Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

Rio looks over the side, wind whipping her hair and making her cheeks vibrate. The ground falls away, trees shrink to become bushes, a tractor looks like a toy, cows are reduced to black-and-white mice.

“I’m flying!” Rio exults.

“Is this your first time up?” Strand says. His mouth is quite near her ear, and she can hear him clearly. She can also feel the rise and fall of his every breath, and even, when she focuses her attention, the beat of his heart.

“My very first!” she shouts into the wind.

“You’re taking it well,” he says. “Some girls might be nervous.”

“I’m not some girls.”

“Sorry? Couldn’t hear you.”

“I said, I’m not some girls!”

She feels rather than hears his laugh.

They fly over hills and over lakes. They fly over farms and orderly vineyards and then turn toward Gedwell Falls.

“Take the stick.”

“No!”

“Just hold it steady, I’m going to take some pictures.” He takes her hands in his and places them on the long, upright wooden baton. She instantly feels the life of the plane in her hands and with it the urge to move the stick, to make the plane obey her, which she sensibly resists.

Strand twists to one side, holding the camera with hi

s left and straining to get his right arm around her to reach the shutter. He has to reach beneath her arm, pressing his strong bicep against her breast.

She wonders if he can feel her heart accelerate. She wonders if he notices that she is no longer breathing. Certainly he cannot see the blush that spreads up her neck to her cheeks, but he is certainly noticing something, because there are subtle changes in his breathing as well, and he squirms a little to lessen contact that she might find . . . improper.

She is in the air. She is in the arms of a boy, no, a man. Something dark and insistent is awake in her, a feeling like pressure, a feeling like hunger. She has never been this physically close to a man, never felt this, never known she would or could feel this. And she would never have believed how much she does not want it to end.

“Shall we make a strafing run on your house, then do some loops over town square?” Strand asks.

“Not unless you want my mother to have a heart attack!”

“God forbid!”

They fly for an hour, all the aviation fuel they can afford, and finally land back in the field.

Once on the ground, Strand begs her to stand beside the plane. “I want a picture.”

“Of me or the plane?”

He takes several shots: Rio with her hand resting on a strut, Rio back up in the cockpit, and quite by accident Rio slipping so she ends up sitting with legs splayed out on the ground beneath the plane.

So much for avoiding telltale grass stains.

“That last one was pretty good, but would you mind tripping again? I’d like to—”

She gives him a playful shove. He takes her hand and, in a single deft motion, draws her to her feet and into his arms.

And kisses her.

It doesn’t last long, that kiss. But when it is done she senses that a profound change has occurred in her world. She has imagined being kissed, but she has never before craved it. Now she wants very badly to kiss him back, to put her arm around his neck and pull him down to her, and for the kiss to go on longer, much longer.

But Rio Richlin is a good girl; she is not Jenou, though she bitterly regrets that fact at the moment. Instead she laughs with forced gaiety to conceal a needier emotion and dances away.