Chapter 8
Lucy
Ilet out an embarrassing shriek, gripping the armrests, eyes flying to the windows in a panic.
“Hey, folks,” a nonchalant voice comes floating over the speakers, unworried and unhurried. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Rourke, but it’s looking like there’s a storm hanging around, some turbulence now, but it could get worse. We’re going to have to stop over here in the UK to wait it out.”
Dane, eyes still on me, leans over and depresses the button for the intercom, “Understood, Henry. Thank you.”
He’s leaning back into his seat when the plane pitches again, and I tighten my entire body, gripping onto the seat for dear life.
I’m trying desperately to override whatever primitive instinct is making me react like this, but I can’t.
We’re like clothes in a dryer, getting tossed and turned.
When I close my eyes, I see smoking engines, a spiral toward the ground.
But I can’t panic. I have to keep a level head.
It’s fine… everything is clearly fine. The pilot isn’t panicking, and neither is Dane. So I should be fine, should be able to relax like them.
But this is only my second time on a plane, and my first time ever on a smaller plane like this, so I’ve not figured out yet how to be calm when it feels like we’re about to spiral down to the earth in a blaze.
“Hey.” Blinking hard through the fear, I look up to see Dane leaning in toward me, his large, warm hand landing just above my wrist. My body has no idea what to do with this, oscillating between total fear from the situation and pulses of desire from his touch.
The plane jolts again, and I reach over, gripping onto him.
His wrist is larger than mine, but his skin is surprisingly smooth. Without thinking, I drag my thumb over the softest part near his knuckles, watching as his eyes darken.
“Lucy,” he says, voice commanding, just like when he’s giving me a task back at the office. “You need to take a deep breath. Do it with me.”
I follow his lead, forcing breath into my lungs, body unfurling as I manage to relax. We breathe together like that for several counts, Dane murmuring the numbers to me low enough that, even if we weren’t the only ones in the cabin, only I’d be able to hear him.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
By the time we’re descending, I’ve managed to overcome the panic racing through my body, convincing my nervous system that everything is okay.
The plane lands and Dane removes his hand from my arm and leans back, picking up his work once more like nothing has happened. My body shakes, exhausted from the tension, from the arousal and fear, and I just stare numbly at him for a long moment, not able to look away.
“Alright,” the pilot says, opening the door between the cabin and the cockpit. “Should only need to wait here for an hour or so. I’m going to get out and talk to the crew. Be back in a jiffy.”
Dane raises his hand in acknowledgment, and the door shuts again, leaving us alone once more.
He is focused on his work, so I try to do the same, pulling my laptop open and scrolling through the conference itinerary.
I check on the flights for the events girls.
They’ve already landed in Amsterdam and should be picking up the supplies for our booth shortly.
For about an hour, Dane and I work in silence. I do my best to ignore the thick, almost tangible awareness around me. The sense of teetering, something just on the edge, ready to fall. It reminds me of physical science, learning about the potential energy of an object raised above the floor.
I feel like the object, and my potential energy is increasing by the minute. I guess that makes Dane the floor.
There’s a sharp rap on the door to the plane, and I jump, letting out another little sound that I’m not proud of. Dane’s eyes cut to the plane door, then narrow. “Come in,” he commands, sounding annoyed.
The pilot must be on the other side. I recognize the cadence of his voice but can’t make out the words. Sighing, Dane sets his things on the table and stands, straightening his suit before he walks to the other side of the plane and pushes on the door handle.
It doesn’t budge.
“What the fuck?” Dane spits out, with uncharacteristic emotion, as he pushes on the handle again. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him swear.
Slowly, I stand, inching closer to him, and this time I manage to make out the pilot on the other side of the door, his voice muffled by the metal and the rain still lashing against the exterior.
“Door’s stuck!” he hollers.
Dane doesn’t waste time responding, “Well, get it unstuck!”
I watch, frozen, as Dane starts to pace, walking around the cabin and trying different doors. The one to the cockpit doesn’t budge, either, and he turns to look at me.
“How long have the lights been off?” he asks, glancing at the ceiling, and I realize, for the first time, that they’ve gone dark. I just assumed that was normal, like the lights going off in a car after cutting the ignition.
“Since we parked—or, landed—?” I say, but Dane is already spinning around, stalking back to the door, throwing his weight against it in a way that’s both controlled and furious. The door lets out a mild groan of protest but otherwise doesn’t move.
His phone rings, and he whips it up to his ear, “What the hell is going on? Open the door.”
Standing where I am, I can make out the voice on the other end. It’s fuzzy, so I lean in to hear better.
“…electrical shortage, affecting the plane’s security system.
Right now, the system seems to think someone is trying to break in, so it’s shut down completely.
Everything is locked up tight with those…
and bolts. We’ll need a special blade to get through it, or…
electrical specialist can come and look—”
Dane shifts away from me, and with the new distance, I can’t make out the other side of the conversation. Still, I’ve gotten the general idea.
We’re stuck in here.
“I don’t care if he’s fast asleep in Houston or the fucking North Pole,” Dane growls into the phone. “Get him on a plane and get him here. I want out of this thing.”
He ends the call, starts to pace, and makes another call, this time requesting someone who can cut through the bolts that are holding the door shut. When Dane seamlessly shifts from English to what I think is German, I sit back down and try to recreate the breathing exercises he just had me do.
It works, and I’m feeling calmer when I open my eyes. Of all the places in the world to be stuck, a luxury private jet with a bathroom and plenty of food isn’t the worst I can think of.
Dane, though, clearly doesn’t agree with me. He makes call after call, even after I feebly point out that with the electric not working, my phone has stopped charging, and his might go dead. He carries on like he didn’t hear me, and maybe he really didn’t.
The expression on his face suggests a sort of single-minded focus that shuts everything out.
“No, no—Tuesday is not acceptable,” Dane growls. “I have a conference to get to. Do you understand that? It cannot be longer than a few hours.”
With each call he makes, he gets angrier and angrier. His tie is loosened, and the collar of his shirt falls away from his neck, revealing a tiny triangle of skin. His hands clench and unclench again and again, forming fists and unfurling, his knuckles white.
“Someone needs to get me off this fucking plane,” he says, at one point, before pausing and listening. “The morning isn’t soon enough. See if you can find someone else—I don’t fucking care if we have to use a chainsaw to get through the shell.”
With that, his phone must die, because he drops it into the seat like a rock and turns, going back to the door.
It’s at this moment that I realize, with a start, what this entire situation reminds me of.
“Uh, Dane?” I ask, shifting against the leather seat. He turns, blinking at me like he’s only just now remembered I’m in the plane with him. “Would you mind if we sat in the back together?”
He’s still staring at me, a slightly vacant look in his eyes, so I just gather our things and move to the very rear of the plane.
Slowly, Dane moves in my direction.
Then he’s sitting next to me, and I reach over, taking his hand in mine. It’s large and warm, weathered but not wrinkled. There are fine, dark hairs up along his knuckles, and it feels intimate to look at them.
It’s intimate to hold his hand, and it’s making my heart sputter, but I try to tell myself that this is just what a good assistant would do. That he comforted me earlier, when the plane was getting tossed around in the air, so it only makes sense for me to offer that back to him.
He said it himself—it’s my job to make his life easier.
And holding his hand will help to ground him, to distract him from what he’s feeling. The pacing, the anger, the agitation… I recognize all this from my brother Thomas. He first discovered he was claustrophobic when we took a trip to the Mark Twain caves, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe.
“I lied to you, earlier,” I admit, and when his gaze snaps to me, I know I’m going down the right path, trying to talk about something that will take his mind off the little tin can we’re currently stuck inside. “About why I took this job.”
He shifts, turning toward me, not pulling his hand away, clearly interested. “Why?”
“Because the real reason is just that…” I suck in a breath, let it out, and meet his eyes.
There was a time, not so recently, that I couldn’t even think about this without getting all tangled up in tears and grief.
Now, I choke out the words, but manage, “My best friend, Frankie, was a super adventurous person. She’s the reason I did anything in college, and she died right after our graduation.
I went home and wallowed in my grief, going through the motions.
Then I had a dream that she was furious at me for it,” I stop, letting out a little laugh at the memory of Frankie, chewing me out from beyond the grave.
“She was angry that I was wasting my life. So, I told my parents I had an internship in NYC and that I was going to live with my aunt. When I got here, I needed something credible to justify not being home. Plus, I needed money. So Aunt Ruby started putting out feelers for a job, and Ember came up through Julian.”
His brows knit together, eyes skipping over my face. “You’re twenty-five, though, right?”
“It’s not…” I let out a sigh and shake my head.
“It’s not like that, where I’m from. Family comes first, and it’s always just been assumed that we’d all be living in Lancaster.
My family takes up half the street. Leaving is like—well, it’s like saying you don’t want them.
It’s not acceptable. Aunt Ruby is the only one I know who’s ever left, and they talk about her like she joined some kind of Satanic cult. ”
Dane hums, turns my hand over in his, and starts tracing his finger along the back of it.
A shiver starts at the base of my neck and turns to a full-body shudder about halfway down my spine.
It feels too good. I hold completely, totally still, like I might spook him away if I make him realize what he’s doing.
“What’s your passion, then?” His gaze settles on me like a lie detector test.
“Painting,” I say, a weight lifting from my chest, relief from telling the truth. “My art.”
“Painting,” he says, slowly. “Your art. So, you applied for this job because you… needed a job. Not because you’re passionate about the product?”
My face flushes instantly at the memory of that first night using an Ember toy. Since then, I’ve made very good use of them. And, horrifyingly, I’ve thought of Dane every time.
And sometimes, not just Dane.
He hums again at the look on my face, and I feel the vibration through his hand. “So, you are passionate about the product…”
“I’m going to do a good job for you, Dane.” How it comes out is not how I mean it, but now that it’s hanging in the air, I’m not going to try to take it back.
His eyes flick to mine and hold, and I swear I can feel my pulse in every corner of my body. “Oh, are you?”
I let out a squeak, convinced my body has been reduced to a handful of nerves that are all twitching, pleading for the tension to break, for something to happen.
But Dane holds perfectly still, like always. His dark eyes are on me, watching. He is, apparently, waiting for me to make a move. More than anything, I want him to be the first to shift, to lunge forward and kiss me, to slide his hand up my arm, or down my thigh—anything.
He doesn’t. Just watches me, carefully, like he’s making it perfectly clear that if I want something to happen, I’m going to have to make the first move.
Here goes nothing.
If the only way to have this is to take action myself, I will. So, instead of doing the sane thing, pulling back and creating some distance between us, I move over, climbing into his lap and lowering my lips to his.