A Mile High by Bethany-Kris Page B

this time off, given how hard you work and everything. And fix that
fucking site!”
    “Josh!” Stumbling over the luggage I’d set on the
floor, I attempted to make it to the doorway before he left. “Listen to me,
please.”
    The shuddering impact of my front door closing was
all that answered me back.

 
    Chapter
Two
     
    I was three seconds away from banging my head on the
desk of flight check-ins. Once again, with clenched teeth and fists squeezed
tight to my sides, I attempted to listen as the employee behind the desk, with
a tag that said her name was Star, explained to me how there had been a mix-up
with my ticket purchase. In my rush to leave the house to catch my plane in
time, I’d managed to leave my printed itinerary sitting on the desk, so I couldn’t
show her it wasn’t my mistake.
    “It was definitely on your end,” she said far too
cheerily. Fingers typed away at her keyboard as she widened her eyes and nodded,
glancing up at a seething, perturbed me again. “Yep, had to have been. Our
systems do not have glitches like that, and if there were one, we would have
found it by now and fixed the problem.”
    Exasperated, defeat coursed through me. Still, there
was no way in hell I was about to let this idiot tell me I had been the one to
screw up. “Listen,” I snarled, teeth still clenched and eyes narrowing. Star
looked slightly taken aback, giving me little satisfaction. “I work with
computers for a living. I understand a lot about Web sites, buying and selling
online, and how to check the right goddamned box when purchasing more than you
could ever understand, okay? So this… issue …was
not my fault. I do not want a flight to Newfoundland, Canada. I bought a flight
from here to Barbados with a two-hour layover in the Dominican. Figure it out,
but I am not going to Newfoundland.” Like
a child not getting their way, my foot hit the cement floor with a thud.
      “Isn’t it
like, really rainy there all year round or something?”
    Star looked up at me from her glasses. “Sometimes
the weather isn’t very welcoming, but this time of year it’s generally pretty
nice.”
    With her gaze averted from my face again, I fought
the urge to give her the finger or stick out my tongue childishly. Nothing was supposed
to be this hard. A vacation was intended to be stress-free, enjoyable, and fun.
I was already about to kill somebody––preferably the moron who messed up my
flights and decided sending me to some Canadian island was better than me
flying off to the heat of Barbados.
    Karma, I thought to myself. That’s what this was.
Karma for being horrible to my brother, for saying terrible things about the
girl he apparently loved, and for acting like an all-around bitch. Karma was
biting me back, hard. That didn’t mean I had to like it.
    “I just want to go to Barbados,” I explained, turning
my voice back to the pleasant tenor we had begun with. “That’s all.”
    The apologetic look I received in return told me
that wouldn’t be happening. “I’m sorry, Miss Carson, but you what you bought
were first-class, round-trip tickets to Newfoundland. The flight leaves in two
hours, so unless you’re willing to pay a fee for changing flights, and you want
to wait another eight hours for the next flight to Barbados, this is your only
option.”
    First-class tickets? My eyebrow cocked at that.
There was no way I had bought first-class tickets. I had called my credit card company
to make sure the money had been taken off without any issue, so I knew how much
I paid for those flights. They had been coach class, both going over and on the
return. First-class was another two thousand dollars I couldn’t afford to pay,
not that I wanted to. That was the clincher in my mind that told me it had in
fact been a mess up on their end…somehow.
    Still, the tease of a first-class flight dangled in
front of my eyes. How could I ever pass that up?
    “Two hours?” I asked quietly. Placing her glasses to
the