2. Chapter One
Chapter One
Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (ANC)
T he security agent took a shaky breath and pulled his pale blue gloves off, tossing them into the trash. His eyes were wet.
“I just need to…um…take a comfort break,” he said, his voice stiff with offended dignity, before he walked quickly away. One of his colleagues reached out a comforting hand to him, but was shrugged off.
Quentin watched him go. He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
“Don’t start,” he said.
It was the sort of simple instruction that should have been easy to comprehend and follow. Instead, Annette immediately started.
“You made him cry,” she said. “For God’s sake, Quentin. You’re like a Roald Dahl villain sometimes.”
“Maybe TSA should teach its staff better conflict resolution skills,” Quentin countered.
He zipped the carry-on briskly and, after a pacifying smile and nod from the other agent, grabbed it off the table.
“Or just give them a page with the Merriam-Webster definition of ‘discretion’ on it in large print to consult every morning.”
He stalked off toward the duty-free, bag swinging by its handle from one hand. A second later, Annette caught up with him, her bag rattling along behind her on wonky wheels.
“He was trying to be friendly,” she said.
Quentin gave her a dubious look. “Why?”
She gawped at him for a second. Then she rolled her eyes over-emphatically
“I don’t know,” she said. “ Maybe he wanted to make a connection. Maybe , if you’d not ripped his self-confidence out, blown your nose on it, and tossed it aside, this would have been the meet-cute you’d have told your kids about.”
“I don’t want kids,” Quentin told her. “And he’s married…which makes him more your type, doesn’t it?”
That was just him being a dick. He could admit that. It had just been a long week, and he wasn’t in the mood.
Annette’s face flushed. The pink was so vivid it looked like her foundation was going to melt right off her face.
“One time!” she said, waving a finger in the air to make her point. “And it was in Vegas.”
Quentin fished his phone out of his pocket as he detoured around a perfume display and a teenager with a smear of tester lipstick on her mouth.
“And, as we all know, marriage licenses don’t cross state lines,” he said dryly. Annette stuck her tongue out at him for that. He ignored it as he pointed out, “Only problem is, I walked in on you and Bennett in Seattle.
The brisk click of Annette’s heels broke off for a second as she stopped. Then she broke into a quick jog to catch up to him. “No,” she argued once she fell in at his side. “It was in Vegas, at the Luxor.”
“Classy,” Quentin said. “But trust me. It was Seattle, in the cockpit of the plane. Sometimes I can still see the flight plan in my nightmares.”
The silence dragged out for a bit as Annette pressed her lips together. Finally, she gave a chastened, “Oh. Yeah. That’s right. I’d forgotten about Seattle.”
“Lucky you,” Quentin said dryly. He swiped into the app to place his order and tucked the phone back into his pocket. “I’m going to get a coffee. I’ll see you at the gate.”
“Maybe I’d like a coffee,” Annette called after him. “Or a cake pop. Did you ever think about that?”
Quentin waved his hand over his shoulder.
“Nope,” he answered her briskly.
****
Ten minutes later, Quentin handed Annette a full cup of coffee as he got on the plane.
“Here,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Well, I wasn’t expecting that. Thank you!”
“Don’t get too excited,” Quentin told her. “They screwed up my order.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You could have just let me think you’d done something nice.”
“You’d have worked it out,” Quentin told her.
“Oh, c’mon,” Annette said as she popped the lid off the coffee. “How bad could they have messed it up? Americano with—Oh.”
She recoiled from the smell that escaped the coffee. Her nose wrinkled. Then she leaned in to take another dubious sniff.
“Pumpkin spice and peppermint oat milk latte,” Quentin said. It was on the side of the cup. He could have probably identified most of it without that, though, except for the milk. “Enjoy.”
“Maybe not,” Annette said as she popped the lid back on. She turned the cup to check it and squinted at the name scrawled over the wax paper. “And I don’t think they screwed up your order. I think you just got the wrong order. This is for Mike? Or maybe Graham?”
Quentin flicked the buttons on his jacket open. “Giving me the wrong coffee counts as a screw-up.”
“You could have just swapped with him,” Annette pointed out. “Made a connection.”
“Or,” Quentin countered. “I could get to the plane so that we could take off on time. Me being the pilot, and all?”
She made a face at him and went to take a drink of the coffee. Except she changed her mind before her lips touched the rim. Quentin didn’t blame her. Even for people who drank their coffee as if they’d rather have a milkshake, pumpkin spice and peppermint was a choice.
“Oh, what if he’s one of our passengers?”
“...he’d probably be happy to trade a coffee to avoid a delay?” Quentin hazarded as he reached for the manifest and tucked it under his arm.
“No,” Annette said. She pulled the curtain back and peered down the plane at the assembled contestants in the game of Clue she’d kicked off in her head. “You could still swap coffees.”
“Or I could get the flight crew to bring me a coffee once we’re in the air?”
“You say our coffee always tastes like socks,” Annette said. She paused as she made eye contact with a slightly alarmed-looking woman in the front row. A quick smile and a dismissively waved hand tried to undo that damage. “It doesn’t. Don’t worry.”
Quentin reached over her head and pulled the curtain back into place. “I’d rather have sock coffee than a cold sore,” he said. “That’s how you get cold sores, Annette.”
She groaned and let her head fall back so she could sigh at the ceiling. “This is why you’re single,” she said. “How are you ever going to meet someone new if you aren’t open to what the universe is throwing your way?”
Quentin took a deep breath…
Corvus Flights was ‘one big family’ according to his stepfather. Dean always said that as if it were a benefit. Quentin wasn’t so sure. He bet none of the pilots on American Airlines had to deal with being matchmade by their stepsister’s BFF.
“Annette, someone tried to mug me last night on the way to the hotel,” he said. “According to you, I should have hooked up with him? Pro-tip: that’s a good way to get rolled and a bad way to find a date. Tell the universe thanks, but no thanks.”
He shrugged his jacket off and hung it up as he headed into the cockpit. Behind him, he heard Annette snort and mutter under her breath.
“The universe is starting to think it wasted its money.”
“What?” he asked as he glanced back.
She shrugged and put the coffee down in one of the holders. “Nothing,” she said, so innocently that he was immediately suspicious. He narrowed his eyes at her, but decided that he was almost definitely happier not knowing.
“Are we good to go?” he asked as he sat down and glanced down the manifest, passengers and cargo all marked up. “All souls on board and strapped in?”
She screwed her face up at him and pressed her index fingers together in front of her mouth. Before she had to answer, Fred slid past her, his branded coffee in hand, Quentin noted sourly, to slide into the co-pilot’s seat.
“We’re just waiting on one passenger,” he said. “Well, four but—”
Quentin made an annoyed noise as he leaned back in the pilot’s seat, the leather cold against his back through his shirt.
He liked things to run on time and go to plan anyhow, but after a week of other people’s bad planning spilling over into his life?
The double-booked taxis, the over-booked hotel, and the guy who let his husky get away at the vet so it could try and chase Quentin’s cat?
Any tolerance he might have mustered had dried up.
“How hard is it to get to a gate on time?” he groused. “It’s not like it’s a lottery. They bought a ticket, they picked the date and the flight on the website. How do they end up late?”
Annette shrugged. “Sometimes stuff happens,” she defended their missing passengers weakly.
“Trust me, it’s been happening to me all this week. I still got here,” Quentin said. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves back, checking his watch as he did so. “OK, I’ll give them some leeway. If they don’t make it, then obviously they didn’t want to fly.”
“How about I get you that coffee early?” Annette offered. “If it tastes like socks, it’s nothing to do with me.”
Fred snorted into his coffee.
Quentin ignored them both as he started his pre-flight checks. At least they’d be ready to go when their tardy passengers deigned to show their faces.
He was finished with those and had moved on to the crossword—three down, ‘ear-related prefix’—when Annette nudged him.
“There they are,” she said. “I told you they’d make it!”
She hadn’t.
Fred leaned forward and craned his neck to take a look. “Give him his due, he’s motoring. Look at him go.”
Quentin looked up, ready to deny that due, and the words dried up on his tongue.
A lanky blond man in jeans and a flannel shirt was power walking determinedly across the tarmac.
He had a hiking backpack on his back, a toddler on his hip, and two bigger-but-not-teens trailing along behind him.
As Quentin watched, the smaller of the two free-range kids tripped and went down. They didn’t get up.
“What?” Quentin said to Fred. “Are you just going to sit there and watch the poor bastard struggle?”
Fred wasn’t often lost for words. That did it, though. He blinked at Quentin and then gave his coffee a suspicious look before he asked, “What?”
Apparently, chivalry was dead. Quentin got up, slapped Fred across the back of the head, and headed for the doors.
He brushed by Annette—his promised coffee finally in its shitty little plastic cup—and ignored her alarmed “Where are you going?” as he ducked through the doors and jogged down the stairs, metal rattling under his boots.
The man had finally caught on that he’d lost a charge and turned back to collect them. So his back was to the plane, and he didn’t notice Quentin at first.
“Jessie, just come on,” he said as he set the toddler down and bent down to try to pull her up. “Just get up.”
Jessie didn’t.
“No!” she said. “Everyone’s looking at me, and I don’t wanna go ANYHOW. I wanna go to Bailey’s birthday party.”
“Well, you have to go,” the guy said. “And no one’s looking.”
The toddler, realizing no one was paying attention, bolted. Luckily, they ran straight into Quentin’s legs and bounced off. He caught them by the hood of their ski-suit before they fell. The kid stared up at him, all big eyes and fat, pink cheeks.
“Hey,” Quentin said. “Let me give you a hand.”
The man turned around and…wow. He was…
OK, kinda normal looking if Quentin tried to put his finger on it.
Somehow though, the unremarkable nose and jaw came together to make what could probably be described as the perfect face.
Maybe it was the eyes, blue and warm with just the right amount of creases around them, that tied it all together.
“Oh, no,” the man said. He smiled awkwardly as he tried to wave Quentin’s help off. “Thank you, but no. I don’t want to be a problem.”
“Too late,” Quentin said. “You’re the reason we’re delayed. The quicker we get you on the plane, the less of a problem it will be.”
The man narrowed those stunning eyes. The expression of mildly amused annoyance was very familiar. Not the one that Quentin had been after, but still very familiar.
“Sorry about that,” the man said. “But then you should probably get back on board, before they leave without us.”
Quentin shrugged. “They’re not going to do that,” he said. “How can I help?”
He thought he’d won the man over for a second, but then he shook his head. “No, honestly, I’m fine. I just–”
“Joe!” the older of the not-quite-teens blurted out in exasperation. “Let the guy help for fuck’s sake.”
“Don’t fucking swear,” Joe said. Then face-palmed, fingers threaded through the blond curls at his temples. “OK. Thanks. I just…It’s just been a long day.”
“Yeah,” Quentin said. “Me too.”
He hadn’t really thought that all the way through, but hopefully Joe wasn’t going to ask him for details. He didn’t know what Joe had been through, but three kids and late to his flight already trumped the whole wrong coffee order debacle.
Look at that. Quentin would call that personal growth.
“OK. Swap.” He traded the toddler back to Joe for the backpack.
He hitched the weight of it up over his shoulder and offered his hand to Jessie, who’d bent enough to sit up.
She crossed her arms and scowled. Quentin wriggled his fingers.
“Come on. They won’t let you back through passport control anyhow.
You’ll just have to wait here until we get back. ”
She gave him a look. “They won’t do that. I’d die from the cold.”
“There’s a special hut.”
Jessie huffed a sigh down her nose and gave Quentin’s hand the same look he’d given his second-hand Americano. She started to reach for it and then paused.
“You’re not a pervert?” she asked suspiciously.
The boy heaved an exasperated sigh. “Well, he’s not going to tell you if he is,” he pointed out, in a tone that was the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll.
“No,” Quentin said anyhow. Then he pulled his hand back slightly as he gave her a dubious look. “You’re not sticky, are you?”
She giggled.
“No,” she said.
It turned out that was a lie. Quentin had suspected that it was going to be.