Page 11 of Max's Mission

For a fraction of a second, she resisted. But then the spicy scent of his soap and something that was all Max hit her. Her resistance crumbled, and she melted into him as best she could with the armrest digging into her side. What she did to deserve this man, she didn’t know. He’d been such a wonderful friend this past year. A rock in the storm. She appreciated his presence, but she hadn’t been as kind about accepting it as she could have been. Instead, she did some beating on the rock. But he hadn’t chipped or wavered. At least, not outwardly. She was starting to see now that maybe there were some internal cracks appearing, but she didn’t know how to let her walls down and let him in.

One thing was certain, though. She needed to figure it out soon before she hit too hard, and he broke and walked away.

Maybe it was inevitable. Everyone had walked away from her. Except Annabeth. She was the sister Margot never had.

Could Max be the brother?

The thought no sooner entered her mind than she dismissed it. She was too attracted to Max to think of him as a brother.

At the core of things, that was what held her back from letting him into her so-called inner bubble. The last man she’d been attracted to—the one who was supposed to love and support her for the rest of her life—had thrown her life into the spin cycle without warning. She wasn’t sure she could handle that again.

But being in Max’s arms sure felt nice. The comfort level he provided was off the charts. Not to mention the low hum of attraction that thrummed through her veins. She liked that too, even if she didn’t feel ready to act on it.

“I never cared much for dark rooms and elevators when I was a kid.” Max’s soft voice broke through her thoughts. His warm breath ruffled the hair at her temple. “They freaked me out a little. My mom, she always made sure I had a nightlight. As an adult now, I don’t close the curtains all the way, and I take the stairs a lot.”

Margot sniffed, curling her fingers into his shirt. She knew what he was doing. He was distracting her by continuing like nothing was wrong. It was an out she’d happily take. She simply didn’t have the bandwidth for her emotions at the moment. “How is that something that tests you?”

He raised a hand, stroking her hair. “You didn’t let me finish.”

“Oh, sorry.” The slightest smile curled her lip.

His chuckle rumbled under her ear. “Those things are fairly minor. A lot of people don’t like the dark or elevators, but they handle them fine. I do, too, usually. But there’s a reason I have a house with a wall of windows. Why I prefer speedboats to Ford’s fishing vessels.”

The hand wrapped around her shoulders gripped her sleeve for a moment before it relaxed. “About a year before I retired from the Air Force, I was involved in a training accident.”

“What?” Margot sat up to look at him. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not something I talk about much. The guys know, but it’s just not something that comes up in casual conversation, you know?”

She could understand that. “So, what happened?”

“You know I was a pararescueman.”

She nodded.

“We were up with a group of PJ candidates, and one of them didn’t want to jump. Even though he’d jumped before, this time was different because we were near water. Navigating away from obstacles is something they need to know how to do, and this guy—well, the thing that tested him was water.”

“Was it deep water?”

Max shrugged. “Deep enough. It was a small lake, and we were close enough to shore, gliding to safety wasn’t terribly difficult. And for the record, it isn’t like we just throw everyone out of the plane and there’s no one on the ground in case something goes wrong when we do these jumps. On this exercise, we had a boat in the water and a team on the shoreline. But this guy didn’t see any of that. He just looked out and saw water and panicked. Anyway, on our training flights, everyone jumps. If you’re in that plane, unless you’re unconscious and/or dying, you jump. If you don’t, you lose your jump status.”

The flight attendant walked by with a trash bag, interrupting them for a moment. Margot gathered the trash from her earlier snack and passed it over. Once the man moved on, Max continued.

“Part of my job was to make sure everyone jumped. I got him moving toward the exit, got him to stop clinging to the door, but he still just stood there. There were two more behind him, plus me, so I slid in behind him to scream at him to move his ass one way or another, and he turned before I could utter a word. I don’t know if he thought I was going to shove him out or what, but his eyes went huge behind his goggles and he shot a handout and grabbed onto my harness. It caught me by surprise, and I stumbled forward. We were close enough to the door that my momentum carried us out of the plane.” He stopped for a second, his jaw muscles working.

Margot put her hand on his forearm and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You don’t have to continue.”

“It’s okay. I want you to know about it.” He covered her hand, then laced their fingers. “When we cleared the plane, he still had a death grip on me. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but sky divers fall a certain way to maintain control. With him latched on to me like a monkey, neither of us could do that, so we just tumbled through the air. Several times a second, I’d catch a glimpse of the lake, and I knew from experience that I had a certain amount of time to get him off and deploy my canopy before our auto-deploy devices would go off.”

“Auto-deploy device? What’s that?” Margot frowned. She’d never heard of such a thing. A backup chute, sure, but not an auto-deploy chute.

“A lot of skydivers have three parachutes now. A main, a reserve, and an auto-deploy. The latter goes off without any input from the diver if it detects an unsafe rate of descent at a certain distance above the ground.”

“Oh. I suppose that’s a good thing.”

“Usually, but if we’d stayed locked together, it could have caused issues for us both. That canopy is on our chest.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Oh… yeah.”

---