Chapter Twenty #2
She watches my profile like she’s trying to decode a classified brief. “Waterfront? A rooftop? Oh! The space needle?”
“If I told you, then it would ruin the surprise.”
“Mean,” she says but grips my arm tighter as if she doesn’t want me to pull my hand off her thigh. Doesn’t she know that it would take a goddamn army to pry me away from her? “How high are we talking?” she asks, glancing out her passenger side window as if she’ll find the answer out there.
“High enough. I want you warm.” I cut her a look. “Too cold?”
She sinks deeper into my jacket like an answer and drags the collar to her nose. “Smells like you.”
I swallow. “Good.”
City lights stack themselves into glass and steel. We turn into the Lawson building’s underground and come up through a lobby that looks like brushed chrome and money. Security nods us through, and I flash a pass that isn’t about money at all.
The moment the elevator doors part, I can feel the shift in Vivi. She clocks the LSS signage, the discreet cameras, the hush that comes with competence. “Is this—”
“Lawson Security.” I press my palm to the reader at the next door. “My friend owns the place.”
“Friend?”
A voice carries from the end of the corridor. “Hartley!”
Callum Lawson is exactly as I left him: too sharp around the edges, eyes that were older at twenty-five than most men get at fifty. He and I collide with a hug that’s a check more than a greeting. He claps my back once, like a heartbeat.
“You must be Vivi,” he says, turning a smile on her that lands just this side of charm. He always did well with the ladies off base back in the day. It feels like a different lifetime now—a different world. Ten years flies by when so much has happened in between. “I’ve heard good things.”
She puts out her hand. “I’d say the same about you, but he doesn’t talk.” Vivi gives me a look that is equal parts accusation and affection.
Callum chuckles with a nod. “Vocational hazard. We’re not supposed to talk about a lot. It’s a hard rule to shake once you’re on the other side.”
“Yeah,” I mutter, more to him than to her. He understands better than most. As an ex-special forces and then a hired mercenary for a number of years, there’s a lot he can’t talk about.
He tried to convince me to leave the Army and come work for him, but I couldn’t leave my unit.
My loyalty was stronger than the dollars in my bank account.
Besides, I have more than most. The kind of money I could have retired on and lived a more than comfortable life with Adeline, but I’m like a workhorse…
I need something to do or I’ll go crazy locked up in a stable all day.
I need a job that pushes me physically and mentally, and that’s where hockey came in.
I didn’t just walk on to the rink for tryouts with physical ability that I had stored for the last fifteen years, just waiting to use it.
I stepped onto the ice with the same determination that I did on every mission.
With failure not being an option and out-skating, out-working every other player who had more natural talent than me who were also vying for the same spot.
In the Army, as a Night Stalker, failure means everyone you are responsible for dies. I stepped out on the ice with the same mindset that I did every time I clicked into that five point harness of my Black Hawk. With failure as no option.
We pass through one last door and the air changes.
It’s cooler, the wind is howling up this high, but there’s excitement thrumming between both of us.
The rooftop is a clean rectangle of tarmac with a circle of paint where the city meets the sky.
The helicopter sits like a legal weapon of power and strength, charcoal with the Lawson insignia small on the tail.
Vivi stops dead. “We’re going on that helicopter?”
“Yep,” I say.
“You paid Cullum to take us on a ride for our date?”
“No, baby. I’m flying. No one takes you for a ride but me,” I say, not caring how possessive I sound.
I glance over, and she’s grinning. She grips my free hand with a squeal she tries to muffle back with her excitement.
“I can’t believe you did this for me. No one’s ever done anything like this. You’re certainly full of surprises, Trey Hartley."
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” I tell her, her hand. My other hand carries the picnic basket and my flight bag. “I want to share something with you that’s important to me. Something that I’ve never shared with anyone else besides John. Is that okay with you?”
She glances at my chest as if knowing right where John’s dog tags rest. “More than okay.”
The last thing I want to do is open up more about John—about losing my brother and Sarah, about my injuries, surgeries, losing most of my hearing in my left ear. But if I want more of Vivi, I have to offer her more of me first. She needs to understand why I am who I am.
Callum runs Vivi through the quick brief like he’s got good news he’s not allowed to give. I help her into the five-point harness up front. She’s in the co-pilot seat, headset cupped over hair I want to fist, chin tilted at the horizon like she was born to look at it.
When I step into the left seat, my body exhales.
There are places your muscles remember better than your mind.
My left ear is a dead zone, so I adjust the radio in compensation.
Hands move without thinking: battery, fuel, lights, aux.
The engine spools. The blades grab air and turn it into sound.
Not a roar—a thrum. A pulse that matches mine.
I glance over, and Vivi’s watching my hands. “You look different,” she says into the mic, her voice intimate in my headset.
“How?”
“Like you just…slid into yourself.” She laughs softly. “That makes no sense.”
“It makes all the sense. This is where I feel the most like myself. Where I don’t have to pretend to be someone else.
” She nods in understanding, and then I ease us light on the skids, lift, and the rooftop falls away so smoothly her breath catches but doesn’t turn to fear.
I level and bring us forward. The city opens like a map and now I’m back to a world I understand better than ballet buns, school PTA meetings, playoff wins, and small talk.
I know this world in the air better than I know myself.
As if part of me is missing when my feet hit flat ground.
“You hear that?” I ask.
She tips her head, listening as her eyes stare out into the dark night above us and the gleaming Seattle lights below us.
“It’s quiet,” I say. “Lots of sound. No noise.”
She turns back to me, her eyes on mine. “I think I finally get it.” Her hand finds my forearm where my sleeve pushes back from the watch. “This is your happy place.”
“Yeah.” It’s not a sentiment I use or know well but she’s right—it’s my happy place. It sits easy in my mouth up here.
We bank toward the Sound. The water is ink with a scatter of city reflection, the boats like little moving galaxies. We skim the Space Needle, the stadiums, the shipyards, the bright grid of downtown lights and cars moving. She says wow a dozen different ways, and each one hits me like fuel.
“What’s the mission tonight?” she asks.
“Give you something you’ll never forget.”
Silence hums across the channel. “I won’t forget you,” she says finally, voice smaller. “That’s already done.”
I could crash us with less impact than that line has on my chest. I want to reach for her hand, but there are rules up here. I follow them. I point out landmarks like I’m not memorizing the look on her face more carefully than anything on the ground.
Being in the sky is what I love, but being with her? There’s no sentiment, no feeling big enough to describe it.
I bring us down on a private pad owned by one of Callum’s wealthy clients.
Someone who owes him a favor I’m better off not asking about.
It juts out over a peninsula of rock and low shrubs, with a view that goes wide open.
The city sprawls to the south, mountains rise to the east, and water stretches in every other direction.
It’s quiet here, except for the wind and the soft tick of the engine cooling.
I cut the power and wait for the blades to stop before I let myself really look at her.
She pulls off the headset. “That was insane. I’ve only ever seen the city at night like that when I’m flying back home from a business conference. But that? That was a totally different experience.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling stupid for not being able to build a better word.
We leave the helmets in the cockpit. I haul the basket, the blankets.
We walk a short rise to a flat spot where the rock gives way to flattened grass, and I lay the first blanket, then the second. The wind blows at the corners but the wool blankets I chose are heavy and stay down…mostly.
I open the basket of food, and she laughs when she starts going through it all, seeing what I packed for us. It’s a random list but far more food than we’ll ever eat. I didn’t leave a single thing off the list that Isla suggested.
She grabs the thermos that she’s seen from home out and looks at me to answer for the contents of it.
“Your hot cocoa recipe.”
“You made cocoa?” she asks, delighted.
“Don’t act surprised,” I say, pouring into tin mugs. “I pay attention.”
“I know you do. You don’t miss a thing,” she says, and it’s not teasing—it’s a truth she lays between us like another blanket.
I pour us each a cup of it and hand one to her.
We both stare back at each other as we angle the paper cups to our lips, waiting for the other to try it.
“Moment of truth,” I say.
“We’ll try it at the same time,” she instructs, and I nod. “One…two…three.”
We both take a sip and neither of us make a spit take.
“Mmm,” she says, and it’s not lost on me that she’s shocked it’s palatable.
I finish my sip, and I’m surprised too, even though I’m the one who made it. “It’s not as good as yours, but it’s not burnt.”