Page 95 of In Shining Armor

A Proposal at Thirty Thousand Feet

Flicka von Hannover

Dieter isn’t impulsive like that.

It was weird.

They entered the plane, and an attendant looked at their tickets and directed them to their assigned seats.

The seats were pressed next to each other like theater seats, except that she was supposed to spend nine or ten hours cooped up in that chair, not just one symphony.

Flicka considered scaling the side of the airplane and crawling on the ceiling to escape the many other passengers that crowded the aisle behind them.

Instead, she shoved the duffel in one of the overhead bins and sat in the 53A seat, which was right next to the window. She surmised that she looked as if she were accustomed to commercial travel, so casually stuffing her bag in the bin up there. She fit right in.

The airplane was much wider than any plane she had ever flown on before, with seats squeezed in with two each near the walls, and then a block of seats that was seven chairs across running down the center of the plane. The thought of sitting in one of those center seats gave her disagreeable chills.

A small tablet embedded in the back of the seat in front of her showed the outline of an airplane superimposed on a map of Europe.

Good.At least she would have something to look at while she was ignoring Dieter and regaining her equilibrium.

Dieter fell into the seat beside her. “You have to put on your seatbelt.”

She squinted at him. “My what?”

“Seatbelt. The seats on private planes have them, but they’re usually tucked down in the corners. On public planes, you have to wear them. The flight attendants will come around and check to make sure you’re wearing it.”

Flicka strapped herself in with the ineffective seatbelt and buckle. If they wanted passengers to be safe, why didn’t they use a three-point harness like she’d seen in the galley area for the flight attendants?

She ignored Dieter while the rest of the passengers boarded and the plane rolled away from the gate.

As they took off, the engines screamed through the plane because they were just outside the fuselage, bolted to the wingsright there,instead of tacked onto the tail like a proper Gulfstream or a decent Lear jet.

When she sneaked a peek at Dieter, his head was lying back against the seat, and his eyes were closed.

Damn him. Her mind roiled too much to even conceive of sleeping.

She flipped through a magazine and read an article, something about steakhouses in the Midwestern US. The little screen in the back of the seat in front of her showed a tiny plane clearing the coast of France to fly over the Atlantic Ocean.

The plane leveled out, and her ears popped in her head.

Dieter opened his eyes. “Can we talk?”

“I can’t stop you.”

He took her fingers in his again. She let him because her heart hurt so much, and holding his hand helped.

Dieter leaned toward her shoulder and whispered, “I never stopped missing you. I thought about you every day.”

“You married someone else.”

“She was pregnant with my child. Because I married her, when she left, it was easy for me to get full custody of Alina. I can’t defend myself except to say that my child is non-negotiable.”

“Well, of course not. Wulfie would have done anything for me when I was little.”

“Exactly.”

“But it’s vulgar to say that you missed me. You left me alone in London.” She stared straight at the backs of the heads and seats of the people sitting in front of her.