Page 147 of Carnal Wagers

Kevin’s roguish features winced, but he held his tongue, no contradiction to voice when I knew canceled jumps happened.

Quickly, Cillian slipped his arms through the vertical straps, snapped the other straps in place, and adjusted them. I scooped up the divorce papers against my chest with gloved hands, ready to show him exactly what I thought of finally getting his signature on them, and hauled myself back onto the bench.

It creaked under Cillian’s additional weight behind me. Unlike Kevin’s professional approach, Cillian locked my harness onto his at my shoulders and hips with forceful jerks. I felt him everywhere—my back, my butt, his dick against my tailbone—and it all dragged me to the pits of hell for a round of torture my body had no business desiring.

“Are they everything you ever wanted?” he asked, tapping the papers for emphasis.

I bit the inside of my bottom lip until I tasted blood. “You know they’re not. Stop mocking me.”

“No? But you did it so well to me.”

“You know that wasn’t how it was between us. Not this last month.”

“Do I?”

Our relationship might not have started out with romantic intentions, but somewhere along the way, I lost myself in the idea of us.

The red-light indicator overhead switched to green, and the pilot yelled incoherently from the cockpit. We had reached the jump spot.

“The ironic part,” Cillian leaned in and crowed in my ear, “I signed those papers for you. I planned to propose to you during this jump and make you my wife.”

I gasped and clutched my aching chest. His words twisted the stake in my heart from side to side until the hole he left behind was too large to heal without surgical intervention. I had come so impossibly close to having everything I wanted, only for it to be snatched away.

Our instructor rolled up the door to the open void. The wind, in combination with the drop in cabin pressure, battered at my ears in a deafening roar. An icy blast of air ravaged through the cabin. Kevin waved us over, and we scuttle-shuffled to the door.

I hurled the envelope out of the plane.

“That’s what I think of our divorce,” I yelled over my shoulder.

The papers flew and snapped out of the envelope. Some dropped. Others stuck to the plane. A few swirled back inside the cabin. The rest sailed and soared in a way I never could, dancing in the wind.

“Don’t think for one second that’ll lighten your sentence,” he roared over the wind as he tugged on my shoulder strap. “You’d be surprised how easy these hooks are to remove. Ready to come to grief, síbhean?”

I didn’t have time to argue before he leaped us through the door, and we free-fell to his cryptic words.

Chapter 36

It felt like she’d shot me full of birdshot pellets and watched me bleed out. I wasn’t going to kill her, but she didn’t need to know that. I wanted to strangle her, yet I preferred her alive. I craved her submission, but I had no desire to push her into a panic attack to get it. It was a mindfuck to sort through.

Call it a sick pleasure, but I relished watching the horror, pain, betrayal, and heartbreak cycle across her face as I tossed us out of the plane. Everything she forced me through over the last twelve hours, she experienced in a few seconds. Served her right. The threats hurt her, just like her duplicity did to me, and it soothed the ache in my head.

We fell. We soared. We fought to the tune of my final threat before the plunge, and I recorded her every reaction with the video recorder strapped to my hand.

My words were meant as a challenge to the woman who never gave up on one, and they had the desired effect. Her body didn’t lock up, and her mind didn’t spiral into a panic as we free-fell. Instead, she focused on controlling the situation. She focused on me.

When I curled my arm and touched the strap as a taunt, she batted at my hand. Or tried to bat at it. With the gale, it was more like swatting her hand underwater. Slow, without force, and futile. With gravity and her weight lugging the straps down, even if I wanted to, it was impossible to unclip the hooks. There was nothing for her to fear, but her struggle against me hauled me away from the suffocating pit of darkness of my thoughts and up to the surface. For the first time since last night’s revelations, I finally breathed fresh air.

She twisted her head left, then right. Her lips moved, wide and stretched over her teeth, but the roar of the wind vacuumed the sound of her voice. I imagined the colorful curses she spat my way that were silenced under the blustering gusts, whether in French or in English, and I grinned. That was my woman. She gave it as good as she got. It was one of the many things I loved about her. Love…

Truth was, no matter what, she was mine. My woman. My girlfriend. My wife, and I loved her still, no matter how much her treachery stung. That was the real head melter.

With her body flush against mine, my anger dampened. We floated on a moving pillow of air slapping at our jowls, while the ground below looked like nothing more than a map of crop fields cut into sections. These jumps were addictive. From jump to landing, nothing else existed but the open air. No drowning beneath expectations and disappointments. No reaching for an evasive surface. It was world domination, with nothing to fight, nothing to survive, nothing to suppress. It was a moment of clarity among the drudgery of the demands of my life that required my complete focus, leaving no time or space for my mind to wander.

With a glance at the altimeter on my wrist, I tapped Alice’s—Alizé’s—shoulder as a warning, then reached in and pulled the chute handle. We whipped upward and upright. The wind softened to a gentle swish, the blaring white noise gone. Our fall smoothed, and Alizé’s weight tugged on my shoulders and hips. Her body clung to mine, her hips against my groin, my chest to her back, and it was bittersweet.

I had a whole plan before last night.

In this moment, flying over everything that held us down, I had planned to propose to her. It should have been one of those memories that stuck with a couple for the rest of their lives. Before her, no one would have ever mistaken me for a romantic. I had aimed to make her my wife, not to cross another goal off that damn bucket list she made—not anymore—but to tie her to me for my own selfishness.