Standing beside her, blocking the cockpit door, his leather flight jacket draped casually over his shoulders, his captain’s peaked cap pushed slightly back on his head, was Tyler Mercer.
He had his arm wrapped tightly around Vanessa’s waist, kissing her temple, laughing as the lead flight attendant handed them a bottle of vintage Dom Pérignon in an airline gift bag:
“Thank you so much, Brenda,” Tyler was saying, his smile radiant: “Make sure the ground staff transfers our personal bags to the Signature Flight Support terminal on the north ramp.
Our private charter to Geneva is wheels-up in forty minutes.”
“It was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen, Captain Mercer!” the flight attendant beamed, clasping her hands: “I took a video on my phone!
I can send it to your personal email!”
“Send it to her private account, Brenda,” Vanessa giggled, leaning her head against Tyler’s chest, her eyes half-closed in smug, intoxicated supremacy:
“Tyler won’t be checking his company inbox ever again.”
TACK.
The sound was not loud.
It was the clean, unmistakable crack of my hand-welted leather field boots stepping through the first-class curtain onto the galley threshold.
Tyler Mercer turned his head.
The easy, charming, billionaire-adjacent smile on his patrician face did not immediately disappear.
It lingered for half a heartbeat like a grotesque mask before his brown eyes drifted down the aisle…
And locked squarely onto seven-year-old Mason.
Tyler froze.
His arm, which had been resting possessively around Vanessa’s cashmere waist, went completely rigid.
His chest hitched in a dry, violent, spastic micro-tremor: tick-tick-tick.
The color in Tyler’s tanned, sculpted face did not drain away slowly; it collapsed inward in a sudden, catastrophic structural failure that left his skin the exact, mottled shade of curdled skim milk:
k-k-k.
His lips parted, his vocal cords struggling to push past an instantaneous constriction in his windpipe:
