It was clear to me now that I had gone about this the wrong way. The more obstacles I put in his way on this road to getting his money back, the more determined he would become to get there, with or without me, but it was too late to change my story about us needing to stay inconspicuous now.
Dammit.
It was the same with me. Thwarting his advances only made Sam more intent on wooing me. Maybe if I made myself look like an easier conquest he would lose interest. It was worth a try. Or it would be, if I could trust myself not to believe my own gig.
The problems that could arise from my pretending to like him would begin and end with the reality that I did like him, and with the way my blood heated every time we accidentally brushed against each other, it would be stupid to assume we wouldn’t end up in bed.
“I don’t want to play a game.”
“Fine. But you’re still going to like me.”
Sam hadn’t drawn his line in the sand. I had, but the more time we spent together, the harder it was to see, or to remember why I’d etched it there in the first place.
Chapter 8
Sam
The Croatian, then Bosnian landscape held my attention for quite a while. Fields of wheat and maybe barley stretched across the foreground, dotted with bales of hay and the occasional grouping of livestock. I glimpsed grapevines and wineries, and we crossed bridges over more than one sparkling, impossibly clear lake complete with crashing waterfalls. The Dinaric Alps reached toward the sky, silent sentinels in the distance. I’d seen those up close, since they sat nearer the coast, but I’d never spent time in the interior of the country.
It all made what would be a six-plus hour ride a little more bearable.
The inside of the bus left more to be desired. Aside from the smell, which I’d identified as a potpourri of impressive body odor, stale breath, and unwashed hair, the bench seats were an army green plastic that reminded me of the behemoth that had dropped me off at elementary school. Pieces of stained yellow foam and the occasional spring poked through faded cracks. Trash—cigarette butts, balled-up scraps of paper, discarded straws and toothpicks—and droppings of what I hoped wasn’t feces smudged the rubber aisle runner, and the few characters who joined us on this journey were suspect at best.
No families, just a gaunt, pale couple with sunken eyes and a twitchiness that infected my nerves, a bunch of men traveling alone, and one fat woman, all of whom, in my rampant imagination, might already be infected with the zombie virus. At best, they were connected to some sort of European ring of organ thieves determined to sell at least one of my kidneys on the black market.
I was quite keen on keeping them both.
Once I put a stop to a pointless internal monologue about all of the potential ways riding on this bus was probably going to kill me, it dawned on me that something had changed between the train from Jesenice and boarding this bus in Croatia—Blair had stopped fighting me at every turn. She’d stopped avoiding my gaze, quit making a face every time I opened my mouth, and had even let her hand brush against my leg the couple of times she’d leaned down to get something out of her bag.
“You two nice couple,” the fat woman said as she tottered past, apparently intent on finding a seat closer to the back. Probably in case the meth heads went into withdrawal. Or maybe there had been a falling out among the organ thieves.
“Oh, no, we’re just—” I stuttered, my voice dusty from the last twenty minutes of silence.
“Yes!” Blair interrupted, turning a hundred-watt smile on the woman and leaning in to my side in the process. “We’re on holiday and wanted to do something different, so we’re touring the countryside. It’s so lovely.”
“Yes, yes. Lovely couple. Thank you.”
Obviously the woman’s English left a little something to be desired, but given that I didn’t understand diddly-squat of any local dialect except the tiny percentage of German that was spoken here, pointing that out seemed more than a little insensitive.
She moved on, her giant muumuu and dirt-streaked coat slapping the bench seats on her way past. It seemed Blair had more ideas on this whole cover thing than she had shared with me. We were a couple on an adventurous holiday, now. I turned to her and raised my eyebrow in a silent question we both knew wouldn’t get answered. Instead of asking it, I choose something more innocuous in an attempt to get her talking again. “I was thinking maybe I should dye my hair, what do you think? Since we’re all keen on the backstories and undercover now.”
“I was thinking you should shave it.”
“You must be kidding.”
“Are you attached to those sunny brown locks, Bradford? How manly of you.”