He didn’t realize just how much he’d shared with her until he saw her expression, but just then, the plane dipped and pitched from side to side. Ian had never been a nervous flier, but though he wasn’t too bothered by the turbulence, Tatiana had tightly crumpled the corner of the script in her hands.
Wanting to soothe her flight nerves, he told her, “I’m sure we’ve just hit a little rough patch and will be through it soon.”
He watched as she deliberately loosened her grip on the pages. “After all the flying I’ve done the past few years, you’d think I’d be better at it.” Turning away from the window as if by doing so she could forget that she was in a little tube shooting through the sky, she said, “Thank you for reading through this with me and talking it over. It helped a lot. More than anything else has so far, actually.”
Just then, the plane did another couple of hard bounces, and her face went white before she plastered on a smile. “I had a really nice chat with my sister this weekend. It sounds like she and Smith are having fun scouting locations in Ireland. Evidently, they closed down the local pub.”
Just hearing Valentina’s and Smith’s names had Ian’s gut twisting with so much guilt that even though Tatiana had told him she wasn’t going to bring anything that had happened on Thursday or Friday night up again—and he should have been glad for the reprieve—he had to know, “Have you told her about us?”
“I promised that what happens while I’m shadowing you stays between us.”
Ian wasn’t sure if it was the rough flight—or the difficult conversation they were having—that was the reason for the quick rise and fall of her chest as she answered his question. All he knew was that what she’d just said had pissed him off.
“Damn it, Tatiana, don’t try to act like having sex with me is the same as sitting in on a business meeting. I might be an ass**le, but even I wouldn’t stoop so low that I’d ask you to sign an NDA before we slept together.”
“You’re not an ass**le.”
“I swore to you that I wasn’t going to treat you badly. I promised myself I would stay away. I blew both of those promises, big time.”
As if the tension between them was directly connected to the weather patterns, just then the plane banked sharply to one side, and then a few seconds later, to the other even more sharply. Tatiana screamed and every thought flew from his head but protecting her as he put his arms around her and pulled her close. She was ice-cold and trembling as he held her.
“Ian, Tatiana,” David’s voice came to them over the on-board speakers, “it looks like we’re going to have to make an unexpected landing on Vancouver Island. Please make sure you’re buckled in. We’ll be safely on the ground soon.”
When he looked down at Tatiana, her eyes had dilated with full-on panic.
“Tatiana, we’re going to be fine.” When it was clear that his words hadn’t registered, he tucked his hand beneath her chin so that she had to focus on him. “David and Linda are the best in the business. I wouldn’t trust anyone else more to get us down safely.”
But when the plane hit more turbulence, Ian knew he needed to do something more to get her mind off the rough flight.
“When we were kids, our parents gave all of us really heavy-duty umbrellas. But we didn’t really use them much, because it wasn’t cool to be seen walking to school carrying one. Looking back, I don’t know how we sat through class every day soaking wet, but I guess when you’re a kid, stuff like that doesn’t bother you much.”
He could see that she was a little surprised by the way he’d just up and started talking about his childhood, and was glad that he’d managed to capture her attention, given the way the plane was wildly rocking back and forth.
“One day, I suppose my mother got sick of dealing with our soggy clothes and made us bring the umbrellas to school. The other kids snickered at us behind our backs, but Adam, Rafe, and I decided we’d make all of them wish they had brought their umbrellas to school, too.”
“How’d you do that?”
He smiled at her, running the back of his hand down her cheek. “We holstered our umbrellas through our belts and climbed up the rain spouts to the roof of the school. Our mom was a big Mary Poppins fan, so we’d all seen the character fly through the air holding her umbrella plenty of times.”
“You guys didn’t actually jump off the roof, did you? Someone stopped you before you could, right?”
“Nope.” He grinned at Tatiana’s wide-eyed expression. “We were quicker than any of the adults. Besides, they already called us the Wild Sullivans, so I’m pretty sure they knew no threats or punishments were going to reform us. Odds are they were less surprised that we were planning to jump off the roof with our umbrella parachutes than they were that we hadn’t thought of it sooner.”
“So what happened?”
She had, it seemed, forgotten entirely about the lurching plane, and he’d never been so thankful for his childhood idiocy as he was now. If he’d played it straight when he was kid, he wouldn’t have had this story to tell her now.
“Half the school was out on the blacktop waiting for us to make our move.” He shook his head, laughing at the memory. “On the count of three, we opened our umbrellas, walked to the edge of the roof, and jumped.”
She gasped. “Were you all okay?”