Still clutching the jagged metal, the prisoner hurtled out the door and hit the murky swamp with a splash. He surfaced a moment later, spitting mud, and waded through the shoulder-high water toward freedom. Disgusted, Ryder turned to the other survivor.
“Don’t ask me to help,” the man whined, scrambling for the door. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding?”
“Yeah, I see.”
The reddish trickle had already started to congeal, but Ryder didn’t waste time appealing to the man’s conscience. Two years in a minimum security facility had taught him most of his fellow inmates didn’t own one.
When he climbed back into the cockpit, Suzanne was awake and not happy about the fact that the crumpled instrument panel had pinned her right leg. She’d dug her fingers into her thigh and was tugging for all she was worth.
“Hang on. Let me help you.”
“Unless…you…have…a jack,” she ground out, “you won’t…lift that panel.”
“You’re talking to a guy who used to wrestle drill bits through hard rock. I don’t need a jack.”
Hoping to hell he could follow through on that bit of Texas-size bravado, Ryder crawled sideways into his seat and got one knee on the floor. An awkward contortion wedged his shoulder under the instrument panel. He pushed upward, grunting with the strain.
“It’s moving!” she cried. “A little more. Just a little more.”
Gritting his teeth, he heaved again. Suzanne gave a gasp and scrambled free.
“Okay, I’m out.”
He let the panel back down and climbed out of the cockpit right behind her, making it to the galley just in time to hear her anguished exclamation.
“Oh, my God!”
Bracing himself against the tilted floor, he stared over her shoulder at the now dark night. No flames or shooting sparks shot into the black velvet sky. Ryder told himself that was good. It had to be good.
“I didn’t hear any explosion when we hit. Or see any smoke when I crawled out here a little while ago. Maybe…Maybe the fuselage just sheared off and is sitting in a few feet of water a mile or so back.”
“Maybe,” she whispered.
A shudder shimmied down her spine, then she pulled herself together with an effort of sheer willpower that was almost painful to watch.
Ryder’s admiration for this woman kicked up another ten or fifteen points. If he hadn’t seen her in action, he wouldn’t have figured someone with her sugar-spun blond hair, creamy skin and baby-blue eyes could be so tough. But then, he reminded himself dryly, his judgment sucked when it came to the female of the species.
“All the computer models for this kind of a breakup say the main body of the aircraft would keep its wings and remain intact,” she told him. “I was counting on that when I brought us down.”
“So they could have all walked or waded out?”
Her jaw locked. “Theoretically.”
“Hey, any theory is better than none at this point.”
She flashed him a look Ryder had no trouble interpreting. She’d been in command of the 727. She was responsible for everyone on that aircraft. She wasn’t asking for or accepting any reassurances until she knew the fate of each soul aboard Flight 407.
“What about the passengers in these seats?” she asked, frowning as she swept a glance at the two remaining rows. “Didn’t you see anyone when you came back the first time?”
“Two men. Both convicts. They bailed out after we hit.”
She arched a silver-blond brow. Ryder knew exactly what she was thinking.
“Why didn’t I bail, too? I owe you, babe, and I always pay my debts.”
The brow inched up another notch, but she didn’t comment on the obvious contradiction of a con with ethics.
“I’m going back into the cockpit to see if the radios are working. If they survived the crash, we can—”
She broke off and grabbed at the galley wall for support as the jet dropped a good foot. Metal groaned. Debris shifted and tumbled. The swampy mud whooshed and sucked.
“This thing’s going under at any second,” Ryder said grimly, kicking aside a chunk of the overhead compartment. “We’d better get out of here.”
“No! We should stay with the plane. Search and rescue will lock on to the transponders and—”
Another sudden drop put an end to that discussion. The floor hit the weeds. Water rushed in, swirling waist high. Ryder grabbed Suzanne and shoved her out the door, then jumped out right behind her. Surfacing, he shook the water from his eyes and spun in a tight circle. He found her a few feet away, floundering.
The water that lapped his shoulders reached almost to her nose. Her heavy boots didn’t help matters. Ryder caught her as she sank into the mud and hauled her along with him. They’d barely made ten yards when the swamp claimed the forward section of the jet. With a sucking groan, the nose and galley settled into the mud. The domed roof rose above the saw grass, glinting in the moonlight for a moment, until the waving plants closed around it.
A few more bubbling hisses escaped. A long whoosh. Then an eerie silence descended.
Ryder swallowed a lump in his throat. With it came the taste of mud and a gulp of cool, refreshing liquid. It took him a moment or two to realize this sea of grass was actually some kind of freshwater lake.
Beside him, Suzanne tread water and stared at the spot where Flight 407 had disappeared. When she spoke, the steely note of command had slipped back into her voice.
“Let’s move out.”
Ryder tightened his grip on her upper arm and started forward once again, dragging her along with him. Utter darkness surrounded them. The tall, waving grass almost blanked out the night sky. His skin crawled when he thought about what might be slithering around beneath the water’s inky surface. He hoped to hell the alligators and crocs native to these parts had gone to roost for the night.
“Are you sure you got a fix on those trees?” Suzanne asked after a few moments, panting with the effort of keeping her chin above water.
Heck of a time to ask, Ryder thought, hiding his own creeping doubts in a sardonic affirmative.
“Yeah, I got a fix on them.”
More or less.
“They were about a hundred yards off to starboard,” he added to reassure himself as much as her.
She didn’t say a word, but he could guess what she was thinking. Starboard covered a lot of territory. They pushed forward another few yards, only to jerk to a halt at the sound of a distant drone.
Ryder spun around, searching the night sky. Suzanne wrenched free of his grip and practically climbed up his arm onto his shoulder to see over the grass. The drone grew louder, changing to the unmistakable sound of aircraft engines.
“It’s another C-130,” she exclaimed. “Search and rescue’s on the scene. Oh, God, look!”
Her scream ricocheted in his ear as a red ball arced out of the swamp and shot skyward.
“It’s a flare!” Pounding on his shoulder with her fist, she shouted again. “Ryder, it’s a flare.”
“I see it.”
“Some of the passengers survived!”
“Maybe all of them.”
He dodged another blow and whipped an arm around her waist to keep her from toppling into the water in her excitement.
“Maybe all of them!” she echoed ecstatically.
She slid back down his body until her boots touched mud, her whole being alive with excitement, and grinned up at him.
Ryder couldn’t help himself. Her face was little more than a pale blur in the darkness. Her hair straggled down her cheeks and wrapped around her neck. But her eyes shone with such joy he had to kiss her. Right there. In the middle of the swamp. With the faint reverberation of airplane engines teasing his ears and murky water lapping at his chest.
This time, she kissed him back. Hooking both arms around his neck, she threw herself into the fusion of wet mouths and wet bodies with an exuberance that rocked him back on his heels. Ryder felt himself going under, literally and
figuratively.
The lust that slammed into his belly almost knocked him off his feet again. It rushed at him out of the darkness, hot and hard and fast. Stunned by the sexual punch, he jerked his head up, yanked Suzanne’s arms down, and put a few watery feet between them.
She looked as surprised as he felt, but, true to form, pulled herself together a whole lot faster than he did. “That was a mistake.”
“One of many I’ve made lately,” he agreed dryly.
Trust him to get a bad case of the hots for a female as wrong for him as he was for her. He’d traveled down that road once. He wasn’t heading down it again…even if Suzanne wanted to, which wasn’t likely given their respective circumstances.
When they got out of this, she’d go back to flying.
He’d go back to prison.
Locking his jaw, Ryder gripped her wrist again and turned his back on the incandescent white flare arcing down through the night sky.
They stumbled onto a slippery limestone ledge ten minutes later. Spiky palmettos crowded right to the water’s edge, scraping Ryder’s arms as he half pushed, half dragged Suzanne onto higher land. Only after she’d gained solid ground did he notice her limp.
“My ankle got caught under the instrument panel,” she said, shrugging aside his concern.
“Take your boot off and let me—”
“I’m okay.”
Hobbling up to the edge of a forest of twisted mangroves and tall, straight hardwood trees, she grabbed a branch for support and turned to search the swamp behind them.
“Look at that!”
Her exclamation swung Ryder around. The sight that greeted him sucked every molecule of air from his lungs.
A mile or so away the swamp was lit up like a Broadway theater on opening night. A half dozen planes circled, their strobes flashing red and white. Powerful searchlights sliced downward. Loudspeakers sent amplified voices wavering across the sea of saw grass.
Ryder’s stomach clenched with each faint echo. Panting from the arduous slog, he stood beside Suzanne and strained to decipher the distant voices.
“We have you. Hang on.”
“Just hook the harness under your arms.”
“This is Search Three. We’ve got—” the voice wavered, cut out, came back on “—on board and are bringing up another.”
“Wrap your arms around the hoist, ma’am.”
Suzanne jerked upright. “Did you hear that?”
“I heard it.”
“That ‘ma’am’ must be Kelly Jackson. She made it!”
“And if she did, I’m betting Spence Cantrell is right there beside her.”
Ryder allowed himself a slow, sloppy grin. They pulled it off after all! Then Suzanne matched his grin, and he felt himself going under again.
Well, damn it all to hell and back! When the woman shed her icy control and let loose with both barrels, she packed more punch than the beer and whiskey chasers Ryder used to down like rusty water after a day wrestling pipe.
He was just experiencing a few adrenaline aftershocks, he decided. Some sort of survival syndrome. He’d beat the odds. Taken a bite out of death, chewed it up, and spit it out. He wasn’t feeling as randy as a goat just because Suzanne Delachek aimed a grin his way. Hell, he’d feel this way about anyone who’d shared the past few hours with him.
Well, maybe not anyone. Just blue-eyed blondes with more courage than common sense and bodies that filled out a flight suit in ways that were probably illegal in fourteen states.
“We might as well pull up a rock and have a seat,” she suggested, thankfully unaware of the tight ache she’d started in his belly. “Odds are search and rescue won’t locate the rest of the wreckage until morning.”
“Morning, huh?”
Not a problem. He’d survived a midair shootout and a plane crash. He figured he could survive another seven or eight hours without making a total ass of himself by tugging down the zipper on Suzanne’s flight suit and devouring her whole.
Unfortunately, his figuring didn’t take into account her little cry of pain when her leg buckled under her. Or the way she fit against his body when he scooped her into his arms to break her fall.
Chapter 3
Suzanne didn’t think of herself as a particularly big woman. Five-six and one hundred-nineteen pounds hardly qualified as huge. But most of the males of her acquaintance would have herniated a disk if they’d tried to swing her up in their arms the way Ryder just did. The mere fact that he’d gathered her up with such ease aroused the heck out of her.
With her body tucked tight against his and heat sizzling in her belly, she tried to rein in her galloping hormones. Sternly, she told herself to throttle back. Like, now! Hamilton was even more of a loser than her ex. She was just turned on because she was alive and Hamilton was a genuine, world-class hottie.
Really. This was all just delayed situational reaction. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why her throbbing ankle, soaked flight suit and weedy hair had all dropped right out of her mind. She’d successfully ditched a 727. Flight 407’s passengers seemed to have survived. And she’d just shared the most intense hours of her life with the sexiest man she’d stumbled across in a long, long time. Of course she’d feel aroused.
Her mind worked it out with perfect logic. Unfortunately, her body didn’t seem the least interested in logic at that moment. Little pinpoints of heat burned just under her skin everywhere she connected with Ryder’s lean, hard frame.
“I’m okay.” She tried to hold herself away from the flat, muscled belly bumping against her hip. “Really. You can put me down.”
“I will, as soon as I find us a comfortable spot to watch the show.”
Hefting her higher in his arms, he searched amid the tangle of palmettos and mangoes lining the shore. Suzanne had almost forgotten how to breathe by the time he hunkered down on one knee and placed her on a tuft of spongy grass, with her back resting against a twisted tree root.
“Let’s take a look at that ankle.”
His hands went to the zipper on the leg of her flight suit. When his fingers connected with bare flesh beneath, Suzanne’s stomach executed a double back flip. Sucking in a swift breath, she decided she’d better get his hands away from her before she did something monumentally stupid…like suggest he play with the rest of her zippers.
“I don’t think I should take the boot off,” she protested. “I might not be able to get it back on, and I’m not walking through any more of this swamp barefooted.”
“I’ll carry you.”
Suzanne didn’t think so!
“I’m okay. The throbbing’s already eased.”
Actually, the pain had gotten lost amid several other, far more immediate sensations.
“Be sensible. If you’ve broken or sprained your ankle, a tight boot could cause it to balloon up worse than a dead armadillo in July.”
“Oh, charming image.”
A grin slashed across his face. “A man’s gotta call it like he sees it. Besides, that’s considered just plain talk where I come from.”
She was still recovering from the whammy of that grin when his fingers went to work on the wet bootlaces. Planting both palms on the spongy ground beside her, Suzanne leaned back. Enough moonlight filtered through the mango’s branches for her to look at him—really look at him—for the first time.
She forced herself to see past his rugged, square-jawed handsomeness to the intelligence in his smoky gray eyes. Past his ropy muscles to the gentleness in his hands when he eased off the boot. Past the convict to the man under the now tattered white T-shirt and tan pants.
“Where do you come from?” she asked, driven by a near insatiable curiosity to know how Ryder Hamilton had made the transition from corporation president to convict.
“A little town no one’s ever heard of, just south of Midland, Texas.”
“How did you get into the oil business?”
He flashed her an amused look. “You ever been to Midland, sweetheart?”
She wished he wouldn’t call her that. Her heart fluttered idiotically every time he rolled out one of those drawling “sweethearts” or “babes.”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Gently, he rotated her ankle. His palms were warm and leather tough against her skin.
“If you had, you’d know it’s smack in the middle of the Permian Basin, one of the richest fields in the West. Folks around Midland eat, sleep and drink oil. Literally. The underground water tables are so contaminated, they have to truck in drinking water.”
“Isn’t Midland where you headquartered your corporation?”
The grin stayed in place, but the look he shot her wasn’t quite as amused. “I guess the marshals filled you in on my background. Or was it the FBI?”
“The FBI.” She made no apologies. “I wanted to know who was in the cockpit with O’Connor.”
He said nothing, just rotated her foot with the same easy touch. An errant bead of water dripped from his hair onto his cheek. Suzanne traced the quicksilver drop down to the line of his jaw. Swallowing, she tried to remember what they were talking about.
“I’ll admit my heart skipped a few beats when they told me you’d never flown anything bigger than a bug smasher.”
“Yeah, well, mine skipped a few beats, too, when I got a look at that shattered instrument panel.”
“You did good, Hamilton.”
Her gaze shifted past his shoulder to the searchlights slashing through night sky.
“Real good.”
He swiveled on his heel, still holding her foot in his hands. His thumb made little circles on the indentation behind her ankle bone while he took in the distant lights.
“We did, didn’t we?” he said softly, his eyes on the search and rescue effort.
Suzanne couldn’t believe what she was feeling right now. She’d fallen head over heels in love with her husband, had ached inside as that love slowly died. She’d hung on stubbornly for two years, determined to make the marriage work despite Jack’s unique interpretation of the concept of monogamy. She’d also learned more than she’d ever wanted to know about the politics of sex from her ex-husband, who’d considered himself an expert at all things erotic.
Special Report Page 18
