“Hello!”
Zach heard the greeting, but was at a loss as to where it had come from.
“I take it you’re Miss Clayborn?”
It seemed to take Mariah a great effort to tear her gaze away from him. The heat he felt sizzled, knowing that she was as compelled by him as he was by her.
“Um, yes, that would be me,” she said finally.
A middle-aged guy with thick glasses popped up from behind a pile of suitcases nearest to them. Zach raised his brows.
“James, at your service,” he said, wiping his hands against his striped, short-sleeved shirt, then offering his hand. “Would either of you like some Starbucks?”
“No, thank you,” Zach said.
Mariah shook James’s hand. “You’re the one I talked to?”
“No. That would be Sally. I don’t sound like a woman to you, do I?”
Zach suppressed a chuckle. The guy in front of them definitely didn’t look like a woman.
Mariah cleared her throat. “Sorry. I was calling from the Houston airport so I really couldn’t make out much about the voice with all the background noise.”
“Airports. Hate ’em,” James said, offering his hand to Zach.
Zach nodded in complete agreement as he gave James’s hand a brief shake.
“So you all are looking for a wedding dress.” James pushed up his glasses again and peered around him. “Someone else here on the same errand. You’d be surprised how many of those things end up here.”
“Wedding dresses?”
“No, people looking for them.”
“Ah.”
“Found one the other day.” He kicked a suitcase out of the path and called out to another guy nearby, telling him to keep the pathways clear. “Wouldn’t be able to find your way out without the pathways,” James explained.
“By ‘found,’ do you mean people or wedding dresses?”
“Wedding dresses, of course.”
Zach tuned in on where Mariah was going. “And by the other day, which day, exactly, do you mean?”
“Two days ago.”
The right timeframe.
“Where is it? The dress, I mean?”
James motioned toward the far corner of the room. “Right where I directed the other guy who got here about twenty minutes ago looking for a dress, too.”
“Ah,” Zach said again, barely hiding his amusement.
Mariah laughed.
James stared at them both, having missed out on the joke.
“Sorry,” Mariah said. “I was just wondering if, you know, the guy looking for the dress actually plans on wearing it.”
James’s brows hovered above the dark rims of his glasses. “You don’t mean…you aren’t saying…” He let out a deep breath. “Oh Lord, I hope not. Either way, I don’t care, though. I’m a firm believer in the don’t ask, don’t tell policy. But now that you’ve said that, it’s put…well, an image in my head, you know? And that’s one image I could do without.”
“You and me both,” Zach said.
Zach took Mariah’s elbow and steered her toward where James was leading the way down one of the paths he’d mentioned. Little more than two feet wide, the path wound around mountains of varying sizes and colors. A Louis Vuitton here, a knockoff there. A khaki duffel bag in the way of the path, a package of skis at shoulder level, ready to decapitate anyone who wasn’t watching where they were going. How did all of this stuff come to be lost?
“James, what happens to all this?”
He shrugged. “Well, the airline does extensive tracking for ninety days. Sometimes the owners themselves find their way here, but not often. If they do, or the airline matches up the bag with the passenger, they regain their things. Otherwise, we sell the stuff in the front room. We also hold auctions. We wouldn’t have room otherwise. We have a Web site, you know. Sell stuff there, too.”
The older man stopped and scratched his chin, considering the piles in front of him when they came to a fork in the path. He looked one way, then the other, then pointed to the right. “This way, I think. Yes, yes. This way.”
Zach gazed down at Mariah, who was looking at the baggage with as much curiosity as he. “Lose anything recently?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “No. But it looks to me as though it wasn’t for lack of the airline trying.”
“I’ve lost no fewer than three bags over the years.”
“Do a lot of traveling, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Work related?”
Zach rubbed his chin. P.I.s traveled, didn’t they? Sure they did. “Yes. Don’t you?”
“This was my third time on a plane. And, this trip aside, my travels have been strictly personal. I haven’t had much call to travel out of Texas yet, you know, for the job.”
“Personal? That one trip wouldn’t have had anything to do with your exes, would it?”
She winced, making him wish he hadn’t said anything. “No. It was for my mother’s funeral. I was eight.”
Zach felt lower than the bottom of his shoes. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, obviously trying to pull off a nonchalance he was sure she didn’t feel. “That’s all right.”
He cleared his throat. “My mother died when I was nine.”
Her big brown eyes widened. “Your father?”
“Out of the picture. I don’t even know where he is. Not that it matters. He wasn’t around long enough to make an impression.”
Zach grimaced. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d volunteered the information. He didn’t think he’d told anyone in his adult life how old he’d been when he’d lost his mother. Yet here he had known this woman for only a few hours and he’d shared the information with her as easily as he did the time.
“I guess it’s my turn to say I’m sorry.”
He mimicked her moves and shrugged his shoulders, knowing the casualness he was going for fell far short of the mark. “That’s all right.”
His response brought a warm smile to her face. He discovered again he liked it when she smiled. He liked it a lot.
“Here we are,” James said, coming to a halt and breaking the quiet moment. The older man scratched the top of his head. “At least this is where I think it is.” He looked around. “But where’s the other guy?”
Fifteen or so jumbo suitcases were stacked behind Mariah. Zach squinted, trying to make out whether or not one of them had just moved. Then suddenly the entire stack began to teeter precariously.
He calmly reached out and touched her arm. She blinked up at him, her tongue darting out to moisten her bottom lip. Then he yanked her into his arms, away from where she’d been standing, where the cases were now hitting the floor one at a time.
“Dang nab it!” James shouted.