In Flight (Up in the Air #1)(23)

He shoved the dirty handkerchief into his pocket and started to straighten my clothes with an almost impersonal efficiency.

He was still pulling my skirt back down to my knees when Stephan burst through the curtain, looking baffled, and then shocked at what he saw.

It must have been obvious from James lowering my skirt that we had obviously been doing something much too intimate for the galley of an aircraft.

Stephan’s shocked eyes flew to my face. Then he blushed like I’d never seen him blush before.

“Was that noise you? That muffled scream?” he asked slowly.

I knew I turned just as pink as him, but I nodded. No point in denying it.

Stephan was still bright pink as he gave James a censuring look. “Really, James? On a morning flight? With a group of perverts just a few feet away?”

Apparently, Stephan was heaping the responsibility of this embarrassing episode squarely on Mr. Beautiful’s shoulders.

James looked a little shame-faced at the assessment. It made him look almost boyish. It was hard to reconcile that look with the James I knew.

I just blinked at them both, at a loss. I had never been in anything even approaching a situation like this.

Stephan pointed in the general direction of James’s seat. “I think you should go sit down now.”

James did so without so much as a word or a look.

CHAPTER TEN

Mr. Kinky

The rest of the flight went by in a kind of a blur for me. We did the wine and cheese service, and I deliberately refrained from making any eye contact, knowing I would be mortified if they gave me strange looks.

I wanted to just pretend that no one had heard us in the galley, and that they certainly hadn’t taken the noises for what they actually were. As long as I didn’t look at anyone directly, I could just keep trying to convince myself that that was the case.

I especially avoided looking at James as we served him. I had pulled my cool composure around me like armor after our sordid scene, but I knew one look at him could undo all of that.

My side of the cart was lined up to serve him by a stroke of bad luck, so I quietly asked him what he’d like without ever looking directly at him.

He said he would take one slice of the brie and some grapes. I set the small plate on his tray table, the sight that met me there stilling me for a long moment.

I noticed several things at once.

He had rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt, revealing tanned forearms, both presented wrist up as he affected a relaxed pose. With the sunlight streaming through his window I could see faint white lines tracing thin scars around his wrists. I was instantly curious about the marks, but they weren’t what caught my rapt attention at a glance.

He’d removed his tie, leaving his tanned throat and just a hint of his chest visible. The sight of his smooth golden skin made me wild. I felt deprived of it, especially with how little I’d gotten to see of it, considering all that we’d done to each other.

The sight of him like that was incredibly sexy, seeming to me almost too intimate for airplane attire. That was ridiculous, of course. There weren’t special rules against him showing any of his skin in public, just because it was so much finer than everyone else’s.

Yes, the sight of him like that turned me on acutely in an instant. But that wasn’t what had stopped me in my tracks. It was the object in his hand that did that.

His right hand lay on his knee, just beside his tray table, empty. But his left hand lay across his tray table, as though displaying the object clutched in his hand like a trophy.

It was the handkerchief he had used on me in the galley. His hand was fisting it reflexively, as though it relaxed him.

I made myself look away from him. I didn’t look back again.

The thought occurred to me quite vividly that he was impossibly out of my league. He was way too experienced. And rich. And kinky. And I was just about as close to the polar opposite of all of that as a person could get. The thought was sobering.

Somewhere along the way I had decided that I would have sex with him. But I had to remember that it wasn’t going any further than that. He obviously liked the pursuit. I would give in. He would f**k me for a few memorable days, if I was lucky, and then we would go our separate ways. I certainly didn’t want anything more.

Relationships terrified me to my very core. So what better candidate to rid me of my virginity? At twenty-three, it was nothing but a burden. I just hadn’t bothered to do anything about it before because no one had interested me enough to try to get past some of my hangups.

Masturbation and some rather sordid online  p**n  had cured the rare urges I’d had. And I’d certainly never felt this sort of all-consuming attraction before.

So I would do it. I would have sex with him. I would satisfy my curiosity, and then I would get back to my normal life.

I managed not to look at James again until we were taking our jump seats for landing.

He smiled at me when I did finally look at him. It was an intimate smile, unlike any I’d ever been on the receiving end of. I couldn’t find the will to smile back, or do anything but stare at him dumbly, trying not to look at the thing still clutched in his hand.

I didn’t come close to stifling the gasp that rushed out of me as he brought the handkerchief to his face, inhaling deeply, his eyes closing as though he were savoring the smell.

“What the hell?” Stephan muttered the question beside me.