But right now, I was cursing Stella for being a good boss. I wish she’d demanded I stay on top of my work because right then I could have been answering a bunch of e-mails—e-mails I was sure were piling up between the two projects I was currently working on. Sometimes I had clients who turned the reins fully over to me; most times my clients just wanted to have the overall aesthetic (maybe even fabrics and palettes) run by them. And then there were the few who wanted to be involved in every choice I made. They were the exhausting clients and right now I had one of them.
I could only imagine she was going nuts waiting on me to get back to work.
Well, I knew the feeling.
I enviously watched my seatmate work away on his laptop.
The only bright spot was when the flight attendants offered us a light lunch and I got that cup of coffee I’d been longing for. It was instant, so it wasn’t great, but it was caffeine and I could not help the little sigh of pleasure that escaped my lips after the first sip.
I thought I felt the Scot tense at the noise, but when I side-eyed him, he was digging into his lunch, ignoring me.
My lunch could wait. First I savored my coffee.
“If you’re not going tae eat that, I will,” he said, sounding annoyed.
How I managed to rankle him just sitting there I did not know.
“I am going to eat it. I’m enjoying my coffee first.”
“I thought maybe you were one of those women that doesn’t eat.” He shrugged, throwing back the rest of his coffee.
“I think we’ve established you’re a judgmental pain in the ass.” I smiled sweetly before turning to my lunch. Feeling his eyes on me, I ate it slowly and deliberately, knowing intuitively that it would bother him. And it was not my imagination that the tension between us thickened as I brought bite after bite of the ham salad to my mouth at a snail’s pace.
“Take that,” he grunted out, and I turned my head to see he was holding his empty tray out to the flight attendant. The flight attendant stared at it, momentarily stunned.
“Of course, sir,” he said calmly, practiced, before taking it and walking away.
Irate at his behavior, I couldn’t help myself. “Do you ever say please or thank you?”
He cut me a dark look. “What?”
I gestured with my plastic fork to where the flight attendant had been standing. “People aren’t your servants. The flight attendants are not your servants. They’re doing a job and trying to make this flight easier on you. You can be forgiven for being abrupt and standoffish and maybe unintentionally insulting because you’re anxious about flying. I was trying to tell myself that, anyway. But the way you speak to people in customer service makes you an arrogant, entitled prick.”
“If I were you, I’d shut up and mind my own business.”
“Yeah, well, if I were you, I’d reach into that goddamn dark soul of mine and pull a thank you out of there every now and then.”
I didn’t know if it was the honest pique trembling in my words, but the Scot’s eyes widened marginally before he glowered and pulled his laptop back out with a clatter on top of his table.
Hateful, hateful man.
Ignoring him now came much, much easier. In fact, after lunch (and another coffee) I actually got into my book. The urge to use the bathroom about fifty minutes from our estimated arrival, however, made continuing to ignore my neighbor impossible. I was going to have to ask him to move. Plus, I was too warm and was dying to take off my jacket.
“Could you please let me out?” I asked in a carefully neutral tone.
Equally lacking in expression, he grabbed up his laptop, pushed his table back in, and gestured for me to get out.
I stared at the barely-there gap between his knees and the seat in front of him. Was he kidding? He wasn’t going to get out of his seat? My gaze flew to his face, but he was staring determinedly ahead.
Fine!
If I happened to step on his feet and then grind my stiletto into his toes, that was his fault. Huffing, I got up, grabbed hold of the top of the seat in front of him, trying not to touch the head of the woman sitting in it, and I shoved my right leg into the teeny gap he’d left. If he’d been an average-sized man, I probably would have squeezed past no problem in the spacious first-class seats.
But he wasn’t an average-sized man.
My leg touched his and my fingernails dug into the headrest in front of me. I shimmied into his space, bringing my left leg into the mix, and I heard him curse when my heel came down on his left foot. A fizzle of satisfaction moved through me and I pushed farther into his space. I felt his legs tense and I was suddenly very aware that my ass was in his face. Thankfully, it was mostly hidden by the peplum of my jacket.
With one last shimmy I stumbled out into the aisle and looked back at him, hoping he was seared and scorched by the heat of my glower.
The bastard already had his laptop back out.
Wondering how it was possible a person as ill-mannered as he hadn’t been caught by karma by now, I marched down the short aisle and into the bathroom at the entrance of the galley.
Inside, I did my business, washed up, and yanked out of my jacket, feeling unbearably hot. Thankfully, the silk camisole I wore was cut low enough under my arms that there were no damp patches on the material. I patted under my arms and sniffed to make sure I didn’t smell. Though I didn’t, I’d need to freshen up soon in order to avoid it. Not that I cared if I smelled while sitting next to that asshole. I’d do anything to make the rest of his flight uncomfortable.
Knowing I couldn’t stay in the restroom any longer, I slipped out, nearly bumping into the woman who had been sitting in the seat in front of the Scot.
“Sorry.” I smiled apologetically. “Have you been waiting long?”
She shook her head, her expression filled with a sympathy that didn’t make sense until she said, “It’s okay. If I were sitting next to that jerk-off, I’d want to stay in there forever too.”
Of course the people around us had heard our conversation. Weirdly, when I was talking to the miserable bully, I forgot everything else around me but him. That knowledge was not welcome. “Yeah,” I managed feebly.
“Good for you, though. You know how to handle him. I think I’d probably have been thrown off the plane before we even took off. You know, for swinging a punch at him.”
I laughed and thanked her, walking back to my seat feeling relief move through me that our flight was nearly over. As I approached, the Scot looked up at me. His gaze dropped to his computer but only for a millisecond before it flew back up. That arctic stare of his moved over my cleavage, now visible in the cami that was tucked into my high-waist pencil skirt.
A shiver I detested for betraying me skated down my neck.
His eyes flew back up to my face and he no longer looked right through me.
He appeared displeased.
Narrowing my eyes, wondering what the hell I’d done now, I gestured to my seat. “Can you let me back in?”
He snapped his laptop shut, dropping his table again. “High maintenance,” he murmured quietly.
I gripped the now empty seat in front of him and turned my back to him as I shimmied in. “Yeah, needing to pee is so high maintenance.”
My left foot hit his left foot and he pressed his knees in closer to the back of my thighs, trapping me.