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“Good,” he thought he heard Merry say as he spoke into the radio, telling the nearest tower what he’d do and asking for wind speed and direction. As he listened, he readjusted the controls and the plane started to climb. With the tower voice in the background, he could feel the small aircraft respond perfectly, and that gave him a sense of relief. It was a great plane. Then he felt the beginning of a drag, a sense of lost direction, right when Merry spoke again.
“Why are we climbing so slowly?”
The radio contact was breaking up, and he ignored it to check the radar. Because the wind is so strong, it’s pushing us back and down, he told himself, but instead said, “The weather.”
He had to concentrate, but was finding it harder than it should have been with Merry so close. He never should have let her get on board. Never. He didn’t need this. It was why he had no wish to be in any long term relationship because he didn’t want the responsibility or pressure. His job and his family were his only responsibilities, and business had been the main focus of his life since he’d started the company.
It still would be if the calls hadn’t come, one after the other over the past month. Calls about mundane things from friends and family in Wolf Lake. But beyond all the banter, he knew their real purpose. His older brother, Jack, needed him and he hadn’t been around.
Initially, Gage had planned on flying back for a day or two closer to summer. Then the request for a full bid on an entertainment complex southeast of Wolf Lake near the Rez had come from the town council, so he had made arrangements to travel there sooner rather than later.
Penciling in a week’s stay in Wolf Lake, he’d pacified his obligations business wise and his own conscience. However, he never thought he’d be in this plane, with a beautiful, confounding woman, flying straight into a storm. When the plane shuddered again, he tried to feather it into the wind to get clear and the action didn’t get any response from Merry. No gasp, no sobs, no petrified screams, so he chanced a look at her.
She was bent forward, her face hidden in her hands, and her back rising and falling rapidly. She was going to hyperventilate if she didn’t stop. He tried to push away that growing sense of protectiveness and that effort made his words sound short and abrupt. “Sit back and stop breathing so fast. You’re going to pass out.”
Her hands dropped just a bit and he could see her green eyes flash angrily at him. “Thanks,” she muttered, but did sit back and drop her hands to her lap.
He dismissed any apology he’d thought he should make, satisfied that she’d stopped counting bubbles and looking so terrified. “Make sure your belts are fastened and tight.”
“You, too,” she said, fiddling with her restraints.
He ignored her curt tone, and went on. “We’re going to have to fight to get to the west,” he told her, focusing on the panel in front of him. “That means jerking and possible dropping, but none of that means that we’re putting down. Do you understand that?”
He heard one word as he kept scanning the screens. “Yes.” She didn’t ask any questions.
“Ready?”
Another single word answer. “Yes.”
He didn’t have to look to know her eyes were shut. “Okay, here we go,” he said and began a painfully slow descent to the west. At first he felt it was working, despite two drops in altitude, and a jerk that snapped his head back. “It’s okay,” he said as much for his own benefit as it was for Merry’s.
“Good,” she replied, but he knew he’d spoken too soon. Things weren’t okay. They were losing altitude at about the same speed he was losing control of the plane. The angry winds knocked them, the snow finally growing into thin flakes that were more like needles being driven at them. Visibility was failing and the compass was nudging toward the south, not the west.
“No,” he murmured, trying to get control. The direction they were heading in was bringing them toward the mountain range that he flew over to get to Wolf Lake.
Now they were twisting in the air, icing on the outside direction adjusters made his control next to nonexistent. He heard Merry saying something, but the static of the radio in his ear drowned it out. He hit the button and heard more static. He felt a rush that came when he got in a tight spot, and he adjusted channels again, trying to get some clear connection between them and the nearest tower.
He gave his call identification, thought he heard someone say, “Roger, where—?” Then abrupt static was all he detected, along with the sounds of the wind beating against the plane, the whine of the engines and his own heart rattling against his ribs. He darted a look at Merry and was surprised to see she wasn’t doing her bubble counting. She was gripping the sides of the seat, but her eyes were on him, filled with what looked like disbelief.
“What?” he asked when she didn’t speak.
With a shake of her head, she rasped, “You’re crazy.”
He didn’t know where that came from. “You won’t be the first to call me that, or the last.”
“I bet,” she managed before biting her lip hard when the plane shuddered from the wind.
“How did you come to that diagnosis, Dr. Brenner?”
“All I had to do was see that excitement in your eyes,” she said. “You’re actually enjoying this!”
He wouldn’t deny that, at least for now, and he hit her with his own question as the plane seemed to settle a bit. “Why exactly are you here?”
Very slowly, they were gaining ground on a southerly direction. “You know why,” she responded.
“No, I don’t know.” Make her talk. Keep her occupied. “You’re terrified of flying, yet spent a hundred dollars to get on this ‘small, fragile plane’—your words, not mine—just so you could get home a day earlier than if you waited for a commercial flight.” He read and reread the altimeter. “Now, don’t you think that unless there’s some certifiably pressing reason behind all of this, you might be a bit crazy to inflict torture on yourself by flying with me?”
When she didn’t answer, he chanced a glance away from the screens to her. She was staring straight ahead, her teeth busy worrying her full bottom lip. “I just want to get home.”
He’d blown it. All that anger was gone, and she looked as if she was on the verge of tears. He could kick himself for whatever he’d said that did this to her. “Okay, you’re just in a hurry.”
She was still silent and Gage felt the plane slide slightly as the altitude decreased enough for him to feel it. He hoped Merry wouldn’t feel it, too. Wrong again. “What was that?” she asked abruptly.
“Just an adjustment,” he replied, then tried the radio again. While he sent out his ID, it was met by the incoming contact. He went through a check, felt positive, and told the tower that they had stabilized and were now heading west. After giving their coordinates once again, he said he’d contact them at a designated time for an update and signed off.
While he settled back, letting the plane do the work now that circumstances were more normal, he had a thought, but didn’t know where it had come from. Merry was doing anything to get home and the logical reason was someone was waiting for her in Wolf Lake, someone she was willing to risk everything to get to.
He kept a check on the information, but wondered why the conclusion he’d drawn, almost annoyed him. After all, what did he care what her reasons for returning home were? He’d known her for an hour at the most, and she was a “client.” That brought a slight smile at the ridiculous way she’d managed to become a client.
“I told you, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she demanded. “You’re almost smiling.”
He wasn’t about to tell her why he almost smiled, that was for sure. So he went for sarcasm that usually served him well. “Yeah, I just love being in the middle of a storm with ice on the wings and a compass that can’t figure out which way we’re going.”
Wrong thing to say again. “We’re lost?” she blurted, his smile long forgotten now.
“No,” he reassured her. “We’re doing just fine right now. We’ll be out of this mess in a bit, and home in Wolf Lake soon after that.”
* * *
“GREAT,” MERRY SAID on a shuddering sigh, her relief a heady thing. That was why he was smiling. They were in the clear, despite the growing storm, and he had it all under control. She’d been wrong to say he was crazy, since she was crazier than him. She should have waited at the airport. “I’m sorry,” she muttered to him, trying to block out the noise outside. “Obviously you’re in control.” She closed her eyes tightly to stop the sight of the ominous grayness that surrounded them.
“We had a problem,” he said evenly. “But we got through it. So, just sit back and count your bubbles.”
She opened her eyes to glance at him at the same time he turned to her. Her heart lurched when she was met by a smile that crinkled the corners of his dark eyes and exposed a single dimple to the right of his mouth. For that moment, she forgot all about the storm and the wind and the plane. It all came back when the plane bucked, the action so abrupt that she felt as if her heart was in her mouth.
Gage quickly got the plane under control. “Merely fine tuning,” he said, as the plane evened out again.
“You...you’re doing fine,” she breathed, needing that encouragement as much as she thought he probably did.
“Thanks,” he said, flashing another grin in her direction. “I like that assessment better than the crazy one.”
She wasn’t sure if there was sarcasm or not in his response. “I trust you, I really do.” And she meant it.
That brought a look her way that was dead sober, the dark eyes considering her before glancing away. There was no response from him, only a soft whistling of a tune she couldn’t recognize. She reasoned if he could joke about their situation, then that meant things had to be okay.
She exhaled, speaking to herself as much as to him. “You know, I’m the crazy one. I’m going back when I should have been patient. I should have called and let—”
She bolted upright. She hadn’t called Marsala back! Since she hadn’t heard anything from her, the receptionist probably figured Merry was still in Pueblo waiting for the morning flight out. She tugged her cell phone out of her jacket pocket and hit the power button. Her heart sank when she saw the battery was low and that no signal was available.
“Oh, man,” she whispered, shoving her cell back into the pocket of her jacket.
“What?” Gage asked.
“Phone’s dead, totally dead and I don’t suppose you can jump out in midair and get my duffel bag out of storage?”
He barked a short laugh at that. “No, I’m not jumping out, but as a matter of fact, I can get to the luggage area over the backseats. But no one is getting out of their restraints until we’re totally in the clear from this storm.” He touched the screen twice, then turned to her. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re agreeing that you’re crazy, too?”
“We’re both going back when we should have stayed at the airport. You knew there was a storm, but you thought you could outrun it, and I knew they’d get me on a plane at ten o’clock in the morning, and I chose to flag you down instead. We both wanted to get to Wolf Lake badly enough to risk all this.”
“Whoa, no. I’m going now because I have business meetings and I didn’t have time to cool my heels in Pueblo. I really thought, from what I was told, that the storm was far enough away and on course to sweep to the east, not southwest.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “If I’d known, I would have stayed put, cancelled this trip and rescheduled the meetings.”
“You weren’t going home for your family?”
“It’s mostly business, but I do need to see my brother and my parents. I couldn’t get away at Christmas, and things are changing on the old homestead, so I decided to combine a business trip with a visit to the family.”
She’d heard about Adam Carson leaving with the woman he’d met at the inn in town. Something about heading to Chicago and they still weren’t back, so Adam obviously wasn’t the brother he was going to visit. “Jackson?” she asked as she leaned her head against the chair’s high backrest and watched him closely.
“Yes, Jack.”
When Gage didn’t say any more, she thought again of the mention of business in his explanation. He was going back for business? She hadn’t heard about any major construction going on, except for something about a hotel or something.
“You have business there?” she asked, thankful that the ride was fairly smooth at the moment.
He exhaled. “Yeah.”
That was that; he didn’t elaborate at all. “I would guess that since you didn’t know about your bulletin board assignment until the last minute, that your business has to be on a grander scale than something in primary colors.”
He chuckled again, a comfortable sound, despite the constant roar of the wind. “Every client is as important as any other.”
“That’s your motto?” she asked as he turned to her, smiling, that single dimple showing up again.
“Maybe it should be,” he said before he averted his gaze to look at the screens again. “So, what’s waiting for you when you get back to Wolf Lake?”
Her stomach knotted. “My kids,” she said simply.
“Your kids?”
“Yes, and I promised I’d be back tonight, before they went home.”
He looked confused. “I thought you said you weren’t married.”
“I’m not. They’re the kids at The Family Center. I told them that I would be back today. I made a calendar and put it up. Today is circled and they’re watching for me. “I can’t let them down. They’ve had too much disappointment in their lives already.”
“So that’s what’s so urgent that you had to hitchhike to get back on time?”
She almost said an automatic, “Yes, that’s why,” but something else hit her out of the blue. Something she realized she’d known all along, but hadn’t acknowledged. She simply wanted to get home as soon as possible. She needed to get back where she felt she belonged. “Partly,” she conceded, but didn’t elaborate.
“I suspect they’d be just fine if you hadn’t found a way to get back,” he said, but his tone had become almost distracted. “Kids are adaptable.”
The tension in her grew even more. “Maybe. If they hadn’t been thrown into lives that they either don’t fully understand or can’t cope with, maybe things would be different.”
“Maybe they need to learn to cope,” he said, tapping the screen right in front of him. She’d thought he was talking to keep her distracted, to make sure she didn’t freak out, but his almost absentminded comment bothered her.
“Tell them that they need to suck it up and get over it?”
The edge in her voice finally caught his attention. “No, that’s not what I’m saying,” he countered. “I just meant—”
“Your reason for going to Wolf Lake is valid, and mine isn’t?”
He held up a palm toward her. “Okay, okay, this has gotten off track. Let’s get back to what I meant, not what you heard.”
That made her snort. “Oh, a case of ‘what are you going to believe, me or your lying ears?’ Is that it?”
He stared at her, and then burst out laughing. She watched him, finally finding the humor in what she’d said, but she didn’t laugh. The best she could do was offer an apology. “Peace?”
“Yes,” he said, and she felt the plane turn slightly to her left, dipping into the snow streaked grayness around them.
“What are you doing? I thought we were managing to get toward the edges of this storm?”
“We are,” he said, but without a lot of conviction in his voice.
“Then why are you looking concerned?” she prodded as the plane dipped even more. “Come on, you can tell me. I won’t get upset, just tell me the plain, honest truth.”
He hesitated, which didn’t bode well for what he was going to say if he did what she asked. She braced herself and the howling wind was almost drowning out the sound of the motors. “Okay, we should be breaking out of this, at least, we should have broken out of it by now, but we haven’t, and the mountains are there, far too close. So, I have to maneuver a bit, and it might make the plane roll.”
“Roll?” She envisioned going head over heels in the plane as it did a giant loop in the sky.
“Shouldn’t have said that. I mean I’m going to have to angle more than normal, and you might feel a shifting of center. But I have to do it.”
“Okay, okay, I can understand that,” she said quickly. “Sure, that makes sense. Go ahead and do it.”
Gage cast her a glance and said, “Thank you, I will.” Then he focused his full attention on the controls.
Things seemed to be just what he said, that dipping, then leveling, then dipping again, mostly on his side, then she heard a muttered oath under his breath. He pressed something on his earpiece.
“What’s happening?” she asked, but he wasn’t talking to her.
He was back on the radio, speaking rapidly, but this time she could tell he was trying to make a connection. He said his call letters over and over again, waited, then tapped the screen several times before he started to talk again. A mishmash of unintelligible words to her. He must have made contact, but as far as she could tell, none of what he was saying was good.
When she thought he was finished trying the radio, she asked, “How bad is it?”
He shook his head as if to silence her, then he was speaking into the radio again. “Roger, roger!” He had made contact, listened, then shook his head. “Negative on that.” He listened as he fought to keep the plane level again. “The edge?” he asked. “Temps dropped, too low.”
Merry turned from him, wishing he was smiling now and enjoying this, despite how much that had annoyed her earlier. He was grim, intent on the words coming into his ears from the headset and the readings on the panel.
CHAPTER FOUR
GAGE FELT RESISTANCE in the controls that had little to do with the fierce wind and the snow sticking to the windows. He could see the temperature outside had dropped twenty degrees in less than a minute, and he knew what was happening. He switched radio channels to one he hoped to never see on any gages in a plane he was flying, 121.5 MHz—the international aeronautical emergency frequency.
