Page 6 of First Comes Marriage
You are not going to die today.You are safe in this giant metal projectile that defies the laws of physics. You will not plummet from the sky in a fiery blaze and crash in a flyover state. Not today.
It wasn’t exactly the type of mantra her therapist had recommended but, after everything that happened with her now ex-husband, Sabrina had learned that acknowledging the doomsday scenarios playing in her head was more helpful than pretending they didn’t exist.
She stabbed at the button overhead to turn on the fan above her seat, but all it did was spit out a burst of hot air. As if she wasn’t already sweating to death. Thank God she had the foresight to block out her mother’s voice this morning—Respectable people do not wear sweatpants on an airplane, Sabrina.Flying might have been Sabrina’s own personal version of hell, but at least she was wearing an elastic waistband and a wire-free bra. Could be worse.
“Fucking hell.”
It just got worse.
Sabrina forgot to breathe. She’d know that gruff voice anywhere. The gravel of it scraped across her skin, and she grew lightheaded as his mere presence sucked all the oxygen out of the tiny space.
You arenotgoing to die today.
Opening her eyes, she met the hard stare of Sebastian Graham. He stood in the aisle beside her row, an immovable tower of censure in a three-piece suit. The sharp slash of his eyebrows and slight flare of his nostrils would be comical on any other man, but only made Sebastian more handsome. How was he so beautiful when he was this angry? The silent wrath rolling off him in waves bent the air around him, like the heat rising on the tarmac below.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He arched an eyebrow at her as though the question offended him.
“I mean, you’re going to Vegas. Obviously. But why?” she stammered.
He shook his head and shoved his carry-on into the overhead compartment with an alarming ease. Swearing under his breath, he unbuttoned his suit jacket and dropped into the seat next to her. She pressed herself against the wall of the cabin, as if that half an inch of space could give her enough room to breathe. As if his thigh wasn’t dangerously close to pressing against hers. Why did they even make planes with only two seats together? What happened to three seats in a row?
You are not going to die today. Not from this hunk of metal falling out of the sky and not from Sebastian Graham’s death glare.
Out of the corner of her eye, Sabrina watched as he settled into his seat, put in his earbuds, and rested his head back, his eyes falling closed, without ever answering her question. Clearly, he had no intention of talking to her, even if they weretrapped with each other for the next seven hours. What were the odds?
But then she remembered—Aunt Lucy had said the other person going to this convention on behalf of Aster Bay was a “young man” who played bar trivia every week. Sabrina winced as she remembered the hours of Trivial Pursuit she and Sebastian had played in the food pantry break room between stocking shelves with canned soup and packing care packages of mini toiletries.
She placed her hand on his forearm to get his attention. His icy blue eyes flew open and stared at the offending point of contact. She motioned to his ears. With a harsh exhale through his nose, he removed the earbud closest to her and watched her expectantly, but he still didn’t say a word.
“Are you—” She stopped herself, swallowing to bring moisture back to her mouth, and tried again, pulling her hand back into her own lap. “You’re the other rep from the Merchants’ Association.”
His eyes flared slightly in surprise before narrowing at her. “Theother?”
“Aunt Lucy volunteered me.” When he didn’t say anything, she continued, words tumbling over themselves. “I moved back. In. With her. I want to open a pottery studio, like the one I had in Maine. Kennebunkport. That’s where I’ve been, the last few years at least. Not that you asked. But I was. And I had a studio there. And a—” She stopped herself.No need to dump all your baggage at his feet.“But now I’m here and I want another one. Studio, that is. And the Merchants’ Association hasn’t approved my application yet for a permit to open. Apparently, pottery’s controversial, which is really saying something, if you think about it, in a town that already has a lingerie store, a boudoir studio, and a sex toy store.”
Her face heated at the mention of the sex toy store, filthy fantasies that had kept her company since she’d spotted him atthe Bazaar flashing behind her eyes: Sebastian pressing a toy between her legs, the way he’d punish her for the last ten years with an endless string of orgasms.
You will not think about orgasms while you’re sitting next to him in this death trap.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with a sex toy store. I mean, it really is progressive of the town to welcome a sex shop in the heart of downtown. And quality toys can be hard to find, you know? I mean, maybe you don’t know. I mean,I know.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped, drawing her attention, and she was momentarily fascinated by the movement of the tiny muscles keeping his jaw tightly clenched.
“What was I talking about? Oh! My pottery studio. Aunt Lucy—you remember Aunt Lucy—she told the Merchants’ Association that I’d go to this conference because she thought it would put me in their good graces to get my application approved and no one else wanted to go. Well, no one else except you. Apparently.”
“Apparently.”
She opened her mouth to say something else when the flight attendant at the front of the plane started her speech about seatbelts and how to use the oxygen masks if they should drop from the ceiling of the plane. Sebastian turned his attention to the flight attendant, his laser focus on the safety monologue making it clear that he was done listening to her babble. Sabrina slunk down in her seat, trying to absorb the information, but it all sounded like white noise. And the less she heard, the more panic clawed at her throat. How would she inflate the oxygen mask if she hadn’t heard the directions? Was she supposed to pull down and then put it on, or put it on and then pull down? And what was that about the seat cushion?
You are not going to die today. You are not going to die today. You are not going to die today.
Unless there’s a sudden loss of cabin pressure and you can’tfigure out how to put the oxygen mask on. Or the plane crash lands in water and you drown before you figure out how to use the flotation device.
Are we even going to fly over water? A flotation device won’t help me if we crash in a field.
Which is more likely to cause fatalities—going down nose first into a Great Lake or a corn field?