by Nancy Warren
She was tiring fast. It wasn’t far to the shore but her teeth were chattering and it felt as though she were swimming through icy-cold Jell-O. Every stroke was an effort, and kicking her feet was a monumental task.
“Almost there,” Max yelled to her as though he felt her distress. Probably because he shared it.
She felt herself becoming uncoordinated. Her arms and legs didn’t seem to want to obey her brain.
She could see the shore of the lake but it didn’t feel as though she was getting any closer. Her body felt heavy, made of lead. She was sinking, just like the plane. She coughed as her mouth filled with water.
“You can stand!” a voice yelled at her.
A hand hauled her to her feet. She stumbled, but he was right. She could stand. Max held on to her hand. Half pulled, half dragged her from the water and onto the shore. She flopped onto a sandy patch, gasping, shivering.
They were alive, which was good. But they were soaking wet and in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.
Not so good.
8
CLAIRE WAS HALF passed out on the beach, trying to get her breathing to steady and the shivering to stop.
Max crawled over and began pulling at her clothing. She tried to slap his hands away. “What are you doing?” She wanted to sound indignant, but she really didn’t have the energy.
“Need to dry out our clothes while there’s still some sun,” he gasped.
“Right. Of course.” She tried to unzip her flight jacket but he pushed her unsteady hands away. “Let me.” He said it as though his only wish in life was to unzip her jacket.
She knew her thoughts were fuzzy, which couldn’t be good, but she had to smile. “You are such a charmer,” she muttered.
“I didn’t think you’d noticed,” he said, easing the jacket off her shoulders.
“Oh, I noticed.”
He laid her jacket on a rocky outcrop. Weighed it down with a stone. She watched him haul his own jacket off and place it beside hers.
“Now what?” Her teeth were chattering so it was hard to get the words out. “Do you strip us both naked and hold me close to ward off hypothermia?”
“Much as I’d like to, that’s an old wives’ tale. You keep a cold person warm by feeding them hot drinks and wrapping them in a sleeping bag. If you crawl in naked with them you don’t raise their body temperature, they lower yours.”
“Oh.” She noticed he was digging into a blue nylon pack and as it sank in, her eyes widened.
“You went back for the emergency pack?” She’d have shrieked if she had the energy. “That’s why it took you so long to come to the surface.”
“Figured we probably needed it,” he said reasonably.
She imagined taking that extra time to grab the pack even as the plane was sinking, and then having to swim to the surface. It was a miracle he’d made it. “You could have drowned.”
He grinned at her. “But I didn’t. And now we have an emergency pack.” He dug through. “Aha! As I’d hoped.” He pulled out a small silver thermal wrap.
The entire emergency kit was encased in a thick plastic bag so everything in it was dry. Including the red sleeping bag Max was deftly pulling from its stuff sack. “Well, well. Somebody really went to town. A sleeping bag! And waterproof matches and a pot.” He nodded. “Good. Bottled drinking water and purification tablets.”
“It doesn’t weigh much and gives a person a better chance of survival.”
He rolled the sleeping bag out on the soft sand. “Come on,” he said.
“I can’t get in there with my wet clothes on.”
“True. Do you need help undressing?”
“No. Just turn your back.”
“Claire.”
“I’m serious.”
He heaved a long-suffering sigh. Unzipped the bag and then turned his back to her. “Let me know if you need any help,” he said.
“I won’t.” But it was more difficult than she’d imagined to strip off her wet clothes while her hands were shaking so badly. She knew it wasn’t only the cold making her shake. It was also shock.
But she wasn’t planning to be a damsel in distress so Max could rescue her. She’d done all right so far.
She managed to peel the wet clothes off her body. Since she couldn’t put them out to dry without revealing herself to Max, she tossed her clothes in front of him. “Here.”
“Thanks.”
While he busied himself putting her things out on the rock, she wrapped herself in the thermal blanket and then crawled into the sleeping bag, ridiculously glad he’d retrieved the emergency kit and survived.
She watched him laying out her utilitarian shirt and pants and tried not to feel embarrassed as he placed her bra and panties alongside them. She supposed that defying death together was pretty intimate. What was a pair of panties in comparison?
Then her copilot began to strip.
She knew he was doing the sensible thing, getting his wet clothes off so they could dry on rock that held the heat of the day, giving his body a chance to dry while there was still some warmth in the sun. A good woman would turn her gaze elsewhere and give the man some privacy.
She wondered if perhaps she wasn’t as good a woman as she’d imagined. Because she couldn’t look away.
He was facing away from her so he couldn’t know that her gaze was fixed on him. As he peeled off his shirt she noticed his back was chiseled with muscle. His shoulders made it look as though he spent half his life in the swimming pool and the other half in the gym, which she knew wasn’t true. But wow, the guy was cut.
He laid his shirt on the warm rock and then reached for his belt buckle. She felt as though her eyes were stuck in place. She couldn’t seem to force herself to look away. He peeled the wet pants down his hips and revealed wet boxer shorts that didn’t hide much. His hips were lean, his butt tight and round. His legs were slightly bowed but all muscle.
The sleeping bag was warming her nicely. Watching Max remove his clothes was doing the rest of the job.
* * *
MAX KEPT A careful eye on Claire but she warmed up quickly once she was inside the sleeping bag. The heat of the day was already passing, but at least they still had hours of sunshine and the forecast called for dry weather for the next few days.
That was working in their favor. He suspected not a lot of other factors were.
“When will the mine be letting Polar Air know that we didn’t make it?”
“Couple of hours from now, I imagine.” Claire wasn’t shivering anymore, he was relieved to see. He’d stripped down to his boxers, figuring modesty had to give way to safety and if the fact that he was nearly naked bothered her, she hadn’t mentioned it.
He nodded. Gazed up at the sky, so clear and blue. “Any chance another plane will happen by?”
“Probably not.”
“And the ELT is at the bottom of the lake.” He stared at the calm surface. No sign of the plane. “How deep is it?”
“I don’t know for sure, but the lakes tend to be very deep around here. I doubt the signal will get picked up.”
“So, basically, we’re on our own.”
“Basically.” She blew out a breath. “I went off course. Didn’t radio Lynette to let her know. That was stupid.”
“Yeah, but the detour probably saved our lives.”
“I know.” She hadn’t wanted to dwell on their narrow escape. It was still too fresh. And too narrow. But he was right, of course. The direct route to the mine was nothing but trees and mountain. The chances of them surviving that crash had they stuck to the planned route would have been pretty much zero.
“The detour and you being a damned fine pilot,” he said.
She smiled briefly.
“And I watched you fight that throttle. Not for a second did you lose your cool. I owe you my life.”
“Does this mean you won’t sue Polar Air for almost killing you?” She was only half joking.
He stared across at her, a trou
bled expression on his face. “It wasn’t Polar Air who tried to kill us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. We both checked that plane this morning. There is no way that elevator should have gone.”
“You can’t be suggesting—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. The possibility he seemed to be floating was unthinkable.
“Suggesting that the aircraft was sabotaged?” He finished the thought anyway. “That is exactly what I mean. When you went up, the elevator suddenly jammed. Same thing would have happened if you’d tried to land. I bet he put something in there that wouldn’t jam the equipment until you were in flight. So your flight check would show everything working.”
The possibility appalled her. “But who would do such a thing?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Got any former employees with a grudge? Somebody who stole a lot of money they can’t pay back? Somebody who knows the fleet as well as you do?”
“You can’t be suggesting Frank Carmondy would try and kill us.”
“He gets my vote.”
“No,” she said. Then she shook her head and gazed out at the lake where her plane now rested in its watery grave. Where she and Max had so nearly ended up. “Oh, no.”
“He came to see you yesterday.”
She nodded. “But he wanted to let me know that he’s in AA. That he’s mortgaging his house to pay us back.” She swallowed. “He even brought a photograph that he had of me and my grandmother and grandfather and him back when I first became a pilot.”
Max didn’t seem very impressed. “He could tell you anything. If he planned to make sure you disappeared, who cared what he told you?”
“But—”
“Did he by any chance ask you not to tell anyone about your little meeting?”
“No.” She thought back. “Not exactly. He simply asked me to give him a few days to get his financing in place and we’d meet again.”
“Knowing there’d never be a meeting.”
“But there’s still Lynette. She knows most of it. He can’t kill her as well. It would be too obvious.” She gulped as a sudden spasm of fear for her beloved grandmother shook her. “Could he?”
“I don’t think he’ll need to. Think about it. It was you who decided to go after him. If Lynette’s grieving over you, she’s not going to have the energy or desire for an unpleasant lawsuit. My guess is she’d sell up and move into town.”
“She’ll be devastated.” She didn’t want to believe what Max was suggesting even though, on some level, she knew she’d harbored the same suspicion. “I still can’t believe it. How would he even know we were coming here? I didn’t exactly discuss flight operations with him.”
“Did you ever step out of the office during your meeting and leave him alone?”
Had she? She thought back to the meeting with Frank. Tried to recall their conversation. Had they been interrupted? “Yes,” she said, thinking back. “Arnie came in and I left Frank in the office for a few minutes.”
“Plenty of time for him to check your schedule.”
“He had no way of knowing you’d be with me.”
“No,” he said. “He couldn’t have known. He probably hoped you’d be alone. I’d have been collateral damage.”
“Oh, Max,” she said, holding her hand out. “I’m so sorry I almost got you killed.”
He reached out and gripped her hand. She liked the feeling of his fingers entwined with hers. “You didn’t almost kill me. You saved both our lives.” His grip tightened. “We’re going to be okay.”
“Then we better figure out how to get back there before Lynette has a chance to get too worried.”
“I know. When the office gets word that we didn’t make it, and they can’t contact us, they’ll start searching. Trouble is, they’ll search the wrong area.”
“Let’s give it a few hours. You know the first rule of a crash. Don’t leave the plane.”
He nodded. “If the ELT’s working we should be out of here in a few hours.”
“Right.” Her thermal blanket crinkled when she moved. “And if that signal’s not being picked up, then we need to hike out.”
“How long will it take?”
“About two days, I think.” She pulled up a mental map of the area. “If we head due west we should hit a logging road. We can follow it down to the main highway.”
“Seems like a plane would be easier to find than two people on a logging road.”
“Yeah. And this is a good spot. Fish in the lake, water, there are water purification tablets in the emergency pack, right?”
“Yep. Also bug repellent, a compass, first-aid kit, basic provisions and a flare gun.”
“We’ll stay here for the night. If they don’t find us by morning, we should hike out.”
The conversation had left her feeling sick with the horror that a man their family had trusted might have tried to kill her and Max.
Was it possible? Had Frank, their family friend, sabotaged their aircraft?
She shivered and snuggled deeper into the sleeping bag.
9
MAX HAD THE bag of fishing tackle spread out, pleased to see that it was in good repair. Claire had already assured him that there would be fish in this lake, so they wouldn’t be stuck with the few power bars and emergency rations in the pack.
A sudden chuckle from his companion caused him to glance her way. “What?”
“I was just thinking, if you say flying is like sex, today you experienced flightus interruptus.”
He felt her amusement as her body made the sleeping bag quake.
“You know what you were saying about hypothermia and sharing a sleeping bag?”
“Sure. Old wives’ tale.”
“Well, the thing is, there is only the one sleeping bag.”
He appeared to think about it carefully. Glanced around as though there might be other options. But, of course, there were plenty of thick trees, some rocks, gallons of lake. But alternative places to sleep? Not so much.
She watched him work out that she was right. Glanced at her with a rueful expression. “I’ve been longing to get you into bed from the second I set eyes on you. But not like this.”
“Really?”
They’d nearly died together so what was the big deal if the conversation got intimate? “The first time I saw you? I walk into Polar Air’s office, for my scheduled interview with Frank Carmondy. I’m focused on what I’m going to say, making a good impression. I open the door and the first thing I see is the shapeliest ass I’ve ever come across, snugged nicely into a pair of tight jeans. I was still checking you out when you fired Frank.”
She chuckled. “I was so busy telling him off that I didn’t even hear you come in. Well, if we’re being honest, I noticed your eyes right away, and then your buff body.”
“And now, here we are. Half-naked and definitely spending the night together.”
“I know what you mean. Normally, if I was going to spend the night with you, I’d put on my best underwear.” She settled into the down bag, in her oh-so-practical cotton briefs, the bra that was built for utility not sexiness and the socks that she wasn’t entirely sure matched. At least they’d dried enough that she could put them back on. “I’d have bathed and done my hair.” She smiled at her own routine. “I have this special body lotion that makes me feel sexy. You wouldn’t know it, but if I was wearing it that would be a sign that I was, you know, interested.”
He turned to her. “What does this lotion smell like?”
She raised her brows. “You want me to give away my secrets?”
“I want to make sure I don’t miss any signals you might give out. Hypothetically.”
“Well, hypothetically, assuming I was interested in spending the night with you in a sexual way, the lotion I’d put on smells like rosewater and almonds.”
“This is very confusing to me. I’m not sure what rosewater smells like. Does it smell like roses?”
“Yeah. Basically.” She shift
ed and the bag rustled. “And almonds.”
“Roses and almonds. Glad you warned me. I doubt I’d have picked up on that as a big sex signal.”
“I think I do that one more for me. The lotion makes me feel sexy. And it’s very moisturizing.”
He settled himself on a nearby log. “Let’s say you were sending signals that were definitely for me and not just something that makes you feel good in your skin. What might those be?”
“You want me to give away my signals? Don’t you think you should have to work for this at all? I don’t want to make getting me into bed too easy for you.”
“But women always think men are so much more perceptive than we really are. Honestly, a lot of those so-called signals you think you’re sending out never get picked up on.”
“You mean you don’t notice?”
“I mean, we’re simple creatures. We like simple, clear communication.”
“Like what?”
“Like, ‘I feel like having sex with you right now.’”
She laughed out loud. “That is so pathetic. No self-respecting woman would ever say that to a man she wasn’t already involved with. And, even then, I doubt she’d be so blunt.”
“Why not?”
She thought about it. “Because we like to be wooed. Well, I guess I can’t speak for other women. I like to be wooed. I want a man to put some effort into making me want him.”
“But don’t you think you should meet him halfway? No guy wants to put himself out there with a woman only to be rejected.”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why we send out signals. Little things that show we’re interested, so you know that you’re not wasting your time.” She huffed out a breath. “Think about it from our point of view. No woman wants to be in a position where she ends up turning a nice man down. So we send signals that say we’re interested and signals to indicate that we’re not.”
“You know that’s like a dictionary in a foreign language.”
“No, it isn’t. Body language is universal.”
“Okay. Give me some of your ‘yes, I’m interested’ signals.”
