Page 33 of Hold On to Me
She thought about Justina’s hand on his. The door closing.
She thought about three weeks without him. The bruise that wouldn’t fade. Paolo’s unmarked hands across a restaurant table and the nothing she felt when he touched her.
She thought about Anton’s note. Don’t let him be.
She crossed the room.
It was the longest walk of her life.
She stopped in front of him, and when he turned from the window, she took his hand.
His scarred, enormous, shaking hand. The one she had noticed the very first time, wrapped around a champagne flute on a redeye to Monaco. It had caught her in turbulence and held for three seconds, grazed her cheekbone in Geneva, gripped the counter in the galley while she took him apart. And it had settled on Justina Karpov’s armrest and broken something inside her that she was only now allowing to mend.
She laced her fingers through his.
He made a sound.
Not a laugh. Not a sob. Something between, something that had no name because it was the sound of a man who had been holding his breath for months and had just, in a penthouse over the Mediterranean, with her fingers threaded through his, exhaled. His other hand came up and covered hers. Both of his hands around one of hers. He pressed their joined hands to his forehead and bowed over them and breathed, deep, shuddering, the breathing of a man whose lungs had remembered what air was for.
“Keep me,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes. His forehead was warm against their hands. His scar was a ridge she could feel against her knuckles. His breath was uneven and his hands were shaking and he was the most undone she had ever seen him and he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“Always.”
The word was quiet. Raw. The voice of a man who had spent thirty-five years building walls and had just, in a single word, dismantled the last one.
They stood there. Forehead to hands. Hands laced. Monaco glittering behind them. The Mediterranean silent and black beyond the glass. Two people who had spent months circling each other in sealed cabins at forty thousand feet, fighting wars with themselves and each other, building walls and tearing them down and building them again, two people who had been shaped by their fathers and survived in opposite ways and found each other in the narrow aisle of a first-class cabin and hadn’t, despite everything, let go.
She wasn’t crew. She wasn’t a promise. She wasn’t a debt.
She was his. And he was hers. And the sky, when they returned to it, together, hands clasped, the engines spooling and the ground falling away, would finally, finally, be theirs.
Epilogue
SHE ASKED HIM TO MARRYher the next morning.
Not with a ring. Not with a speech. She woke in the penthouse with Monaco silver and gold beyond the windows and his jacket over her shoulders, he had given it to her again, when the air conditioning in the penthouse dropped the temperature past comfortable, and she had taken it without protest because she was done refusing things from Andrei Almazov, and she said, over coffee that was significantly better than the hotel’s, “Marry me today.”
He set his cup down.
“Today.”
“Today. I don’t want a venue. I don’t want a guest list. I don’t want three months of planning to give either of us time to overthink what we’ve already decided. Your brothers. Raven. Someone with the legal authority to make it binding. Today.”
He looked at her across the table. The morning light caught his scar and turned it silver. His hands were around his coffee cup, the scarred hands, the champagne-flute hands, the hands she had laced her fingers through last night and was never going to let go of, and they were steady. For the first time since she had known him, his hands were completely still.
“Are you sure?”
She almost laughed. The man who had bought an airline, moved her belongings, purchased a flat, installed a security system, andrearranged her entire professional life without once asking if she was sure, that man was asking her now.
“Andrei. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. And I want one more thing.”
“Anything.”
“The wedding night. I want it in the air. On the jet. Our jet.”
He looked at her as if trying to gauge if she was serious, and she was.
