Anna glowered.
Seven hours jammed into an aluminum can like an anchovy was not something to be perky about.
Not that she disliked flying coach. It was what real people did, and she had spent her life, all twenty-six years of it, being as real as possible.
Which wasn’t easy, when your old man was a la famiglia don.
It was just that coach had its drawbacks, she thought as she trudged down the ramp toward the plane. No computer outlets, sure, but other things, too.
Like that flight to D.C. when the guy next to her must have bathed in garlic. Or the one to Chicago, when she’d been sandwiched between a mom with a screaming infant on one side and a dad with a screaming two-year-old on the other.
“You guys want to sit next to each other?” Anna had chirruped helpfully.
No. They didn’t. They weren’t together, it turned out, and why would any sane human being want to double the pleasure of screaming kids trying their best to drive everyone within earshot to infanticide?
One of the flight attendants had taken pity on her and switched her to a vacant seat. To the only vacant seat.
Unfortunately, it was right near the lavatories.
By the time the plane touched down, Anna had smelled like whatever it was they piped into those coffin-sized closets.
Or maybe worse.
In essence, flying coach was like life. It wasn’t always pretty, but you did what you had to do.
And what she had to do right now, Anna told herself briskly, was find a way to review her notes in whatever time her cranky old laptop would give her.
At last. The door to the plane was just ahead. She stepped through and somehow managed not to snarl when a flight attendant greeted her with a smiling “Buona notte.”
It wasn’t the girl’s fault she looked as if she’d just stepped out of a magazine ad. Anna, on the other hand, knew she looked as if she had not slept or fixed her hair or her makeup in days.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t.
Her father had dumped his problem on her twenty-four hours ago and she had not slowed her pace since then. A long-scheduled speech to a class of would-be lawyers at Columbia University, her alma mater. Two endless meetings. A court appearance, a desperate juggling of her schedule followed by a taxi ride to the airport through rush-hour Manhattan traffic, only to learn that her flight was delayed and that no, she could not upgrade her seat even though she’d realized during the taxi ride that she had to do so if she wasn’t going to walk into the meeting in Rome without a useful idea in her head.
And on top of everything, that—that inane confrontation with that man …
There he was.
The plane was an older one, which meant the peasants had to shuffle through first and business class to get to coach. It gave her the wonderful opportunity to see him in seat 5A—all, what, six foot two, six foot three of him sitting in 5A, arms folded, long legs outstretched, with 5B conspicuously, infuriatingly empty.
Her jaw knotted.
She wanted to say something to him. Something that would show him what she thought of him, of men like him who thought they owned the world, thought women were meant to fall at their feet along with everybody else, but she’d already tried that and look where it had gotten her.
And, almost as if he’d heard her thoughts, he turned his head and looked right at her.
His eyes darkened. The thick lashes fell. Rose. His eyes got even darker. Darker, and focused on her face.
On her mouth.
His lips curved in a slow, knowing smile. Remember me? that smile said. Remember that kiss?
Anna felt her cheeks turn hot.
His smile tilted, became an arrogant, blatantly male grin.
She wanted to wipe it from his face.