Page 4 of P.S. It’s Always Been You
Call it luck, call it good fortune—call it the best hire of Vikas Winters’s life.
My heart squeezes, and my throat tightens, and I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t want to feel a damn thing.
I stop reading the reports. I turn off the news.
But that only works short-term.
Because that rescue catapults him to the spotlight. Within a few short years, the man who saved the billionaire philanthropist’s life becomes wildly famous, hosting an adventure series. And I have to see his stupidly handsome face on billboards and posters slapped up all over my city.
The insult of his obnoxious omnipresence, this modern-day Magellan with nerves of steel, smacks me square in the jaw one day when I walk into a bookstore to pick up a Valentine’s Day gift for my sister’s kids and spot in the front of the store a giant cardboard cutout, looking all square-jawed, intense, and scruffy-sexy, promoting shelf upon shelf of his brand-new hardcover. Seriously? The man leaves me a few days after our Valentine’s Day trip, and now the universe picks right before the same holiday to serve up his two-dimensional face here of all places?
I grit my teeth as I pick up a copy of the book, give it my best whatever eye roll, then set it down.
I’ll just do my book shopping online, thank you very much. Especially since my own book was never even carried in bookstores.
Sigh.
Thankfully, Hunter Armstrong fades into the background once more, where I can ignore his existence.
That is until the day I learn it won’t be a bookstore endcap or a five-story-tall Hunter staring at me, but something much worse.
1
Hunter
Present day
* * *
My father used to say every man should own three things: a watch, a pocketknife, and a tuxedo.
I agreed with him on the first rule, since punctuality is key. As for a pocketknife, I don’t leave home without one. But a tux? Seems like a luxury.
Yet, at this moment, twenty-six thousand feet above Queenstown, New Zealand, I’m glad I listened to the old man. The penguin suit has come in quite handy during the last few years, and it looks damn good.
Who am I kidding? It looks fantastic, and the ladies will love it when I share these photos later today.
Correction: when my assistant shares the photos on my social media feed.
From my chair at the tiny dinner table suspended forty feet below a hot-air balloon, I slice another bite of the eye fillet of beef, then chase it with an asparagus tip. “I give it a B-plus,” I say to my dinner companion and good friend Trevor. Then I blink—I haven’t graded food in, well, ages.
“C’mon, man. I slaved over a hot stove to make this meal.”
I laugh, rolling my eyes. “As if you even cook anymore.”
“Hey, I cook when I have to,” Trevor remarks. “I.e., when we’re stuck in the wilds of some jungle and I have to roast bugs on a campfire or something.”
I point to the three-course meal prepared by a chef for our stunt. “But is this better than fire-roasted bug?”
“Now that you mention it, it is,” Trevor says dryly as he tucks into the chocolate mousse. “Even though, let’s be honest, it’s chilly AF up here.”
“Try igloo temperature. That’s colder than the South Pole.”
“And you would know.”
“You too.” Trevor’s been with me to the end of the world and back. When we finish—quickly, I might add, because freezing temperatures suck balls—we tug our oxygen masks back on.
After we do a little prep work, we’re ready to get the hell out of the sky. “Please fasten your seat belts, ladies. It’s now time for us to make our final descent,” I say in a smooth flight attendant tone.
“Let’s hope it’s not our final descent,” Trevor says.
“I’ll toast to that.” Especially since I had been damn sure a recent one was indeed going to be my last.
I signal to the pilot in the basket up above to pull up the table we dined on, then, with a silent thank you to Vikas Winters for giving me my first big chance, I shove away thoughts of that jump gone wrong.
There will always be imperfect jumps.
Today’s will be perfect, I decide.
I take the plunge, Trevor close behind.
Even after thousands of them, both as a paratrooper and as a civilian, it’s still exhilarating, this feeling of flying. I hurtle toward what looks like Middle-earth, savoring the mountains and lush hills as best I can with the ground rushing toward me at two hundred feet per second. But skydiving engages both your mind and your emotions—as you careen to the face of the earth at rocket speeds, cheating death, you have both zero time to think and all the time to ponder.
Mostly I feel as I hurl to the ground.
But once again, my mind drifts to regrets.
