Fight or Flight

The surprise in his expression abruptly transformed into surly with a curl of his upper lip. “I hope you dinnae expect a thank you.”

His tone was so cold I almost shivered. I realized at some point in our conversation I’d started leaning toward him. Pressing back against my seat away from him, I mirrored his expression. “Silly me to even expect it.”

“Aye, well, annoying me tae distraction doesn’t count as being helpful.”

I returned my attention to my e-reader, readying myself to ignore his existence. “You are a miserable bastard, do you know that?”

“Babe, when I start caring what pampered princesses think about me, I’ll know my life is no longer worth living.”

Hurt flashed through me hot and unwanted, making my cheeks prickle. This guy was horrible. Just horrible! My fault for feeling sorry for him and mistakenly thinking his behavior could be excused due to his fear. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. “Stop calling me ‘babe.’ My name is Ava.”

He didn’t respond and I wished I’d just ignored him entirely.

When they announced that we could start using larger devices, my loathsome neighbor pulled his laptop back out and returned to disregarding my presence—something I decided was a blessing. I was no longer insulted by his pretending I didn’t exist. Clearly, it was better for my self-esteem that he did.

However, either it was the book I was reading or he was affecting me more than I’d have liked, because I could not get into the story. I would have turned to sketching, whether it was designs for work or just random sketches for my own pleasure. But Stella had told me not to pack my laptop and to set an out-of-office notice on my e-mails so I wasn’t distracted by work, and I’d decided not to bring my sketchpad either. My boss was covering for me for the next few days, because she wasn’t just my boss; she was my friend. There were only four of us at Stella Larson Designs. Stella, myself, Paul, and our junior designer, Gabe. We handled projects all over the world, not just in the U.S. I was used to flying out to a project, taking specs, measurements, an abundance of photographs, so I could design the space from our office in Boston. Depending on the size of the project, I’d maybe have to fly back to the site a number of times.

The budgets we worked with ranged from the mid six figures to well into millions of dollars. And we were dedicated to Stella’s company. She made it easy, demanding excellence with a no-nonsense attitude, but treating us as more than employees: as friends who could talk to her when we had a problem. There were not a lot of employers like Stella, and she’d won our loyalty with her own. The day she approached me after seeing the results of my first big solo project out of college (I’d convinced my uncle to let me overhaul his office, and he just happened to be Stella’s accountant), was one of the luckiest days of my life.

But right now, I was cursing Stella for being a good boss. I wish she’d demanded I stay on top of my work because right then I could have been answering a bunch of e-mails—e-mails I was sure were piling up between the two projects I was currently working on. Sometimes I had clients who turned the reins fully over to me; most times my clients just wanted to have the overall aesthetic (maybe even fabrics and palettes) run by them. And then there were the few who wanted to be involved in every choice I made. They were the exhausting clients and right now I had one of them.

I could only imagine she was going nuts waiting on me to get back to work.

Well, I knew the feeling.

I enviously watched my seatmate work away on his laptop.

The only bright spot was when the flight attendants offered us a light lunch and I got that cup of coffee I’d been longing for. It was instant, so it wasn’t great, but it was caffeine and I could not help the little sigh of pleasure that escaped my lips after the first sip.

I thought I felt the Scot tense at the noise, but when I side-eyed him, he was digging into his lunch, ignoring me.

My lunch could wait. First I savored my coffee.

“If you’re not going tae eat that, I will,” he said, sounding annoyed.

How I managed to rankle him just sitting there I did not know.

“I am going to eat it. I’m enjoying my coffee first.”

“I thought maybe you were one of those women that doesn’t eat.” He shrugged, throwing back the rest of his coffee.

“I think we’ve established you’re a judgmental pain in the ass.” I smiled sweetly before turning to my lunch. Feeling his eyes on me, I ate it slowly and deliberately, knowing intuitively that it would bother him. And it was not my imagination that the tension between us thickened as I brought bite after bite of the ham salad to my mouth at a snail’s pace.

“Take that,” he grunted out, and I turned my head to see he was holding his empty tray out to the flight attendant. The flight attendant stared at it, momentarily stunned.

“Of course, sir,” he said calmly, practiced, before taking it and walking away.

Irate at his behavior, I couldn’t help myself. “Do you ever say please or thank you?”

He cut me a dark look. “What?”

I gestured with my plastic fork to where the flight attendant had been standing. “People aren’t your servants. The flight attendants are not your servants. They’re doing a job and trying to make this flight easier on you. You can be forgiven for being abrupt and standoffish and maybe unintentionally insulting because you’re anxious about flying. I was trying to tell myself that, anyway. But the way you speak to people in customer service makes you an arrogant, entitled prick.”

“If I were you, I’d shut up and mind my own business.”

“Yeah, well, if I were you, I’d reach into that goddamn dark soul of mine and pull a thank you out of there every now and then.”

I didn’t know if it was the honest pique trembling in my words, but the Scot’s eyes widened marginally before he glowered and pulled his laptop back out with a clatter on top of his table.

Hateful, hateful man.

Ignoring him now came much, much easier. In fact, after lunch (and another coffee) I actually got into my book. The urge to use the bathroom about fifty minutes from our estimated arrival, however, made continuing to ignore my neighbor impossible. I was going to have to ask him to move. Plus, I was too warm and was dying to take off my jacket.

“Could you please let me out?” I asked in a carefully neutral tone.

Equally lacking in expression, he grabbed up his laptop, pushed his table back in, and gestured for me to get out.

I stared at the barely-there gap between his knees and the seat in front of him. Was he kidding? He wasn’t going to get out of his seat? My gaze flew to his face, but he was staring determinedly ahead.

Fine!

If I happened to step on his feet and then grind my stiletto into his toes, that was his fault. Huffing, I got up, grabbed hold of the top of the seat in front of him, trying not to touch the head of the woman sitting in it, and I shoved my right leg into the teeny gap he’d left. If he’d been an average-sized man, I probably would have squeezed past no problem in the spacious first-class seats.

But he wasn’t an average-sized man.

My leg touched his and my fingernails dug into the headrest in front of me. I shimmied into his space, bringing my left leg into the mix, and I heard him curse when my heel came down on his left foot. A fizzle of satisfaction moved through me and I pushed farther into his space. I felt his legs tense and I was suddenly very aware that my ass was in his face. Thankfully, it was mostly hidden by the peplum of my jacket.

With one last shimmy I stumbled out into the aisle and looked back at him, hoping he was seared and scorched by the heat of my glower.

The bastard already had his laptop back out.

Wondering how it was possible a person as ill-mannered as he hadn’t been caught by karma by now, I marched down the short aisle and into the bathroom at the entrance of the galley.

Inside, I did my business, washed up, and yanked out of my jacket, feeling unbearably hot. Thankfully, the silk camisole I wore was cut low enough under my arms that there were no damp patches on the material. I patted under my arms and sniffed to make sure I didn’t smell. Though I didn’t, I’d need to freshen up soon in order to avoid it. Not that I cared if I smelled while sitting next to that asshole. I’d do anything to make the rest of his flight uncomfortable.