Unfaithful (33 page)

“It’s a fighter plane, to be exact,” he said, smiling.

I stared at it, totally at a loss, then walked over and touched the fuselage, studying the details, running my hand across the gray paint faded by time. There was no denying it was magnificent. I flinched when I felt deep holes as big as nickels in its front end. My blood ran cold. They must be bullet holes. I tried not to imagine why they were there and instead focused on the picture on its side, by its left wing: the words
KILROY WAS HERE
and the doodle of a man peeking over a wall, his big nose sticking out. I smiled faintly as Evan studied my face with a pleased expression. Beneath the wing, “
U.S. ARMY
,” stenciled in white letters, still stood out against the dark background. I had no idea how the plane had gotten all the way there or how long it had been hidden under the thick military tarp. It almost looked like it had always been there.

“What do you think?” Evan’s voice rose in a whisper like the cloud of dust that had settled on the floor.

“It looks really old,” I said after a moment of hesitation as I looked for the right words.

“Older than you think,” Evan said. He joined me by the plane and silently stroked its painted surface, deep in reflection. “It’s a P-51 Mustang. The terror of the skies during World War Two,” he went on, serious, as he patted the side of the plane with his hand almost affectionately. His gaze seemed lost in memory. “It was Drake’s,” he said before I could ask. “Once in a while I like to come here and polish it the old-fashioned way, even though he doesn’t like it. The others don’t even know it exists, of course—otherwise Ginevra would have fixed it up her own way. But I like to use more normal methods just to relax from time to time. Or maybe, without realizing it, it was a way for me to try to feel more human before I met you.”

“You
are
human,” I replied instinctively. “Your emotions are human.”

“No, they’re not.” He lifted my chin and kissed it softly, then looked me in the eye again. “And I’ve never been happier about it.”

The electric charge his mouth sent through me when he whispered those words against my skin left me so dazed I couldn’t reply. My eyelids fluttered as I tried to regain control. “How did you manage to block your thoughts about it from Ginevra?” I asked, fascinated by his ability to control his own mind as well as others’.

“I learned over time.” Evan hid a sardonic smile, clearly understanding from the twinkle in my eye what I was about to ask him.

“Think you could teach me?”

He laughed. “Ginevra would go nuts! But”—he glanced at me, a sly smile on his face—“I guess I could. Anyway, we’re not here to talk about that right now.” The eagerness in his voice was evident.

“What are we here for, then?” The look on his face made me uneasy and a wave of emotion rose up in my throat, making it difficult to breathe. Still, I wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t because of something else. Worry, maybe. “Evan, you can’t be thinking of—” I blinked and steadied my voice. “You can’t be thinking of going up in that thing?” I couldn’t see his face, but I was more than sure he was smiling. I watched with alarm as he grabbed hold of the wing and nimbly swung himself up onto it. He climbed into the cockpit and looked down at me. “Why do you think I brought you all the way here?”

A mix of emotions churned inside me, rising to my throat. I stared at him for a moment and his sexy, enthusiastic smile made something tremble inside me, something in my chest that quivered with each breath. The sight of him behind the controls of a fighter plane was something I never would have expected to see, and yet for some reason he perfectly fit the role of a soldier. The clothes he wore—a black military-style jacket with patches and an army-green sweater—strengthened the impression even more. It was as if we’d gone back in time and Evan was there in that warrior eagle, ready to take off and soar through the skies to do battle like a soldier. An Angel of the skies.

“You think it’s capable of flying?” I asked as the sputter of the engine drowned out my voice. The propeller on its nose came to life, more dust rising in a cloud from its whirring blades. A delicate wind blew on my skin and stirred my hair as Evan jumped out of the tiny cockpit and looked at me with satisfaction. He walked across the wing to where I was standing, knelt, and held out his hand.

My heart skipped a beat and pounded in my ears, challenging the roar of the airplane. It was
really
about to happen. Part of me was already aware of it, even if my brain was having a hard time ordering my hand to take hold of Evan’s. I wasn’t sure which was making me hesitate: fear or excitement. Evan always said that in certain situations one couldn’t exist without the other. This must have been one of those times. And yet I wanted with all my might to take his hand, so why was I hesitating? I had nothing to be afraid of when I was with him—I knew that perfectly well—so it must have been because of my emotional reaction that was so powerful it paralyzed me when I saw this Angel hold out his hand to take me into the sky with him.

His voice resonated inside my head as he answered.
“Want to find out with me?”
It enveloped me like the rays of sunset.
“Fly with me, Gemma,”
he whispered in my mind.

I grabbed his hand and squeezed it with all my strength. A second later I was standing on the wing, wrapped in Evan’s arms. Releasing me from his embrace, he took off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders. The dog tag he wore around his neck glinted against his green short-sleeved shirt. “So you won’t get chilled,” he whispered to me, forehead to forehead. He wouldn’t need it.

Evan’s arm muscles flexed as he grabbed hold of the metal rim overhead and slid down into the single-seat cockpit.

“It doesn’t look big enough for more than one person,” I pointed out warily.

Evan didn’t respond, but sat me down in front of him so we could share the cramped space. In the end, being so close to him wasn’t uncomfortable. He tucked his chin over my shoulder. “That just means we’ll have to stay closer together,” he whispered sensually in reply to my thoughts. He carefully shut the glass canopy above us.

Fascinated, I stared at the control panel without recognizing any of the levers that Evan was moving confidently. “This is the throttle,” he explained, his voice calm, resting his hand on a lever to our left. He gripped it in his fist and smoothly pushed it forward. “This gives the plane power. Think of it like the accelerator in a car.”

I watched him in silence as he used his other hand to grab a larger lever that looked kind of like a car’s stick shift. I couldn’t find words to express the emotions that filled me when the plane began to move and the hangar disappeared behind us. In spite of my excitement, though, all I could focus on was the heat emanating from Evan’s body, snug against mine. I leaned to the side slightly to give him a better view of the controls as the landscape beyond the canopy raced by ever faster. Only my heart, maybe, was keeping up with its pace. I held my breath and his smile tickled my neck, his arm muscles flexing as he pulled one of the controls toward him.

“And this is the control stick,” he said, speaking close to my ear. “If I pull it back like this, it brings the nose of the plane up.” The craft gradually tilted up until the ground disappeared from view. We were so close together I was sure Evan could feel every heartbeat. “Or you can push it forward for a nosedive.” He glanced at me, his expression sly.

“Don’t even think about it,” I warned, looking him straight in the eye. He laughed.

A moment later the barren field disappeared, replaced by the thick tangles of trees of the Adirondacks. Evan kept the plane at low altitude, flying just above the forest’s majestic canopy.

“What’s this for?” I asked, looking curiously at a straight line that scrolled continuously across a screen.

“That’s the artificial horizon. It’s used to check the plane’s orientation relative to the horizon.” Evan veered right and the line tilted, imitating his position in the sky. Just when I was almost sure I’d regained control of my breathing, a strange rumble rose from the propeller, making me flinch.

“Evan, are you sure this thing isn’t too old?” I blurted, gripped by a feeling of alarm I tried hard to hide. My heart was in my throat and Evan’s silence made me panic even more. But it wasn’t his hesitation that worried me—it was his hands, jumping frenetically from one control to the other as the treetops grew sparser, revealing a mirror of water ready to swallow us up into its abyss. “Evan!” My voice held a hint of stifled desperation. At this point, there was no doubt about it: something was wrong.

He clenched his jaw and cursed.

“Evan, what’s wrong?” I cried.

“Brace yourself!” he shouted between gritted teeth, his muscles tensed. “Oh, shit!” he snarled, clutching the control stick as his arms squeezed me in an iron grip.

“Evan!” I cried again, my voice suffocated with panic, but the plane quickly lost altitude, drowning out the rest of my sentence. My heart leapt violently in my chest as the lake below rushed toward us. Every part of me trembled with terror as I stared at the rippled water and dug my nails into whatever was beneath them. A scant few yards from the surface, I held my breath and closed my eyes, waiting for the impact.

Just then Evan’s laughter resounded against my back, muffled by my hair. He confidently pulled the control stick toward him an instant before hitting the water and the plane righted itself, its wheels skimming the lake, tickling it, raising silver splashes against the windshield as we flew over the surface in perfect balance. I took a deep breath, my heart still doing somersaults, and turned to look at the gentle wake stretched out behind us. Evan was still laughing. I sighed, held my breath, and forced myself to laugh with him, my hands still shaking.

“Idiot!” I slugged his shoulder. “I hate it when you do stuff like that.” I rolled my eyes, my breath still coming in gasps.

“That was fun, don’t you think?” he said, grinning.

“You have a weird sense of humor,” I shot back, glaring at him.

Evan nudged me with his shoulder affectionately. “C’mon, I was just kidding around. A harmless little dose of adrenaline certainly won’t kill you.”

“Right. As if I didn’t have enough in my system already,” I said, trying hard not to let him feel how much I was trembling. I took another deep breath and calmed down, letting myself smile with him. With that breath the scent that wafted up from his jacket and filled my nose distracted me from everything else. It was
his
scent.

Evan slowly pulled the control stick toward him and the fighter plane nosed up again, this time more smoothly, flying over the green treetops that disappeared below us.

Whenever I’d chanced to look up at the sky when I was growing up, no matter how different it looked, I’d made the mistake of assuming it was always the same sky. But now it was like I was seeing it for the first time. I was sure that from that moment on I would never see it with the same eyes again.

Every second in the air with Evan seared itself into my memory. Once we were back on the ground it would stop burning, but it would leave a permanent mark on my heart. The ground had completely disappeared beneath us. The plane flew along through soft patches of clouds, gradually rising above a thick, continuous, reddish blanket of them. Although it was hours until sunset, the sky was a palette of intense shades, from red to orange to blue.

“Evan, we’re flying!” I said, full of wonder.

“Yes.” Evan smiled behind me. “We’re flying,” he repeated, pleased. His breath tickled my ear.

“My God. It’s amazing,” I whispered, enchanted. As I gazed through the glass canopy, my vision lost itself in the contrast between the orange and the pale blue. Hidden behind a fluffy cluster of clouds, the sun looked like a black pearl rimmed with fire. All around us the clouds scattered to the horizon, pierced by shafts of golden light that illuminated the dust particles in the air, making them sparkle like diamonds. Something about the sky’s reddish hues reminded me of the place we’d been a few days before. It was still hard for me to conjure the thought in my mind, but I had to, because that’s where I felt I was right now—in heaven.

“You don’t need to tremble,” Evan whispered behind my ear. “You’re safe up here with me.” His mouth grazed my skin.

“I’m not afraid.” It was the truth. “I’m trembling because it brings up so many emotions in me.”

“Give me your hands.” His hot breath, as light as a caress, stirred the tiny hairs on my neck. It hadn’t been a request; before I could reply, he’d already taken them in his own and wrapped them around the control stick. “If I could enfold all the love I feel for you the same way I’m holding your hands right now, I would transfer it from me to you.”

I closed my eyes at the sound of his velvety voice, tilting my head back to touch his, intoxicated by his words. “You already are,” I whispered.

“Hold it tighter, like this.” When he squeezed his hands over mine I realized his intentions.