Page 17 of Love Is A Draw (Check Mates #2)

The pilot pulled a lever, and the roar of flame cut through the quiet.

Heat billowed upward, filling the orange envelope with life as the basket creaked faintly and swayed.

The ropes strained against the ground anchors.

Gail’s ribs clenched, but not from fear—not entirely—from something closer to anticipation, the kind that danced on the edge of exhilaration.

She felt on the cusp of something dangerous and wild, but thrillingly so.

Victor’s steady presence beside her kept her grounded, even as the world below seemed to prepare to slip away.

The balloon swayed as it began to lift, a slow, deliberate pull that made Gail’s stomach lurch.

She clutched the edge of the basket tighter with one hand, the other still in Victor’s grasp.

The wicker creaked faintly beneath her feet, and she couldn’t tell if the unsteadiness came from the balloon or from her trembling legs.

The upward motion wasn’t harsh, but insistent, as though invisible hands were guiding them to the heavens.

Wind blew her hair, and she could tell her pins were coming undone.

She tried to focus on the rules of physics she had learned long ago.

The heat from the burner expanded the air inside the balloon, making it lighter than the cooler air outside.

Simple, measurable science. And yet, it didn’t feel simple at all.

Her pulse raced as they ascended, her breaths coming faster, shallow even.

Each second pulled them further from the earth, an inexorable rise that defied the safety and steadiness she preferred.

The world tipped slightly as the basket swayed, and she took a half-step closer to Victor.

The gardens below began to shrink. The once sprawling paths lined with elegant trees and well-kept hedges diminished into a patchwork of curling green shapes seemingly no larger than saucers.

The magnificent, stately trees of Vauxhall, their leaves creating whole stretches of shade in the daylight, now appeared like tiny dark coins scattered across the pale ground.

Gail blinked to orient herself, but the basket shifted with her movement, lurching slightly.

Before she could steady herself, Victor’s hands rested on her shoulders, pulling her gently yet firmly toward him.

His arms enveloped her, secure and sure, and she found herself leaning into him, his steadiness welcome.

She exhaled shakily, feeling the warmth of his touch even through the layers of their clothing.

She had been so focused on the view below that she hadn’t realized how unsteady her footing had become.

Now, with his arm around her, she felt tethered—not to the earth, which had all but disappeared beneath them, but to him.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His hand slid around her waist, drawing her gently against him, as if her presence steadied him as much as the basket beneath their feet.

Gail’s breath caught. Her cheek brushed his collar, and she closed her eyes for the space of one heartbeat—two—trying to remember how to breathe.

The world fell quiet. Only the slow hiss of the burner remained, like a whisper meant for someone else. Her fingers curled against his coat, not for balance now, but because she couldn’t bear to let go.

“We are flying,” she whispered, not knowing if the words came out in English or Russian. It didn’t matter because she could be herself with him.

Victor’s breath stirred her hair as he leaned closer. “Then let it be this moment that untethers me,” he murmured. “Because with you, I would never ask to land.”

Gail dared a glance downward, her heart pounding harder as she tilted her head over the basket’s edge.

Her breath caught. The garden seemed to be sliding away like a tablecloth swept too quickly from a table, unraveling into the larger city beyond.

But not only the cloth disappeared; all London stretched into view.

Roofs of townhouses appeared, a disorderly row of gray and brown squares reaching toward the horizon.

Chimneys speckled the scene like markings of a checkerboard, each varying in size and leaning slightly, some puffing faint gray smoke into the distance.

Higher still they climbed, until the colors beneath her faded, muted by the heavy morning mist. The streets she had walked endlessly now curved and twisted like ribbons.

She could no longer make out the hurried figures she saw from her window or the clopping horses drawing carriages through cobbled lanes.

All of it seemed impossibly small now, like a part of another world they had somehow, impossibly, risen above.

Her body stiffened again, and she tightened her grip on Victor’s coat sleeve.

He turned her gently to face him. “What do you see?”

“Life with you… you change my perspective.” Gail said.

The sway of the basket became constant, a rhythm she couldn’t predict, but even as her body screamed at her to retreat, she held her position.

To her surprise, holding to Victor wasn’t just steadying, it was electric.

Propriety demanded she step back the moment she found firm footing, but they’d left propriety on the ground far below them, joined by logic and reason. Her heart dictated her movements now.

She clung to Victor more tightly than was proper or logical.

Her fingers twisted into the fabric of his coat like a desperate pawn grabbing a knight’s reins, a move she wouldn’t retreat from.

Something within her had shifted too, breaking free of the rigid structure she usually imposed on herself.

She didn’t understand the developing attraction blooming for Victor, but she knew, for once, it didn’t need to be calculated. Only felt.

He paused, his breath brushing her ear, then his lips descended to hers—soft, deliberate, and full of all the unsaid things between them. The world tilted, the flame hissed, and the balloon rose—so did Gail’s heart.

Victor tightened his stance, and his boots braced against the shifting floor of the basket as it swayed with each restless movement of the balloon above.

Gail’s weight pressed lightly into him, the warmth of her shoulder brushing his arm.

The world had dissolved into muted grays and silvers, the gardens and rooftops swallowed by a thick, damp veil of clouds like a shroud of whispered secrets.

The pilot’s call of “Clouds ahead” rang faintly in his mind, distant now, secondary to the swirl of sensations consuming him.

This balloon ride had been a reckless choice, one of the more absurd decisions he’d made—daring, impractical, and entirely unlike him. And yet, it had worked. Gail deserved something otherworldly and this was as close he could offer her. Plus his heart.

Victor’s chest swelled with something unfamiliar, something entirely unquantifiable, as he realized how glad he was that she had come, that she had trusted him with this. He wondered whether she trusted him with more. Would she? Could she?

The damp air clung to his clothes, the chilled mist settled over them, folding them into a world made only of their shared breaths and the subtle creak of the shifting basket.

He reached instinctively for stability, his hands flexing against the ropes as he steadied them both.

She said nothing, yet her presence and warmth cut through the damp cold.

Victor’s words drifted between them, unsteady but deliberate.

“Clouds become fog when they fall to the ground.” The simplicity of the statement didn’t matter.

He needed to say something, anything, to steady the…

whatever this was building between them.

His words meant nothing, and everything.

They were for her. For him. For the narrow space between them.

He couldn’t see her; the cloud had erased the visible world, but he could feel her, and that set his pulse racing in a way he hadn’t expected.

Was she smiling at his comment? The opaque walls of the cloud wrapped around them concealed her expression, but he adored her breath against his cheek, impossibly close and unmistakable.

Her breath wasn’t like the cool, damp touch of the cloud, nor like the heat that hissed in uneven bursts from the burner above, it felt soft, warm, intimate as it brushed his skin like a fine thread that wove itself into the very fabric of him. His chest heaved, his body frozen yet entirely alive.

He reached more tightly for her, his movements hesitant but driven by a force quieter and steadier than thought.

He found her back first, the curve of it familiar now after he’ held her int he basket.

His fingers curled lightly, hesitating at the faint dampness sticking to the fabric of her gown as though it might stop him.

But beneath the cloth, he felt her warmth, her life, and something unnamable and thrilling that pushed him further.

Still lost in the mist, invisible to his eyes, she mapped perfectly to every nerve in his body.

Her breath mingled with his, tentative and trembling with something that mirrored the rush in his chest. He leaned in even further, the movement so slight it was almost imperceptible, and his fingers brushed the line of her jaw.

The softness of her cheek grounded him more than the basket beneath his feet.

She didn’t pull away, didn’t shift, and for one astounding moment, as though they were suspended entirely—not by ropes or tethers, but by something stronger and infinite.

Her breath hitched, audible now, and he froze.

“Victor,” Gail whispered quietly enough for his name to scatter between them on the wind. Two syllables. His name. There was no warning in it. Only permission.

His restraint shredded.

Victor cradled her jaw, his thumb brushing over soft skin, precious and almost impossibly fragile. The mist swallowed her features whole, but he knew her, every breath and shift of her weight. The air dared to press between them, but it could not take what was already his.

“Tell me,” he murmured, his forehead dipping close, his breath unsteady as he hovered there, the world between their lips thinner than parchment. “Tell me if I’m wrong.”

Her silence sent his heart tumbling, but then her own hand rose with trembling will. Her fingers grazed his chest, hesitant, searching, until they came to rest lightly at the center, over a heart pounding far too hard for his calm exterior.

“You’re not.” Although she spoke softer than the wind, her words still pierced him.

He closed what remained of the space between them, his lips meeting hers in a touch so achingly light it took him a moment to register it. And then, like a spark catching dry kindling, the first moment ceded to the next.

The world stilled. The burn of the balloon’s flame faded into silence, the sway of the basket continued unnoticed.

He was aware only of her, soft and impossibly real, her warmth dispelling every cold, every fear that had lingered at the edges of this chaotic, daring leap.

Her lips parted against his, and for the first time in years, he believed something good might last.

It wasn’t a kiss that consumed. It didn’t demand or overwhelm.

It grew, unfolding in layers that stole his restraint and left him entirely undone.

The very softness of it, her warmth against the cold mist, sliced through him with more force than any tempest. She was tender, deliberate, and astonishingly honest, her lips pressing back against his with a confidence that faltered and built in equal waves.

The taste of her lingered faintly, sweet but grounded, like freshly bloomed honeysuckle amid the weight of rain. Victor deepened the kiss, shaping it carefully, drawing her closer as though their forms might merge, the mist between them burning away beneath an unstoppable heat.

Her sigh slipped between them, a sound that hooked his soul to the moment as surely as ropes to the basket beneath their feet.

She leaned into him, her hands braving their way from his chest to clutch at the lapels of his coat, trembling slightly but steady enough to remind him she was here.

She wasn’t running nor turning away from the one who’d stirred so much inside her.

His free hand swept up and down her back, the motion slow and almost reverent. His fingers mapped the slight dip of her spine, memorizing her shape in a way his eyes could not in the cloudy haze. He cupped her cheek again, deepening the kiss as her lips parted for him like a prayer answered.

The burner hissed above them, a sharp contrast to the softness of her, but he barely noticed it, nor the creak of the balloon ropes or the faint whistle of the wind.

There was Gail, and only Gail, her lips silken, a revelation he hadn’t anticipated but knew, as sure as the sky opened, he wouldn’t forget.

“Gail,” he whispered against her mouth, her name half plea, half prayer. His forehead touched hers and his unsteady breath mingled with hers in the narrow space they left between their mouths. “You feel it. Tell me I’m not alone in this.”

She trembled a little when she answered, her lips brushing his with the movement. “You’re not.”

Her soft finality left him breathless. She opened her eyes, their gazes meeting, and the weight of the world dissolved into that fragile, ephemeral moment.

Mist still clung around them, diffused light painting everything in softened tones, but as Gail gently closed her fingers over his coat in a motion meant to steady as much as to pull closer.

Victor realized clarity had nothing to do with sight.

“You’re more,” he said, raw and unguarded.

“More?” she asked, caught between disbelief and wonder.

Victor’s palm cupped her cheek, and his thumb brushed away a stray drop of dew that had settled there, or maybe it traced the shape she was leaving on his soul.

He leaned so close their breaths mingled once more. “More than anything I’ve known,” he finished, his voice cracking slightly on the words.

And as the balloon shifted upward, breaking free of the densest fog, ribbons of light pierced the cloud cover, illuminating her features piece by piece. The burn of the flame nestled above them hissed, and the air grew thinner, cooler, and clearer.

But Victor barely noticed. His hand slid downward to curl against her back, claiming her in the quietest of ways, his chest still racing, his mind full of this immutable fact: she wasn’t a fantasy anymore. She was real. And she had chosen to be here.

She was everything.