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I quickly follow, entering a room that, much like downstairs, is all clean lines and masculinity, with a low king bed with a gray leather headboard and a seating area off to the left. Cole enters another doorway to my right, and almost immediately returns with a suitcase in his hands. “For you,” he announces, setting it by the bed. “Those bags you brought with you won’t transport easily.”
In other words, he knows I don’t have a suitcase. “Thank you,” I say.
He arches a brow. “No other comment?”
“Just that you miss nothing,” I reply.
“If that were true,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been cocky enough to believe that I’d won you over in that hotel room. And I damn sure wouldn’t have gotten in the shower without taking you with me.”
“You had me at hello, Cole. You know that.”
“And yet I didn’t.”
“You do now.”
“No,” he says. “But I intend to change that.”
His cell phone rings yet again and I’m left feeling that I might still be a challenge to Cole, and wishing we had time to really talk. Cole’s call is quick, but he’s only just disconnected when it buzzes again. “I’m never going to get packed at this rate,” he grumbles, answering the line with, “Cole Brooks,” which tells me he doesn’t know the number on his ID.
He listens a moment and then says, “Now what?” ignoring his suitcase as he focuses wholly on the call, which I soon decipher as the private airline flying us tonight, dealing with some sort of challenge. I walk to the items sitting on the bed by his suitcase and get to work.
He steps to my side, takes my hand, and kisses it, a smile in his gorgeous eyes that reads like a welcome into his personal space. Just that easily, my fears that I am still a challenge, and nothing more to Cole, fade. He turns away from me and goes back and forth on his call before he disconnects the line and scrubs his jaw. “There was a problem with the pilot who was taking us up,” he says, zipping up his bag before I can.
I frown, not a happy flyer, even without that statement. “What problem?”
“They have sleep regulations he would have hit mid-flight, but the on-call pilot called in while they had me on the phone. We’re good and if we leave now, we can be in the air in an hour.”
Three minutes later, we’re rolling his bags through the lobby. Once we’re at the trunk of the hired car, Cole helps me pack my bags into the suitcase, and then this time when we join the driver both of us settling into the backseat, our energy is different. We’re still sitting a professional distance apart, but there isn’t a world between us. Just the conversation we haven’t finished having, that we can’t have until we are alone, that he may or may not know, is important.
The car starts to move, and for now, I focus on the other important conversation we can have. “How far is the airport?”
“It’s a private strip,” Cole says. “About fifteen minutes.”
“This new pilot has slept his hours, right?”
He laughs. “I’m sensing you’re not a good flyer.”
“If you mean do I like sitting inside a big metal machine while some person I don’t know or trust, controls the wheel? No, I do not. And I already know that you’re a control freak. You don’t even like your files outside your office. How does it not bother you?”
“I’ll save us if we start to go down.”
I scoff and rotate to face him. “Do not joke about going down.”
His eyes meet mine, “I really will save you. I have my pilot’s license. My father was a pilot and I started flying when I was fifteen.”
“Did you really?”
“Scout’s honor, and yes, I was a scout. My father thought it would look good on a college resume, even though I was just a kid at the time. My mother thought it would teach me self-preservation and good manners.”
Now I laugh. “I saw those manners tonight,” I comment, lowering my voice, and repeating his words to Lance. “Who are you and why do I care?”
“An asshole gets asshole treatment.”
“You didn’t know that he was an asshole at that point, despite the fact that he is. You didn’t even know who he was.”
He reaches down and grabs my thigh, pulling me next him, and behind the driver’s seat, heat flaming between us instantly. His fingers flex on my leg and he leans in close, lowering his head near mine, his voice low, intimate, for my ears only. “I saw how he was looking at you. I knew he’d had you. I knew he still wanted you. I made sure he knew that wasn’t going to happen.” He cups my face, cheek pressed to mine. “I made sure he knows he has to go through me to get to you again.” He eases back, and even in the darkness and shadows, the flicker of passing lights illuminate the hard lines of determination on his handsome face and the heat of possession burning in his eyes. Perhaps I should push back. Perhaps I should worry that I will lose myself if I’m consumed by such a man, as I had that day on the street. But I’m not the same person, in the same situation.
I lean in and press my lips to his. He cups my head in that hot, possessive way he does, and kisses me to the point I really want to fuck him right here, in this car. And when he pulls back and gives me a smile, before sliding his arm around my shoulders to hold me close for the rest of the ride, I come to a conclusion: I’ve seen death and illness. Life is too short to feel what I feel with this man and walk away, especially when I trust this man, which is big for me after feeling betrayed by my father, and even Lance for that matter.
