“Yes, I do.” I grinned at her, reining in my upstate accent. “I can fly anything with wings. I used to be in the Air Force. I can also land anything,” I added, when she opened her mouth to speak again. “Not that I’ll have to. I know these pilots, and they’re great at their jobs. Everything will be fine.”
I sharpened my gaze to prevent her from chickening out and backing away. An airline agent beckoned us from the door.
“If you’re ready, Dr. Novatny?” I said, trying to guide her that way.
“I guess we have to leave on time, right?” She was trembling. “I mean, otherwise, we might crash into another plane because we’ve messed up the flight patterns.”
“That would never happen. Air travel is exceptionally safe. There are backup systems on top of auxiliary systems on top of redundant systems. Seriously, the safety precautions are crazy. You were in more danger traveling here in your car.”
“I took a cab.”
“My point stands.”
She hung back, still arguing her points. “Between a car and a plane, a car crash is more survivable. I have more chance of surviving in a car if…if something goes wrong. Because things can go wrong.”
I heard the scientist in her voice, the scholar who researched and crunched numbers, and considered possibilities. Even in faded leggings and a loose blue sweater, she came off sharp. Her wide eyes blinked. Her lips tensed, revealing a flash of white teeth. Ah, those nerd glasses, and hardly any makeup. She didn’t need it. Hell, she was even beautiful in a ball gag.
Get her on the plane, asshole. Forget the other shit right now.
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” I said in my Dom voice, even though we were in an airport rather than a dungeon. Authority was authority. She was under my protection for the next few hours, and I wanted her to feel secure. I was pretty good at helping women feel secure while their world fell into disarray and danger, while they flailed and panicked, and wished they could use a safe word.
Ella and I wouldn’t have a safe word, but I was still going to get her important scientific brain to New York so she could do her groundbreaking astrophysicist thing.
“Let’s do this together, Ella, you and me,” I said. “One foot in front of the other. Let’s go.”
Chapter Three: Ella
Devin Kincaid. That was his name, the man who’d whispered in my ear at Via Sofferenza. My body was sure of it, although my mind rebelled, because, while I’d been blindfolded, he wasn’t. If I recognized him by his voice and his body’s presence, he certainly recognized me, as much as he was trying to hide it. He knew it was me.
And I couldn’t deal with that right now, because I had to get on the plane. I couldn’t get caught up in the fact that the man who’d stroked and spanked me at Via Sofferenza was the flight therapist offered by Gibraltar Airlines to get me where I needed to go, the place I didn’t really want to go. God, I was a thirty year old doctor and professional, and a highly respected figure in the field of theoretical astrophysics. Why was my life spiraling this way?
Memories of our erotic interaction warred with panic as Devin and I started down the accordion-style jet way to the plane. At the end of the tunnel was a door where I’d have to step into the darkened tube of metal and rivets that would carry me high into the sky. Too high. He touched my back, a small nudge, but any contact brought too many feelings.
“Go on,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
I crossed over the threshold of the plane. One step. Two steps. You can do this. You have to do this.
The plane was bigger than I thought, but not big enough to calm my fears. This aircraft had to make it all the way across a huge ocean, and it didn’t look big enough to do that. Or maybe I was just a mess. No more anxiety meds, my doctor had said, after my bad reaction flying to Italy. You need to use a flight therapist. That was two years ago, and I hadn’t flown since. But now…
I had to get to New York. Dr. Leopold Mann had summoned me to the NSF’s new astrophysics consortium, where the United States’ greatest science minds were converging to explore gravitational waves. I’d been perfectly happy doing that work in Europe, and refused his invitation when he first offered it. Leo and I had such a sticky history, after all.
Then he’d sent the photos and videos.
It’s hard enough for a woman in science, he’d written, attaching new photos in every email. How many had he taken during our six-month relationship? And why had I let him do it? Because I was young and stupid, and he was skilled at manipulating a young masochist’s emotions. If you don’t come to New York, everyone in our field will see these photos.
Leo left me no choice. He was making me get on an airplane, damn him, and that was the worst thing of all, at least in this moment. Gravitational science, professional rivalry, even blackmail, all of that made sense to me. My fear of flying did not.
As soon as we boarded, Devin introduced me to the other pilot in the cockpit, a smiling Indian woman with a long last name. Then, to distract me, he introduced me to all the off-duty flight attendants coming along for the ride. I didn’t remember any of their names. I was too unsettled by my glimpse at the vast bank of levers, switches, and electronic lights that made up the cockpit. So many controls and flashing lights. So many things to go wrong.
The plane was big enough for two hundred passengers, but ninety percent of the seats were empty. Devin led me to a first class row across from his friends. I’d already forgotten their names too, because my mind was preoccupied with silent panicking and my possible violent, fiery death.
“Do you want the window or aisle?” he asked.
“Aisle.” No way was I sitting next to a Plexiglas hole carved from the fuselage of a plane.
“Are you sure? You’ll have a nice view, at least until we fly over the ocean.” He looked at his watch. “Won’t be dark for a few hours yet.”
I shivered. “No, the aisle’s fine.”
He moved past me and folded his tall frame into the window seat. I swallowed, distracted from my anxiety for a moment by his physical presence. His navy blue sweater hugged boxer-like shoulders, and his jeans showed off well-muscled thighs. His hair was short and blond, framing a broad, handsome face with model-worthy features.
Oh God. This scarily perfect man had played with me during the scene at Via Sofferenza. I remembered what he’d whispered about not gagging me. I’d keep your mouth clear and open. I’d stick my cock in it all day. He’d said something else in his smooth American accent, something about me being a good fucking girl. Out of all the deviant whispers, his had affected me the most. It wasn’t just that his words were in English rather than Italian. It was the note of aggression in his tone. I could feel that same aggression in his fingers when he touched me over my panties.
A pilot…and a pervert. One percent of me still hoped I was mistaken, that he wasn’t the man who’d whispered If you were mine… I guessed he was a few years older than me, maybe late thirties. He had that seasoned, lady-killer aura about him, and his lips, his voice…
God, it was definitely him. He glanced over at me and I looked away, but I could see in that fleeting eye contact that he felt as uncomfortable as I did. A blush heated my cheeks and I turned my attention to buckling my seat belt. When the plane started its death spiral toward the earth, it would at least keep me from bouncing around the cabin like a ping-pong ball. My fingers shook too badly to thread the latch, so Devin reached over me to do it.
“Like this,” he said, like I couldn’t do something as simple as buckle a seat belt. Maybe I couldn’t. God, his hands were so big.
No. Don’t think about his hands, or the way he fingered you, or any of the fantasies you had about him as you were falling asleep last night. I clasped my hands in my lap and tried to take deep, long breaths. It was that, or run off the plane screaming.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No, not really.”
“Everything’s going to be fine.”
He kept saying that, everyone kept saying that, but it was hard for me to believe. I had no reason to be afraid of flying, had never been in a crash or even a hard landing. That’s what made my phobia so difficult to treat: there was no basis for my paranoid beliefs. Scientists were known for their rationality, but the science I studied dealt in theory and mutability, and the inexplicable vastness of space. Theories were proposed and, most of the time in my field, discarded or disproved. I didn’t take anything on evidence, including air-safety statistics.
Plus, it wasn’t natural for a human to be lifted so far off the ground. Birds were designed to fly. People weren’t. One of the flight attendants smiled at me and swung the door of the plane shut, locking it. Oh God, this was it. Okay. I was going to be fine.
Devin shifted beside me. “Comfortable?” he asked.
“Not. Really.”
“Would you like a drink to take the edge off? Gibraltar serves premium vodka in first class.”
“No. Thanks.”
I couldn’t seem to say more than one word at a time, although my mind was racing. The engine revved and I heard a series of bumps. A whimper escaped my lips.
“That’s just the jet way disengaging,” he said in a low, soothing voice. The air from the vent above me paused, and the lights flickered. “And that’s the APU powering down. This is perfectly normal pre-flight activity.”
I nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”