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He closed the magazine and covered his eyes with his huge hand.
His huge hand that was shaking. And his forehead was kind of glistening, like he was sweating. It wasn’t hot in the airplane, even though it was full of people, most of them humans.
I don’t know why I smiled when the thought occurred to me. “Are you afraid of heights?”
His eyes opened wide the next second. “No,” he spit, way too fast.
My smile spread wider. “Yes, you are.” He hid his face with his hand again. “The great Dominic Dane, who slays berserkers and kills kelpies all on his own, is afraid of flying.” Holy shit, Patricia was going to love this so much.
“I am not afraid of anything,” he said and suddenly leaned closer to me until his face was all that I could see. “We’re in the air!” he whisper-yelled. “There’s no ground beneath this thing for miles. All it takes is a single machine to malfunction, and then we’re all gone.”
Oh, my God, he really was afraid of heights!
I tried my damn best to bite back the laugh. I really tried.
And I failed.
My shoulders shook, and I turned back to the window, looking at the darkness and lights that were miles beneath us, until I had myself under control again.
“Sorry about that. It’s not funny, I know.” I cleared my throat. “When I was little, my mom had this strange story to tell me every time I was afraid of something. Thunder and lightning got to me pretty badly. They still do, a little bit.” I hated it when the sky roared—it was the one monster none of us could do anything against, not with magic, not with weapons, not with numbers. “But anyway, she told me to close my eyes first.” I waited for him to do the same, but he just kept blinking at me. “Just close your eyes, Dominic. I’m not going to kill you on a plane full of people.”
By some miracle, it worked. Blowing out a breath, he closed his eyes.
“Good. Now imagine this: what will happen next?” I remembered my mom’s voice, and I used it in my own head even now, at twenty-three years old. It still calmed me like a charm. “Imagine you’re sitting there, safely strapped, and the plane is in the air, soaring through the sky, and every piece of it works as it’s supposed to. And when the time comes, it will slowly move closer and closer to the ground, and its giant wheels will touch down, and then the plane will stop, and the doors will open, and we’ll get off it the same way we got on. Safely. And then you’ll look back at this moment and think how silly it was that you were scared in the first place. Everything was going to go as it was supposed to from the beginning.”
I talked and the words were familiar, but not because I’d ever heard them before. My mother took me through what happened during a thunderstorm, all the way until the sun shone the next morning, and we were out chasing rainbows. Knowing the steps of it made it so much easier to imagine the happy ending. It made me brave, even if only for a moment.
Dominic didn’t open his eyes when I finished speaking. I bit my tongue, terrified that I’d bored him to sleep. Not that that was a bad thing for him, just for me.
“Dominic?” I whispered, my eyes scrolling over every inch of his face, every line and every curve, as if I was trying to memorize the details of him. My God, he really was beautiful. Those pitch-black brows and those dense lashes that were just begging my fingertips to run over them, and that beard framing those perfectly defined lips of his…
“And what happens if something does go wrong, and we end up crashing on the ground instead?”
His voice took me by surprise. He’d opened his eyes and had caught me staring at his lips. Shit. I turned to the window again, mortified.
“Then we die quickly,” I mumbled. “It’s not such a bad way to go.” My eyes squeezed shut. It was a terrible way to go.
“We die quickly,” he mumbled to himself and leaned back in his seat with a sigh.
I focused on my breathing, focused on not thinking about his face. So what that I was attracted to the looks of him? He was a handsome man. There was nothing wrong with that. It wasn’t the end of the world.
But I had to stop staring at him, and thinking about his lips, and about how close he had been to actually kissing me in front of my apartment building. We were here to work. On a mission. We hated each other, and that’s all we were ever going to feel about one another.
“All right, Teddybear,” he said after a few minutes. When I turned to him again, he no longer covered his face with his hand or pretended to read a magazine. He simply leaned closer to me to whisper in my ear: “I can’t tell you much right now. Too many people around us. But you can read this.” And while he reached in his pocket for a folded piece of paper, my heart was about to burst right out of my ribcage. I felt his breath blowing down my neck and every inch of me was covered in goose bumps as a result.
Did he notice?
Please, please, please don’t let him notice.
I focused on the piece of paper, and as soon as he gave it to me, I pressed myself to the other side of my seat, trying to put as much distance between us as I could. I should have just asked someone to exchange seats with me so I wouldn’t have to sit in the same row with him, damn it.
“Read that. We’ll talk more when we land. Just remember one thing,” he said, leaning closer and closer to me again. This time, I was determined to be in control of my body. No more goose bumps. No more noticing how his breath felt on my skin. I was a grown woman. I could handle a hot wolf-ass just fine. “The moment I wear that man’s skin, you’re going to pretend to be in love with me. Do you understand me? Our lives depend on it, Teddybear.”
No, no, no, no.
Stop!
It wasn’t working. I tried to control my feelings, my senses, my reactions, but my brain was blocked. Error 404. System not responding. By the time he leaned back in his seat, I was covered in goose bumps again, my cheeks were flushed, and the letters on that piece of paper swam and swam for a good two minutes before I was able to make out a single word.
Damn you, Dominic Dane.
