Flight Risk

by Barbara Valentin

  Ignoring him, she lifted both eyebrows and exclaimed with great difficulty, given the fact that her pulse was racing and sweat was starting to bead out of every pore, "I drove all the way down there, interviewed the head guy, took some pictures, and then he outfitted me with all the gear, brought me up to the platform, and told me what to do, and I—"

  She stopped to catch her breath and swipe her forehead before gasping. "And I looked down in the gulch…I don't even know how high up we were."

  She heard Claire say, "Just breathe, honey."

  "Doug! A paper bag, please." Sara seemed to yell, although her voice sounded distant.

  The interior of Chez Doug's started to spin.

  Closing her eyes, Aubrey leaned back against something solid.

  "I gotcha." That voice came from behind her.

  With two hands gripping her upper arms, she let herself be walked to a nearby chair where the personal boundaryless guy dropped to one knee right in front of her. Taking her hands in his, he said in a low, hypnotic voice, "Look at me. Look into my eyes."

  Struggling to take a full breath, she yanked her hands from his and glared into his eyes—his rich, caramel-colored eyes.

  And after a full minute had passed, she started to feel nothing short of fine. Absolutely calm and fine.

  Morphing her glare into a scowl, she breathed, "How did you do that?"

  At that, his teasing smirk returned. "You're not afraid of heights."

  Her defenses on high alert, she shot back, "Oh yes I am," well aware that she sounded like a fifth grader picking a fight on the playground.

  With a quick shake of his head and that same teasing smile, he murmured, "You're just afraid of falling."

  Her face fell into a frown. "Oh."

  The thought had never occurred to her, but now that she thought about it, it made perfect sense, especially after seeing Max fall headfirst to his death. Eager to erase that disturbing image from her mind, she pulled her eyes back to his.

  As if reading her mind, he said, "And I can totally help you get over that."

  Ah, here we go.

  "Yeah, I'll be you can," Aubrey chortled. "Excuse me. I have to go." She attempted to stand, but he sprang up first.

  "Easy does it." Taking her clammy hand in his, he pulled her to a standing position. "You sure you're OK?"

  His concern was starting to unravel her defenses, making it that much more difficult to keep her scowl on.

  When she nodded, he reached into his back pocket and produced a pen. "Here. Just gimme a second."

  Watching as he gave his pen a click, she was surprised to see him uncurl her hand and start writing something on her open palm.

  It tickled like hell. Her scowl abandoning her, she pressed her lips together to suppress a giggle.

  But the ink wouldn't stick. Her skin was still too damp.

  Which might explain what he did next.

  Aubrey watched, mesmerized, as he held her open palm to his mouth and blew on it.

  While part of her brain knew he was just trying to dry her skin, when he locked his eyes on hers, the rest of her was all in for him doing more of the same on the rest of her clammy self.

  Feeling the tip of his pen press against her skin with just enough force to leave a mark but not inflict any pain, a delicious warmth pulsed through her.

  When he was done, he released her hand and looked right at her. "I've got to get to work. Give me a call sometime."

  With that, he gave Sara and Claire, standing stupefied nearby, a quick nod. "Ladies."

  After watching him walk out the door, Sara blurted with a bit of a growl in her voice, "Forget Malcolm, honey. There goes your plus one."

  Claire, fanning herself with her hand, just nodded. "Amen, sister."

  Aubrey, ignoring them both, couldn't peel her eyes away from her palm, unnerved not so much at what he wrote but where he wrote it—perfectly spaced between the marriage line and the heart line of her upper palm. Grabbing a napkin from the counter, she dabbed it in the cup of ice water Claire had offered her.

  "Are you kidding me?" she shot back as she did her best to scrub the ink from her palm.

  "Did you see what his shirt said? Not to mention the fact that he looked as if he was about eighteen years old."

  Then her phone emitted another chirp.

  "Oh, God. Dianne."

  CHAPTER THREE

  "I always knew I wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific." —Lily Tomlin

  "Well, that was pathetic," John groused as he walked to the service entrance on the north side of the Gazette building. "Trying to seduce a woman in line at a coffee shop. Pathetic."

  In his prepoverty days, if the uptight girl with the gypsy eyes (as her tall friend aptly described) had spotted him in line behind her, he would've had to fight her back with a stick. Not that that ever happened, but she sure as hell would've been a lot friendlier.

  He wouldn't have even bothered hitting on her if he hadn't overheard the whole thing about tea leaves and her soul mate's initials being M.D.

  What are the chances?

  The thought of introducing himself using his full name had crossed his mind, but he wouldn't be able to prove it without showing her his license, which still had his old Gold Coast address on it.

  But still—three times, same result, she said.

  "Well, she's got my number," he muttered to himself. "Ball's in her court."

  After checking his cheap prepaid cell phone to make sure it was turned on, charged, and not on mute, John stood and looked up at the Gazette building before going in through the service entrance, keenly aware that he was one marriage license away from waltzing through the front doors of what would then be considered his building.

  But today, it still belonged to his gran.

  He had debated all week about alerting her to the fact that he'd be washing the windows of her building but thought it would be better to surprise her, if she was even there that day. It was, after all, her 70th birthday. It was the only reason he agreed to accompany her to dinner, and it would be the first time he had seen her since bolting.

  To date, he had successfully rebuffed her periodic but odd invitations sent via Cameron, his gran's acerbic driver who had an unnerving ability to find John, no matter how far off the grid he tried to get—all for dinner parties she was planning to host for buddies of his from school who had recently married or announced their engagements, along with their better halves and happily betrothed parents.

  After a while she must've given up.

  Stepping into the freight elevator with his crew, though, his thoughts shifted back to the woman from the coffee shop. Not that he expected her to actually call him or anything, which was too bad because she was pretty cute. And feisty. How he thought he could ever help her get over her fear of falling he had no idea.

  Which was fine because she probably scrubbed his number off of her hand the minute he walked out of the coffee shop.

  Given that he was over a year into his self-imposed insolvency, he had gotten used to living without the finer things in life—the 360 rain shower in his uber-luxurious bathroom, his Maserati Quattroporte (and Audi coupe, Range Rover, and BMW 5 Series sedan), his forty-foot sailboat in Burnham Harbor, the well-appointed wardrobe in his walk-in closet that, if he calculated correctly, was a good 200 square feet bigger than his sparsely furnished studio apartment.

  But the one thing he couldn't get used to was the way women treated him. Either they didn't notice him at all, or when they did, they were not impressed. At all.

  And that morning's sad attempt had been no different.

  But that's what this little exercise was all about, right? Trying to find someone who would love him for him and not his fortune. Well, that and trying to prove to his gran that he could survive just fine on his own. And he was, sort of.

  If barely having enough for rent, getting around via public transportation, relying on coupons to cover his grocery bills, not bein
g able to travel anywhere outside of the city, and having to decide whether to go out drinking with his buddies or pay his cable bill meant surviving, then he had already proven himself several times over.

  But it was more than that. He had seen what his dad went through, always working, always alone, never living.

  With a sigh, he punched the button that would take him, his fellow crew members, and their gear to the roof.

  "Happy Friday. Any plans this weekend?" Alberto, or "Cruz" as the guys called him, asked as he hopped into the elevator seconds before the doors closed.

  John turned to face him. He knew by now that when Cruz asked that question, what he was really asking was, "What are you gonna do this weekend to remind yourself that there's more to life than work?"

  No wonder he liked the guy.

  While John was almost a foot taller and had about fifty pounds on the father of three who wore his thick, straight, black hair in a ponytail (all the better to show off the cobra tattoo that circled his neck), he was keenly aware that it was better to stay on his good side.

  "Nah, just taking my gran to her birthday party tonight."

  Which I'm dreading with all my heart.

  Cruz nodded his approval. "Ah, si, tu abuela."

  "And a dinner party thing tomorrow night."

  Cruz pulled a face. "Damn, that sounds too busy to me."

  John just nodded then after a couple of seconds passed, added, "Oh, yeah, and I still gotta find a woman who'd be willing to marry me by June 7th, or I'll lose my inheritance."

  "What?" Cruz laughed. "That's crazy, man. That's what—next week?"

  Knowing full well how ridiculous he must have sounded to the working class guy who had befriended him when he got the high-rise window washer gig, John lifted an eyebrow. "I'm being completely serious. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find someone who will love me for me and not my fortune?"

  "You're killin' me," his coworker chuckled. The rest of the non-English-speaking crew looked on, bewildered.

  Cruz translated. Group laughter commenced.

  John just kept talking in his usual matter-of-fact tone. "Yeah, so I'm thinking my best bet would be to find someone who doesn't know I'm rich, ya know?"

  Cruz stepped out of the freight elevator wheezing with laughter. "Stop it, man. We gotta get to work."

  Feigning exasperation, John asked, "What? I'm being completely serious."

  As they stepped into a little hallway and up a flight of stairs to the roof, Cruz said, "OK, let's pretend you're serious, just for a second. You're a good-looking guy. You make decent money. You shouldn't have any trouble getting a nice girl to fall for you."

  John pulled his face into a skeptical half grin. "I don't know, man. You think so? I'm havin' a helluva time."

  They strapped on their safety gear and then loaded their buckets and hardware into the scaffold. Cruz was the last to step in. He hit the button that would lower them down to their first bank of dirty windows and lifted his chin at John. "Tell you what. I'll bet you a hundred bucks that you can get the next woman who notices you to marry you."

  The face of John's gran floated before his eyes.

  "Hold on. It can't be just any woman. She's gotta be young and pretty. And single."

  "Aw, see? That's your problem right there. You're too picky, man."

  "Ya think?"

  Cruz nodded. "A hundred bucks."

  "Hey, I don't want to take your money," John joked.

  "Double or nothing."

  There was something in the way he said it that threatened to suck the fun out of their lively banter.

  Before he could respond, John felt a warm spring breeze come off the lake that took his spirit soaring all the way up to the brilliant blue canopy above them. He closed his eyes and imagined himself skydiving through it with his buddies as they had over the beautiful beaches of Belize a few years before. The rush of jumping out of the plane, the air racing over every inch of him as he plummeted 125 miles per hour, being careful to keep his back arched so he'd stay horizontal.

  God, how I miss that.

  He opened his eyes and nodded at Cruz. "You're on."

  * * *

  Flying out of the café, Aubrey spotted a stretch of rickety scaffolding that covered an expanse of the sidewalk in front of Chez Doug's and went all the way down to the Gazette building's entrance. Even if it meant stepping into the oncoming traffic on Michigan Avenue during rush hour, there was no way she'd be walking under it even though everyone around her did so without giving it a second thought.

  Idiots.

  Didn't they know these things could collapse faster than an umbrella in a hailstorm?

  Just as she was edging between the exterior of it and a parking meter, she felt a drip. Then another. And then a sudsy splash of cold, dirty, and probably dead bug-infested water cascaded over the top of her head, down her cheek, neck, left shoulder, and sleeve.

  Mortified, she sprang off the sidewalk and into the path of an oncoming Chicago Transit Authority bus, the driver of which promptly blared its horn at her. Her survival instincts kicking in, she ducked under the rickety scaffolding, shook herself off, and fished in her purse for a packet of tissues and a little bottle of hand sanitizer that she always kept with her in case of just such an emergency.

  Certain that the day couldn't possibly get any worse, she hurried into the lobby of the Gazette building with just minutes to spare and punched the poor Up button on the elevator with enough force to shove her nana's Volvo down the alley behind her apartment building.

  Peering at her reflection on the elevator door, she plucked at the damp side of her sweater and did her best to smooth her soggy hair back into place, but not before checking to make sure there weren't any dead bugs in it.

  Must get tetanus shot.

  Eager to make it to Dianne's office before she texted again, Aubrey hopped in and pushed the button that would take her to the 7th floor. The doors closed, and the elevator started chugging upward…very…slowly.

  I knew I should've taken the stairs.

  Almost as if it heard what she was thinking, she felt the elevator come to a full stop. Clenching her fists, she hung her head back and let out a low growl.

  She closed her eyes and listened as the doors opened.

  Come on. Come on. Come on.

  "Good morning."

  Redirecting her gaze to the person who had just joined her in the small confined space, she said, "Morning."

  To Malcolm freakin' Darvish.

  OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyGod.

  And just like that, she started channeling an amalgam of all of the flight attendants she had seen in action over the years.

  Slapping on a smile that would make Debbie Downer look like Miss America, she started, "I don't believe we've ever formally met."

  Then she lifted one eyebrow with all of the coyness of Cleopatra. "I'm Aubrey Thomas. And you are…?"

  Cocking his eyebrow, he unleashed an orgasm-inducing grin and said, "Malcolm Darvish."

  Aubrey rolled her eyes and gave her head a quick shake. With that stupid smile still plastered on, she replied, "That's right. Malcolm." She made sure to say his name in slow motion, as if she was describing the world's most decadent dessert.

  And our specials tonight include chocolate and whipped cream-covered M-A-L-C-O-L-M…

  Seeing that they were about to reach her destination, Aubrey decided it was now or never. First, she tilted her head as if the most brilliant thought had just occurred to her. "Say, would you like to go to lunch sometime? I was hoping you could…"

  Crap. How did Claire put it?

  "…give me a, uh, better understanding of how…"

  I'll bet your suit cost more than what I pay for rent.

  "…the, um, travel department's bottom line…"

  No, that's not it. Think. Think. Think.

  "…is, ah, affected by…"

  Hell, I'm just gonna go for it.

  "…foreign currency exchange rates."r />
  There.

  His eyebrows crinkled together in the most adorable way. "Absolutely. I just gave a presentation on that very topic to the executive board."

  Go. Me.

  It took no small amount of effort to restrain from attempting a cartwheel right there in the middle of the tiny elevator.

  Keep cool. Just keep cool.

  "OK, great."

  When the elevator dinged, Aubrey turned her back to the doors and with a slight shrug of her shoulder, asked, "Are you free today? We could meet at The Boatman?"

  It was a little out of her price range, but how often does one take one's future fiancé to lunch?

  He seemed impressed. "Perfect. How about noon?"

  "Perfect."

  That was way too easy.

  She turned to leave, but not before he pointed out that she had a dead fly on her shoulder.

  Wishing she had enough time to duck into a nearby bathroom stall so she could release the high-pitched scream that she felt bubbling up inside of her the moment he stepped into the elevator, she instead took one deep breath right after another all the way to Dianne's office.

  By the time she arrived, Aubrey was ready to hyperventilate.

  She knocked on Dianne's door, hoping against hope that Claire was right and that her editor was about to lavish her with long overdue praise for all of her recent submissions. If not, she had a lunch date with Malcolm in her back pocket.

  One more deep breath and she just about had herself convinced that her day was going to get a whole lot better. But one look at her editor's face was all it took for Aubrey to know that better was not what her day was about to get.

  With one eyebrow cocked under her trendy bangs, Dianne started, "Aubrey, it pains me to say this—"

  So don't.

  "As you know, Will Brandt is leaving which means there's a senior-level spot open." Aubrey couldn't help noticing that Dianne sounded less than pleased about this.

  She nodded while white-knuckling the arms of the chair. Will had confided in her that leaving the Gazette wasn't his decision. She was glad to learn, though, that he had already landed a position at Conde Nast magazine.