Tempting the New Boss

by Angela Claire

  The cacophony of the storm permeated the cabin, and he wondered at how he had not heard anything of what was going on outside until now. Too engrossed on what was going on inside.

  And it had been a very enjoyable feeling.

  Her breath, rapid and warm, was against his neck as they endured the bumpy ride for a few minutes more until she broke the silence by saying, “When I said I might die tomorrow, I didn’t mean, like, literally tomorrow. This job is really turning out to have been a bad career move.”

  “We’ll be fine,” he said calmly, even though the two successive bumps right after his pronouncement—as if the plane had hit an air pocket and then lurched on—weren’t giving him a lot of confidence on that score. But he did feel calm. Strangely calm. Perhaps the endorphins released in his recent orgasm were contributing to that. Or maybe he was just glad to be here with her.

  Clearly, there was something wrong with him.

  Chapter Four

  Mason held her hand as the plane shook up and down and pretty much threatened to make her lose her scotch. Her hand was trembling, but his, which felt steady and warm against hers, wasn’t.

  Was this sudden turn of events all some kind of wildly out-of-proportion punishment for her lapse in professional judgment? Christ, she’d thought disbarment was the worst they could do to her for failing her lawyerly duties. Who said anything about plane crashes? She was clearly having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. She should have listened to Shreeman after all.

  Oddly enough, though, the looming danger had an effect on Talbot, too. It rendered him unusually composed and reassuring. When he put his arm around her and buckled her up, and even when he nodded at the pilot, he seemed more like a CEO than he ever had before then. She liked this strong, controlled side of him. Maybe life-and-death situations did that for the guy.

  Or maybe it was the sex.

  Whatever, she clung to him, not ashamed to be the obvious wimp that she was. Burying her head in his shoulder, she said the first thing she could think of. “Have you ever been in a plane crash before?”

  “No.” He brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Which is a shame, since statistically speaking, if I had been, it would be unlikely that we’d crash now. As you might imagine, the chances of one person being in two plane crashes, where flying is not their job, of course, is slight at best.”

  “There’s a flaw in that logic somewhere,” she muttered.

  “Don’t think about it too hard.”

  “What? Crashing?”

  He brought his face very close to hers, brushing his lips against her temple. “Anything.”

  She shook her head. “At least this is putting my ruined career in perspective.”

  “I am sorry if I ruined your career.”

  “No, you didn’t. Well, you did a little. I did the rest, I guess.”

  The plane took a precipitous dive that snatched any further words right out of her mouth. When they stabilized, sort of, she babbled on to keep the thoughts out of her head. “You’re really kind of nice.”

  He pulled back a little to look at her. “I am? Does that mean you’ll marry me?”

  “No!” She laughed. “You’re insane! Though maybe that is how this is supposed to go. We’re supposed to realize we’re meant to be together right before we plunge to our fiery deaths.”

  “I think it’d be our watery deaths if we don’t make it to Nova Scotia.”

  “Thanks so much for that clarification.”

  “But let’s not keep thinking about how it’s supposed to go. Okay? Let’s just let it go how it goes.”

  “I’m scared,” she said abruptly. “I’m scared I’m going to die, and I haven’t done anything but work.”

  He said nothing.

  “How about you?” She squeezed his hand. “Aren’t you scared?”

  “I’m less scared about what happens when we crash than I am about what happens when we don’t.”

  The plane swooped down, lower still, and she let out a terrified yelp. She wasn’t embarrassed about it, either.

  With the darkness outside the window, it was impossible to tell how high they were or weren’t relative to the ground. Or even if it was ground. It could still be water for all they knew.

  “What do you mean?” she whispered when she could, huddling even closer to him. “That you’re more scared if the plane doesn’t crash?”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I mean I don’t want you to quit.”

  “That’s it? Well, don’t worry about it. That’s not quite the catastrophic issue I thought it was a half hour ago.”

  “I want to have sex with you again.”

  One step forward and two steps back.

  “You know you should work on filtering out things before you say them.”

  “I will.”

  She wrapped her arms around his waist. “Did you, I mean, do you,” she purposely kept it in the present tense, “like your work? Designing and thinking up and making those thingies? If you do it all the time, do you at least like it? I wouldn’t have minded the hours I worked if I at least liked it. But I didn’t.”

  “I do. I did. I never minded working all the time. It was all I had. All I wanted.” He talked freely, quickly, filling up the horrible time it was going to take to see if they made it. “But now I think something was missing.”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Fulfilling your biological urges on a more regular basis?” She would have thought she was too scared to joke, but apparently not. Gallows humor anyone?

  He laughed. “Maybe. Maybe something more. I don’t know now.”

  The plane kept descending, feeling nothing like the countless descents in the air she had felt a hundred times or more. No smooth gradual motion, so slight you had to look out the window to register it. Instead the plane was jerking side to side along with the vertical drops, so hard and disconcerting her teeth would be rattling if she didn’t concentrate on keeping her jaw locked.

  Her face must have shown the effects of the descent. The pure unadulterated panic she could feel rising in her even as the plane itself dropped.

  Mason watched her, urgently, intently. “What would you like to do if you could?” he asked, loud enough to make himself heard over the increasingly deafening rattle of the aircraft and continued fury of Mother Nature.

  “Camilla!” he called her attention back. “What did you want to be when you grew up? When you were little?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  “Tell me,” he demanded, keeping her gaze on him with the force of his somehow.

  “I think I wanted to be a pilot,” she finally said, laughing at the irony of that at this very moment. “I never saw myself as a flight attendant like some little girls did.”

  “Wimps,” he said with a smile.

  “Just less full of themselves, I think.” She had to shout now too, and keeping the volume up helped to block the rest of it out. At least a little. So she kept it up. “But I was always wanting to run the show. Always the pilot. Not that my big sisters would let me if they were in the game.”

  “Smart enough to be whatever you wanted to be, I bet.”

  “Well, dumb enough to think I could be anyway.”

  “You have sisters?”

  “A ton of them.”

  “What?”

  “A lot. Eight kids total.”

  “Eight? Wow. You’re kidding?”

  “Would I kid you at a time like this, Mason?”

  He was smiling steadily, tugging her closer, keeping eye contact. He really did have the deepest blue eyes. His sperm donor must have been something.

  “What was it like growing up with so many kids?”

  Answering that could at least take up the rest of the time here. But she couldn’t find her usual longwinded, many-faceted response to that inevitable question and just said, “Crowded!”

  “What number are you in the birth order?”

  She shut her eyes tightly, try
ing to transport herself out of where she was. To put herself in that big house in Detroit with her six sisters and her little brother. “Seventh. I was seventh. Youngest of seven girls. I had a—I mean have a—”

  The plane took a bump so hard her luggage tumbled down from the overhead compartment, barely missing them, and the cabinet where she’d gotten her scotch came unlatched from whatever held it to the wall and started careening up and down the aisle, crashing with her carry-on.

  Oh God, she could not do this. She thought about something her mother had once said about childbirth, a subject about which the poor woman understandably knew volumes. There’s a moment in the delivery room, she had said, where there’s all this pain and you have a panicked feeling that you can’t get out of it. That you just have to do it.

  And then, she had followed up with a beatific smile, you go right through it and everything is okay and they hand you this beautiful baby.

  She couldn’t die. She just couldn’t.

  And she had always wanted children, she thought suddenly. She’d never known it, but right now she did. She knew it.

  And it was never going to happen.

  “Open your eyes, Camilla,” Mason barked, shaking her to bring her back to him. “We’re going to land. That’s all. You have a what? Tell me!”

  “A little brother.”

  She whispered it, but he heard, or else he could read lips.

  “One boy and seven girls? Jesus, he must be spoiled.”

  “He’s great. Joey is so great.”

  And she started to cry.

  The wings clipped something solid in terrifying bites as they descended, tipping sharply one way and then the other to avoid it, like a drowning person gasping for air, and the plane came down in one bone-crunching move that keeping her jaw locked had not spared her. Suddenly, they were skidding along whatever surface they were on, going so fast on the ground that if there were even the slightest tree or pole in their path they would surely get their fiery death. Maybe watery would have been better.

  And she and Mason held on to each other for dear life, their eyes locked in a desperate closeness as the world shattered around them. They clung to one another as if not a breath should try to come between them, not knowing or caring where one of them began and the other ended. Whether it was advisable or not, whether they would have been better served by cradling their heads low between their knees or reaching for the oxygen masks, which had come down at some point, or whatever, they didn’t do any of the things flight attendants had warned them to do in the event of disaster on every single airplane they’d ever been on. Instead they held tightly, fiercely, to each other.

  Holding on to each other felt so much more reassuring.

  By the time the plane jolted to a stop, hot tears rolled down her cheeks, and the blood coursed through her veins like never before.

  She took an impossibly deep breath. The plane had stopped. They were alive.

  The cockpit door burst open just as they loosened their hold on each other, and both pilots came out, drenched in sweat and beaming.

  “We made it!” one of them said.

  “Fucking amazing!” the other one chimed in.

  Camilla sat up, away from Mason, wiping the moisture from her face with her sleeve, feeling disoriented. When he went to unsnap her belt, she brushed his hands away and did it herself. He did the same, still seeming calm and self-possessed, looking over her shoulder. “This doesn’t look like Halifax.”

  When she recovered enough to peer out the window, through the sheets of rain and unnatural darkness that came with a storm rather than nightfall, all she could see were rows of trees, branches whipping around in the wind, so dense in their green that they barely provided a pause in the otherwise black around them.

  “We didn’t make it to Halifax.” The pilots looked out the window of the door to the plane, turning various knobs, pulling back latches. “We were flying blind, the fuel gage plunged, and we had to land. Thank God, this was here.”

  They opened the plane door, letting in a gust of rain and wind, and gestured for them to get up. “We better get right out. This jet took a hell of a beating. No telling if there might be a fire that broke out. We’ll check around the perimeter, make sure it looks okay and that there are no signs of trouble before we do anything else.”

  “I understand,” he said, reaching for his ugly suit jacket and putting his hand on Camilla’s elbow to steer her out before him. Her legs were shaky when she stood.

  After losing it on the plane as she had, she shook off Mason’s hand, wanting to walk on her own down the stairs, though she had to grip the railing tightly to do so. When she got to the ground, she nearly slipped on the combination of the mud and her still shaky legs, righting herself at the last minute and glaring around to see if anybody caught it.

  Only Talbot did, right behind her, watching her closely.

  The pilots walked around the plane with flashlights, shielding their eyes from the rain as they examined the engines, talking in tones to each other she could not hear, before one of them said loudly, “Looks all clear.”

  Camilla tipped her hot face up to the steady fall of the cooling drops as the pilots slapped each other on the back and grinned. She heard Mason in the background saying, “We really appreciate what you did up there.”

  No etiquette lesson required.

  He must need a potential plane crash to behave like a normal human being. Or when it counted, he knew the right things to say. And she hadn’t even thanked the pilots for the ultimately safe landing. She would. She absolutely would. As soon as she got herself together.

  Cupping her hands to catch the rain, she splashed some on her cheeks and neck, consoling herself that she at least had not wet her pants, if nothing else. Well, she hadn’t barfed either she supposed. But other than that, she’d pretty much fallen apart while her boss stayed calm.

  It said something about modern intimacy that she was more embarrassed by her weakness and her closeness with Mason during the harrowing plane descent than she was about having sex with him.

  And she absolutely hated the crying thing. Anything but that. With seven girls, her parents were tired of tears by the time they got to Camilla, and she never indulged in the exercise of crying, since it did her no good.

  She swiped her hands across her face a number of times, sure any traces of makeup were long gone, until she thought she looked as normal as a girl could look after a brush with death and everything, and then she went over to the others.

  Starting with the pilots was easy. They were grinning now like little boys at a candy counter, patting the plane as if it was their faithful dog right beside them, and she said, “I can’t thank you enough for getting us through that.”

  In the tough guy way pilots were supposed to do it, they minimized the feat with a lot of “doing our jobs” and so on. She never would have been able to be a pilot now that she thought about it and was surprised that the long ago dream, probably as long ago as kindergarten, had even come up when Mason had pressed her.

  He stood quietly by, looking around, and only then did she take in that they were absolutely nowhere, in the middle of a jumble of mud and woods through which the pilots had miraculously detected a strip of land that might have been a runway once but now was far from the carefully laid out and tended pavement she was used to taxiing down and landing on. Crowded with drenched weeds and only just long enough to fit in the descent of their jet without crashing into the trees beyond or the black lake visible to the left, the strip afforded no lights, no painted markers to guide pilots, and most importantly, no traffic control tower or people of any kind manning one.

  Mason smiled at her. “See, what did I tell you? We landed safely.”

  The unreasonable resentment she harbored for the fact that he had stayed calm and she had fallen apart melted away. A flush of gratitude overtook her and she smiled weakly. “Yes, you were right.”

  She was still shaking, but God, she was alive. They
were actually alive.

  Whether Camilla realized it, she was still crying. Tears leaked down her face and mixed in with the steady rain as she appeared to be trying to smile. It was nothing like the expression she was always naturally breaking into, even occasionally when she was angry with him on the plane, as if she couldn’t help herself. This expression involved only a tremulous stretching of her beautiful pink lips, an effort to smile, not a smile in itself. He felt tender toward her, protective, and at the same time proud of her brave effort to buck up, to shake off the near death experience and try to reclaim her feisty norm. Whatever fears and apprehensions he had—where the hell were they anyway?—melted away, and a surge of exhilaration coursed through him. They had made it, all in one piece, and they were here, now, together.

  He put his arm around her shoulders, and this time she didn’t push him away, shivering. In the exultation, none of them had paid much attention to the fact they were all getting soaking wet.

  One of the pilots shown a flashlight down the strip, in the direction they had come from in their landing. “I’m going to go see if there’s a sign or building or something we didn’t make out.”

  He headed that way.

  “Come on,” Mason said to Camilla. “Let’s go back inside for a minute where it’s dry.” He turned to the remaining pilot. “Okay to go sit back in the plane, while we figure out what to do here?”

  “Hang on a minute, sir, until the captain comes back. We want to make sure she doesn’t blow.”

  “What?” she cried in alarm, her fingers clutching at Mason’s jacket, as all three of them moved farther back from the plane at the possibility.

  “We don’t think it will,” the pilot added hastily. “The wings were roughed up a little from the tree tops as we came down, but the gas tanks weren’t punctured, and there was no sign of leaking fuel, so it looks like the readings must have been faulty. And of course no fires broke out. She’s shaken, but she’s okay.”