He stared at her profile, seeing the clenched jaw and the glaze of misery in those golden eyes.
Knowing that he was the last person who should criticize someone for trying to hide their feelings he straightened and returned to the front of the airplane.
He’d disciplined himself right from the start never to allow emotions access to the cockpit. He flew with his head and his instincts engaged, knowing that plenty of accidents had occurred when the pilot was distracted.
He told himself that today was no different.
He might have dropped Brittany ten days into their marriage, but he wasn’t about to dump her into the ocean.
And if she was upset, well, she had her friends to talk to.
She didn’t need him.
WHY THE HELL hadn’t she taken the ferry?
Her head ached and her wrist throbbed, but the feeling that bothered her most of all was the butterfly flutter of awareness in her stomach that refused to die.
It was a feeling she associated with her teenage years, along with the heady excitement of first love and the shivery recklessness that was part of youth.
She didn’t expect to feel it now, years later, when she was older and supposedly wiser.
Too wise to be distracted by a strikingly handsome face and a body made of hard honed muscle and sinuous strength.
Remembering Sky’s suggestion that they should just have sex, she ran her good hand over her face and closed her eyes.
The more she tried not to think about it, the more she found herself thinking of nothing else. She could imagine herself sliding her hands under his shirt, tracing skin pulled taut over the brutal swell of hard muscle. She could feel the coarseness of chest hair grazing her naked flesh, the graze of his jaw as he dragged his mouth down her body. She could feel the slow stroke of his hands, the skill of his mouth …
Shit.
She opened her eyes.
She wasn’t going to feel any of that.
She wasn’t going to be the sort of woman who repeated her mistakes.
He’d been her first lover. She’d been eager, but clueless, following his lead in everything. It had felt like the biggest adventure of her life. She’d had relationships since, but nothing that had matched the physical intimacy she’d shared with Zach.
What would it be like now?
With a groan, she opened her eyes and stared out the window.
That was one question she was never going to be able to answer.
No way.
She wasn’t going there.
The moment they landed, she ripped off the headset, dived into her bag for her phone and called Emily.
The call went to voice mail and she decided to wait a few minutes and call back instead of leaving a message.
Zach strolled out of the cockpit. “Something wrong?”
“No. But I’m supposed to be calling Emily when we land, and her phone is going to voice mail.”
“I’ll take you home.” He gave her a long look that made her wonder if somewhere on his sophisticated instrument panel was a device that scanned her thoughts.
Presumably not, or the aircraft would have been filled with ringing alarms and flashing red lights.