her laptop and briefcase, I told her, "I'm going shopping later. I might be gone a while.”
“Take Nikolay and Bao-Zhi, and only go to approved stores," she said and swept past me out the door without another word.
Escaping my entourage had just gotten a lot easier.
I wasn’t about to take Nikolay out on a date with Grant, but since I’d been able to buy Bao-Zhi’s silence with good tips, I had him chauffeur me to meet Grant. Our designated spot was a back road in the middle of nowhere. I felt sort of like an underworld spy, going to these lengths to avoid detection, but I didn't want to let anyone else take a picture of us together.
When we got there, I handed Bao-Zhi a wad of bills, told him I'd call when I needed him again, and climbed into Grant’s Jaguar.
I should have been used to his good looks, to his square jaw and the sweep of his hair, but he looked at me and I lost the ability to speak. All I could do was mumble, "Hi.”
Grant pulled onto the road. "Are you glad to be back home?"
Maren’s house could never feel like home. "Yeah," I said.
Grant let his eyes drift from the road to my face. "I missed you."
The phrase struck a blow to my plan of aloofness, but I tried to hold firm. I shifted in my seat to put more distance between us. He didn’t notice. He was back to watching the road. I tried to keep my voice businesslike. "So where are we going for this mystery date?"
"It’s still a mystery," he said. "You won’t know until we get there."
"Am I dressed right?”
His gaze ran over me, lingering on my face. "You look great."
It wasn’t what I’d asked, but I still liked hearing it.
We made small talk, then finally pulled up to the airport. "What are we doing here?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, just steered the car away from the terminals. We drove onto the tarmac and pulled up to a private jet.
I stared at it in disbelief. I should have known this wouldn’t be like dating the guys in Morgantown.
As we got out of the car, I laughed nervously. A sudden fear sprung to my mind: Maybe he'd found out who I was and was sending me back to West Virginia. Instead he took my hand and stepped onto the plane with me. It looked almost identical to the one I’d come to California on, right down to the beige leather seats.
I sat down and buckled up, glad that I'd already been on a plane once so I knew how to work the safety belts. "So where are we going for our date that requires a plane?”
"You’ll know when we get there,” he said.
"I think that's something you say when you’re kidnapping a person, not dating her.”
He laughed, but didn't tell me. For the next hour we talked and ate a lunch of raspberry-glazed roast duckling and artichoke hearts. We might as well have been in some elite restaurant. And no matter how many different ways I asked, he still wouldn't tell me where the plane was headed.
When we landed, he took out a blindfold and slipped it over my eyes. "Have any more guesses as to where I'm taking you?”
“Right now I’m thinking a firing squad.”
"Wrong again.” He took my hand and led me slowly toward the exit door. As I stepped outside, a wall of heat engulfed me.
"Do you know where we are?” he asked.
"An oven? Hades?”
"Las Vegas,” he said.
"Why are we in Las Vegas?" I reached for my blindfold, but he wouldn't let me take it off. He led me along the runway and then helped me step up into another vehicle. He climbed in beside me, buckled my safety belt, then put headphones over my ears. "You’re going to need these in a minute,” he said.
Before I could ask why, the vehicle shuddered and thumped with a loud chopping noise. I reached for my blindfold again, but Grant took hold of my hand. "Not yet,” he called over the noise.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Helicopter.” He didn’t let go of my hand. I interlaced my fingers with his and tried to figure out where we could be going. What was around Las Vegas that you couldn't drive to?
Wherever it was, it took an annoyingly long time to get there. But finally Grant reached around to the back of my hair and loosened the blindfold. I blinked in the light, adjusting my eyes, and the Grand Canyon came into focus in front of me.
I’d seen pictures of it before. And I knew the word grand meant big, yet I’d never imagined it could be so huge. I felt like a speck in a plunging rock sea. The world had suddenly become layered stacks of orange and brown.
I gasped and leaned closer to the window. "It’s amazing."
"Better than pizza and a DVD?"
I squeezed his hand, but kept my gaze out the window. The helicopter made a lazy descent so that the canyon walls seemed to reach up and surround us. "You know, you've set a really bad precedent for first dates,’’ I said. "How is anyone ever going to top this?”
I turned to him for the first time. He was watching me, not the scenery. "I brought you here because I wanted to see the look on your face when you saw this place.” He smiled, and my heart flipped over. "It was worth the trip.”
Eventually, the helicopter landed in a remote spot. We wouldn’t have to worry about being seen down here. The pilot handed us a couple of backpacks with water, sunscreen, and hats. Then we stepped out into the vast landscape of towering rock walls. The Colorado River stretched out before us.
I knew long before Grant took hold of my hand again that my plan to remain emotionally uninvolved had disappeared somewhere among the layers of sun-baked stone.