headed for the empty first-class desk. The old guy followed suit with Halle’s bags, leaving them alone—if you didn’t count the ten thousand people in the queue.
‘You sure you want to waste an extra five grand just to avoid a queue?’ he asked, even though he guessed she probably never travelled anything but first now.
The thought lit another sparkler.
‘I was up last night until one trying to design a cake decoration inspired by free condoms that didn’t actually involve making little foil packets out of modelling paste. So yes, the five grand is well worth it. I need to sleep on this flight.’
They did beds in business. The business class flights he’d paid for out of his own pocket so he could get his apology over and done with. But he refused to let her snotty attitude or the juvenile reaction in his groin triggered by the word ‘condoms’ get to him. ‘Sounds tasteful, what’s the cake for, a stag do?’
‘You’d think, but no,’ she said cryptically.
The assistant returned looking pleased with herself. ‘I’ve got you an upgrade to first. Derek’s loading the bags.’
‘Wonderful, thanks, Mel.’ Halle turned back to him, her relief palpable for a second, before she covered it with a polite smile. ‘I guess I’ll see you in Atlanta.’
He frowned after her as she marched off to the first-class check-in.
OK, what was that about? Because the hairs on the back of his neck were going haywire, a sure sign he’d been played.
He did what he always did when his journalistic radar was telling him a source wasn’t being entirely truthful. He examined the evidence.
Halle had always been super frugal when they had been together. Pinching every penny—especially the ones they didn’t have. And while she had money now, probably more money than she knew what to do with, Lizzie frequently moaned about her mum’s penny-pinching ways. So splashing the cash still wasn’t her style. Why, then, had she bumped herself up to first, when she could sleep just as easily in business without paying five grand for the privilege?
He watched Halle say goodbye to her crew and head towards the departure gates. She didn’t look back at him. His journalistic radar went into meltdown.
Son of a bitch. In business she’d be next to him.
Was that it? She was still trying to stonewall him?
Bugger that. He swung his leather holdall over his shoulder and crossed to the first-class desk. He wasn’t into unnecessary expenditure, either, but she’d spent sixteen years not talking to him. Five grand didn’t seem like too much to pay to stop her buying him off for another ten hours.
Here endeth the silent treatment.
Ushered through the boarding gate, Halle clutched her carry-on luggage, stocked with anti-nausea medication, antacids and the Xanax—which she’d dosed up on in the car on her way to the airport.
She was over Luke. She just wasn’t over him enough to spend nine hours and forty minutes in a plane freaking out while he sat beside her being composed and competent and annoyingly buff.
The quest for closure could wait until she was good and ready to deal with it.
And after the hours she’d put in last night finishing off the Kane redesign, the five grand it had cost her for ten extra hours of karma was a totally justifiable expense.
Especially as the Xanax didn’t appear to be working yet. Which had to explain why spotting Luke standing in the bag-drop queue in battered jeans and a leather jacket, with his hair dishevelled and his jaw covered in stubble, had made her body hum as if she’d been plugged into an electric socket.
‘May I take your bag, Ms Best?’ A flight attendant with immaculate make-up and a chignon that could withstand a nuclear holocaust beamed at her as she stepped aboard the plane.
Halle tightened her grip on the bag. ‘No, thank you.’
The attendant led her past the galley and the functional luxury of business class and up a spiral staircase into a section way too reminiscent of a vintage Star Trek set. Eerie blue-toned lighting illuminated a series of pods, each furnished with a reclining seat, a mirrored wall, a control panel of knobs that would confuse Lieutenant Uhura and enough leather to fit out an S&M boutique.
Halle tucked her bag into her assigned pod and tried not to think of all the other much more useful and tangible things she could have done with the five grand her flight aboard the Starship Enterprise was costing. She was a celebrity. She worked superhard. She had a very healthy bank balance these days. She was entitled to splurge on herself occasionally.
This was not because she’d panicked when she’d seen Luke. She could easily control any and all inappropriate reactions where he was concerned. Simply by remembering how much she despised him. This was because she deserved to pamper herself. And because the take-off alone could cause her acid reflux to go into overdrive—so why add to her stress with an audience?
There were only two other people travelling in first class: a balding, middle-aged executive seated four pods up, who was tapping industriously on his laptop, and an elderly woman three pods across, who was lying back with an eye mask on and was doing a great impression of being already dead.
I should be so lucky.
She quashed the spurt of panic. Once the take-off was over, she could let the pampering begin.
‘Would you like a beverage, Ms Best?’
She briefly entertained the idea of deadening her anxiety with champagne. ‘Some iced water would be great,’ she replied. Getting legless could be her fallback position if the sedative didn’t kick in soon.
Settling into her seat, she stared in dismay at the panel of buttons. Sweat collected on her upper lip and the muscles in her neck began to twitch. If only one of those buttons could whisk her across the Atlantic at warp speed.
‘How many knobs does one person need, right?’
Her head swung round so fast at the suggestive comment it was a miracle she didn’t get whiplash.
‘Luke, what the …?’ She searched for the flight attendant. ‘You’re not supposed to be in here. They’ll throw you out.’
‘I’ll risk it.’ The sheepish expression on his too-handsome face instantly threw her back to their schooldays and all those times he’d done something diabolical—like spray-painting an image of Mrs Wendell going down on Mr Truer all over the sixth-form toilets—and she’d been his final line of defence against instant expulsion. Annoyance bunched in her neck muscles, but beneath it was the furtive spike of excitement. A mortifying reminder of how her sixteen-year-old self had once relished his bad behaviour.
‘Relax.’ He settled into the pod next to her. ‘I got an upgrade, too.’
‘What?’
He slung his laptop bag under his console while she gaped as if he’d just spoken in Swahili. Either that or she’d gone momentarily deaf and misheard him.
What had happened to Luke Best, class warrior? The guy who thought first-class train carriages were there to be invaded? Even business class had seemed like a stretch.
‘I’m a frequent flyer. It only cost a couple of grand extra. And it’s tax deductible.’ He began to fiddle with the dials on his personal control panel. ‘This is actually pretty cool.’ Propping his feet on the footrest, he rolled his shoulders and relaxed into the seat. Then sent her a grin that plugged her right back into the electric socket.
‘You can’t stay here.’ The in-flight trauma of taking off was bad enough, she did not need the one man capable of giving her a nervous breakdown when she had both feet on terra firma as a witness to her humiliation.
‘Try me.’
‘But doesn’t travelling