It was much harder when it was real, and this fucker obviously knew what he was doing.
He moved so fast I was in a headlock before I realized he was moving. I slammed my elbow back into him hard, again and again, rage giving me strength, and an inability to feel any of the pain being inflicted on me.
He squeezed my neck tighter and tighter, until I felt my vision getting fuzzy, my limbs beginning to go slack.
“You think this will help her?” he growled into my ear. “You think fighting me will get you even one step closer to finding out what happened to her?”
I shook my head and began a fresh bout of struggling out of his hold.
Finally, an elbow to his groin had him releasing me with a curse.
“You said help her?” I gasped, staggering back. I’d latched onto that part fast. “Is she okay? Is she . . . alive?”
He shook his head, and it took everything in me to keep from charging at him again. “I can’t tell you anything. I have to show you. If you really care about her, you’ll come with me, no questions asked.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Fine. Let’s go.”
“Leave your phone behind. I’m driving.”
I took my phone out of my pocket, tossing it on the sofa. “Where’s your car?”
“Just outside of the security gate. You’ll sit in the back. I can’t have you seeing where we’re going. And I need to pat you down first.”
I let him, holding my arms out, thinking of taking his thick neck in my hands and squeezing the entire time.
He straightened in front of me when he was done, and grinned, though his pale eyes stayed cold. Bastard was enjoying my antipathy. He was young, mid-twenties, if I had to guess, but something in his eyes told me he’d seen and done things I’d only ever written about.
The fucker was tall, maybe an inch taller than I was. And bigger than I’d realized, muscular and broad shouldered. Probably outweighed me by fifteen pounds.
I really hated that.
It was a bit of a walk, and as I followed him, watching his back with gimlet eyes, I couldn’t help but poke at him. “You know she loves me, right? I don’t know what you have over her, but it’s me she wants. Me she belongs to. I’ve staked my claim on every last inch of her.”
He didn’t say a word, just turned on his heel and punched me square in the jaw.
I staggered back, but recovered with a mean left hook aimed right for his teeth.
He ducked, and I caught him in the right temple.
“Shut the fuck up!” he roared, blond hair falling into his crazed eyes, fists clenched, looking like he wanted to come at me again. “You talk about her like that again, and I will fucking end you, you understand? And I sure as fuck won’t give you any answers.”
I didn’t speak, just nodded at him to keep walking.
I didn’t have one single, civilized word to say to him, so it was best to stay silent.
I had more than a few reservations about getting into the back of a van with no windows, driven by a man that hated me, but I barely paused before climbing in.
I knew it was possibly the stupidest thing I’d ever done, but what else could I do?
If there was even a chance I could find out what had happened to her, I had to take it.
There wasn’t even a seat in back, and the compartment was completely blocked off from the driver’s cabin.
I had essentially walked into a moving cage.
He started driving just as I sat. He was a maniac of a driver, turning corners hard enough to send me sliding across the floor, accelerating so fast that I slammed into the back door.
And it wasn’t a short drive.
I didn’t have any way to keep track of time, but it must have been hours before he started to slow, turned sharply, then stopped.
I had plenty of time to wish I hadn’t worn a suit to travel from my parents’ home. It was a habit, though, with them. No jeans for the Masters, no. And whenever I went home, I had to pretend to be one of them, though in reality, I spent most of my time in my sweats in front of a laptop.
I’d loosened and finally removed my tie, undoing the top three buttons of my white dress shirt and taking off my dark gray jacket.
“How long have we been driving?” I asked, when he opened the back doors to glare at me.
“I’m not going tell you that, and don’t bother trying to figure it out. The less you know the better. We aren’t there yet, anyway. Just a pit stop.”
He tossed me a bottle of water. “Drink up.”
I caught the water.
He shut the door again.
It had been about three in the afternoon when we’d left, and the sun was beginning to set now. Roughly four hours of driving so far, I guessed.
More time passed. Lots of time.
All the while, my mind raced.
I slept propped against the side of the car for a time, my suit jacket held against my temple as the most useless pillow in history.
Even sleeping, I dreamt of Iris.
Where were we going? There was no way of telling, but when I’d been counting turns at the beginning, with some notion of where we were, I thought we’d headed east out of town.
In my mind, we were somewhere deep in Utah by now, but again, that was the most vague of guesses.
The van careening to a stop again woke me, and when the back doors opened, it was to darkness.
He tossed me another bottle of water and a protein bar, told me to shut up before I spoke, and shut the doors again.
More driving.
More sleep.
The doors opened again to the bright morning light.
“Get yourself presentable again. Wouldn’t want you looking like a slob for this. After that, turn around and back up to me. You want to do this, you’re going to let me blindfold you. I don’t need you picking out any fucking details.”
I scraped a hand through my hair, smoothing it back, then set to work on the buttons of my collar, watching him to see if he was serious about the making myself presentable part.
“Put your tie and jacket back on,” he ordered me.
I did what he said, vividly imagining doing him bodily harm all the while.
I backed up to him on my knees.
“I need to pee,” I told him.
He slid a cloth sack over my head and clicked handcuffs tight onto my wrists.
“In a minute. Unless you prefer to piss on a tire, there’s an actual restroom close by.”
I hoped he meant that minute part literally.
Logically, I knew I should be worried, and I was, to an extent. But the feeling that ruled me just then was anticipation, because finally I would get some answers, and it was much more powerful than any concern I felt for myself.
What was in store for me here? What would I learn, and could I live with the answers? And, if the worst had happened, did I really want to know?
He gripped the back of my upper arm and led me across gravel and onto sidewalk, from the sun into the shade.
I heard him working a key into a lock and then he barked at me to step inside.
“Use the bathroom, and then stay put. You take a step out of this room, you’ll regret it.”
He undid my cuffs, and I heard the door slam shut behind me.
I pulled the bag off my head, glancing around.
It was an old, musty hotel room, with the front windows blacked out.
I headed straight for the bathroom, used it, and explored, peeking out the window, which was frosted over and apparently bolted shut.
The whole setup was creepy in the extreme. Just the type of place someone would take you to finish you off.
I checked my appearance in the mirror, and thought I turned out rather well, all things considered. Suit only marginally wrinkled, brown hair disheveled, but not more than usual. Eyes only slightly bloodshot, but not terribly so.
The room didn’t have a phone, but it did have an alarm clock that read ten minutes past seven.
Th
ere was an ancient TV centered between the two double beds, and after waiting thirty minutes, I switched it on. Turned out, it actually had a good lineup of channels.
I wound up watching one of the reality shows Iris used to love. It was called My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and it was atrocious.
Around an hour after I’d been left in the room, the door opened. That blond son of a bitch poked his head in, customary glare in place.
“Turn that shit off,” he growled, then shut the door again.
I heard his voice faintly outside again not a minute later, though by his even, non-hostile tone, he clearly wasn’t talking to me.
“Brought you something,” he was saying in a neutral voice.
There was a long pause, then a quieter, fainter voice responding softly.
Something about that other voice had me standing, breath growing short, heart skipping beats.
“Go inside and see,” the bastard responded.
I watched the door, body drawn taut in anticipation.
Hands clammy and shaking with it.
Finally, mercifully, that door began to move.
It creaked open slowly, and the sight that filled it nearly brought me to my knees.
“Iris,” I breathed.
There she stood.
She looked different.
Wearing gray sweats and thick framed glasses, her blonde hair braided thick to one side and draped on her shoulder. Her face was clean of makeup and as beautiful as ever.
She looked about fifteen, dressed like that. It was a perturbing development, but overshadowed completely by the burst of sheer joy in my chest at the sight of her.
She was whole and alive. Safe and sound.
A BRAND NEW TEASER FROM MR. BEAUTIFUL (UP IN THE AIR #4)
Mr. Beautiful will be a full-length novel that mainly takes place after the events in Grounded. This book will be from the POV of James and Stephan (with a bit of Tristan and Frankie thrown in).
It will also contain many bonus scenes from the Up in the Air trilogy in the male POV.
STEPHAN
BUT THEN I MET HIM
I heard every story there was to hear about Javier before I ever laid eyes on him. He was slutty. He was a snob. He loved drama, and it followed him everywhere. He couldn’t keep a secret. There was more dirt flying around about him than I could keep up with, and though I tended to shy away from gossip, I had every reason to believe most of it, based on the fact that there was just so damned much of it.
But then I met him.
No one had told me he was drop dead gorgeous, or that he had the thickest eyelashes on the planet, and that his dark eyes sparkled when he smiled.
I was wildly attracted to him the instant I set eyes on him, but even so, I didn’t like him. He had a shitty reputation, and he was not my type. Not at all. My unruly body, and my stupid heart, couldn’t seem to keep that straight.
We met at the crew headquarters. He was our fifth flight attendant, not a part of the regular crew, which meant he was on call, and had likely had to rush to work with only an hour’s notice. He didn’t look it. He looked very well put together, his tie straight, his hair perfect. He looked calm and relaxed, and good enough to eat.
Everyone was there, including the pilots, so we did the crew briefing as we waited for the bus that would take us to the plane.
It was a short briefing, because almost all of us had been working together for a full month, and Bianca and I always worked together in first class. I sent her a brief smile, and that was all, before addressing Javier, whose eyes I’d felt on me since the moment we’d been introduced.
He was brazen, that one.
“Jessa has the galley,” I told him, “and Julie is our usual third this month, so that makes you fifth. You’ll be doing the count and helping the girls between their carts.”
He just nodded, giving me his full attention in a way that unnerved me. He didn’t know I was gay. Very few of the people we worked with did. I never dated anyone from work, and only our closest friends had any inkling of the truth. Most thought Bianca was my girlfriend, and that suited us both fine. But the way he looked at me felt like a come one, and I felt myself both infuriated and fascinated by that. There was no way he could know. I didn’t believe in that Gaydar crap.
I held Bianca’s hand as we sat together on the crew bus. This was in no way unusual for us. We were close to the point of inseparable, and had never felt the need to hide it, not from anyone. Still, somehow, with Javier’s stare boring into me across the aisle, I felt defensive about the handholding, and I wasn’t sure if that was because I wanted to explain it to him or use it to warn him off. It rankled that I even had to think about it. I didn’t owe explanations about any part of my life to anyone, I told myself firmly, let alone some little troublemaker I’d just met.
The plane was boarding through the second door at this jet bridge, so the passengers were entering the plane between the front of coach and the back of first class. This had Javier at the door with me, side by side, as we waited for the passengers to board.
“You and Bianca make a beautiful couple,” Javier said quietly beside me.
This had me raising my brows and looking directly at him. He was smiling, a brow arched playfully.
Was he messing with me? Did he really think she and I were a couple, or was he mocking me?
I honestly couldn’t tell.
“Thank you,” I replied, my tone very neutral.
“Like Barbie and Ken.”
That almost had me laughing. “Don’t tell her that. She hates it when people call her Barbie. We’ve gotten that comparison a lot.”
“I don’t know why she’d hate that. Most girls would kill to look like a Barbie doll.”
“Well, not Bianca. My advice would be to stay on her good side, and rule one to doing that is not to call her Barbie.”
“Got it. Have any rules for staying on your good side?”
“To always be on Bianca’s good side.”
“So it’s like that . . . interesting.”
I studied him, almost positive that he was mocking me. “We’re a package deal.”
“Noted. I always wanted a best friend like that. You two are lucky.”
“We’re more than just best friends,” I told him firmly, wanting to set up clear boundaries.
He smirked at me, and I knew, just knew, that he had guessed my secret. “Sure. Okay. More. I get the hint. You two have any plans for the layover?”
I shrugged. We were headed to Miami with a twenty-four hour layover. “Probably just hanging out at the beach or the pool. Nothing big.”
“Would you mind if I tag along, or do you two need to be alone?”
I glared at him, wondering why he felt the need to be so sarcastic. “Tag away. This is a friendly crew. They’ll probably all be out there.”
“Thanks. I hate it when I get the crews that stay in their rooms all day.”
“No problem. It’s Miami, and the weather is supposed to be beautiful. It would be a pity to stay inside.”
“You going to hit the gym?”
I chewed on my lip, considering my answer.
I wanted to avoid working out with him, if that was what he was getting at. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt like I needed to avoid him altogether. “I’m not sure.”
The first wave of passengers began to board, which was a relief, because even chatting with him unnerved me.
Boarding, takeoff, and our redeye service went smoothly and quickly. I didn’t even see Javier again until the flight was half done.
I was drinking coffee in the front galley alone. Bianca was in the back, chatting with Jessa, so I was manning the front of the plane, wondering if I should call them up to the front.
I didn’t like to be alone. Not ever.
I jumped a little as a smiling Javier burst through the curtain, nearly making me spill my coffee.
“Hey,” he said, moving to stand way too close to me. “I thought you might be lonely up he
re, with all the girls chatting in back, and all of the passengers sleeping.”
I made a noncommittal noise, staring at him. One black curl had fallen onto his forehead, bringing out his thick lashes, and his dark eyes. He really was just a striking man.
“So about the workout tomorrow. I like to hit the gym. I’m not ripped like you, but I try to keep fit. I hate going alone though.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, trying hard to take exception to the way he was staring at me. He was just so brazen.
I should call him out on that, I thought, but I didn’t.
I watched his hand move to my arm, gripping as though to test my muscle. “What are you doing?” I asked him, my voice hard with tension.
“You don’t get arms like this by skipping the gym. I think you’re going to go, but you just don’t want to go with me. What have you heard about me?” As he spoke his hand moved to my abs, skimming over the taut ridges under my shirt.
I didn’t react right away, genuinely shocked at his nerve.
Finally, my free hand shot to his, gripping it hard enough to make his eyes water with pain.
“What have you heard about me that makes you think I want you touching me?” Each word came through my clenched teeth.
“Nothing,” he said, pulling on his hand.
I let it go, and he shook it, as though to shake away the pain. “I’ve only heard how hot you are and that you’re with that girl.”
“Bianca.”
“Yeah. Her.”
“Why did you touch my stomach?”
“I was just making conversation. I . . . wanted to feel your six-pack, since I could tell that you had one. You can’t tell me you aren’t working out tomorrow. I won’t believe you. I was just trying to prove my point.”
“You shouldn’t grab people like that without their permission. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Javier didn’t answer, his gaze arrested, pointed at my crotch. I’d grown hard at his first touch, and I couldn’t hide it, even in my work trousers.
He swallowed hard, staring. And staring.
Great, I thought, this one is sure to tell the world my secret. And on the tail of that thought: Well, now that he knows, the harm is already done.