LITMIR.BIZ

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his mother telling him a gentleman always did when a lady arrived. He thought such things ridiculously old-fashioned, but Sasha had also once told him she was an old-fashioned kind of girl, so he figured it couldn’t hurt.

      She smiled at him.

      Score one for Mom, he thought as Sasha slipped into the booth opposite him.

      Suddenly he couldn’t think of a thing to say. He’d rehearsed in his head what he’d tell her about Trish, but he’d somehow forgotten to work on anything else. Desperate, his gaze landed on the brightly colored bag.

      “Still carrying your life around, I see,” he said, then groaned inwardly at the lameness of it.

      “You never know,” she said, as she always had when he’d teased her before about seeming to need a ton of stuff with her at all times. “Besides, it’s a special bag. It was made for me by a friend.” He looked more closely as she went on. “It was knitted, then washed in really hot water to shrink it. It’s called felting.”

      “Shrink it?” he said, eyeing the thing that seemed the size of a large briefcase skeptically.

      “It’s perfect,” she said, her voice taking on an imperious tone he hoped was teasing. “It’s solid, sturdy, but nice and soft to the touch.”

      She stroked a finger over it as if to demonstrate. It was a simple motion, and he had no explanation for the sudden hike in his pulse rate. He studied the bag for a moment, more to give himself a moment to collect himself than out of real interest, but when he did, he noticed the intricacy of the pattern.

      “It looks like the geometric screen saver Ian uses.”

      Sasha laughed. “Maybe that’s where she got the idea.”

      “She?”

      “Liana Kiley.”

      His head came up then. “Liana? Our Liana?”

      Sasha grinned. “I love the way you Redstone people are. Yes, your Liana. I figured you’d know her, given she works in your neck of Redstone, as it were.”

      He did know Liana. She worked for Lilith Mercer, who was cleaning up a mess left by the former head of the R&D division, a task he’d been involved in periodically, including some time spent with the pretty redhead. She was relatively new to Redstone, but that she was a perfect fit had become clear very early. Ryan liked her. And not just because she liked computers and was pretty good with them; she was a genuinely nice person.

      And apparently a friend of Sasha’s, which he hadn’t known.

      “Your colors,” he said, not sure what else to say; that she was friends with someone he saw almost every day bothered him somehow.

      “Liana called it ‘Fright of the Bumblebee,’” she said with a grin.

      He couldn’t deny it fit; the explosion of yellow and black did look a bit like a bumblebee gone berserk.

      The waitress arrived with two large glasses and set them down, along with a couple of menus, then left to give them time to look. Sasha looked at the glass, then at Ryan.

      “I took a chance you’re still into Diet Coke,” he said.

      She smiled. “As long as it’s not decaf. I mean, what’s the point?”

      He laughed, and the knot in his gut loosened a bit. “Order something. I’m buying.” She lifted a brow at him. “I called you,” he pointed out.

      “Point taken,” she said, picking up the menu. “And since they fund us as well, I know how Redstone pays.”

      “I’m not hurting.”

      She looked up from the menu. “Not about that, anyway.”

      For an instant he thought she meant hurting about her, and he winced inwardly. Then he realized she had to mean Trish, and he felt like a fool, and worse, an uncaring idiot, for even momentarily forgetting the matter at hand.

      “Tell me about your sister,” she said in that soft, encouraging tone that had always made him want to go out and climb a mountain or slay a dragon, and not in any virtual world, but the real thing.

      She’d never met Trish during the short time they’d been together, but he knew he’d told her about his little sister, probably with that exasperated tone most older siblings used. Although with ten years between them, he’d moved out on his own when she was nine, so he hadn’t had to deal with the teenage angst on a daily basis.

      And then he’d hacked himself into that colossal mess and she’d become a staunchly furious eleven-year-old defender, changing his view of his pesky little sister.

      “She was there for me when I was in trouble,” he said, only vaguely aware, lost in the memory, “and now I’m afraid she’s in trouble.”

      “So you’re going to be there for her,” Sasha said, and the approval in her tone warmed him. “Tell me what’s happened. Was there trouble at home?”

      “No,” he said quickly. “Not the kind that would make her take off. My folks are great.”

      “You’ve always said so,” Sasha said. “But sometimes siblings see things differently.”

      He shook his head. “Trish got along fine with them. No fights, no blowups. Just the usual teenage stuff. She thought they were overprotective, but so did I.”

      “Sometimes,” Sasha said again, this time carefully, “parents are different with girls.”

      Ryan considered this for a moment. “My dad was, a little. Extraprotective. But Trish could get around him, too, in a way I never could.”

      “Girls and their daddies,” Sasha said. “It’s a fact of life.”

      “Yeah. I envied her sometimes, when I was still at home. There she was, seven years old, wheedling things out of him that I couldn’t get at seventeen. But it was hard to stay mad at her when she…” He trailed off awkwardly.

      “When she adored her big brother?”

      A sheepish smile curved his mouth. “Yeah.”

      “That’s the natural order of things, too,” Sasha said.

      There was a pause as the waitress took their order—she still went for his own favorite cheeseburger, which likely meant, given she hadn’t changed at all, she still worked out like a triathlete—and then she continued.

      “You said it’s been a week.”

      He nodded.

      “And she just turned eighteen?”

      He nodded again. “On the ninth.”

      “Any reason to think she didn’t just take off on some celebration of her newly gained adulthood?”

      And there it was, Ryan thought. The same wall they’d run into with the police. “Concrete reason? Like something I could show you?” He sighed. “No. The opposite, in fact.”

      “Opposite?”

      “She left a note.” To her credit, Ryan thought, her expression didn’t change. “Not a suicide note,” Ryan said quickly, since that was the first thing the cops had asked.

      “I assumed it wasn’t, or you wouldn’t be talking to me, the police would be investigating. Are they?”

      “No.”

      She merely nodded. “Do you have it?”

      “No. My folks do.” He shifted in his seat. “They didn’t know I was going to call you.”

      “Will it bother them?”

      Not nearly as much as it bothered me, he thought.

      “I don’t think so. They just want somebody looking for Trish, and obviously the police won’t unless we come up with

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