“You are ready?”
I jumped, Vik’s voice in my ear.It’s a radio, you melt.And my answer was a resoundingfuckno. But I nodded, gritting my teeth. Vik had survived a thousand versions of hell to bring me here. Throwing it back in his face felt worse than lighting a crack pipe for him.
He doesn’t smoke crack.
Man, I wanted a cigarette.
Viktor flicked a couple of switches. Noise built, shaking my seat, rattling my bones. “We will taxi now. I will tell you before we take off.”
Cheers, mate.
The chopper began to move, edging forward, the blades casting whipped shadows on the tarmac, taking a slice of my soul with them with every rotation, curdling my stomach.
Don’t puke.
I wouldn’t. Never did, never had. But fuck me, this was the closest I’d felt since I ate eleven McFlurries that one time a million years ago.
The bird reached the magic spot. I risked a glance at Viktor. His face was a study of sexy as hell concentration, but he spared me a grin, that spark in his eyes brighter than perhaps I’d ever seen, and I realised that how I felt about him was more than love. That if I only saw him so alive this one fucking time, it was worth everything.
Even the breakfast I clearly wasn’t getting until this was over.
The noise of the chopper grew louder, the blades above my head picking up speed.
Viktor said something else about thrust. A strangled sound escaped me, and he rubbed my arm. “You are okay. I promise.”
Absolutely was not. But that wasn’t going to change. I peeled his hand from me and pushed it back to where it needed to be on the controls. “Both hands on the wheel.”
His soft laugh crackled in my ear. I held onto it, and to Lida’s happy bark, as the heli made some fucked-up sound and finally began to rise...
And rise and rise and rise, leaving my stomach on the ground as my hand flew to my mouth and my eyes slammed shut.
Fuck.
Fuckingfuck.
Viktor did this shit on the regular? Forfun? If I hadn’t known he was tapped before, I did now.
JesusChrist.
“You can look, Asher.”
“Fuck off.” I pressed the heels of both hands into my eye sockets. “Tell me when we’re on the ground again.”
“It will be awhile.”
“Don’t care.”
“If that was true, I would not be able to do this.”
His hand grazed my leg—my thigh, skimming the constricted muscle. But the touch was over too soon, cos this fucker had toconcentrate.
It felt like I was stuck in a potato rumbler for a hundred years, but eventually, the god-awful noise mellowed. “Are we in space yet?”
Viktor laughed again. “Lookand see.”
Nope.
Still not doing it.
