CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
Two hours earlier
Stevie Parker was cold and annoyed. The longer her takeoff was delayed, the more money she was losing. She needed to get this cargo over to the East Coast. If she didn’t, she wasn’t going to get paid, and if she didn’t get paid then it was going to be another very long winter.
When storms disrupted things half the time, and there was no way for her to get paid if she wasn’t actually making her deliveries, it was a recipe for disaster.
Her dad couldn’t work anymore. His liver was shot, and he was barely hanging on.
Things weren’t getting any cheaper. Inflation was making it impossible to feed her family.
She sighed heavily.
She loved her sisters. Every last one of them. All six of them.
But their household was an expensive one, and everybody else was still in school.
And Stevie wanted them to finish school. She didn’t want them to end up like her. Not that she didn’t enjoy her life. She loved piloting. Flying planes was the closest thing to being free as far as she was concerned. And she really valued that freedom.
But taking over her father’s shipping company had been a necessity rather than a dream, and while it was something she loved, if she’d had the whole world of choices in front of her…who knew what she’d have done?
It didn’t matter. She did love to fly.
For a few blessed hours at a time, she was flying above her problems. Flying above everything. Stevie might never be a powerful or important person in the world, but she had the ability to escape in a way most people didn’t.
She valued that. She appreciated that ability in herself.
She thought that she was pretty amazing actually. Though, with her flight grounded, she wasn’t feeling particularly amazing.
It was freezing in Bozeman, and only getting colder.
Her only hope was that there was a small break in the wind so that she could take off. And as soon as she got the all clear, she was going. She meandered into the bar, and took off her puffer jacket. Her ponytail snagged in the hood, and she wrinkled her nose. She tried to fix her hair as she walked up to the bar.
“Hey, Stevie,” said Frank, the bartender.
“Hey. Can I get a coffee?”
“You think you’re going to fly out?”
“As soon as the wind breaks. If they let me take off I’m going to. I’ve got a get this cargo to Boston.”
She was pretty sure that the final destination for the gear she was carting was Martha’s Vineyard. Very fancy. Some royal wedding.
“Well, be safe. It’s nasty out there.”
“Nasty doesn’t worry me. Not making my deliveries worries me.”
And that was when she saw him. Sitting in the back of the bar, in a corner booth, black hair pushed back off of his forehead, a large hand wrapped around a glass of whiskey.
He was looking at her. Right at her. His gaze was intense, and it made her want to turn away from him.
But she found she was unable to. All she could do was stare.
She swallowed hard.
The bartender looked at her, and then raised his eyebrows. “He’s been here for hours,” he said. “Not the usual clientele.”
“No.” She sighed. “He wouldn’t be.”
“Wonder what his story is.”
She tore her gaze away from the stranger. “I don’t have time to wonder about things like that.”
Her phone buzzed. A notification letting her know that the blanket grounding all flights had been lifted for now.
“I gotta go.”
She knocked her coffee back and turned away from the stranger. She slipped her coat back on as she walked through the terminal, headed toward the corridor that would take her outside to where her plane was parked.
“Stop.”
The voice was commanding. Deep. And she found herself agreeing, even if she couldn’t figure out why. She turned slowly. It was him.
“I’m in a hurry,” she said.
“And so am I. You said that you were headed to Boston?”
His words were faintly accented, but she couldn’t quite place what the accent might be. He was… He was stunningly handsome. She’d never seen a man like him.
His skin was olive, his hair black. His eyes a crystalline blue. His jaw was square, and his nose a straight blade. His lips were… She couldn’t recall ever looking at a man’s lips before but she was captivated by his. He looked familiar. Vaguely. But she couldn’t quite place him. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn that he was famous. The black suit that he wore fit him exquisitely. And it looked like it cost more money than she had ever made her life.
“Yes. I’m going to Boston. I have a cargo plane.”
“I need to get to Boston.”
“Sorry, but don’t you have a private jet?”
“I do,” he said. “Did you think that I might fly commercial?”
“I don’t know. But I have a very short window to get out of here, and I need to take it.”
“And I will go with you.”
She stared at him. “You won’t.”
“Yes, I will. I will pay you handsomely.” He named a figure that just about knocked her back. She wouldn’t have to worry about money for a year if he paid her that much. It was… It was ridiculous. Obscene.
“You have to be kidding.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“How do I know?”
“What’s the worst that could happen? You have an extra passenger on your flight.”
“You might assault me.”
“Midair? That would turn out badly for me, I think.”
“Unless you’re a hijacker, and you know how to fly the plane.”
“If I could fly my own plane, then believe me when I tell you I would be flying a very different plane out of here.”
“Why do you need to get there so badly?”
“Trying to get to a wedding. It would be a bad look to miss it.”
He was certainly dressed smart enough to be attending a wedding. He could go in the back with her actual wedding delivery, and her other cargo.
“All right. Come with me. But I doubt you’re going to find the seating arrangements to your liking.”
“Well, sleeping rough is definitely not my first choice, but things happen. And I have lived a life filled with unpredictable turns of events. I think this will hardly feel like a singular event.”
“Not to me it won’t,” she said. “This is my day-to-day. You don’t have a parka?”
“No. Why?”
“You better brace yourself.”
She couldn’t help but laugh as she opened the door to the walkway, where it was already bitingly cold.
The glass corridor shielded them from the wind, and the other more aggressive part of the elements, but not from everything else. And when they stepped through the entryway that would take them out to the plane, the wind was like knives.
Though he did not react. Did not buckle.
Strange. Because it was freezing.
“Come on,” she shouted over the roar of the wind. She got into the cockpit, and then walked over the seats and into the main part of the plane. She opened the door there, and yelled down below. “Climb on in. You’re getting added to my cargo.”
He got into the plane, and looked around. It was sparse. There was a chair that faced sideways next to all the cargo. And then there was her seat up in the cockpit. There was a copilot seat, but she would not be inviting a stranger to sit up there with her.
“Have a seat.”
She did her preflight checks, including looking at her report from the mechanic and making sure everything checked out as being in good order. She signed off on the report, and passed it out of the cockpit to the bundled-up man standing on the tarmac.
“What are you transporting?” her passenger asked.
“A few things.” She did a physical check of the instruments and waited for her all clear from the tower.
“Your box says wedding.”
“Yeah. Some royal shindig out at Martha’s Vineyard? I don’t know. I’ve got flowers I think. On ice. Not that we’re short on ice.”
“True,” he said. “You don’t recognize me?”
“Do you recognize me ?”
He lifted a brow. “Should I?”
“Not any more than I should recognize you, I reckon. Unless we met and I don’t remember. I do meet a lot of people in my line of work.”
“We haven’t met.”
“All right, then.”
“What’s your name?”
“Stevie,” she said. “Buckle up. I gotta get going. We’ve only got a small break in the weather here, and I gotta get up above these mountains.”
“All right.”
He sat down.
Right then, she got the go-ahead from the tower.
“Buckle,” she ordered.
“As you wish.”
He did.
She engaged the engines, and the propellers began to turn.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “Going to be rough.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
The casual vernacular sounded strange with his accent.
“I don’t want a lawsuit on my hands or anything.” The plane began to trundle down the runway, and Stevie felt a kick of adrenaline. She flew almost every day, but the rush of knowing that she was going to make it out of here, the triumph of having defeated the storm, gave her a slightly spicy feeling at the moment.
“Here we go.” They picked up speed, the wind pushing them along, turning them into an icy bullet as they shot down the runway, and began to achieve liftoff.
And then, they were airborne.
And it was as bumpy as she had feared.
They jostled around like they were on a road filled with potholes, as she pulled back and increased the altitude. The snowy mountains around them were majestic. Glorious.
She loved to fly.
She checked her radar and frowned. There was some rough weather up ahead as they headed east. But it seemed like once they cleared the mountains it settled down.
They were still climbing toward altitude, still getting jostled. She looked back at her fancy passenger. He had a sort of grim, stoic look on his handsome face.
She bet that this was a whole different way to travel than he was used to.
She snorted, and carried right on.
When they made altitude, things settled down a little bit.
She checked her instruments, and began to relax. Settled in for the flight. It was so loud in this tin can there was no making conversation. But she wasn’t regretful about that.
Picking up the passenger while she was flying cargo was one of the weirder things that had ever happened to her. But it really hadn’t made any sense to leave him behind. He had a wedding to get to.
She blinked. That was odd. A wedding. She was transporting goods for a wedding. Maybe he was attending that wedding. Of course it would attract very rich guests.
But then, he hadn’t said anything when she had commented. But she could definitely tell he was kind of a whole thing.
She didn’t have time to think about that. Or worry about it.
She just had to keep on flying.
But then suddenly, her instruments dipped, revived and dipped again.
She’d never seen that happen before. She’d heard about it, in training, of course, but she hadn’t actually experienced it. She tried to keep her cool. She looked out at the horizon, and could see nothing but white. They were socked in. She needed her instruments to tell her where she was. She couldn’t rely on sight, not in weather like this.
She swallowed hard, and tried to get a gauge for what was going on. Her altimeter was still working, and she wondered if she could navigate to a different airfield…
But then, the altimeter went out too.
“Oh, no.”
She started flipping switches. It was a catastrophic electrical failure.
And she couldn’t panic. Because she was the one in charge.
It hit her then, quite bitterly, that that was the story of her life.
She supposed she could have emotions when she was dead.
Her heart hammered as she tried to clear her mind and focus on the task at hand.
She had a backup engine, but she did not have backup instruments. And the power source that was supposed to engage in case of any problems wasn’t working.
She looked down below, and her heart started to pound. There was one vaguely clear spot that she could see coming up ahead. And if she used her knowledge, and general take of the area, it was possible that she could land.
But she was afraid that if she kept on flying eventually they were going to come into regrettable contact with the mountainside. If she died, her family was doomed. Her chest locked tight, and she began to tremble. But she couldn’t lose her cool. She could not afford to. Panic filled her but she didn’t let it win. Slowly, she began to push down, maneuvering them down, steadily. She kept her eyes out the windshield, her vision their only hope, her experience their only guide.
She was twenty-five. She’d been flying planes for four years. But it was always something she felt like had been in her blood. Something innate. Her dad had done it. Before he had been deemed unfit.
Her dad.
Her chest clenched tight. She had to do this.
She had to.
She gripped the yoke hard and pushed down, bringing them lower and lower, and she turned around just briefly to take a look at her passenger, who was beginning to undo his buckle, his expression one of concern. “Stay buckled,” she shouted. And then, she lost control. A thermal shot up, and rocked the plane, and suddenly, she found herself disoriented. And the descent became bumpy.
She wanted to close her eyes. She wanted to shield herself from the reality of what was happening. She had to keep them open. She was the one in charge.
She was the one that was going to keep them alive.
An echo of her life these last few years.
And all she could think was that it really would’ve been nice at one point to have somebody who took care of her. Instead, she was going down in a blaze of pointlessness.
Leaving behind seven people who counted on her for their care.
Her dad had always thought it was dumb her mom had died of an illness when he flew cargo planes for a living.
He had always thought it should’ve been him. Flying around in his rattly old contraption that somehow she’d convinced herself was safer now that she was flying it and making sure to dot every i and cross every t before taking off.
But no. Apparently not.
She didn’t even have time to say a prayer, before she realized they were in the tops of the trees. Before the wing clipped a pine, and they went hurtling toward the earth. After that, she didn’t remember a thing.