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The anticipated surge of adrenaline and fear when the plane rolled forward chased away her fatigue. Matching an organ to a recipient and saving a life always had that affect on her. Tomorrow she’d pay the price, but it was well worth the physical strain to bring hope to another family.
“Houston. Quit begging and come here.”
The dog whined again and wedged his nose underneath her arm. His short muscular body wriggled into a more comfortable position.
Ruth laughed and placed the headset on. “For a dog that flies for a living, you certainly are a coward.” Like me.
“He’s got you fooled. He’s a sucker for blondes.” Noah’s voice crackled in her ears.
So Houston likes blondes. What about you Noah? Somehow that last caramel-flavored coffee drink touched off her sarcastic side instead of giving her the much needed energy boost. Ruth tore her gaze from Noah’s broad shoulders and looked out the window.
The dusty desert did little to contrast with the buildings in the distance. An occasional palm tree dotted her vision as the world blurred. The bumpy ride on the runway smoothed out like a clean piece of glass.
A haze painted the blue sky as the plane ascended into the thermals. Instinctively, she clasped the stress ball again. Even with all her flight hours, she still had an insane fear of flying. Today’s flight was made worse without their usual pilots behind the controls. But Noah had to be as capable or AeroFlight wouldn’t have contracted with his company. This was routine.
She ignored the chattering of the med students sitting behind her. Dr. Cavanaugh flipped through the latest medical journal while Nancy filed her nails. Ruth looked out the window again. Rush hour traffic snaked along the 101 heading east. Unless she had another call, she’d be back in the valley by nine and asleep by ten.
A yawn escaped. Her body fought the effects from last night’s coordination along with a full day of meetings and appointments. Now wasn’t the time to relax. She had calls to make, an itinerary to keep on top of and a staff to direct. She could chill out later.
“Okay, Houston. Time to work.” Her fingers caressed the shaggy fur before she set the dog on the aircraft floor.
A sleep-deprived ache registered behind her right eye. Not even pressure from her thumb deadened the pain. Now that they were airborne and she couldn’t cause any problems with communication between the pilot and the control center, Ruth placed the headset around her neck, grabbed the Flight Fone and then dialed the coordinator’s number in San Diego.
Noah sank back against the pilot’s seat as he leveled off to cruising altitude. His fingers strangled the yoke. He’d love to do the same to Brad’s neck. He would deal with him later, out of earshot of his passengers. He wondered how much they’d overheard before they’d made their presence known.
Either way, his partner had no right to sign a contract without informing Noah of what would be required. Brad should have known better than to solicit a company like AeroFlight, whose sole mission was to provide medical transportation, including the retrieval of organs.
Human organs. From a donor. From another casualty of the medical profession. Bile rose in his throat. Maybe he should ask Ruth for one of those biohazard bags she was so fond of.
With the exception of his family and Brad, few in his current life knew of his past. But then again, Noah had come to terms with what happened. He’d moved forward with his life.
Or had he?
The moment he’d seen the curvy blonde gracing the stairs of his aircraft, his stomach took a nosedive and landed near the soles of his feet. He hadn’t recovered yet. Against his better judgment, his gaze froze on the reflection of the woman in the tiny mirror he’d discretely mounted up front. Curly hair tied back in a red ribbon revealed a soft, oval face. Her deep green eyes bracketed by an unknown sorrow intrigued him, or maybe it was the delicate slope of her neck and the fullness of her lips.
Wholesome and innocent. For someone else. Not him.
The woman sitting in the first row wasn’t Michelle. His wife had died three years ago and taken his heart with her, but Noah saw the same vulnerability in Ruth that brought out a protective streak he fought to control.
A tightness rivaling a wound rubber band tensed his shoulder and neck muscles. He concentrated on forcing oxygen into his lungs. Passing out behind the controls topped the preflight imaginary checklist of things not to do. He didn’t need the FAA breathing down his neck.
It wasn’t as if they could afford to be choosy at what jobs became available. A fledgling business didn’t have the luxury of saying no—not when they had overhead and payroll and other people depending on them. Guilt threatened to consume the shred of sanity Noah grappled to hold on to.
He forced his thoughts back to flying the plane.
“Thanks for the update. We’ll be there shortly.” Ruth’s melodic voice drifted around him through the headset.
He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to listen to her words. But his fingers refused to isolate her from his communication.
“Okay, team. Here’s what we’ve got. A seven-year-old male.”
Noah’s grip tightened. Don’t listen.
“He was struck by a car while riding his bike.”
Sweat broke out underneath Noah’s arms and across his forehead. A chill seared his nerves, and beside him he sensed Brad shifting in the co-pilot’s seat.
It’s okay. I’m over it.
“Medium build, type O blood.”
Jeremy…
Maybe I’m not over it.
Disgust wrapped around all the other emotions struggling to surface. How could the woman sitting behind him be so detached to the situation? That boy lying in a hospital bed was a person, not a turkey to carve up and distribute to the neediest person.
His first thoughts had been right. Vultures. Every one of them. Worse than vultures. They were lower than the scum he’d washed off his shoes each summer night on his granddad’s farm.
A disembodied voice from air traffic control crackled in his ears. His attention focused on the preparations needed to land the plane safely even though he’d done it a thousand times before.
“ETA is twenty minutes, people. Please make sure your seat belts are fastened,” Noah announced, managing to keep all emotion inside him.
“Thanks, Noah.” Ruth’s voice surrounded him again, lulling him into a false sense of peace.
As he heard Ruth update the hospital, Noah tilted the nose of the plane down, starting their descent into San Diego. He eased back into his chair and concentrated on relaxing.
He needed a vacation away from a past that wouldn’t change no matter how many different scenarios played out in his mind.
Once the plane stopped on the tarmac by the waiting ambulance, Noah unclasped his seat belt and looked at the woman in the seat directly behind him. He couldn’t help himself.
She represented everything he hated about the medical community. Yet something about her played on his misguided sense of chivalry. Was it a vulnerability he sensed under her professionalism? Or the fear of flying she so gallantly tried to cover?
He watched her rise from her seat. The gold cross suspended from a thin chain around her neck winked at him. The irony that she wore a cross around her neck mocked him. She had the audacity to worship the God he’d turned his back on years ago. Noah didn’t have time for all that religious mumbo jumbo, anyway. It meant nothing. But to her, it obviously meant something.
“Here’s the dinner list. We should be back in just over an hour.” Ruth said softly, her feminine voice cocooning Noah into a false sense of comfort. He shook his head to dispel the feeling. It was part of his job to provide her crew with food for the ride home. He noticed her hand tremble when she handed him the paper. Their fingers never touched; yet he could almost feel her warmth.
“Okay.” Noah willed the underlying current running between them to disappear.
“Mr. Barton? Are you all right?” Ruth’s eyebrows drew together again, accentuating the tiny crease between them. Her deep green eyes softened as she gazed at him.
“Fine. And call me Noah,” Noah responded, but he was anything but fine.
“We need to get going then, Noah. We’ll see you later.” Her charm bracelet jangled when she placed her hand on his arm. Her touch magnified just how alone he’d been these last few years. He stared in her eyes. For a heartbeat, neither of them spoke. Her mouth opened as if to say something else. She clamped her lips shut and tilted her head a fraction before a smile emerged. As she stepped away, her light, distracting scent disappeared with her. “Bye.”
Noah fisted his hands to keep from reaching out to her as he strode to the entrance of the aircraft and watched Ruth descend the stairs.
“If she interests you that much, why don’t you ask her out?” Brad joined him.
“I’m not interested.” Noah breathed in a lungful of ocean air laced with the distinct scent of jet fuel.
“Right. Then why do you keep staring at her?”
Okay, so maybe he was a little interested, and it scared him. He hadn’t thought of another woman since his wife died, and he didn’t plan on starting to even though this one caused a tiny blip on his radar screen. Noah wouldn’t risk his heart and put himself through the pain and agony of falling in love again and losing her like he’d lost Michelle.
Brad spoke quietly again. “You have to admit she’s appealing in a girl-next-door way.”
“Not my type.” Noah’s gaze betrayed his words as it lingered on the blonde coordinator again. Now he knew how the moths that fluttered around his back porch light felt.
“Then what is?” Brad asked.
“I don’t know. Not someone like her.” Noah ground out. He forced his fingers to uncurl. Even if the only thing that remained from his fighting days was a crooked nose and a few tiny scars, Noah knew better than to tangle with the taller, heavier and younger Brad again. Still his gaze lingered on the woman jumping inside the white and blue ambulance behind the rest of her team. Her hesitant wave before her blond head and white lab coat disappeared inside sucker punched his gut. Anger wrestled with disgust.
The lights flashed against the metal of the hangar to his right. He couldn’t shake the image of a big black bird hovering over the emergency vehicle as the sirens echoed in his ears. He continued to watch until it passed through the gate and out onto the street running parallel to the small airport.
“Let me have the dinner list. I’ll go pick it up.” Brad grabbed the slip of paper Ruth had given him and took off to find the flight-based operation’s courtesy car.
Noah’s fingers gripped the strap of Houston’s leash when he and the dog descended to the tarmac. A walk in the strip of grass would do both of them good after being cooped up in the plane. It might also release the tension tightening his neck and shoulder muscles.
“Come on, boy, we’ve got some time to kill.” He frowned at his choice of words. “Make that some time to waste.”
Not really. As if he hadn’t learned that every second was precious and not to be frittered away. All those years flying commercial aircraft had eaten away the hours he could have been spending with his family. Now he had the time, but his family existed only in photographs.
His shoes crushed the grass beneath his sneakers as Houston did his business. Why did his partner agree to this contract? Maybe because Brad had recognized what Noah hadn’t. He hadn’t come to terms with the death of his wife and son.
Too bad. Noah would face his nightmares by himself, not be forced into it by someone who didn’t understand. Tomorrow he’d flip the pilot schedules so he wouldn’t be called out to do any more organ recovery fly-outs.
Once the distant siren melted into the hum of early evening traffic, Noah relaxed.
Slightly. They still had to get the team and whatever piece of human anatomy they’d removed back to Phoenix. But for now, it was him and his dog. Noah knelt down and scratched the dog his son had picked out behind his ears. The only thing he had left from his happier days. The days when he was half of a whole. Now he wandered around as one of those left behind.
Houston’s body wriggled in delight while the dog licked Noah’s hand. The adjustment hadn’t been easy for him, either, and every once in a while before they’d moved from the house, Noah caught Houston staring into Jeremy’s empty room.
Waiting for a boy who would never come home.
He picked up the dog and held his body close to his chest. The dog’s heat permeated the thin cotton of his shirt. The nightmares rose to the surface, clawing their way through layers of protective coating meant to shelter his heart. Noah buried his face into the dog’s fur. When would the pain go away? When would he feel normal again?
Enough.
He opened his eyes as the almost full moon peeked over the horizon. A light breeze kicked up some of the litter by the chain link fence. With the onset of dusk, he retreated back inside his airplane. Then he settled back in the seat Ruth had occupied because it gave him quicker access to the front.
Her warmth and scent lingered, creating an unwanted longing for female conversation he’d thought was buried behind three years of bitter emotions. He closed off the tap feeding the thoughts and forced them back to the dry recesses of his brain.
With over an hour before Brad, Ruth and the medical team came back, he decided to rest.
As best he could under the circumstances. Noah closed his eyes and almost immediately fell into that bottomless nightmare that had become a part of him.
“Just sign here, Mr. Barton.” A jumble of words wavered before his eyes.
“No!”
“There is nothing else we can do, sir. Your son is brain-dead. But there is something you can.” The bright red lipstick worn by the garish woman dressed in hospital garb reminded him of an old Japanese movie. The one dubbed over in English where the lips moved independently of the words.
“You want to carve up my son and dole him out like pineapple slices,” Noah spat back. Guilt over not being able to do enough to save his son coursed through him like a jolt of electricity.
“Sign the paper, Noah. It’s what Michelle would have wanted.” His sister spoke softly and rubbed his back. “You know it’s the right thing to do.”
The clipboard dangled in front of his vision. The line marked with an X tormented him but not as much as the shame. He’d failed his son. A hand he recognized as his own grabbed the pen and scribbled his name.
“Thank you, Mr. Barton. This will save someone’s life.”
But what about my life?
Noah jolted awake to find Houston licking the tears from his face.
Chapter Two
“Are you okay, Ruth?” Nancy asked as she strapped herself into the seat in the rear of the ambulance to ride back to the waiting airplane.
“I’m fine. Just a little tired.”
Exhaustion seeped into her pores again. Child donors were always the hardest. And not very common, which was why so many sick children died while waiting for organs. A fact she tried to change with each donation she coordinated, but sometimes she felt like a hamster trapped inside one of those wheels getting nowhere fast. There weren’t enough organs to go around.
She stared out the tiny window in the back over Nancy’s shoulder. No need to let the staff know this particular donation had affected her. She wouldn’t fall apart in front of the team that depended on her to be the calm one. The reliable one. Boy, did she have them fooled.
But that wasn’t what made her unusually quiet. Her silence stemmed from the glimpse she’d caught of the donor’s parents’ faces as she passed them in the hallway on the way to surgery. A look her own parents had once worn when they realized one of their children was dead. Grief curled around Ruth’s heart and opened the door for memories to flood in, carrying debris and fallout from an earlier time.
She’d hoped and prayed for a miracle for her sister that never came. Sometimes she didn’t understand God’s ways. But she never questioned His intentions, which was why she followed His calling and dedicated her life to making sure every possible donation was a success.
Digging into her purse, she grabbed two pain relievers and plopped them into her mouth with hopes that they would deaden the pain emerging behind her eye again. The heart Dr. Cavanaugh carried in the cooler was two decades too late to help her twin, but another child would have a second chance at life.
“How about you? How are you holding up?” Ruth asked Nancy. The fatigue lines bracketing the first assistant’s mouth mirrored her own. The surgery had gone well once they’d finally had their chance to operate.
“Fine, though things could have gone a little quicker.”
“That kidney team sure took their sweet time,” one of the med students announced. “I didn’t think they’d ever get finished. Why did it take so long?”
With six years’ experience as an O.R. nurse before becoming a coordinator, Ruth had been involved in hundreds of operations—many successful, others not. Since the heart was the last organ recovered, her team had to wait almost an hour and a half before they could operate.
Things had gotten tricky during the surgery, too, but Dr. Cavanaugh pulled it off. Ruth’s team had not lost an organ yet.
“Sometimes things don’t quite go as planned. I’m not familiar with that surgeon, but from his appearance, I’d say he doesn’t quite have the experience Dr. Cavanaugh has.”
“He sure was good-looking though.” The other med student piped in. “Too bad that team was from L.A. and not Phoenix.”
Ruth leaned against the padded bench and closed her eyes to the inane conversation swirling around her. She put pressure on her eyelid in hopes of alleviating the pain made worse when she realized she still had to get inside a plane and fly back to Phoenix. Instead of finding relief, she saw a sad Noah Barton staring back at her.
“Ready to fly back, Ruth?” Noah’s question sounded more like a sigh once she’d picked up her food from the cardboard box next to the door.
