CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
Stevie felt cocooned in warmth. She was so comfortable. The pillow beneath her cheek was firm, but she didn’t mind it. She shifted, and she felt someone’s arms tighten around her.
She froze. That was a completely unfamiliar feeling.
And suddenly, she remembered everything.
And realized just then that she was not resting her head on a pillow, but her mysterious stranger’s chest. Her hand was also on his chest, his beating heart right beneath her palm.
She was torn between being mortified that she had ended up like this in her sleep, and being grateful that he was still alive.
She sat up, and looked around the plane. Her heart was pounding double time.
She had never slept with a man in her life. Not that this was sleeping with him, sleeping with him. But she had never done that either. She had never done either thing, thanks.
She was quite typically pure as the driven snow.
Well. Right now the snow wasn’t so much pure as punishing.
Of course, purity could also feel punishing, she knew that for a fact. She wasn’t a virgin because of her convictions, but rather her circumstances.
She was too busy for men.
It would be a shame for us to die without sampling another of life’s vices…
She closed her mind off to that. They weren’t going to die. She was annoyed though, that she…somewhat agreed with him.
“Good morning,” she said loudly.
He stirred. And opened his eyes slowly. He looked rumpled, and yet somehow magnificent. A plane crash and loss of blood hadn’t done anything to diminish the intensity of how… How sexy he was. And he really was very sexy. He was…quite beyond anything she had ever experienced before. Granted, her experience was very limited. But she had seen men. She lived in the world. She didn’t have to be a great seductress to know what was out there.
He was spectacular.
She had been ridiculous when she had decided to call him Clem. In truth, she was trying to do something to diminish the impact of him. Her chest hurt.
Just suddenly.
She had been very afraid that he was going to die. When she’d had to put the tourniquet around his leg…
It had been a truly terrifying experience. She had taken a fair amount of first-aid training, but it really hadn’t prepared her for this. It hadn’t prepared her for the reality of somebody bleeding while she tried to stop it…
But there he was. Okay.
Gorgeous.
And they were still stuck.
“Good morning.”
“Sorry. We aren’t rescued yet. But you didn’t die in the night.”
She tried to present that as optimistically and cheerfully as possible.
“I appreciate that,” he said.
“It would’ve been a tragedy.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Are you an evil warlord?”
“No,” he said.
“Then I’m pretty sure it would be a tragedy if you died.”
“Some of my past lovers would undoubtedly disagree with that take.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling unaccountably disappointed. “Why? Are you not accomplished?”
It had been a bold question, and she was not inherently bold when it came to topics like that. But she was otherwise bold, and maybe that was why it seemed reasonable to say out loud.
“Oh,” he said. “I’m very accomplished. It is only that I am temporary.”
“And that upsets them?”
“It has been said.”
“I see.”
“Have you been out foraging for acorns this morning?”
“No. Because it’s cold. And I’m not a squirrel.”
“You have a slight squirrel energy.”
“Do I?” She wrinkled her nose. And then immediately stopped wrinkling her nose.
“Yes.”
“Great. Well, another thing to add to my résumé.”
“If we get out of this,” he said. “I’ll make sure that you’re rewarded.”
The way that he looked at her was suddenly so serious. It struck her in a strange place in the chest. She had no idea who this man was. And he didn’t seem to want to tell her. That did make her wonder if he was a warlord. Or something. Because why not just give her his name?
He must be famous.
She cursed the lack of access to the internet out here. She cursed her own attention span when it came to popular culture. Well, it wasn’t really her attention span. It was what she had time for. If she wasn’t flying cargo, then she was taking care of her family. She was busy. She was mending clothes, knitting, making dinner. She was working outside in the garden, feeling the earth between her hands. She liked it all. She liked her life, in truth. She didn’t find it difficult or confronting in any way. She just found it to be…life.
But money. Money was a worry.
And he was promising to reward her.
She believed that he was rich. He definitely looked like he was. Not that it was a certain indicator of anything. A man could definitely put on some nice clothes and pretend to be above himself. Con men existed for a reason.
But she didn’t think that he was one. Well. She thought about what he had said about his past lovers. Maybe he was… A grifter in other ways, but she really did believe that he was rich.
The way that he had approached her, with all that confidence, like she would bend over backward to do exactly what he wanted, spoke of a man who was so innately used to being deferred to. She had never met anyone quite like him. She knew a lot of men who were demanding and commanding. Knew a lot of men who thought that they should be listened to simply because they were men. But that wasn’t the way that he behaved. It was difficult to parse. Difficult to explain. And yet, she did.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m a man with a great many resources. And you saved my life. I won’t forget it.”
“I… I wish that I was in a position where I can tell you that I didn’t want your money. But I’m not.”
She suddenly felt very small, very aware of the fact that there was a vast wilderness out there, on the outside of the wrecked plane.
Her plane was wrecked.
Which meant the business was effectively halted. Even if there were insurance claims she could file, there would be delays, and there could be issues.
And if there was any interruption of service, pay, she was in huge trouble.
All of her clients were going to have to use other people. And if that happened, then how was she going to get them again?
This was a disaster of epic proportions. He had offered her all that money to take him to Boston, and she could definitely use that money. But now she was infinitely in need of more.
“Yes, I gather that.”
“I’m sorry. It must seem very…crass to you. Being with somebody like me. Who needs to beg you for money.”
“You haven’t begged. And there is nothing crass about you. Indeed, you have conducted yourself with extreme bravery these past few hours. What you have done actually deserves a reward beyond money, but I’m a man with money. And that means it is the manner with which I can reward you.”
“Well. I could hardly just let you die.”
“Again, some of my ex-lovers might have.”
“That’s very concerning.”
“It is,” he agreed. “But I have had some time to reflect, as I lay here incapacitated. Perhaps my life needs to change.”
“Really?”
“Isn’t that what a near-death experience is for? Reformation? Transformation?”
“I don’t know about that. I’m going to go back to my life the way that it was. I have responsibilities. I have people to take care of. I can’t afford to transform. I mean, if you give me money… I guess there will be something of a transformation. But I’m going to go right back to work. I’m going to get another plane, I’m going to make sure that I’m operational as quickly as possible. That’s all I want. Stability.”
“Stability?”
“Yes. Do you have any idea what it’s like? Watching your bank account, watching the money evaporate from it. Watching the price of eggs go up, and knowing that there’s nothing you can do, because God knows you need eggs. I mean, I have chickens for that very reason. So the eggs didn’t hit me that hard. But I don’t have a cow. The milk really is a burden.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know what any of that’s like.”
“I feel like I work so hard, and it just… Never seems to be enough. It’s disheartening. Because you would think… I do an honest day’s work. I have a family home, and that makes me one of the lucky ones. My dad is still alive, and that’s lucky too. But he has medical issues, and they aren’t all covered under his Medicaid. Sometimes there are really expensive bills. And then there’s my sisters. They all need things. All the time. Everybody always needs things.”
“And what about you?”
She shook her head. “I’m the one earning the money. If I needed things too, that would just be irritating. I don’t work for me. I work for them.”
“That hardly seems fair.”
“Fair isn’t a thing. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“Well. I’m here to tell you, life isn’t fair. So consider that your first time.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “What would you do if you had all the money in the world?”
“I would make sure my family was taken care of. For a start. Then I would try to fix some of the things that are broken. Some of the things that make it so people like me have to work so hard. Work so hard and never dig out. It’s like spinning on a hamster wheel. I don’t think it should be that way.”
“I see. And do you have ideas as to how to fix it?”
“If I had all the money in the world I would consult with the smartest people. I would invest the resources that I had—the money—and I would educate myself. And then I would listen to those people. There are a lot of experts who talk to world leaders, and I assume they get money for consulting. It’s big business. I also think it’s big business to keep the problems, rather than fix them. Because if people need their problems to be fixed, then they’re more likely to care about what this candidate or that candidate is doing.”
“American politics,” he said. “I am blessedly unfamiliar.”
“All right. You’re not American. Well. I have a dim view. I’m out here working hard trying my best to make a living, and it’s never gotten me much.”
“I will fix that,” he said. “I swear to you.”
“Well. I appreciate it. And I’ll hold you to it. If we get out of here.”
She couldn’t even worry that much about the reward. They had to get to safety first. All of it was theoretical if this man died.
“I’m going to go outside and try to see if I can find what we need to start a fire.”
She looked at him one last time and found she had a hard time catching her breath. Then she turned and moved to the plane’s makeshift exit.
She blinked against the harsh light and let her eyes adjust.
It was beautiful out here, even though it was austere. Even though they were trapped.
It was quiet. In some ways, more restful than her life usually was.
But she had to make sure they had water. And it would be best if she could figure out how to get a fire going outside too.
She tramped into the woods, trying to shake off any of the fear that she felt. Any concern about wild animals. She was hell-bent on finding something to help her clear away some snow, and get some dry wood.
She was going to try to call on the supplies that they had in those boxes, and her years in Girl Scouts to get a fire going.
She started to gather sticks, and bring them back toward the plane.
“Stevie.”
She heard her name coming through the curtain of blankets that she had draped over the opening of the plane.
She scurried inside. “I need to be able to stand up,” he said.
“No you don’t,” she said. “You need to stay right there.”
“I can’t stay right here.”
“Clem, you gotta take care of yourself,” she said, forgetting for a second that his name was a game she was playing with herself.
“Stevie, I have very little modesty to my name, and the call of nature and the answering of it is not something that concerns me any, but this is a shared space.”
“Oh.” It took her a second, but then she realized he was… Well. Practicalities, of course. “I just collected some… Some sticks. I can see if one of them will work as a crutch. I’ll help you up, though.”
She was worried his leg might be more than just cut. If it was broken, then it was going to be very difficult for him to stand up. Though she knew that sometimes shock could provide a little bit of insulation against pain. She didn’t wish that for them.
“I’ll help you up, just a second.”
She went outside, and examined the sticks that she had gotten. One of them seemed like it was a very competent walking stick. She went back to the edge of the woods, and searched around until she found another. He could use them as trekking poles in the snow. And hopefully that would keep him upright. Because if not, and he fell, then they were going to be in a hell of a situation trying to get him back up.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to help you. But you also have to help, or you’re not getting very far.”
“All right,” he said, seeming irritated now.
He was clearly not a man used to needing help. And why would he be? He was so tall and strong. He was probably used to being able to do whatever he wanted. Whatever he needed.
Forget all the rest.
She bent down next to him, and urged him to drape his arm over her shoulder. He still smelled good, somehow. Like whatever expensive cologne he was wearing, and the night air of the forest sank down into his skin. She didn’t know how he managed that.
He shouldn’t be so devastating still. And yet.
She handed him one of the makeshift poles. “Okay, lean on me with part of your body, and that with the other half. And let’s try to get you up. If you start bleeding again, you’re going right back down. Practicalities be damned.”
She looked at him, and her heart rate sped up. There was sweat beading on his forehead, and his teeth were clenched. “Let’s go,” he said.
She began to help lift, as he pushed his own self up, his incredibly impressive upper-body strength making the feat much easier than she had imagined it might be. “Hand me the other pole,” he said, leaning heavily over her.
“I don’t want to drop you,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said.
He released his hold on her and grabbed hold of the first stick with both hands, supporting himself on that, and his good leg.
Then she grabbed the other pole. “Okay,” she said, “use those to help support you. I can stand on the outside of the plane and try to help you get down. The snow is deep in places, it’s going to make it tricky.”
“Stevie, I have traveled the world. Traversed it over so many times there are few places left unexplored. This is one of them. I consider it an opportunity, not a detriment to have this moment, and I will seize it as I have every other adventure. Firmly about the throat with both hands.”
She had no idea why his words should create an erotic shiver inside of her.
She had no idea how she so readily identified it as an erotic shiver, given that her life had been void of those.
But the minute that she had met him, it had been like colliding with the inevitability of all that she had been missing out on.
She was, frankly, trapped with a man who exuded the kind of sexual temptation that she had never once been exposed to.
Like being tossed into the sea to learn how to swim, rather than being able to slowly get her feet wet in the kiddie pool.
It would be a terrible shame to practice chastity in the face of our inevitable demise…
She shut that off. The man was…injured. She had no call objectifying him so. Though, he had sort of objectified himself, in truth.
Angrily, she stepped out of the plane, and watched as he leaned forward, planting one pole down in the snow, and then another, before using the entirety of his upper-body strength to vault himself out of the plane, and land on one foot.
“Thank you,” he said. “This works.”
“Don’t stab yourself through with one,” she called, as he disappeared into the woods. His movements might be slow, but they were deliberate, his coordination unquestionable.
She would’ve said that he was a man who had never done a day’s worth of labor in his life, and yet he seemed at ease with the physicality of what was asked of him now.
He was an enigma.
She decided that she would worry about him in five minutes. And until then, she would focus on the fire.
She went back into the plane and began to scrabble around the different boxes. Inside, she found a lighter. There weren’t even any Girl Scout shenanigans required.
She laughed as she took hold of a flat piece of bark and began to clear snow away to create a bare patch of earth. There, she began to lay out the necessary tinder to get a fire started.
In the plane she found a pot in the cargo, and though she wasn’t entirely sure how she was going to suspend it in the fire, she knew she would figure it out. At this point, things were going shockingly well.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to go looking for him, because he reappeared just as she was trying to decide whether to pause and go after him, or continue on in her fire starting.
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
“I’m never anything but busy.”
“It seems so.”
“Well, what’s the alternative? Sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.”
“I feel like I would be quite good at that.”
He grinned.
Everything about him just then absolutely made a mockery of that. He was standing out there in the snow in what still looked like a very nice suit, cut open, looking quite at ease.
“You are… You are the strangest man that I have ever met.”
“It’s fair, then. Because you’re the strangest woman that I’ve ever met.”
“How am I strange?”
“For a start, I’ve never met a female cargo pilot before.”
“Well. What do you do for work?”
“I invest.”
She snorted. “Don’t even get me started on the stock market. It’s an unnecessary game that we don’t have to play that creates poverty and financial crisis.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And then every corporation has a primary job to their stockholders, it isn’t to their customers or their employees.” She snorted. “Shameful.”
“You’re a very opinionated woman,” he said.
“Show me somebody without opinions and I’ll show you somebody who doesn’t have enough thoughts in their head.”
“Well. Perhaps that’s my problem.” She didn’t believe that either. Whatever he was, it wasn’t honest.
She wasn’t sure why she was so certain of that, but she was.
The man was entirely full of it.
“I’m going to melt some snow. We can’t go eating the snow, or that’s a one-way ticket to hypothermia. I don’t know that this fire is going to be warm enough to sit around to actually…counteract being outside, but… Well, we have it.”
“I’m not going to chance sitting down in the snow,” he said. “I may not get back up. But I would like to stand for a while.”
“The bleeding didn’t continue on?”
“No. The tourniquet and the bandage seem to have helped. But I imagine I should keep my movements to a minimum.”
“Very likely.”
“You look worried.”
“Well, the prospect of infection worries me quite a bit. Not trying to be grim, just…”
“Practical.”
“Practicality is sort of the linchpin of survival, I would say.”
He nodded slowly. “And you don’t find the stock market to be practical.”
“I surely don’t.”
She put some snow into the pot, and held it over the fire. She switched hands back and forth, trying not to scald herself, but the snow melted quickly.
Then she set the pan aside, in the snow, hoping it would cool enough for them to drink quickly.
She lifted the pan to her lips, and drank. “Thankfully,” she said, handing the pan to him, “this will be a renewable resource. For a while.”
“A good thing.”
She looked around. “I’m going to make a way for us to sit around the fire. At least until the wind conditions pick up again. Right now it’s not any cooler out here than it is in the plane.”
She went back inside, and continued to dig through the boxes. There was a camping chair, and then another. More sleeping bags. She went outside and set them up as close to the fire as possible, and he managed to get himself sat down in one. She got sleeping bags, and wrapped one around his shoulders. His mouth turned up into a half smile, and he looked up at her. She was immobilized for a moment by those mesmerizing blue eyes.
“Thank you,” he said. “I can’t recall ever having been cared for quite so nicely. Maybe there was a nanny that I’m struggling to place.”
She felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for him. And also, recognition. It had been a long time since anyone had cared for her, and she missed it. Very much.
She went back inside, and grabbed the meat and cheese they had eaten last night. She speared some of the meat slices on a stick, and held it out over the fire. It might not need to be cooked, but they would both enjoy something warm.
He reached out. “Let me,” he said. She handed him the stick with the meat slices, and he turned his attention to roasting them.
“Do you cook?”
“Not often. I’m busy. And typically have someone do it for me. I make a decent breakfast.” He looked up at her, and grinned.
“Was that supposed to make me think of something?”
“Yes. That I have many women I make breakfast for after entertaining them in my bed.” Her stomach went tense. And then he tilted his head to the side and frowned. “That would be a lie, though. They don’t stay the night. Though I have been known to make an omelet late at night before a woman goes back on her way.”
“You’re not close to anyone in your family, are you?”
His shoulders tensed. “Why?”
“I don’t know. You seem to be suggesting that you have a lot of…liaisons. And I don’t have time for that kind of carry-on. I have a job, I have my sisters, I have my dad. You told me that you have a job. You also told me that your mother left. So…”
“I have my father.”
“Are you…close to him?”
His expression went austere. “We have and always been. We don’t see eye to eye about a great many things. But my father is a good man. He is…unaffected.”
“What do you mean?”
“When my mother left, I was sent into a great and terrible spiral. I was a terribly unpleasant little boy. No one could deal with me. My father, no one on the staff. He would offer increasingly higher amounts of money for people to come and tame me, but nobody could. Eventually, he hired Greta. And Greta was Norwegian, and thought it best to raise children outdoors. She took me to Norway for a while, had me run around among the pines. This is not wholly unfamiliar to me.” He looked up, and around. “Only Greta was able to tame me. And it was by… Not trying to. She was perhaps the last person to truly take care of me. Though she was not a soft touch. Don’t get me wrong. It was not an indulgent sort of care. She denied me, for the first time. I had otherwise never experienced denial. Other than the removal of my mother’s love, of course. Though, I’m not entirely certain that I ever had that.”
“Oh,” she said.
The kind of childhood he spoke of was one filled with the sort of privilege she could only ever imagine. But it was…also sad sounding. It didn’t put her in the mind of happy memories, or ease. She would’ve said that she couldn’t feel sympathy for somebody who was as apparently rich as he was. But in that moment, she did. They ate the roasted meat, and cold cheese. They drank more water, and sat outside until the sky began to darken. There was nothing to do in a situation like this but try to conserve energy. In many ways, they were lucky. They had food. They had a way to make fire. They had supplies, unexpectedly.
“I guess you missed that wedding,” she said, looking up at the stars.
He nodded slowly. “I guess I did.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No matter. Though, I suppose had I made it, I would be dancing there now. Rather than…” He gestured to his leg.
“You certainly can’t dance now.”
“Have you not learned yet the dangers of challenging me?”
A hint of amusement crept into his face.
He gripped the makeshift trekking poles, and propelled himself up out of the chair. Then he let one drop, and extended his hand.
“You have to be joking,” she said.
“No, I am always deadly serious about dancing.”
She was stuck in the middle of the wilderness with the most beautiful man she had ever seen, and he was asking her to dance. She had never been held in a man’s arms before.
It made her feel so many things she hadn’t even considered feeling before, not like this. Not so close, and personal and real. He lit her up inside. Made her feel like a woman in ways she never had before.
What if they did die out here? And when they found them, they were nothing but frozen bones. She would’ve wished that she had danced. She would have wished that she had…
So many things.
So she went to him. In her parka, with him leaning on that pole, and he wrapped his arm around her waist, and held her close. He was still leaning heavily on the pole on his bad side. But his hold was firm, and she found herself shocked yet again by his strength.
She looked up at him, and his eyes were burning now. Or maybe it was just a trick of the firelight.
Her heart beat heavily, a surge of excitement winding through her.
This was ridiculous. And ten kinds of wrong. There was no way that she should be… Caught up in the moment like this. In circumstances.
This wasn’t her. And it wasn’t her life.
And you may never get back to your life.
Eventually they were going to have to make a choice. She was going to have to decide if she wanted to try and hike out of here, or if they should wait where there were supplies. She might die.
It was a very real risk.
And suddenly, who she was seemed so distant. It felt much more real to be this woman. One who didn’t have all these people depending on her. One who was held, warm and secure in a man’s arms.
This was like a dream she had never had before.
One she had never allowed herself. She had let herself believe that her life had to be stark. Spartan.
But it was all a girl like her could have. All she could aspire to. Because she had to work, and work was the most important thing. Because… Because.
And yet right now, she felt alive with possibility. And it almost felt like… She was being given a chance to live. Out here under the clear sky. Out here, where her life might just end.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said.
“The same thing that’s been happening since the moment I set eyes on you,” he said.
“And that is?”
“When two reactionary elements meet. Chemistry.”
“But that doesn’t happen to me,” she said.
“Why not, Stevie?”
“Because I am a cargo pilot. With six sisters and a sick father. Because I am not special. And I never have been.”
“I cannot believe that. That you, standing here, brilliantly alive in the face of all of this, could ever believe that you weren’t special. You are. You are extraordinary. I have said it, and therefore it is true.”
“You’re very arrogant,” she said.
“Yes. A well-documented part of my charm.”
They were odd words. She frowned. “Documented by who?”
“One never really knows.” He brushed past that, and then, brushed her cheek with the back of his knuckles, and that made her forget the words even better than his quick redirect. His hands were warm somehow, in spite of everything. “You don’t have time for liaisons?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Out here we have nothing but time.”
She had never been saving herself for somebody special. But it was pretty miraculous to think she might’ve been saving herself for somebody this hacking gorgeous. Because he was. And yes, he was injured. Yes, they were out in the wilderness. But he was right. If this was it, what was the point? What was the point of restraint?
What had it ever gotten her, in fact?
She was an adventurous spirit. It was why she was a pilot. Well, that and it was an inherited legacy. But she loved it because she liked to take that leap. She liked that moment when she was suspended in the air, and climbing.
That was this. Suspended. In awe of the moment. Of the beauty. That was everything.
He hadn’t even done anything overly intimate, and yet she felt on fire.
She had never been this close to a man.
She didn’t really want to tell him that. She didn’t want to do anything to impact the power of the moment.
He wasn’t taking advantage of her. She was the one taking advantage of this. This moment out of time. This moment where she got to be whoever and whatever she wanted.
This moment where she got to…be free.
Utterly and completely.
She stretched up on her toes, and before her nerve could desert her, she leaned in, and pressed her mouth to his.