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)
She laced her fingers through his.
He made a sound.
Not a laugh. Not a sob. Something between, something that had no name because it was the sound of a man who had been holding his breath for months and had just, in a penthouse over the Mediterranean, with her fingers threaded through his, exhaled. His other hand came up and covered hers. Both of his hands around one of hers. He pressed their joined hands to his forehead and bowed over them and breathed, deep, shuddering, the breathing of a man whose lungs had remembered what air was for.
“Keep me,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes. His forehead was warm against their hands. His scar was a ridge she could feel against her knuckles. His breath was uneven and his hands were shaking and he was the most undone she had ever seen him and he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“Always.”
The word was quiet. Raw. The voice of a man who had spent thirty-five years building walls and had just, in a single word, dismantled the last one.
They stood there. Forehead to hands. Hands laced. Monaco glittering behind them. The Mediterranean silent and black beyond the glass. Two people who had spent months circling each other in sealed cabins at forty thousand feet, fighting wars with themselves and each other, building walls and tearing them down and building them again, two people who had been shaped by their fathers and survived in opposite ways and found each other in the narrow aisle of a first-class cabin and hadn’t, despite everything, let go.
She wasn’t crew. She wasn’t a promise. She wasn’t a debt.
She was his. And he was hers. And the sky, when they returned to it, together, hands clasped, the engines spooling and the ground falling away, would finally, finally, be theirs.
Epilogue
SHE ASKED HIM TO MARRY her the next morning.
Not with a ring. Not with a speech. She woke in the penthouse with Monaco silver and gold beyond the windows and his jacket over her shoulders, he had given it to her again, when the air conditioning in the penthouse dropped the temperature past comfortable, and she had taken it without protest because she was done refusing things from Andrei Almazov, and she said, over coffee that was significantly better than the hotel’s, “Marry me today.”
He set his cup down.
“Today.”
“Today. I don’t want a venue. I don’t want a guest list. I don’t want three months of planning to give either of us time to overthink what we’ve already decided. Your brothers. Raven. Someone with the legal authority to make it binding. Today.”
He looked at her across the table. The morning light caught his scar and turned it silver. His hands were around his coffee cup, the scarred hands, the champagne-flute hands, the hands she had laced her fingers through last night and was never going to let go of, and they were steady. For the first time since she had known him, his hands were completely still.
“Are you sure?”
She almost laughed. The man who had bought an airline, moved her belongings, purchased a flat, installed a security system, and rearranged her entire professional life without once asking if she was sure, that man was asking her now.
“Andrei. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. And I want one more thing.”
“Anything.”
“The wedding night. I want it in the air. On the jet. Our jet.”
He looked at her as if trying to gauge if she was serious, and she was.
“I want the first night of our marriage to be at forty thousand feet because that’s where we started and that’s where I want us to begin.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up his phone and made a single call.
“Anton. I need a favour. Several, actually. A marriage officiant by noon. The jet fuelled and filed for a night routing. And tell Alexei.”
A pause. She could hear Anton’s voice on the other end, not the words, but the tone. Delight. Absolute, unrestrained, Anton-level delight.
“Yes,” Andrei said. “Today.”
He hung up. Looked at her. And the thing that was almost a smile became, for one brief, shattering moment, an actual smile. Small. Uncertain. The smile of a man who had never had reason to practise and was doing it for the first time because the woman across the table had asked him to marry her over coffee and meant it.
The ceremony was in the Ace Royale penthouse at half past two.
Small. Anton as witness, grinning, of course, grinning so hard it looked like his face might split, holding a glass of champagne he had poured before the officiant had even arrived because Anton Almazov didn’t wait for occasions to begin before celebrating them. Raven beside Ciana, she had flown in from Nice on a charter Andrei had arranged in ninety minutes, and she had walked into the penthouse and looked at Ciana and looked at Andrei and said, very quietly, “You impossible woman. You magnificent, impossible woman,” and then she had hugged Ciana so hard that Ciana’s composure had cracked for the first time in weeks and she had laughed into Raven’s shoulder with the uncomplicated joy of a woman who had found her way home.