Such a Rush (29 page)

I laughed bitterly, thinking of Molly dragging me to Francie’s party. “Grayson, people do mess with me. Taking care of yourself makes you a target. And as Molly so kindly pointed out at dinner, the people who should have taken care of me never have, because nobody gives a shit.”

“I do.”

My body lit on fire with a new wave of the awareness I’d felt since I’d been here. But Grayson was manipulating me. Rolling on my back and staring up at the exposed pipes in the ceiling, I murmured, “You have a funny way of showing it.”

He was moving by the dark wall. For a second I thought I’d made him mad, and he would stomp out into the storm.

But then he was kneeling beside me, one hand very close to me on the cot. “Leah, I’m sorry about tonight with Mark. Patrick ran into the house to tell me Mark had grabbed you. I was afraid he’d hurt you. I may have overreacted, but”—he opened his hands, giving up—“that’s just what I do sometimes. You can’t hang out with Mark, okay? You’ll be really sorry.”

“Right,” I grumbled. “You care about me so much that you shove me toward your brother.”

Grayson sighed in frustration. “That’s for his own good. All of this is for him.”

“Tell me why,” I insisted.

“I can’t.” Grayson focused on me and his face was full of concern. “If I told you, you’d change the way you act around him, and he would know it was all for show.”

“Is he sick?” I guessed, hoping not. That would be too much for both of them to take.

“No!” Grayson said so vehemently that I believed him. “He just needs some help remembering that he’s human. I guess we all do.” He moved his hand from the side of the cot to my cheek.

Our gazes locked. Electricity formed in my cheek and zinged straight down, through my whole body.

He blinked slowly. Up close, his face was an elongated version of Alec’s. His long, blond lashes were the same. But his eyes were completely different from Alec’s innocent blue ones. They were stormy gray, swirling with heat.

Suddenly I knew why he’d been hiding behind his shades or looking down at his phone whenever I was around. Why he’d taken potshots at me yesterday for flirting with Alec, even though he was the one making me do it. He couldn’t
have me. That would ruin his plans for me and Alec. But he wanted me.

We paused there on the edge. His thumb stroked my jawbone as he leaned closer. I closed my eyes.

And then we were kissing, panting, kissing again, his lips hard on mine, his hand sliding down my bare skin underneath the blanket.

Wow. Earlier that night and the night before, kissing Alec would have been nice if not for all the baggage with it. It felt good, and he acted like a gentleman. Grayson did not act like a gentleman at all. Kissing him was an adventure, a journey, a battle, every movement of his lips and hands sparking new explosions all over me.

“Oh,” he said, drawing back. Then he changed his mind and kissed me again. His hand cupped my bare breast, his thumb rubbed across my nipple, and I was not going to tell him no. I didn’t need to. He would make a fist and exercise the impulse control he’d been taught in five, four, three, two, one.

He broke the kiss and sat back on his heels. His hand moved from my breast to the center of my chest, over my heart. “Leah.” He was breathing hard. “I’m sorry. I do care about you. Please know that. I just… I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell me I don’t have to date Alec anymore.”

“What?” His face hardened against me, and he withdrew his hand. “No.”

“Tell me
why
I have to date Alec.”

“No.”

“Then fuck off.” Hugging the blanket tightly around me, I rolled over with my back to him.

Much later I woke again
and sat up suddenly, alarmed at the weight on my chest. The lights were still off, but I could see
in the dim glow through the cellar window that both blankets covered me. Grayson lay sprawled across the cement floor with no blanket at all, his wet T-shirt balled under his head for a pillow. I watched his smooth, muscled chest rise and fall for a few peaceful breaths. Then I lay back down.

“Leah,” he whispered. “Hey. Wake
up.”

As I opened my eyes, he was moving his hand away. My scalp tingled like he’d been stroking my hair.

“Get dressed,” he said. “I’m waiting outside for you in the truck.” He climbed the stairs in his damp clothes and disappeared through the door.

The light was back on. I slipped my own cold clothes on, wishing for the warm blankets, and followed him up the stairs. Outside it was still night. The rain had moved away, leaving a heavy white mist in its place. The airport looked ghostly and abandoned but intact. I wondered why Grayson had woken me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as I hopped up into his truck. “Did the tornado touch down?”

“Not around here,” he said. “A couple of people were killed in a trailer park a few counties west of here.”

Nothing unusual. A chill passed through me.

“But the storms are gone,” he said, “so I’m taking you home.”

“Couldn’t you let me sleep through the night and then walk home?” I grumbled.

“No, Alec might get here early in the morning and see you.”

“Why couldn’t you tell him the truth? That you didn’t want your employee to die, so you brought me into the storm cellar and slept on the floor across the room from me, and we made out for a few minutes but didn’t do it?”

The truck bumped from the highway to the gravel road through the trailer park. He said quietly, “It would look like we did it.” Gravel crunched under the tires as he stopped the truck in front of my trailer. “If I told him about it, he would figure out that I wanted to. He knows me pretty well.”

Though my fingers and toes were frozen, my blood heated as he whispered this.

He sighed, dismissing the thought, back to business. “Sleep late tomorrow if you need to. I’ll make up an excuse to tell Alec. Or take a nap on break. What matters most is other people—” He touched his thumb.

“Then me, then the airplane, then the banner. I know.” I jumped down from the truck and crossed the dirt yard, unhealthily pissed that every time Grayson and I were about to make an actual connection, he brought up business. Or Alec. They were one and the same for him.

I tripped over the edge of a miniature canyon the rain had carved into the dirt. That was the only difference the storms had made. In Grayson’s headlights, the trailer shone dully. Like a cockroach after a nuclear war, it would still be here when we all were dead.

“Is he
really asleep?” I called to Alec, just loud enough to be heard over the drone of the fans in the hangar.

We both sat in lawn chairs. I’d just started lunch, Alec was finishing his, and Molly was outside, getting his next banner ready. I’d thought Molly would make my job flying for Grayson more fun and less awkward. She’d said she was here to protect me. Yet because of the way our meals and breaks fell, I hardly saw her. When we did speak, she acted funny, like there was something wrong between us.

Or maybe that was me, still miffed about Francie’s party last night.

Grayson lay on the couch in front of Alec and me, obviously unconcerned about its dust issues. He’d been talking to us about the turbulence we’d all felt that morning now that the days were getting warmer and pockets of hot air rose from the beach. He’d closed his eyes, but he kept responding to everything Alec and I said… more and more slowly… and now he
looked like he had in the basement last night, his face at peace, his long body strangely relaxed.

Alec nodded. “He spent the whole night here last night, watching over the airplanes. In the one-in-a-million event that a tornado
did
touch down here, what was he going do? Hold on to one wing of each Piper to keep them from blowing away?”

Afraid to admit I’d asked Grayson the same thing last night, I shrugged. Grayson’s vigil had nothing to do with the airplanes themselves. It had to do with worry, responsibility, helplessness, and the need to do
something,
I thought. And it had a little bit to do with me.

Alec stood and threw his trash in the can. “I’ll see if Molly needs help, and then I’m flying. Don’t wake Grayson up, even if it’s time for you to fly, okay? Just let him sleep. And if he jumps down your throat later, tell him I told you so.” He crossed behind me and squeezed my shoulder.

I nodded, still watching Grayson. Alec disappeared into the hot afternoon. Out on the runway, Mr. Simon’s Stearman biplane passed in front of the opening of the hangar. One of his employees was taking a tourist for a ride instead of Mark taking me. The distant roar echoed around the metal walls and mixed with the drone of the fans, hum upon hum. Grayson didn’t stir. I took another bite of my sandwich as I examined him.

One long leg extended off the edge of the couch, past the armrest. The other leg was folded under him. His arms were folded across his chest too, hugging himself. His face settled to one side, toward me, his features softened by sleep, his blond lashes long against his cheeks. His shaggy curls peeked from behind his head on the sofa cushions. In that moment I saw him differently: not as an American boy with a tenuous grip on the family business and his own sanity, but as a British
teenager crashing after a night on the town in London, listening to some strange pop music, wearing the straw cowboy hat for offbeat fashion rather than to keep the glare of the sun out of his eyes. Tall as he was, with a long nose and elegant hands despite the engine grease that usually streaked them, he would make a good Brit.

I felt like a voyeur, watching him sleep as I ate my sandwich, as if he were a movie for my entertainment while I munched popcorn. He’d watched me sleep the night before, I reasoned, so I didn’t owe him this sort of privacy.

I finished my lunch and dumped my own trash in the can. Instead of walking outside to my plane, though, I sat back down in my chair, a few feet from Grayson. I didn’t think he needed protecting, exactly. Nobody would come into this hangar to attack him, not even Mark, while his uncle kept him busy. And Alec was right: I shouldn’t wake Grayson. He would be angry that we hadn’t woken him. Alec and I would argue that if he was tired enough to need a nap in the middle of the day, he was too tired to fly until he caught up on sleep.

I should have left him sleeping and gone back to work. Something stopped me. His chest rose and fell more rapidly underneath his protective arms and his red T-shirt. His smooth brow wrinkled ever so slightly, like he’d had the briefest glimpse into something horrible.

A plane started not far outside the hangar, Alec’s Piper. The engine was quieter because he was only taxiing toward the end of the runway, not taking off. But he was so close that the noise vibrated the hangar, growling underneath the drone of the fans.

Grayson sat up in a rush, one hand gripping the sofa cushion and the other white-knuckling the back of the couch. He looked straight at me, mouth open, gray eyes wide. His sudden
movement had stirred the dust in the couch. A cloud of it twinkled around him in a shaft of sunlight streaming through the hangar door.

He asked, “My dad, and Jake. Are they dead?”

My fingers turned icy in the warm hangar. I could only imagine what cruelty his subconscious had dealt him. A family lunch, with his dad and Jake gathered around the dusty couch instead of Alec and me. A family argument that he’d hated every second of but wished he could have back again now that he understood it had been their last.

I nodded.

He closed his eyes. “Where is Alec?” he asked quietly. The noise from Alec’s plane had faded as he taxied away on the tarmac, but Grayson’s voice was still barely audible above the fans.

I waved toward the runway. “Flying.”

Grayson winced. Swinging his legs off the couch to set his feet on the floor, he leaned over and cradled his face in his hands. “It’s not fair,” he murmured through his fingers.

I wanted to reach out to him. I didn’t think it was fair, either, and I wanted to put my arm around him and tell him so. He’d been cruel to me in the past three days, though. He’d made it clear what he thought of me. He didn’t want comfort from me.

He sobbed into his hands. Silently. I recognized the sob by the way his shoulders moved.

Just once.

In two steps I crossed the empty cement floor between us, sat next to him on the couch, and slid my arm around his back. I wasn’t tall enough to put it around his shoulders. As I sat, I stirred up more dust. The air around us filled with golden sparks.

Now that I was touching him, I could tell how fast he was breathing. He tried to control it, though, refusing to let go of more than that one sob. He breathed long and deep, then wiped both hands down his face. He turned to me, eyes red and wet. “Do not tell Alec.”

“I won’t,” I said.

He growled, “I will make your life hell.”

I heard my own gasp of surprise. I removed my arm from around him and shifted back to my original chair. “You don’t have to threaten me, Grayson. I said I wouldn’t tell him, and I won’t.”

He ran one hand across yesterday’s blond stubble that he hadn’t gotten a chance to shave. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He sniffed. “I don’t think I’m getting enough sleep at night.”