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“Anything for you, sweetheart. You just keep my little niece or nephew safe, okay? Bye.”
Dylan disconnected and went inside his house of the past four years. He had never brought a woman here; he’d preferred encounters to happen at their place instead. It made leaving much easier and awkward talks about why he couldn’t stay much less necessary.
Dylan preferred his solitude and planned to keep it that way. He’d tried dating, but many women thought being a widower meant he needed to be smothered with attention. With love. They wanted to wrap their arms around him and help chase his demons away. Dylan knew they meant well, but he couldn’t tolerate that kind of unrelenting attention.
Dylan would face his own demons. Always had.
So he kept things casual with women, and kept them out of his personal space. Sometimes, much more rarely now, he got physically involved, but he was sure to let a woman know up front that his heart was off the table. A future with Dylan was not an option.
Dylan walked into his bedroom and changed out of the dirty work clothes he’d had on for normal plane maintenance. He decided to take a quick shower, cursing Burgamy again when he couldn’t linger under the hot water to help loosen some of the residual soreness from old wounds. Thirty minutes wasn’t a long time to get to Falls Run from his house.
And yes, Sally’s was the only sit-down restaurant in the small town, more of a diner than anything else. There were also a couple of fast-food places, a gas station, a bar, hardware store and bank. Falls Run wasn’t that small. And it was perfect for Dylan’s purposes in a town: small enough that he didn’t have to worry about too many strangers wandering around, and large enough that he was able to get what he needed regularly enough for both his business and personal needs.
He’d chosen Falls Run on purpose. At the borders of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, it allowed him access, via his Cessna, to almost anywhere on the East and Gulf coasts. Plus, the town was surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains. In Dylan’s opinion, you couldn’t ask for better real estate than that.
And it was far enough from Washington, DC, and Omega for him to stay away from his past there.
Dylan rolled his eyes. At least he thought Falls Run was far enough away. Evidently not, given the past few years. Dylan got dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, grabbed his keys and wallet from the dresser and headed out the door to his pickup truck.
What the hell. He’d enjoy a nice meal at Sally’s—he was tired of his own cooking anyway—and meet Megan’s friend. Dylan pretty much kept to himself, but he knew how to be polite and charming when he wanted to be. His mother had instilled that much in the Branson siblings when they were growing up. Shelby Keelan wasn’t at fault for Burgamy’s high-handed tactics; no need to blame her. He’d meet her and move on.
Get the codes. Deliver the codes. Get out.
No problem.
Chapter Two (#ulink_d7f3ebcc-fb2f-5a0e-95b9-49cbd15df7e4)
For the first time she could remember, Shelby Keelan cursed her gifts when it came to math. Normally she was very appreciative of them: they allowed her to make a great living doing something she enjoyed—making games kids loved to play. But not this time. This time her abilities had brought her out of her nice comfortable home to a strange town to meet a strange person she had no real desire to meet.
Of course, Shelby rarely had the desire to meet anyone new.
She easily found a parking spot at the restaurant in Falls Run, although the lot was across the street from the diner due to the narrow shape of the town forced by mountains. Shelby had been told there was only one restaurant and she couldn’t miss it, but she’d still been a little worried. What kind of town had only one restaurant?
Evidently the town of Falls Run.
Shelby didn’t mind small towns. She didn’t mind big cities either. It was the people in both that tended to cause her stress. Shelby just didn’t do people very well.
Even now, pulling into a mostly empty parking lot, she was pretty stressed out. Shelby knew she would need to make small talk. With strangers. Multiple strangers maybe. She had many talents, but chatting with people wasn’t one of them. She was an introvert through and through.
Her introversion had driven her flamboyant mother crazy when Shelby was a child. Her mom wanted to show her off—as if people really wanted to hear some four-year-old recite pi to the two-hundredth digit—but young Shelby had just wanted to be alone.
Adult Shelby just wanted to be alone, too. Back at her own house in Knoxville, where everything had its place and was comfortable and safe and familiar. Where she didn’t have to think too hard about what she did or what she said or if she was coming off as rude or unfriendly or standoffish.
It wasn’t that Shelby was afraid of people, she really wasn’t. She wasn’t agoraphobic, as her mother tried so often to suggest. Wasn’t afraid something terrible would happen to her if she left her house. People just...exhausted Shelby. So she chose to be around them as little as possible. Fortunately, she had a job developing games and software that allowed her to spend most of her time away from people. Perfect.
Plus, she had plenty of friends in her life, just mostly of the four-legged and furry variety. And none of them were disappointed when Shelby wasn’t up to making small talk. They kept one another company just fine. And Shelby had a couple of the two-legged-friend versions, too.
But it took pretty grave circumstances to get Shelby to willingly leave her house and be around people she didn’t know for extended periods of time as she was doing now.
Like a terrorist-attack countdown in the coding of a children’s computer game. One that Shelby happened to discover two days ago. One that anyone else in the world would’ve missed.
But Shelby hadn’t missed it, the way she never missed anything having to do with numbers. She had known immediately the numbers she saw were not part of the game. They clearly had been planted, and once Shelby dug into them a bit, she realized they were, in part, a countdown. But she couldn’t figure out any more than that on her own.
Sure that she had stumbled on to something potentially criminal at best, downright sinister at worst, Shelby had emailed her computer engineering friend from their college days at MIT, Dr. Megan Fuller.
Except Megan was Dr. Megan Fuller-Branson now, and expecting a little baby Dr. Fuller-Branson in a couple of months.
Shelby had explained the coding she’d found and what she suspected. Most others would’ve scoffed or accused Shelby of overdramatizing, but Megan and Shelby had developed a healthy respect for each other years ago at MIT. They may not be the type to chat with each other over coffee, but they took each other seriously.
And it ended up that Megan was now working with her new husband at some sort of clandestine law enforcement agency that specialized in saving-the-world type of stuff. Quite convenient for the matter at hand. Especially since the codes had been planted by some terrorist group known as DS-13, who was evidently really bad news.
Spotting the codes and realizing their nefarious purpose had been the easy part for Shelby. The hard part had come when Megan had asked Shelby to travel to Washington, DC.
Shelby understood why Megan needed her to come in. The string of coding Shelby saw in the game had only come up for a moment before deleting itself. Very few people would’ve been looking at the game in its raw-data form, and nobody would’ve been able to catch the countdown codes and the coordinates embedded in it in the split second it was available.
Unless you were Shelby, who was able to memorize thousands of numbers at once just by looking at them. A complete photographic memory when it came to numbers. And coding, whether it be as innocent as games, or as deadly as a potential terrorist attack, was essentially numbers.
Shelby now had the numbers she saw permanently stuck in her head. She couldn’t get rid of them even if she wanted to. Megan had the decoding software that would help make sense of it all. They needed to put together Shelby’s brain and Megan’s computer. And fast. Because whatever the countdown was for was happening about sixty hours from now.
Megan knew about Shelby’s dislike of being around people. Driving to DC from Knoxville was too far, so Megan had mentioned her brother-in-law’s charter airplane service. The way Shelby saw it, one person in a small airplane was much better than airports and large planes full of people. And it was Megan’s husband’s older brother. That shouldn’t be too bad.
So here she was, pulling up to a restaurant based on a text message she’d received from somebody named Chantelle DiMuzio, personal assistant of Dennis Burgamy. The assistant had requested that Shelby call Burgamy, but Shelby couldn’t remember the last time she’d used her phone to talk into. Her outgoing voice-mail message pretty much summed up her opinion about phone conversations:
Sorry, I can’t take your call. Please hang up and text me.
Shelby could text much faster than she could talk. She could type twice as fast as that. She was off the charts on a numpad.
Finally, the Chantelle lady had left a message that Mr. Burgamy had arranged for Dylan Branson, Megan’s brother-in-law, to meet her at the town’s only restaurant. Branson would fly her into DC tonight.
Shelby put the car in Park. Okay. She could do this.
She was already a little shaky from an incident about fifteen miles back when some moron had literally driven her off the road. That was the problem with driving in the mountains: if someone wasn’t paying attention—or worse, doing something stupid like texting and driving—and nearly hit you, then it was pretty much game over. These mountain roads with their sheer drops were pretty scary.
It was only because of Shelby’s hypervigilance behind the wheel that she’d managed to stay on the road and not drive off the side of the mountain altogether. Shelby wasn’t 100 percent sure of her driving skills—she really didn’t drive terribly often, and never on roads like these—so she’d wanted to make sure she was paying extra-careful attention.
And thank goodness, because that idiot hadn’t even seen her. Didn’t slow down, stop, give an “oops, I’m sorry” wave or anything. Shelby could’ve been flipped upside down at the bottom of the ravine right now and she doubted the other driver would’ve even noticed. He, or she, just sped on.
So, all in all, not a great start to this adventure. And adventure was very much Megan’s word, not Shelby’s. Shelby’s idea of adventure was more along the lines of trying the new Thai place across town, or branching off in a new direction for a video game she was developing. This whole scenario was way beyond adventure in Shelby’s opinion.
Shelby opened her car door and heard thunder cracking in the darkening sky. Great. More adventure to add to the adventure. Could small planes even take off in a thunderstorm?
Shelby walked to the door of the diner and entered. How would she know who Dylan Branson was? Inside she looked around. There were a couple of middle-aged guys and a woman at the counter, an older lady at the cash register and a teenage waitress carrying food to a couple at a table near the door. Some dark-haired Calvin Klein–looking model sat back in the corner booth—yeah, Shelby wished she could be that lucky—and a shorter, stockier man in khakis and a pretty bad polo shirt sat at a table near him.
Nobody was wearing a Trust Me, I’m the Pilot T-shirt or held a sign with her name. So evidently Shelby wasn’t going to be able to slip in without having to talk to anyone except Megan’s brother-in-law.
Shelby approached the lady at the cash register. “Hi, excuse me—”
“Oh, my goodness. Honey, you’re not from around here. I would remember that hair anywhere.” The woman’s voice wasn’t unkind, but it was loud, drawing the attention of pretty much everyone at the diner.
Shelby sighed. Remarks about her hair weren’t uncommon. It was red. Not a sweet, gentle auburn, but full-on red: garnet, poppies, wisps-of-fire red—Shelby had heard all the analogies. If she’d been born a few centuries earlier, she would’ve been burned at the stake as a witch just for her coloring.
Shelby tended to forget how much it grabbed people’s attention when they first met her. “Um, yeah. It’s really red, I know. I was wondering—”
“You couldn’t get that color out of a bottle, I imagine. Especially not with your skin coloring. Your hair must be natural.”
See? This was case and point why Shelby tended not to want to talk to people. Because really, did she have to go into her natural coloring with someone she’d known for less than ten seconds? Shelby didn’t want to be rude, but neither did she want to talk about which side of the family her coloring was from.
And Shelby was sure that question, or something very similar, would be the next inquiry from the cash register lady.
“Yeah.” Shelby remained noncommittal about the hair. “I’m looking for somebody. A pilot. His name is Dylan Branson. He was supposed to meet me here.”
“Oh, yeah, honey, he’s right over there.” The lady gestured toward the corner, and Shelby looked over. Great, it was the balding guy in the bad polo shirt. Shelby thanked her and headed that way before the woman could ask any more questions about her hair.
Dylan Branson was eating what looked like meat loaf at his table and had just put a huge forkful into his mouth when Shelby walked up to him.
“Hi, Dylan Branson, right? I’m Shelby Keelan.”
The man looked over at Shelby and his eyes bulged. He held his hand up in front of his mouth, rapidly chewing, and began standing up.
“No, don’t get up. I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal.”
Shelby sat down across from him. Of course, the polite thing for Branson to do would’ve been to wait until she got there and then eat together, rather than shoveling food in right when he was supposed to meet her. But whatever. Shelby just hoped Megan’s husband was a little more considerate than his brother.
And for the sake of her friend, Shelby hoped he was a little more handsome, too. Not balding and portly, like Dylan here. But maybe follically challenged didn’t run in the Branson family, just this one brother.
And he was still chewing. How big of a bite could he have taken, for goodness’ sake? The look he was giving her over his moving jaw was clearly confused.
“Take your time.” Shelby smiled. She didn’t want him to choke or anything. That wouldn’t get her to DC very quickly.
“Oh, honey, not Tucker,” the lady called out from behind the cash register, pointing to the man eating. Then she looked past Shelby to the booth beyond her in the corner. “Dylan Branson, shame on you. You knew this young lady was looking for you. You should’ve said something.”
“I would’ve, Sally. But I wanted to see if Tucker would actually choke on the meat loaf while trying to talk to her first.”
The deep voice came from the booth behind Shelby. She didn’t need to look up to see who it was. She knew. The dark-haired, sexy-as-sin Calvin Klein model.
Chapter Three (#ulink_94bb06a0-784a-5116-b1de-fa342a344c55)
The attraction punched him in the gut. Dylan had been punched enough times to know clear and well what it felt like: it stole your breath, caused you to wonder which end was up, made your whole body tingle.
Of course, it was usually followed by agony. But in this case it might be worth it.
Striking was the only word for Shelby Keelan. Her red hair fell around her face and shoulders in long wisps and curls that had escaped from the loose braid she seemed to have attempted at some point. Her eyes —now looking at him rather than Tucker—were a clear emerald green with a hint of gold in them.
But, for the love of all things holy, it was her freckles that were killing him. Scattered across her nose, her cheeks, her forehead. They were quite possibly the most alluring thing he had ever seen.
Shelby Keelan wasn’t a traditional beauty, but she was striking.
From his corner booth where he could see the main entrance, kitchen entrance and emergency exit—old habits died hard—Dylan had seen her come in. He’d been almost positive who she was from that moment, and then her brief conversation with Sally had confirmed it.
He should’ve said something when she sat down at the table near his booth and started talking to Tucker, but he couldn’t resist seeing how that played out. Poor Tucker still looked as if he was going to have a heart attack.
Shelby Keelan sat in her seat at Tucker’s table, her green eyes zeroed in on Dylan. She did not look amused.
“Confused strangers are the top entertainment around here, I take it?”
Uh-oh. Dylan stood, giving Shelby his most charming smile. “Not usually, I promise. I just couldn’t resist seeing how Tucker was going to react.”
Tucker was still staring at Shelby. “I, uh, I mean, I’m not Dylan Branson.” He finally got the words out, much too late to be helpful.
Dylan walked over and slapped Tucker on the back good-naturedly. “I think she caught that much, Tuck. Ms. Keelan is dropping off some items for me to deliver.” Dylan looked over at Shelby and held out his hand for her to shake. “I’m Dylan Branson. A pleasure to meet you.”
Shelby stood and grasped Dylan’s hand. Dylan shook it, then kept it, glad when she didn’t snatch it away, and led her over to his booth. “Let’s leave Tucker to finish his meat loaf.”
A huge crash of thunder shook the windows in Sally’s diner. “I can’t take off in this anyway. I’ll need to let Megan and Sawyer know I’ll be delayed for a few hours.”
Shelby looked out the window at the rain now pouring down and nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”
“Maybe you’ll let me buy you dinner to make up for my rude behavior. Since we have some extra time before I can fly in this.”
Shelby didn’t look convinced, but Dylan wasn’t going to let it go. The way he saw it, this situation was the best of all worlds: a chance to spend some time with a gorgeous woman, but one who would only be around for a couple of hours. Once the weather cleared and she gave him the codes, they’d go their separate ways. No complications.
But for now he could just enjoy her; her company and her beauty.
“Unless you’re in a hurry and just need to drop everything off and run.” Dylan gave her another smile. “But I hope that’s not the case and you’ll have dinner with me.”
She gave him a confused look, but then nodded. “Okay, dinner. A chance to redeem yourself.” One of her eyebrows arched as she looked at him.
“Deal. Let me contact Megan and Sawyer to tell them about the storm.” Afraid he might yell at Megan for not preparing him for how beautiful Shelby was, Dylan just sent a text to Sawyer.
Shelby in pocket, but storm will delay flight. Will contact with updated ETA soon.
Dylan received a reply just moments later from Sawyer.
Roger that. I’ll inform Burgamy.
Good, let Sawyer handle Burgamy. Dylan wanted as little communication time with his ex-boss as possible. He caught the attention of the young waitress who brought them both menus. Shelby began looking through it, but Dylan didn’t even need to.
“Already know what you want?” Shelby asked him.
“Yeah. Sally’s chicken pot pie is my favorite. I usually get that.”
“That sounds good. Perfect for a rainy night and to recover from my near-death experience a little while ago.”
As far as Dylan knew, most people didn’t have near-death experiences around Falls Run. He hoped she wasn’t talking about poor Tucker. He wasn’t that bad. “What happened?”
They both ordered pot pie and sweet tea then Shelby told him about the car that had driven her partially off the side of the road. It sounded as if the driver never even saw her.
“Wow, first almost being run off the road, then almost having to have dinner with Tucker. That’s a double whammy.”
