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She gave a small, brittle laugh. ‘Strangely, having my flight hijacked by you doesn’t feel like a reason to celebrate.’ She was speaking calmly and precisely, as if that might change what was happening. But of course, it didn’t.
‘I was talking about our engagement,’ he said, and his voice had a softness to it that made her shiver.
She felt her face get hot. ‘We’re not engaged.’
‘And yet here we are. Together. Heading off into the sunset.’ He glanced out of the window to where the sun was starting to slip beneath the horizon. ‘It’s almost as if fate is trying to tell you something. As if being “hijacked” by your fiancé is what you want. Only you don’t want to admit it out loud,’ he added, and, for a moment, she couldn’t breathe properly.
She couldn’t understand why she had thought there was more to Trip than met the eye. He was hiding in plain sight. A wealthy, powerful man who took what he wanted, when he wanted it, without any thought for the collateral damage he caused en route to satisfying his whims.
Unfastening her seat belt, she stood up. ‘What I want is to be left alone.’
She snatched her bag and waited for him to move his legs, which he did with a measured slowness that made her fingers tremble. Ignoring him as best she could, she stalked down the cabin to a seat with a table beside it and spent the next hour pretending that Trip wasn’t there.
But even though she was sitting with her back to him, it was impossible not to be aware of his presence. She was like the princess in that fairy tale, and he was the pea beneath all the mattresses. As she listened to him talking to the stewards, she knew exactly how he would be sitting. Not stiffly like her, with her spine digging into the seat, but lolling easily against the leather, his chin tilted upwards, limbs arranged with a kind of louche grace that inspired both envy and longing. What was more, she could picture the cabin crew crowded round him, hanging eagerly on his every word, wide-eyed like children watching a magician perform a series of elaborate tricks.
Steadying her breathing, she reclined her seat a fraction. As well as a headache, her neck was starting to hurt with the effort of not turning round and she felt a little queasy. As a child she’d suffered terribly from motion sickness, but nowadays it was rarely a problem unless she was tired or stressed.
Her lip curled. Thanks to Trip, she was both. Luckily, she had some pills with her so maybe she would take a couple and close her eyes...
She woke up with a start.
Her mouth felt dry and her eyes felt as if they were on back to front. Light was filling the cabin, not artificial light but daylight, and outside the sky was a dazzling blue. What time was it? She glanced at her watch and jerked upright, frowning. She had assumed that she had dozed off for a couple of hours, but it was morning.
‘There she is. Hey, Greta Garbo. Have a nice sleep? I tried to wake you, but you were out for the count.’
As Trip sat down opposite her, she was still too woolly-headed to do anything more than answer truthfully.
‘I get motion sick sometimes, so I took a couple of pills. As soon as we land, I’ll be fine.’
As soon as we land.
The words echoed inside her head and she glanced out of the window, feeling that same quivering apprehension as she had back at the apartment just before Trip had told her he wanted to marry her. Looking down at her watch again, she frowned. ‘Why are we still in the air? It only takes seven hours at most to reach London.’
‘True.’ Trip nodded.
‘So why aren’t we there?’
He smiled then. ‘Probably because we’re not going to London.’
‘What do you mean?’ His answer seemed to have sucked the breath from her lungs so that her voice sounded high and thin.
Now he studied her for a long, level moment. ‘We’re about an hour away from a private airstrip in Siena.’
‘Siena?’
‘It’s in Italy. Near Florence.’
‘I know where Siena is,’ she snapped.
In the weeks since she had last seen him, his hair had grown longer, and he pushed it back from his face. But that wasn’t why her heart began to beat faster.
‘I don’t understand. Was there a problem? Have they had to divert the plane?’ Except that didn’t make any sense because Italy was further away than England.
‘There’s no problem.’
‘Then they must have made a mistake.’ She tried and failed to keep the edge of panic out of her voice. ‘Why else would we be going to Italy?’
His blue gaze was bright and hot and satisfied. ‘Because that’s where I told the pilot to land,’ he said softly.
