Page 63 of Falling for the Playboy Pilot

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DALTON

We wound our way back toward the party. “Mouth still on fire?” I asked her.

She laughed. “No. I think I’m recovered. Thank you for saving me from myself. I should have listened to your warnings.”

“We all had to learn the hard way,” I said. “We tried to save you.”

She was gorgeous and wild, and it rattled me more than I wanted to admit. In the cockpit, rules were everything. They were necessary. They kept us alive, kept us focused, kept us from making the kind of mistakes that got people killed. But down here, watching her laugh at her own misfortune with that chili, seeing her drop to her knees without a second thought to pet a mangy cat, I loved how free she was. How she didn’t second-guess herself or worry about what other people thought.

It scared the hell out of me, and fear was not an emotion I was accustomed to. I’d built my whole life around control, around keeping people at arm’s length where they couldn’t hurt me. Where I couldn’t hurt them. But Janna was different. She didn’t just slip past my defenses; she bulldozed right through them like they were made of tissue paper.

The way she’d looked at me when she caught me with Max, like she was seeing something in me that I tried to keep hidden. The way she’d laughed when she figured out I had a soft spot for a stray cat.

I watched her walking beside me, still licking the last of the ice cream from her cone. I felt something shift in my chest. Something dangerous. Something that said she might be worth the risk of putting my heart out there where it could get smashed to pieces.

I pushed those thoughts down before they could take root. I’d gotten good at that over the years. I was really good at compartmentalizing, shutting off parts of myself that were too dangerous to examine. Building a lasting, meaningful relationship wasn’t something I thought about. That was for other people with normal lives. People who hadn’t seen the things I’d seen, and who hadn’t lost friends like I had.

I’d watched good men disappear into smoke and flame. I’d stood at too many funerals, shaken hands with too many widows, looked into too many kids’ eyes and seen the exact moment they realized their dad wasn’t coming home.

I glanced at Janna again, at the way the setting sun caught the gold in her hair, and felt that familiar tightness in my throat. She was everything I couldn’t afford to want. Young, full of life, believing she was invincible the way we all did before the job taught us otherwise. She still looked at flying like it was pure magic instead of controlled chaos that could go bad at any second.

The smart thing would be to keep my distance. Keep things physical, keep it simple. Don’t let her get too close to the parts of me that were already broken.

“Dalton?”

I blinked and glanced over at her. I had been off in my own world. “What?” I asked.

She nudged me. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“You sure? You looked like you went somewhere else.”

I looked away. I wasn’t used to people noticing. And definitely not asking. “Just thinking.”

She nodded. “About what?”

I shook my head. “Nothing important.”

Her voice got softer, quietly persuasive. “You can tell me.”

We had passed by the party and were walking toward the edge of the property. I hadn’t even realized we were still walking.

I sighed and kicked at a loose stone. I hadn’t talked about the dark thoughts that plagued me. Not with anyone. But something about her made me feel like I could trust her with the things that haunted me when I was alone at night. Hell, anytime I was alone with my thoughts.

“Let me tell you a story,” I said quietly.

She didn’t say anything.

I took a deep breath and gathered the courage to just spit it out. We found a couple of tree stumps to sit on, away from the noise and lights of the party. I could hear the distant sound of laughter and music, but it felt like we were in our own little world out here.

“Three years ago, we got called out to a fire about forty miles north of here,” I began, my voice rough. “Started as a small spot fire, maybe ten acres. The kind we could usually knock down in a couple hours if we caught it early.”

Janna settled beside me, not saying anything, just listening. The way she waited, patient and still, made it easier somehow.

“They sent in a crew of jumpers first. Eight guys. Good guys, all of them. I’d worked with most of them before.” I rubbed my jaw, feeling the familiar knot form in my stomach. “The plan was simple. I’d make a retardant drop on the north side to cut off the fire’s path, give the jumpers a safe zone to work from while they built a firebreak.”