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She’d been up and showered for hours already; the early-to-rise habit sticking even though she’d been away from home base in Atlanta for nearly three months now. She’d already toyed some more with the mock website that she wanted to show Tanner, dealt with a few minor crises with her staff at FortuneSouth and saved a bunch of real estate listings she was interested in looking into on her cell. And as soon as Wendy was finished showering, Emily would meet with the adoption attorney she’d been working with for the past few months. If that meeting ended up as fruitless as all the others she’d already had, then she’d confirm her appointment next week with the gynecologist to go forward with a second insemination attempt. After that, she’d head out to Tanner’s office for the brief duty-meeting with Tanner and his marketing guy.
She didn’t particularly mind the meeting. It had sort of been her own fault, anyway, because she’d happened to mention that the website for his flight school was a little … dry. Fortunately, her new brother-in-law hadn’t been offended. Instead, he’d asked her to come in and discuss the matter, as well as kick around some marketing and advertising strategies for increasing the flight school’s business. Of course, she’d said she would. He was Jordana’s brand-new husband and the father of the baby they were soon expecting, so how could Emily refuse?
Besides, she liked Tanner.
And even though she’d come up with the mock site herself—something she had some fun doing, even though the technical end wasn’t particularly her area of expertise—it didn’t mean she was particularly interested in discussing business with anyone any more than she was interested in her own duties with FortuneSouth these days.
For the first time in her life, Emily’s eye was not only on business. She’d realized what mattered and one way or another, she was going to become a mother.
Not because she was trying to keep up with her sisters. But because it was the one thing she’d come out knowing, after that horrible day when the tornado had ripped through the Red Rock airport, seemingly bent on changing all of their lives.
She was thirty years old. She was alive. She wanted to be a mother. To give all the love inside her that she had to give to a child, the same way she’d always known her mother loved her.
And she wasn’t going to waste any more time.
Max Allen eyed the plain watch on his wrist and held back an oath while he picked up his pace, crossing the tarmac from the Red Rock Regional Airport’s terminal to the hangar that housed Redmond Flight School. Admittedly, he wasn’t looking forward to the meeting that his boss, Tanner Redmond, had set up with his sister-in-law. But that didn’t mean he wanted to be late for it.
After a month, he still had a hard time believing that he was even working for Tanner as his assistant. Which meant he also needed to swallow the obvious fact that his boss figured he needed some help and had asked him to meet with Emily Fortune.
Best thing Max could do was forget about all the reasons he wasn’t qualified to handle any sort of sales and marketing for the flight school, and learn anything and everything he could from the high-powered advertising executive.
He skirted a slow-moving fuel truck, absently giving the driver, Joe, a wave, and broke into a jog to cross the last fifty yards. Not a smart move, he realized, when he pushed through the door to the business office and cool air-conditioning wafted over him, reminding him that it was a hot June afternoon out there.
Not only was he running late, but he was going to look like he’d been running late, too.
Through the window of Tanner’s office, he could see the back of a blond head. The woman had already arrived. Naturally.
He shoved his hand through his hair and blew out a deep breath. Hell with it. The lady would just have to put up with him the way he was. Sweating, unqualified and all. Before long, Tanner would probably realize the error of his ways and Max would be out of the job, anyway.
At least he had the animals at the Double Crown where he still worked part-time as a ranch hand. They didn’t have to bother seeing beyond his checkered past; all they cared about was getting their feed and water when they needed. And he was pretty sure that Lily Fortune would let him go back to full-time, even though the woman had been one of the ones to encourage Max to take a chance with the flight school gig when Tanner had offered it.
He reached out and pushed open Tanner’s office door, his gaze focused on his boss’s face. “Sorry I’m late.” Might as well get the obvious out of the way first. “I got hung up talking to the maintenance supervisor.” Though the airport was up and running again, repairs were still going on from the damage caused by the December tornado.
Tanner didn’t look unduly worried. “No problem.” He gestured toward the woman sitting in front of his desk. “Emily Fortune,” he introduced. “This is—
“You,” the woman interrupted as she rose.
Max focused on her, then, and her obvious surprise. She was stepping away from the leather chair she’d been sitting in, her hand extended toward him. She was wearing a black jacket and matching pants that only accentuated her slender figure, and her pale blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She looked expensively professional and even though there was no dirt covering her face and no debris tangling in her hair, the green eyes staring back at him through narrow, black-framed glasses were definitely the same ones he remembered.
He must have stuck his own hand out automatically, because her smooth, warm palm met his, her long fingers clasping his in a no-nonsense way and jolting his attention away from that mossy green.
“It was you at the airport that day,” she was saying in a smooth voice that held a trace of a Southern drawl. “Wasn’t it?”
He nodded and managed to find his voice somewhere. Even though he’d figured out that day at the airport who she was, he’d been hoping that she wouldn’t remember him. “You look like you came through it pretty well.”
She smiled a little, then looked down and he realized he was still holding her hand. He quickly let go.
“I was lucky,” she said. “Just a sprained ankle.”
“So, I’m guessing you two have met.” Tanner sounded amused.
Emily looked away from Max to his boss. She’d tucked her hands in the pockets of her blazer, Max noticed, and that abrupt swell of pleasure he’d felt at first dimmed. Probably not used to touching the lower class unless she was being pulled from beneath a collapsed roof by one.
“He rescued me after the tornado,” she was telling his boss. Her gaze slid toward Max. “But we never did get around to introductions.” She smiled again, and tucked-away hands or not, Max felt another jolt.
“It was the rescue workers who pulled you out,” he reminded.
“Yours was the voice that kept me going,” she countered. “I’ll never forget it.”
He didn’t want her gratitude. He’d done what anyone would have done. There was no point in admitting that he hadn’t forgotten it, either. If she’d been just an average girl, maybe. But she’d turned out to be a Fortune. One of the FortuneSouth Fortunes.
They had money and class and first-class educations followed by first-class careers.
Way, way out of his league.
So he’d stuck the moments they’d shared while she’d clung desperately to his hand and stared into his eyes while a halfdozen rescue workers lifted what seemed half a building off of her in a box and tried not to think about it. Only now, as a favor to her new brother-in-law, she was supposed to teach Max how to do his job.
He looked at his watch. “We should get to it, I guess.”
Her confident smile seemed to falter a little. She looked back at Tanner. “He’s right. Time’s money and all that.” She pulled her hands from her pockets. “I know you didn’t ask me to,” she told Tanner, “but I toyed around with some website ideas. I can show you that, and then we’ll take a look at the marketing materials you’re using now and we can go from there.”
“Actually,” Tanner said, pushing back from his desk, “that all sounds great, including the website stuff, but I’m going to have to leave all that for you and Max to go over.” He rounded the desk. “I’m going with Jordana to her O.B. appointment.” He gestured at the small, round conference table in the corner of his room. “Make yourselves comfortable here, if you want. I know there’s more room there than in Max’s office.” He squeezed Emily’s shoulder as he passed by. “If you want a tour of the place, Max can give you one. He knows every nook and cranny around here by now. Right, Max?”
Max nodded, but as his boss left the office, he couldn’t help wondering what Tanner was thinking, leaving it all in Max’s lap.
“Why don’t we start with the tour, then? It would help if I can get a little bit of a feel for this place.” Emily was looking at him, her eyebrows lifted a little. If she had any suspicion that her expertise would be wasted on someone like Max, at least she didn’t show it.
“Sure.” He stepped out of her path so she could exit the office. “Do you know anything about flight schools?”
She laughed a little, and the sound seemed to send heat straight down his spine. “Not a single thing,” she admitted as she walked past him. “You’re the expert, here.”
He grimaced. Evidently, Tanner hadn’t told his sister-in-law much at all. Maybe she’d have refused to help if she knew how unqualified he was. “I’ve only been working for Tanner for a month,” he said. There was no point in putting any varnish on it. The truth was what it was. He’d started out—officially—on a part-time basis, but just a few weeks ago, Tanner had asked if he’d be willing to take on more.
Max still had a hard time believing it.
“I don’t know diddly-squat about marketing,” he told her.
She stopped in her tracks and looked at him. “Tanner said you are his marketing assistant.”
He hated titles. Mostly because they’d only ever pointed out that he was low-man on the totem pole, which he’d been perfectly aware of. “Assistant … whatever,” he said. “The marketing stuff is just a priority right now. A long time before he actually hired me, though, I was mopping floors and cleaning toilets around this place.” She might as well know that truth, too. “Did anything and everything, pretty much, in exchange for flying lessons.”
Her head tilted slightly. The silky end of her ponytail slipped over her shoulder. “How’d you learn about the flight school in the first place?”
He shrugged. “Everyone around Red Rock’s heard of the flight school.” He had, even before the day he’d actually walked through the front door.
“But how,” she pressed. “Radio spots? Signage?” A faint smile played around the corners of her lips, which only meant he was studying them too closely for politeness. “Good old word of mouth?”
“Word of mouth.” He dragged his attention away from her mouth.
“Never underestimate the power of good word of mouth. It can make or break the success of any number of things,” she said. “You’re lucky, actually. You’ve got a unique perspective, Max.”
Again, he felt heat slide down his spine. “How?”
“You’ve already been your own prospective customer.” She turned again and headed along the tiled hallway that led from the front door of the business office to the rear that opened out into the hangar. “You know what brought you to Redmond Flight School.”
He was pretty sure that “desperation” wasn’t the angle that Tanner wanted them to promote. Fortunately, Emily was unaware of his thoughts as she continued.
“So now what you need to think about is what would have brought you here even more quickly.” She glanced at him.
“Money.” It was an obvious answer. One that hadn’t exactly applied to him at the get-go but sure had ever since.
She sent him a smile over her shoulder again, obviously not shocked by his blunt tone. “Part of your job, then, is to convince the masses that money isn’t the object. Learning to fly is.”
“If everyone knew how it felt to be up there, we wouldn’t need to advertise.” He reached past her to push open the heavy metal door and got a whiff of something soft. Almost powdery.
Nothing around the hangar smelled like that, including him. Which just left her.
He would have been happy to stand there a long while breathing in that completely feminine fragrance, but she was already moving through the door, that long ponytail of hers swinging.
If he’d ever thought anything was particularly sexy about a woman’s hair, it was only when it looked messed up from his hands tangling in it. But there was definitely something sexy about Emily’s swinging length of sleek, corn-silk blond. He wondered what it would look like flowing over her bare shoulders …
“That’s even better,” she said, stopping again to turn on her heel and face him. Beyond her glasses, her eyes were animated. “You’re already honing in on your messaging,” she said, thankfully oblivious to his wayward mind. “Show your prospective customer what it feels like.”
The palms of his hands were suddenly itching. He shoved them in the pockets of his blue jeans. “What it feels like,” he repeated, feeling about as dumb as a rock.
“Up there.” She waved her hand. “You said it yourself. If everyone knew how it felt to be up there.” She pulled off her glasses, folded them and tucked the earpiece down the front of her jacket, giving him the briefest of glimpses of something black and lacy beneath, which did not help his distraction any.
“So … show me around,” she invited. “My only contact with airports has been as a passenger.”
A first-class passenger, he figured, but kept the thought to himself. Maybe if he concentrated enough on describing everything to do with the physical layout of the flight school, he’d get his thoughts off of her physical layout.
“This area, obviously, is the classroom.” He pushed on a hidden partition halfway down the main wall. “We can break it up into three smaller classrooms with partitions like these.” He nudged the partition wall and it smoothly disappeared again. “They’re all new additions since the tornado. Just had the desks delivered a few days ago, in fact.”
Emily wandered among the empty chairs that looked reminiscent of her high-school days, complete with an attached desktop, and wondered fleetingly what Max had been like in high school. Probably football team captain and hotly pursued by all the cheerleaders.
She had not been a cheerleader. Too ambitious with her eye already on making her place in her father’s company. Hoping that then, maybe, he’d see something worthwhile in her.
She abruptly pulled her thoughts back into the present. Ever since the tornado, she’d vowed to focus on the future. Period.
She glanced at Max and despite her good intentions, had to work hard to focus on her purpose there and not him.
Max had put another few chairs in between them. His eyes were still the same blue that they’d been that December day. But all of the gentleness in them that she’d clung to in those brief moments before he’d disappeared among the rescue workers crowding around her was nowhere in sight. Now, those eyes were completely unreadable.
She found him no less compelling, though.
Which was so not her purpose right now.
She mentally shook her head, trying to get her thoughts in order. It was more difficult than it should have been. “I, um, I know the terminal was badly damaged. But how much damage did Tanner’s building sustain?”
“It was still standing. Barely.”
She walked over to a white erase board that stood on wheels in front of the desks. “Really? I had no idea it had been that bad.” She picked up one of the markers from the tray at the bottom of the board and toyed with it, wishing that her heart would stop its frantic little cha-cha inside her chest.
“The roof was gone. Half the planes had some sort of damage. The offices needed to be completely gutted and built over.”
“That’s a lot of repairs accomplished in a short amount of time. I’m impressed.”
He shrugged. “That’s Tanner.”
“He is a force to be reckoned with.” She smiled wryly. “Or so my sister, Jordana, says.” She dropped the marker back in the tray. “Okay.” She eyed the classroom’s trappings. “So you have the ability for multiple classrooms. What happens in them?”
“Ground school.”
“Which is … what?” She couldn’t help looking at him again. He wore plain old blue jeans and a white button-down shirt incredibly—with a capital I—well. “You’re the knowledgeable one, remember?”
“There are rules in flying just like there are rules in driving. FAA regulations. Have to learn them as well as some basic aeronautics and be able to pass a test on them. You don’t learn everything in the cockpit. In fact, most of it seems like it’s done sitting at a desk whether in a classroom with other students or on a one-to-one basis with a private instructor.” He shrugged. “Classroom’s obviously more economical for the student pilot, but we offer a lot of different options.”
She propped her hip on one of the desks. “How many instructors does Tanner have?”
He looked away, but she could see the abruptly grim turn of his lips. “Eleven, now. Gary Tompkins died in the tornado. He was my first instructor.”
Regret pinched hard. She’d known Tanner had lost an employee and wished that she’d shown more tact. “I’m so sorry.”
“He was a good guy.” His gaze slanted back at her. “As patient as the day is long, which was a good thing when it came to teaching me.” She was glad to see his expression lightening as he shook his head, looking wry. “Probably telling the same old stories in heaven that he was always telling everyone down here,” he said.
She smiled. “Did you always want to know how to fly?”
He shook his head, that bit of lightness in his expression fading, and leaving her wanting it back again. “That’s more recent.”
But he didn’t elaborate, which only left her wondering about him even more.
He glanced at the sturdy leather watch strapped on his wrist and gestured toward the door opposite the one they’d come through. “Anyway, Tanner hasn’t replaced Gary yet. He’s interviewing now, though. But he’s also interviewing for commercial pilots since he’s set a July 4 launch date next month for his charter business expansion, and he wants to get another ATP on board.”
“ATP?”
“Airline Transport Pilot. Highest rating you can get. Tanner has it. He wants a backup.”
She wasn’t surprised about Tanner’s ambitious business plans. He’d received the “John Michael Fortune” seal of approval when it came to business, after all, and that wasn’t an easy thing to come by. She passed through the doorway when Max pulled it open for her and nearly lost her train of thought again when her shoulder brushed against his. “Any … any other employees besides the instructors?”
“Just me.” He touched the small of her back briefly, directing her toward the rear of the soaring building. Sunlight shined through the long, narrow windows set high in the rafters onto an assortment of small planes parked in precise order on the gleaming floor. The main door was open, too, and she could see the airport terminal some distance away. “Our simulator room is back here,” he said.
He ushered her into another room, this one considerably smaller than the classroom, which could have easily seated a few dozen students.
This one only seemed to have room for two.
He dropped his hand on top of the enclosure that surrounded what looked—eerily, to her—like an airplane’s cockpit. “One of three sim rooms,” he said. “Most places just have two. And these are state-of-the-art.” He kept moving, passing the doorways that obviously housed the other two flight simulators, before exiting out into the main hangar area again. “We have aircraft available for lessons as well as rentals.” He waved at the planes as he walked toward the closest one. “Slow day today, though. Half the fleet is in. Usually they’re all out this time of day.”
Surprised, she looked over the planes again. “Where do the rest of them go?”
