Flying Home (4 page)

“We had a problem,” he said evenly. “But we got through it. So, just sit back and count your bubbles.”

She opened her eyes to glance at him at the same time he turned to her. Her heart lurched when she was met by a smile that crinkled the corners of his dark eyes and exposed a single dimple to the right of his mouth. For that moment, she forgot all about the storm and the wind and the plane. It all came back when the plane bucked, the action so abrupt that she felt as if her heart was in her mouth.

Gage quickly got the plane under control. “Merely fine tuning,” he said, as the plane evened out again.

“You...you’re doing fine,” she breathed, needing that encouragement as much as she thought he probably did.

“Thanks,” he said, flashing another grin in her direction. “I like that assessment better than the crazy one.”

She wasn’t sure if there was sarcasm or not in his response. “I trust you, I really do.” And she meant it.

That brought a look her way that was dead sober, the dark eyes considering her before glancing away. There was no response from him, only a soft whistling of a tune she couldn’t recognize. She reasoned if he could joke about their situation, then that meant things had to be okay.

She exhaled, speaking to herself as much as to him. “You know, I’m the crazy one. I’m going back when I should have been patient. I should have called and let—”

She bolted upright. She hadn’t called Marsala back! Since she hadn’t heard anything from her, the receptionist probably figured Merry was still in Pueblo waiting for the morning flight out. She tugged her cell phone out of her jacket pocket and hit the power button. Her heart sank when she saw the battery was low and that no signal was available.

“Oh, man,” she whispered, shoving her cell back into the pocket of her jacket.

“What?” Gage asked.

“Phone’s dead, totally dead and I don’t suppose you can jump out in midair and get my duffel bag out of storage?”

He barked a short laugh at that. “No, I’m not jumping out, but as a matter of fact, I can get to the luggage area over the backseats. But no one is getting out of their restraints until we’re totally in the clear from this storm.” He touched the screen twice, then turned to her. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re agreeing that you’re crazy, too?”

“We’re both going back when we should have stayed at the airport. You knew there was a storm, but you thought you could outrun it, and I knew they’d get me on a plane at ten o’clock in the morning, and I chose to flag you down instead. We both wanted to get to Wolf Lake badly enough to risk all this.”

“Whoa, no. I’m going now because I have business meetings and I didn’t have time to cool my heels in Pueblo. I really thought, from what I was told, that the storm was far enough away and on course to sweep to the east, not southwest.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “If I’d known, I would have stayed put, cancelled this trip and rescheduled the meetings.”

“You weren’t going home for your family?”

“It’s mostly business, but I do need to see my brother and my parents. I couldn’t get away at Christmas, and things are changing on the old homestead, so I decided to combine a business trip with a visit to the family.”

She’d heard about Adam Carson leaving with the woman he’d met at the inn in town. Something about heading to Chicago and they still weren’t back, so Adam obviously wasn’t the brother he was going to visit. “Jackson?” she asked as she leaned her head against the chair’s high backrest and watched him closely.

“Yes, Jack.”

When Gage didn’t say any more, she thought again of the mention of business in his explanation. He was going back for business? She hadn’t heard about any major construction going on, except for something about a hotel or something.

“You have business there?” she asked, thankful that the ride was fairly smooth at the moment.

He exhaled. “Yeah.”

That was that; he didn’t elaborate at all. “I would guess that since you didn’t know about your bulletin board assignment until the last minute, that your business has to be on a grander scale than something in primary colors.”

He chuckled again, a comfortable sound, despite the constant roar of the wind. “Every client is as important as any other.”

“That’s your motto?” she asked as he turned to her, smiling, that single dimple showing up again.

“Maybe it should be,” he said before he averted his gaze to look at the screens again. “So, what’s waiting for you when you get back to Wolf Lake?”

Her stomach knotted. “My kids,” she said simply.

“Your kids?”

“Yes, and I promised I’d be back tonight, before they went home.”

He looked confused. “I thought you said you weren’t married.”

“I’m not. They’re the kids at The Family Center. I told them that I would be back today. I made a calendar and put it up. Today is circled and they’re watching for me. “I can’t let them down. They’ve had too much disappointment in their lives already.”

“So that’s what’s so urgent that you had to hitchhike to get back on time?”

She almost said an automatic, “Yes, that’s why,” but something else hit her out of the blue. Something she realized she’d known all along, but hadn’t acknowledged. She simply wanted to get home as soon as possible. She needed to get back where she felt she belonged. “Partly,” she conceded, but didn’t elaborate.

“I suspect they’d be just fine if you hadn’t found a way to get back,” he said, but his tone had become almost distracted. “Kids are adaptable.”

The tension in her grew even more. “Maybe. If they hadn’t been thrown into lives that they either don’t fully understand or can’t cope with, maybe things would be different.”

“Maybe they need to learn to cope,” he said, tapping the screen right in front of him. She’d thought he was talking to keep her distracted, to make sure she didn’t freak out, but his almost absentminded comment bothered her.

“Tell them that they need to suck it up and get over it?”

The edge in her voice finally caught his attention. “No, that’s not what I’m saying,” he countered. “I just meant—”

“Your reason for going to Wolf Lake is valid, and mine isn’t?”

He held up a palm toward her. “Okay, okay, this has gotten off track. Let’s get back to what I meant, not what you heard.”

That made her snort. “Oh, a case of ‘what are you going to believe, me or your lying ears?’ Is that it?”

He stared at her, and then burst out laughing. She watched him, finally finding the humor in what she’d said, but she didn’t laugh. The best she could do was offer an apology. “Peace?”

“Yes,” he said, and she felt the plane turn slightly to her left, dipping into the snow streaked grayness around them.

“What are you doing? I thought we were managing to get toward the edges of this storm?”

“We are,” he said, but without a lot of conviction in his voice.

“Then why are you looking concerned?” she prodded as the plane dipped even more. “Come on, you can tell me. I won’t get upset, just tell me the plain, honest truth.”

He hesitated, which didn’t bode well for what he was going to say if he did what she asked. She braced herself and the howling wind was almost drowning out the sound of the motors. “Okay, we should be breaking out of this, at least, we should have broken out of it by now, but we haven’t, and the mountains are there, far too close. So, I have to maneuver a bit, and it might make the plane roll.”

“Roll?” She envisioned going head over heels in the plane as it did a giant loop in the sky.

“Shouldn’t have said that. I mean I’m going to have to angle more than normal, and you might feel a shifting of center. But I have to do it.”

“Okay, okay, I can understand that,” she said quickly. “Sure, that makes sense. Go ahead and do it.”

Gage cast her a glance and said, “Thank you, I will.” Then he focused his full attention on the controls.

Things seemed to be just what he said, that dipping, then leveling, then dipping again, mostly on his side, then she heard a muttered oath under his breath. He pressed something on his earpiece.

“What’s happening?” she asked, but he wasn’t talking to her.

He was back on the radio, speaking rapidly, but this time she could tell he was trying to make a connection. He said his call letters over and over again, waited, then tapped the screen several times before he started to talk again. A mishmash of unintelligible words to her. He must have made contact, but as far as she could tell, none of what he was saying was good.

When she thought he was finished trying the radio, she asked, “How bad is it?”

He shook his head as if to silence her, then he was speaking into the radio again. “Roger, roger!” He had made contact, listened, then shook his head. “Negative on that.” He listened as he fought to keep the plane level again. “The edge?” he asked. “Temps dropped, too low.”

Merry turned from him, wishing he was smiling now and enjoying this, despite how much that had annoyed her earlier. He was grim, intent on the words coming into his ears from the headset and the readings on the panel.

CHAPTER FOUR

G
AGE
FELT
RESISTANCE
in the controls that had little to do with the fierce wind and the snow sticking to the windows. He could see the temperature outside had dropped twenty degrees in less than a minute, and he knew what was happening. He switched radio channels to one he hoped to never see on any gages in a plane he was flying, 121.5 MHz—the international aeronautical emergency frequency.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday!” he repeated, followed by his call sign and his coordinates. “Extreme temperatures, engine involvement.”

A voice from a tower two hundred miles north of their location spoke in his ear. “Roger that,” the voice said, stating what he’d just told the person. “Got you. Can you maintain altitude?”

“Negative,” Gage sent back. “Going down.” He heard Merry gasp, but he couldn’t even look at her right then as the voice said, “I read you five by five.”

“Starting now,” he said into the radio and eased back on the rudder, cutting his speed so the nose slipped lower. “Now!”

“Roger that. Assistance is on the way.”

* * *

M
ERRY
HUGGED
HERSELF
AGAIN
, but she couldn’t make herself close her eyes and imagine the meadow and the bubbles. She stared at the icy snow hitting the window, and the way the light was all but gone. Mountains? Had he said mountains? And they’re going down? An image of a huge peak coming at them shook her, the visibility cut so drastically that she wasn’t sure they’d see anything before they got to it.

She said a quick, silent prayer for both of them, and for the children. She looked at Gage. “Are we going to crash?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. I have to cover all eventualities.”

She remembered something her father had mentioned years ago. “A couple of those Carson boys are big risk takers, going to be hard to control when they get older.” He’d explained that there was no other reason why Gage and Adam ended up at the lake one night, hanging from an outcropping like two puppets, just because they’d wanted to climb the face of the cliff right after a rainstorm.

At the time, she hadn’t given her dad’s remark much thought, and couldn’t recall anything other than he had been called out for the rescue party by the boys’ grandfather, old Jackson Wolf. “You climbed the cliff at the lake and dangled there with your brother Adam until your grandfather found you, didn’t you?”

He cast her a sharp glance. “What made you think of that? Adam and I missed the route we planned on the climb and got stranded. My grandpa found us. He said he had a vision or a hunch, but he came and got us down.”

“I bet you enjoyed it until you realized how far you’d gone, didn’t you?”

His expression got quizzical. “When you’re a kid, you think you’re immortal, and nothing can—” His words were cut off when the plane lurched violently, making her heart drop just as suddenly.

He was on the radio again, giving new coordinates, over and over again, and something else that she couldn’t make out. She just knew that they were well and truly going down, not up. The plane shuddered ferociously, dropping more quickly than she knew it should. “Go back,” she yelled. “Just turn around and go back!”

He ignored her hysteria, speaking into the radio again, giving what she thought were coordinates.

The plane dropped again, jarring everything in Merry, and she wanted to shake Gage and force him to turn around. But before she could do anything, he was speaking to her, not into the radio. “We can’t,” he said. “We’re past that point.”

“Are we going to die?”

He gave her one long look and said, “Listen to me. You are not going to die. I promise.”

As strange as it seemed, she believed him. She really believed him. “Okay,” she found herself saying. “Okay.”

He reached over and covered her hand that was holding on to the seat for dear life. “Now check your belts, then hold on. If I tell you to get down, put your head on your knees and clasp your hands behind your neck.”

“We really are going down now, aren’t we?”

“Yes.” Their eyes met for a moment, neither said a word, yet they seemed to be communicating just the same.

There was another sharp drop of altitude, deeper into the driving snow that blinded them to everything. Gage barked out, “Look for any level place, anywhere that’s flat!”

Before she could do more than blink, Gage was speaking into the radio again, “Mayday! Mayday!” he said urgently, followed by coordinates, over and over again

She scanned as much of the area as she could make out in the storm. Gage continued to shout into the radio, over the piercing roar of the laboring engine. “Merry! Find us a spot!”

She tried to speak, but her voice was lost to her. The engines faltered, then shut off. Only the rushing wind could be heard. “Glide, glide!” she screamed.

“Exactly,” he said as the plane glided lower and lower. He hit some switches and reported, “Fuel, shut.”

Merry stared out the window, her worst nightmare a reality. In this plane, with this man. This was all that was left of her life.

There was snow and more snow, backed by darkness. Merry strained to find anything of the ground below them, but just when she was ready to tell Gage there was nothing visible, he yelled, “Get down, head on knees, hands clasped behind your neck.”

She did so without argument, bending at her waist to press her forehead to her legs. Her last glimpse out the window was of blurred shapes through the snow, a towering one directly ahead, as if rising up to meet them.

“Stay down no matter what happens,” Gage ordered.

She heard Gage clicking something, as a numbing fear gripped her. She didn’t want to die with this man, someone she barely knew, and the children...she couldn’t even say goodbye to them or her mother and her stepfather. An aching part of her wished she had someone, truly that one person she’d always thought would come along sooner or later, a man who loved her, really loved her.

She heard the howl of the storm, felt the shuddering, a jerk, a violent upheaval and the plane dropping. With her eyes closed tight, she shuddered, whispering for her and Gage to be all right.

Her world condensed in one explosive moment when the plane hit something, and there was a cracking, ripping of metal, then the belly scraping violently against the ground before it sat upward, then crashed down again. It jarred every bone in her body. The impact willed her to go in the wrong direction, but the restraints wouldn’t let her go, digging into her, stopping her. The pain was intense.

She couldn’t scream, no words were there as the plane twisted to her left, spinning, snapping her head so violently that she felt a cracking blow by her ear. Then another snap produced more pain and disorientation. Before she could even try to assuage how she really felt, there was a gut wrenching jerk.

Then nothing.

No movement. No sound apart from the raging wind outside. Was this death? No, as pain seemed to be enveloping Merry, in her head and her ribs and arms. She tried to figure it out, the true agony came from the unbearable tightness of the restraints. No, she wasn’t dead. She was hurting. “Thank you,” she breathed, her words so simple but she meant them so profoundly.

She was grateful to be alive, pain and all, grateful for her mother and stepfather, the kids, and for Gage, who had done everything in his power to protect her. She stayed very still, almost afraid to move, wondering where they had landed.

She had to brace herself before she opened her eyes, a slit at first, then she blinked at what seemed like shadows, until she realized that the only lights were the security ones in the junction where the floor met the walls. The control panel was blank; there were no red lights, nothing was flashing.

She slowly, carefully, flexed her neck and shoulders, moved back into the seat and sank into the leather upholstery with a sigh. The pressure from the belts had eased, and she could breathe without too much difficulty.

“Oh, gosh,” she whispered, trying to absorb the lingering discomfort in her arms and head. Alive. She was alive. They were alive! They’d made it. “Gage, we—”

She startled as she turned to him. He was twisted away from her, huddled against the window, his hat gone and his headpiece askew.

“Gage, Gage?” she said, her fingers fumbling with the buckles of her restraints, her voice sounding almost like a sob. “Please, Gage, look at me. We did it. You did it. We got down safe!”

He didn’t move and the panic that she had fought to keep at bay during the last minutes of horror, welled up in her. “Gage...Gage.” She pleaded for him to respond and reached for his arm. “Please.”

Her fingers closed over the rough jacket sleeve, and she pushed closer, ignoring the way the partial console bit into her thigh. “Wake up, wake up,” she begged. The horror she felt was almost suffocating her, horror that he was wounded or even worse. She couldn’t even fathom the possibility that he was gone.

“You can’t die,” she wept. “Please, don’t leave me.” She tugged his dangling headset off and tossed it onto the backseat “Please, don’t leave me!” It was then that she received her second miracle in one day.

A groan, barely audible over the sounds of the storm, caught her attention, then his right arm twitched. Relief was heady, and grew when she saw his hand move, awkwardly lifting up as if he was going to touch his face, then it fell heavily back on his thigh.

“Oh, Gage, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she breathed.

Then he shifted, slowly moving away from the window and toward her, and relief surged through her again. But as he turned his head in her direction, the air almost drove out of her chest. There was blood, so much blood, all over the left side of his face. Blood matted his hair. Blood on the window. Blood dripping on his jaw, soaking his jacket collar, staining the whiteness of his shirt underneath.

* * *

F
OR
ONE
INSANE
MOMENT
, Gage was twelve years old again, sneaking up to the “lake” in the middle of the night, climbing straight up the rocky face still damp from the earlier rain. Without warning, the world fell out under him. His hands were gripping the shale outcropping, and Adam was right with him, both of them screaming into the night.

Then everything he was thinking was gone and all he could feel was the pain. And the pain was real, very real, and someone was calling out to him, over and over again. He tried to move, to get his eyes to open, but all he could do was let out a low groan. That voice, calling to him, trying to reach through the misery in his head, but his hand wouldn’t cooperate, not any more than his eyes would. His hand fell, and the voice got louder. He tried to think beyond the pain, and then it came to him—the crash, the gut wrenching pain, and Merry. She was talking to him, urging him to wake up, and he wanted to see the world, and to see Merry.

A touch on his chin and yes, Merry was speaking very close to him. “Just open your eyes, please, just open your eyes.”

Gage fought to obey her. After several failed attempts, he finally managed to pry his eyes open. All he could see were shadows at first and then...

Merry.

“Yes,” she said on a choked sob, “Thank you, thank you.”

“What for?” he actually managed to get past his lips.

The dim light outlined her sweet face. But he didn’t miss the tears that were trickling down her cheek. She touched him, her hand connecting with his jawline. “For...” She swallowed hard. “For getting us down,” she said, then added quickly, “and for not dying. Thank you.”

He got his hand to cover hers, feeling her shake, but she didn’t move from the contact. “I hadn’t planned on dying,” he rasped.

With his free hand he felt along the side of his face, there was dampness there, but not from Merry’s tears. One touch and he knew before he even saw his fingers stained with red, that he was bleeding. He groaned and gingerly felt his cheek again.

“No, don’t,” she said quickly. “It’s...you’re cut just under your hairline, and it’s bleeding so much.”

He drew back, exhaled and grabbed the edge of his seat to get into a better position. A cut...not important. But what was important was him checking the plane, to make sure there were no fuel leaks, although he couldn’t find any chemical odor as he tested the air in the cabin. But he had to be sure, and he had to find out how badly the aircraft was damaged.

But just the simple exertion of sitting up a bit, stopped him dead. His chest raged with pain, and he closed his eyes for a moment. He caught his breath and opened his eyes to Merry. “Sorry, a bit light-headed,” he fudged.

“How can I help?”

“First aid. Backseat, underneath,” he said thickly.

He watched her move back, shifting to one side, getting over the console, then she was gone. “Got it,” she finally said. She reappeared up front with a large white tin with a red cross on its lid.

She looked at him again, barely suppressing a flinch, but he saw the expression on her face. “It’s just a cut,” he said softly.

That brought on a rush of nervous chatter from her as she awkwardly perched herself half on the console and half on her seat. She kept her eyes down on the contents of the tin once she snapped the metal fasteners open. “Yep, it’s first aid, all right, and I can do this,” she went on. “I’ve patched up a lot of kids after they’ve done something silly, and they lived to tell about it, so this should be a breeze...”

His head throbbed, and her rapid speech was grating, but he understood that in some way, this rambling was a coping method for Merry. Without warning, she stopped, and the silence amidst the sound of wind and driven snow, was almost deafening. Slowly, she looked up from the tin, and even in the low light he could see more tears shining in her eyes. He grimaced at the thought of her despair and him having no way to help her.

“I...thought for a moment that you were...that you were hurt worse than a cut.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “You aren’t, are you? You’re okay, right? Just the cut? Not any broken bones or anything else?”