I woke to warm, female flesh pressing against me.
“Wake up, hotshot. It’s time for some fun,” Lina murmured in my ear.
Me and my cock both gave her our full attention.
She kissed me hard, nipping my bottom lip with her teeth. “Sorry, handsome. We don’t have time for that kind of fun this morning. Time to get up.”
I guided her hand under the covers to my erection. “I am up.”
Her husky laugh was warm against my throat. “After,” she promised. “Come on. Get that cute ass out of bed.”
She slid off me before I could capture her and convince her to stay. My hard-on pitched a worthy tent under the sheet.
“No amount of fun is going to be better than staying in bed with me,” I warned, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.
A pair of athletic pants hit me in the face.
“We’ll see about that,” she said smugly. “Get dressed. We’ve got an appointment.”
“No fucking way, Lina.”
She grinned from behind the wheel and said nothing as she turned the Charger onto the lane after the sign that said Just Jump Aviation and Skydiving.
The paved lane ran parallel with a small airstrip tucked between acres of cornfields just south of the Virginia-Maryland border. Unlike the misery of yesterday, the morning sun burned bright in the cloudless sky over the oranges and golds of autumn leaves.
Lina whipped the car into a parking spot against the cavernous red hangar with a white-and-blue logo painted on it.
Still grinning, she lowered her sunglasses to look at me. With those red lips, she looked like a temptress, a siren trying to lure me to my death.
“Planes are meant to land,” I insisted.
“It will land. We just won’t be on it when it does,” she said, shutting off the engine and unbuckling her seat belt.
I refused to move. Nothing was going to get me out of this car and anywhere near a goddamn parachute. “It’s irresponsible to jump out of a moving vehicle. Especially one that’s several thousand feet above the fucking earth.”
Lina reached between her legs and slid her seat back.
Before I realized her intention, she managed to climb over the console into my lap. “I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, Nash.”
“Great. Let’s go get some breakfast and then we can go buy caulk to fix the loose tile in the shower.”
She shook her head, still smiling that siren’s smile. “I’m going up. And I would love for you to go with me.”
Fuck.
“You’re not throwing yourself out of a goddamn plane.” A cold sweat erupted in my armpits.
She slid my sunglasses on top of my head and cupped my face in her hands. “Nash, I’ve done this more than a handful of times. This is one of my favorite things to do, and I want to share it with you.”
Double fuck.
How in the hell was I supposed to say no to that?
“Come on, hotshot. Have some fun with me,” she coaxed.
I’d put her through hell yesterday and this was my punishment. Death by gravity.
Less than a minute later, I was—reluctantly—following her toward the huge open garage door on the side of the building. Her hand gripped mine in a way that suggested she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“Doesn’t this require a license or some kind of complicated paperwork that takes weeks to get approved?” I asked desperately.
She looked over her shoulder at me, smirking. “Not for a tandem jump.”
“What the hell is a tandem jump?” My back was turning into a Slip ’N Slide with sweat.
“Newbies jump attached to pros,” Lina said, pointing to a giant poster just inside the hangar’s open door. In the photo, a guy too stupid to be scared was grinning like a lunatic. He appeared to be harnessed to another man from behind.
“There’s no way I’m dying with another man strapped to my back.”
“Of course not. You’re jumping with me.”
I stopped in my tracks and dug my heels in, putting an abrupt end to Lina’s forward momentum. She rebounded into my chest.
“I’m certified,” she said.
Of course she was.
“Nash.” There was laughter in her tone.
“Angel.”
“Tell me what you’re feeling right now,” she insisted.
Abject panic. A little delirious.
“Just sit through the training video and then decide. Okay?”
A training video. If it was long enough, I could pray for a thunderstorm to roll in. Or a cloud of locusts. Or some kind of mechanical failure that would be discovered while we were still safely on the ground. Oh, two flat tires and a hole in the propeller? Too bad. Let’s go get some breakfast.
“Please?”
Fuck. Me.
I had two options. I could put my foot down and wuss out, in which case I’d have to sit here alone on the ground and panic until Lina floated back to earth. Or I could sign my own death warrant, defy gravity in a tiny tin can, and then hurl myself out of it with her. For her.
I was vaguely nauseous and extremely sweaty. But those brown eyes locked on my face. Her cool hands pressed against my chest.
She wanted this from me. And I had the power to give it to her.
“Fine. But if we plummet to the earth and create a tandem crater in a cornfield, I will never forgive you.”
She let out a little squeal and launched herself into my arms. She may have knocked me back a step, but I still managed to catch her, holding her so her feet dangled off the ground.
Her mouth crashed into the side of my face and she gave me a loud kiss.
“You’re not going to regret this. I promise.”
I was busy regretting every single thing about the day, starting with the decision to get out of bed, when a guy in cargo shorts casually rolled up the flimsy door in the plane’s fuselage.
“It’s time,” Lina said in my ear. We were straddling a bench that was bolted to the floor. I was hog-tied to her with a series of nylon straps that didn’t look like they would hold Piper, let alone a full-grown man.
Every cell in my body screamed for me to cling to the bench. Instead, I stupidly forced myself to crab walk toward the gaping hole in the side of the plane. This was by far the dumbest thing I’d ever done for a woman.
“Are you sure about this?” I yelled to her over the rush of air.
“I’m positive, hotshot.” I could hear the smile in Lina’s husky voice.
We balanced in the opening, each gripping a handle on the inside of the door, and I made the mistake of looking out and down.
My knuckles went white on the handle.
“You can let go. Trust me, Nash,” she said.
So I did. One finger at a time. I hoped Knox wouldn’t put something stupid on my headstone.
And then Lina was tilting us to the right and we were falling into nothing.
I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for the panic, but it was too late for regrets. The wind buffeting my face, the drop in my stomach like an endless downhill of a roller coaster, told me that.
“Open your eyes, hotshot.”
I didn’t know how she knew I had them closed. Just another bit of her magic.
“I don’t want to see myself die,” I yelled back.
I felt her laugh against me, and her amusement had me prying one eye open and then the other.
My heart did a slow roll in my chest.
We were suspended above the earth. Autumn rolled out in a carpet of reds, oranges, and golds that went on forever beneath us. Ribbons of river, grids of roads, the smooth rise and fall of mountains all formed a patchwork quilt of nature and civilization thousands of feet below.
It didn’t feel like we were careening to our deaths. It felt like we were suspended in time. Like gods surveying the world they’d created. Above it. Apart from it.
A bird’s-eye view. The big picture. There was nothing between me and the entire world, and it was fucking breathtaking.
The world wasn’t dark and terrifying. It was beauty unfolding all around us.
“Well?” Lina demanded in my ear, her hands squeezing my arms.
I gave the only answer I could.
“Holy shit.” My roar of laughter was instantly swallowed up by the wind.
“I knew you’d love it!”
I wrapped my hands around hers on the straps and squeezed. “This is fucking amazing. You’re fucking amazing!”
Lina whooped triumphantly into the wind.
I followed suit, reveling when the sound was snatched from my throat.
“Ready for the best part?” she asked.
“What’s the best part?” I yelled back.
I’d barely gotten the words out when the free fall stopped abruptly and we were jerked up and back. One second, we were flying, belly down, and the next, we were suspended like marionettes as a bright red parachute billowed into being above us.
The rush of the wind in my ears stopped instantly, leaving nothing but an unearthly silence.
We were so far from everything that seemed so important on earth. Up here, we were removed from the minutiae of daily life. Here was only silence, peace, and beauty.
Emotions that I’d thought long dead welled up inside me, clogging my throat, making my eyes sting behind their goggles.
“I wanted you to see this. To feel it,” Lina said.
I could have missed this. I could have died that night. I could have chosen to give up on her, on us. I could have said no on the ground. But instead, everything had led me to this moment. To Lina Solavita.
I was awestruck.
“This is… I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad you didn’t have sex with me this morning.”
Her laugh was music in the silence.
“Wanna know a secret?” she asked.
“You have more?” I quipped.
“I don’t jump for the rush. I jump for this. Everything makes sense up here. Everything is always beautiful and quiet. And I remember that, even after my feet touch the ground.”
I got it then. Really got it.
I loved her. I wasn’t using her as some crutch to avoid the world. She was reintroducing it to me one experience at a time.
My heart belonged to this woman and I was going to go buy her the biggest fucking ring I could find.
