Only Mine

by Susan Mallery

  He was sure she’d meant what she’d told him—that she had no expectations. That he could walk away. She would probably draw up one of those agreements where he gave up all rights to the kid and she gave up all rights to financial support. She wouldn’t want him to feel trapped.

  Which should have made him happy. It had taken eight long years, but he was finally exactly where he wanted to be. Free. He could go anywhere, do anything. Hell, if he sold the business to Bill, he would have freedom and cash. Life didn’t get any better than that.

  “I’M FINE,” Dakota insisted, speaking the words for the fourth or fifth hundredth time. “Completely and totally fine.”

  Both her sisters stared at her, as if not convinced. The statement would probably have been a little more believable if her eyes weren’t red and puffy from all her crying. During the day she managed to be brave, but as soon as she was alone at night, she kind of lost it.

  “You’re not fine and you shouldn’t be,” Nevada told her. “You told Finn you loved him and he left. He didn’t say anything, he just walked away. You’re left here, pregnant with his baby and completely alone.”

  “Thanks for the recap,” Dakota murmured. “Now I sound pathetic.”

  “You don’t,” Montana said quickly. “You sound like you’ve been through a lot and you have. You’re strong. You’ll be okay.” She and Nevada exchanged a quick look.

  “What?” Dakota demanded. She wasn’t surprised they’d been talking about her behind her back, but she was concerned that they’d reached a conclusion that hadn’t occurred to her.

  They were at Jo’s bar, with Project Runway playing on the big screen and HGTV on the smaller TVs. Denise had insisted Hannah spend the night, probably to give the sisters time to be alone. As the baby adored her grandmother, Dakota wasn’t worried about her daughter.

  “It’s a big thing, finding out about the baby,” Montana said carefully, as if expecting Dakota to blow up at her.

  “I know that.”

  “He probably needs a little time. You needed time.”

  “I was willing to give him time,” she said, doing her best not to clench her teeth as she clutched her glass of cranberry juice. “This isn’t a time thing. He left. It’s the leaving I object to. He stayed in town after his brothers had moved on right up until I told him I loved him and that I was pregnant. That’s when he walked out. Left for Alaska that night. No call, nothing.”

  She’d never been left before. Not like this. The closest feeling she had was when her dad had died. That, too, had been unexpected. There was no arguing, no bargaining. There was just absence and pain.

  “It’s so like a guy to walk away,” Nevada said. “Now you know he’s that type.”

  “What type?”

  “He disappears rather than faces responsibility. He only cares about himself.”

  Dakota shook her head. “That’s not fair. Finn doesn’t do that. He’s spent the past eight years raising his brothers. He had to give up everything to take care of them.”

  “Look how that turned out,” Nevada muttered.

  “What do you mean? They’re great guys.”

  “One of them wants to be an actor and the other is dating a woman nearly twice his age.”

  Dakota straightened. “That’s not true.”

  “Sasha doesn’t want to be an actor? He didn’t move to L.A., abandoning his college education one semester from finishing?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Nevada shrugged. “You’re better off without him.”

  “No, I’m not.” The unfair assessment startled her. “There’s nothing wrong with Sasha following his dream. Should he have finished college? Maybe. But he can go back later. It’s not going anywhere. As for Aurelia, she’s nine years older than Stephen, as you very well know. She’s sweet and they’re great together. Stephen is going back to college. He’s studying engineering, something you can relate to.”

  She felt herself getting angry. “Where do you get off being so judgmental? Finn is a good man. He’s proven that over and over again. I don’t regret our relationship and I sure as hell don’t need you making unfounded comments about him and his brothers.”

  Nevada picked up her drink and smiled. “Just checking.”

  “Checking what?”

  “To see if you’re still in there.”

  Dakota opened her mouth, then closed it. “What does that mean?”

  “You’re too accepting of this,” Montana said, leaning toward her. “You can’t be happy Finn left, but you’re all Zen about it. What’s up with that? Why didn’t you fight for what you wanted?”

  “Fight? I can’t force him to want to be with me.”

  “No, but there’s a whole ocean between doing nothing and forcing him.”

  Nevada nodded. “Come on. When you wanted to get into that special grad program so you could get your masters and Ph.D. at the same time, did you just put in your application and wait? No. You pestered the department chair until he nearly put a restraining order out on you. When you needed a classroom of kids for your thesis research, you knocked on teachers’ doors for weeks until you found exactly what you were looking for, then you got her to agree.”

  “When you found out you couldn’t have kids without help,” Montana added, “you put in your application for adoption, went through all the studies and home visits and adopted a kid. You do things, Dakota. You’re quiet about it and you don’t expect people to notice, but we do. You’ve always gotten things done. So why are you being so passive now?”

  She felt both praised and scolded. “I’m not being passive. I’m giving Finn time to come to terms with what he wants to do.”

  “What about what you want?” Nevada asked. “Isn’t that important?”

  “Sure, but…”

  “There are no buts,” Montana reminded her. “Remember what Yoda said? ‘Do or do not. There is no try.’”

  “You can sit on your butt and wait for him to decide,” Nevada said. “Or you can take control of your destiny. I know you’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  They both stared at her, eyebrows raised in identical expressions of disbelief.

  She sighed. “I’m a little scared,” she admitted. Confronting Finn did mean taking charge of her life, but it also meant facing the fact that he might tell her he just plain wasn’t interested. That she wasn’t for him.

  She didn’t think he was going to walk away from his child. It might take him a while, but eventually he would show up and want to be a part of his or her life. Finn would be a great father, but was he interested in being a husband?

  “I thought the people on the show were stupid,” she said slowly. “I thought they were desperate and that I should feel sorry for them. But they were simply looking to fall in love. Something nearly everyone wants. At least they did something about it. What have I done?”

  She half expected her sisters to defend her, but they were both silent. Talk about truth in communication, she thought, both bemused and a little hurt. Then she reminded herself that it didn’t matter what anyone thought but her and Finn. They were the ones this was all about.

  She knew what she wanted. She wanted a happily-ever-after kind of ending with the man she loved. She wanted to marry him and raise children with him. She wanted a house full of kids and dogs, with a cat or two and carpooling and soccer practice. She wanted a little of what her parents had, with a twist that made it all their own.

  But what did Finn want? She knew that eventually he would figure it out and tell her. But was giving him the time he needed being mature or being afraid?

  He’d heard her say that she loved him and that she was pregnant, but she’d never had the chance to tell him the rest of it. About how she saw their future and that being responsible wasn’t all bad. There were many wonderful rewards.

  “I’m not going to wait,” she said as she slid out of the booth. “I’m going to South Salmon to talk to him.”

  “There’s an Ala
ska Airlines flight out of Sacramento at six in the morning,” Nevada told her. “You connect with the flight to Anchorage in Seattle.” She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it over. “I made a reservation earlier. You can pay for it when you get to the airport.”

  Dakota couldn’t believe it. “You planned this?”

  “We hoped,” Montana told her. “We were also arguing with Mom about who gets Hannah tomorrow night.”

  Dakota felt tears filling her eyes, but for the first time in days, her crying wasn’t about being sad or having lost what mattered most. She waved her sisters out of the booth, then hugged them.

  “I love you,” she said as she held them close.

  “We love you, too,” Nevada told her. “Warn Finn that if he’s an idiot, we’ll send all three of our brothers after him. He can run, but he won’t be able to hide forever.”

  Dakota laughed.

  Montana kissed her cheek. “We’ll keep it all together here. Don’t worry. Just go find Finn and drag his butt back here.”

  “COIN TOSS?” Bill asked.

  Finn stared out the office window. The first storm had blown through, but there had been a second one behind it. This one was bigger and headed directly for South Salmon.

  Storms out here weren’t like those down in the lower forty-eight. They were a lot less polite and plenty more destructive. Normally all flights would have been grounded, but a call had come through from a desperate father. His sick child needed to be flown out as soon as possible. The medical planes were all out on other calls. No one else could get there.

  Now dark clouds rose fifty or sixty thousand feet into the heavens. There were wind shears and flashes of lightning. Flying in something like that was like daring the hand of God.

  “I’ll go,” Finn said, grabbing his backpack and walking toward the parked planes. “Radio the family that I should be there in about three hours. Maybe a little longer.”

  “You can’t go around the storm.” It was too big. There was no “around.”

  “I know.”

  Bill grabbed his arm. “Finn, wait. We’ll give it a few hours.”

  “Does that kid have a few hours?”

  “No, but…”

  Finn knew the argument. People who chose to live outside the civilized world risked situations just like this. Most of the time, the gamble paid off. Every now and then, fate exacted a price.

  “That kid isn’t going to die on my watch,” Finn said.

  “You don’t owe them anything.”

  He owed them trying. That’s what this job meant to him. Sometimes you had to take a risk.

  He crossed to the plane and walked around the outside. The preflight routine was something he could do in his sleep, but today he took extra time. The last thing he needed was a mechanical problem complicating an already difficult situation.

  By the time he was ready to take off, the first fingers of the storm were trying to grab him. Wind gusted and there were raindrops on his windshield.

  The problem wasn’t the flight out. He would be heading away from the storm. It was getting to Anchorage that was going to be the trick.

  Six hours later, he knew he was going to die. The parents and the kid were in the plane, the worried father next to him, the mother sitting next to her son. The winds were so strong, the plane seemed to be standing still instead of moving forward. They were buffeted and tossed. A few times they were caught in a small wind shear and dropped a few hundred feet.

  “I’m going to be sick,” the mother called to him.

  “Bags are next to the seat.”

  Finn couldn’t take the time to show her. Not when all their lives depended on him getting them safely landed.

  Despite the fact that it was afternoon, the sky was black as night. The only illumination came from the lightning strikes. Wind howled like a monster out to get them, and Finn had a feeling that this time the storm might win.

  He watched his warning lights, checked the altimeter and made sure they were on course. Without wanting to, he found himself mentally drifting to another flight very much like this one. A flight that had taken his parents and changed his world.

  There’d been a storm, dark and powerful. The lightning had flashed around them, dangerous shards of destruction. Finn remembered one cutting so close, he’d been able to feel the heat. He’d been flying, his father in the copilot’s seat. The wind had growled and thrown them around like a kid with a softball.

  They’d swooped and bucked, and then a single flash of light had hit their engine. The plane had shuddered as the engine was fired into a useless molten part, and the plane had dropped like a rock.

  There’d been no controlling the descent. It had been too dark to know where to land, assuming there had been somewhere safer than the forest where they’d crashed. Finn didn’t remember much about the impact. He’d awakened to find himself lying on the ground, in the rain.

  His parents had both been unconscious. He’d cared for them as best he could, then he’d hiked out to get help. By the time he returned, they were gone. They’d probably died within an hour of his leaving, but he didn’t like to think about that.

  Lightning flashed next to the plane, jerking Finn back to the present. The mother screamed. The boy was probably terrified but too sick to make a sound. Next to Finn, the father clutched his seat.

  No one asked if they were going to die, although he was sure they were thinking the question. Probably praying. Finn waited for a sense of regret, a voice that said nothing was worth this, that he should have waited.

  And then he felt it. A sense of something other than himself. Even though he knew it was impossible, he would swear his parents were there with him, helping him. It was as if someone else took control of the plane, guiding his hands.

  Not knowing what else to do, he listened to the silence, turning left, then right, dodging lightning and the wind shears, finding the calmest part of the storm. He flew lower when the invisible forces indicated he should, veered left, then up.

  For the next hour he flew as he’d never flown before, and gradually the power of the storm faded. Fifty miles outside of Anchorage, he saw the first hint of sunlight. A voice from the control tower crackled in his headset.

  They landed less than thirty minutes later. An ambulance was waiting to race the boy and his family to the hospital. At the last second, the father turned back to him.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” the man said, shaking his hand. “I thought we were going to die. You saved us. You saved him.”

  Then he was running after his wife and climbing into the back of the ambulance.

  Finn stood by his plane and watched the sun break through the clouds. Automatically, he checked the plane. Everything was fine. There wasn’t a single mark to indicate what they’d been through. He climbed back inside, knowing whatever he was looking for wasn’t there.

  Maybe it had been his parents, maybe it had been something else. Flying was like boating. If a man did it long enough, he experienced things that couldn’t be explained. For whatever reason, he’d been spared the night of the crash. He’d always thought it was to raise his brothers, but maybe there was another purpose. Maybe he’d been saved so that he could find his way to Dakota.

  He loved her. Having to go through a near-death experience to figure that out made him an idiot, but he could live with that. As long as at the end of the day he got the chance to tell her.

  He loved her. He wanted to marry her and have lots of babies with her. Hell, he needed to call Hamilton and tell the old coot he wanted to buy the business. Then he should let Bill know he was selling. Most important, he had to get back to Fool’s Gold and tell Dakota how much he loved her and wanted to be with her.

  He pulled out his cell phone and called Bill.

  “I’ve been worried,” his partner said. “I had to hear it from the tower that you arrived? You couldn’t call?”

  “I’m calling.”

  “You’ve been on the grou
nd ten minutes. What have you been doing? Shopping?”

  Finn chuckled. “Getting my passengers into the ambulance. Look, Bill, I’m out. You can buy me out of the business. I have to go back to Fool’s Gold right away.”

  “This is about that woman, isn’t it?”

  Finn thought of Dakota and grinned. “Yeah. I’m going to figure out how to convince her to marry me.”

  There was a pause, then Bill said, “She’s going to be really happy to hear that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s standing right next to me. If her smile is anything to go by, I’m going to guess she’ll say yes.”

  DAKOTA USED binoculars to scan the sky. Bill had told her in which direction to look, and when she saw the tiny speck of a plane appear, she began to jump up and down.

  Finn landed and guided the plane off the runway. She was already running toward him.

  They met on the grass by the tarmac. While there were a thousand things she had to say, right now she only wanted to be in his arms. Then she was, and he was holding her and kissing her and nothing had ever felt so right.

  “I love you,” he told her, then kissed her. “I love you, Dakota. You and Hannah and our unborn baby. I should have told you that before.”

  She was so happy, she wasn’t sure she even needed to breathe. “You needed time.”

  “I got scared and then I took off.” He cupped her face in his hands. “I want to marry you. I want us to be a family.”

  She searched his face. “Even though that means a lot of responsibility?”

  He nodded, then kissed her again. “Who am I kidding? I was born to be responsible.”

  “You were a wild guy.”

  “For about fifteen minutes. I want to be with you.”

  Beautiful, amazing words, she thought happily. Perfect words, from the man who was exactly right for her.

  “I love you, too,” she whispered.