“I’m not,” he replied. “You were amazing.”
She glanced at him again, looking for the teasing, the punchline. Without breaking eye contact he peeled her fingers away from the edge of the basket, then took her wrist in his fingers in a touch so delicate, so careful, so viscerally possessive, she stopped breathing. He pushed up the sleeve of her sweater and the silk thermal t-shirt below, then turned her wrist underside up to press a soft kiss into her wrist. The contrast between his soft lips and his raspy beard sent a hot thrill through her.
She’d stopped looking for Grannie’s balloon. And breathing. The air up here was very thin, trickling into her lungs past her locked throat. The seemingly endless sky all around her, the ancient landscape below her, and Keenan’s blue eyes conspired to pull her into this moment, in a hot air balloon, halfway around the world from her daily life. Her brain, normally chattering away like a monkey on crack, suddenly was possessed of two thoughts. Last night was a one-off, and she wanted to do it again.
He could tell. He’d known before she had, that much was clear in his knowing eyes. A hawk soared on the same rising current that lifted them, then wheeled to dive into a field and come up with breakfast, a mouse by the look of it. She swallowed, and turned her attention to the balloonist’s patter about Cappadocia’s fairy chimneys, dousing the fire, but the coals still smoldered, waiting for night.
“Rebels used to hide here,” Keenan said during a lull.
“Which rebels?”
“All of them,” he said, then nodded at the gently folded terrain. “See how the roads wind and lift with the terrain? You couldn’t easily get mounted troops, or chariots, into the area, and if you did, the insurgents would hide in one of the thousands of caves.”
“Does it remind you of Afghanistan?”
“The terrain is more mountainous in Afghanistan, but the problems armies face are similar.”
She surveyed the territory again, but with a different eye, an eye toward the human cost. “Do you see the world in terms of warfare now?”
The heater whooshed again, sending hot air skyward, keeping them aloft. Keenan rested his elbows on the woven edge of the balloon’s basket, and didn’t meet her eyes. “Yes,” he said finally.
The balloons dropped gently until they skimmed a few feet above the landing sites and were hauled down to the beds of waiting trucks by handlers who deftly secured the baskets and stowed the billowing balloon fabric. The balloonist unlocked the basket’s gate and let out the other passenger, then Keenan, who reached up for Rose’s hand to help her down to the ground. A linen-draped table with strawberries and champagne awaited them. Grannie, Florence, and Marian each had a glass in hand, and triumphantly bent forward so the balloon company’s owner could drape medals around their necks. For a moment she thought Keenan would refuse the cheerfully intended honor, but he stood by her and accepted his medal with only a hint of the ridiculous in the set of his lips.
*
They clambered into the waiting shuttle bus for the drive back to their hotel. The Babes spent the drive comparing pictures, leaning over the back of Rose’s seat to draw her into their conversation. When they arrived back at the hotel, Keenan mustered everyone around one of the comfortable sectionals in the lobby. “I took a look at your bucket list, and your itinerary,” he said as he held up a map neatly highlighted and marked with arrows, then handed each of them a printed sheet of paper. Rose skimmed it and saw he’d reworked the trip. “Your original plan took you to a number of archeological sites along the Meander Valley, but didn’t leave you much time to linger in Istanbul. If we cut out a couple of the smaller sites, which aren’t as excavated anyway, we can visit Konya, Ephesus, and Troy, which gives you more time at each site, plus extra days in Istanbul. This way you spend your daylight hours at significant sites, and nights driving to the next location. You wake up there, ready to go.”
He looked at Grannie, who was already nodding, then at Rose. “I put the itinerary together after Jack pulled out but before I knew you were going to replace him. I was leery of driving at night in a strange country where I might have a hard time reading road signs.”
With precious cargo in the backseat, his gaze read. “I’ve got that,” he said.
“Rose?” Grannie asked.
She was running his itinerary against Grannie’s bucket list. “If you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it.”
Grannie looked at Keenan.
“Ma’am,” he said respectfully, “Ephesus is the best-excavated site in Turkey. Unless you have a deep interest in the spread of Christianity, Roman ruins, or the history of the Ottoman Empire, you’re not missing anything at the other sites.”
“Done,” she said. “Let’s go.”