A new flight attendant nodded her head at me as I walked into the cabin. I could hear the captain’s competent murmur from the cockpit. Jackson slipped his hand over my waist as he entered and gave me an encouraging squeeze and a peck on the forehead.
The Burkes slid in behind me and took the captain’s chairs next to the dining table. Declan watched me with a smirk and pulled his sunglasses off, folding the arms in and sliding them into the leather case.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, grinning suavely.
I nodded, momentarily dazzled by the circumstance again. They fixed me in their sky-blue gazes and waited: Naughty and Nice, all set up in their private jet. The jet I was on. The jet we were taking to Amsterdam. The three of us. Like we belonged together.
If this is a dream, I would like to never wake up, thank you.
“How long is the flight?” I asked as I settled on the sofa, arranging my silk dress over my hip to show just a flash of the pointelle, side-tie panties I’d worn. The leather felt warm and soft on the back of my thighs, like a lover’s hand.
“About eleven hours,” Jackson answered. “You can sleep most of the way if you want.”
“No she can’t,” Declan growled, his eyes hungrily skirting the hem of my dress. My heart jumped in my chest to see the desire in his face.
Yes, Amsterdam was my best idea ever!
The cabin door closed with a hydraulic sigh and a solid thud, and the cabin hissed as it pressurized. The hangar slid by the windows as we edged out onto the tarmac and I bit my lip, watching the LA skyline going by next to us, wondering when I would see it again.
“You nervous?” Jackson asked, his head cocked adorably to one side.
“Am I?”
“Well, you look nervous,” he said.
“I feel… outstanding,” I replied with a grin.
He winked at me and nodded. His smile was affectionate and earnest, and I saw the pride in his eyes as his gaze flitted over my earlobes. I had worn the diamond earrings he gave me and was happy to watch him notice them. He looked pleased, and my inner puppy wriggled happily as he smiled at me with unconcealed delight.
“Prepare for takeoff,” the flight attendant called out politely from the front of the cabin, and we all dutifully snapped the seatbelts over our laps.
The jet sped down the runway like a predator hurtling after some unseen prey. In seconds, I felt the cabin lunging into the sky, the sound of the tires silenced, the whine and clunk of the landing gear being tucked away into the machine’s belly. We were in the sky already, and the whole trip was really underway. I bit my lips closed, trying to control my kid-at-Disney expression.
Declan and Jackson chatted seriously as we ascended, leaning across the table toward each other while I watched LA sliding away below us. The jet banked hard to the right, filling up the small window with the sight of neighborhoods, one after the other, all arranged in neat symmetries.
Everything flowed beneath us, silently slipping under our wings and away, the landscape changing almost faster than I could understand it. First the houses got closer together, then farther apart, gradually taken over by the great circles of fields all set together, knitted together like a patchwork quilt.
Clouds shot by outside my window, cotton-candy puffs of white. We ascended into a blinding fog and I peered into the grey, trying to see individual shapes. Then suddenly we were above it, and a bumpy sea of white froth stretched out farther than I could see to the horizon. I remembered a story about Georgia O’Keeffe going up in an airplane for the first time, and how seeing the tops of the clouds had changed her forever. For years after that, she was obsessed with painting these huge, thirty-foot-wide canvases showing rows upon rows of orderly, overwhelming masses of white. I knew exactly the feeling she was trying to convey.
“Margot,” Declan said suddenly from across the aisle, “why don't you come over here?”
He opened an envelope and spread out three sets of papers before him. Each was stapled together. Jackson held his chin in his fist and looked out the window.
“What’s all this?” I asked as I slid into the seat next to Jackson.
Declan took a pen from the front of his Hermes bag and worked it between his fingers.
“Well since we’re going to be working together,” he said with a brilliant smile, “I’d like to get everything laid out.”
“Oh this is for me?” I blurted and instantly wished I hadn’t. God, you still sound like a bumpkin, I scolded myself. I felt Jackson wince beside me but he kept his gaze out the window.
“This is for all of us,” Declan said simply. “It’s really just a formality, but I like to have a paper trail. Feels so official,” he added with a wink.