Such a Rush (21 page)

“Spoken like the daughter of restaurateurs,” I said, trying to get back into the swing of her banter.

“Those misspelled banners cost us a lot of time in the air,” Grayson grumbled.

I could see why he wasn’t laughing. The contracts Mr. Hall
had made with these businesses specified that we’d fly their banners for a certain number of hours a day. When Alec and I dropped our banners, we circled above the airport, waiting for Zeke to spell everything correctly. Then we picked them back up, but we had to tack that many minutes onto the ends of our flights. Grayson had paid me a little overtime in my check. I hadn’t minded, but Grayson had minded very much.

“Did you talk to Zeke about it?” I asked Grayson. I didn’t see what good that would do, though. A bad speller was a bad speller, and there was no spell-check for banners.

“I fired him,” Grayson said. “I can do it myself.”

“And not fly?” Alec stopped laughing for the first time since he’d sat down. “You have contracts for three planes in the air.”

I puzzled over Alec phrasing it that way: “
You
have contracts,” rather than “
We
have contracts.” The business belonged to both of them now.

Grayson didn’t seem to notice the way Alec had put it. “I’ll take some extra time between my flights to get the banners ready,” he said. “After you two are up in the air, I’ll go myself. I’ll have to fly longer to make up that time.” Fly longer, and work longer. He was talking about his eight-hour day stretching into ten, probably more since he was doing the paperwork.

Molly’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Who was in charge of the banners when your dad was still around?”

I watched Grayson and Alec for their reaction, the wince that passed across both of their faces when someone mentioned their dad. I saw it flit across Grayson’s, even in the flickering colored lights from the bar.

Alec didn’t hesitate. He leaned forward and told Molly, “Grayson and I took care of the banners. We couldn’t get our commercial pilot’s licenses until we turned eighteen last October, so we haven’t been allowed to fly for money until now.”

I pointed out, “You also watched the takeoffs to make sure nothing fell off the planes when they snagged the banners. If Alec and I are already flying, who’s going to do that for you, Grayson?”

Grayson glanced at me with no expression on his face and squeezed his fist into a ball.

“Hire me,” Molly piped up.

“Yeah!” Alec exclaimed at the same time Grayson asked “What?” and I said “No.”

“I can spell,” Molly said. “I can drag these banners around if they’re not hugely heavy, right?”

“You’re hired,” Grayson said.

I glared across the table at Molly, but I couldn’t catch her eye. Not knowing what she was up to made me very nervous. She wandered into her parents’ café to help out only if she happened to wake up early enough and was bored. She could definitely work at the airport instead of the café if she wanted to. But why would she want to? The work would be dusty and hot with a side of gas fumes. I couldn’t imagine what good she thought she could get out of this job, unless she intended to meddle in my business with the boys. And I couldn’t let her do that. My flying career was too important. I couldn’t let her give my secret away to Alec, accidentally or otherwise.

“Wait a minute,” I chimed in. “Grayson, I don’t think this is a good idea. You just met Molly. There are things about this job that she won’t be used to.”

“Like what?” she challenged me.

“Labor,” I said.

“Oh,” she said with a threatening laugh, “I will cut a bitch.”

I kicked her underneath the table, warning her that she was making me look bizarre and unglamorous to Alec. “Not in front of the children.”

“You’re hired,” Grayson told Molly again. “But whatever kind of drama we’ve got going on when we’re on the ground, we’re not doing anything that affects what happens in the sky. There is no crashing at Hall Aviation. That means no hangovers. No drinking.” He slid Molly’s daiquiri toward the middle of the table.

“Hey!” she cried. “It’s spring break! Just one drink?”

“None,” Grayson said firmly.

“But I’m not flying,” she pouted.

“You’re aligning the banners correctly,” he said. “You’re watching the airplanes to make sure nothing falls off. You’re spelling.”

She stuck out her bottom lip and fluttered her eyelashes at him.

He laughed. “You can have
one
.” He slid the daiquiri back to her.

“Thanks, boss. Want a sip? It’ll loosen you up a little.”

“I’ll pass. Loosening up wasn’t my goal for the night. I don’t get involved with my employees.”

I’d been watching this whole exchange in horror. At first they seemed to be flirting. But I doubted he would have made this comment about his employees so flatly if he’d wanted to make a move on her.

She wasn’t offended. She laughed straight through it. “Why are you the boss of this outfit instead of Alec? Are you older?”

“We’re twins,” Grayson and Alec said at the same time.

“I knew that!” Molly exclaimed. “I totally forgot! You’re nothing alike.”

“Yes, they are,” I said. This wasn’t true, but I was feeling territorial again. Molly got along with the boys so much better than I did, and she didn’t even care about them.

“No, we’re not,” the boys said at the same time. They
looked at each other across the table. Grayson smiled, and Alec laughed. I got the feeling they hadn’t laughed together in a while.

“How did you and Leah become ‘friends’?” Grayson asked Molly, making finger quotes.

I grinned at him and spoke up. “I stole her boyfriend.”

“You
tried
.” She reached across the table and patted my arm soothingly.

“What really happened?” Grayson asked.

I looked to Molly to answer this. She didn’t know what had really happened. I did, but I wasn’t going to tell her. We were friends now, and that was all I wanted. Honesty wasn’t worth the trouble.

“I’d just moved to town two years ago,” she said. “I snagged the hottest guy at school, right? And the next thing I know, all these chicks are telling me that Leah Jones is after him so I had better watch out.”

Alec chuckled. Grayson said dryly, “She’s that kind of girl, is she?”

“Apparently,” Molly said, giving me a brief glare as she always did when she mentioned Ryan. She was still resentful about him. “If I’d been at my old school in Atlanta, I might have let it go and watched how things went. But I was at a new school and I felt like I needed to lay down the law so girls wouldn’t mess with my property.” She moved her finger in the air as she said this in a poor imitation of some kind of gangland gesture, which was even funnier coupled with her blue glittery clubbing eye shadow. “So I confronted her about it.”

“Girl fight!” Alec exclaimed.

I giggled, because Alec was funny. Patrick anticipating the same thing outside my trailer last night hadn’t been funny at all, probably because it had been a lot closer to the truth.

Grayson watched me without laughing. “What did Leah do when you confronted her?” he asked Molly.

“She was
funny,
” Molly said. “Can you believe that? Everything I tried to serve her, she dished right back to me. I realized that I wanted to be friends with her more than I wanted to go out with that hunk of burning love.”

That’s not what had happened with Ryan. But I let her go on thinking so, since she liked viewing me as a tough girl from the hood. She might not want to be my friend otherwise.

However, I didn’t appreciate the way she characterized the argument, like she’d decided we would be friends, and therefore we were. Like she’d chosen me over Ryan. Like she’d adopted a kitten from the pound. I certainly felt that way when she picked me up and took me to her parents’ café for dinner, but I hated the way it sounded now that these boys were listening.

“So you’ve always been a heartbreaker,” Alec said at my shoulder, low enough that Grayson and Molly couldn’t hear, and close enough that I felt his breath across my skin. I turned to him. He watched me with that half-smile on his lips, looking into my eyes.

For the first time that night, I got the feeling that we were more than friends. Grayson might have put a halt on being paired with Molly, but Alec wasn’t putting a halt on him and me. I held his gaze, gave him my sexiest smile, and tried my best not to panic.

By order of Grayson for
everyone to get a good night’s sleep, we left not long after. First we drove through gates draped with flowering tropical vines and dropped Molly off at her parents’ beachside villa. If there’d been any question remaining about whether Grayson wanted to be more than friends with
her, it was answered here. Alec waited until she went in the front door to drive away, but Grayson stayed in the car.

Next they drove me home. Alec explained that Grayson was still in tow because he had some work left to do at the hangar. Alec would drop him off. Grayson would drive his truck back to his beach shack later. I wondered whether this was really why, or whether Grayson had engineered this excuse to watch Alec and me from the backseat and make sure I held up my end of our dark bargain.

Alec was handsome and so sweet, a super-nice guy. I kept reminding myself of this as he drove closer to the trailer park. The pain in my stomach grew worse, even though I had a belly full of bar food and wasn’t hungry for once. There was no way out of what was coming, but I gave it a try anyway. As he turned onto the gravel road and dust billowed into the headlight beams, I said, “You don’t have to walk me to the door.”

He didn’t answer. The silence stretched into awkwardness, without even a noise from Grayson’s phone in the backseat to break it.

Finally Alec asked, “Why not?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I made up one. “It’s not much of a door.”

“Of course it’s a door, and I’m walking you to it.” He parked the car, cut the engine and the lights, and got out.

He was walking around the car to open my door for me. I didn’t have much time. I turned around, looking past the seat’s headrest, and said, “Good night, Grayson.”

He was already looking straight at me when I turned around. “Good night,” he said with absolutely no expression on his shadowed face or in his voice.

I didn’t know exactly what I’d wanted from him. Jealousy?
Maybe a declaration of
No, Leah, don’t do it! I’m calling the whole thing off!
Whatever I’d wanted, this wasn’t it.

“I like your hair better curly,” he said in the same flat tone.

Before I could ask him what he meant—
he
liked my curly hair, or he thought
Alec
liked it better?—Alec opened the door.

Heart racing, I got out of the car and stepped into a thick cloud of barking from the pit bull. Alec followed me across the yard and up the cement-block stairs. I didn’t want to kiss him, but there didn’t seem to be any way around this now. I met his gaze and tried to telegraph to him that, sure, I did want to kiss him, but his brother was watching us, and moreover, hello, was
he
horny with that pit bull barking his head off?

Alec didn’t seem to get my meaning, though. I was afraid I’d screwed things up by accidentally implying that I didn’t want to kiss him at all. I almost explained the whole thing to him:
I don’t want to kiss you outside my trailer with a pit bull barking in my ear. It’s too much like my nightmares about my marriage someday.

But he did understand. He half-smiled down at me. “Tomorrow night I’ll make sure we’re alone.”

There would be a tomorrow night? This was good—Grayson couldn’t complain that I wasn’t holding up my end of the deal—yet my face burned with the possibilities. I was frightened that Alec would want to do more than I was willing to do.

He bent toward me. I went rigid, anticipating his kiss, and tried to relax. Maybe he felt me go stiff, or maybe he didn’t really want to kiss me either. For whatever reason, he hesitated, and swallowed.

Then he came in the rest of the way, pushing both his hands back into my hair. His lips met mine.

He was kissing me. But not very dynamically. The kiss was awfully chaste for a couple of legal adults on spring break. I
didn’t want him to think I was a prude, but I didn’t want to encourage him, either. Or, I did, but just enough for Grayson to see I was encouraging him.

And for Grayson to eat his heart out.

So I slid my hand into Alec’s hair and pulled him closer.

He broke the kiss and started again. I felt his tongue against my lips, but he didn’t press inside. It was like kissing a middle school boy who’d heard about kissing but had never done it himself.

I didn’t correct him.

He pulled back and slid his hands out of my hair, or tried. One finger got caught in a layer underneath that had kinked in the night humidity, defying the flat-iron.

“Ow!” I squeaked.

We both laughed.

“Sorry. Hold on just a sec.” He squinted at my hair in the moonlight and used his other hand to extricate the finger that had gotten caught. As he released me, I glimpsed the hand that had been snagged and saw he was wearing Mr. Hall’s Air Force ring.