Wade glanced at the ceiling.
“Just a little turbulence.”
“You fly a lot?” he asked.
“I was a flight attendant, before . . .” She dropped the end of her sentence.
That look of pity started to cross his face again.
“None of that. Please, Wade. I’m not worthy of your pity on the subject. I wouldn’t have mentioned my late husband if I could have gotten around it.”
Wade closed his eyes and shook his head. “I’m glad you told me. It’s all adding up now.”
“What’s adding up?”
“The not wanting to go home. Your desire to dis me last night and never see me again.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “We are on a jet together, so my conviction to stay away obviously wasn’t that strong.”
“Yes, but you’re sitting over there instead of in my lap, which is where I’d rather you be.”
That had her laughing. “You’re so blatant.”
“I’m honest. It’s a curse, though my mama would say differently.”
The plane dipped again, forcing Trina to hold her glass up to avoid spilling the wine. The intercom system inside the plane made a noise, and the voice of a man she assumed was the captain started to talk.
“We’re hitting some rough weather, Mr. Thomas. I’d suggest you and your guest stay seated with your seat belts fastened until I can get us away from this storm.”
Wade sat a little taller and looked out the window. “Don’t have to tell me twice.”
Trina took a drink of her wine to keep it from spilling. “They wouldn’t have taken off if it wasn’t safe. It’s just gonna be bumpy.”
Trina peered at the flight attendant, who was sitting several feet away, the phone to the cockpit to her ear.
“This doesn’t bother you?”
“Not at all. In fact, I was working in the private sector as a flight attendant before my marriage. I’d planned on creating a company for private flight attendants.”
“That didn’t work out?” Wade asked.
“I didn’t pursue it. I might, eventually. I’ve had other priorities this year.”
“I can imagine.”
“Enough about me. What’s your story?” The way he was watching the rain against the window told her Wade was nervous. In her experience, the best way to quell that was to get him talking.
“I started singing in the shower as soon as I realized a hairbrush could double as a microphone.”
The image of a young boy covered in soap, holding a round brush, popped into her head.
“When I was about eight, me and my buddy started a two-man band. He used an old paint bucket as a drum, and I had a hand-me-down guitar I learned how to play on my own.”
The plane dipped again. This time Wade’s glass fell to the floor and started rolling around, spilling wine everywhere.
Trina looked at the flight attendant, who reached for her seat belt to cinch it tighter.
“Whoa.”
“It’s okay—”
“Sorry for the turbulence, Mr. Thomas. This is the captain speaking. It looks like we’re being encouraged to land on Grand Bahama instead of Nassau. There are lightning strikes on the smaller island, and turning back to Miami would have us chasing this storm. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience. As soon as the weather clears, we will get you to your destination.”
“That’s not good,” Wade said, looking behind him toward Nita. “Is everything okay up there?” He pointed toward the cockpit door.
“Just lightning, like the pilot said.”
Wade turned his wild eyes on Trina.
“Hey, it’s fine.”
“Easy for you to say. Musicians always die in small plane crashes.”
Trina couldn’t help but take the blame for being on the plane with a storm approaching. Not that she felt they were at risk of falling out of the sky, but Wade obviously considered it a high probability.
“Do you need me to come over there and sit next to you?” she asked, trying to tease him.
His eyes locked on hers. “Don’t you dare take that seat belt off.”
The plane started to descend and bank to the left. Trina tried to see the ground but only saw clouds.
“Does your friend still play the drums with you?”
“What?”
“The drums. You said you had a friend who played when you were a kid.”
Wade shook his head. “No. He ah . . .”
Trina noticed his hands fisting on the armrest. His knuckles turned white.
“He what?” Trina kept her concern about the bad weather to herself. As flights went, this was one she could have done without. The small plane made it worse.
“Married his high school sweetheart, had a daughter within the first year.”
“Married life and your job aren’t compatible?”
“I’m not sure about that. Drew didn’t have the same drive. Took the excuse of a wife and a kid to stop trying and went to work with his father.” Wade looked out the window again and released a relieved sigh. “Land. I see land.”
Trina leaned forward and rested a hand on his knee. “Hey . . .”
He turned her way and tried to smile.
He sucked at it.
“I’m sorry. This was a bad idea.”
Wade covered her hand with his and squeezed. “It was my bad idea.”
“You were just trying to get me to go out with you.”
There was a pause and a tilt of his head that she’d seen him do before. “I think after this flight, the least you can do is say yes to a date.”
Oh, yeah, he was definitely playing it hard. Not that she thought for a second his anxiety about the flight was a show. White knuckles and wild eyes were a dead giveaway.
“How about dinner at whatever hotel we muster up once we land?”
His thumb stroked her fingers.
On instinct, she pulled away, only to have him hold her tighter. “That was a given. I’m talking about when we get back to Texas. I still need to teach you the two-step.”
The plane rocked back and forth as the runway approached. Wade squeezed her hand a little tighter.
“Who says I don’t already know the two-step?”
“Do you?”
“It’s two steps, how hard can it be?”
The first punch to the tarmac and Wade squeezed her hand hard enough to have her tense. Once the wheels made decent contact and the nose bounced before leveling out, Trina placed her free hand over his fist.
Wade glanced at his hand. “Oh, damn, sorry.” He let her go the second he realized the grip he had.
Trina shook out her hand with a laugh. “I don’t need my hand for the rest of the day anyway.”
Tilting his head back and closing his eyes, Wade let his shoulders fall. “That was not fun.”
“We landed. We’re good.”
“Little lady, I haven’t worked this hard for a date since I was in Miss Kuhnar’s third grade class.”
She laughed. “Third grade? You started early.”
“Patty refused to let me walk her home up until the last week of school.”
Trina had a strong desire to learn more about Patty.
The airplane came to a stop, and Nita stood from her seat as quickly as she could.
“Sincere apologies, Mr. Thomas.”
Relaxed now, Wade flirted with his eyes and put Nita at ease. “I’ll use this in a song,” he told her.
The younger woman seemed to like that idea. “I can’t wait to hear it.”
Wade winked.
“Do you know who Wade Thomas is?” Avery glanced up from her cell phone to find Lori’s and Shannon’s eyes.
“The name sounds familiar,” Lori said.
Avery turned her phone around and showed the others the image on her screen. “He’s a country western singer. A friggin’ musician!”
Lori blinked. “Okay . . .”
“Trina is in a private plane with a cowboy rock star. This isn’t good.” Avery hated to think of her vulnerable friend being taken advantage of by some sweet-talking, yes, ma’am kinda man that had women throwing themselves at him in a different city every night.
Shannon and Lori didn’t share her distress.
“Remember Miguel?”
They all exchanged glances in a memory of the man that had latched on to Trina during their weeklong cruise in the Mediterranean last year. The man had put drugs into Trina’s drink, his intentions never truly revealed, since they had intercepted their friend before anything tragic happened.
“One case of bad judgment isn’t a reason to assume Trina isn’t capable of picking up a decent guy,” Shannon said.
Lori was biting her lip with a frown.
“What?” Avery asked.
“I seem to remember something in Trina’s file saying she had a track record of dating lousy men.” Since Lori was the lawyer who wrote up the prenuptial agreements for all the First Wives, she would know. Alliance, the company that had arranged all of their fake marriages, procured painstaking background checks. Those reports included everything from criminal behavior to previous relationships, bad behavior on and off the record, financial issues good and bad, all the way down to the skeletons in the family closets.
“She’s too trusting.”
“There isn’t a lot we can do about it until she comes home,” Lori told her.
Avery pushed off the couch in the middle of Trina’s Texas ranch estate. A home Trina had inherited from her late mother-in-law, a mansion way too big for a single woman, even if it had a staff of half a dozen people milling about at all times of the day. “Oh, yeah, there is. We can go to her. She isn’t planning on coming home.”
“She wouldn’t ditch us,” Shannon said.
Avery moved around the great room until she found a pen and paper. “That’s exactly what she’s doing. It’s been a year since Fedor offed himself. The only people who know about her other life are here. Everyone out there only knows what she tells them. If you haven’t noticed, Trina hasn’t exactly fostered any new friendships since all this went down. According to Andrea, she has made several excuses about going into the office, except when they have board meetings.” Trina had inherited a third of Everson Oil, including a place on the board. Shortly after coming into her inheritance, she’d embraced the company and her mother-in-law’s sisters, Andrea and Diane. That was up until a month before, when she escaped to Europe. She’d pulled away then, and hadn’t emotionally returned.