Tempting the New Boss(24)
“What? Crashing?”
He brought his face very close to hers, brushing his lips against her temple. “Anything.”
She shook her head. “At least this is putting my ruined career in perspective.”
“I am sorry if I ruined your career.”
“No, you didn’t. Well, you did a little. I did the rest, I guess.”
The plane took a precipitous dive that snatched any further words right out of her mouth. When they stabilized, sort of, she babbled on to keep the thoughts out of her head. “You’re really kind of nice.”
He pulled back a little to look at her. “I am? Does that mean you’ll marry me?”
“No!” She laughed. “You’re insane! Though maybe that is how this is supposed to go. We’re supposed to realize we’re meant to be together right before we plunge to our fiery deaths.”
“I think it’d be our watery deaths if we don’t make it to Nova Scotia.”
“Thanks so much for that clarification.”
“But let’s not keep thinking about how it’s supposed to go. Okay? Let’s just let it go how it goes.”
“I’m scared,” she said abruptly. “I’m scared I’m going to die, and I haven’t done anything but work.”
He said nothing.
“How about you?” She squeezed his hand. “Aren’t you scared?”
“I’m less scared about what happens when we crash than I am about what happens when we don’t.”
The plane swooped down, lower still, and she let out a terrified yelp. She wasn’t embarrassed about it, either.
With the darkness outside the window, it was impossible to tell how high they were or weren’t relative to the ground. Or even if it was ground. It could still be water for all they knew.
“What do you mean?” she whispered when she could, huddling even closer to him. “That you’re more scared if the plane doesn’t crash?”
He kissed the top of her head. “I mean I don’t want you to quit.”
“That’s it? Well, don’t worry about it. That’s not quite the catastrophic issue I thought it was a half hour ago.”
“I want to have sex with you again.”
One step forward and two steps back.
“You know you should work on filtering out things before you say them.”
“I will.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist. “Did you, I mean, do you,” she purposely kept it in the present tense, “like your work? Designing and thinking up and making those thingies? If you do it all the time, do you at least like it? I wouldn’t have minded the hours I worked if I at least liked it. But I didn’t.”
“I do. I did. I never minded working all the time. It was all I had. All I wanted.” He talked freely, quickly, filling up the horrible time it was going to take to see if they made it. “But now I think something was missing.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess. Fulfilling your biological urges on a more regular basis?” She would have thought she was too scared to joke, but apparently not. Gallows humor anyone?
He laughed. “Maybe. Maybe something more. I don’t know now.”
The plane kept descending, feeling nothing like the countless descents in the air she had felt a hundred times or more. No smooth gradual motion, so slight you had to look out the window to register it. Instead the plane was jerking side to side along with the vertical drops, so hard and disconcerting her teeth would be rattling if she didn’t concentrate on keeping her jaw locked.
Her face must have shown the effects of the descent. The pure unadulterated panic she could feel rising in her even as the plane itself dropped.
Mason watched her, urgently, intently. “What would you like to do if you could?” he asked, loud enough to make himself heard over the increasingly deafening rattle of the aircraft and continued fury of Mother Nature.
“Camilla!” he called her attention back. “What did you want to be when you grew up? When you were little?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.
“Tell me,” he demanded, keeping her gaze on him with the force of his somehow.
“I think I wanted to be a pilot,” she finally said, laughing at the irony of that at this very moment. “I never saw myself as a flight attendant like some little girls did.”
“Wimps,” he said with a smile.
“Just less full of themselves, I think.” She had to shout now too, and keeping the volume up helped to block the rest of it out. At least a little. So she kept it up. “But I was always wanting to run the show. Always the pilot. Not that my big sisters would let me if they were in the game.”