Adam Then and Now Read online

  “I certainly had one,” Adam said easily.

  Of course, he’d probably forgotten all that, she thought. She was the fool who’d allowed stupid details to stick in her mind all these years.

  “But Josh hasn’t been in any serious trouble,” Walt continued. “He’s a credit to his mother.”

  Adam turned to her, his eyes gentle. “I can see that.”

  “Thank you,” she managed. He could have been your son. She was amazed the past still inspired such anguish in her. A long time ago, she’d fantasized about tracking Adam down and pointing out to him how his heroics had destroyed their lives. But time had shifted her perspective, allowed her to accept some of the responsibility. If she’d read at least one of his letters, instead of ripping them to shreds, if she hadn’t married an antiwar protester, which she now could admit had been an act of revenge, things might have been different.

  Then again, maybe not. Adam had run out on her, left without a word. Something else had been more important than her love. Had they reconciled, she might have lived in fear that he’d abandon her again if another noble cause came along. She looked away from the heartbreaking kindness in Adam’s eyes. Perhaps everything had happened for the best.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ADAM’S GAZE caressed Loren’s face, relearning its curves and hollows. She turned away before he got his fill of her fawn-brown eyes. Come back to me, he pleaded silently, but she refused to meet his glance again.

  “By the way, I brought turkey sandwiches and bottled water to drink,” she said, moving toward the back of the plane, away from him.

  “That’s fine. I didn’t even think about food.” A gigantic understatement.

  “You’re the client. You’re not supposed to.” Her comment emphasized the line she’d drawn between them. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d better recheck a few things on the maps.” She pulled out two rolled topography maps from a compartment in the back and made a great pretense of studying them. At least he figured it was a pretense. She’d surveyed this area for him before and knew the routine.

  She sat cross-legged and unrolled the maps on her bare knees. He remembered she used to be so limber she could sit like that for hours, involved in a debate about social issues with Sherry and some of her other friends. He’d loved standing in the background watching her spirited conversation, her animated expression.

  He’d imagined this meeting for so long that he could hardly believe she was here, little more than an arm’s length away. “Everything checking out?” he asked, wanting to maintain conversational contact.

  She didn’t look up as her supple fingers smoothed back the corners of the map. “Just familiarizing myself again.”

  And so was he. When he’d stepped off the plane, the sight of her had weakened his knees. He wondered how long he’d stood there staring like an idiot, his heart hammering and his palms sweaty. Seeing Loren had stripped away the years, the experiences that had jaded him, the stagnation that surrounded his heart. She stole his breath with the picture she’d made walking toward him, her skin sheened with moisture in the summer heat, her smile welcoming. For a wild moment, he’d imagined the smile was one of pleased recognition. Then he’d taken off his sunglasses, and the smile had faded.

  “Your daughter must be a good pilot if you trusted her to land at Sedona,” Walt said.

  He turned to Walt. Pride tightened his chest. “She’s so good it astonishes me.”

  “Does she plan on a career in flying?”

  “I wish I knew. Right now she seems to be...drifting.”

  “Mmm.” Walt’s nonanswer didn’t disguise the note of disapproval in it.

  “She’s still young. Eighteen’s a tough age,” Adam said defensively. Secretly he believed Daphne was too talented to waste her time like this. She’d learned to read before she’d started school and he’d recognized an intelligence in her that matched, sometimes surpassed, his own. But from the time Daphne was born, Anita had appropriated her, accusing Adam, with his ideas for stimulating her mind, of “trying to turn her into a son.”

  Consequently, Daphne had become somewhat of a mystery to him. She’d hired a stranger to teach her to fly, rather than take lessons from him, which had hurt like the devil. But he’d been afraid to ask her why she’d done that, afraid to discover she hadn’t wanted his guidance. Anita had hinted that was the case, that Daphne didn’t think he was on her wavelength.

  After the divorce, he realized he’d lose her completely if he didn’t try to establish some sort of common ground, whether or not Daphne welcomed it. They’d had a few dinners together, and he had to admit he didn’t speak her language, especially when it came to designer clothes and musical groups. He’d learned that she favored short skirts and fast cars, attended college because she liked sorority life, had no clue as to what career she wanted and went through boyfriends with the speed of an F-14.

  On the plane ride up here today, he’d seen the first glimmer of hope as they found something they both loved to discuss—airplanes. Maybe this was how they’d finally connect, even though she apparently hadn’t trusted him enough to teach her to fly them.

  He sensed some movement behind him and turned to see Loren putting away the maps. Then she began cleaning the lens on the camera. Every brisk, professional movement she made filled him with ridiculous, unfounded pride. He’d had nothing to do with the woman she’d become. Although, if he’d given in to her demands and presented her with a baby twenty-three years ago, her life might have been far different. Maybe he could take some satisfaction in his refusal to saddle her with that sort of responsibility before she’d been ready for it.

  When she’d mailed Scorpio Steel the results of her first assignment for the company a few months ago, he’d cherished those mundane shots, because she’d taken them. He’d traced her left-handed, back-slanting signature on the accompanying invoices. If his own signature hadn’t become so illegible over the years, she might have deciphered his name at the bottom of the checks she’d cashed. Never in his life had he paid out money with such excitement.

  “Seems like things have gone well with you,” Walt said, obviously wanting more information.

  Adam broke off his reverie. “Financially things are fine,” he said. Adam understood Walt’s curiosity, but he didn’t want to get too specific about his personal situation until he could look into Loren’s eyes while he explained it. “I was sorry to hear about your wife,” he said, shifting topics.

  “It was pretty bad. Cancer’s gotta be the worst way to go.” Walt lowered his voice and tilted his head back slightly. “It was real tough on her.”

  Adam’s heart twisted. “I’ll bet.”

  “Who told you about Fran?”

  “I keep in touch with Jim Denton.”

  “That’s right,” Walt said. “You and Jimmy Denton were friends in high school. I’d forgotten that. Guess you know he’s getting a divorce. Hell of a thing.”

  “Yes, I know. There’s a lot of that going around.”

  “Your folks still in Flag?” Walt asked.

  “No, they bought a retirement place in Sun City.”

  Walt made a noncommittal sound deep in his throat. “Don’t suppose I’ll ever retire. I’m having too much fun.”

  “That’s great.” Adam realized he envied Walt a little. Flying and working on airplane engines sounded like a pretty good life compared to the pressures of running a multimillion-dollar company. “It’s beautiful up here.”

  “Wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

  Adam watched the plane’s shadow skim over the nubby desert. Walt had taken them northwest over Prescott National Forest to pick up Interstate 40, a dark gray ribbon stitched between Williams and Kingman. The highway would lead them most of the way across to the bridge construction site on the Colorado River, just south of Laughlin, Nevada. To their left marched gray-blue mountains, backdropped by another range, then another, each jagged silhouette tinged a lighter blue than the one before, like the shades of a color
wheel.

  “Remember you once offered to teach me to fly?” Adam asked Walt.

  “Yep.”

  “I should have taken you up on it.” Except flying lessons would have interrupted his time with Loren, and all he’d wanted in those days was to be with her, to hold her, kiss her...

  “Well, you learned how to fly, I take it.”

  “Yes, I learned.” More than how to fly, he thought. But flying had been the saving grace in a life where other satisfactions danced perpetually out of reach. A plane was the first major toy he’d bought when Scorpio Steel began turning a sizable profit.

  Walt pulled the nose of the plane up a little. “Is the bridge construction going along on schedule?”

  “No, it’s not, which is the reason for all these pictures.” Part of the reason, he amended to himself. Ever since Jim Denton had mentioned that Loren was an aerial photographer, he’d been looking for a reason to hire her.

  “Figured as much.” Walt called back to Loren. “Bridge isn’t on schedule, just like I told you.”

  “Have you figured out what’s wrong?” Loren’s voice held the same husky, rich tone he remembered. Back in high school, they’d talked on the phone for hours, and he’d never tired of that sultry sound. Sometimes he still heard it in his dreams.

  He turned in his seat. “The contractor claims he’s getting shorted on the steel shipments.”

  “But you’re shipping the right amount?”

  “I’ve spent several hours going over the invoices, and everything checks out. I think he’s getting the steel and off-loading to another site.”

  “Really?” Her brown eyes grew alert with interest. He remembered how she’d always hated injustice. “Embezzling the steel?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you know the contractor?”

  “I know him. His name is Barnaby Haskett.” Considering Loren was obviously still hostile toward the military, he decided not to add that he’d served in the same unit with Haskett in Vietnam.

  “I’ve never worked with anybody by that name,” Loren said. “How long have you known him?”

  “Quite a while. I helped him get his contractor’s license.”

  “And this is how he shows his gratitude?”

  Adam shrugged. “That was a long time ago. He’s probably forgotten.” While they’d shared the choking humidity of the jungle, Adam had convinced Haskett that Arizona was the place to live. But after he’d helped him settle in and get his license, they’d lost touch. When Adam noticed Haskett was the contractor for the bridge project, he’d invited him over to the house for dinner, for old times’ sake. Then, only days afterward, Adam had come home unexpectedly and found Haskett in bed with Anita. So much for esprit de corps.

  “If you helped him get his license, why do you now think he’s the type to be embezzling the steel?” Loren asked.

  Adam didn’t want to go into Anita’s indiscretions at this point. “I know him a little better than I did back then,” he temporized. Haskett and Anita were engaged now. His anger over her adultery was tinged with guilt at not having given her enough love and attention during their marriage. Maybe he could make partial amends by keeping her from marrying someone who would ultimately end up in prison. Daphne didn’t need that kind of embarrassment, either, so he hoped to wrap this up before the wedding.

  As a by-product, he had an excuse to see Loren. Hiring her to work for him while he found out what Haskett was up to seemed like a logical, low-pressure way to find out if he and Loren still had anything between them. Jim had failed to tell him that Loren had a son about Daphne’s age. Josh. So Daphne and Josh had become a reality. Anita hadn’t wanted the name Daphne, but that was a battle he’d won.

  “What exactly are you looking for in the pictures?” Loren asked.

  “I’m hoping to get lucky, see Haskett’s crew actually transferring steel somewhere else.”

  Walt nodded toward the burgeoning gray thunderheads on the horizon. “Those clouds may screw up our chances this morning.”

  “Aw, Dad, we can make it,” Loren said.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not flying this baby to the exacting specifications of a lady photographer I know.”

  “I’m not that critical.”

  Walt snorted and glanced at Adam. “Not that critical, she says. When Loren’s taking pictures, she wants the plane steady enough to balance a martini on each wing without agitating the olives.”

  “That’s a gross exaggeration!”

  Walt winked at Adam. “Just watch. And listen.” He handed Adam a headset and put on his own.

  Adam needed no invitation to study Loren as she worked at the job she obviously loved. The film canisters looked heavy, but she used leverage and economy of movement to load the film with the same grace he’d admired when she’d turned cartwheels in front of the grandstand of Flagstaff High. They’d met when she turned a cartwheel right into his arms. He’d never believed it was an accident. She wasn’t that clumsy.

  “Five minutes,” Walt said. “How low do you want us to get, Adam? Population’s sparse enough here to go in at five hundred feet if you want.”

  “No, that might create undue suspicion. Twelve hundred feet is fine. This should look like a typical survey run, unless I spot a truck going in the wrong direction with a load of steel.”

  “So we’ll do a normal grid pattern,” Loren said.

  Her voice, so intimately close, stirred memories of holding her, and he felt as if someone had just drop-kicked his heart. “Yes.”

  “If we can,” Walt muttered as wisps of cloud shrouded the plane momentarily and moved on. The bulk of the storm lay directly in front of them, ragged tails of rain unraveling from the underside of the cloud bank.

  Adam peered down at the bridge construction on the Arizona side of the river, where steel supports sprouted in a row across the turquoise water of the Colorado. The trucks and cranes on the bank beside the river looked like the scattered toys of a five-year-old who’d been called in to lunch.

  “Rolling,” Loren murmured in his ear just as the clouds moved overhead and blocked the sun, turning the river water gray.

  Walt guided the plane as if stringing a loom, with each pass parallel to the last. Then the plane hit an air pocket and lurched.

  “Steady, Dad,” Loren said, her tone breathless with concentration. “Steady.” Another pocket. “Dammit!”

  “Can’t hold it. Storm’s moving in,” Walt said as a few drops hit the windshield.

  “You can do it,” she barked. “Left wing down! Come on, Dad, hold that course.”

  Adam saw an eighteen-wheeler pull away from the site. Which way was it going? A layer of clouds moved under them, obscuring the view.

  “Shi—shucks,” Loren said.

  In spite of his own disappointment at missing the direction of the truck, Adam smiled.

  “Keep going, Dad.”

  Walt turned the plane and started back.

  “Hold that line...hold it.... Now back across.”

  Adam had lost sight of the truck. He didn’t think Loren was getting much with the cloud interference.

  “Easy does it,” she said. “That’s it. You’ve... No!”

  The jolt of the plane threw Adam against his seat belt as Loren groaned in frustration.

  “Give it up, sweetheart,” Walt said, banking the plane. “I’m heading home before we get socked in.”

  “Damn. We almost had it.”

  Adam spoke into the small microphone attached to his headset. “We’ll adjust, Loren. Maybe the weather will be better tomorrow. We could start early in the morning.” He thought about Daphne and figured he wouldn’t be taking time from her. She’d already announced she wanted to sleep in on this trip.

  “We could try another run in the morning,” Walt said, “but you’ll have to choose between that and a tune-up. I can’t be two places at once.”

  Adam knew an opening when he saw one. That instinct had made him the best running back in Flagstaff
High’s history. “What if I flew the plane for Loren?”

  Loren’s reply was like a shot. “Our insurance wouldn’t cover it.”

  He wasn’t giving up his advantage. That time alone would be the perfect opportunity to explain about his divorce. They could talk, maybe clear the air about what had happened all those years ago. “My lawyer could fax a release.”

  “I still wouldn’t want to do it.”

  He knew what she didn’t want to do—be in a plane alone with him. Disappointment dampened his mood.

  “Seems like a reasonable solution to me, Adam,” Walt said, “assuming you can put up with the drill sergeant in the back.”

  “I can.” He mentally crossed his fingers.

  “But, Dad,” Loren said, “I don’t think”

  “Now, Loren, I’m sure Adam can manage this plane. I’ll let him fly us the rest of the way home so he’s checked out on everything. I don’t think the insurance is a real problem, do you?”

  Adam waited through another period of silence.

  “I guess not,” she said at last.

  “Then it’s a deal,” Adam said, closing his eyes with relief. Tomorrow he’d be alone with Loren for a few precious hours. It was the most he could hope for at this stage.

  * * *

  DAPHNE RIORDAN DROVE fast over the winding roads to Los Arboles, trying to wipe out the memory of how her father had looked at Loren Stanfield. Daphne certainly recognized sexual tension; despite her youth, she’d stirred up enough of it. And she’d solved the mystery of why her dad had hired an aerial photographer from Sedona when he certainly could have found a more convenient service in Phoenix.

  What a bitch of a situation, to be hanging around while her father tried to light up an old flame. Not that Daphne had really expected him to spend all that much time with her. Years ago her mother had warned her that her father cared about business first and family second. Since the divorce, he’d seemed a little more interested in her activities, though.

  Besides, she tried to remember that his success with the steel company allowed her and her mother to live in Fountain Hills, wear boutique clothing and drive sexy cars. His preoccupation with business seemed normal; she could take it. But Loren Stanfield wasn’t business. And if he found another love, what would happen to what little attention she’d been getting from him in the past few months? She knew the answer to that. Most of her friends’ parents were divorced, and a new lover usually meant the kids could go hang.