CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Once they were airborne, Michael returned to the topic of her family. “So you and Noelle help out your mom?”

“Yes. We want to be there as much as we can for her. That’s why I try to keep my jobs out of town as short as they can be. Especially since Noelle is so busy.”

“How is your sister? Did she ever start the bakery like she wanted to?” he asked, and Annalise loved that he remembered that little detail from their phone conversations years ago.

“Yes, she did. She runs it with her husband now, and she has three kids. So she’s been busy.” She pictured Noelle and Patrick up before dawn, peddling baguettes and croissants, and loving their little corner shop in Paris. Annalise adored that bakery too. When her sister had struggled to secure a loan to start it up, Annalise had given her the money she’d saved from her café job in college – the money she’d once earmarked to see Michael. But they’d lost touch, and her sister needed the help, so it seemed as if fate had intended something else for her savings. She was glad to have helped her sister start up her business, and that business had provided the foundation for Noelle’s family.

“I’d say they’ve both been busy,” he said with a wink, and she returned her focus to him.

“True,” she said, laughing. “The kids are great. Nine, eleven, and twelve. She’s exhausted all the time.”

“I’m exhausted just hearing that. Does that mean you have to take care of your mom more?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes, but that’s okay. My mom took care of me. It’s only fair,” she said, then softened her voice, placing her hand on his arm. “Is it weird to hear other people talk about their mothers?”

His eyes darkened briefly, then he shook his head. “No. It’s the way it should be.”

“Do you ever see her? I know you did at first, but then you didn’t ever want to anymore.” They’d talked about his mother, and he’d told her that he’d visited her in prison a few times when he was in high school and college. He’d stopped after that, though.

His jaw was set hard, and he heaved a sigh. “You’re right. I used to, a long time ago because I wanted to try—I don’t know—maybe to understand what had happened, and why she’d done it. But soon enough it was clear there was no way to make sense of it. I couldn’t be near her anymore. I don’t think of her as my mother, and I haven’t in years.”

She ran her hand down his arm. “I understand why.”

He turned his head and met her gaze. “Not everyone does,” he said in a quiet voice.

“You mean other women?” she asked, and a brief burst of jealousy flared inside her at the prospect of him with other women. Of course, he hadn’t been celibate over the years, but the thought of him with someone else was like a hot poker jabbing her flesh.

He ran a hand across his jaw, shaking his head. “Just people in general. My brother Ryan, and even Shan for a while. They wanted me to visit her, but I just couldn’t.”

“Do you think it’s because you were closest to your father, or just because that’s simply how you feel?” she asked as the plane began to level out, nearing its cruising altitude.

“Probably both.”

“Do you think that will ever change? Your feelings for her?”

“I don’t see how it could. Unless she was found to be not guilty,” he said with a scoff, as if that were truly impossible.

“Is there a chance of that happening?”

“Not a chance in hell, as far as I can see,” he said, then cocked his head, studying Annalise’s expression as if he were looking for answers to an unspoken question. “I believe there are other people who are also responsible, but I don’t believe she’s innocent. So I don’t see how I’d ever think of her as a mother again.”

“Are you okay with that?” she asked quietly.

“Are you okay with that? With me feeling the way I do?”

She nodded resolutely and ran her fingers across the back of his neck. “Of course. It’s your life. It’s your choice.” The tension seemed to lessen in his shoulders as she touched him, and she was struck with a memory as crisp as the images in front of her—a phone call, years ago, a couple months after she’d left Vegas and returned to France. It was one of the few times she’d heard him shed tears. His mother had just been found guilty of murder for hire, and had said her good-byes to her family before she was taken away in the bus to prison. He was choked up, and it had shredded her to hear him recount the day. But her emotions were nothing compared to what he was feeling at age seventeen with a family pulverized by tragedy. The pain had started to fade from his voice over the next few calls and letters, and he’d told her, “Talking to you is one of the few things that makes me feel okay.”

Okay.

Such a small, flat word. But it was all he wanted, and it was enough. To feel okay. Somehow, she’d given that to him. Perhaps she was doing the same now, helping him see that it was indeed okay to not want to be his mother’s son.

“You sure?” he asked, and his voice was laced with nerves, like he desperately needed her reassurance.

She cupped his cheek and spoke confidently. “Yes. You’re a man without a mother. And it’s okay to be that way. It’s like she died, too, and your mourning for her just took a different shape.”

His eyes locked onto hers, and he relaxed further. “Sometimes I wondered if I was too hard on her. Too angry. Too unforgiving. But then she admitted to Ryan that she did it. I don’t need to forgive her.”

“Some things are unforgivable. Obviously, this is one of those things,” she said, letting her hand drift down from his face to rest on his leg. “Do you still miss your dad?”

“Sure. Of course. But you get used to it. It becomes part of your life, doesn’t it? The missing,” he said, as the flight attendants unbuckled and began to move about the cabin.

She nodded, and though he hadn’t said her husband’s name, she knew what he was getting at.

“Do you miss Julien?” he asked. Point blank. Direct. The elephant in the room.

She swallowed, her heart rising up to her throat and sticking there. “Sometimes I do,” she admitted quietly, looking down at the armrest, the inflight magazine, the screen on the back of the seat in front of her. Then she gazed into Michael’s eyes, clear and fixed on her. “But not right now.”

The crackle of the speaker interrupted their talk as the attendant announced that they were free to turn on computers and other approved devices. Neither she nor he made a move to do so.

Instead, they talked. They talked as they flew over Colorado, then Kansas, past Illinois and Ohio, through water and club soda, through the afternoon lunch service, and through the movies that others watched. He told her about his family, catching her up on his brothers and sister. She remembered them all from when they were younger, and she savored every detail he shared. His sister’s pregnancy was going well, and she was expecting a baby boy; Ryan was engaged to a beautiful philanthropist who made him happier than Michael had ever seen him; and his youngest brother, Colin, had started up a serious relationship with a social worker who had a teenage son. She loved the details, ate them up like fine, dark chocolate, as she pictured the Paige-Princes—now the Sloans—in their new lives, healing from the damage that had ripped them apart years ago.

“What about you?” she asked, meeting his cool blue gaze. “They all sound so happy. So settled. Are you happy, too?”

The corner of his lips curved up, the barest lopsided grin. “I’m happy now.”

Now.

The word echoed. Reminding her that now was all anyone ever had. This moment. Make the most of it. Go for more than okay, and do it right now. No guilt—only pleasure, only passion, only the present.

She threaded her hand into the back of his hair, feeling those soft, dark strands on her flesh, and he groaned. Low, barely audible. Just for her.

“Come closer and kiss me,” she murmured, and he obliged, dipping his head and kissing her like they were the only two people on the plane—flying across the sky, leaving Vegas far behind, and heading to a new adventure.

* * *

Michael Sloan had always been perfectly content to fly commercial. First class was great, but he’d never longed for a private jet. Not that he’d have minded one, but it was along the lines of a yacht or a mansion—nice to admire in a magazine, but wholly unnecessary for his happiness.

That was no longer the case. A private jet was the only thing in the world he wanted right now. No, want was too small a word for it. He fucking craved it like air. Because this kiss was different. It was as hot as all their others, but it was something more, too. It was crazed and beautiful. It was hungry and full of regret. For years gone by. For missed connections. For the past and for the present. It was as if everything that could have been between them was bottled up, stored and aged to perfection, all for this one kiss. With her hand on the back of his head, she kissed him deeply, but tenderly, too.

The wildness at the nightclub was gone. The frenzy of the dressing room had slunk away. They would return, but right now this was a kiss that made him a little drunk, like his body was buzzing with some kind of sweet opiate, and that opiate was her. He wanted to pull her on top of him, run his hands over her soft flesh, unzip her jeans, and then slide into her. Wanted to watch her fuck him here on the plane. To enjoy the view of her straddling him, riding him, slow and unhurried, lingering and lovely, as she rose up and down on his cock.

He loved and hated this moment.

This was just a fucking kiss.

But it was so much more.

He’d never kissed like this before. Fierce and greedy. Needy and dreamy.

He wanted to live in this kiss.

At some point, he broke the contact, because he had to. Because another second of her kisses would be too much. He brushed her hair away from her ear. “You keep doing that, and we’re going to be putting on a show.”

She grinned naughtily. “I think we already did,” she said, glancing clandestinely over her shoulder. Some of the other passengers seemed particularly engrossed in their screens and books, as if the sight of the two of them devouring each other had been too much to bear.

“Tell me something,” he whispered, “how do you say ‘I want you so much’?”

“In French?”

He nodded.

“Je te veux tellement.”

He repeated it close to her ear, flicking the tip of his tongue over her earlobe as he said those words to her.

She shivered visibly. “Mon dieu. I love the way you say that.”

“But see, Annalise,” he said, running his index finger across her top lip, “I love the way you say it. I want to make you feel that way.”

“You do,” she whispered, her accent thickening, and he knew she was heading down the same path he was already on.

He slid into another question. “How do you say ‘fuck me harder’?”

She shivered and answered, “Baise-moi plus fort.”

He didn’t repeat it. Instead, he simply raised an eyebrow. “Good. Now I know how it sounds in your regular voice, so I can have a baseline for comparison when you say it later while I’m inside you.”

Shuddering, she ran a hand down her front, then whispered, her voice heated, as if she were in the throes of passion, “Baise-moi plus fort.”

Lust slammed into him from all corners of the world. He bent his head to her shoulder, dusting the barest kiss on her collarbone. “You’ll be saying that later, won’t you?”

She nodded, a small, sexy sigh escaping her lips. “I will.”

“How wet are you right now?”

“So wet.”

“How much do you want to be fucking me on this plane?”

“So incredibly much.”

“Is it driving you as crazy as it’s making me?”

She opened her eyes. Hers were shining with desire as she whispered the words to him. “Insane. I’m insane with wanting you.”

Soon enough, the plane landed, and twenty minutes after that they were in the town car he’d reserved. He raised the partition, and in seconds her hands were on his pants, unzipping them.

Well, he wasn’t going to say no to that.