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She wasn't hungry, the evening was too exciting to be bothered with eating. She'd rather talk to him.

“Originally, no. I'm from Minnesota. I've been living here for the past year. But I've lived all over the place. New Jersey. Chicago. I spent two years in Germany. I'm going out to California after the first of the year. I go wherever there's an airstrip.” He seemed to expect her to understand that, and she looked at him with increased interest.

“Do you fly?” For the first time, he looked genuinely amused by her question, and he seemed to relax visibly as he answered her.

“I guess you could say that. Have you ever been up in a plane, Kate?” It was the first time he had said her name, and she liked the way it sounded. He made it seem personal, and she was pleased that he had remembered. He looked like the sort of man who would forget names with very little effort, and anything else that didn't hold his interest. But he was fascinated by her and had noticed everything about her even before they met.

“We flew to California last year, to take the ship to Hong Kong. Usually, we travel by train, or ship.”

“It sounds like you've done some traveling. What took you to Hong Kong?”

“I went with my parents. We went to Hong Kong and Singapore, but up till then we'd just gone to Europe.” Her mother had seen to it that she spoke Italian and French, and a smattering of German. Her parents thought it would be useful for her. Her father could easily imagine her married to a diplomat.

She would have been the perfect ambassador's wife, and unconsciously he was grooming her for it. “Are you a pilot?” she asked, with wide eyes, which betrayed her youth for once. And he smiled again.

“Yes, I am.”

“For an airline?” She thought him both mysterious and interesting, and watched as he unwound his long limbs, and sat back in his chair for a moment. He was like no one else she had ever met, and she wanted to know more about him. He had none of the obvious polish of the boys she knew, and at the same time there was something enormously worldly about him.

And for all his shyness, she could sense a deep sense of confidence about him, as though he knew he could take care of himself anywhere, at any time, in any circumstance. There was an underlying innate sophistication about him, and she could easily imagine him flying an airplane. To her, it seemed very romantic and powerful.

“No, I don't fly for an airline,” he explained.