I cover my head with my hands and curse before I lean into the aisle and watch her claim a seat far from anyone else. Squeezing my eyes shut, I lean my head back and try to think straight. Why didn’t she even ask why? A million answers fly through my head. She was ready for this. She knew it had to happen. She wasn’t sure she really loved me. I mean, we’ve only known each other for a few weeks. Or of course, there’s the other option: I hurt her. And damn it, she’s been hurt by everyone in her life.
***
PRI
Hurrying down the aisle of the plane, I move away from Adrian, and my heart is beating too fast.
My emotions are out of control. I’m really not an emotional person. I’ve stood across from many a monster and never even blinked. But Adrian is no monster. He’s the man I’d assumed myself in love with. But he’s right. We don’t know what we feel right now. We’ve known each other for a few weeks. That means we’re in lust, not love, infatuated at best. I’m infatuated with my key witness and that’s trouble.
I find an open lounge area with blankets and pillows and I sit down, scolding myself as I do. I’m the lead prosecutor on a dangerous case against a dangerous man. That comes with responsibility. I owe Waters’ victims my focus, my best. That means I can’t be distracted by a personal relationship with a witness.
Everything that is not about this case has to be set aside.
And yet somehow, my mind flashes to a moment in the bathroom when Logan’s hands had been all over me when his tongue had been in my mouth. I press my hands to my face. “I shot him,” I whisper, and my eyes open and land on a little compartment under the bench across from me, where there seems to be a minibar filled with, you guessed it, mini bottles of whiskey. I’m not a drinker, but I’m thirty thousand feet in the air and I shot my ex in the foot tonight after he almost raped me. I’m certainly not going to talk about what happened, so drinking it away seems logical. Besides, even if I was going to talk about it, the one person I might have done so with is Adrian, and he’s no longer on the options list as of a few minutes ago.
Adrian and I are no longer personal. That’s how it has to become. That’s how it has to be. He knows it. I know it.
Decision made, at least where the drink is concerned, I squat down in front of the minibar, grab a bottle, and I don’t even look at what I’m about to be drinking. I open the top, and gulp it, choking with the bite of amber liquid sliding down my throat. Once I’ve shoved the bottle in the trashcan that is by the little bar area, I sit back down.
I grab a pillow and hold it to me, and already the numbing effect of the whiskey is overcoming me and it’s sweet bliss. I lay down on the bench and unbidden, I’m back in the moment when Adrian walked onto the plane. Then the moment when my arms were around him and his were around me. And when his mouth had come down on my mouth, I’d tasted his passion, his desperation, his fear. His love. Or not.
What do I really know of love?
What do I know of anything right now? Well, aside from the fact that my father is dirty. My ex is a monster. My mother is a fool. And his conviction or not, Waters will never quit coming for me or Adrian. Not as long as he’s alive. I’ve never wished someone dead, but I do him. Waters is the devil on earth. And I can’t even believe I just had that thought.
Chapter Eleven
ADRIAN
“Move your ass over.”
At Savage’s gruff demand, I don’t fight the command. He has something to say and he’ll say it to the whole damn plane if I don’t give him room to join me and say it to me. “What do you want, Savage?”
“No appreciation for the wicked, I see. I saved that asshole back there.”
“And that’s supposed to please me?”
“Pri doesn’t have to deal with a death investigation, so yes. You should be so fucking pleased you pee yourself.”
“What do you want, Savage?”
“For you to listen. You don’t have to talk.” He pulls a bottle of whiskey from his pocket and hands it to me. “But you can drink if you want.”
On that, I don’t argue. We have hours on this plane, hours with Pri somewhere other than by my side. I open the bottle and take a slug, offering it to him. He downs a drink and says, “Candace and I were engaged years ago. And apart years after. Because like a dumb-ass fucktard, I left her.”