Taking Flight (A Devereux Novel) (3 page)

I can’t believe
I’m planning on doing this.

Derek strolled through the
open doors into the bustling ballroom. Eyes and cameras followed his every move
as he made his way through the press of people to grab a drink from the bar at
the opposite side from the entrance.

“Derek! There you are!”

Oh, perfect.
It was the commissioner, the last person Derek wanted to see. Evan’s
warning had haunted him, and eventually he’d decided in
favor
of caution. The official opening gala for the air race season was the perfect
place to announce his retirement from the exclusive and popular sport, but he
didn’t intend on giving the commissioner the chance to talk him out of it
before he could make his announcement.

“Frederick! How good to see
you. And you are looking smashing as usual, Sandra.” He shook hands with the
older man and submitted to the mandatory kiss on the cheek and too-close hug
from his wife. “You’ve outdone yourself with the season-opening festivities
this year, Fred.”

The commissioner waved his
hands around, encompassing the rich atmosphere, opulent decorations and
veritable galaxy of stars wandering around. “Oh, this? Merely a small dinner
party.”

They laughed, but Derek
couldn’t help but think that maybe it was an accurate statement from someone of
Frederick’s stature. The
air racing
league was unlike
any other sport in the country. The pilots were almost exclusively wealthy and
competed not for winnings, but for the fun of it—it was a real boy’s
club. When everyone involved had more money than God and infinite leisure,
there weren’t many ways in which to prove one was better than everyone else,
and the air races gave an avenue for that latent aggression and display of male
dominance. Derek enjoyed emerging triumphant over the stuck-up bastards who
raced against him.

“Derek, I hope you are ready
for an even bigger, better, more thrilling season than ever. You are our
biggest star, you know, and the biggest draw. I know you don’t need the money,
or the fame, but I can guarantee you never feel more alive than when you are
fighting the G-forces and racing to get the record for fastest run, am I
right?”

At the sound of Frederick’s
words, Derek itched to have the throttle in his hands while ensconced in his
cockpit.
For the whir of the engine and sweetly tuned roar as
he took his plane through its paces and they ran the course as a perfect meld
between man and machine.

“It is… thrilling, you are
correct,” Derek said. “But if you’ll excuse me, I have only just arrived and
don’t want to ignore those who wish to talk with me.” His language always grew
more stilted and correct around Frederick, the result of new money brushing
elbows with old money and attempting to blend in without too much notice.

“Of course, of course, enjoy
yourself. I wouldn’t want your admirers to be deprived of your absence for any
longer than necessary!” Frederick shooed him away, but Sandra’s eyes followed
him as he left. The woman was a natural-born cougar.

Although he had begged off
to meet and mingle with the rest of the guests, Derek avoided as many people as
he could while making his way to a less busy area of the room. Raised away from
the limelight, he still found it difficult to deal with being the focus of so
much attention at one time. He’d taught himself to thrive in the sea of
admiration as much as possible, but occasionally it became too much and he
needed to seek shelter.

It was impossible to avoid
everyone, so Derek found himself caught in one meaningless conversation after
another. After being waylaid by several people whose names he couldn’t even
remember, he looked around for an out. A slim blonde with smoky blue eyes stood
off in another group of people, but looked right at him. Derek lost the thread
of the pointless conversation as he locked eyes with the woman.

“Derek!” The brunette he had
been speaking with slapped his arm playfully. “You are such a ditz. Didn’t you
hear what I just said?”

He looked at her face, still
not sensing a hint of recognition stirring anywhere within him. He could afford
to be just shy of polite with this one. “Ah, no, I didn’t. Forgive me, I just
saw someone I must go talk to.”

He left her standing there
with her jaw hanging open. He would have laughed if the blonde wasn’t already
gone, no longer where she had been a scant twenty seconds before.

Where did she go? She was right there.
Derek mulled his options.
The brunette came back his way, so he ducked around a corner and stumbled into
his least
favorite
person in the world.

“You know, I hardly think
it’s fair, actually,” the man was saying to a group of men and women. “I
probably shouldn’t even be allowed to compete this year. I’m so good they have
to reduce my plane’s power just to give the other guys a fighting chance.”

Rex
Trator
.
The one person everyone else on the tour
agreed was the biggest douche there. No one except for his cronies would sit
with him or even speak with him unless they had to. He hammed it up, and
Frederick put up with the complaints from the others because the rivalry angle
worked so well for the publicity of the race series. Derek would not miss
having to deal with Rex once he withdrew from the league.

“Oh, speak of the devil.
Derek Devereux, ladies and gentlemen! What wonderful timing, man. I was just
telling them about how I’m going to destroy the field this year. I’ve been
practicing for weeks, and I wish for your sake I was lying when I said I’m even
faster than last year.”

“Rex.” Derek nodded in a
cordial manner he did not feel in the slightest. “Having fun spinning your
fiction again? You said the same bullshit at the start of last season, and I
beat you… what, seventy percent of the time?”

As the heads of the
spectators whipped back and forth between the two men, Rex merely laughed. “Oh,
I was just spinning my wheels last time, Derek, but no longer. I’m confident in
my superiority. Just wait and see what happens when we get out there, you won’t
even know what hit you.”

Derek shook his head.
I’m so glad I won’t have to deal with this
asshole anymore.
“Whatever, Rex.” He walked away, unwilling to stay long
enough to hear the inevitable comeback.

He needed to find the time
and space to make his announcement. It would be best if he could head off
Frederick’s season-opening speech, which would go into exquisite detail on the
pilots and why they made the league so amazing. Not the note he wanted to
follow by telling everyone he wouldn’t compete this year. It would not be great
for Frederick’s image to be taken so unaware by his reigning champion
resigning.

The microphone stood by
itself on the stage—Derek could walk up there and start talking. It
wouldn’t be the first time he had taken command of a party unexpectedly, and he
had cultivated the image of a man who was able and willing to do whatever he
pleased. The audacity was part of what had endeared him to the high society
types in Los Angeles, and something that gave him an extra kick. It was
something else to act like you were better than everyone else, or at least that
you had no rules restricting your ability to do what you wanted.

As he set out to cross the
floor and take the podium, a sparkling blonde he glimpsed out of the corner of
his eye stopped him in his tracks. It was the woman from earlier, and she
watched him once more, this time from the other side of the bar. She smiled
just a little when his eyes caught hers with an almost physical hold.

He froze, indecision halting
his progress. He looked toward the microphone and then across the room to where
Frederick held forth with several of his older moneyed generation.
It will take him a while to extricate
himself from them and make the speech. I’ve still got time.

Derek’s frustration reached
a peak when he changed course to the bar and found it devoid of the blonde.
Are you kidding me? Again?

He kept walking, scanning
the crowd carefully and examining each group of people as he passed to make
sure he didn’t miss her. To his surprise, he got all the way to the bar without
success.

“Scotch,” he said. He had to
force himself not to growl at the bartender. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t
have the gently curled blonde hair and smoky eyes he looked for.

Where are you?

Derek worked the room,
touching base with the people he knew, greeting those from the social circles
he ran with. Actors and models, mostly, but there were several people famous
simply for being famous, and others famous for being rich.
As I suppose I am,
he mused.
Although
I hope my wealth is more opaque than most others’.

With a ruthless
determination, he never lost sight of what had become his primary goal for the
night. When he finally spotted the curly blonde locks again, he was ready. This
time she hadn’t seen him first, and he made his move.

This is more
exhausting than I thought it would be. It’s just a party, after all!

Sara hustled for all the
information she could glean, all while keeping up her guise as the girlfriend
of a small-time actor who’d scored an invitation and conveniently didn’t exist.
She and Becky had arrived in Los Angeles a few days ago, and after probing all
her sources, Sara still had made no headway into discovering more about Derek
Devereux’s past. Her luck had hit a peak when a friend of hers found out Derek
would be at an event for the stunt
airplane racing
league he competed in.

It had been a long time
since Sara had put her talents as an investigative journalist to the test.
She’d put out feelers to every friend she still had in the city, and their
friends, until she came away with a connection—someone who worked
security at the event. They would let her into the gala—for a small fee.

Then it was time to go to
work. It was a delicate balance being at a party you didn’t belong at. At an
event such as this, nobody knew everybody, but everybody knew somebody. Sara
had to work to build a rapport with a few groups of people so she couldn’t be
caught out. It was easier to slip back into an assumed persona than she thought
it would be. She hadn’t done real investigative work since the accident two
years before, and while she was a little rusty, it didn’t take long to work the
kinks out.

The first time she caught
sight of Derek across the room, she was glued to the spot. He was even more
handsome in person than he was in the countless pictures pasted across the
tabloids and the Internet. She couldn’t even imagine what it might feel like to
be standing right next to him. When he noticed her looking from across the
room, she flushed.
Caught red-handed.
As soon as he looked away, she bolted.

Whew. That was close.
Her heart pounded from the rush of meeting his eyes
like that. She doubted he would even remember her within a minute or two. He
must be used to random people staring at him, considering his fame and good
looks. Plus in a party like this, people were bound to randomly lock gazes here
and there.
It’s fine.

Sara sidled up to a friend
she’d made earlier in the night, an actress who hadn’t hit it big yet, but had
been in a couple well-received supporting roles in smaller movies. “Hey,
Melody, how’s it going?”

“Oh, good, Sara. How are you
enjoying the party? Your
boyfriend letting you roam
free for now?”

It had been a couple years
since someone had talked to Sara about having a boyfriend, and she fought off
the pang of sorrow deep in her chest. Somehow she summoned a smile to her face.
“Oh, you know how it is. I’m not even sure where he is, but he’ll turn up by
the end of the night. Just before it’s time to go, I’m sure.”

They shared a laugh.

“If you don’t mind, I’m a
little new to town and I noticed Derek Devereux is here. Do you know much about
him?” Sara tried to be nonchalant, but she didn’t have to bother hiding her
interest too much. There were no young women in the city
who
weren’t
interested in the young and
wealthy bachelor, no matter their own relationship status.

“Derek? Oh my God, you
haven’t met him yet?” Melody’s expression perked up as though she was about to
let her new friend in on an amazing secret. “He is the most amazing guy. That
face… mmm!” Her eyes glazed as she stared wistfully into the distance.

Sara couldn’t help but
smile, although it wasn’t the information she was looking for. She had felt
that pure magnetism in the few seconds she’d met his eyes. “He is gorgeous,
that’s a fact,” Sara agreed. “Have you ever talked with him? I’ve heard he’s a
little mysterious.”

Sara had found over the years
that playing dumb and asking innocuous questions was the best way to extract
information from people without them even realizing it was happening. It was in
human nature to want to be seen as knowledgeable and important.

“Oh, many times! Derek and I
have had some good chats.” The way Melody said it gave Sara the impression she
may exaggerate her experiences. “He’s easy to talk to, you know. I mean, it’s
intimidating, but also gives you that thrill, you know?”

Sara kept an open and
impressed look on her face. “Wow! What did you talk about?”

“Oh, just little things,
small talk, you know. He was at a party for one of my movies. It was surprising
he showed up—everyone was so thrilled. That alone probably helped it do a
little better than it might have otherwise.” Melody nattered on for a while
longer, the conversation shifting away from Derek and onto the movie’s
performance and her hopes for a spin-off where she might get a leading role,
and how big of a break that would be for her.

She knows nothing about him.
That much was clear. If Melody had gotten close with
Derek, she would have been more than happy to brag about it to her new closest
admirer. It was a disappointment, but expected. Getting information about the
man would be even more difficult than Sara had thought.

At the earliest possible
opportunity, Sara excused herself and made her way to the bar, determined to
scout out a better connection that might be more useful to her goals.

As she waited for her drink,
Sara scanned the room. It was amazing how many stars were there in one place,
for what a normal person might have assumed would be a non-event. Could this
many people care about rich boys who flew their planes around an obstacle
course? Or was it just the new chic thing, a
past-time
that leant a certain cachet to the audience?

She spotted Derek and
watched as he left a group of people at the side of the room. She recognized
Rex, one of his regular opponents in the air races. That was one thing certain
from her preliminary research—there was no love lost between those two.

Then, the dark eyes swept
across her again. For the second time that night, they met hers and stayed. A
tingle swept along the back of Sara’s neck, a feeling she hadn’t experienced in
years. She couldn’t help but smile a little at her body’s reaction to the eye
contact.

Uh oh. He’s not looking away.
She hadn’t thought she might attract Derek’s
attention on the first night she was near him. Getting close and talking to him
was a virtual necessity for the story and her investigation, but that would
come much later—when she had all the background she needed to ask the
right questions. She was not ready for a meeting yet.

Despite her thoughts, she
couldn’t bring herself to drop her eyes. It was impossible to stop looking at
that face.

He looked away, and Sara
took a deep breath. Unable to think of a better escape, she pretended to drop
her purse and crouched down behind the bar to pick it up.
Damn. That was intense.
It took a minute for her to regain her
breath, all the while she pretended to search through her purse for
lip gloss
.

She peered over the bar.
Derek stood a few feet away, leaning back against the other side of the
U-shaped bar, facing toward the room.
Shit!

Creeping away, Sara slipped
off in the other direction, toward the women’s bathrooms. She waited,
pretending to play with her phone just around the corner until Derek walked off
and mingled with other guests again.

It’s time to see what his rival has to say about him.
Another tip Sara had learned
was that it was always easier to get a person talking about an enemy than a
friend. You had to be more careful about sorting through the responses for the
real truth, but they were more likely to tell you damaging information that
could lead to unexpected avenues of research than friends were.

Rex and his cronies were
still ensconced in their little nook on the far side of the room. Sara took
care to plan her route to take her through the opposite side of the dance floor
from the path that Derek had taken.

She was about twenty feet
from her destination when she ducked around a pillar and came face-to-face with
dark gray eyes and a
chiseled
jawline—the
features of the man she was desperately unprepared to meet.