Rocket Man

by Melanie Greene

Justin laughed and swiped his cheeks. “All right, then. Best not to argue with her.”

  “I wouldn’t dare. Coffee?”

  He nodded. “Thanks. And about the funeral....”

  This time Dillon cut him off. “Nope. Not going there. You’re the one with all the insight, so you don’t need me to tell you that I have issues about their deaths that pop up once in a while. I’m dealing with it.”

  Justin just rotated his coffee mug and looked at him.

  “And I’m not in love with Serena because I’m in a hurry to rebuild my nuclear family. Shannon covered that, too. I’m in love with Serena because I am. Because of—well, her skirts.” Justin raised his eyebrows, and Dillon grinned a moment. “And her smiles, and the cruelty-free linens she dries outside on a line. And the way she sees color everywhere, and cause she took the time to figure out that she likes Janeway better than Kirk, even though that’s clearly the wrong opinion to have. And because she was scared to meet you guys, but did it anyway, because I asked, and she’s brave and honest about most things.”

  “Except cats.”

  “Except mysterious cat-induced allergies that defy explanation.” Dillon wiped his own eyes, but only out of solidarity with his brother-in-law.

  “All right.”

  “All right?”

  “Yes. All right. I believe you. Well, I don’t believe you could love someone who doesn’t love Kirk, but maybe you’re maturing a little.”

  Dillon just gave him the finger as he bit into his apple. He and Justin hugged before his brother-in-law headed off to work, and Dillon took a couple of minutes to clean up the place before Serena arrived. He needed to get his head in the game. He had a gate to pry open.

  First thing Dillon noticed was the blue denim skirt. That boded well. She couldn’t have forgotten getting the mint stains out of it, and had to have worn it deliberately. Sure, they were going to the Blue Capri B&B, but it wasn’t all about the client.

  Second thing he noticed, though, was the upright spine, the hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. She hadn’t gotten out of the car to greet him, just popped the trunk so he could add his overnight bag to hers.

  Relentless steamroller, he reminded himself. “Morning,” he said, casual, with a smile. No leaning in for a kiss.

  “Hi.” Terse. But not biting. Maybe closer to tentative than friendly, but as long as the hostility was all gone, he could work with it.

  “Thanks for picking me up. I meant to tell you, I have to go over some revisions with Philip and told him I’d take him to lunch, so we could head out around one, one-thirty?”

  Serena nodded, maybe nodded too many times, but said, “Sure, perfect. Do you need to take my car for lunch?”

  “No, Phillip can drive. I’m going to spend the whole day being chauffeured, like the superstar I was born to be.”

  That earned him upturned lips, and, even better, relaxed shoulders. He couldn’t come up with any other jokes that didn’t fall flat, but by the time they were walking into the office, Serena had spent a record twelve minutes by his side without blocking him out. Sure, she’d been behind the wheel of her car, but it still counted.

  “Okay, see you after lunch.” He looked down at her, careful about her personal space but also careful to ensure that she was meeting his eyes.

  And how about that? Another smile. It wasn’t an ‘I love you and can’t wait to get you alone’ smile, but it wasn’t the worst, fake one, either.

  He’d take it.

  One bite at a time, Serena forced herself to consume most of her lunch salad. Not the cheese, not with the ball of lead she was already digesting, but the greens, and the nuts, and most of the pear. Spending the next hour on I-45 beside Dillon with a growling stomach wasn’t on her agenda.

  It wasn’t that he’d been cold that morning. He’d been perfectly civil. But Dillon was an extremely nice human being, and he wouldn’t have wanted to throw her presentation to Mrs. Kirby for a loop by introducing a lot of interpersonal drama beforehand. As far as she knew, it was a façade designed to keep her from seeing his ongoing anger and resentment. It was certainly no guarantee that he would be willing to listen to her later. It didn’t mean he would understand and accept what she was going to tell him.

  It didn’t mean he would understand and accept her.

  “Just about ready?” Dillon asked from the break room door, and Serena tried not to jump.

  “Three minutes. Meet me in the lobby,” she said, standing to scrape the rest of her meal into the trash. When she turned to add a nonsense comment about her fruitless but ongoing quest to establish workplace composting, he was gone.

  Okay then.

  Serena did her best to shrug it off, going instead to her list of last-minute tasks. Restroom, set email away message, text Anica that they were on the way out, refill water bottle, turn off office lights, leave. If she could just keep checking things off of lists until dinner time, she might just get through without wondering too often what Dillon was thinking. Six hours, tops, and they’d be done with Mrs. Kirby and free to talk without worrying that it would interfere with the main work portion of this trip.

  She could be calm and unflustered for six hours.

  Squaring her shoulders and exhaling a long, slow, centering breath, she set off to do just that.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Serena drove. She was good at driving, even in Houston’s traffic. When she’d turned sixteen, her parents had given her a car, and she only had to pay gas and insurance. It seemed like a sweet deal, until she realized it just meant they could leave all the logistics of whose house she was sleeping at up to her. A couple of boyfriends had tried to point out that, with no one particularly checking up on her movements, she could just stay out all night with them. It had never been persuasive enough to get her to clean out her back seat for them, though. She had a couple of carefully packed milk crates of art supplies she didn’t want to accidentally leave at some step’s house, so she made a nest for them in her back seat. The trunk was a portable study desk—everything she needed for classes, research projects, college entrance tests. She could quickly find any textbook or composition notebook, no matter where she was. Her study groups always loved her.

  So all in all, she was more than capable of navigating the freeways of her hometown. Abruptly short entrance ramps, left exits merging into stop-start commuters, traffic that flowed from seventy to thirty-five and back up to seventy within a mile with no warning; nothing fazed her.

  Which begged the question: why, as they drove past the proliferation of billboards and strip malls that characterized I-45 South past downtown, did Serena feel the need to concentrate on such basics as the three-second following rule, and checking each mirror at routine intervals? She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel, not taking her eyes off the road to see if Dillon bought that she was just tapping in time to the music.

  Just north of NASA, chain stores to either side and an expanse of cumulus clouds against the cornflower blue sky ahead, traffic stopped. Judging by how hard she had to stomp on the brakes, Serena wasn’t paying as much attention to the road as she’d told herself.

  She most certainly did not bite her lip. And her neck wasn’t prickling with nascent itches. Just because they’d sat in the car for half an hour exchanging barely a dozen words, and all of them work-related, was no reason to panic. Serena had a Plan, after all. And this time, The Plan was open-ended, and depended on Dillon's input. She checked the clock. Five and a quarter hours, maybe less, until she could begin. He’d be willing to listen to her, right? Serena stole a glance at Dillon, leaning back against the headrest, long legs sprawled everywhere. His eyes were half-closed against the glare of the midday sky, but she thought, for such a narrow look, it was a kind of relaxed. If such a thing was possible, Dillon could pull it off. It must be the cheekbones. They were remarkably calming, for cheekbones.

  Serena tried to let out a long slow breath without making it sound like a sigh. A smart woman, when c
oming up with a detailed Plan for after the meeting and tour of Blue Capri, would have put at least a token amount of thought into the eighty minutes they’d spend in the car getting to that meeting. She had nothing.

  At least the traffic picked up again.

  Dillon watched the telephone poles give way to palm trees as they approached the coast. The occasional field of wildflowers broke up the succession of car dealerships and outlet malls, and a flash of peripheral movement had him tracking a seagull across the brightening sky.

  When he leaned forward to retrieve the pair of sunglasses he’d stashed in Serena’s glove box, the seat belt bit into his neck. “Hey,” Dillon said before he’d thought it through, “who’s been messing with my seat?”

  Dumb, dumb, dumb. She was going to tense up at the implication that he had a right to personal settings in her car. Even leaving the sunglasses there had probably been a mistake. Dillon turned to fiddle with the belt’s height adjustment, avoiding any looks she might shoot his way.

  But, “That was Jonas,” was all Serena said.

  “Oh, I didn’t know you’d seen him.” Damn her casual response, he’d let his guard slip again. He wasn’t her keeper, he wasn’t entitled to know her every move; Dillon could hear her mental arguments lining up, waiting to spill forth.

  And Serena laughed. Just a quick bark of laughter, and Dillon was able to consign half his tension to outer space. “I almost wish I hadn’t. I offered to take him to the movies on Sunday afternoon, thinking we’d see the Pixar movie or something like that.”

  “No comment.”

  “Hey, he’s thirteen. I was limited.”

  “And what did you end up at then?”

  “Guess.”

  Dillon mentally scrolled through a list of recent releases, and remembered the anime-inspired action flick. So not Serena’s thing. He looked at her over the shades. “No.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Oh, Serena.”

  “Yeah, it was excruciating. Let’s just say that I was not the target audience.”

  Dillon grinned. She was so pretty when she was poking fun at herself. Or, really, all the time. “Did Jonas at least like it?”

  “He claims he did. I remember a couple of times, taking him to Disney or Pixar movies when I was back from college for the summer. That was usually fun. I don’t know why I thought it would be kinda the same now that he’s older.” She was getting downright chatty. More tension evaporated.

  “You just were off on your timing. Another couple of weeks, you could take him to the summer blockbusters.”

  “Dear lord.”

  “Come on, live-action fight scenes, space travel, alien villains? All epic fun.”

  “Okay, okay, I believe you. But I’m not taking Jonas to see any of it unless you’re with me. Let’s all go to Platform Nine and Three Quarters and beam up to the USS Enterprise.”

  Dillon would stop grinning, someday. But the summer didn’t start for weeks, and Serena wanted him to meet her brother. She might think he was expressing appreciation for her joke attempt, and he obligingly threw out a “Funny girl,” to keep her thinking so, but he didn’t try to fool himself. Even casually made plans for the future were music to his ears.

  “Funny woman.”

  “Okay, funny woman,” he conceded. “Only because no self-respecting child would confuse Harry Potter and Star Trek. They know the difference between fantasy and sci-fi.”

  “I could have said the Millennium Falcon.”

  “I’d have been more impressed if you’d said TIE Fighter.”

  “Or podracer!”

  “I knew I should never have let you see that movie.”

  “Come on, little Anakin was so cute.”

  “You’re trying to torture me.”

  “He just wanted people to recognize that he was special. I feel sorry for him.”

  “Pull the car over. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “Across the water?” Serena nodded her chin at the salt marshes that now flanked the freeway.

  “Look at that bird!” Dillon sat forward again, fortunately without being attacked by the seat belt this time. “That looks biblical or something.”

  Serena laughed. “It’s a White Ibis. They’re everywhere. But they won’t ferry you across to the island, so you’d better stay where you are.”

  Pushing his sunglasses firmly back up the bridge of his nose, Dillon slouched back in the seat again, where he had the best unobserved view of the skirt riding up her smooth thighs. “Okay, you win, I’ll stay. But if you mention Jar-Jar Binks, so help me, I won’t be held responsible for the consequences.”

  “He’s Dobby’s friend, right?”

  “Funny, funny, funny girl.”

  And now Serena’s fingers really were tapping along to her driving playlist. She vowed to never admit that she saw why the Star Wars prequels were an abomination to Dillon, not if she could get such a dependable rise out of him. It was a delicious power. Mainly because he knew that she agreed, so pretending otherwise was just to torture him.

  What if she told him some of the stuff before they got to Blue Capri?

  But what if she didn’t get it all right? They’d spend a couple of hours with Mrs. Kirby, and instead of wowing her with the pitch, Serena would have half her brain on analyzing what Dillon was thinking about their private lives. As her car rose up the bridge that would put them on Galveston Island, Serena let a calming energy surround her and lift the worry away. A couple of pelicans circled past, and she imagined them scooping up her troubles into their weird throat pouches, dumping them in the bay and leaving her free to get through the work part of the day and, finally, to the personal time.

  Maybe, just maybe, it would all go right.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Blue Capri B&B was between the Seawall and the Strand, set among other historic homes with lovely landscaping that lined the letter-named cross streets of Galveston. It had been originally ordered out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog in 1909, when the city was rebuilding after the 1900 Hurricane that flattened the island. The house had been modernized, of course, and bathrooms added to the four upstairs bedrooms to give each guest an en suite. Mrs. Kirby also had a two-bedroom cottage at the back of the garden, and this is where she’d put Dillon and Serena.

  “I hope this is all right,” she fussed, leading them along the bricked path, past a shaded seating area and small wall fountain. “You do have to share a bathroom, but this way we can sit in the parlor to discuss everything without disturbing the main house guests.”

  Mrs. Kirby herself was surprisingly modern, given the profusion of antiques and leaded glass and cross-stitching in her home. Her lipstick red cork-heeled wedges didn’t match any of the muted blues and creams of the décor. They assured her that the cottage was perfect—Serena tried not to show how perfect it was, if her Plan went well—and embarked on the rest of the tour.

  “I’m expecting a couple for the Solaro Room in about an hour, so we’ll start there,” Mrs. Kirby said, leading them upstairs. “All of the rooms are named after mountains on Capri, and as you can see, I’ve hung several prints of the Hyde and Sargent paintings from the island. I also have some books written on or about Capri in the bookcase there,” she pointed to a set of shelves that also held a wide selection of beach-friendly paperbacks and current release DVDs.

  As she showed them the Solaro, the Cappello, the Tiberio, and the San Michele, Mrs. Kirby kept up an intelligent commentary about the furnishings and the history of the house. Dillon was taking notes non-stop, leaving Serena to direct the conversation and take a few shots on her digital camera to supplement what they already had.

  “This is all wonderful,” she told Mrs. Kirby as they returned to the ground floor. “Why don’t you give Dillon and I half an hour or so to organize ourselves, and we’ll show you what we’ve brought down for you?”

  They agreed that Mrs. Kirby would head to the Grotta Azzurra—their cottage—once her other guests wer
e checked in, and retreated.

  Serena opened her work bag on the parlor’s side table and reminded herself to stay professional. Dillon took both of their overnight bags into the large bedroom with the heirloom quilt-covered queen sized bed, and Serena suppressed the frisson of awareness that shot between them when he returned to the parlor’s doorway. He’d finger-brushed his hair, but it was still falling insouciantly across his forehead. His jaw held just a hint of dark stubble, and Serena willed herself not to imagine the rough scrape across her belly. She caught the white glint of his teeth as he hitched his mouth into a quick smile, and began to count her breaths to keep herself steady.

  Work. Yes, right. Work. She unpacked her color boards and powered up her laptop, cued up the slideshow of their web templates, brochure, and new logo. Checked the time. If Mrs. Kirby’s guests were slow settling in, she was going to start blurting things at Dillon and probably a mess would ensue.

  Impressed, Dillon added ‘watching Serena work with clients’ to the list of things he liked about her. The harder edge of certainty she brought to internal meetings was softened by an openness that had Mrs. Kirby nodding eagerly along with her presentation. Dillon had jotted down a few quick descriptions of the Cappello Room, and Serena had added them and a couple of her photos to her website template then showed that page side by side with the existing site, letting the differences speak for themselves. Mrs. Kirby couldn’t keep her eyes off of the new version.

  And when Dillon was talking her through his plans for the tone of the copy, Serena’s left foot—surely not accidentally—slid sideways a little under the table and rested up against his right. Neither of them moved so much as a toe for the further hour that they all sat around the little bistro table, discussing the account.

  Not long after six, Mrs. Kirby headed back to the main house’s parlor to await her late arrivals, and Serena and Dillon sat back, smiling.