Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88902 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
“Why?” It was the hardest thing she had ever done, keeping her voice from breaking. “Because of your promise? Or because it was me?”
“Because you deserve someone who won’t ruin you.”
She looked at him. At the scar. At the hands still gripping the counter. At the eyes that were telling her everything his mouth refused to.
“You keep saying that.” Her voice didn’t break. She wouldn’t let it. “And you keep ruining me anyway.”
She left the galley.
He let her go.
She walked to the rear of the cabin and sat in the last seat and pressed her forehead against the window and the glass was cold against her skin and the world outside was black and featureless and she didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried since she was sixteen, since the hospital in Marseille, since the day she had learned that the people who are supposed to stay never do. She wasn’t going to cry now. Not for a man who had just shattered in her hands and was still, even shattered, going to give her away.
She pressed her palms against her eyes. Breathed.
The engine hum was steady. The aircraft moved through the dark. Somewhere forward, in the galley that smelled like coffee and him, a man was standing at the counter, alone, in the wreckage of the thing he had just refused to keep.
Morning.
A different morning. The Atlantic crossing was behind them. They had landed, separated, spent a day in rooms she didn’t want to think about doing things she didn’t want to imagine, and now it was the next flight and she was boarding the jet at the Nice airfield with her crew bag over her shoulder and her chignon perfect and her face a mask of professionalism so complete it could have been painted on.
She climbed the stairs. The cabin door was open. She stepped inside.
There was a woman in the cabin.
She was sitting in one of the four seats that faced each other across the walnut table, the seats that Ciana had never seen anyone occupy, because the jet was configured for one and the one was always Andrei and the rest of the cabin was always empty. The woman wasn’t empty. She was luminous. Tall, dark-haired, the kind of beautiful that had been assembled with care and money and the genetic confidence of someone who had never in her life walked into a room and wondered if she belonged there. She wore a cream silk blouse and gold at her throat and she was reading something on a tablet with the poised disinterest of a woman who had been placed here and was waiting, patiently, for the scene to begin.
Ciana stood in the doorway. Her crew bag was on her shoulder. Her hands were at her sides.
She heard the stairs shift. Heavy footsteps. The particular creak that only one person’s weight produced.
Andrei boarded behind her. She stepped aside to let him pass, professional, automatic, the body remembering its choreography even when the mind was somewhere else entirely. He moved through the cabin without looking at her. He sat in the seat beside the woman. Not his usual seat, not the forward suite, not the owner’s chair. The seat beside her.
His hand, the scarred one, the one that had gripped the counter last night while she took him apart, the one that had framed her face in the rain, the one that had grazed her cheekbone in Geneva, settled on the woman’s armrest.
Not touching her. But close. Close enough.
Ciana looked at that hand. She looked at the armrest. She looked at the beautiful woman who glanced up from her tablet and gave Ciana a smile that was warm and polite and completely, devastatingly innocent.
Something inside Ciana’s chest didn’t break. Breaking was a violent word, a loud word, a word for things that shattered. This was quieter. This was a door closing. A lock turning. A woman who had never been intimate with anyone, who had reached for this man last night with the first vulnerable act of her life, watching his hand rest on another woman’s armrest twelve hours later and feeling the last warm, stubborn, irrational part of herself go still.
She picked up the champagne bottle.
Chapter 8
SHE POURED CHAMPAGNE for the woman Andrei brought onto the jet and didn’t spill a single drop.
Dom Pérignon. The same case she had opened weeks ago, the first morning on this aircraft, when the only person in the cabin was a scarred, silent man in the owner’s seat and the only thing she had known about him was that his hands around a champagne flute made her notice things she had no business noticing. She lifted the bottle now with the same professional grip, the same forty-five-degree angle, the same controlled pour that turned the wine into a thin gold ribbon unspooling into crystal without a sound. She had done this a thousand times. She could do it in her sleep. She could do it while something inside her chest was turning to stone.