by Jill Shalvis
“Got me.”
“You okay?”
Noah hadn’t taken his eyes off Bailey. Nor she him. She was taut as a drum and looking more than a little frazzled around the edges. He suspected if he so much as said, “boo,” she’d fall apart. “Always.”
Brody let out a low laugh. “Right. Well, I’ll just put the million-dollar plane away and bill her for the services. For both planes. You know, sometimes, the erratic behavior of the rich and famous really works for me.”
“Yeah.” Noah shut his phone.
Bailey didn’t move.
He gave it a long beat, then straightened to his feet. “I have to tie-down.” He paused, brow arched. “You going to try to stop me with your pen?”
She had the good grace to blush as she rose, too. “No.”
He watched as she pulled a small backpack from beneath the seat in the back. “Are you going to be here when I get back?”
Suddenly, she was very busy playing with the zipper on her backpack.
Jaw tight, he pulled her around to face him. Beneath his fingers, she felt thin. Fragile. What is she going off to face all on her own? “Let me rephrase. Be here when I get back.” He took his hands off her while he still could, gave her one last long look, then exited the plane.
Cold air smacked him in the face. He was in the center of the sharp, craggy Sierras, and at just over six thousand feet altitude, it showed. Piles of fluffy snow lay along the outer edges of the runway, lining the tarmac. The mountains surrounded him in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of jaw-dropping gorgeousness, every one of them white.
Just what he’d come for. Snow, skiing, snow bunnies, beer, sleep. Not a crazy heiress with haunted eyes and a tendency to hold people up with pens.
He handled the tie-down and spoke to a lineman about getting the landing gear fixed, all while keeping an eye on the plane. She was going to bolt, he just knew it.
And sure enough, not sixty seconds later, she came out of the plane as if she owned it. Not as the bag lady she’d been hiding as, but as the gorgeous, swank Bailey Sinclair. The loose sweats were gone. Her head was back, chin high, eyes flashing as though she was queen bee as she carried her bag. She wore designer jeans that fit her like an old friend, fancy boots up to her knees, and a snug, shimmery siren red sweater, all of which screamed class and sophistication. Her hair had been tamed in a sleek ponytail, and she’d put on some gloss that made her mouth look…
He had to tear his gaze off the mouth. It didn’t matter what her lips looked like, or even what they said. He wasn’t buying any story she was selling.
But she wasn’t leaving. Not without some answers.
Maddie had called ahead and ordered fuel and overnight hangar storage for the Piper. She’d also gotten him a Jeep. She had the unique ability to locate anything, obtain it, and have it delivered in a blink, and in the year since they’d started Sky High Air, she’d made herself invaluable to both him and the guys, and also their customers. Now all he needed to do was get into the Jeep and drive off. It was what Bailey wanted him to do.
Too bad he’d never been so good at doing what other people wanted. He strode back toward the Piper and met her just as her expensive boots hit the tarmac.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said, staring at his throat, carefully not meeting his eyes.
How, he wondered, had he ever not known that soft, sweet yet somehow outrageously sexy voice? Her long side bangs blew into her face, and she shoved them free with fingers that had gone white with cold. “I’ll never forget it.”
They had a past, a professional one, and in that past he’d never called her anything but Mrs. Sinclair.
But now they had a decidedly unprofessional past as well, and he couldn’t bring himself to call her Mrs. Sinclair ever again. “Bailey, wait.”
“No, I’ve got to—”
He put his hand on her arm, and she looked at him then, from eyes so filled with worry and fear and terror that he put his other hand on her as well.
He couldn’t say why, but he was not letting her go.
“You turned me in, right?” she whispered. “The police—”
He slowly shook his head.
She just stared at him from wide eyes. “Why?”
“Why what?”
A shudder wracked her frame, and he didn’t blame her. It was butt-ass cold. “Why didn’t you turn me in?” she asked.
Hell if he knew. Maybe he was just thrown by the circumstances, the coincidences…maybe it was that in spite of himself, he really was just curious. What threw a poor little rich girl over the edge?
Okay, no. That wasn’t it. He was curious, yes, but he was also…
Concerned.
Sincerely, extremely concerned about her. For some inexplicable reason, he wanted to get to the bottom of this freaked-out, sexy as hell, hurting woman and her problems.
“You could have overpowered me on that plane,” she said as a particularly icy wind blew between them. “I know you could have. If not when you were flying, then when I was.” She hugged herself. “Or on the radio. Or on the cell phone. Or a million other times. You could have easily given me away, but you didn’t.”
He had to shove his hands in his pockets rather than stroke her bangs out of her face—what the hell was that?
She wrapped her arms around her waist. “So why didn’t you?”
“I have no idea.” But he did.
She was freezing, and so was he, which was stupid. He grabbed his duffle bag, then hers, and led them both off the tarmac, toward the rented and waiting Jeep, where she dug her heels into the crunchy snow and balked.
“I don’t need a ride,” she said.
“No? So your plan was to get here, to the airport, then freeze to death? That’s why you hijacked me?”
She looked away.
“Truth, Bailey. You owe me that.”
“Okay, truth. The truth is you have to get far, far away from me. I mean it. I’m like a bad luck charm. Trust me. Being with me, here, is going to get you hurt.” She swallowed. “Or worse.”
He stared at her as that soaked in. She was trying to protect him? “I’m a big boy,” he assured her. “Just tell me. What are you doing here?”
“I already said. I’m here to pick something up.”
“Fine.” Any second her teeth were going to rattle out of her pretty head. “Get in the Jeep, I’ll drive you to get this ‘something.’”
She pulled out her cell and read a text message.
“What is it?”
She didn’t answer, but thumbed some sort of quick response.
“Bailey—” Knowing she wouldn’t tell him a damn thing, he snatched the phone.
She’d typed: YES, I’M IN ASPEN. HAVE 2 TRY 2 FIND IT.
“Hey!” She grabbed the phone back, hit send, then glared at him.
“Who are you texting with?”
“Kenny.”
Her brother. Okay, but if the guy cared so much, where the hell was he?
Bailey glanced back at the terminal.
“What, you going to go hijack a taxi now?” he asked.
“This isn’t funny.”
“You’re right there. Nothing about this is even remotely funny. You could have gotten into anyone’s plane. Hell, I always assumed you were richer than God himself, so—”
She interrupted him with a harsh laugh as he unlocked the Jeep. He held open the door, the interior light casting her face in bold relief. “You could have gone to any airport,” he said again. “Into any plane, but you got into mine. So now get into my Jeep.”
She stared at him for a long beat, then surprised him by slipping inside. She started to look up at him, but her gaze snagged on a neighboring parked car, a nondescript SUV, and she frowned.
“What?”
“There’s someone in that car watching us,” she whispered.
The SUV started up, but the lights didn’t go on.
Very interesting, he thought. “Why would anyone be watching us?”<
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“Just get in,” she said urgently, sinking low, reaching back for the hood of her soft angora hoodie sweater, putting it on over her hair, and slipping on a pair of wide sunglasses despite the fact that the dusk made them unnecessary. “Please, Noah! Just get in and get us out of here as fast as you can.”
Something had changed in her body language, and since he’d had his gaze pretty much glued to her body nonstop, he couldn’t miss it. Everything had gone rigid, her shoulders, her face, and her hands were white-knuckled on the dash. Most telling, the utter, sheer terror was back. So much so that he took a good long second look at the SUV.
With the sun sinking below the horizon, long shadows cast across the parking lot. He couldn’t see through the windshield to the driver, or if there was a passenger.
But his gut told him there was at least one passenger, and his gut was rarely wrong.
And she was still trying to protect him. Hell if that didn’t sting. He walked around to the driver’s seat, casually but quickly, then started the engine. “Where to?” he asked when he got them on the move.
“Uh…” She was looking in the rearview mirror as he pulled out of the parking lot.
The SUV followed.
Oh, yeah, things just kept getting better and better. “Friends of yours?”
“No.”
“So you have no idea who they are?”
She didn’t look at him. “No.”
Shit. Another omission, he was certain. He turned down a side street.
So did the SUV.
Could be a coincidence. A strange one, but still…. He made another unscheduled turn.
So did the SUV.
“If you don’t know them, why are they following us?” he asked, dividing his attention between the road, the rearview mirror, and Bailey’s very tense face.
She still had white knuckles on his dashboard, neck craned as she watched behind them with a growing expression of dread and renewed fear. “Don’t know.”
Gritting his teeth, he made a quick turn.
And still the SUV kept up with them.
“I don’t suppose calling the police is an option.”
She didn’t say a word to that.
He glanced at her as he pulled out his cell. “Speak up or forever hold your peace.”
“No,” she whispered.
“Even if I leave out the hijacking part?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you might as well just kill me yourself.”
He shot her a look, but she wasn’t kidding.
“Noah, did Sky High Air figure out I wasn’t on that flight to Aspen?”
Noah divided his attention between the rearview mirror and the road, while trying to think with his mind racing at eighty-five miles an hour.
“Noah?”
He glanced at her, knowing the truth was in his eyes, and not sure that he cared.
She just stared at him, horror dawning. “Oh, boy. Well, that’s it then. Now I’ve done it.”
“Done what?”
“Gotten you good as dead, too.”
Chapter 6
Maddie Stone closed down her computer and walked through Sky High Air’s building, turning off lights and making sure everything was shut down for the night to her specs. She had high specs—for herself and everyone else—higher than was asked of her as a concierge and personal assistant to three adventurous, gorgeous rebels.
But she loved it here, loved it more than any job she’d ever held, and she’d held a lot of them, carrying far more experience than any twenty-six-year-old should.
Everyone deserved a second chance, she reminded herself, and that Sky High had given her hers…well, she’d never forget it.
At first she’d found it odd that out of everything she’d done, both legal and not, both good for her and most absolutely not, stuff she was proud of and stuff she’d rather forget, she’d ended up on a private airstrip watching over three of the wildest, most outrageously sexy men on the planet.
But then again, that actually fit.
The four of them fit, a surprising wonder she marveled at every day.
Noah, Shayne, and Brody, three childhood buds in crime, had quite the history together. According to legend—or so Shayne had told her after a few beers one night—they’d met on one fateful day in middle school detention; Shayne having been nailed stealing a chemistry test cheat sheet, Brody for getting caught naked with a girl four years his senior in the supply closet, and Noah, fresh from England, having gotten himself in a fight. The three of them, unlikely friends from entirely different walks of life, had bonded that day over a shared love.
Airplanes.
Maddie had never actually given airplanes much thought, seeing as all her life she’d never been able to afford hopes and dreams. But that had changed.
Thank God that had changed.
Still, she held no illusions. She knew she was different, knew, too, that with her funky, out-there clothes and tendency to change her hair to colors not quite on the chart of acceptability, she didn’t look the part of the concierge. But since the day she’d walked in here and proven herself competent, not a single one of them had ever judged her.
She could love them for that alone.
And she did. She loved the carefree playboy Shayne, the intellectual adventurer Noah Fisher.
Which left Brody.
Did she love the edgy, dangerous, bad boy Brody?
Hard to say, as every time she was anywhere near him she lost control of her thought processes and her body went all tingly and weird.
Pathetic, secretly lusting after one of her bosses. Pathetic, and not going to happen.
Ever.
A thought that Brody seemed to share as well, since he did his best to avoid her. Assuring herself that it didn’t hurt, that it didn’t matter, Maddie lifted her chin and reminded herself that for the most part, men sucked anyway.
Well, except for Shayne and Noah. The two of them had never been anything but kind and wonderful to her, which was why her heart ached for Noah these days. When she’d first begun working here, he’d been quick to smile, fast-witted, and always the center of the fun. A wanderlust at heart, he’d traveled the globe many times over, and was perpetually adventure ready. His zest was intoxicating, and he’d given her a renewed lust for life by just being himself.
She wanted to see him smile again, wanted him to find joy in life and flying and Sky High Air again. Somehow, she had to help him, would help him.
