Page 2 of Working for the Heiress

Camel-colored, soft, looked like it cost more than my truck. Her hair was dark blonde, pulled back into a low knot at the nape of her neck. She had a leather bag over one shoulder and a phone in her hand and she was wearing thigh-high boots with a tiny skirt in October in Colorado. The sight of her curves swelling round and ripe above those boots caused a violent, chest-shattering roar in my soul—a primal instinct I hadn’t felt for two years. She didn’t know I was staring at her, hadn’t seen me yet. But the moment my eyes locked onto her, looking away became physically impossible. She owned me before she even knew my name. She had no idea anyone was watching, and I saw her take in her surroundings. She didn’t flinch, didn’t wrinkle her nose at the smell of engine grease. Instead, she held herself like a queen stepping into my domain. The sudden, bruising rush of blood to my jeans wasn't just lust—it was a definitive claim. A lightning bolt striking a tree. I hadn't felt alive like this since the tragedy at Raptor Creek, but one look at this woman just resurrected me.

Then she found me.

Her eyes landed and her face assumed the right expression for a woman pretending to be in charge of the workplace. She smiled. It was warm and professional and did not reach her eyes. And then she started toward me, those hips swaying as I stared, long past appropriate. The boots clacking sounds on the concrete. Diaz, beside me, made a noise under his breath that could have been a laugh or a prayer.

"Excuse me," she said. "I'm looking for someone who could point me to the office. I think I parked in the wrong place".

Up close, the smile was even better. Up close, I saw her eyes were brown, and there was a freckle on her cheekbone. I could smell whatever she was wearing — not perfume exactly, something cleaner than that, maybe cinnamon or vanilla, like cookies. I knew I looked like a filthy beggar compared to her polished decorum.

“Office is the building on the left," I said. "You want to come in through the side door. The front one sticks".

"Thank you".

She didn't move. She was looking past me at the bird, the one I'd just buttoned up, and there was a small change in her face — quick, gone before I could name it — that was curiosity, maybe. The kind a person has when they're looking at a thing they recognize.

"Is that the Three-Fifty?" she said.

I blinked.

"The B-three," she added, like she was correcting herself. "Sorry. I don't know if you call them by the model or by the tail number around here. I'm — I'm trying to learn".

I looked at her. The curiosity was real. The smile had dimmed a notch into something more honest, almost embarrassed, and that surprised me. I was rarely caught off guard.

"B-three," I said. "Yeah. That's the one we use for the lift contracts".

"Okay." She nodded, and tucked a piece of hair that wasn't loose behind her ear, and looked at me, and said, "I'm Lilianne Ashford".

As if I hadn’t known. But hearing her say it, in her own voice, in my hangar, did nothing to ease the pressure behind my zipper.

“Holt,” I spit out as I wiped my right hand and held it out — and even as I did it I was already preparing for the moment she'd look at it and decline. Women always looked. The hand never came clean. I'd learned to offer it anyway, because not offering it was its own kind of statement, and then to retract it gracefully when the woman in question gave the small apologetic smile that meant I don't touch that.

And then the heiress took my damn hand. She held it with a full grip, a firm shake that had nothing delicate about it as my blood surged and my nerve endings fired heat up my entire arm. Her palm wasn’t the delicate, useless hand of a spoiled heiress. Amid the scorching firestorm in my veins, I realized the truth. She had tiny friction calluses on the inside of her fingers—the distinct markings of a pilot who knew how to grip a cyclic stick. I felt the electric current of her strength mapping itself through the grease on my skin. I let go three seconds too late, completely unapologetic about the footprint my grease left on her spotless skin. She was marked now. By me.

"Holt."

She said it back to me the way a person says a word they're tasting. She didn't ask for a first name.

"Welcome to Forge Creek, Ms. Ashford."

"Lili, please."

"Ms. Ashford," I said again, because my mouth had decided some things my brain was going to have to catch up to.

A small smile. "All right," she said. "Holt."

Diaz, behind me, dropped a wrench. It was deliberate. He picked it up too slow and too loud, and I could feel him grinning without having to look.

"Thigh-highs in the hangar," he said, to the air, to nobody, to me. "Boss is gonna love that."

It was the kind of thing Diaz said, and ordinarily I'd have ignored it, but Lili — Ms. Ashford — turned and looked at him with that same even smile and said, "Hi. Are you the boss?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then I'll wait to be loved."

She said it lightly and Diaz laughed and the temperature of the hangar shifted by some fraction of a degree, and I understood that this woman was different from what I had decided she was.

"Office is over there," I said again, because it was the only thing I could figure out to do.