Page 10 of Hold On to Me
“Text me in the morning. If you don’t, I’m assuming he’s proposed and I’ll need to go dress shopping.”
Ciana hung up. Almost smiled. Almost.
Hour four.
The jet’s heating system was designed for flight, not for sitting on a frozen tarmac in the Swiss Alps with the auxiliary power unit running at minimum. The temperature in the cabin had dropped steadily since they’d landed. Ciana had her uniform jacket buttoned to the throat and her hands tucked into hersleeves, and she was still cold. The kind of cold that settled into the joints and the jaw and made your teeth want to click together if you weren’t concentrating on keeping them apart.
She was concentrating on keeping them apart.
He appeared at the galley curtain. She hadn’t heard him move. He was unnervingly silent for a man his size, as though his body had learned a long time ago to take up as little auditory space as possible. He stood there with his suit jacket in one hand, extended toward her without a word.
She looked at the jacket. She looked at him. He was in shirtsleeves now, the white fabric pulling across shoulders that belonged on a man who moved heavy things for a living, and he didn’t appear cold. He appeared, in fact, as though cold were a concept that applied to other people.
“No, thank you.”
He didn’t move. The jacket remained extended. His face gave nothing away: the scar a pale line in the dim cabin lighting, his eyes steady, his expression the absolute zero of a man who had decided to wait.
“I said no.”
Still nothing. He stood there the way a wall stands, not aggressively, not impatiently, simply present. Immovable. Offering something she didn’t want to take because taking it’d mean accepting comfort from the man who had disassembled her life and rebuilt it without asking.
Her teeth clicked together. Once. Involuntary.
She took the jacket.
It was warm. Unreasonably warm, as though his body ran at a temperature several degrees above normal, and the fabric held the heat the way good wool holds heat, slowly, deeply, releasing it in waves that she felt first in her shoulders, then her arms, then the backs of her hands. And it smelled like him. Cedar, she thought. And smoke, not cigarette smoke but something older, woodier, as though he spent time near fires that burned real wood. And underneath both, something she couldn’t name. Something warm and dark and distinctly, irreducibly him.
She hated that she noticed.
She hated that the warmth made something in her chest loosen, like a fist uncurling. She hated that the smell was already filing itself away in the part of her brain that stored involuntary memories, the part she couldn’t control, the part that would replay this sensation later, in her bed, in the dark, unbidden.
He turned and walked back to his seat without a word. She pulled the jacket tighter around her shoulders and pressed her mouth together and didn’t say thank you because she had already said no twice and taking the jacket was concession enough.
The snow fell. The cabin ticked with cooling metal. She sat in the galley wearing his jacket and staring at the ceiling and thinking about promises and fathers and the particular cruelty of being cared for by someone who wouldn’t explain why it felt like more than obligation.
It happened in the galley. The eighth hour.
She was making tea, because the coffee had run out an hour ago and because making tea was a task, and tasks were the architecture that held her upright when everything else wasshifting. The kettle had boiled. She was pouring, her back to the curtain, her hair coming loose from its chignon after eight hours without a mirror or a bobby pin to spare. A strand had fallen across her cheek and she hadn’t bothered to fix it because there was no one to see her except a man she wasn’t trying to impress.
She turned.
He was there.
Too close. Not menacingly, but something else...like gravity. He was standing in the galley doorway and the space was narrow and he was enormous and suddenly the distance between them had collapsed from professional to personal to something that didn’t have a word.
His hand rose.
Slowly. So slowly that she could have stepped back. Could have flinched. Could have said don’t or stop or please. He gave her time for all of it, time that stretched and thickened until she could feel each fraction of a second individually, like counting in slow motion.
She didn’t step back.
His scarred hand reached her face. One knuckle, just one, the first knuckle of his index finger, hooked the strand of hair that had fallen across her cheek. He drew it back, slowly, tucking it behind her ear. And as he did, his knuckles grazed her cheekbone.
She stopped breathing.
Not dramatically, not a gasp, not a catch. Just a complete, involuntary cessation, as though her lungs had decided thatbreathing and feeling this at the same time was more than they could manage and they had chosen feeling.
The graze lasted less than a second. The texture of his scarred skin against her cheekbone was rough and warm and precise. He touched her the way he held the champagne flute, with a control that acknowledged the possibility of damage and had decided, with great private discipline, against it.
