This is progress, people!
“Since we’re going to be together for the next few weeks, I, um, thought we should try to get to know each other better.” He seems nervous, like there’s something else he wants me to know, but isn’t sure how to say it.
If the guy can tell me I’m hot—I have to fan myself just thinking about it—I’m sure he can come clean about whatever other secrets lurk in the recesses of his mind.
“Want to play two truths and one lie?” I ask and explain the rules in which we each reveal two facts about ourselves and one fabrication that’s outrageous but plausible.
“I was thinking more like twenty questions.”
“How long is this flight?”
Grey takes my diary and opens it to a new page. He writes the numeral one and then proceeds to write a list, numbering each one. “This is what I want to know about you.” He gives me the notebook back.
“You want to know about my relationship with Todd?” I read the first one.
“When we got hitched, I didn’t realize you were engaged before.” His eyes land on the ring he’d given me on that very strange day several months earlier.
“Does it matter?”
“If the guy is threatening you, yeah. It’s my business.”
“Might I remind you of the MOC Club rules?”
“And one of mine is no woman in my life, least of all my wife, Marriage of Convenience Club or not, is going to be threatened by some jerk knob.”
“Fair enough. Don’t Hulk out here, we’re in a metal tube hurtling through the sky, thousands of feet in the air, no trapeze net below.”
“My Hulk days are behind us.”
“You want to know if I’m afraid of Todd’s blackmail and threats?” I don’t even pause to think. “When I’m with you, no. With him? Yes.”
He stiffens beside me.
I read the next item on the list. “You still want to know what I did wrong.” My lips turn down. “I told you. I almost married Todd. Didn’t think I’d get a second chance at marriage.”
“So, you believe in second chances?”
“To a fault. Sometimes third and fourth chances, too.”
“Are you referring to Todd?” Grey says my ex-fiancé’s name with disgust.
“But there’s no chance I’ll ever give him the time of day again. Okay, if he was waiting for a train, I’d tell him because that would mean he’d be traveling away from me.”
Grey runs his finger down the paper. “My mother taught me to make lists. She said it keeps the head organized. Out of the mind and onto paper. Frees up space for creativity.”
“You don’t strike me as a particularly creative guy. More strategic. Analytical.”
He wears a lopsided smirk. “Ah, that reminds me. I have one more question. Your father and our marriage. How will that go over with the Ice King?”
At the mention of my father, my insides freeze like I’ve been tossed into a vat of dry ice. Fitting, since Dreven Lefevre is theIce King.
I write my own list of questions on the page and Grey reads them.
“I’ll tell you about the scar if you answer one more item from this list,” Grey says.
There’s more I want to know about him than that, but it’s a start.
Turning to face Grey, I take in his distinct cheekbones, the crystalline gray eyes that see more than I expected, and then land on his lips—they’re perfectly proportioned, only interrupted by the scar running across his lower one. I touch my finger to it from where it runs through the scruff of his beard across his lips. My entire body quakes.
