After the Rain (The Twisted Fate Series Book 1) (5 page)

BAM.

The plane felt like it dropped a few feet in the air, and everyone jumped. A few passengers let out shocked gasps and Marcus woke up instantly. He turned to see that Stormy was looking at him with a strange expression on her face. When he met her gaze, she blushed and turned away immediately, and he automatically did the same. He wondered why she wasn’t panicked – unless, of course, she’d somehow just had the same dream that he’d had?

But the next violent, jarring shudder put the fear straight back into her eyes. This time, even Marcus got a fright.

TING-TING
.

The sound of the seatbelt signs being turned on rang out through the cabin, and everyone around them started scrambling in their seats just as the plane did another gut-wrenching drop. This time, it felt like a lot more than several feet. Stormy grabbed Marcus by the hand again and looked at him in sheer terror. This time he didn’t mind. He felt a responsibility to keep cool, calm and collected, so as not to send her into full-blown hysterics. He couldn’t imagine what someone like her would look like in complete panic mode – it would probably not be a pretty sight. But he was struggling to keep a lid on his own sense of alarm. He had to admit that he’d never felt anything quite like this–

And it only got worse as the plane suddenly felt like it was being tossed around in the air like a ragdoll. The engines roared and made a loud grinding noise as they struggled against what sounded like gale-force winds. People were screaming now, and the overhead storage compartment burst open, tipping some hand luggage out into the aisles.

Stormy grabbed Marcus tightly, eyes now wild with terror.

“Ladies and gentleman,” the overhead speakers crackled. It was the pilot’s voice – that was never a good sign. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, we are experiencing some rather severe turbulence. A freak monsoon has arrived off the coast of Kenya, which we are currently flying over. We have just received word to make an emergency landing at the Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi. They have requested that all planes in the area be grounded.”

“Shivering Shiva!” Stormy was practically on top of him now, straining against her seatbelt as she crawled into his lap and squealed hysterically in his ear. The sky outside looked like the interior of a strobing nightclub as the lightening split the air around them, causing the plane to shudder even more. The overhead lights flickered and failed, plunging the cabin into darkness. A rogue catering cart clattered past them down the aisle as the nose of the plane tipped precariously.
Shit!
Panic finally gripped Marcus, and a realization hit him: he was going to die in the arms of this strange woman, this Stormy-Rain. How appropriate, in a way, considering they were in a storm.

A terrifying thought hit Stormy: she was going to crash in the arms of Marcus. The stars had been right, Goddessdammit. She’d broken out into a sweat and the nausea was rising and falling in intense swells as the plane was buffeted through the air.

“Please keep your seat belt buckled and do not leave your seat,” the pilot was practically shouting to be heard above the roaring engines and pounding wind. “Hold on, this is going to be a bumpy landing, but don’t worry – I will get you on the ground safely.” Stormy couldn’t help but wonder if she detected a hint of doubt in his voice.

The turbulence got even worse as they began their descent, and the engines sounded like they were about to blow up at any second. The grinding sounds coming from them grated against Stormy’s already shattered nerves. The plane felt like it was bouncing up and down on a trampoline – one minute they were dropping and the next they were rising. The tray tables started to shudder and all Stormy could do to stop herself from screaming was clutch onto her amber and to Marcus for dear life. Her eyes were tightly shut and her head was buried in his chest. She felt him reach up and wrap his arm around her shoulders and pull her closer. Even in her state of wild panic stations, she felt a little reassured by the strength and solidness of his body.

Stormy forced her eyes open and looked up at Marcus. His eyes were wide and glued to the seat in front of him, and his mouth was set in a grim, hard line.

“Marcus,” she managed to whisper through the nausea. “I don’t really hate you. I’m sorry I said that.”

Marcus’s eyes met hers and he forced a tight, fleeting smile. “Me too. Sorry I said that, too.”

And then, without any kind of warning,
it happened.

They were kissing.

It was fast and frantic and furious and frenetic and other words that begin with an ‘f’. Stormy gasped loudly as Marcus buried his tongue in her mouth with an audible groan. Her sudden need for him drowned out her pulsing fear; it felt like she couldn’t get enough of him as she opened her mouth wider and wrapped her hands around the back of his head to pull him even closer.

Sanity had left her, and clearly him, too. She felt like she was being controlled by a power and force greater than herself as they licked and bit and nipped at each other like starving animals.

Stormy gasped against his mouth once more as she felt him slip his hand down the front of her dress and squeeze her breast. She squirmed deliciously in his lap as he bit down not-so-gently on her lip. Stormy responded, arching forward and pushing her body into him. His mouth left hers and traveled to her ear, and a shiver shot up her spine as he bit down on her earlobe and ran his tongue down the length of her neck.
This was crazy.
She knew it, but she didn’t care. She reached under the blanket that was still draped across his hips and ran her hand over the front of his jeans. He was rock hard. They grabbed at each other like two hormone-driven teenagers, suddenly unconcerned that they were about to plummet to their deaths and totally oblivious to the fact that they were surrounded by people. They were caught up in their own storm right now.

“We are about to land, please assume the brace position.” The pilot’s strained voice finally broke through their frantic groping, and they let go of each other as the plane thundered towards the runway. Stormy grabbed Marcus by the hand as the plane finally hit solid ground with a heart-stopping thud.

Moments later, applause rang out through the cabin, and some passengers even burst into tears from the sheer joy of being alive. But Stormy didn’t move. She froze. Dead still and silent. Out of the corner of her eye, she observed Marcus fixed in a similar pose, still locked in the brace position with his eyes down.

Slowly, as the minutes ticked by and the passengers around them started to gather up the hand luggage strewn down the aisle, she stuck her head up like an ostrich out of the sand and came face-to-face with Marcus. They stared at each other in absolute shock. Stormy couldn’t quite recall how the whole thing had happened – it was as if they’d both been possessed.

“Um….” Marcus finally spoke, his voice sounding shaky and uncertain. “Can we just pretend that never happened?”

Stormy nodded vigorously. “Yes, absolutely. Never fucking happened.
Noooo
.
Not at all. Not in a million gazillion millennia, no way Jose, nada.”

“You don’t have to take it
that
far, okay.” Marcus sounded offended. “I mean, it was, it was….” His pupils dilated as he looked at her again, and she felt her face go hot. “Never mind. Let’s just make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“Oh, it won’t!” Stormy was certainly never going to let that happen again.

“Was it that bad?” Marcus suddenly asked looking a little crestfallen.

Stormy was taken aback by the question and licked her lips, still tasting him. “No. It was… um, it was… it was good.” It
had
been good. In fact, it had probably been
too
good.

Marcus was satisfied. He didn’t
want
to kiss her again, but his ego dictated that she didn’t think he was a bad kisser, either.

But it hadn’t
jus
t been a kiss. He remembered his hand on her breast and her hand… he looked down at his pants and saw that the zip was undone. Stormy followed his gaze with her eyes and went bright red.

“Oops,” she said, clutching at her top as she realized that one of her straps had slipped down.

What the
hell had just happened?

Oh, She’s been called
so many different things over the years, since the dawn
of time: Fate, Karma, Kismet, Moirai… But call Her what
you like, there was no doubt that She was here,
and She was working Her magic on Stormy and Marcus.
Weaving Her devious little web around them.

Trapping them.

Pushing
them.

Pulling them.

Twisting, turning, moving and manipulating them to
Her divine will. Making them dance to the beat of
Her invisible drum…

But where would She take them exactly?
Oh, where indeed… Well, that remains to be seen. But
if the conjuring of a freak storm was anything to
go by, this was just the start of a very
bumpy ride that these two star-crossed lovers-to-be
would find themselves on.

6

There’s no such
thing as vampires

The Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi looked like a marketplace. It was packed and buzzing with activity. Dozens of planes had been grounded due to the freak storm and frightened passengers had been herded into the cramped airport terminal like cattle. Some were still green around the gills and wobbly from their landings, while others were bruised and scraped due to falling luggage, but all of them looked relieved.

Despite the chaos, the airport was full of happy chatter. People phoning home and letting their loved ones know that they were okay, honeymooners making out, and parents hugging their children. No one cared that they had been inconvenienced; they just cared that they were still alive. The atmosphere buzzed and hummed with a happy, joyous energy.

But Stormy felt anything but happy, and as she glanced up at Marcus, she was pretty sure that he was feeling the exact same thing. That queer look of agitation on his face that had caused his brow to furrow seemed like a dead giveaway.

As they made their way through the cheerful commotion, Stormy felt more frightened and shocked than she had when she thought she was going to die.
What had just happened?
Not the plane almost plummeting from the sky thing… the other thing.The
thing!
Things like that didn’t happen to her. Sure, she was a spontaneous, live-for-the-moment kind of gal, but she was in no way a public-unzip-and-touch type of gal. She had never done anything like it in her life. Well, okay, maybe once – the time she and Tim had gone to the drive-in when they were 18. That had gotten pretty wild. But it was
nothing
compared to this!

The world around them felt like it was moving, but time was standing still for her as her brain desperately tried to process what they’d just been through. The awkwardness was overwhelming. This was not an elephant in the room between them – it was a Boeing 747 on serious steroids. Neither of them had uttered a syllable since walking off the plane.

Stormy stood in silence amongst the crowd. Marcus had placed himself a few meters away, watching the bags go around and around on the baggage carousel. But the chaos was unbelievable: people pushed and elbowed and grabbed. Too many bags, too many people, too much confusion. Stormy watched as Marcus grabbed his branded Loo Vuitton suitcase. Stormy scoffed loudly at the ostentatious show of wealth – again, the cost of that designer suitcase could probably feed a starving village of children for a year. There were still so many things about him that she just didn’t like.

They continued to stand in silence for a few more minutes, until Stormy finally saw her plain black bag coming around the corner. She pulled it off, wondering vaguely why it felt heavier.

“So now what?” Stormy finally asked, still avoiding eye contact.

“Well,” Marcus looked at his big shiny watch – why did his watch need to be so big? And so bloody shiny. It was practically luminescent. It could blind people. “We have a wedding to get to in two-and-a-half days, and we’re stuck in a country with a monsoon in progress. I don’t think we’ll be getting out of here for a while.”

“Do you think we’ll miss the wedding? We can’t!” The thought of missing Damien and Lilly’s wedding made Stormy feel sick – she had to be at that wedding, come hell or tall water.

“I know, but it might not be in our control.”

“I swear to Buddha, I knew I shouldn’t have flown today, the stars and the numbers predicted this. I
knew
it!” Stormy started wrapping her hair around her finger frantically. She felt like she was going to wig out at any second. She turned to Marcus, hoping for some kind of reassurance, but all he did was roll his eyes and scoff at her (there seemed to be a lot of scoffing in their interactions, Stormy noticed).

“I don’t know how you believe in all that crap.” Marcus shook his head. “That stuff is about as real as things like aliens and vampires.”

“What!” Stormy gasped. For someone who seemed so worldly, Marcus was woefully ill-informed. “The aliens built the pyramids. Don’t be so close-minded.”

“And vampires?”

“Oh, don’t be silly.” Stormy stopped twirling her hair now and faced off with him angrily. “There’s no such thing as vampires.”

“I just don’t get you.” Marcus looked her up and down again. But this time it felt a little different, given the fact that half an hour ago he had been holding her breasts and she had unzipped him.

“I don’t get you, either. One minute you’re kissing me and the next you’re insulting my belief system,” she spat back, feeling riled.

“Hey,” Marcus sounded angry. “I could say the same for you . It’s ‘close-minded’ to only believe in one thing and not open your mind up to the possibility that you could be wrong, too!”

Stormy looked at him and nodded. “Whatevs. So we still don’t really like each other even though we…
you
know?”

That was the million percent question, wasn’t it: why had that happened if they didn’t see eye-to-eye at all and had nothing in common and didn’t really like each other? Stormy was generally comfortable with supernatural phenomena and the unknown, but this was too peculiar for even her to fathom.

“Look,” Marcus finally said slowly, as if still trying to convince himself too. Which maybe he was, Stormy thought. “It was a stressful situation, we thought we were going to die. Things like that happen… I think.”

Stormy considered this for a moment. “That’s one explanation. The other, of course, is that the stars were right – we’re just fiery-crazy sexually compatible.”

“Well, you know what I think about star signs, so… I’ll go with the near-death experience theory.” Trust Marcus to look for the logical – and
boring
– explanation.

They stood in silence for a few moments. “So now what?” Stormy asked again.

“Well, the airline will probably put us up in a hotel for the night. But as long as we can fly out by tomorrow, we should make the wedding in time, as well as the wedding rehearsal dinner.” He checked his watch again – it seemed to be a nervous tic of his. Not surprising, really; Marcus seemed like the corporate type who was always hung up on schedules and deadlines. That probably explained his blocked throat chakras. “You stay here with the bags, and I’ll go talk to the airline people, find out what’s going on.”

Marcus walked up to the crowded airline desk and somehow managed to elbow his way to the front of a queue of confused, stranded passengers from their flight. Stormy stood a few feet away and zoned out, her anger slowly abating as she thought back to that airplane thing… that
thing!

She had touched his… you-know-bloody-what! Through his underpants, of course, but still… How did she go from hating the way he ate his meat, to wanting to eat him up herself?

She watched him as he chatted to one of the desk clerks. He was really very big and broad and probably quite muscular with his shirt off. That had never appealed to her before, but now…

He had a very generic pretty boy face, again something she would never go for; but suddenly he was the hottest guy on the planet. She was so sexually attracted to him it was almost painful. She was forced to cross her legs tightly.

“What do you mean, you only have one room?” The sound of Marcus’s raised voice snapped her out of her daydream. Just as well, really, because she had started mentally peeling his shirt off and was ready to sink her teeth into his shoulder. She walked up to the counter to see what the commotion was all about.

“I’m so sorry,” the desk clerk apologized, looking a little alarmed at Marcus’s sudden outburst. “It’s all we have left, and the hotels are fully booked.”

Marcus was struck by an unfamiliar bolt of panic – he didn’t panic. What would happen if he and Stormy shared the same hotel room? Look what had happened when they’d just been sitting next to each other on the plane, surrounded by other passengers! Despite their spat at the luggage carousel, he was still feeling so hot for her it was driving him insane. Even when they were arguing with each other, he was imagining her naked. He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anyone, and it was freaking him the fuck out . In fact, he wanted her
especially
when they were arguing. No one ever argued with him – not outside the courtroom, anyway – and now that someone was, now that
she
was, it was the hottest thing he’d ever seen. It caused dirty thoughts to flood his mind like never before. He wanted to do to her what he’d never done to any woman before… Although he still didn’t quite know what that was, exactly.

“I’m sorry,” the woman behind the desk said again. “We just don’t have anything else.” Marcus glanced up at her and felt bad – she looked almost frightened.

“Sorry, that will be fine thanks,” Marcus conceded, leaning closer to the counter so as not to give away the obvious physical reaction his body was involuntarily having to his thoughts. It was hard to have a normal conversation with the party that was happening in his pants right about now.

The desk clerk glanced at Stormy as she approached the counter, with a strange look, almost as if she was trying to size her up. Marcus didn’t blame her, he suspected this was a common reaction Stormy elicited everywhere she went. “You’d better go now and get a taxi while you still can – the worst of the storm will be hitting soon and I don’t think cars will be allowed on the roads for much longer,” she advised them. Marcus nodded his thanks and turned away from the desk, indicating for Stormy to follow him. He noted that Stormy seemed deep in thought, and it looked like it had nothing to do with the logistic predicament they now found themselves in.

The airport was still full of people, and Marcus had to negotiate their luggage trolley around stranded passengers who were settling onto the floor and chairs to sleep for the night. At least they had a hotel, he thought – it could be worse.

The storm outside was severe: sheets of water were pelting down and the winds were starting to pick up. And although Marcus was not one for histrionics, he couldn’t help but think of one of those post-apocalyptic films where the world as everyone knew it is annihilated. The desk clerk was right – they needed to get to a hotel as soon as they possibly could, and luckily theirs was only a few kilometers away.

But running from the airport to the line of taxis a few meters away was another matter entirely, and by the time they got there, they were absolutely drenched. Marcus allowed himself a quick glance over at the drenched Stormy and immediately regretted it – because now he was thinking of a wet T-shirt contest.

It was eerily silent during the cab ride. Neither of them spoke and instead sat staring out in opposite directions as the wind whipped sheets of rain against the windows. Marcus shivered a little; it was cold and he was starting to feel very uncomfortable in his wet clothes. But minutes later, after the driver had negotiated the perilously flooded streets, they arrived at the five-start hotel, and Marcus felt a lot better when he thought about the warm shower he could soon take.

Their room was spacious and comfortable, but only had a double bed. Marcus quickly decided that he’d sleep on the comfy-looking sofa in the corner – the more distance he could put between him and Stormy, the better. This wasn’t like him at all, but he just didn’t trust himself in her presence. He liked to think of himself as the master of cool, calm and collected; over the years, he’d learnt to control his feelings and wishes. If he didn’t, he always found himself disappointed. His tenth birthday, for example: he would’ve sacrificed every single one of his presents (which was saying a lot, since he’d gotten several Ninja Turtle action figures) to see his parents there. They’d promised they’d be there, but a few days before, some Pandas or monkeys or marmosets or whatever had been mistreated in China or Japan or Vietnam or wherever, and they were on it. No child should be without their parents on their tenth birthday. That was the day that Marcus realized he could no longer let his emotions run away with him, because if he did, nothing but hurt would follow. So he’d vowed to become the master of control. Logic would guide him, even when it came to choosing a wife and settling down. It was a rational decision that would be carefully calculated. And he would never miss
his
child’s tenth birthday party, that’s for sure.

But there was something about this rainbow-haired woman that was causing him to lose his grip. And he didn’t like it. This was uncharted territory – not a comfortable position for someone who was used to dictating the rules and following the letter of the law.

Being the gentleman that he was, he let Stormy use the bathroom first to shower and change for dinner, but a few minutes later, he heard a sudden, outraged yell.

“Oh my Shiva!” Stormy screamed.

“What’s going on? Are you okay?” Marcus jumped up and hovered by the door, not sure whether he should go in. Stormy might be naked, and there was no need to tempt Fate again…

“No, I am
not
okay!” She stuck her head around the bathroom door. “I have a stripper’s bag!”