So, why don’t you go now? What’s stopping you? Nobody’s forcing you to get on that ridiculous toy airplane.

The plane coasted to a stop. Beside her, Holt touched her elbow, then went jogging out onto the packed-earth runway. The plane’s single prop slowed and finally stopped, and the door opened and the pilot crawled out onto the wing, then jumped to the ground. He ambled over to meet Holt, and the two men clasped hands, then went in for the brief back-thumping that passes for hugging among guy-friends. Then Holt turned and beckoned to Billie.

She hauled in another breath she didn’t seem to have room for.

Why don’t I go? There’s the answer, right there. I hate it, but it’s there and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s him-Holt Kincaid. What good would it do me to run? He’d only find me again. I can’t escape the man.

And somewhere way in the back of her mind a voice she didn’t want to listen to was saying, Why would you want to?

“I want you to meet my friend Tony,” Holt said, reaching out to touch her arm, drawing her closer. “He’s the man who’s going to take us to Reno.”

The man’s hand swallowed hers and his smile seemed to light up the already sun-shot day. He reminded her of a Humvee-big and square and formidable, and he made her feel safe.

She nodded and managed a breathless, “Hi,” and his whiskey-colored eyes crinkled with laughter.

“Hey-it’s all good. I promise I’ll get you there and back in one piece.” He clapped his hands together like an enthusiastic child and beamed at her. “Okay. Are you ready? Well, hop in, then.

“You get to ride shotgun,” he told her as he guided her up onto the wing. To Holt he added, “Sorry, buddy-you get to sit on the floor. I took out the passenger seats to make room for my equipment and extra fuel.”

“I guess it’s a good thing it’s not a long flight,” Holt said dryly.

“I’m a photojournalist,” Tony explained to Billie. “So I’ve got lots of stuff. Plus, the places I go don’t always have convenient airfields with fuel pumps.”

“Uh-huh,” Billie said. She had her head inside the plane now, and was trying not to stare at the array of instruments across the front of the cockpit. She glanced back at the two faces smiling encouragement at her from below. “Um…I can sit on the floor. Really. I wouldn’t mind.” Because back there where nobody can see me, maybe I can curl up in a fetal ball and stay there until we land…

The two men chuckled, as if she’d said something funny.

“Never flown in a small plane before, huh?” Tony’s eyes were warm with sympathy. “You’ll be fine-I promise not to do anything crazy. Just buckle up…settle back and enjoy the ride, okay?”

“Okay.” She gave him the smile he seemed to want, but the truth was, she did feel a little better. It was just something about him, the laid-back, effortless charm that made her forget about thirty seconds after meeting him that he had a face resembling a cross between a bouncer in a biker bar and a benevolent pit bull terrier. Whatever it was, she just had the feeling she could trust him.

As she settled into the passenger seat she looked over her shoulder and found Holt’s eyes on her. Something in their watchfulness made a shiver go through her.

What about him? Do I trust him?

Why do I have to ask myself that? I must trust him, or I wouldn’t be making this insane trip with him, would I?

If that’s so, why does he make me feel…off balance? Unsure of myself? Scared?

Yes-scared. The truth was, Holt Kincaid frightened her. She hadn’t thought of it quite like that, until she’d met Tony and realized the difference. Tony was a stranger to her, and yet, he made her feel safe. Rather like having a big brother…

Brother? Wait. No. Could this be…

The thought popped into her head, and just as quickly she rejected it. No, this man had the deep-mahogany skin tones and broad cheekbones that hinted at Native American origins, and besides, Holt had told her her brothers’ names, and none of them had been Tony.

Still…the thought lingered. Brother…I have brothers? Holt says I do. Real ones.

And from the thought, as if from a planted seed, feelings began to grow inside her. Feelings she couldn’t define, because she’d never felt them before. Feelings…like warmth, and…comfort, and whatever the opposite of loneliness was called. Perhaps belonging?

All this went through her mind in the few seconds while she stared into Holt Kincaid’s eyes. Then she drew a shaken breath and turned in the high-backed red velveteen seat and pulled her seat belt across her chest. And as the little airplane’s engines caught and the seat beneath her began to vibrate, as Tony donned headphones and muttered into a radio microphone, inside her chest she quivered with excitement and apprehension and anticipation, and something that felt-impossibly-like joy.

At the same moment, on the floor behind her seat, strapped uncomfortably to the wall of the passenger compartment, Holt was wishing he’d never gotten Billie to take off her sunglasses. Those eyes of hers…he’d never seen anything quite like them. And as the Piper Cherokee shot down the runway and lifted into the cloudless Nevada sky, he knew the hollow feeling in his stomach had nothing to do with the abrupt change in altitude.

No use kidding himself-it wouldn’t change the fact that the unthinkable had happened. He was in grave danger of falling in love with his client’s baby sister. Falling in love with a woman with two names and more complications than anybody he’d ever met. A woman he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to completely understand. How was that even possible?

Not that he knew much about it-falling in love-from personal experience, anyway. It hadn’t ever happened to him before, and he’d come to believe, with pretty much equal parts regret and relief, that it never would.

Right now, with his backside growing numb from its contact with the floor of a vintage Piper Cherokee, he couldn’t even recall exactly when it had happened. Looking back, it almost seemed as if it had been that very first moment, when he’d first caught a glimpse of her face on his TV screen, half hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and there’d been that electric shiver across his skin. He’d been carrying her picture around in his pocket for weeks, but the sense of recognition was more than that.

But he doubted that was true. It only seemed like he’d known her, or at least had been looking for her, all his life.

Fanciful stuff, and he was not a fanciful man. Nor did he believe in things like fate and destiny. No, he told himself, this was just biology, a simple matter of chemistry, which was maybe even harder to explain.

With her face pressed against the side-window glass, Billie watched the strangely colorful desert terrain give way to the curving avenues of Reno’s suburbs. She’s down there…somewhere, she thought. Hannah Grace. My daughter.

Why did I ever ask him to find her? What was I thinking?

Why don’t I feel anything?

It was as if her subconscious mind had thrown up a firewall around her emotions. Self-preservation?

But I want to feel something. I should feel something…shouldn’t I? What’s wrong with me? I’m going to see my child. My baby. She was a part of me, and I gave her away. And I can’t feel anything!

She could remember feeling. She remembered that day…remembered the awfulness of it. But it was only a memory of pain, not the feeling of it.

“She had dark hair,” she said, and was vaguely surprised to discover she’d spoken aloud. Tony looked over at her, and his warm-whiskey eyes were hidden behind aviator’s sunglasses. “I remember being surprised by that,” she told him, not really knowing why she did. “That she could have dark hair, you know? Because I don’t.”

“Lots of babies have dark hair when they’re born,” Tony said. “Then it falls out and grows in a whole different color. So you can’t tell anything by that. She could have blond hair now. You never know.”

She gave a laugh that hurt, then drew a shaky breath. After a moment she looked over at him and said, “You sound like you know a lot about babies. Do you have kids?”

He shook his head, but smiled. “Not yet. I’ve just got a whole bunch of sisters with kids-lotsa nieces and nephews. I’m planning to, though.” And his smile seemed to glow with warmth and promises and secret intimacies.

“So you’re married?” Billie asked, wondering why the smile of a man so obviously in love should make her feel wistful.

Tony chuckled, a sound that matched his smile. “Not yet. Planning to be, though.”

She drew another uneven breath and forced a smile. “She must be somebody special,” she murmured, wishing it didn’t sound so trite when she meant it with all her heart.

She wondered why he laughed, then, as if he knew a delicious secret.

The airfield north of Reno was much larger than the dirt airstrip in the desert near Las Vegas. Since it had once been an air force base and now served as home to the air tankers used in fighting forest fires in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, its runways were long, wide and smooth-a factor for which Holt’s backside gave thanks. Tony guided the Cherokee to a flawless landing, then taxied onto the expanse of tarmac where they were to park. Before leaving Las Vegas, Holt had called and arranged for a taxi to meet them, and he could see it waiting for them in the parking lot next to the airport office building.

Tony cut the engine and turned to give Billie a thumbs-up and a smile. “See? Told you I’d get you here.”

Holt managed to get himself straightened out and limbered up enough to open the door and exit the plane first, Tony being occupied with the unknown details involved in concluding a flight and buttoning down his aircraft. While Billie was slowly unbuckling herself from her seat harness, he gingerly stretched his legs and aching back, then turned to give her a hand climbing down, if she needed it.