Thin Air

I had to admit that kick-started my heart into a whole different speed. I looked around at the cabin mutely. “They’re Wardens,” I pointed out. “Well, except for Cherise.”

“So they are.” He didn’t seem much concerned. “Trust me. They wouldn’t notice a thing.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He looked very seductive all of a sudden-it was indefinable, how he shifted from business to pleasure, but it was a definite and unmistakable change in his body language. All of a sudden I was hyperaware of the clean, cool lines of him, the way his black T-shirt hugged his chest…the full, rich softness of his mouth.

“You’re doing this,” I murmured. “No fair.”

“Doing what?”

My attention fixed on his lips. I wetted my own lips with my tongue, suddenly remembering a ghostly echo of how he tasted. Half-remembering, anyway. I definitely needed a reminder. “Dji

“Oh, I promise you, it’ll be good,” he said. Bastard. I caught myself leaning forward and thought about stopping myself, but there didn’t seem to be all that much reason, and deep down, I didn’t want to even try.

So, I kissed him.

He tasted rich and warm and real. His lips were damp and firm, smooth as silk, warm as sunlight, and I sank against him with a moan. I’d missed this. My body had missed it, not just my mind, and my body stuck my mind in the backseat, bound and gagged it, and took the wheel.

David’s kiss filled me with an exhilaration and heat that my skin could only barely contain, and when I opened my mouth to the gentle stroke of his tongue on my lips, he bent me back, cupped my head in his large hand, and got down to business. The boy knew what he was doing, and French was definitely something in which he was fluent. The warmth in me coalesced into specific aching places.

I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I was on his lap by that time, feeling thoroughly and satisfyingly ravished, and his hands started to roam. I

Had I ever been magically undressed before? If I had, it was a memory worth keeping. There was a breathtaking sense of being out of control, but utterly safe in his hands. By the time he’d worked his way down to my waist, the shirt was open and loose, and my bra underneath seemed more like a display case than a cover.

Because he’d made it transparent.

“Um…” I pulled back, cheeks flaming. I could still hear the other Wardens talking, moving around, coughing. Somebody was playing a personal stereo at high volume to be heard over the turbulence and engine noise.

Surely someone-probably Lewis, with my luck-was going to look back and get the topless show. Not that I minded making extra money, but it seemed excessive. Not to mention unprofessional, if I had to work with these people later.

“They can’t see or hear us,” David said. “What they’ll see, if they actually do look, is the two of us talking. It’s what they expect to see.”

Maybe, but still…I found myself gathering up the gaping halves of my shirt and pulling it together. “Sorry,” I said. “But this is just too strange. It’s not that they might see me; it’s that I can see them. It’s distracting.”

“Oh.” David looked briefly chagrined. “Sorry. I didn’t think about it. You always-” He broke off before uttering whatever sordid bit of my personality he was about to disclose, and instead vaguely nodded toward the rest of the plane.

Which disappeared behind a milky white wall. I reached out and touched it, and my fingers registered a cool surface, not quite solid.

“Soundproofed,” he said. “But if you want out, all you have to do is push.”

I took my hand away and looked at him. “I don’t want out,” I said. I meant that in so many ways. “Any chance these seats fold out into a bed?”

“There is now,” he said, and his eyes sparked to a hot, swirling bronze.

He put his hands behind my back and lowered me. Slowly. The seats dissolved into a soft, firm expanse of what felt like a real bed. My head encountered the airy softness of a feather pillow, and I couldn’t help but sigh in true happiness.

David was watching me, his eyes half-closed. Braced above me on stiffened arms.

Not touching me in any way. Not yet.

My breath caught helplessly in my throat as his elbows bent, as his shoulders flexed and the muscles slid under that smooth, matte-velvet skin. I bit my lip as I felt his lips touch my trembling midsection. A burst of warmth zipped up my spine from down low, then exploded outward and inward like an echo. Oh.

His lips traveled down, and his tongue trailed gently over the inward slope of my belly button. My bitten lip started to hurt, but when I let go, I moaned. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help my body from lifting toward him, either.

He put one large, warm hand just under my breasts and pushed me back down. “Not yet,” he murmured, with his lips brushing my skin. His gaze was dark and wicked and intensely sexual. “We have a long, long way to go. Can’t have you going off just yet.”

“Then you’d better stop touching me,” I said breathlessly. “Because if you don’t, I’m going to go off like a Roman candle any second.”

His eyebrows canted upward. He dragged his fingertips over the center of the thin fabric of my bra, and it just…dissolved. Then he folded the two halves back from my body, along with my shirt. “Then I’d better make it worth your while,” he said, and moved up to trail his tongue over my right nipple.

His hair was warm and silky under my fingers, and for a while I just whited out, flying on sensation. When he touched the waistband of my pants, and I felt the button and zippers giving up to him, I knew I was lost. Deliriously, deliciously, wonderfully lost.

I didn’t lie to him. I did come like a Roman candle, bursting into waves of light and shuddering pleasure, striving against his hands and his lips, long before we got to the main course.

That didn’t mean I was finished, though.

And he’d known that all along.

FIFTEEN

It felt like too short a flight, since we spent it horizontal, naked, and blissful under silken covers, protected and secluded by a swirling bubble of opal energy. David’s body fit perfectly under my hands, as though it had been made to match me. In theory I was a virgin, but in practice, memory wasn’t a barrier to this at all. There wasn’t any pain, there wasn’t any hesitation, and there was certainly no trace of shame, no matter what I felt moved to do with him, or for him. It felt like the world had opened up to me for the first time, cha

If he was using any kind of Dji

As we lay in a dreamy, disheveled state of paradise, twisted together in the sheets, I traced letters on his chest like a lovesick kid. “Do you know what I’m writing?” I asked, and had a sudden dizzying idea that he’d seen lovers play that game back when writing was still in hieroglyphics. Or cuneiform.

“Tell me,” he whispered, and pressed his lips to a particularly sensitive spot at my temple. I shivered.

“I…L…O…V…E…”

“Chocolate,” he said. “Fast cars. Dangerously expensive shoes.”

I drew a single letter-U.

He didn’t speak. He traced with one warm finger the spot on my temple he’d kissed, drawing something that was more abstract than letters, more direct.