Bright Eyes.
He scowled at the intrusive thought and focused on answering her question.
“Your disguise was going to be too much of a hassle with airport security, and we didn’t trust any private pilots well enough to hire them on such short notice. Besides, airports are blanketed with surveillance cameras. It seems as if things have gone well with Leti fooling your followers for the time being, but if something goes amiss, an airport would be the worst place for us to be. It’s better just to steer clear of them altogether. So we’re driving to Illinois instead of flying.”
“Driving,” she repeated flatly.
“It’ll be nostalgic,” he reasoned before shooting a significant glance in her direction. “You can relive your Jack Kerouac days.”
He noticed her sharp intake of breath. Seth grimaced. It had been unfair to make a reference to that intimate conversation they’d had years ago about that cross-country trip with her mother, given the fact that he’d made a point of saying that was all in the past.
“We’re taking the southern route?” she asked incredulously, staring at the highway.
“Yeah,” he replied, his gaze safely on the road in front of him. “I thought we’d even do a few parts of Historic Route 66.”
He didn’t look at her for several silent seconds, but he felt her gaze on his profile.
“How long will it take?” she asked.
“It depends. Are you going to take a turn driving?”
“Okay,” she agreed.
“Then if you’re game, we’ll drive straight through. I put some toiletries in a bag in the back so we can clean up on stops. Each of us can sleep while the other is driving. There are some pillows and blankets in the backseat as well. If we do that, we should get there sometime tomorrow afternoon. We’ll put up with a little discomfort now, but we’ll be in Jennifer’s comfortable beds all that much sooner.”
“Fine,” she mumbled, sounding so edgy and bewildered, his heart went out to her a little. “Can you turn on the radio, please?”
He wordlessly did what she asked, finding a soft-rock station.
“Okay?” he asked.
She made a muffled sound of assent.
Neither his motorcycle nor his little Nissan GT-R were appropriate for a cross-country road trip where comfort was essential. He’d borrowed an SUV from a good friend named Alexi who was a cinematographer and was out of town on location. Gia tilted the passenger seat all the way back in the roomy vehicle and turned her head determinedly away from him.
For the thousandth time in the past twenty-four hours, he sensed her disquietude and irritation simmering in the air between them. He exhaled some of his own agitation and focused on the road.
“How can you act so blasé about all this?”
He blinked at her sudden question. He thought she’d fallen asleep. Her head was still turned away from him.
“How do you think I should act? It’s a situation. I’m dealing with it,” he said bemusedly.
She made a disgusted sound. His response had clearly just annoyed her more. “It’s only three weeks, Gia. Is it that hard for you to take a break?”
She whipped her head around, causing her sunglasses to go slightly askew. “Why are you determined to make this all about my job? You are constantly suggesting I’m some kind of fame-aholic.”
He stared at the road, choosing his words carefully. “I’m sorry if I’m mistaken, but from what I’ve gathered while working in the industry and from the checkout-counter tabloids, you’ve been on a meteoric rise ever since we first met. If you have taken a break, it would have been a miracle, with everything else you’ve accomplished in the past several years.”
“So, being ambitious is my crime. When is the last time you took a three-week break, Seth?”
When he didn’t respond, because he was mentally grasping for the answer, she made a disgusted sound. “That’s what I thought,” she said scathingly. “My crime is being an actress, not a hard worker. I suppose when you’re an artist like you, they call it creative drive, and when you’re a film actress like me, it’s just dirty, scheming ambition.”
She jerked her arm into the backseat and grabbed a pillow. Throwing it down on the reclined seat with force, she again turned a stiff back to him.
After twenty or so minutes, her rigid posture seemed to loosen, her body growing suppler. Seth suspected she slept. He inhaled slowly, forcing his clamped jaw and tense muscles to unclench.
Why had he agreed to this crazy scheme when he knew how much she could get to him . . . when he knew how much he didn’t want her to? The obvious answer immediately popped into his head. It didn’t sit well with him, having the shadow of that insidious cult and its dangerous leader cast over Gia. It made him edgy to think of the press spying on her . . . hounding her.