Fifteen minutes later, the three men left the minister’s house with a handful of signed and stamped permits.
Chapter Four
Jumla
Dree
The helicopter blades pounded against the air.
Gravity forced Dree farther down into the seat’s cushion as the vehicle lifted away from the Earth. Hearing-protective headphones were clamped on the sides of her head.
A four-point seatbelt cinched around Dree’s waist and over her shoulders like a backpack, buckling where the four straps met over her pelvis. Her hands clenched into fists around the two woven straps by her shoulders.
She’d managed to finagle a center seat on one of the two couches of three seats each that were facing each other and attached to the walls of the helicopter’s fuselage.
Flying was still scary for her after twenty-five years of never having done it until she’d endured two international plane flights in the last week, and this was her first helicopter ride. She wasn’t planning on grabbing anyone around the neck and screaming, but she wanted two big male bodies on either side of her so she would feel safer. Also, from the center seat, someone large was between her and the windshield in front and the porthole windows in the back, so she would feel less like she was going to topple out of the oversized mechanical dragonfly.
The chopper climbed in altitude and sped away from the airport, banking to the left. She shifted forward in her seat. Her body hung in the harness.
Dree did not loosen her grip on the straps, though her knuckles ached.
She wasn’t going to scream. Shewas notgoing to scream.
She ground her molars together, not screaming.
Alfonso, the Spanish engineer with dark blond hair and eyes of the clearest green Dree had ever seen, sat on one side of her and had turned his head away to look through the cockpit and out of the front windshield.
On her other side, Maxence was reading something on his phone and whispering to himself.
Max’s thigh pressed against the outside of hers. He was trying not to man-spread, but three rather large men occupied the seats facing them. Max’s long legs just didn’t have anywhere to go.
Batsa, Father Booker, and Isaak sat in the seats across from them, and all of them had rather long legs, too. There had been some careful, unspoken negotiations about whose leg could go where without touching each other too much, which Dree had found hilarious until the helicopter had lifted off and all her attention had been diverted to not screaming.
Father Booker had his hands folded in his lap and his eyes closed, leaning his head back against the seat, either resting or praying to keep the helicopter up in the sky.
Everyone wore hearing-protective headphones over their ears, but the roar of the engine and the rotors beating the air were still deafening in Dree’s ears.
Both Alfonso and Isaak casually looked out of the windows and kept glancing at her.
Isaak winked at her.
Dree hadn’t planned on picking a bed partner while they were on this little charity mission. She hoped they realized that.
The helicopter climbed in altitude, which meant that the seats that Dree and Max were sitting in felt like they tipped sideways and toward the helicopter’s tail.
Gravity forced Dree to lean against Maxence’s shoulder just a little bit even though she was hanging onto her straps for dear life.
Maxence closed his eyes and continued whispering. She couldn’t hear what he was saying over the whine of the laboring engine and flapping of the rotors. Warmth from his muscular body seeped through their clothes, and gentle heat radiated over Dree’s thigh. His shoulder was higher than hers by several inches. Her arm was pressed against his triceps, again separated only by a few paltry layers of cloth.
Even though the interior of the helicopter had a particular smell—sweat from many previous passengers and dirty motor oil—Dree was sitting so close to Maxence that his subtle aftershave wafted toward her nose. It wasn’t the same cologne he had been wearing in Paris, which was a bit more like the grass growing on white cliffs over the ocean. Now, with just a turn of her head, she could smell darker musk and the far-away thoughts of a cinnamon and vanilla sweet in a Hindu temple filled with sandalwood and incense.
This was the closest she had been to him since he had left the bed in Paris without waking her up.
Really, the last time she had been this close to him, she’d been sleeping in his arms, naked.
The sun was still quite near the eastern horizon, but light flooded the helicopter whenever they turned. Even though they had met at the rectory at six o’clock, the helicopter hadn’t taken off until after eight. The winter sun had been up for over an hour, and while it was quite cool, Dree had removed her heavy coat before they had boarded the helicopter because she’d been overheated.
Every time the helicopter tilted, either she rolled against Maxence, or despite him bracing his legs against the floor and holding onto the arm of the seat, his muscular body pressed hers.
