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As if she didn’t know that. “Yes, but—”
“I’ve been flying small planes since I was too young to drive a car. Cancel the flights.”
She ground her teeth together and reminded herself that he was the boss, that she was very grateful to him for giving her this chance when she’d been his assistant for only a month. “Yes, Dax. All right.”
“I love it when you’re obsequious. It happens so seldom. And guess what?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’ve already found our photographer.” He paused, sipped more coffee.
“I’m listening.” No, she had no illusions it was going to be her.
And it wasn’t. “I called Ramón Esquevar. He’ll be in Guatemala next week and he’s promised to meet us in San Cristóbal.”
Okay, she was totally impressed. She sighed. She couldn’t help it. Esquevar was world-class. His photographs appeared in Time and National Geographic. She’d always hoped someday she might meet him. Now she would get to watch him work.
Dax was grinning at her. “You’re speechless.”
She let her smile bloom wide. “Esquevar. I can hardly believe it. That’s fabulous.”
“We got lucky. The timing just happened to be right for him.” He spotted her ring finger, where a ring that looked exactly like the one she had broken the day before glittered, big and bright. “That was fast.”
She kept on smiling. Let him think what he wanted. She’d gone back to the same shop last night, got there just before it closed. The tattooed shopkeeper had dug up another ring for her—even given her a discount after she gave him a hard time for selling shoddy goods.
Dax sipped his coffee and watched her for a minute, no doubt waiting for her to confess that there was no Johnny and there never had been.
She did no such thing. The deception might be a little frayed around the edges. But it still did the job, still made it clear to Dax—to both of them—that she was off-limits to him as a potential bed partner.
Finally, he growled at her, “What are you grinning about? Why aren’t you working?” and turned and disappeared into his office.
The rest of that week and the one that followed were hectic. There were a thousand and one things to do before they could be ready to go. And the time line to get everything in order was scarily short. Preparations for the Spotlight trips usually took months of careful planning. But not this time. Dax had decided they were changing everything up. And Dax, after all, was the boss.
Over a stolen hour for lunch the Friday before they left, Lin said it was his nature. “Things go too smoothly for too long, he can’t stand it. He needs challenge, a little crisis theater, some spice in his life.”
Zoe sipped her iced tea. “You know he’s flying us?”
“Why not? He owns three or four planes. Might as well use one of them.”
“A small plane, he said. A single-engine plane. Ugh.”
“Look on the bright side. Commercial flights are a zoo these days, planes breaking down, the nightmare of security checkpoints. With an airline, you could land in Mexico City and never leave.”
“We have to stop just over the border at Nuevo Laredo anyway, and deal with customs. The checklist of papers we have to carry and file is endless. We even had to get third-party liability insurance from a Mexican company.”
Lin waved a hand. “Travel’s a pain, it’s true.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I love to travel, under any circumstances. I love luxury destinations. And I don’t mind roughing it.”
“But you hate small planes, is that it?”
“No, I can take a small plane. I get a little motion sickness, but I have the pills to handle that.”
Lin shrugged. “Then what is it? Is Johnny upset that you’ll be gone for a week?”
“No. Of course not. Johnny … supports me. Completely.”
“Then what is the problem?”
Zoe thought about Dax. His honed razor of a mind, his hot body. His gorgeous bedroom eyes that could look so low-lidded and sensual, but somehow always saw way too much. She loved her job. She would not lose it. And she had this feeling lately that Dax had set out to purposely tempt her.
Just the two of them, in a small plane. It seemed … dangerous—though, really, how could it be? He would be flying the damn thing. No way would he have a chance to try convincing her of the benefits of joining the mile-high club.
And even if he did break his own rule and make a pass, well, he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her. She had her priorities in order. Ending up in bed with Dax was at the very top of her list—her never-to-do list.
“Zoe. Yoo-hoo. You’re zoning out on me here….”
Zoe blinked away her worries and pasted on a bright smile. “Sorry. You’re right. The small plane thing is fine. It’s perfect. The whole trip is perfect. I don’t know why I’m complaining. I’m going to meet Ramón Esquevar. It’s my first Spotlight, one I came up with myself, and I’m thrilled to be going. There is no problem. No problem at all.”
They were in the air at eight in the morning on Monday, the second of August. The four-seater Cessna 400 Corvalis TT—for Twin Turbocharged—was top-of-the-line among single-engine aircraft, Dax explained. Zoe thought it was rather like sitting in a big, comfortable luxury sedan—a sedan that sailed the clear blue sky and had an instrument panel instead of a dashboard.
There was plenty of room in back for the clothing and equipment they would need, and then some. Zoe had taken her Dramamine and was feeling pleasant and relaxed as she looked down on the San Antonio sprawl below them. She watched as it faded away behind them.
“This baby has a cruising speed of two-hundred thirty-five knots,” Dax told her with the pride men always seem to have in their big, expensive toys. “We’ll be in Nuevo Laredo in no time.”
And they were. They checked in with customs and were cleared for takeoff again an hour later. Because the Cessna 400 had a ginormous gas tank, they could now go all the way to their destination airport at Tuxtla Gutiérrez. That would take another five or six hours.
“I can’t wait,” Zoe said drily. But she would have to. She’d been careful not to go overboard on the morning coffee and to visit the ladies room at Nuevo Laredo. But even with that, she had a feeling she was going to be very grateful to touch down and race for the nearest el baño.
For a while, Zoe watched the land flow away from them below and snapped a few random pictures of the starkly beautiful desert rock formations with her lightweight Nikon D90, which she considered the best possible all-around camera there was.
Yes, she had more expensive cameras. She had a nice trust fund and could afford to indulge herself. But for most situations, the D90 and a couple of good lenses were all she ever needed.
Dax seemed happy as a kid in a big candy store. He extolled yet more of the virtues of the Cessna 400.
“Safety is a top priority with Cessna. Every exterior surface—fuselage and wings and the flight controls—is embedded with lightning mesh. You never have to worry about a lightning strike. Also, they install static wicks on the back edge of the wings and elevator, which means static buildup is discharged safely without affecting function or disrupting other electrical systems.”
“That really puts my mind at rest,” she told him drily.
“I knew it would. I love to fly. My uncle Devon, the family ne’er-do-well, taught me. He had a ranch near Amarillo.”
“Being a rancher makes a guy a ne’er-do-well?”
“To my father, it did. He and my uncle were the last of the Girard line. My father expected my uncle Devon to do what all Girards have done. Because a Girard comes from money—and is fully expected to do his part making more money. My uncle refused to follow the plan.”
She knew that Great Escapes was not a huge moneymaker. “So you’re kind of like your uncle, huh?”
The dig didn’t even faze him. “Yeah, guess I am. But I do understand money and I know whom to hire to make me more of it, so I can afford to indulge myself in my passion for travel and in my magazine.”
“And in your airplanes and expensive cars and designer motorcycles.”
“Yes, exactly. And still my fortune just keeps on growing.”
“Not that you’re bragging about that or anything.”
He slanted her a glance. “You really should be more impressed with me, you know.”
“Sorry, I’ll work on that.”
“And where was I?”
“Your ne’er-do-well rancher uncle who taught you to fly.”
“That’s it. Now and then, I got to go visit Uncle Devon. He started teaching me to fly when I was eight.”
She rested her camera in her lap. “Eight, yikes! That shouldn’t be legal.”
“But it is. You can start to learn at any age. You just have to be tall enough to reach the controls.”
“But you grew up on the East Coast, right?”
“We had homes all over the world. But we lived in an apartment on Park Avenue. And we had a house upstate—not that we ever visited there after my mother died. The house had been hers. My dad couldn’t bear to part with it, but he couldn’t stand to be there either. He never admitted it, but I knew it brought back too many memories of her.”
“You have brothers and sisters?”
He shook his head. “I was an only child.”
It seemed strange, thinking of Dax as a child—with a mom and a dad and a ne’er-do-well uncle. She chuckled. “You know, Dax, I can’t picture you with a mom—or a dad, for that matter. Then again, everybody has one of each, right?”
He shrugged. “I hardly remember my mom. I was five when she died.”
She thought of her own mom, of Aleta’s innate goodness, her fierce love for each and every one of her nine children. “How sad for you,” she told him softly.
He sent her another glance and a faint smile in response, then turned his gaze back to the wide sky ahead.
The weather was perfect. Zoe put her camera away and settled back in the comfy leather seat. Through the windscreen, the sky was endless, not a cloud in sight, a gorgeous expanse of baby blue. The steady drone of the engine lulled her and the Dramamine made her sleepy. She let her eyes drift shut.
For a long time, she drifted, dreaming in snatches, coming slightly awake to the smooth, steady drone of the Cessna’s engine, to awareness that she was on her way to the jungles of Mexico with her hot-guy boss, Dax Girard, that she was going to meet Ramón Esquevar, taste some of the best coffee in the world, visit the ancient Mayan villages of San Juan Chamula and Zinacantán. She would tell herself she really ought to wake up, act like a decent assistant, make a little conversation, at least.
But Dax didn’t seem to mind if she slept. He flew the plane and left her alone and she felt so peaceful. Inevitably, after a few moments of wakefulness, she would fade back into her own pleasant oblivion again.
What woke her, finally, was the turbulence. All of a sudden, they were dipping and dropping, literally lurching through the sky.
Her eyes popped open as a volley of hail beat at the windscreen.
It was dark. When had that happened?
She glanced over at Dax. “Is it nighttime?”
He shook his head. “Just a squall. But a wild one. I’ve been trying to get above it, but it’s not working. And we seem to be in a dead space. I’m getting no response on the radio. Check your restraint. In a minute, I’m going to see if I can get below this.”
Check your restraint? She was not reassured. Still, she tugged on the belt to make sure it was fastened securely.
More hail pelted the plane and the wind screamed like the end of the world. They kept rising and dropping—hard—as if they’d actually hit some physical object, though she knew they hadn’t, that it was only the racing wind currents.
They would bottom out, the small plane shaking as if grabbed and pummeled by the hand of an angry god. And then they would rise again, only to fall once more.
Rain came—buckets of it. Beyond the cabin, she saw nothing but darkness and horizontal walls of water coming at them, racing by. The wind wailed and they lurched and bounced. The restraint held her in the seat, but in back, she could hear the strapped-in equipment. Even tied down with a cargo net, it was banging around, hitting the fuselage, battering the backs of the rear seats.
And the stomach-churning drops continued. The plane bounced like a ball, a toy tossed between the cruel hands of a madman.
Still, she refused to believe that they wouldn’t get through this. She was twenty-five years old. She had a wonderful family, a father who drove her nuts but who she knew adored her. A mother who had never wavered in her devotion, her loving support.
She’d finally found work she could do for years and only get better at it, never get bored. She didn’t have to be the slacker of the family anymore. Her whole life lay ahead of her, beckoning. It was all coming together, and it was going to be so good.
Surely, it couldn’t be snatched away now.
Dax kept trying to raise a response on the radio. Nothing. He spoke to her once. “Next time, I swear, we’ll fly commercial.”
He mouthed their coordinates into the unresponsive radio and yet again gave the distress signal.
The plane started down. At the last second, she saw that he had found a bare space in the wall of black and green below them. A very small clearing in the dense, never-ending forest—surely, that tiny cleared space was much too small for a landing.
She said what she was thinking, “Oh, God, Dax. Too small, too small.”
He didn’t answer. He was kind of busy. They hurtled toward the minuscule clearing as the wind and the rain tried to rip them apart.
Her last thought before they reached the ground was, I guess I won’t be meeting Ramón Esquevar, after all.
With a teeth-cracking bounce, they hit the ground. Dax couldn’t keep the nose up. The propeller dug into the soggy, black earth. It dug and held, the engine screaming. Huge clods of dirt were flying everywhere.
And the plane was spinning, spinning, the jungle that rimmed the clearing whizzing by in a circle, so fast she thought she might throw up. She heard cracking, shattering sounds. Something hit the back of her seat hard enough to force all the breath from her lungs. And then something bopped her on the back of the head.
She cried out. And then she sighed.
As blackness rolled over her, she knew it was the end.
Chapter Five
“Zoe? Zoe, wake up.” A hand slapped her cheek lightly. A delicate sting.
And her head hurt like crazy. She groaned, reached back, felt wetness. She opened her eyes, brought her hand in front of her face. Blood, but not much. She reached back a second time, probed the injury carefully. Already a goose egg was rising.
Goose eggs were good, she’d read somewhere, hadn’t she? If the swelling was on the outside, you were less likely to end up with a subdural hematoma, which could be bad. Very, very bad.
“Zoe?”
She blinked. Dax was craning toward her from the other seat. He’d taken off his headphones and his chest was bare. He held his shirt to his forehead, on the left side. The shirt was soaked through with blood.
