“She’ll deliver it to our apartment tomorrow.”
“Our?”
He glanced at me and then away and I liked it. I liked how for once in my life I was controlling the temperature in the room. It was…exciting. And perhaps it was the champagne or the danger. But that excitement pooled between my legs and began to hum. Filling me with reckless energy.
More champagne.
“What answers do you think we’re going to find in that bankers box?” I asked, crossing my legs like I was wearing a formal gown from my previous life and not a pair of black jeans and a borrowed flannel shirt and still no goddamned underwear.
“Why Caroline wanted you to marry the senator. What he was doing for the Morellis and why they wanted you dead or alive.”
“That’s a lot of work for a bankers box,” I said.
“I don’t know who the hell you’ve turned into,” Eden laughed, “but I like her. I like her a lot.”
“You liked the old me enough to want to fuck me,” I said, reckless and dangerous, and again the temperature in the cabin changed. The energy coiled and it was like each of us took a deep breath and held it.
“You should get some sleep.” Ronan’s voice was quiet and firm and I remembered the girl on that side lawn, the first time he used that voice. The way I’d wanted to do what he said. The way I craved his attention and approval.
“It’s my wedding night,” I said. I met his beautiful blue gaze and didn’t look away. My entire body shuddered with a memory, physical and real as if it were happening now and here rather than days ago. His body over mine, the thick head of his cock just inside of me. Just enough to hurt and feel better than anything ever had before in my life.
For that shaking and delicious second, I’d had the power. And he’d been helpless against me.
Yeah. I’ll have a side of that feeling with my champagne.
“It’s your wedding night, too,” I said, which was somehow the weapon that made him look away. His eyes on the dark sky out the window. His jaw tight. “Someone should get fucked.”
In the stone-cold silence, I drained the last of my champagne.
“Is this…a volunteer situation?” Eden asked, looking between Ronan and me.
“You’re drunk,” Ronan said, as scathing as he could be, which was pretty damn awful. I wasn’t drunk. Adrenaline was eating up the alcohol as fast as I could drink it. But I was in that dangerous place, that shaded gray between completely in and completely out of control. Maybe, I thought. Maybe this is where I’ll be from now on. I stood up, my legs spread wide so I didn’t topple in the slight movement of the plane. Eden was looking at me like a prize she’d won. Like we were in a cartoon and she was starving in the desert and I’d turned into a big chicken leg.
Stand up, I thought at her.
Like she heard me, like I was super powerful, she did, her body small and curvy and two inches from mine. The plane shimmied in turbulence and that was all it took for her body to brush mine. Our breasts. Our bellies. She reached out a hand to steady herself and I grabbed it with mine. I’m using you, I thought. I’m using you to make him do something. To provoke him into action. But then, she’d used us to save her own damn life, so maybe things were even.
“How sorry are you for making us get married and bringing us back here?” I asked her.
Her eyes ignited. “Very very sorry.”
“Have you ever kissed a woman?” Ronan asked, pulling my attention back to him. He sat, a dark shadow on all that cream leather. His leg was crossed, an ankle on his knee, and his arm was stretched out along the back of the banquette. He looked casual. Uninterested.
“Yes,” I said, surprising both of them. College. A party gone a little wild. A blonde volleyball player had kissed me and I had kissed her back until some frat boy came in and snapped a picture. The volleyball player had punched the frat boy in the face and deleted the picture off his phone. I’d spent the next week grappling with my sexuality and identity, and the next time I saw the volleyball player she’d moved on to the arms of a woman who worked in the student union.
“Did you like it?” Eden asked. There was a chance I had liked the idea of it more than the actual kiss, preoccupied as I’d been by the fact that I was kissing a woman.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
Eden smiled. She really was so pretty with all her manipulations and bright red lips. “Let’s try and jog your memory.”