Page 4 of Frequency of Attraction

Discretion, Hadrian. Look it up. Better yet, google self-restraint. Or commitment.

You’re one to talk, petite poule,he replied.

She hated that nickname.Little hen, because she was always clucking over him. And she was short. Only five-three. But public perception was part of public relations. Clucking over him was herjob.

Huffing, Quinn turned her attention away from French headlines, which would be replaced tomorrow with something more scandalous than the proposed duel of honor, and instead back to the email she’d been composing to her team. Noises from the hangar reached her from the open door of her office. Music, laughter. Tate’s dreamers hard at work towards their mission of getting paying passengers to space.

She lost the next hour to updating their couture store launch calendar for the executive and communication teams. They’d need people on the ground for those events and press online, especially for their new prototype stores rolling out in Asia. She’d be attending the new Chaleur opening in Tokyo herself.

She filtered through the stack of mail on her desk next, mostly luxury magazines in which Geier Group advertised their various brands. Sponsorship and donation pleas were peppered in as well. But her attention was grabbed by a square envelope whose return address she recognized. Altitude Flight School. Tate’s favorite charity supplied scholarships to students at that school. She slit the envelope open with a monogrammed paper knife, a gift from her cousin Matt, revealing a flimsy piece of paper that made her freckled nose wrinkle in distaste.

Representation in Aerospace, Tate’s pet nonprofit, was hosting a gala to raise money for their scholarship fund. The cause, covering tuition for women and people of color in aerospace programs, was an important one. But it was clear from this sad little Save the Date that they needed some help. Regular-weight paper? Plain black ink andfour fonts? Tate sat on the RIA board. OrbitAll was the platinum sponsor for the event. Quinn knew they had multiple millionaires on the guest list.

She needed to fix this.

She pushed back in her chair and stood, straightening the deep green pencil dress that worked wonders on her curves. She darted across the hall to the open-concept administration area. “Luz, tell me what you know about the RIA gala. Who’s in charge of planning?”

“Mister Tate’s board, I believe,” Tate’s assistant answered. “I’ve received several calls from Gloria, the director of the flight school.”

“Mm-hm.” RIA’s board was mostly old men, retired commercial pilots and airline executives. And Gloria. Sure, the board wanted to facilitate positive change in the industry, but that did not mean these people were skilled party planners.

“Do you get the impression they could use some help?”

A smile flickered across Luz’s face. “From the tone of Gloria’s calls,si.”

“I’ll handle it.”

Quinn hurried back across the hall as the front office door blew open. She did not look back.

Unlike the rest of their company, OrbitAll existed for a loftier purpose than making money. With Tate’s idea to give away two spots to deserving individuals on every flight to space, the true OrbitAll had been formed. Their wait list was nearing five hundred guests and they were still two years away from their inaugural flight. There were two sections on OrbitAll’s purchase page: One for the people who could afford the quarter-million-dollar price tag for a two-and-a-half-hour trip to space, and one for people who couldn’t. The dreamers. A short bio and essay entered the dreamers into a lottery system.

Tate truly wanted to change the world. That’s why Quinn had relocated from France. Her parents had already washed their hands of the family business and bought a farm in Africa a la Isak Denison by the time she’d left. Now they emailed annually, on her birthday. She hadn’t talked to her brother in years. As she’d told Trav, the cute bartender at The Saloon, she’d left Paris behind without regret. Besides Hadrian when he was sober and walkable streets, she didn’t miss her hometown.

Like Tate, she wanted to see some good come from their legacy.

In her office, with the Save the Date in hand again, her mind flitted to Elle, OrbitAll’s Director of Experience. The woman was a world-renowned event planner. Ideally, she would recruit Elle for a party takeover scheme like this, but a bomb had dropped at OrbitAll earlier that week. After only three months, Chen, their brand-new astronaut, was heading back to China. And Elle just so happened to be his very smitten girlfriend. The poor thing had looked heartsick all week. She couldn’t bug Elle about party planning when Chen had only a week left with them.

Quinn didn’t have many girlfriends—who had the time?—but Elle, similar in age and interests, had wormed her way into Quinn’s schedule and then her heart. They’d even gotten their nails done together. Quinn couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat still for that long when she wasn’t sleeping.

She wondered if life would ever slow down.

First, they’d lost George, their original test pilot and the man who had helped Tate develop their human spaceflight program from the ground up. He had been the loving, foul-mouthed grandfather neither she nor Tate had been blessed with. But he’d left them months back for a rival company closer to his family. Soon after hiring Chen to take his place, George had been killed in a test flight gone wrong. Tate still wouldn’t talk about him. Not to her. He was crushing hard on the architect they’d hired to design the hotel they needed for their space-bound guests. Maybe Tate talked to Rosie about George. Maybe Rosie knew what he planned to do about Chen’s abrupt departure, since now, once again, they needed a new pilot.

Was it any wonder Quinn couldn’t relax? With twelve major brands under the Geier Group umbrella, she always had a lot on her mind. And after those rumors and her visit to Sri Lanka, she had thousands of employees on her mind, too.

Since Elle was grieving a dying relationship, Quinn decided to put a proposal together herself for the gala planning and get it on Tate’s desk. Then she’d figure out what girlfriends did to cheer each other up. She really didn’t know. Proposals for budgets? No problem. Surefire cure for a friend’s broken heart? No clue.

She had a decent budget drafted for the gala within a few hours. Excited, she snatched up her iPad to show Tate some of her ideas. He wasn’t in his first-floor office, which meant he was likely in the hangar. All the offices, all thework, oriented around the centerpieces in the hangar: Stratos, their sleek, luxurious spaceplane, and Mothership, the aircraft that carried Stratos aloft. OrbitAll was set to make history by ushering the first paying passengers to space. That was the kind of PR that made news of impending duels with cuckolded Belgian royals worthwhile.

Quinn wove through the people and pop-up tables and rolling storage cabinets that dotted the three-story hangar. Her heels clicked a staccato rhythm on the polished cement floor. She did a quick email check as she skirted through. Chen’s excited tones reached her, followed by a much louder baritone that she didn’t recognize. She registered the Russian accent as she looked up. And up, to meet eyes the color of glacier lakes. Her breath hitched as she was drawn closer. For an indeterminate unit of time, there was just the giant man. Just those eyes.

When she let the breath leave her lungs, the rest of him blinked into focus. Square, smooth jaw and lips as full and wide as her own. Dark, heavy brows that looked comfortable in a frown. The massive man had to be a full foot taller than her or more and constructed of hard-earned muscle. And he was tattooed everywhere.Everywhere. Her eyes skimmed over the ink, the hints of buildings and patterns that indelibly marked his impressive body.

Quinn’s fingers twitched as she memorized the contours that made him. Would this stranger feel more hard than soft? How was it possible she felt his gaze on her skin? And what was this weird heat invading her body?

When her eyes met his again, Quinn knew what the spreading warmthwasn’t. Not a spark. Not a zing. No, what she felt was a fucking explosion that resonated through every atom of her being. This was a recognition of something she’d never known.

4

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