by JoAnn Ross
Finn
7 Brides for 7 Brothers
JoAnn Ross
Also Available
7 Brides for 7 Brothers
Luke: Barbara Freethy (#1)
Gabe: Ruth Cardello (#2)
Hunter: Melody Anne (#3)
Knox: Christie Ridgway (#4)
Max: Lynn Raye Harris (#5)
James: Roxanne St. Clair (#6)
Finn: JoAnn Ross (#7)
Copyright © 2016 by Castlelough Publishing, LLC
Kobo Edition
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
“Carry Me Home” copyright 2016 by Jaspar Lepak Music
This is a work of fiction. The characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation to anyone bearing the same name or names. All incidents are pure invention and any resemblance to actual persons, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Also Available
Copyright Page
About the Book
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Other Books from JoAnn Ross
About The Author
Meet the Brannigan brothers—seven sexy brothers who bring the heart and the heat! From bestselling authors Barbara Freethy, Ruth Cardello, Melody Anne, Christie Ridgway, Lynn Raye Harris, Roxanne St. Claire and JoAnn Ross comes a brand-new contemporary romance family series: 7 Brides for 7 Brothers. You won’t want to miss a single one!
FINN – JoAnn Ross
Finn Brannigan has a need for speed. Fast cars, fast jets, and the fast life that comes with being a TOPGUN aviator. He’s flying missions over Afghanistan when his media mogul father dies unexpectedly, leaving Finn an airline in the wilds of the Alaskan wilderness. Which is a cool surprise, though he hasn’t a clue what he’s supposed to do with three small planes half a world away.
After escaping death—not once, but twice—Finn leaves the Navy and heads north to the Last Frontier to escape the world. But his planned isolation is blown to bits when he flies a runaway bride to her planned honeymoon cabin located in his remote mountain town of Caribou. As the short Alaskan summer spins out, Finn finds himself wanting to slow the days down and savor every delicious moment with the free-spirited singer/songwriter who’s made him feel alive again.
Tori Cassidy has had it with dishonest, cheating playboys. Alaskan bush pilot Finn Brannigan is exactly the kind of man she can envision building a life with. Hardworking. Honest. Ordinary. There’s just one problem: Finn is lying about who he really is.
Dedication
To the amazingly talented Jaspar Lepak, who not only wrote a beautiful song for Tori, but was also a joy to work with.
“Escape may be checked by land and by water, but the air and the sky are free.”
Daedalus to Icarus
“You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.”
Amelia Earhart
1
Finn Brannigan had a need for speed. Fast cars, fast jets, and the fast life that came with being a naval aviator, the smallest, most elite—to his mind—club in the military. Which explained why he was about to commit a controlled crash, in the blackass dead of night, onto the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier after completing a bombing run of terrorist targets over Afghanistan.
A carrier landing was one of the most incredible rushes ever. But any pilot who didn’t admit that a night one—significantly called a trap—out in the middle of a black ocean on a moonless night was also the most terrifying was flat-out lying.
It was like wearing a blindfold while flying through a bottle of ink dropped into the middle of a black hole, and all Finn had to do was pass over the ship, bank, pull off a three-to four-G high-level turn before bringing his jet in at full speed, hooking an arresting cable set four inches off the rolling, pitching deck that was running away from him.
Piece of cake, right?
Wrong.
Missing in any direction could not only mean the end of an aviator’s career, it could prove fatal. Which was how Finn came to be sleeping in the rack of a guy who’d come up short and slammed his F/A-18 Hornet into the back of the USS O’Halloran.
As he approached the boat (and yeah, maybe sailors called the flattop a ship, but to aviators, anything that floated was a boat), Finn’s heart kicked into high gear. Which was par for the course, since it had been proven aviators’ pulse and blood pressure readings were higher when they were speeding up behind the carrier, preparing to snag one of four deck cables than while dodging surface-to-air missiles or flying in areas patrolled by enemy aircraft.
The weather had gotten worse. The blackened sea was pitching like crazy and the crosswinds had kicked up. Unfortunately, since they were too far out to sea to divert planes to the nearest bingo field—Navy speak for an alternate carrier land runway—he didn’t have any other choice than to pull this landing off.
As he touched down onto the slanted deck hard enough to destroy lesser planes, Finn pushed the Hornet to full throttle, keeping power to become airborne in the off chance he missed a cable. Given that arrested landings were the most dangerous part of a dangerous business, even the best pilots could fly perfectly good aircraft into the sea.
He snagged the fourth and final cable and prepared his body for the shock of going from one hundred and fifty-five knots to a complete stop in under two seconds.
But the familiar, welcome jerk that would slam his body against the five-point harness with a force that had all his internal organs and head continuing to rush forward didn’t happen. Instead, the jet merely slowed down and, as sailors scrambled for safety, careened down the landing deck. And if that weren’t effed up enough, the drop in speed from having snagged the cable wouldn’t allow Finn enough thrust to take off again. Which gave him seconds to eject.
Or…
There was one other possibility. Crazy, reckless, and perhaps suicidal.
Hell, like the Boss sang, no retreat, no surrender.
Deciding to go the fuck for broke, instead of hitting the eject button, Finn hung on and rode his fighter jet off the edge of the deck.
2
Ten months later
Caribou, Alaska
For as far back as he could remember, flying had been Finn Brannigan’s life. His older brothers still occasionally ragged him about having slept with toy planes when he was a toddler, and when other kids were coloring dinosaurs and houses with smiley suns, he’d been drawing pictures of Navy Phantoms and Tomcats.
During his years landing his F-18 Hornet onto carrier flight decks, Finn had had neither the time nor inclination to settle down with a wife, two-point-five kids, and a house with a
picket fence. Like his former old-school TOPGUN commander had decreed, if the Navy had intended a naval aviator to have a spouse, they damn well would have issued him one.
During the past year, as if they’d all come down with the same virus, his six older brothers were now in committed relationships with their women. Hell, real estate tycoon Gabe had even gotten himself hitched! Fortunately, Finn had been inoculated against love at an early age.
Although Luke, Knox, and Max would probably never be entirely domesticated, from what he was able to tell, their lives had gotten a helluva lot more settled. And, hooyah for them, happier. But he still had every intention of remaining the last single Brannigan brother standing.
Colin Brannigan hadn’t been military, but he might as well have been, given how much time he’d spent away from home running his media empire. Finn couldn’t count the number of family events the old man had missed. Including both his and his brother Luke’s twenty-first birthdays. At least he’d been away from the Naval Academy on a summer warship aviation training cruise. Not that he’d given a damn about whether or not the man even remembered his birthday. His assistant had, however, dutifully sent a snazzy, store-wrapped Burberry scarf, which would’ve gotten him thrown overboard if he’d dared shown up wearing it on a flight deck.
Luke, on the other hand, had been stood up at the restaurant after having been invited to a rare celebratory dinner. After a long wait, their father’s assistant had called with the news (big effing surprise) that Colin had been called away on business, leaving the bartender to pour the traditional coming-of-age Bushmills 21. The first of many glasses, from what Finn had been able to tell after his brother had called, drunk and majorly pissed off. But, he’d sensed, deeply disappointed.
Growing up watching his older brothers’ complex family relationships, Finn had long ago decided that he had it easier. His memories of his pretty blond mother were fleeting and vague, and except for one memorable week-long trip with Colin to Alaska the summer Finn turned thirteen, his father had always been a distant, absent parent.
All that, along with knowing that he’d only been conceived as a final, last-ditch attempt to have the daughter his mother had always wanted, had taught Finn an early life lesson: it was easier to keep from being wounded if he avoided emotional entanglements in the first place.
He had come close once. He’d thought. Maybe. But the woman in question hadn’t stuck around long enough to find out. Which was probably just as well.
After the initial shock, Finn hadn’t been all that surprised that his father had kept his fast-moving cancer a secret from all his sons. The media mogul had always lived his life to suit himself, so it fit his personality to go out the same way.
Finn had been stunned, however, to discover that he’d inherited Osprey Air, the three-plane airline in the remote town of Caribou, Alaska, he’d flown on during that trip with his dad. The highlight of the week had been when Mike Muldoon, the pilot/owner, had let him take the yoke as they’d soared over the craggy, snowy peaks of the central Alaska Range.
He’d learned of his father’s death after that near carrier crash that, unfortunately, would probably remain on the Navy’s YouTube channel forever. Hell, if he hadn’t been the one in the cockpit having to pull off a maneuver that would go viral, he would’ve thought it cool to watch. Insane. But nevertheless cool.
His last-second decision, since ejecting at such a low altitude would’ve probably gotten him killed and sent his jet back to the taxpayers in pieces, had been to allow the plane to go ahead and fall toward the water, which, theoretically, should cause it to pick up speed. Fortunately, physics, and all the fates, had aligned, allowing him to go full throttle, fly back up again, and keep circling until the crews could clear the deck of debris and any injured from the cable snap. Then he’d landed again, this time snagging the second hook, leaving the third still available, just in case.
Once he’d been through the critique in the Ready Room and had been both sharply and loudly dressed down for the risk and complimented for pulling it off by his LSO, still too wired to sleep, he’d gone to the computer lab to check his email. Not that he’d expected any.
His family was a long way from the Waltons. The Brannigan brothers’ email chain was a running joke, though he did occasionally receive extreme videos from Luke, who made big bucks in endorsements and those films. Finn had been hoping for one that night.
No such luck. Instead, the only thing in his inbox had been an email from his aunt Claire, which seemed a little odd since the weekly ones she’d always written while he was deployed usually showed up on Saturdays. The Your Father subject line also hadn’t been encouraging. Although Finn and his father had never been close, news of his death had made an already sucky day even worse.
Nine months after receiving the email, after surviving being shot down by a surface-to-air-missile and spending two high-stressed nights in the Kush Mountains before being rescued by a team of kick-ass SEALs, he’d separated from the Navy and claimed his out-of-the-blue inheritance.
For the past month, instead of oceans and war-torn landscapes, he’d soared like an eagle over a vast, spectacular land that, from the air, looked like a three-dimensional Alaskan tourist bureau postcard. The snow-peaked mountains, dominated by Denali, were nothing short of majestic. And then there were the endless lakes. If Minnesota was the land of ten thousand lakes, which a pilot on his last carrier cruise had insisted, Alaska had to be the land of ten million lakes.
After taking a morning run along the lake the house he’d also inherited was situated on, he strolled into the office of Osprey Air, where Mary Muldoon had his daily flight schedule waiting for him. Mary was the widow of the pilot who’d taken him on those memorable flights so many years ago, and as far as anyone in the town of Caribou knew, she was still the owner. Finn was already a cheechako, a newcomer. No way did he want to show up in town as the guy who’d stolen a widow’s livelihood out from under her.
After spending too many years trying avoid the media spotlight that followed Colin Brannigan around, Finn also intended to figuratively fly under the radar. The summer he’d come up here with his dad, he’d discovered Colin had used his wife’s maiden name—Hayes—as an alias. He’d been surprised to discover that the high-profile media mogul occasionally just wanted to be seen as a regular guy. The way Finn did.
Even when his dad built the largest home in the valley—which wasn’t nearly as expansive as the Calabasas ranch house the family called home—residents had merely viewed him as another rich guy who’d come to the last frontier for a remote getaway. To their minds, everyone in the lower forty-eight would probably love to do the same thing if they could afford it.
Then there was the third, most important reason Finn had kept the legacy secret. Having spent too many years crammed into four-bunk quarters on a carrier, and having escaped death not just once but twice, he wanted to be left alone and savor the peace and quiet. Fortunately, along with keeping track of the schedules, accounting books, and payroll, Mary actually enjoyed chatting with people.
When Finn had first learned of his inheritance, he’d tried to sign it over to her, but she’d refused, insisting that his father had obviously intended for him to have it, so who was she to argue with a man’s last wishes? As far as he was concerned, she might not be the owner, but she was the boss. And his ego didn’t have a problem with that.
“Good morning!” Her smile was, as always, as wide as a half-moon. Although it wasn’t yet seven in the morning, long black hair streaked with silver was already tumbling from a messy bun atop her head. “You’ve got a party of two on a flight out of Anchorage,” she said, handing him a Thermos of steaming coffee. The woman brewed a better joe than he’d ever gotten from the carrier mess, which had gained a Starbucks before his last cruise.
“They’re not taking the train or bus?”
Tourists took over Caribou in the summer, coming up to visit Denali National Park, hike, fish, and just soak in the magnificence
of nature. Many came to attempt to climb the highest mountain in North America, and Osprey Air made a good living catering to all of them. But Finn had yet to run into any tourist who’d actually ponied up the big bucks to fly here from Anchorage.
“The guy’s on his honeymoon, so I guess he wants to spare no expense to impress his bride.”
“Seems there are a lot better ways to impress your bride on a honeymoon than throw around money,” he said.
“It’s been fifty some years since my wedding night, but I’d have to agree with you on that.” She handed him the clipboard with the name and flight from Seattle’s arrival time.
“Carter George Covington IV?”
“Yeah. It’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Seems the family isn’t exactly known for originality when it comes to naming their kids.”
“The Covingtons are big on tradition. And status.”
She lifted a brow. “Sounds like you know of them.”
“They own Covington Cruise Lines out of L.A. As well as a bunch of hotels. I don’t know them well, but they’d show up at my family’s annual Christmas open house. Carter’s a few years older than me, but he was a bratty kid who, last time I saw him, had grown into a dick of a teenager.”
“Small world,” she said.
“Tell me about it. Dad must have mentioned flying Osprey on his trips up here to Carter III, which was probably how we got to be the lucky ones IV chose.” Finn couldn’t keep the distaste from his voice.
“You want me to give the flight to Yazz?” Jim Yazzie was a native Alaskan who’d flown jets for the Air Force before returning to his hometown to fly for Osprey.
“Nah. He said something about a cousin’s birthday.” Which, given the size of the Yazzie family, could include half the town. “I don’t mind taking it.”
