Page 122 of Badd Love
No more SAR missions that went horribly, horribly wrong.
Hopefully, this would be interesting and fun and challenging but not traumatizing.
See the world, fly cool shit, make bank.
Fuck yeah.
The dog tags hanging between my breasts felt cold for a moment—I had two sets. Mine and…his.
Not going there.
I pushed memories aside as I followed Albert around the building into a private little office where I filled out reams of paperwork, signed releases and a viciously ironclad NDA, received the badge that would get me where I needed to go, andthen was shown the rest of the office, the garage—filled with Rolls Royces and Mercedes-Maybachs and Rezvanis—and then I was taken to the LMT private hangar.
Roth jets—three of them! Sexy and sleek, they made my blood race.
A Roth helo—stealth, silent, and faster than anything the military could put out, according to the scuttlebutt.
There are more prosaic craft as well—Cessnas, Gulfstreams, regular private helicopters, a replica WW1 biplane, a genuine Spitfire…oh,man.
I was in heaven.
We approached Ketchikan,and I radioed the tower, got permission to land. It was an easy, smooth touchdown. I taxied the Gulfstream, parked it, and ran through my post-flight checklist while my new employer did whatever he was doing back there.I was driving him around as well, so once I was done, I met the courier who had driven Linus's Range Rover up here from Seattle.
We took a ferry, which was weird but kinda fun.
I expected our destination to be a fancy hotel, or, barring that, a high-end Airbnb.
"Badd's Bar and Grille, Tea," Linus told me, once we'd left the ferry.
I put the destination into the GPS. We arrived a few minutes later.
I eyed the place. "Linus? You sure this is where you wanna go, sir?"
He laughed. "Yes, Tea. We're meeting my possible hire here."
"Should I circle the block? Park?"
"Park and come in with me. It's dinnertime, after all."
This was feeling more and more like I was an additional PA who just happened to also be a pilot…and a driver. Considering how many zeros were in my contract, I was fine with this arrangement, as long as I didn’t have to cook, clean, pick up dry cleaning, or anything gross, like clip toenails; my sister had moonlighted as a PA for a low-level exec in Silicon Valley right out of college, and she'd had to clip her bosses toenails. Fuck that.
We entered the bar—it was early afternoon, so it was mostly empty. He'd told me eight this morning, but we hadn't actually been wheels up until almost noon—his delay. There were a few regulars at the bar, a few tourists at tables, and a young man by himself in a booth near the kitchen.
Linus consulted his phone—a one-off he'd designed and was testing out, apparently—and then looked at the young man.
I followed a few feet behind Linus as he approached the guy—not a kid, just younger than me by five or so years.
"Jax Badd?" Linus said.
Jax held up a finger and went back to typing. “Yeah, one sec. Just gotta…" he trailed off, frowning at his laptop, tracing a line of code with his finger. “A-ha! Got you, little fucker." He entered a single keystroke, triumphantly, and shut the laptop. "Sorry, sorry. I'm Jax."
He stood up and turned to us.
Jesus…Jesus.
He was…
His eyes were—and his jawline? Fuck me.
