Wild Fire (Chaos #6.5)(7)

She made a show of stopping, blasting him with an unhappy look, then drooping a shoulder to allow a beat-up leather backpack to fall off. She caught the strap in her hand, dug into the pack, pulled out her phone, then made a further show of taking it out of airplane mode and waiting until it binged with her texts.

“Should turn off airplane mode the instant the wheels touch down like every other loser who can’t breathe without an electronic connection,” she mumbled irritably to her phone then looked at him. “Carolyn shared. Thanks for coming all the way out here to get me.”

She said that last like she wasn’t thankful even a little bit.

“Not a problem,” he lied right back.

Her eyes narrowed like him not meaning what he said was rude, but her doing it when he’d just met her and was doing her a big, freaking favor was a-okay.

Jesus.

This was Carolyn’s sister, all right, totally the pain in the ass Carolyn had described her to be.

“You gotta pick up a bag from baggage claim?” he asked in order to get this show on the road.

“Yeah,” she answered, her gaze scanning for the screens that shared baggage claim info.

“You’re on seven.”

“Right,” she muttered and started motoring.

He watched her go.

More accurately, he watched her ass as she went.

Okay, he’d give friendly a try.

“Not a carry-on person?” he asked, falling into step beside her.

She was tall-ish. Maybe five six. Five seven.

And something the photo didn’t share, she was curvy as fuck.

Carolyn was tall too, but reed thin, no tits, but even he had to admit she had a great ass.

Georgiana had it all. Tits. Ass. Thighs. A belly.

She was Ashley Graham and then some.

And just as fuckable.

Fuck him.

“I like to shampoo my hair, and sadly, I can’t shake my dedication to mascara and foundation. Too many liquids to get through security,” she said to the space in front of her, like she was talking to air, and he didn’t exist. “And I detest all those jerks who cram all their crap in the overheads, making boarding last a million years instead of twenty minutes. They act like getting one over on the airlines and not paying to check a bag is akin to their own personal V-E Day.”

Right, well, it wasn’t like he didn’t know she was opinionated.

He definitely knew that.

And now it was confirmed.

“And when they shove their stuff in the bins over first class, and they don’t sit in first class, it makes me want to scream,” she ranted on. “I mean, the folks in first class either pay through the nose for those seats or travel so much, they have the miles to upgrade and earn a guaranteed section of overhead bin. It isn’t like the flight attendants won’t find a place for your bag because every other blockhead has taken up all the remaining space. And they’ll use first class if they have it. And a bag checked at the gate does not spontaneously combust when it’s put in the cargo hold. But you didn’t pay for that privilege, and you take it anyway, because you somehow think it’s your due, so how the world revolves around you, I do not know.”

Okay then.

He’d given it a shot by asking what he thought was an innocuous question.

He decided it was quiet from here on out.

“Needless to say,” she carried on even though he’d given her no indication he wanted to hear more, “I’d upgraded once, long flight, like this one. To New York. I was running late, got to the plane, so I didn’t get to board at the beginning. I had my laptop bag, which isn’t very big, mind you, and my backpack, and I had to put one in the overhead bin, no way I was going to check either. The plane wasn’t fully boarded, but some buffoon in the back had shoved his bag in my bin and the rest of first-class stowage was totally full. The guy sitting next to me was already there, saw it and told me. So I had to shove my laptop bag in a bin halfway up the plane. It sucked. I had to work on that flight, and it was a nuisance walking back there to get my laptop. Jerk.”

They’d made it to carousel seven, and as they stopped to wait, Dutch kept his trap shut in hopes she’d catch his drift and stop bitching about shit that did not matter.

He was feeling optimistic about this when she was silent for long beats.

Unfortunately, this didn’t last.

“Do you not travel?”

He looked down at her. “What?”

She was staring up at him. “Are you not a traveler?”

“I got somewhere to go, I get there on my bike.”

She visibly fought a lip curl before mumbling, “Of course.”

“Though, I’ve been on a plane more than once and I don’t care what other people do with their bags. I check. It’s less hassle. The rest is not my business.”

What made him share that, he had no idea.

It was a mistake.

“It’s literally impossible, not only scientifically, for the world to revolve around seven point seven billion people,” she declared.

“What?”

“The world’s population,” she informed him.

“You do know, you bitchin’ about this shit means you think the world revolves around your opinion about it,” he returned.

Her eyes got huge.

It was cute.