Carla Neggers - Kiss the Moon

“Then there’s nothing more to do but get on with it,” Frannie said. “Your father and mother are already at the reception. We should go.”

“I’d just like to say goodbye to Brandon.” Colt observed a rare flash of nervousness in her eyes. She knew if anything could give him cold feet, it would be his baby brother. “He’s asleep.”

“Hurry.”

Colt had rehearsed this moment a thousand times in his mind. He hurried down the hall, hardly making a sound on the thick carpeting, his heart racing, his hands clammy. He passed portraits and photographs of uncles and great-uncles, cousins, his grandfather, on various adventures. There would be no photographers to record his adventure. He didn’t want notoriety or adulation.

He just wanted Frannie Beaudine, he thought, his pace slowing as he approached his brother’s half-closed door.

He pushed the door open, and his throat caught at the sprawl of boy and stuffed animal in the bed, the city lights silhouetting his bony figure. He wore pajamas with little cars and trucks on them.

Unexpected, unrehearsed tears stung Colt’s eyes. He doubted he would see his brother again for months, perhaps a year. He would have given up Bear by then, lost his boyish imagination and possibility. Sometimes Colt longed for his own boyhood, when he had liked nothing better than to roam around in the Museum of Natural History. His father had assumed his mind was filled with fantasies of becoming a Sinclair. Instead he’d memorized the form and the colors, the shapes, the essence of the birds and animals and tools on display. In dark corners, where no one would find him, he would pull out scraps of paper and a nub of charcoal and try to capture what he’d memorized.

Sinclair men did not become artists.

If Frannie hadn’t fallen in love with him, Colt was certain he would have thrown himself off the Empire State Building by now. And then he would never have seen Brandon again. Now, at least, there was a chance.

He gave his sleeping brother a mock salute and tiptoed down the hall, where Frannie was waiting for him. She had no brothers and sisters. She couldn’t know the agony of what he’d just done.

Ten minutes later they were at the museum. They made small talk and drank champagne and pretended not to be in love, and Colt thought Frannie was the most beautiful and alluring woman in the room. She seemed at ease with everyone—scholar, rich donor, journalist, poor art student—and she talked knowledgeably and passionately about the collection of art and treasure she’d helped put together even as people asked her when she would again climb into a cockpit. She was unique, and Colt could hardly contain himself at the thought that she loved him.

He avoided his father, fearful Willard Sinclair would penetrate his older son’s mind and find out what he was planning. When the time came, Colt had no intention of telling his father goodbye. His mother, either. She would be impossible to extricate from her friends and her champagne.

Across the room, he saw Frannie, impatient, unable to stay still, slip down a dark corridor past indulgent guards. Colt followed, stifling a surge of panic. What was she doing? They were to make their apologies and separate exits in minutes. He glanced at his father, who was regaling eager listeners with tales of his latest expedition up the Amazon. If only he could give his two sons as much care and attention, Colt thought bitterly, and tried to ignore the tug of regret for his brother, who would no longer have a buffer between their father’s increasingly domineering temperament and Brandon’s zeal to take him on. After tonight, Brandon, just eleven, would be on his own, at least for a while.

Colt shook off his sudden melancholy and followed Frannie into the bowels of the museum, where she had been granted a closet-size office to continue her work on the Sinclair Collection. She used her key to open it, moving quickly. He could hear her rapid breathing. She left the door ajar, but he remained in the dark shadows, trying to ignore a sense of foreboding. This wasn’t in their plan.

Seconds later she emerged from the tiny room, and he heard her check a laugh.

In her hand was a black, hard-sided case the size of a small artist’s painting case.

Colt took a step forward, and she stopped, her already pale face going paler still. “Colt, good heavens, you startled me!”

“Frannie?” He pointed. “What’s in the case?”

She caught him by the arm and pulled him down the corridor. “It’s no time for questions,” she whispered fiercely, “or for the fainthearted. You’re in, Colt. You’re in all the way.”

“Frannie…”

“We have to go.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t speak.

“Now.”

Wisps of hair dripped from their pins, her dark blue eyes shone even in the shadows, and her chest heaved, not from fear but breathlessness. Excitement. She was so certain. Always so certain. He hadn’t asked about how many men she’d loved. She was twenty-six, and she was Frannie Beaudine, beautiful, intelligent, spirited.

Her expression softened. “Colt…I can’t do this without you.”

Still he didn’t move. “What’s in the case, Frannie?”

Her lower lip quivered, the red stain gone, and he could see uncertainty creep into her eyes.

“It’s something from the collection,” he said.

“Of course it’s something from the collection. Diamonds, Colt. Valuable, perfect diamonds of an uncertain provenance. No one but me even knows they exist. God knows how long they sat in that dusty warehouse.”

“Frannie, I can’t.”

Irritation set her jaw. “It’s the only way for us to be together. You know that as well as I do. Colt—please, we have to go. If the guards catch us now, it won’t be Canada we’ll be seeing at dawn, it’ll be the bars of the jailhouse.”

He followed her out. There was nothing else he could do. They would take a cab to the airfield where his Piper Cub was waiting. She’d asked him to fly it. He’d been so stupidly pleased. Now he knew he was a romantic, idealistic fool, just as his father had told him.

In the cab, Frannie covered his hand with hers. “I do love you, Colt Sinclair.”

Maybe she did. He stared out the cab window as they crossed the bridge. It was a cold night for flying, but they had a full moon. It was so huge, and it seemed so heavy and big that even the night sky couldn’t hold it. Colt pretended he was on it, looking down at the shiny cab, at the beautiful aviator, the rich twenty-one-year-old and their stolen diamonds. He had fancied them living by their skill and wits in Canada until his family accepted them and what they’d done. But Frannie had wanted it all, and she’d wanted it now.

For six weeks, Colt had deluded himself into thinking he was enough.

He remembered reading Treasure Island aloud to his little brother under a full moon last summer, and he wished he could be with Brandon now, poking him in the ribs and sneaking him into the kitchen for hot cocoa.

Wouldn’t their father be surprised, Colt thought. He was a Sinclair, after all. He had given up the love of his brother for a misguided, wild adventure, and in so doing, he had given up himself.

It was, of course, the Sinclair way.

Five hours after she’d headed onto Sinclair land to check out sugar maples for tapping, Penelope Chestnut sank onto a granite boulder and admitted she was lost. The sun had sunk low in the sky, the temperature had already started to drop, she was down to the last of her water, and she didn’t have the vaguest idea where she was. New Hampshire, in the woods above Lake Winnipesaukee, probably still on Sinclair land. More specifically than that, who knew?

Her parents were expecting her for Sunday dinner at six. If she didn’t show up, they’d worry. Given her history, they’d worry all of ten minutes before calling out a search party. Dogs, snowmobiles, helicopters, men on snowshoes with flashlights. They’d all join in the hunt. Not one would be a stranger. And not one wouldn’t be just a little pissed at her for taking them out on a chilly March night.