“Never tell me that line works, mate,” she gasped. “If it does, I’m practicing.”
He pulled her upright and said loudly, “She’s fine. Ready to go.” Then lowered his mouth to Willow’s ear and whispered, “Behave.”
“Too naughty for you?” she whispered back. “You know what you can do about that. Keep me in line, hey.” And had the satisfaction of watching him lose his cool. She’d missed him.
“Right,” Andy, the balloon man, said. “We’re ready for you to climb in for our safety briefing, and then we’ll be on our way.” His mouth was smiling, but his eyes were saying, It’s free publicity, and I’ll be rid of these knobheads in an hour. I hope that artsy bugger gets a good shot of my logo.
Which was when Brett Hunter, the world’s most discreet man, took Willow by the waist with one hand and the shoulder with the other, pulled her into him, gave her the kind of soul-searing, back-arching kiss that took your breath away, and said, “They’re waiting, baby. Get in there for your safety briefing.”
I know exactly what you’re doing, his expression said. And you set me on fire.
She’d encountered that expression on a few previous occasions. She’d enjoyed every one.
Willow was the last one to step through the wicker door and into the basket, thanks to Brett’s very public display of affection. She may have been a little wobbly, too. The pilot, Andy, did place her diagonally across from Crystal, which was annoying, before he latched the door shut. The cameraman was straight across from Willow, though, and his camera panned from her, to Andy, to the paddock, where woolly white sheep grazed, and on to Jamie’s bearded-pirate face and broad chest. Jamie’s black hair was a little long, and he was, Willow realized with another fit of the giggles, wearing earrings: thick, squared-off stainless-steel hoops like chunks of visible badassery. He raised an arm to pull back his hair, as if on cue, and showed off the tattoo on his bicep. No Regrets.
Deep stuff. Brett would be so unsurprised.
The cameraman didn’t seem to be including Crystal at all, and she was either pouting or scared, Willow couldn’t tell which. On the ground, Tom circled the basket, held to earth now by only four lines, while above their heads, a gout of yellow flame roared from the burner into the opening in the balloon, fed by a canister strapped into a center compartment. It was more flame than Willow had expected, but it was exciting, too. An adrenaline rush, especially when you took off, surely. The airfield was surrounded by huge gum trees, but Andy must be used to clearing them.
Doing something new was always scary, but the fear was part of the rush, a package deal.
Andy finished his monotone recitation of emergency procedures, which didn’t sound nearly as unlikely as the flight attendant saying, “In the event of a water landing, the life jacket is under your seat. Pull on the red tab to inflate,” and you thought, “In the event of a water landing, we’re all dead anyway, mate. I don’t think I’ll be doing any bobbing in the sea, life jacket or no.”
Andy said, “Hang on,” and began to unhook ropes from the black handles on the outside of the basket, which Tom caught and began to coil. Crystal, who’d been nearly hopping up and down and gazing imploringly at Jamie, said, “I’m sorry, but I need to . . . I’ll be back straight away. I can’t . . .” She got a leg over the basket and began to climb down the outside, her feet reaching for the black handles, and Andy shouted, “Oi!” and lunged for her.
The basket began tilting under her weight, a meter off the ground. Tom grabbed for a line and dragged his weight against it, the basket rocked in his direction, nearly throwing Willow out and into Tom, and Crystal lost her footing and fell a meter and a half, hitting the ground with a cry on one palm and both knees, then staggering to her feet.
Tom was desperately dragging at the rope, the basket tilted farther, and Andy was manipulating the burner closed, shouting, “Hang on!” Willow did, and thought only semi-hysterically that it was a good thing Azra wasn’t seeing this. Pilot error? Passenger error, more like. Crystal was such a wet little sook.
Eventually, they were on the ground again, and Amanda was bent over Crystal, who was holding her wrist. “I’m fine,” Crystal said, a few tears staining her cheeks. Of course, she cried prettily. “So stupid. And I still need to use the loo.” She tried to laugh. “I don’t want to go up, though. I’m sorry, Willow. I can’t. You go instead, Amanda. Please. You’ll look beautiful for the film, and I . . . I can’t.”
Andy looked like he wanted to mutter, but he didn’t. “You’re welcome to come,” he told Amanda, “as long as you sign the release. Or you, Tom, if Amanda’s willing to drive the chaser. But we need to catch the dawn. If we wait much longer, the winds will pick up, and we’ll have to abort. If you’re OK,” he added to Crystal. Willow thought, I’m guessing you’re meant to report this, mate, and that you won’t. Though it was as minor as you can get, and as much her own bloody fault, and glanced at Brett.
He was standing with his arms crossed, frowning, opening his mouth to speak, so she said, “I hope we can still go up, as long as Crystal’s OK. I’ve been looking forward to it. I can’t imagine you’ve actually ever come to grief, Andy.”
“Do me a favor,” Andy said. “I wouldn’t be in business if I had. I take risks on my own time, not with clients, and I’m still standing. Safest mode of transport there is, as long as you judge the wind right and don’t hit power lines. Which is why we leave now, or we don’t leave at all. Let me know what you want to do, and we’ll do that.”
Amanda asked Tom, “What do you think, darling?”
He said, “I’ve gone up dozens of times. We can go another day, the two of us. We should give Crystal a lift to A&E for an X-ray anyway, if her wrist is still bothering her.”
“It’s better,” Crystal said, bending it back and forth. “A sprain at most. Honestly, I’m sorry to be so stupid. Just . . . a lift home, maybe. I’ll put some ice on it. Surely nobody else has to go, though. Willow and Jamie can do it. They’ll look good being filmed.” She laughed, sounding giddy now that she was back on the ground. “Young, and like a happy couple.”
“Don’t be silly,” Amanda said. “I’m quite happy to go up.”
“Are you sure?” Tom asked. “Wait for me instead. I can’t come. Somebody has to drive the chaser. Dunno why we’ve never gone up together before this. Maybe we should do it for our anniversary.”
“We haven’t done it because I was working, most likely,” Amanda said, with one of her brittle smiles, and Willow, for once, felt sorry for her. “But I’m here today, I have the time, and why not? Surely I deserve to live a little.”
“Right, then,” Tom said. He asked Crystal, “Do you think your wrist would be OK for an hour? You could ride along with me and rest it.”
“I . . . I think it would.” The words were breathy little puffs, and Crystal was still holding her wrist. Brett could have offered to take her home, but for once in his well-mannered life, he didn’t. Willow’s own feelings were pretty straightforward. She was glad Crystal wasn’t getting fussed over, that her big brown eyes and heart-shaped face weren’t working. Maybe she was the stand-in for every snippy, superior girl at cooking school, the ones Willow had cooked rings around, and maybe she wasn’t. All Willow knew was, in this moment, she didn’t like her. Crystal wasn’t actually looking at Brett, but Willow had not a doubt in the world that if she’d been alone with him, she’d have tried it on.
“I’m going, then,” Amanda announced. “Substitution.”
Andy already looked bored again. “No dramas. As long as we start now.”
Tom went over to the van and brought back a clipboard and pen, and Amanda scribbled her name on the release, then handed it and her own puffer coat to Tom before she stepped through the wicker door and into the basket with evident satisfaction. She was, Willow noted with only a little amusement, wearing a sapphire-blue silk sweater and a gorgeous mother-of-pearl pendant with a blue pearl in its center, and had her hair in a French twist and a pair of oversi
zed sunglasses covering her eyes, like she was vying for Most Polished Person In a Balloon. She was wearing flat shoes, too, ones Azra would have approved of, with pointed toes in a sort of brown zebra print, unlike Willow’s cludgy trainers. Had she wanted to go all along?
Easy answer. Of course she had. Her voice had sounded tight when Willow had told her about the plan last Thursday. Willow had thought it was the aftermath of landing the Dean wedding without her efforts, that she knew she should congratulate Willow and couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. Now, it seemed more likely that she hadn’t been happy about Willow asking Crystal and Jamie to go up instead of her, the firm’s owner and the obvious choice to star in a video for her website.
Oh, well.
Maybe Willow shouldn’t have enjoyed the ride without Brett with her. Pity she’d been born for thrills.
When Andy fired up the burner again, the rush of warm air was like sliding into a spa tub, or something better—sliding into Brett’s pedestal bath while the heat from the fireplace warmed the air and the snow fell outside in huge white flakes. And when the last ropes fell away and the gondola left the ground at last, it was like no plane ride ever. There was no jolting sensation, just a gentle rise, like ascending in a dream.
The first time she remembered flying—between some posting or other when she’d been five or six—she’d looked down at the puffy white clouds and thought how soft they seemed. If you could lie on them, she’d imagined, they’d pillow you, and you could pull their edges around you and snuggle down. That was exactly how she felt now. The sight was exciting, of the ground dropping away as the balloon headed south over the paddock, the basket seeming nearly to brush the tops of the gum trees, but the feeling was pure waking dream.
“A bit of drama,” Andy said as they drifted so close to the treetops, they nearly brushed against them, “just to show you we can.” He seemed to have lost his grumpiness along with the ground, as if his spirits, too, were buoyed by the balloon. “Southeasterly wind, which will take us through the hinterland. Need anything from me, mate?” he asked the cameraman.
“No worries,” the cameraman, whose name Willow didn’t know, said. “You fly it, and I’ll shoot it. Just don’t put us on the ground.”
Beneath them, the earth dropped away, but not much. They skimmed the folds of emerald hills and paddocks neatly bordered with hedges. The earth shone in the mellow dawn light and looked like the prettiest model railroad layout in the world, and the shadow of the balloon startled a flock of woolly sheep into a gallop. Willow laughed and pointed with nobody to care that she was doing it, and didn’t feel like a fool at all. To the east, the pearly-pink light changed to gold, and she watched it and was glad to be here.
The wind wasn’t blowing, or they were moving with it, and her hair remained tucked in its knot. Above her, the flame roared into the balloon. Beside her, Jamie looked out across the sloping hills to the sea, seeming to forget to be brooding and mysterious, and Andy operated his burner to rise or descend and said nothing. It was exhilaration, and it was peace.
“How does Tom know where we are?” she asked Andy as they neared the coast. “Surely you can’t fly back, not if we’re being pushed with the wind. It’s not like a . . . a sailboat, where you can tack.”
“GPS,” he said. “And Tom knows the roads.”
“Will we fly over the water? I was hoping to whale-watch.”
“We could do,” he said, “if you wanted to swim home. Not many landing spots once you’re out in the Pacific.”
“Oh.” It made sense, but she couldn’t feel stupid. She laughed instead. “I could’ve sussed that out with a bit of thinking.”
“No worries,” he said. “Almost everybody does expect a return journey. Nobody thinks about aerodynamics. I’m aiming to put us down south of Ballina. We can fly lower if we’re not going over the towns. Low as we like, in fact. Better for filming.”
“Perfect.” If Brett had followed them, she could have climbed straight into the car and been driven to his house. She wanted to tell him about this, preferably while she was wrapped around him somehow. His leg was, he said, “seventy-five percent.” Which, unfortunately, ruled out her leaping into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his shoulders, and waiting for him to back her up against the wall.
Future goals. You had to ride that high, once you found it. The best waves were the ones that lasted.
She was drifting with it, half an hour later, thinking about her wedding menu and that she could take photos and put them on the site as a sample. Four or five different ideas, from the rack of lamb anniversary dinner to the non-beach barbie . . . Which somehow became Brett taking her back to his perfect house in the hinterland after this, and the way she’d cook breakfast for him there, wondering the whole time if he were thinking about making love half as much as she was. Ahead of her, the coastline was coming closer, the golden strip of sand growing, the white line of foam on breaking waves edging ripples of turquoise, when something brought her out of her thoughts and made her look around. Andy was frowning, and they were descending faster. Over a town, which wasn’t what he’d said they’d do.
“What?” she asked.
He was staring at something. The gauges, she realized, above the fuel tank. “Change of plan,” he said. “We’ll come down on the beach.”
“What is it?” she asked. The others weren’t looking, other than the cameraman, who had his lens firmly fixed on them.
“Wind’s shifted. We’ll come down early to be sure.”
He was lying. She could feel it in the jagged prickles of awareness down her forearms, her calves.
“That’s Suffolk Park down there,” she said. “And those are power lines.”
“Yeah. I know.” He was manipulating the burner, and the balloon was dropping. They weren’t skimming tin rooftops, but they weren’t far up, and there were power lines below, deadly, thin black snakes that could tangle a balloon, wooden spikes that could pierce it.
“You should tell me,” she said. “In case I need to help.” A kind of hyper-alertness was taking the place of the prickles. She was aware of the rough texture beneath her hand as she clutched the edge of the basket, the sensation of descent in her stomach like riding down in a lift, and the furrows on Andy’s forehead.
His gaze went from the ascending ground beneath them to the dials, then up into the balloon. He said, “We’re losing pressure in the tank.”
It wasn’t good, that was obvious. “Why does that happen?”
He looked at her. No more grumpiness. Nothing but calm in his eyes. “If there’s a leak between the hose and the fitting, most likely.” He raised his voice. “Time to get in the brace position, everybody. We’ll be landing shortly.”
“What?” Amanda looked at her watch. “It’s been forty minutes. I thought you said an hour.”
“Brace position,” he said.
Willow was about to drop to her bum when she saw the silver glint ahead. She said, “Transmission tower,” and Andy said, “I see it. Get down.”
The balloon wasn’t descending anymore. It was going up, and fast. Her stomach was telling her so, even though she couldn’t see anymore. Ahead of her, between Andy’s braced, jeans-clad legs, she could see Amanda’s face. It was pale, her lips moving.
Amanda had to say it twice before Willow heard it. “Something’s wrong.”
Willow nodded, and Amanda shut her eyes. Her fingers went to her pendant as if it were a cross, and at that moment, Willow felt a rush of pity so strong, it nearly swamped her. Fear could make you do all sorts of things. Fear of failing, of losing. And if you couldn’t let anybody see? That just made it worse.
The balloon was going down again, and it was going fast. She couldn’t see where they were anymore, and she tensed, waiting for the jolt she was sure was coming.
They were still north of Broken Head, and that was a series of cliffs, with only small scallops of beach. A strip of land between the town and the headland, bu
t a balloon couldn’t land in the trees. Or on a cliff. Or in the sea.
Well, it could. You just weren’t likely to get out of it well.
It reminded her of something, like she’d had this experience in a dream. She could see them coming down, hitting the trees, the bodies falling to the ground, as if it had already happened.
Beside her, Jamie reached out his hand, and she took it. He wasn’t a pirate anymore. He was scared. He was only twenty-five, and he’d thought he’d live forever.
It was seconds, or it was minutes. She had no idea. Andy shouted, “Brace!” They did, and it was a good thing, because the basket was tipping. It had hit on one edge, and Willow was grabbing hold to keep from sliding straight into Andy’s legs. Another jolt, and the cameraman, whose name Willow still didn’t know, jumped up, Andy reached for him, the basket tipped farther, and their legs disappeared.
A flash of white light above, and below them, corrugated blue filling her vision, bright as a jewel. The sea, meters below, but the balloon was rising fast.
She looked up. It was . . . on fire. Burning like a love letter held in your hand, after you lit the match. And Amanda screamed.
It only took a second, and it wasn’t a choice. She leaped to her feet, pulling Jamie with her, and shouted, “Jump!”
He stared at her, his blue eyes like marbles, looked down blindly, and pitched himself up and over the side while Willow was grabbing Amanda.
It felt like ten seconds. It was probably one. Amanda moaned, “No,” and Willow said, “Yes,” and threw her over the side. Then she threw herself after her.
Falling without a parachute. Twisting so she’d hit feet-first, so she could go in like an arrow.
Who can swim? she thought. And waited for the impact.
Brett watched the balloon lift off the ground. He raised a hand, but Willow wasn’t looking at him. She had a smile on her face that he was sure she wasn’t even aware of.
He said quietly to Dave, who’d climbed out of the car at last to watch the ascent, “She’s loving it. Why don’t I?”
Sexy as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 3) Page 41
