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Unless she was a ticketed passenger on the flight.
Did she really want to fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico in a bridesmaid dress, with nothing but her dainty little bridesmaid purse and an uncomfortable pair of satin shoes as baggage? And then she thought of Luke, of what he’d done for her, of how empty her life would be without him, and she knew the answer without a doubt.
If it hadn’t been for Luke, she wouldn’t have been able to fight off Eli, and more importantly, if it hadn’t been for Luke, Jane would still be a lonely, repressed thirty-year-old woman without a clue what she wanted out of life.
She picked up her skirt again and took off, following the signs to the airport check-in area. Luckily, there weren’t any hordes of people flying on a Saturday evening, so ten minutes later she had an unbelievably over-priced ticket in hand and she was running for the departure gate.
By the time she made it through the security checkpoint and to the gate, her hair had fallen all the way out of its sophisticated French twist, her stockings had an undetermined number of runs, and she was sweating like a woman who’d just run a marathon. She’d given up feeling embarrassed about all the people who’d stopped to stare at her along the way. The security guards at the gate eyed her warily but waved her through, by some miracle.
When Jane stepped onto the plane, a flight attendant at the entrance gave her a once-over and produced a strained smile. “I can’t wait to hear your story,” she said, then took Jane’s boarding pass and looked at it. “You can use the left aisle to get to 23C.”
Jane stopped to catch her breath and then offered up a silent prayer that Luke would forgive her hardheadedness, that he’d be able to overlook all her stupid assumptions and all the times she’d taken him for granted. Most importantly, she prayed for him to take her, flaws and all.
She made her way down the aisle, looking for his face in the anonymous crowd of passengers. It didn’t take long to spot him. He was sitting in an aisle seat near the middle of the plane, his head reclined against the headrest, his eyes closed. The window seat next to him was empty.
Jane stopped next to him. “Excuse me, I just need to get into my seat.”
Luke’s eyes opened and he gazed up at her, completely perplexed. “Jane.”
She tried hard not to smile. “Didn’t I tell you I was on this flight, too?”
“What are you doing—”
Holding up her hand to silence him, she said, “Do you mind if I sit first? I’m looking a little conspicuous here.”
He seemed to take in her marathon-running-bridesmaid appearance for the first time and raised an eyebrow. But mercifully, he stood up and let her get into the window seat.
When they were seated side-by-side, Jane turned to Luke. “Could we just back up a little, pretend a few things didn’t happen, maybe sort of…start over?”
He shrugged, rightfully unwilling to forget the way she’d behaved. A shrug was a start.
Jane took a deep breath. “So, what takes you to San Juan?”
“Business,” he said, tossing her a strange look.
“Ah, what sort of business are you in?”
He looked at her again, pausing for a long moment before he answered, probably deciding if he was willing to play along. “Security.”
She continued in her airplane chit-chat voice, “That sounds interesting. I recently had to hire a personal security specialist, myself.”
Luke was silent. A flight attendant began announcing safety procedures on the intercom as the plane taxied down the runway.
“You see, I’m an author. Maybe you’ve heard of my book, The Sex Factor? I’ve made quite a few men angry with it, and I had to hire someone to help protect me from them.
“But I made a huge mistake. I didn’t learn everything he tried to teach me, and I let him go when I shouldn’t have.”
“Sounds like you’ve got problems.” He pulled an in-flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him and began flipping through the pages.
“I was misguided. I wrote a book that gave some bad advice, and he tried to make me understand that I’d missed the mark. He was right.”
Luke looked at her then, his dark eyes inscrutable. “Could you say that first part again?”
“I was misguided?”
“Yeah, that.” He revealed a half smile then, and Jane’s pent-up emotions released by a tiny degree.
“I just don’t know how to tell him what I really feel.”
“Why don’t you try out what you have in mind on me. I’ll tell you if it sounds good.”
The roar of the plane engines grew louder, and the aircraft slowed to a stop, then accelerated. As they lifted off the runway, Jane looked out and saw Dallas just beginning to light up. To the west, the sun had splashed streaks of orange and pink across the sky as it set.
