Chapter Three. We level off at cruising altitude, the soft hum of the engines lulling
We level off at cruising altitude, the soft hum of the engines lulling
me into deep thought, and I can feel my mind trying to go places I don’t
want to go. Flashes of the tattoo on my handler’s wrist keep interrupting
my plans to keep Liam’s questions at bay the rest of the flight.
The tattoo shifts to flames and I am suddenly floating in a cloud of
thick smoke, trying to escape, but I can’t see to get out of it. I can’t scream.
I try to scream. They are screaming. Oh God. Oh God. I have to get to them.
A sudden bright light pierces the fog and I jerk to a sitting position and grab
my throat, gasping for air, feeling the rasp of smoke burn through my lungs.
“Easy, sweetheart. You’re okay.”
I barely register the voice. I can’t focus. My hands go to my face.
“Where am I?”
“Amy.”
Strong hands touch me, turn me, and I blink a pair of piercing blue
eyes into focus.
Memories rush over me. “Liam?”
“Yes. Liam. That must have been one hell of a nightmare.”
Nightmare? I fell asleep? “No, I…” Images flash in my mind, and I
squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out my fear, the smoke, and
gut-wrenching screams. My fingers curl around what I realize is Liam’s shirt,
and on some level I know that I’m clinging to a man I barely know, but he is
all I have. Somehow he is all that is keeping me from melting down.
“Amy,” Liam whispers, stroking a hand down my hair. I tell myself it’s
inappropriate for him to touch me like this. It’s also exactly what I need,
and somehow so is he. I tell myself it’s simply that he’s at the right place at
this very wrong time in my life, but it does nothing to discourage my
reaction to his touch, to the warmth radiating from where my palms rest on
his chest and up my arms. Without a conscious decision, I lean closer to him
and my lashes lift, my eyes meeting his, and the connection shoots
adrenaline through me. I am no longer in the hell of my head. I am right
here with this man and he leaves no room for anything else.
“Is she okay?”
I jerk back at the sound of the flight attendant’s voice and Liam’s
hands fall away from me, leaving me oddly cold. “Excuse me? Am I okay?” I
ask, wondering what the heck I did that would merit that question.
“She doesn’t like it when I talk sports,” Liam jokes, obviously trying to
spare me a more personal explanation of…what? What the heck did I do?
“Too much basketball makes me crazy,” I add, trying to snatch up the
breadcrumbs Liam has tossed my way, but I fear I sound too strained to
sound more than baffled.
“It’s not basketball season,” she points out, looking less than pleased.
“Since when does that stop a basketball fan from killing us with
basketball talk?” I ask, and that earns me a deadpan look, which has me
quickly shifting gears, trying to make blind amends. “I’m fine. Sorry if I
caused some kind of trouble.”
She frowns and glowers accusingly at Liam, and all signs of her early
admiration of his overwhelmingly hotness from earlier are gone. “She
doesn’t seem fine.” Her gaze shifts to me.
“You shouted. It scared the heck out of us.”
Shouted? Oh, good grief. Way to not bring attention to yourself, Amy.
“I took a decongestant,” I say, trying to be truly convincing this time. “They
make me sleepy and give me nightmares.”
Her lips purse, but her expression quickly softens. “Well, that makes
sense. Yes. I can see how that might happen to someone sensitive to
medications, but boy oh boy they must have worked you over. We’ve only
been in the air fifteen minutes and you were awake when we took off. You
were knocked out hard and fast.”
Which isn’t like me. Not on a normal day. Certainly not on a day I feel
threatened. “I’m really sorry I scared you,” I offer, attempting a smile that
I’m pretty sure never makes it to my lips. “I promise to stay awake the rest
of the flight.”
“You don’t have to promise that,” she says, and grins. “But maybe
warn us before you go to sleep. We’ll have dinner served in five minutes.”
She rushes away and Liam doesn’t give me time to savor her departure.
“Decongestants?” Liam asks softly, drawing my gaze back to his.
“My ears pop when I fly.” The lie comes easily. I’m back to the me I
hate. “And unless you want to confess to drugging me, that’s my story and
I’m sticking with it.”
He studies me a bit too carefully for my own good, and something in
his eyes has me warm all over and wishing he’d touch me again. “What are
you afraid of, Amy?”
You, I want to say. You scare me because you make me want to trust
you. I laugh, and it sounds strained even to my own ears. “Godzilla,” I say,
confessing the fictional monster I’d feared in childhood, until life had
shown me real monsters existed.
If I’d expected his laughter, he doesn’t give it to me. “Godzilla?” he
prods, angling his body to block out anyone passing by us, his back to them,
his body almost caging mine. The impact of this man’s full attention is
overwhelming. My breath turns shallow, and to my utter disbelief, my
nipples are tight and achy. I do not respond to men like this. I just…don’t.
“Everyone has a proverbial monster under the bed,” I manage, and
thankfully my voice sounds far more steady than I feel. “Godzilla is mine,” I
continue. “And hey—at least there weren’t any hippos crossing the road in
this nightmare. I’ve had that one a time or two, as well.
Actually, I don’t think the hippos felt like nightmares. Just strange
dreams.” Shut up, Amy. Shut up. Why are you telling him anything more
than you have to? You never, ever tell more than you have to.
“I won’t try to analyze what the hippos mean,” he comments, and
the slight curve to his lips on the words fades away as he adds, “but your
monster under the bed sounds more like a skeleton in the closet to me.”
“Fear and a secret are two different things,” I remind him, pointing
out the difference in the two phrases.
“Often they come together. A secret that leads to fear in one way,
shape, or form.”
Suddenly, my joke feels like an open window to my soul that I
desperately want to slam shut. Tension coils in my muscles and I quickly
pull my guard into place, turning the tables.
“Sounds like a man who speaks from experience.”
“Yes, well,” he says, a cynical tinge to his voice, “experience isn’t all
it’s cracked up to be, now is it?”
I search his eyes and look for the meaning behind his words, but I
find nothing. He is unreadable, as guarded as I am on my best day, and I
sense that I’ve now glimpsed a little piece of his soul. “What makes you
have nightmares, Liam?”
“Nothing.” His answer is short and fast, his tone as unreadable as his
face remains.
“Everyone has something that scares them.”
“I own my fear. It doesn’t own me.”
A sound of disbelief slips from my throat. “You make it sound so easy
to control fear.” I regret the words that admit my fear the instant I speak
them. It’s a mistake I never make, but I’ve made it with him. Liam truly is
dangerous.
His gaze lowers to my mouth, lingering there and sending a tingling
sensation down my neck and over my breasts, before slowly lifting. “Maybe
you haven’t had the right teacher, Amy.”
What did that even mean, and why did it create an acute throb
between my legs? I’m spiraling out of control and my defenses bristle. “I
didn’t say I needed a teacher.”
“You didn’t say you didn’t, either.”
“Dinner is served,” the flight attendant announces, and neither of us
looks at her.
“I don’t,” I say, and now I’m the one who isn’t sure if I’m trying to
convince him or me.
My heart is racing. Why is my heart racing?
His lips quirk. “If you say so.”
“Dinner is served,” the flight attendant repeats, sounding a little
anxious.
“I do say so,” I assure him, cutting my gaze and lowering my tray to
have my chicken dinner immediately placed on top of it.
The flight attendant leaves us alone and I don’t look at Liam. I have
this sense that if I do, he’ll see more of me than I see myself. As it is, I’m
letting him see things I shouldn’t have. This banter between us has to stop.
It will stop. No more. I’m done playing friendly seatmate. There is a reason I
stay away from men like Liam, men with experience and confidence. Men
who make a girl who already can’t remember her name forget her name.
They do see too much. And they make everyone else see too little.
I snatch a roll from my plate that I don’t want and tear it apart, then
set it back down.
Teacher. What does that even mean? And why am I making myself
crazy wondering, anyway? It doesn’t matter. He’ll be out of my life in a few
short, or not so short, hours. And true to that assessment, the next few
minutes feel like an eternity. I tell myself the silence is good. We are
slipping into a typical passenger-to-passenger travel arrangement. We
don’t have to talk. It’s better this way. Talking means giving away facts I
need to suppress. It’s logical. It’s right, and yet, I am so ultra-aware of Liam
beside me that I can barely taste the few bites of food I force down. Any
woman—heck, any human being—would be. There’s nothing more to it.
He’s gorgeously carved, like a fine work of art. That’s all it is. Isn’t it?
“You didn’t tell me why you’re going to Denver.”
The question surprises me and my fork freezes in the rice I’d been
pushing around. In sixty seconds flat, I go from relieved that he has broken
the silence to panicked at the idea of sharing my new lies. I’m not ready. I
don’t ever want to be ready.
I cut him a sideways look and my pulse leaps when I find him
watching me. I’m rattled at how easily he draws a reaction from me, and
I’m almost snappy as I counter with, “Why are you headed to Denver?” And
darn it, there is a tiny quaver to my voice I hope he doesn’t hear.
“So that’s how it is, is it?”
My brow furrows and I set my fork down. “What does that mean?”
“You give what you get,” he replies, and there is no mistaking the
challenge etching his words.
No, I think. That’s not how it is. That’s not ever how it has been. Not
in my world.
“Wouldn’t life be better if that’s how it truly was?” Another quaver
ripples in the depths of my question. I really need to stop talking.
This time he sets his fork down, turning to face me more fully. “You
do know that for a ‘give what you get’ philosophy to work, that someone
still has to give first, right?” And there is something as intimately
inappropriate to the way he looks at me, and how he says the words, as
there has been when he’s touched me.
“And you want that to be me,” I state, intentionally leaving off the
question mark. I try to leave out the breathless quality of my voice, too, and
I fail. I don’t like that I fail. It’s another sign I have no control over myself.
Worse. I think I might like it if this virtual stranger had control over me,
which tells me how emotionally on edge I really am.
“I’m in discussions to be part of a downtown Denver building
project,” he surprises me by saying. Giving before he “gets”.
“What kind of building project?”
He just looks at me. So much for being done with friendly banter, I
think as I cave to his silent demand I “give” a part of me. “I was laid off and
my old boss got me a new job in Denver.
And before you ask, it’s nothing exciting. It’s administrative.”
He tilts his head slightly. “So you’ll be staying in Denver.”
“For a while,” I say, and the satisfaction I see in his eyes surprises and
pleases me far more than it should. I ask the obvious question, telling
myself it’s simply because it’s expected.
“How long will you be in Denver?”
“It all depends on whether I take on the project.” The flight attendant
proves she has brilliant timing again by picking right then to take away our
plates, leaving me with an incomplete answer I want completely. By the
time we’ve been offered coffee and dessert that we both decline, I have no
idea if he would have said more, or how to get things back on topic without
seeming too interested. And I am too interested. He’s a risk. He could be a
mere stranger or he could be an enemy. Worse. I’m too risky for anyone to
befriend. I put them at risk, and with that blistering thought, I know there is
nothing more to ask him. Nothing more to say but “have a nice life”. I
cannot ever be close to anyone. No one. Ever.
I snuggle under a blanket the flight attendant has left me, and
surprising me, Liam reaches into the seat pocket in front of mine and
removes what looks like a sketchpad, which I hadn’t noticed until now. He
pauses halfway between my seat and his own, glancing at me, and he is
close, his mouth within leaning distance. It’s a great mouth, sensual and
full, and I wonder what it would feel like on mine.
“If you want to sleep,” he says, “I promise to keep Godzilla at bay for
you.”
He couldn’t have said anything more perfect and I know right then
what it is about Liam that makes him so irresistible. Men have been scarce
in my life, namely because of my fear of getting close to anyone. The few
times I’ve broken that rule have not turned out well, and I admit that in a
few lonely, weak moments, I’ve indulged in my share of Cinderella fantasies
where my Prince Charming swoops in and makes life better. Liam is good
looking, confident—he radiates control in a way my fantasy Prince
Charming would. But more so, I believe Liam would fight Godzilla if he had
to. Maybe not for me, but for someone he cares about.
“I’ll hold you to that,” I finally say, unable to find even a thread of jest
to lace the words.
I watch his eyes flicker, the color diluting to a soft blue then
darkening again, and I am not sure how to read the meaning when he is
otherwise guarded, as much a mystery as who I am running from. “Good,”
he replies simply before he leans back fully into his seat.
I let my head drop to the cushion, and for a few minutes I indulge in a
fantasy about Liam to keep the monsters of my past at bay. But as the hum
of the engine starts working me over again, flickering images of the past
begin to slip inside my head, and I start to unravel. I’m not going to be able
to sit here without getting lost in my own head and going crazy. A flash of
flames has me jerking to a sitting position and my hands go to my face, my
elbows to my knees.
I can feel the heaviness of Liam’s attention. He’s looking at me but I
don’t want to look at him. If I do, I will talk to him. I will ask him questions.
He will ask me questions.
“Amy?”
His voice slides through me, and somehow it manages to be
soothing, warm comfort and sensual fire at the same time. Not for the first
time, I’m baffled by the way a man I barely know manages to be silk on my
raw nerves, but I’m not going to overanalyze it. I have to hold myself
together until I’m someplace safe enough to cave to a little temporary
weakness, and he feels like the answer. He’s what will get me through this
flight. I sit back to look at him, and though I’m perfectly aware that he is a
heavy dose of delicious man, my heart still races as I blink his dark good
looks and his piercing blue eyes into view.
He sets his pencil down on his tray and abandons his work for me,
giving me a concerned assessment. “Everything okay?” he asks, and I think
of him as a gentle lion in that moment, only it is me who is purring under
his powerful male attention.
“Fine,” I reply, because “fine” is nothing but a word. There is no
agreement on my end, no lie. I tilt my head back. Liam closes his tray and
does the same, sticking his pad beside his seat.
With both our heads on our cushions, for several seconds we stare at
each other and for moments I am lost in the deep blue pools of his eyes.
“You do know,” he says slowly, “that as a man I’ve been taught that a
woman never means ‘fine’ when she says ‘fine’, right?”
I might have smiled another day, but not this one. “I guess we all
have our own ways of defining fine.”
He studies me a moment, then another, and I have the impression
he’s trying to understand me. I want to tell him “good luck”. I don’t even
understand me. “You don’t want to sleep.”
Somehow I don’t openly react to the surprising change of subject and
too accurate of an observation. Dodge and weave, I tell myself. Dodge and
weave. “I don’t like to sleep in public places.”
“Talk to me, Amy,” he murmurs softly.
“Talk to you?” I ask. I want to talk to him. That’s the problem.
“You need to fill the empty space in your head, and right now, talking
is your only method of doing that.”
I try to joke away his suggestion. “And you’d rather talk to a stranger
than have her fall asleep and get you in trouble with the flight attendant
again?”
“We aren’t strangers anymore, and I find the idea of occupying your
time increasingly appealing.” His eyes light. “So use me, baby.”
The air crackles between us and there is no denying the growing
attraction I have for this man. “Fine, then. I’d love to hear about the project
you’re traveling to Denver to discuss.”
“There isn’t a lot to tell yet. It’s a typical property development deal.
A group of deep pockets get together and aspire for greatness that equates
to dollar signs in their eyes. In this case, it’s a plan to create the world’s
largest event center, complete with concert facilities, a shopping mall, and
an office complex.”
He sounds blasé when I’m excited just hearing about the project, and
I find I’m more curious about Liam than ever—enough to be nosy. “Are you
one of those deep pockets?”
“There are too many egos fighting in one room for me on this one.
Egos translate to delays and problems.”
He didn’t deny he has deep pockets. I was right. He is money, sex,
and power. “So then, what’s your role, if not investor?”
“I’m the architect they want to design the project.”
I sit up straighter at this surprising news. “You’re an architect?”
“Yes.”
“An architect that could create a project of the magnitude you just
described?”
“Yes.”
“Would I know any of your work?”
“I’ve done a few high-profile projects.”
I frown. “Isn’t this where you drop names and impress me?”
“Do I need to impress you?”
My cheeks heat. “No. I…most people…”
“I’m not most people.”
No. No, he most definitely is not most people. “Have you thought
about your design for this project?”
“I’ve drafted my vision, but I already know it’s not likely to please the
financiers.”
“But they requested you. They must like your work.”
“They want me to create the tallest building in the United States.”
I blink. “Could you really create something of that magnitude?”
“‘Can I’ isn’t the question. ‘Will I’ is the question. Height is a short
man’s dream of perfection. It’s also narrow-minded. How high you stand
isn’t as important as how magnificent you are.”
Magnificent. The word resonates deeply for me. I’d once thought I’d
be a part of something I could describe that way. I’d like in some small way
to be a part of what he describes that way. “Are you allowed to show me
your design?”
“I’m allowed to do whatever the hell I want.” He reaches for his
sketchpad and thumbs through it to open to a particular drawing, and
starts to hand it to me, but pulls back. “I don’t normally show my work to
anyone until it’s complete.”
“But you’re going to show me?”
“Yes, Amy. I’m going to show you.”
He offers me the pad and I accept it, but my attention remains on
him. “Why would you show me what you show no one else?”
“Because I want to.”
I do not know what to say. “I…thank you.” Touched and confused, my
gaze lowers to
look at the drawing and shock radiates through me, trapping air in
my lungs. I blink, certain I am not seeing what I am seeing, but the image
remains the same. He showed me what he shows no one else, and what he
has shown me is a piece of my past. Adrenaline courses through me. That
can mean only one thing. I shove the pad beside me and reach for his right
arm and turn his wrist face up, searching for the tattoo that would tell me if
he’s my handler.