Page 72 of A Wolf After My Own Heart
“Amateur. Garsea can get through a locked door.”
“Uh. Yeah. About that… She felt bad before—”
“She would have felt worse if she’d kept opening more of my drawers. She thought the bottom one was bad? Just wait.”
“—but now that we know you better, she feelsreallybad. Also, at the risk of repeating myself, we should go out again. A pretense-less lunch. Or any kind of lunch you like.” He glanced away from the road to look her right in the eyes.Green eyes green eyes ohthosebeautifuleyes.“It’s so fucking decent of you to help me,” he added, squeezing her hand.
“No.”
He dropped her hand. “What?”
“I’m not helping you. I’m helping Sally. You should probably keep that straight in your head. She’s the priority, not you or Garsea or Macropi. Also Macropi’s arsonist. They’re my other priority. If I empty a shotgun into someone’s face, d’you think you could look the other way?”
“Depends on the face.”
She laughed. “That’s cold. Almost as cold as me.”
“Cold is the last adjective I’d use to describe you.”
“Chilly.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Frosty”
“Nope.”
“Icy.”
“Nope.”
“Frigid?”
“Christ, I hope not.”
* * *
“And here I’ve been giving Delta all my frequent miles like a sucker.”
Berne chuckled. “Keep with them, lass. I’ve got no plans to put any major carrier out of business.”
They were mounting the steps to the plane while Berne finished his preflight check. Lila had been surprised to see Oz skip the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport for a vastly smaller airfield just outside Lakeville. They’d been directed to the right gate (one of five possibilities), and then Oz took her outside, where Berne was prowling around his plane like an overprotective…well. Bear. No TSA, no pat down, no wildly overpriced bad coffee.
The Cessna was a small white plane with long navy blue stripes along the body and belly. She could see three windows in addition to the cockpit, and then she and Oz were ducking their heads to enter the cabin and take their seats. It wasn’t her first ride on a single-engine high-wing plane, though it had been about five years. One and done, in fact.
Meanwhile, Berne was explaining that preflight checklists saved lives. Specifically, they would have saved a Gulfstream crash in 2014, and several other crashes the man rattled off because he thought talking about plane crashes would calm his passengers.
“And not just twenty-fourteen! D’you know that the NBAA7found only partial preflight checks on fifteen percent of all flights? Fifteen percent! Even though they’ve been recommended since the thirties! It’s a bloody miracle there haven’t beenmorecrashes.”
“Um,” Lila began, because the color was falling out of Oz’s face, making his eyes seem that much greener. Which should have been sexy but wasn’t.
“Back then, the gust locks something and then they something-something. Leave it to those buggers at Boeing, eh? And not only that, but something else and then another something else, so of course something-something. Everyone died, poor bastards. All right, buckle in, we’re cleared.”
“Oz,” she murmured, which might have been a waste of time. Did werebears have super hearing? Could Berne hear her over the engine? “Are you okay?”
“Fine. I’m totally fine. Everything’s fine.” This while he cinched his seatbelt tight enough to obstruct his breathing. “Totally, completely—hurrk!—fine.”
Sure, pal.She raised her voice in an attempt to turn the chitchat away from crashes. “So, Berne, is this a super-duper secret Shifter-only airport? I’ve never heard of it, but I’ve only lived here a couple of days.”
