Page 8 of Badd B*tch

I nodded. "While I can't know the details, such things do happen. Even the most well-maintained airframe can suffer an unexpected mechanical failure. Things degrade over time. It's entropy."

Helena didn't much like this answer, but she couldn't argue with it, so she just huffed. "I just don't like all the flying you do."

"The perils of having a business empire that spans the globe, my dear."

"Can’t you just, like, downscale your ambitions just a tad? I mean, you have what, four hundred billion dollars?" Helena sidled up behind her fiancé, rested her cheek on his shoulder with her eyes on her father. "Isn't it enough?"

I couldn’t deny my own curiosity at Linus's answer, so I leaned a shoulder against the doorframe and waited for his response.

"It's not about getting more money at this point, sweetheart. It's…momentum, I suppose you could say. L-M-T is almost a living thing at this point. I have investors, a board, shareholders. I have employees—thousands of them. I can't just…stop. My investors and shareholders have expectations. I have employees who have spent years on various projects. I can't just go pffft," here, he waves a hand as if batting away a fly, "and shelve it all because I've got enough money. You know my plans to donate the majority of the fortune, babe. We've been over this enough. I can't make you take it, but I can set up the trust for you, and I have, and I will continue to add to it. You may never use it, fine. But it's there. It's yours."

"I wouldn't mind dipping into it once in a while,” Helena’s fiancé muttered, more to himself than out loud. "I see no reason to struggle when we don’t have to."

Helena's mouth opens, but Linus beats her to it. "Nope! You two can fight about whether to use that money for the rest of your lives. Don't waste this time on that. It's not worth it."

"It's your money, Dad, not mine."

I took my leave, because that conversation wasn’t meant for me. I headed upstairs to my room and got the shower running while I brushed my teeth.

A rap at the door startled me. "Tea? Just letting you know I'll be ready in about an hour. We're picking up Jax from his house on the way; I just talked to him."

"Yeah!" I call from the bathroom, spitting toothpaste out. "Heard!"

I got in the shower, and out of a lifetime of habit, I was in and out in under five minutes. Beyond the way I was raised, shower times in the Navy are heavily restricted to conserve water, so after my upbringing and ten years of various shipboard assignments, short showers are a way of life for me at this point, and a five-minute shower is almost a luxury. I honestly wouldn’t even know what to do for more than five minutes.

I put my still-wet hair back in a tight braid, dressed in my flight suit, and put my go-bag back together. I stripped the bed, found new linens in a hall closet, and remade the bed—purely out of habit. I am simply incapable of leaving a bedroom without making the bed.

Thirty minutes later, I'm behind the wheel of the Range Rover, door open, foot kicking idly as I wait for Linus to emerge. The man's lack of punctuality might very well drive me fucking nuts, but what can I do about it? Not a damn thing.

After another ten minutes of waiting, Linus finally zombie-shuffled out of the B and B, face buried in that bespoke cell phone of his, thumbs a blur as he composed a text or email. He slid into the rear passenger-side seat, tossing his overstuffed leather messenger bag onto the seat beside him.

My phone chimed.

"That's the address for Jax's parents' house," he said without looking up from his cell.

I input the destination into a nav app, plugged my phone into the car's infotainment center so the map appeared onscreen, and then headed out.

"Tea?" Linus said, his attention more than half elsewhere. "Will you please turn off the A/C and roll down the windows? I get car sick if there's not airflow." A pause, then, under his breath: "Another reason I fly everywhere."

I did as I was asked, and not without some relief, because same. I've never owned a car, and the only way for me to not get carsick is to do the driving myself.

From what I can tell, Jax’s family lives in a pretty bougie part of Ketchikan. The houses are big, tucked away into secluded clearings with stunning views of the bay—although I just learned while browsing the internet while waiting that it’s not actually, technically, a bay, but a channel between islands called the Inside Passage. The destination address was a sprawling Craftsman done in hunter green shingle siding with white trim. The covered porch is deep and stretches from one side of the home to the other, with large bay windows on either side of the centered front door and a porch swing in a small alcove on the far right. A massive detached garage that is more of a carriage house than a garage sits back and to the right; neat flower beds with a colorful profusion of tulips, dahlias, and zinnias line the base of the porch, and small squares of emerald green grass border the sidewalk, kept in place by red brick retaining walls, three concrete steps leading up from the sidewalk and then three more up to the porch.

"Our plucky young hero is running late, it would seem," Linus said. "Run up and collect him, if you would. I've made us late enough as it is—I would like you two to get in the air soon."

"God save me from tardy men," I muttered.

"What's that?" Linus said, finally looking up to meet my gaze in the rearview mirror. "Didn't quite catch that."

"Nothing, sir."

"Tea." His tone made it a warning.

I sighed. "I'll call you Linus, but it'll take me a long time to stop saying ‘sir.’ It's not just ingrained from my time in the Navy, but my whole life.”

"I suppose that's valid. It irritates me, though. I'd just like that registered."

"Noted. And in which case, you shouldn't have hired a legacy Navy brat pilot," I remarked. "I'll go hustle along our charge."