Lucky in Love (12 page)

We were still caught up in that charged look when the airplane abruptly dropped like a stone. My terrified gaze flew to the back of the pilot
's head as he started messing with the controls. He lifted his right hand from what he was doing to briefly depress the communication button on his headset. "Wind shears from the warm front we're going in to."

How could I have forgotten
—my stupid luck! It was ironic, just like that Alannis Morrisette song: "He won the lottery and died the next day." This was it. I was a goner.

Dropping
Chance's hand, I fumbled with the fastenings on my seat belt. Before he could stop me, I got it undone. He started saying something into my headset, but I yanked mine off, and then his, leaving them to bounce and dangle from the spirally cords attaching them to the ceiling. Then I climbed into his lap, straddling him.

Chance
's look was priceless as I captured his face in my hands, his dark stubble lightly scratching against my palms. He was yelling something at me furiously, but the roar in the back of the cabin of the little aircraft was too much to make out what it was. His firm, warm lips were still moving when I locked my mouth to his and I bit his lower lip hard to make him stop.

Whatever Chance was saying, it didn
't take him long to forget it. His hands came up, knocking my blonde wig off. It took him about four seconds to loosen my braids and send my hair cascading down in random waves and kinks. His hands tangled in the mess, anchoring at the back of my head.

Then, he took over the kiss, sweeping his tongue inside my mouth, and simultaneously rocking his hips upward so that I could feel how hard he already was. He tasted so good, and it was like the kiss in the gym ten years ago all over again. The Cessna climbed a little, then gave another dip and shimmied to the right. I was dizzy, but not from the aerial acrobatics. Who the hell cared that we were crashing at this point? We were going out in style.

Chance untangled one hand and dropped it to my waistband, untucking the neat white shirt. Sliding his hand roughly up my stomach, around my ribcage and up my back, he unclasped my bra with a quick flick of his fingers. I groaned and traced my tongue lightly over his lips as he slipped his big palm back to my front and under my now-loose bra and cupped one heavy, aching breast. When he teased his thumb over the taut nipple, I almost came right there and rubbed myself hard against the strong ridge that strained against his jeans. I was hot and wet and ready, fumbling for Chance's zipper… and then I was tumbling sideways off his lap to land in a heap, half on the floor and half on my own seat.

Turns out, we weren
't dying after all. In fact, our jerk of a pilot had managed to get the plane under control while we were steaming things up in the back. Lacking any other way to get our attention, he had dipped hard to the left.

Chance pulled me to my feet and I
slumped down in my own seat, fastening my seatbelt as fast as I could. My cheeks were still flushed and my breath coming in hard gasps, and I was glad to see that this time, Chance wasn't any more in control than I was. He had his headset back on, but wasn't paying any attention to the pilot, who was gesturing wildly and obviously supremely pissed. Instead, Chance was looking at me intensely, his eyes molten green.

The expression in them warned me
that we had unfinished business that he couldn't wait to settle up.

Chapter 19

When we landed at a private airstrip outside of Vegas, our pilot was still yelling about how stupid we were and that he didn't want us on one of his planes ever again. I wasn't sorry to see the last of him as I followed Chance to where a car waited to take us to a hotel.

"
Fisher," Chance called out. "How'd you get here so quick?"

Now that I had a chance to really see him, the thin young guy that had been camped outside my apartment looked more like a college student that spent his time eating pizza and playing
Black Ops in a college dorm room somewhere than he did an FBI agent. He had on a loose green Mowglis t-shirt and baggy pants that sagged around his hips. Tennis shoes on his feet, instead of the shiny tasseled loafers I had imagined were standard FBI footwear, rumpled brown hair and wire-framed glasses completed the picture of someone's slightly-dorky kid brother.

Fisher had a nice smile, though, and he slapped Chance on the shoulder with what seemed like genuine affection.
"Flew in a couple hours ago," he said. "Tired as hell, but Nate brought me up to speed on the new plan and figured I should be here.

He held out a hand to me and I shook it. He had a strong grip for a skinny guy.
"Lucky, right?"

"
Not very often, but yeah that's me," I answered.

"
Well, you sure were lucky on the highway yesterday," he said admiringly. "Where'd you learn to drive like that and where were you headed in such a hurry?"

I blushed.
"Sorry about that," I said. "I had an appointment in Lansing I was late for." Geez, the lottery. I had totally forgotten about that again. Chance gave me a suspicious look and I shrugged.

"
I do have a life, you know," I told him.

Fisher cleared his throat.
"Well, I'm going to run us to a hotel just inside the city to wait things out. There are a lot of conventions in town this week, though, and a big Elton John concert tonight at one of the casinos, so I could only get two rooms."

"
Lucky and I are old friends," Chance said. "We grew up together. Bunking together won't be a problem." His look dared me to argue.

"
Fine by me," I replied, trying for nonchalant while my stomach skittered with nerves.

When we drove into Vegas, the sun was just setting, and the neon and flashing marquees gleamed in the dusky light. My view out the window was a blur of elegant casinos, gaudy restaurants, and thick traffic. People streamed down the sidewalks, tourists with cameras and Bermuda shorts rubbing shoulders with men in business suits, girls with miniscule skirts and hooker heels and more Elvises than I thought were statistically probably to see all in one place.

Our hotel was super flashy, which I pretty much expected, and the ding and
ka-ching of slot machines met us as soon as we came through the revolving doors. Apparently hotels in Vegas made it so you didn't even have to leave the lobby to lose all your money. To contribute further to the disorienting effect of the frenetically flashing slot machines, everything was either mirrored or plated in gold-toned chrome. The gleam of the lobby was dizzying, and I was glad when we were checked in and on our way to our rooms.

We took a mirrored and gold elevator
to the third floor, and I squeaked in horror when I caught sight of my reflection in its shiny little confines. My borrowed suit was rumpled and my wig was still covering the hair I'd hurriedly rebraided on the plane, but just barely. It looked ready to rear up and leap off my head at any second.

"
Why didn't you tell me I looked like such crap?" I hissed to Chance. The two men exchanged a glance and a shrug, as if to say, "We thought you knew."

When we got off at the third floor, I was still finger-combing the mess and tucking stray reddish strands back beneath the blonde. Fisher stopped at a pair of doors next to each other and handed Chance a card key. He hefted a beat-up backpack over his shoulder.

"There's a shop downstairs, just off the lobby, if you want to get a change of clothes and some basics. I figured we'd just order in some room service and cool our heels until we hear from Nate and Tanya."

"
Sounds fine to me," said Chance, running the card through the lock at the door handle. It released with a click. A change of clothes always sounded good to me, but mostly, I wanted to not be a Tanya clone as soon as I could possibly manage it.

"
All right then," said Fisher. "Guess we'll regroup in the morning if we don't get a call in the meantime."

He disappeared into his room, and I followed Chance into ours. I ran into his back when he stopped in the darkness to fumble for a light
switch. When the overhead light came on, I cringed automatically, expecting more reflective surfaces, but it appeared that the hotel had surprisingly spared their guests the garishness of the rest of the place in favor of subdued earth tones in a tasteful Southwest theme. I was even more relieved to see
two
comfortable-looking king sized beds. I had jumped Chance in the plane, but that was when I thought we were near death, for Pete's sake. I'd had a little time to reevaluate since then, and I wasn't sure that muddying the already murky waters with sex would really improve our situation beyond the obvious physical appeal. Besides, I was feeling less than sexy right now and needed a shower in a bad way.

"Which one do you want first?" 

My eyes widened.
"What?" I asked, sounding breathless.

Chance grinned at the obvious conclusion I had jumped to.
"Food or clothes? Jeez, Lucky, get your mind out of the gutter."

My face reddened.
"I knew what you meant. And clothes. I'm not sleeping in these things, that's for sure."

"
I didn't figure you'd be sleeping in anything at all," he murmured, heading for the door again.

I valiantly struggled to control my reaction to his offhand words, but it was a losing battle.

Chapter
20

I was feeling a billion and a half times better an hour later, dressed in a black t-shirt that had green rhinestones spelling out the name of the hotel, which was, ironically, "Lucky Sevens." I also had a pair of matching black yoga pants, with three iridescent green sevens embroidered on the hip.  My hair was freshly washed and hanging wavy and damp down my back and I had a plate full of room service French fries in front of me and a container of ranch dressing. I hadn't waited for Chance to get out of the shower before digging in. I was too hungry.

The burger had long been demolished, since it felt like I hadn
't eaten in six months, and there was a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie playing on the flat screen. If it hadn't been for my constant worry for Julian, now Nate and Tanya, and even whether or not Louie had eaten my mom, I would have been in seventh heaven. I reached for a thickly-frosted dark chocolate brownie and took a huge bite to distract myself, washing down the bittersweet deliciousness with a swallow of white wine from the tiny bottle I'd grabbed from the mini-bar.

It wasn
't a penthouse suite or anything, but I'd never stayed in such a nice hotel before. On my previous budget, the Holiday Inn was an almost unheard of extravagance and the rooms I'd checked into sure hadn't had mini-bars. Maybe when this was all over, I'd tour the country for a month and stay in fancy places, just because. I could take Addy, since I was sure she'd be tired of Jack in a month or less, and we could stay in a Hilton, a Waldorf, a Hyatt… I was trying to think of more extravagant hotels when the bathroom door opened and I almost choked on my brownie.

Chance stepped out, wrapped only in a towel. All of his old aw
kward planes and angles had been chiseled away and hardened in the last decade and he looked like a battle-scarred warrior, which I guess wasn't too far off the mark, really. Skin burnished bronze, probably in an Afghani desert somewhere, stretched over the taut muscles in his chest, powerful shoulders and forearms, and tight abdominal muscles—in regulation six-pack formation, no less. All of that mouthwatering maleness was dusted over lightly with dark hair that arrowed down to disappear into the snowy white towel that was tucked around his hips and thighs. Which, of course, drew my attention to the sizeable bulge beneath that towel that got more intriguing the longer I looked at it. A flush burned in my cheeks as I quickly looked up at his face and all of a sudden, it was really hard to catch my breath.

This couldn't be
my Chance. This was some pinup guy that fell out of the pages of a hot firefighter calendar. He was a conglomeration of all the things women fantasized over: that body, those thick-lashed eyes that gleamed deep green with a hot glow, smooth-shaven cheeks, firm lips that could twist in a cocky grin as easily as they pressed together in determination, and that short, dark hair that I already knew was silky to the touch. This man was the stuff dreams were made of.

I wanted to make a snarky comment or look back toward Fred and Ginger, still twirling around on TV
—anything to break the charged moment—but my sarcasm skills had temporarily failed me and I couldn't look away. And then he was coming toward me with lithe steps, despite his size, his feet making no sound on the carpet. That brought my eyes level with his navel, an interesting little dip that I abruptly wanted to lap my tongue into. Instead, I looked up.

"
Dessert?" Chance reached up and brushed his thumb across the corner of my mouth.

"
Brownie," I replied stupidly, my tongue darting out to catch any frosting he might have missed. I definitely did not want to be sitting in front of this gorgeous man looking like a toddler that had just gone buckwild on a birthday cake.