Page 89 of Coming in Hot

I hit my brakes hard when Natalia’s car slows dramatically in front of me.

As I park behind her on the tilted shoulder, she clambers out of the Jeep and hurries across the road to examine a sign affixed to the weather-beaten fencing. The original sign reads,FOR SALE BY OWNER—6.4ACRES, BARN, HOUSE2200SQ FT. Affixed to a corner is a newer sign:SALE PENDING. COMING SOON: AMAZON DISTRIBUTION CENTER.

I climb out and go to Natalia. Her expression is anguished.

“Talia,” I breathe, scooping my arm around her. “What’s the matter? Is this…?” I join her in looking at the barn in the distance.

“Thatjerkof a grandson!” she chokes out. “It’s bad enough that he wouldn’t give me a shot at the place, but… now they’re just going to tear it down!” Her voice cracks and she buries her face against my jacket with a sob.

Holding her, I find myself instinctively murmuring comfort to her in German, words my mother used long ago. Natalia’sstifled tears shudder through her, and I hold her tighter, kissing her hair.

Finally she draws back, pulling a handful of tissue from her coat pocket and mopping her face. “I offered Braeden Marshall five thousand over list—the most I could get the bank to agree to. I have some savings, but… I just quit my job, and my advance on the book isn’t huge. I tried appealing to his sense of community, sent an email telling him how important this farm is to me. He saidno. He’s never even lived in this town—he’s in Chicago.”

She pivots to gaze miserably across the field. The wind blows a strand of her hair across her face, and I smooth it away.

“It was wrecking me enough,” she continues, bleak, “losing out on the place… but knowing it’ll begone? Turned into a parking lot and a damned warehouse?”

I comb her hair behind her ear. “Why didn’t you ask me for help?”

She shoots a bitter look up at me. “Good lord, Klaus. Obviously I wasn’t going to have you lend me a hundred fifty grand.” She jabs a finger at the sign. “The corporate high rollers probably came in with a bid liketwo hundredthousand so no one else had a prayer.”

“Is that all?” My tone is disbelief over the modest price, but at the look on Natalia’s face, I know how arrogant it sounds. “Forgive me—I’m not making light of things. But that seems very little for so much land.”

She scrunches her mouth to one side. “This town’s in the middle of nowhere, and the house hasn’t been lived in for years. It’s probably a disaster inside.” Her nostrils twitch with a frustrated sigh. “And it’s too late anyway.”

I wrap my arm around her shoulders again, and together we stare at the house and barn. “If someone offered double the accepted sale price,” I venture, “unless the ink is already dry, I suspect the owner would reconsider.”

Natalia stiffens under my arm.

“With a bid of, say, a half million, the matter could be settled,” I add.

She takes a step back, assessing me gravely. “I can’t ask—”

“Youdidn’task, kleine Hexe. I offer this as a gift to our child, with no strings attached.” I take Natalia’s hands, cold in the wind, and squeeze them gently. “If I pondered it for a hundred years, I couldn’t conceive of a gift that would mean more than this… a place you love, which has history for you.”

Her expression is intense, but unreadable. I drop my eyes, focusing on our enmeshed fingers.

“As you said,” I continue quietly, “it may already be too late. But let me try. And know that however things turn out between us… even if we have no romantic future… my esteem for you is immeasurable, and my love for our child—”

… and for you, always…

“—is boundless.”

She continues watching me, and the language of her eyes is rich with all the things I suspect she’s afraid to say.

“At the very least,” I add with a weak laugh, trying to make light of the offer, “let us prevent the blight of a warehouse spoiling this beautiful landscape.”

When Natalia pulls her hands from mine, my heart sinks, anticipating rejection. Instead, she hops across the ditch to the fence where the sign hangs. Pushing her coat sleeves up, she grabsthe edge of theSALE PENDINGsign and pulls. It resists her, and she grits her teeth and leans back. I jump across to join her, adding my own hands to the effort. The sign pops free, revealing a phone number beneath.

Natalia gives me a determined smile. “Ussounds better. I’m in for thirty percent of the half mil. Let’s do this together.”

26

ABU DHABI

THREE WEEKS LATER

NATALIA

---