By 4:17 on Christmas Eve, Claire Bennett had already missed one shuttle bus, dropped a glove into a slush-filled gutter, and learned that airport carpeting can make a rolling suitcase feel twice as heavy as it is. None of those things mattered by the time she saw the gate at the far end of the terminal and realized the door was still open. She ran harder.
The airport seemed designed to resist urgency. Families clustered beneath tinsel garlands with shopping bags at their feet. Children in red sweaters dragged plastic airplanes along rows of orange seats. A man in a fur-collared coat stood directly in the center of the concourse arguing into a payphone. A woman pushing a stroller stopped without warning, forcing Claire to swing her brown suitcase wide enough that it clipped the edge of a wastebasket. She whispered an apology without slowing down.
Snow fell heavily beyond the tall windows, turning the runways into pale blue strips under the fading winter sky. Every few seconds another gust pressed a white curtain against the glass. Ground crews moved in bright jackets around aircraft already collecting powder along their wings. Somewhere overhead, a boarding announcement dissolved into static.
Claire was twenty-five, beautiful in the composed way that becomes inconvenient when composure is no longer possible. Her long brunette hair, usually brushed smooth with deliberate volume and a clean side part, had come loose around her face. Melted snow caught in the strands. Her eyeliner remained miraculously sharp, though her lipstick had faded at the center from biting it every time the cab stopped in traffic. She wore a long black wool coat over a black V-neck top and black pants, and the small wheels of her brown suitcase rattled violently behind her as she sprinted toward Gate 14.
“Please wait!” she called. The gate officer looked up. So did the man standing beside him.
Jack Mercer had one foot angled toward the jet bridge and the other turned back toward the terminal, as if he had been undecided about leaving even before a breathless stranger shouted in his direction. He was thirty, tall without looking imposing, with short dark hair, light stubble, and a face that seemed built for amusement before seriousness. He wore a white turtleneck beneath a long black overcoat and a patterned scarf loosened at his throat. In one hand he held a leather carry-on. In the other, a boarding pass.
The gate officer, a gray-haired man with the weary expression of someone who had personally been blamed for weather all afternoon, shook his head. “Boarding is closed.” Jack glanced toward Claire again. She was still ten yards away, struggling with the suitcase.
“Wait,” he said. “She’s with me.” The gate officer looked from Jack to Claire and back. “She is?”
Claire skidded to a stop, breathing hard. “I’m with you?” Jack gave her a small, confident smile that would have irritated her if she had enough oxygen to defend herself. “Well,” he said, “you’re mine for the next eight hours.”