Flying Home (6 page)

“Good to know,” he quipped. “And I’m not worried.”

“Sure, you’re not,” she said, and a smile started to emerge.

But before he could see the full expression, her face darkened with concern as she leaned toward him. Involuntarily, he gasped when she touched his bare skin at his shoulder. “Wow, you’re going to have some wicked bruises,” she mused as she slowly outlined something on the area with the tip of her finger. “No wonder your ribs hurt.”

He wasn’t breathing now, and didn’t until she drew back. She met his gaze, before quickly looking away. He could only guess at what she’d seen in his face. “Just bruises,” he reiterated.

She came closer to cut the sleeves up to the collar on both sides, and then easily tugged at the ruined shirt to free it from behind his back. Without asking, she dropped it on the floor between his feet. “Oh, shoot, I should have asked if we can get to the luggage before destroying your shirt.”

“We can,” he said. “At least, I think you can.” Then he went on to explain about the double backseat, how each side reclined and the luggage area could be partially accessed from there. “There’s a duffel,” he said. “Navy blue, with the company logo on it.”

“Okay, no problem,” she replied and didn’t hesitate getting over the console into the back the way she had to get the first-aid kit. She finally figured out how to get the seat forward to expose the luggage area, and in less than a few minutes, she had his duffel on the other backseat. “What do you want out of this?” she asked from behind him.

“Jeans, a flannel shirt, socks and there’s thermals in there, two sets. Get them both out.”

She rummaged around, and then climbed into the front and onto the pilot’s seat with the clothes in her hands. Laying them on the console on top of the first-aid box, she looked at him. “What’s first?”

The shirt, so I’m not sitting here half naked with a woman with tiny scissors close by,
he thought, half wondering if he had a bit of concussion or not. He obviously wasn’t thinking clearly, and he didn’t believe it was because of Merry being there. Not at all. A mild concussion made more sense. Out loud he simply said, “The thermal top, then the flannel.”

She held the thermal out to him. “You can do this?”

“With a bit of help,” he said, and she came closer, leaning over the console.

“Sit up just a bit,” she instructed and when he lifted his head, she slipped the thermal over his head. “Any ideas how to do the rest without you passing out from pain?”

“Just do it,” he said and as slowly and easily as he could, he pulled the shirt down, wiggled his hand to get to the armhole, then, gritting his teeth, pushed his hand into the sleeve. He repeated it for the other side, then Merry tugged it down over his chest.

Gage sank back, breathing a bit harder than he had been, but it had worked. The flannel was easier to put on. He sat forward and with Merry’s assistance was able to get his arms in the holes without too much problem. As he settled back again, she reached over to button up the front of the shirt.

She exhaled softly and studied him. “It’s your call on the rest.”

He glanced down where she was flicking her gaze, at his soaked jeans and boots. He could feel his feet squishing in his socks, and the chill was achingly persistent. After trying to heel and toe himself out of one boot, he finally gave up. No way he could bend forward enough to do it, and there was no room to lift his foot to pull the boots off. “This shouldn’t be this hard,” he muttered as he sank back in his seat. Merry hadn’t moved. “What’s that old saying? ‘Life’s hard, then you—’”

“Not funny,” she retorted.

“I was going to say, ‘Life’s hard, then you get smart,’” he improvised.

Her smile came a bit reluctantly, and he had a stunning thought—that despite everything that had happened and what they were going through, she looked almost happy. He couldn’t figure that out. A joke was a joke, but being stranded like this, didn’t even come close to funny, despite his silly attempts at humor.

“Sure you were,” she said, shaking her head in wry disbelief.

He honestly wanted to laugh himself, and wished he could, but he could still grin. Then Gage looked at her and knew that no concussion could make him think what came next. She was beautiful. At the airport terminal, he’d thought she was attractive in a quiet sort of way, but right then, things shifted. Her dark auburn hair had escaped from the ponytail in wisps that framed her face and brushed against her neck. Her eyes seemed incredibly green, the lashes luxurious, and her skin was almost translucent.

He muttered, “Oh, boy,” and closed his eyes for a moment. One thing he knew was that, pretty or not, he found himself very grateful that he had Merry Brenner right there with him.

* * *

M
ERRY
WATCHED
G
AGE
as his expression morphed from a smile into a contemplative frown that stole that single dimple away. She had no idea what brought about that change, but she didn’t like it. It tightened her stomach and made the sounds of the unrelenting storm seem more overwhelming.

Gage motioned vaguely behind them. “I need to get back there,” he said. “We both do.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to have to shut the heat off in a bit. We can’t risk getting too low on power, and it will stay a bit warmer now. Hopefully, the doors aren’t damaged and leaking air. We don’t need that. And I admit...” He lifted one booted foot a bit off the floor. “These boots are soaked.”

They did look distorted from all the moisture they’d absorbed. “How will you get the boots off? I mean, you’re in pain and getting in back to do it will be a bit tricky.”

He didn’t say anything as he slowly lowered the back of his chair again, until it was almost horizontal to the floor. He twisted just enough to look at the seat he needed to get to, before his dark gaze met hers. “I think I can slip back there without too much trouble. I have to push as much as I can and figure out how to move onto the seat.”

“Okay,” she said, stretching to grab her bag she’d pulled out of storage along with his, realizing how much bigger it was than his duffel. She pulled it into her lap and he was clear to try to maneuver.

She watched Gage, desperate to help him but knowing there wasn’t anything she could do. When he was half on the backseat, half on the front seat, she dumped her bag onto the floor on top of the bloodied shirt and said, “Stop.”

He looked at her, and she knew he was in pain from the slightly hazy, narrowed eyes that didn’t appear to be able to focus right then. “Why?” he said in a low, rough voice. “I’ve almost made it.”

She shifted toward his feet and grabbed a foot. “I can help you now, to get your boots off, so you can relax better when we get back there.”

She heard him take a shuddering breath and exhale sharply. “Okay, just do it,” he said.

She got a grip on the left boot and warned him she was going to pull. Even without looking at him, she knew it was painful for him. But the boot came off and the other soon followed. Quickly she stripped off the cold, wet cotton socks and threw them after the boots. She got his clean socks on him, and then glanced up at Gage. She forced herself not to react too much when she saw the fine sheen of sweat on his forehead. “I’m sorry if that was painful,” she said softly. When he didn’t move or open his eyes, she asked, “Are you okay?”

“Sure,” he mumbled.

“You’re lying again, aren’t you?” She reached for the package of pain pills. “You can have more medication. I think you need the second pill.”

He started to shake his head, but relented. “Okay.”

She shook out the pill, handed it to him and before she could get him the last of the water in the bottle, he dry swallowed the medication. Keeping his eyes closed, he resumed what he’d started. Inching slowly and carefully, he got onto the backseat faster than she’d thought possible. With a shuddering sigh, he moved gingerly into the area behind the pilot’s seat, and settled himself on the leather.

Merry got onto the seat he’d just vacated, and watched him. He didn’t have bruised ribs. They were most likely fractured or fully broken. Pain was in the fan of lines at his eyes, and the brackets at the sides of his mouth. She didn’t miss how he clenched and unclenched his jaw. She was getting scared.

CHAPTER SIX

M
ERRY
SPOKE
SOFTLY
. “You would have been better if you’d stayed in this seat. It goes all the way down. Now you’re in the middle of the seat with nowhere to rest your legs.”

“Ah, not so,” he murmured. “Lower the pilot seat as far as it can go.”

“What about your jacket?” she asked.

He frowned. “Put it on the floor up there.”

She did so and slid off the seat, bent over the pilot’s chair and found the lever. She lowered the seat, the headrest met the seat in the back, and she saw where he was going with this. “There,” she said. “Can you shift enough to get on it?”

“Watch and learn,” Gage said, then slowly moved to his left until he could stretch his legs out on the back of the now prone front seat for support. He sank back, fumbled with the adjustment on his seat and lowered the back enough to make something akin to a large chaise lounge. “This works for me.”

She settled on the front seat. “Very nice,” she agreed.

Merry watched him close his eyes, not moving, except for his chest rising and falling with each breath he took. She waited, letting him set the pace for whatever they were going to do. She worked at not jumping every time the plane shook from the wind. She had so many questions, but she knew she had to wait until he was up to answering them. Better that he dealt with the pain right then, than for her to rush anything.

She averted her eyes from the bandage, unable to look at the blood that had soaked through it. She thought the bleeding had stopped, but she wasn’t going to check right then. Maybe when the pain pills really kicked in, she’d try to change the dressing.

A cut and some cracked ribs. Not good, but much better than it could have been. Then a thought struck her that made her breath hitch in her chest. What if he had a concussion? What if it wasn’t just a cut? She remembered something about not sleeping; keeping the patient awake for...she couldn’t remember the time limit. If he had a brain injury, he had to stay awake.

She leaned toward him and spoke quietly, “Gage?” When he didn’t respond, she touched his knee and shook it gently. “Gage?”

His eyes fluttered, eventually his gaze held hers. He looked less tense, his eyes heavy. “Sorry. It’s just...” He shifted to sit up a bit more, but stopped and sagged against the seat. “Sorry.”

“I had a thought,” she said. When he started to close his eyes again, she spoke quickly. “No, don’t do that. You have to stay awake.”

“Why?”

“Because of your head. I was just thinking, how do we know you don’t have a concussion?”

He was quiet for several seconds. “How do we know I
do?
”

“That’s my point. If you do, you can’t sleep. If you don’t, you need to sleep.”

“Catch 22?”

“Yes, exactly. I remember that no sleeping rule applies to a concussion. I just don’t remember if one of the symptoms is dilated pupils, or constricted pupils. Nausea, I know that, dizziness, I know that, pain, too.”

“Check.”

“What?”

He opened his eyes wider. “Check my eyes.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, and shifted closer to him. His eyes were so dark in the dim light that it was difficult to see the pupils. When she managed to see them, they were dilated, but then again, there was no brightness in the plane, either, so it seemed obvious that the dark brown was little more than a thin circling of the pupil. “Shoot,” she whispered.

“Well, am I going to live?”

That wasn’t any funnier than his, “Life’s hard...” quip. “They’re dilated...a lot.”

“And that means?”

“I don’t know. There’s only a little light in here, so they’d be dilated anyway.” She moved on. “How do you feel right now?”

He seemed to be really considering the question, then said, “Cold, tired and bruised.”

“Are you nauseated or dizzy?”

“No, just hungry.”

She frowned. “I sure wish I could talk to Dr. Blackstone, but...” That brought a thought and she felt a jolt of excitement in her chest. “Of course, Dr. Blackstone.” Her cell phone was dead, but she’d seen Gage on his cell phone in the terminal. “You have a cell phone with you, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said, then all but crushed her hopes. “If you’re thinking of making a call to Moses, then forget it. No service at all.”

“How do you know?”

He shifted and she noticed he didn’t really wince at the movement. Progress? “My cell’s in the side pocket, by my seat up there. Check it yourself.”

She did just that, and then watched and waited as the screen loaded. The last icon on the screen was for the signal strength, and it had a red circle with a slash through it. As if that wasn’t obvious enough, a message flashed just under it. “No signal.”

Muttering under her breath, she put it back where she’d found it and huffed. “Nothing,” she told him.

Gage didn’t say, “I told you so,” which Merry thought was gracious of him. Instead, he said, “I guess we need to talk about what we’re going to do.”

“Do we have any choice?” she asked. “Don’t we just sit and wait until they find us?”

“Pretty much, but we need to stay protected and warm until reinforcements come.”

“That’s covered with the heater working.”

“That’s another thing we have to discuss,” he said evenly. “Like I said, we can’t keep it running constantly. There’s a limited amount of power for it and it has to be enough to last us for a while. We have to be careful and not get greedy for the heat.”

“We have to keep the lights on, don’t we, I mean, so they can see us when they search for us.” She could hear the panic in her voice and tried to hide her worry.

“No, these lights won’t help them. These lights barely could be seen if someone was within five feet of the plane.”

“Then how can they be looking...?” Her voice trailed off, her heart lurching as a logical truth hit her. “They aren’t looking for us, are they?”

“They will be, but they have to wait until light, they’ll be able to follow our signal better. No point in trying while it’s dark out.”

That was totally rational, but it didn’t help her at all. “Even when it’s light, what if we’re buried by that time? You know, snow all over the plane. No one will see us.”

“We have a good supply of flares, and we have some fuel to make a rescue fire. At dawn, we can make that all happen. The smoke can be seen easily, if the wind stops.” He sat a bit straighter, and despite the touch of warmth in the cabin, he shivered again. “First things first, we should focus on getting through the night.”

“What about the radio?”

“No, it’s gone. But the rest of the system for retrieval is in place, and the signal is going out. That’s what they’ll be searching for, and when we know they’re close, we’ll we have the fire and flares ready to go.”

She looked down at his long legs stretching out along the prone back of the pilot’s seat. His jeans were discolored from the cuffs to his knees. Reaching out, she touched the denim again. “Your pants, you need to...” She bit her lip.

“Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing.”

“Can you...get them off? What about your ribs?”

“I think I can handle it,” he said.

“Okay, where do you want me to go?”

He glanced exaggeratedly around the cabin. “Oh, I don’t know. How about the first class area?”

“What?”

He pointed forward. “Just scoot farther up, and I’ll take your word for it that you won’t peek. Just give me the thermal pants and the jeans.”

She felt the heat rush to her face as a vivid memory of his strong chest and flat stomach, which she’d glimpsed when she’d cut off his shirt, came to her. Shoving the thought aside, she quickly picked up his jeans.

“The bottom thermals, too,” he said.

She passed him both things. “What about the second set of thermals?”

“They’re yours, probably too big, but they’ll help a lot,” he said as he took his clothes.

She turned away from him, and faced forward. Thermals for her? That meant she had to put them on. Well, duh, she thought. Of course she had to put them on and she would.

“You can change in first class,” Gage said as if he’d read her mind.

“Great,” she muttered, but didn’t turn back to him. She could hear him shifting, his breathing getting a bit strained, and she closed her eyes.

She could imagine what he was doing, stripping off the wet jeans, putting on the thermals, then the dry jeans. After what seemed forever, she heard him almost fall back against the seat. Then a long, loud exhale of air. “Done,” he finally said. “Your turn.”

She twisted to look back at him. “Oh, shoot,” she said when she realized that Gage was just zipping up his jeans. Looking away, she apologized fast. “Sorry.”

“You can peek now,” he said with just a touch of humor in the words.

Slowly, she turned again, relieved that he was really finished this time. The pain lines in his face seemed to have eased considerably, despite the exertion of changing his clothes. His wet jeans were in a ball on the floor by the seat back. She reached for them and added them to the pile on the floor—his jacket and the bloody, shredded shirt.

She adjusted the lever to lower the back on her seat and sat cross legged on the soft leather. She looked over at Gage. The bandage was horrible and she leaned to her right and made a grab for the first-aid kit where she’d left it. “You need to change the bandage. It’s totally ruined.”

He gingerly tested the soaked bandage. He flinched at the contact. “I can do it,” he murmured.

“No, let me,” she said, taking out some cotton swabs, antibiotic wipes and three butterfly bandages. If the blood had stopped, she could pull the wound together in hopes that the scar wouldn’t be too ugly when it finally healed.

He didn’t argue, and didn’t even flinch when she moved back on the lowered front seat. She gently tugged the tape off his skin and slowly got the saturated cotton pad free from the wound. Thankfully the blood flow didn’t start again. Carefully she cleaned the wound, before putting the three bandages along the cut strategically to make sure the gash was closed.

“Were you a medical doctor before you went into psychiatry?” Gage murmured, his eyes still closed.

“Psychology, and no, just the basics I had to take, but I’ve—”

“I know, bandaged kids up before.”

She would never admit that she hadn’t bandaged a man’s wounds before, let him think that she’d done this any number of times in the past; that it was nothing special. When in fact, it was kind of special. She shivered as he slowly opened his eyes and met her gaze. Not only had she never bandaged a man’s wounds before, she’d never bandaged a man who could make her breath catch in her chest merely by looking at her.

* * *

G
AGE
MET
M
ERRY
’
S
green gaze, an intensity there for a fleeting moment, and then instantly it was gone. She really was lovely. And he wasn’t confused, certainly not by the pain or the medication.

Though he regretted taking on the responsibility for Merry, and then failing so miserably, a part of him was just plain thankful that she was here with him. He recognized the selfishness in that thought, but that didn’t alter the truth of it.

“Thanks,” he said and meant it. “I feel a lot better.”

Merry shrugged as she moved back on the lowered front seat, but she seemed very serious, and offered no answering smile. So he finally asked, “What is it? The cut? It’s worse or something?”

“Oh, no, it looks okay, or at least as okay as it can.” She bit her bottom lip. “I was just thinking, you mentioned about the heater. So, do we make a schedule or just use it when we need to or what?”

“Yes, we use it as little as possible to preserve the power. The lights should go on forever, they’re very low voltage.”

“No radio at all?”

“No.” He wanted to move past that quickly. “The heater and the flares and fire are our main means of survival. To keep the cold from getting too intense.”

Her fine eyebrows lifted. “Too intense?”

“We don’t want frostbite or worse.”

She looked as if she’d never even thought about that possibility. “Of course not,” she murmured. “Can we leave it on a bit longer?”

“Sure, for a bit,” he said, before segueing to a new subject. “You really recognized me at the airport?” That still surprised him.

“Well, not at first, but then I heard that man who found you asking if you were Gage Carson. That’s when I really knew who you were.”

“I thought I’d changed a lot since I was a kid.” He’d been a skinny child with unruly dark hair, tanned to the color of coffee, and always sporting a bandage after some mishap with his brothers and friends. “A lot.”

That teased a smile from her. “Oh, you’ve changed, a lot, but there’s something so familiar.” She shrugged, her smile fading just a bit. “You look like how I imagined you would look when you were grown.” She gestured with her hands. “I’d heard that you were a huge success with your own construction company, and then there you were getting on your plane to head to Wolf Lake. It seemed to be a...” She hesitated on the word, then flushed slightly when she said, “A miracle.”

Some miracle. He cringed a bit at her words, especially since they were stranded in a storm in a plane he’d crashed. He hadn’t even been capable of taking off his own boots. “Logistics.”

“Excuse me?” she asked.

He realized he’d switched subjects again, and that it had surprised her. “Logistics. I couldn’t even get my boots off and it’s only simple logistics.” He made a noise that sounded suspiciously to him like a snort, but then he realized it was about the only way he could actually do anything close to laughing. “I run a huge construction and design business, and yet even with all my engineering skills you had to pull my boots off.”

She chuckled at that and he liked the sound of it. “Ah, yes, thank goodness for all my higher education,” she kidded.

“I didn’t get that far. My education is from living my life, the good, the bad and the ugly.” He watched her as his eyes began to feel heavy.

Sobering slowly from his words, she shrugged, but didn’t speak. Those beautiful green eyes looked down at her hands pressed to her knees, and he knew what he’d said had bothered her, but he didn’t know her well enough to understand why. He was with a woman who had been a relative stranger to him just hours ago, and now their fates were intertwined in a way that he’d never thought possible. “Life is a great teacher,” he said, noticing how low and slightly slurred his words were.