Nonstop (Open Skies #3) - Becca Jameson Page 0,55

and she wondered how Bracken was going to take the news when she told him she wasn’t flying back to Dallas either.

Bus. Car. Bike. Even walking would be preferable. She wanted less than two feet between her and the pavement.

Chapter 21

When Bracken stepped out of the bathroom in their hotel room ten hours later, he found Bex curled up on her side under the covers. She wasn’t asleep because her eyes were open and fixed on a random spot on the floor. She didn’t shift her gaze to his.

He could see the strap of a tank top on her shoulder, so he knew she’d put at least some clothing on after her shower.

He was still wrapped in a towel, but he came to her side, sat on the edge of the bed, and set his hand on her hip. “You okay?” She wasn’t. He knew that, but he needed to keep asking anyway.

“Nope. Yep. Sure.”

He chuckled. Her mixed answers were also becoming commonplace. He rose, but only because he needed to find some shorts and climb in behind her. He needed to hold her.

The only reason he’d packed shorts or let her pack tank tops was because she’d been insistent that they couldn’t sleep naked at his parents’. By now they’d intended to have spent the entire day with his folks and be settled in for the evening.

That hadn’t happened. For one thing, it had taken them the entire day to work through the questioning and red tape. Bracken had killed two men. He’d been questioned for hours. Bex had also been intimately involved in the entire skirmish and had been questioned separately for just as long.

Neither of them had any desire to drive to his parents’ house, and Bex needed far more downtime to process everything before heading to a stranger’s home and making nice with new people. So, they’d gotten a hotel in Portland.

Bracken rummaged through his bag, found his shorts, and dropped his towel to shrug into them. Seconds later, he was behind her under the covers, his arms wrapped around her body.

She was shivering, so he tried to cover as much of her as possible with his arms. He kissed her shoulder. It was hard to think of what to say. There were no words for what she’d been through. Twice. Three times if he counted the trauma she’d suffered at sixteen.

“Next time I suggest a vacation, you’re going to shoot daggers at me with your eyes, aren’t you?” he teased.

She sighed. “If you want to take a vacation, you should probably go alone to avoid the bad omen. I’m like a black cat.”

“Maybe it’s me?” he suggested.

“I can’t decide if the universe is trying to tell me that you and I should definitely go our separate ways or if it’s saying that I should hold on to you and never let you go. After all, you saved three hundred lives today. Mine was one of them.”

He gave her arm a squeeze. “You don’t know that for sure. Maybe some other passenger would have stepped up and taken over. Anyone could have done it. All I really did was wait for the right moment to grab the gun, aim, and fire.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you? I mean besides the fact that no one who wasn’t used to terrorists and trained on how to manage them could have had steady enough hands, the wherewithal to know the precisely perfect moment to snag the weapon, and then the skill to shoot to kill. If there had been a stray bullet from either of those men or from you, a blown-out window would have caused the air pressure to drop, and we would have had an entirely new problem on our hands, not to mention passengers losing their minds over it. Plus, there wasn’t another pilot on that plane.”

He shrugged. Maybe she was right, but he’d like to think someone else could have landed that plane too. After all, the captain was still awake and able to give instructions. Besides, he’d had ground control.

She turned her head to face him. “Thank you.”

He set his forehead against hers. “You’re welcome, baby. Any time.”

“You sure?”

“Am I sure about what?”

“You sure you want to continue hanging out with me? If I were you, I’d think hard about finding someone who didn’t attract so much drama. You’re liable to get hit by a truck standing near me.”

He reached for her face and cupped her cheek. “I’ll take my chances.”

She drew in