Page 95 of Cockpit
“It does. I’m surprised you weren’t scared about me taking you up.”
“I hid it well,” I say with a laugh. “But you seem very competent.”
“Just competent? Not incredible or mind blowing?” He chuckles.
“We are talking about flying, right?” I ask and squirm out of the way when he reaches out to tickle me. Unfortunately, in my scramble to get away from him, I knock over the bottle of wine, which he saves before too much spills. “My hero. Grayson Malone is my hero!” I shout to the hundreds of lights twinkling in the valley below.
“Don’t even start that hero crap again,” he says, but he’s laughing right along with me.
“Oh, Mr. Malone, you are such a hero,” I continue.
“Says the defiant damsel.” He hands me a glass and begins to fill it with the almost spilled wine. “Scratch that—says the queen manipulator.”
“It was all Rissa,” I refute as I take a sip.
“Uh-huh. I’m not buying that for a second.”
“It was, I swear. I told her you were the one who was going to win the contest. She has her sights on another guy. She decided to plant a few stories in the Gazette—against my knowledge, I might add—to make sure it was a ‘fair fight.’”
“She doesn’t think I can win?”
“Not against her man,” I say, realizing I’m spurring on the competitive side of the man next to me.
“Bullshit,” he snorts, and it makes me laugh. “Rissa? It was seriously Rissa who set all this shit up?”
“The article. The hero party. Not my idea.” His eyes find mine through the moonlit darkness. “Now you have no reason to be mad at me, right? Your brothers signed you up, and she egged it on.”
“You’re far from innocent, Thorton.”
“Only in all the right ways.” That earns me a pinch on my side. “For a man who takes risks for a living, though, you should learn to be a little more comfortable being called a hero.”
“Whatever.” He takes a drink of his Coke and leans back on one hand.
“Tell me about the High Sierras.”
“They’re a mountain range in California,” he says drolly.
“No shit.” A part of me loves that he helps without wanting the attention, but I want to hear this story for me, not because I want to use it for votes. “What about the hikers you rescued?”
He looks over to me with an angle to his head and a sudden shyness in his expression. “Who said I rescued any hikers?”
“C’mon. Everyone knows it was you, why are you too shy to talk about it?”
“I don’t rescue people to get accolades.”
“No one said you did.” I can’t figure out why he’s so cagey about responding.
“Anything I tell you is off the record, right? No telling Rissa so she can call the Gazette.”
“This whole date is off the record.”
His smile spreads across his lips and warms so many parts of me. “I don’t talk about it because it was stupid on my part.” His voice lowers, his eyes soften.
“I would hardly say that saving a whole family is stupid.”
“Yeah, but I could have ruined lives, too. I took off, thinking only about Luke. Thinking about how, if that were my son, I’d move heaven and earth to find him and save him. It wasn’t until I was in the air and the chopper pitched and swayed that I realized how goddamn stupid I was. That I was risking my life and could very well end up leaving Luke fatherless. It was a stupid move. Just too risky.”
“And, yet, you did it again, and it got you grounded.”
