Ari chewed on her lip. “I don’t know...”
“Please Ari,” Sebastian whispered. “We need this wedding. We need this business.”
“We don’t really.” Ari sighed. “But I know how much you want it.”
“Look at this place.” Sebastian gestured around them to the sprawling estate, the stately manor and the glass summerhouse. “This is American money at its finest, and I’d like a piece of it.”
“Sebastian—”
“Think of Reine,” Sebastian added quickly. “If you do this wedding, we’ll make enough money that you can cut back your hours. We could hire more people and take fewer clients.”
Ari felt a twinge of guilt. She knew she worked hard and saw her daughter too little. She recalled the look of disappointment in Reine’s eyes when she’d left for the airport, recalling her downturned face and sad tears.
“All right,” Ari agreed with a reluctant sigh. “Okay.”
Sebastian stopped, looking down at Ari with concern. “Ari, Luis and I love that girl. She’s our niece. I would never do anything that might adversely affect her, you know that.”
Ari nodded. “I know.”
“This can work, for all of us,” Sebastian continued. “I’ll put your daughter at the front of all the plans we make. I adore her. Luis and I have been like the father she doesn’t have. Now come on, let’s give Sasha the happy news.”
At that Ari shook her head. “She has a father,” she reminded Sebastian. “He’s coming back for me.”
Sebastian nodded, but Ari could see from the look on his face that he didn’t believe her. Sometimes, when she was at her very lowest, she didn’t believe herself either.
* * *
The last time Tom had been in a plane that stalled, his father had been in the cockpit. Sitting in the back of the aircraft, Tom had heard his father shouting and swearing, a litany of curses as he rebuked the plane for failing him. But Doug was nothing if not an accomplished pilot, and Tom had watched, completely unfazed, as his father started the usual stall procedure. Nose down, increase engine power, level the wings, pull up. Through wide eyes, Tom heard and felt the plane respond to his father’s methodical flying, and when the plane levelled and began flying at full power once more, Doug gave him a wide smile.
“She never lets me down,” he’d said to Tom with a wink, before giving his full attention to the plane again.
When they were on the ground once more, Doug had slung an arm around Tom’s shoulders as they walked away from the hangar. “You can always recover from a stall,” he’d explained. “Sometimes it’s just one of those things. Sometimes it’s just a bump in the road. But if you keep your head, you can always get back to where you need to be. Remember that, okay?”
Over the years, Tom had been through many stalls. He’d experienced more bumps in the road than he cared to remember. The biggest bump of them all — his runaway years, Marnie sneeringly described them — he tried not to recall at all. His father’s death was another bump, just another stall.
He recovered from them all. Nose down, full throttle, level wings, pull up, fly once more. Every stall in life was always the same. Doug had been right... all Tom had to do was keep his head, and all would be fine.
The only time he hadn’t kept his head was when he’d been presented with a blue pair of eyes and pink lips curved in a smile, a smile that was only for him. Tom had lost his head and his heart in a big way, and he’d never really recovered. Nose down, full throttle, level wings, pull up and fly... For the first timein his life, it hadn’t worked. Some stalls, it seemed, you couldn’t recover from.
He didn’t know why, but when Doug’s plane stalled that morning, with Tom flying solo in the cockpit, he thought of Ari. As the blue sky dipped away, and the plane glided into the dark clouds, dangerously out of control without an engine, her face crossed his mind.
The ground loomed before him, getting closer and closer with every passing second, and all Tom saw was Ari. He steered the plane as best he could, knowing he would crash with her face in his mind.
* * *
“If I’m your queen of spades, what does that make you?” she asks him one night, her head turned in his direction. She’s naked, just a sheet draped over her legs, lying on her front, her hair falling over her shoulders like a Botticelli angel. He sweeps it away, pressing a kiss to her shoulder blades, sighing warm against her skin. “The king?” she suggests with a smile.
But he shakes his head. “Not the king.”
“The knight then,” Ari suggests, “protecting the queen in her castle.”
He shakes his head once more. “Nope. Not the knight either.”
“The ace?” She laughs. “Or . . . I don’t know . . . the seven? The eight? Tell me.”
He grins back at her, pulling her into his arms and rolling on top of her. He presses his lips to hers, marvelling once more at the feel of her in his arms. She’s soft and warm and lovely and his, and each and every one of these facts is like a small miracle to him.
“The joker, the fool,” he tells her, and she laughs.
