“Please give my thanks to the board. I won’t let you down,” Lindsey said, but Nick could feel her watching him from the corner of his eye.
The air grew heavy after Brenda and Artie’s departure. After a long beat, Lindsey met his gaze. He was sure she was going to give him a piece of her mind, but her blue-green eyes softened.
“Skyhawk?”
She remembered.
“It’s not my grandfather’s. That one was pretty old and had seen better days. I sold her for scrap and parts a few years ago. I picked up this Skyhawk last year.”
“You don’t have to take me up, Nick. I can wait until one of the flight instructors has time.”
His phone pinged. “That’s the ground guys. We should go.”
Her gaze danced between him and the staircase like she was contemplating making a run for it. What had made her this wary of people? The answer hit him like a slap across the face. He had. He didn’t know what had happened to her since he’d last seen her. All he knew for sure was that he had hurt her, and she still carried that pain.
He gestured toward the stairs. Lindsey retrieved a large camera bag and walked a half step ahead of him. The clouds shifted and caught her hair in a stream of sunlight. The chestnut-brown, red, and gold strands called to him. He wanted to weave his fingers through each gentle wave.
Christ! What was he doing? One minute he was kissing her, the next, he was gunning to get her fired on her first day. He wasn’t thinking clearly. She had cracked open the memories he’d locked away deep in his heart with one kiss and had changed everything.
He had lived a very uncomplicated life, these last sixteen years. He had finished high school, went to college and studied aviation. He was a pilot—and a damn good one at that. It had not only been his life’s work. It had been his entire life. His pilot stripes were all he had to show for his time on this planet. While that once was enough, seeing those blue-green eyes again chipped away at the façade he had mistaken for a life.
“Is that yours?” Lindsey asked, pulling him from his thoughts.
He looked up. There she was: his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Callsign Lima six, four, two, three. Pearl white and just as shiny as the day she had come off the line. Two racing stripes, one sky blue and one forest green, cut a clean edge along her body and arched artfully near the nose just shy of the propeller. The breath caught in his throat. Jesus, her eyes. He had known the minute he’d seen this plane that she was the one for him. But he’d never understood the lightning-fast connection—until now.
“Yeah, that’s her.” He crossed in front of Lindsey and helped her into the cabin of the plane.
“She’s good to go, boss,” one of the crew called from behind.
Boss.
On top of having Lindsey crash into his life, in a few days, he would be in charge of this facility. But contending with fuel costs, mechanical issues, weather delays, and novice pilots seemed like a breeze compared to living only a few feet away from the woman he had locked away in his past, like a child’s treasure, hidden in a dented metal tin far away from prying eyes.
He settled into the cockpit. Lindsey buckled up and put on her headset. She stared out the window. She wasn’t tense. Her shoulders weren’t up by her ears, tight and anxious like they had been when she’d first arrived. Any fool could tell, she had done this before.
Most people have flown commercial, herded like cattle into a 747 or an Airbus, but it’s quite a different story to hop into a two or four-seat prop engine plane. It’s the proximity that gets the novices. The cockpit is tight. The controls are only inches away. Gauges, switches, and screens blink and beckon to be touched. You see exactly what’s controlling your fate. There’s no buffer of folding trays or flight attendants. Visceral and breathtaking, this kind of flying was the real deal.
Man. Air. Machine.
He gave Lindsey another glance before pulling on his headset and taking his kneeboard out of the side pocket. He pressed a button on the panel and the sound of a woman reading off the most recent weather report cut into his headset.
Winds variable at four miles per hour. Good visibility. Temperature at seven degrees Celsius, about forty-five degrees Fahrenheit.
He continued listening and scribbled the information down onto his board. That spark he hadn’t felt since the first time his grandpa had taken him up flared to life.
It was a good day to fly.
He entered the flight plan into the computer. “Do you have any questions?” he asked, going into default instructor mode.
“I’m not going to pretend I understand everything you’re doing, but I know enough to keep out of the pilot’s way until after we’ve been cleared by the tower.”
“Roger, that,” he replied.
She was sticking to business.
He went through the preflight checklist, and the familiar routine centered him. He contacted ground control and was cleared to taxi out onto the runway.
“Kansas City Downtown Ground, Cessna six-four-two-three Lima is taxiing to runway one-niner for departure to the south. KC Downtown Ground.”
“Cessna six-four-two-three Lima, KC Downtown Ground. You are cleared for take-off, heading south on runway one-niner. KC Downtown Ground.”
Nick taxied to the runway and lined up the nose of the Skyhawk with the yellow center line. Follow the yellow brick road. That’s what his grandfather had told him the first time he had taken the yoke with his other hand steady on the throttle. He got the final clearance and, in the time it took most people to tie their shoes, the Skyhawk was airborne, climbing to a comfortable cruising altitude.
The downtown airport is situated at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. Nick followed the majestic body of water as they left the airport’s airspace and began a lazy loop around the city.
“Is there anything in particular you want to make sure we pass by?”
“No, I just want to take it all in,” she answered, her voice sounding neutral and mechanical through the headset.
He liked talking to her this way. Eyes on the sky. Her voice merely words coming through the headset. If it wasn’t for her scent, she could have been just a voice over the radio. Not a real flesh and blood woman, sitting inches away.
He followed the outline of the Kansas River and continued south toward Langley Park.
She leaned forward. “Is that Lake Boley and the Langley Park Botanic Gardens?”
“It is.”
She was quiet as they passed overhead. Though it was nearing the end of March, winter hadn’t entirely released its grip, and the gardens still looked spindly and sparse from eighteen-hundred feet.
“When did your dad pass away?”
He wasn’t expecting that. “My father?”
“Yes, last night you said the kindest thing he did for you and your mother was to die young.”
Last night. Christ! He did tell her that. He swallowed hard. “My freshman year of college. He died of a heart attack. He was with some woman he was having an affair with. My mom and I didn’t know he had died until a couple of days later.”
They passed through a crosswind, and Lindsey put a hand on the console to steady herself as he found a smoother patch of air.
“I’m sorry, Nick.”
He didn’t answer. He hated that phrase. It made him think of his mother.
I’m sorry, Nick. I can’t leave your father.
I’m sorry, Nick. He promised he wouldn’t hurt us again.
Nick never had a real relationship with a woman because he never wanted to hear those words. There was no need to apologize when nothing was expected. He had been with plenty of women, but he’d always steered clear of commitment.
He glanced over. Lindsey rested her left hand on top of the control panel as she gazed out the window. Something angry stirred inside him. Her ring finger was bare, but she had married someone else. Maybe it was the mention of his father or his disappointment with his mother, but agitation flooded his system.
“You
married the cloud guy, didn’t you?” he said. The mechanical bite of the headset couldn’t hide the bitterness in his voice.
He felt her eyes on him. “Who?”
“The big cloud photographer guy, Robert Davies. You mentioned him at Camp Clem. You liked his work.”
A beat of silence and then a rush of laughter filled his headset.
13
Lindsey couldn’t help herself. After all she had been through, Nick just assumed she’d run off and married some photographer she had admired as a teenager. It was so simple, and so completely off the mark, it left her laughing like a lunatic. Davies was also her maternal grandmother’s maiden name. She hadn’t even considered choosing Davies because of the photographer.
She took a breath, stopped another convulsion of laughter from breaking loose, and focused on a stretch of wispy clouds far off in the distance. She exhaled. There were no more giggles to suppress as she fixed her gaze on the clouds, pink, yellow, and silvery-blue in the late afternoon sun. There was something beautiful though, that the name she had chosen connected both her mother’s heritage and her love of photography.
She caught Nick out of the corner of her eye. He had gone rigid. His knuckles on his hand holding the throttle had gone white. This was no joke to him. It also presented a problem she hadn’t anticipated.
Why was her last name Davies?
She hadn’t expected anyone besides her godmother to know her in Langley Park. She’d had no reason to expect this question. But now that Nick was in her life again, she needed to come up with something.
“It’s complicated,” she said into the headset mic, not answering his question.
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “You're either married, or you’re not married, Lindsey. There’s nothing complicated about that.”
“I’m not married.” She hoped he would hear the finality in her tone. She was done with answering his question. He was digging, and digging was dangerous for someone who was trying to live under the radar.
Her stomach flipped, and a wave of hot nausea forced her to brace herself on the console and drop her head between her arms.
“Linds, are you okay? Are you going to be sick?” The anger had drained from his voice and was replaced with concern.
She started to shake her head, but the motion only made the dizziness worse. “This doesn’t usually happen. It’s been a while since I’ve been up in a prop plane. It’s probably just that.”
All true, but she’d never flown pregnant. She broke out into a cold sweat. She hadn’t even seen an obstetrician. There were restrictions on flying for women in their third trimester. She knew that. But she didn’t know much else about pregnancy and flying. She couldn’t be hurting the baby, could she? Anxiety ripped through her chest. She needed Nick to land the plane.
He read her mind. “Linds, can you hold on? I can have us on the ground in less than ten minutes.”
“Yeah,” she breathed. She lifted her gaze and focused on the Kansas City skyline. “I can make it.”
“Do you want an ambulance to meet the plane? I can call it in.”
She turned her head a fraction and met his gaze. She didn’t see the person who’d just interrogated her over her last name. No, that man was gone. All she saw now was the boy who had told her he loved her. She focused on the horizon. “No, I’ll be okay. Let’s just land.”
Nick kept his word. He didn’t have an ambulance waiting when the plane landed, but he did insist on taking her straight to the emergency room. Lindsey dangled her feet off the side of the examination table as a shiver spider-crawled its way up her spine. She didn’t like hospitals. Hospitals were full of doctors. The fact that Brett was a doctor was one of the qualities that intrigued her in the beginning. There’s something intoxicating about someone skilled in the art of healing. It pulled her in. It blinded her.
The door to the exam room opened, and a woman with dark hair fashioned into a loose twist entered the room. Ebony tendrils framed her face as she paged through a chart. “Ms. Davies, I’m Dr. Samira Al-Amin. It looks like you’re experiencing some nausea from a plane ride. How are you feeling now?”
She released a shaky breath. “Better, the nausea’s gone.”
Dr. Al-Amin wrote something on the chart then gave her a warm smile. “You’re new to Langley Park?”
“Yes, I’ve only been here a couple of days.”
Dr. Al-Amin scanned the chart. Her brown eyes softened. “You remember giving the nurse a blood and urine sample before she took your vitals?”
Lindsey dropped her gaze to the floor. “I know I’m pregnant. What I don’t know is if going up in that plane did something to the baby.”
“We can certainly check and see how the baby’s doing. Do you have an obstetrician in Langley Park yet?”
Lindsey shook her head and blinked back tears. “I haven’t seen a doctor about the baby at all.”
Dr. Al-Amin patted Lindsey’s hand. Her touch was soft and reassuring. “Let’s take a look. Your blood and urine both looked good. You could do with some more iron, but that’s common for many pregnant women. I’m going to do a quick physical exam, and then we’ll see about the baby.”
A tiny drop then another made small circular dots on her skirt. Tears. Tears trailed down her cheeks and fell in slow, steady droplets as Dr. Al-Amin pressed and palpated.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Does this hurt? Follow the light with your eyes.
The doctor’s rich, honeyed voice put her in an almost meditative trance, and the tears stopped.
“Why don’t you lie back,” Dr. Al-Amin said, adjusting the table into a reclining position. “Let’s say hello to your baby.”
Lindsey sat back and looked down at her abdomen. Hardly a bump at all.
“When was your last period, dear?”
She didn’t know the exact date of her last period. What she did know, with exact precision, was the date she had gotten pregnant. She hadn’t been with Brett in months which had been a relief. She knew he had to be screwing someone else, but she didn’t care. Brett used sex to humiliate and defile her. That’s how they would make up after a disagreement. Her, bruised and battered. Him, holding her by the back of the neck as he forced himself on her from behind.
She let out a breath. “The date of conception was in mid-November.”
The doctor made a note in the chart then rolled a portable ultrasound from the corner of the room. “That puts you at around seventeen weeks.” She motioned for Lindsey to lift her blouse and squeezed a generous amount of a jelly-like substance on her belly. “The gel will be a bit chilly, but it has an important job. It provides a bond between the skin and transducer.”
“Transducer?”
“This,” Dr. Al-Amin held up a device. It looked almost like an electric razor except that the end of the instrument was smooth. “It works kind of like SONAR or how bats use echolocation. Sound waves are aimed toward a structure, in this case, your baby, and as they bounce back and forth, you get a picture. Rest assured, it does no harm to you or the baby.”
Lindsey nodded.
“Here we go,” Dr. Al-Amin said, pressing the transducer onto her slick belly.
Lindsey stared at the screen. Fuzzy black and white bands spasmed back and forth.
“There you are,” the doctor said, angling the implement.
It was just like in the movies. A grainy black and white image appeared of the profile of a head attached to a tiny body and a steady flicker of movement pulsed in the baby’s chest.
“Is that the heart?”
The doctor nodded. “It is indeed. I’m going to take a few measurements and then we’ll take a listen.”
Dr. Al-Amin moved the transducer around her abdomen, and the grainy picture of the baby went in and out of focus.
“Your baby is measuring a little small, but still within the normal range. Structures and organs look good. Your baby could fit into the palm of your hand like a little banana, Ms. Davies.”
“So small,” Lindsey
whispered.
“But strong, take a listen.”
The doctor pressed a button. A fast whooshing sound filled the air.
“The heartbeat is one hundred forty-two beats per minute.”
“That’s okay?”
“It’s perfect,” Dr. Al-Amin answered.
Lindsey exhaled. She had been holding her breath.
The doctor lifted the transducer and the rhythmic sound faded. “You can clean off with these,” she said, passing Lindsey some tissues.
Dr. Al-Amin glanced toward the door. “Ms. Davies, do you feel safe in your home?”
Lindsey deposited the tissues into a small trash receptacle and adjusted her blouse. Did the doctor know Nick was a few feet away waiting for her? Did she think Nick might be hurting her?
She met the woman’s gaze. “I’m safe now. I’m safe in Langley Park.”
“I’m very glad, Ms. Davies.” She reached into the breast pocket of her lab coat. “Here’s my card. I’m just on call at Midwest Medical today, but my practice is close by in the medical wing of the hospital. If you’d like, I can see you through this pregnancy.”
Lindsey took the card. “I’d like that very much.”
“And don’t forget these,” the doctor said, passing her three, index card sized pieces of smooth photo paper. “These are a few pictures of your baby.”
Lindsey stared down at the grainy images. She ran her finger along the curve of the baby’s profile. “Thank you, Dr. Al-Amin.”
The doctor pushed the ultrasound machine back into the corner. “I look forward to seeing you, Ms. Davies.”
The doctor left the exam room. Lindsey fastened her boots and smoothed her blouse and skirt. She put the ultrasound photos into her purse and walked out into the ER’s waiting area. Nick must have been watching the glass doors. Before it even closed behind her, he was there.
He took her purse. “Let me carry this.” A frown line creased his brow. “I asked the nurses how you were doing, but all they said was that you were with the doctor.”
“I’m all right. I’ve got low iron.”
It wasn’t a lie, just another half-truth.
The Complete Langley Park Series (Books 1-5) Page 63
