“Such a romantic. First a proposal and now poetry.”
He smiled. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”
“I guess, but if you have to ask, I’m not doing it very well.”
He tugged her closer. “You’re doing it extremely well. I don’t even recognize it if other people do it.”
“Maybe nobody else ever has.”
“That’s possible,” he conceded.
The cockpit door opened with another sideways dive of the plane, and one of the pilots staggered out, holding on to a strap on the wall to keep upright. “We’re having some issues, Mr. Talbot,” he called out to them.
“What’s wrong?”
“The storm is rougher than we thought and caught up to us a lot faster than we anticipated, so it’s still at full strength,” he shouted over the sound of it. “The wind speed, the lack of visibility from the rain… We can’t fly in this much longer.”
“Should we turn back to New York?”
“No, we’d never make it. We’re too far out to try it by now. We’ll have to land.”
Camilla peered outside anxiously, but it was too dark to see anything below. “Land?” she squealed. “Where?”
“If we go sharply north,” he explained, again in a shout, “we’ll hit Nova Scotia. Halifax is our best bet, and we might just make it.”
“Might?” she said faintly to Mason.
Mason nodded at the pilot, though it wasn’t like they were asking him for his permission or anything. In this kind of situation, it certainly didn’t matter a whole lot who owned the plane.
“Strap yourselves in,” the pilot yelled, “and if we have to crash land, put your heads between your knees.”
“I was just thinking of doing that,” Mason said. The pilot made his way back to the cockpit. “But in a remarkably more enjoyable context.”
She looked at him, her lips thinned and her hands shaking as she tucked a stray lock of hair behind an ear. Her cream complexion had made it to paper white by now as the plane turned perceptibly left, and without a thought, he pulled her closer, securing her seatbelt as he did so and then seeing to his own.
The cacophony of the storm permeated the cabin, and he wondered at how he had not heard anything of what was going on outside until now. Too engrossed on what was going on inside.
And it had been a very enjoyable feeling.
Her breath, rapid and warm, was against his neck as they endured the bumpy ride for a few minutes more until she broke the silence by saying, “When I said I might die tomorrow, I didn’t mean, like, literally tomorrow. This job is really turning out to have been a bad career move.”
“We’ll be fine,” he said calmly, even though the two successive bumps right after his pronouncement—as if the plane had hit an air pocket and then lurched on—weren’t giving him a lot of confidence on that score. But he did feel calm. Strangely calm. Perhaps the endorphins released in his recent orgasm were contributing to that. Or maybe he was just glad to be here with her.
Clearly, there was something wrong with him.
Chapter Four
Mason held her hand as the plane shook up and down and pretty much threatened to make her lose her scotch. Her hand was trembling, but his, which felt steady and warm against hers, wasn’t.
Was this sudden turn of events all some kind of wildly out-of-proportion punishment for her lapse in professional judgment? Christ, she’d thought disbarment was the worst they could do to her for failing her lawyerly duties. Who said anything about plane crashes? She was clearly having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. She should have listened to Shreeman after all.
Oddly enough, though, the looming danger had an effect on Talbot, too. It rendered him unusually composed and reassuring. When he put his arm around her and buckled her up, and even when he nodded at the pilot, he seemed more like a CEO than he ever had before then. She liked this strong, controlled side of him. Maybe life-and-death situations did that for the guy.
Or maybe it was the sex.
Whatever, she clung to him, not ashamed to be the obvious wimp that she was. Burying her head in his shoulder, she said the first thing she could think of. “Have you ever been in a plane crash before?”
“No.” He brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Which is a shame, since statistically speaking, if I had been, it would be unlikely that we’d crash now. As you might imagine, the chances of one person being in two plane crashes, where flying is not their job, of course, is slight at best.”
“There’s a flaw in that logic somewhere,” she muttered.
“Don’t think about it too hard.”