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me. Nobody ever will.” I was still holding her hand. She glanced down at our linked fingers. “This don’t make us engaged, you know.”
    I let go, feeling a little off balance after all of this craziness. It wasn’t often that someone threw me, but Whitney had, in every possible sense. She wasn’t at all what I’d expected.
    “Why didn’t you just tell us about this, if you knew it was coming?”
    She shrugged, which set off lots of glittering waves from the diamonds. “What kind of fun is that? I got you here, didn’t I? I just did it my own way.”
    “Your way is insane. Go do something useful,” David told her. “Send up a flare for the emergency rescue parties. They’ll be on the way by now.”
    She gave him a smart little military salute, which was
very
weird considering her outfit, and executed a perfect turn to march away.
    “Wait!” I said. “The guy you threw in our way on the road. Who was he? Why did you do that?”
    She glanced back at the plane. Smoke blew away from the fuselage, and I saw a long, ragged hole, with the fragile metal skin peeled away. “He’s the man who put the bomb on board,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d care if you didn’t stop in time. I wouldn’t have.”
    And then she vanished in a mist of diamonds. Gone. I looked over at David, who was shaking his head.
    “What?” I asked.
    “She took the bikini,” he pointed out. “And nobody’s going to get it back. That’s her price for altruism.”
    I laughed. I could hear emergency sirens back toward the road, and I could just see Whitney standing out there glittering like a diamond convention, pointing the way for all the rescuers.
    “I think I like her style,” I said.
    David rolled his eyes. “
You
don’t have to be her boss,” he pointed out. “Now. Let’s see to the wounded.”
    In the end, there were remarkably few, and most of the injuries were minor. MIRACLE FLIGHT , they called it on the twenty-four-hour news channels, which featured interviews with everybody possible: people who’d been anywhere in the flight path of the plane, the crew, the passengers, and the director of Whitney’s failed commercial shoot, who somehow managed to take high-definition footage of the aircraft on its dramatic flight and landing. He did a documentary. It won an Emmy.
    The Case of the Missing Million-Dollar Model occupied headlines for many months, along with positively drooling pictures of Whitney leaning against the Bugatti Veyron with just enough diamonds on her lady parts to make her legal. She was spotted in Rio de Janeiro, and then in Cannes, and then in Argentina and—on the same day—in Shanghai. I think she enjoyed playing Where’s Waldo.
    David and I never got our beach picnic, but back home, many hours later, we made do. We moved the furniture out of the way, put down the blanket, and had wine and cheese and bread and each other, and somehow, that was still utterly blissful. As we lay there wrapped in each other’s arms, lit by candlelight, I felt the rumble of suppressed laughter in his chest.
    “What?”
    “I was just thinking,” David said. “Whitney. She’s just insane enough to make a good second in command for me, don’t you think? If Rahel can’t do it?”
    Rahel was a longtime friend and a very formidable Djinn. I couldn’t imagine any set of circumstances under which Rahel wouldn’t be able to step up to the plate, so I shrugged. “I suppose,” I said. “She’s certainly not the obvious choice.”
    He kissed me, long and sweetly. “That’s what everyone said about you,” he told me, and traced his thumb across my damp lips. “I think my instincts are pretty good.”
    “And I think you have a weakness for girls in bikinis.”
    “You’re not wearing one now.”
    “I’m not wearing
anything
.”
    “Oh yes,” he agreed soberly. “I
do
have a weakness for that.”
    And he showed me, all over again.

IN VINO VERITAS
    Karen Chance
    The bottom half of my longneck shattered,