Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (53 page)
Read Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Online
Authors: Dorothy Fletcher
She knew only that never, at any moment of her life, had she imagined such joy and passion, such rapture and bliss … ecstasy that was almost like pain.
Whatever she had known of love … or thought she had known, paled into insignificance in the face of this overwhelming surge of exaltation … this transport of glory … this yearning, burning passion.
He let her go finally, and held her gently for a moment until both were able to speak again.
“Come, we must go,” Iris said breathlessly. “They’ll think we’ve been kidnapped.”
“Yes, we must go,” he agreed, settling his tie. “Anyway, we should conserve our energies. For those one hundred and ninety kisses on the steps down from the Butte.”
“If they’re anything like that one,” she said, as they went into the lounge, “I’ll end up in the hospital. I think you just broke three of my ribs.”
“Well, there you are at last,” Louisa said gaily, and a genial Claude Marchand stood up at their approach.
“Bon soir,
Iris Easton,” he said warmly.
“Bon soir,
Claude Marchand.”
“So I was wrong in my conjectures,” he said, and shrugged. “But as you Americans say, you can’t win them all.”
“You were wrong, but you were right,” she said. “Half right and half wrong.”
“Yet it doesn’t really matter, does it,” he remarked. “As long as the ending came out all right.”
“Forgive me for contradicting you, M. Marchand,” Paul said. “But it is not the ending. It is only the beginning.”
This edition published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
Copyright © 1979 by Dorothy Fletcher
ISBN 10: 1-4405-7190-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7190-9
eISBN 10: 1-4405-7189-9
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7189-3
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © 123rf.com; istockphoto.com/EHStock
Dorothy Fletcher
Avon, Massachusetts
CHAPTER 1
The girl in the ITA uniform walked briskly through the main waiting room at Kennedy Field, stopped at a newsstand to buy an evening paper, paid for it, closed up her purse again, then ran lightly down the stairs and opened a door that read Flight Operations. The briefing room was on a lower level and she was, out of training and habit, on time. It was a minute or two before six-thirty when she entered the busy room: report time was an hour and a half before take-off.
Her name was Kelly Jones. She had been flying for ITA for four years and had recently graduated to the status of chief stewardess, or purser. The flight was a 707. She would return on one of the 747’s. But on this trip she was top dog and when she entered the room she moved up to the front, making a last adjustment to her cap and tucking her flight bag under her arm.
There were four other stewardesses present; the fifth walked in quickly at exactly half past six. The briefing began promptly and was the usual thing. There were no new campaigns, happily, such as “No white lipstick on this flight.” Yes, of course, it could be as petty as that, Even after all these years you had the feeling that you were sized up like a hunk of meat, like a bunny in a Playboy Club. There was still that sense of losing your own individuality. You belonged to the airline and to the hundred odd passengers you were about to service.
But to be fair, you were paid more, per flight time, than you could earn in almost any other field of endeavor. So you stood and suffered the inspection and pretended not to mind.
“Check your coffee makers,” Mrs. Tree (who was the briefing instructor) advised. “We’re trying a new kind.”
A little later she said, “You have two infants.”
Groans were stifled.
The only saving grace about night flights (what with all the other draggy circumstances they entailed) was that babes in arms were generally absent. Sensible adults transported babies in the daytime. Two infants meant tears and wails and a good deal of extra service. And as if that weren’t enough, Mrs. Tree added, “You have an unaccompanied minor.”
Well, Kelly thought. It was going to be a rough flight.
“A child of ten. Male.”
Um. Old enough to go to the john himself, Kelly thought. At least there was that.
“Relatives will meet him in Madrid.”
Relatives would meet him in Madrid. Meanwhile, it’s I who will have to wipe his nose, Kelly reflected, without a change in expression. We will deal with these problems in due time, she told herself; you took it step by step.
“No exceptional passengers otherwise,” Mrs. Tree said, in her dry voice. Which meant no movie stars. I didn’t expect any, Kelly thought, bored. Night flights were for people who were loath to lose time on travel. The poor bastards counted every penny and started out, practically sleepless, sightseeing on the double.
“Have a good trip,” Mrs. Tree concluded and then the Captain, who had spent the last half hour studying the flight plan in the Dispatch Room, walked in for his innings.
It was Norm Robertson, one of the old-timers; Kelly knew him well. A nice guy, one you could depend on. He saw her smile and grinned back.
He greeted them nicely; his voice had warm southern overtones. He was tall, nearly six feet; he had a broad eye-span and sun-tanned skin. He had intelligent, land eyes. He also had six children and he didn’t sleep around.
Most of the Captains got Kelly aside and told her in detail how they wanted their roast beef done before they got down to cases. Captain Robertson, however, was one of the seasoned ones, no nonsense and no gall. He quietly put the girls through their paces: “Tell me how to open the door and put the slide down …”
Some of the new ones, after establishing that they wanted their ribs bloody rare and a double portion of the
mousse au chocolat
, got carried away with it, shooting rapid-fire questions at the girls, coldeyed and mean. But Norman Robertson, who had been doing this for years and years, knew enough to leave it to the cabin crew. He was experienced enough to be sure that the stewardesses were as cautious as he was, that they watched for a grease-fire in the galley or a cigarette thrown by a careless passenger in the waste disposal. The main concern was fire and an airline hostess was as keenly aware of the danger as the cockpit crew.
The routine questions were answered to the point and to the Captain’s satisfaction. I wonder, Kelly thought, if passengers had any idea that occasional stewardesses were found wanting and dismissed and a new crew called in. It had happened … and in her time.
The Captain was giving the flight plan now. When that was done he asked who the purser was. Kelly stepped forward.
“Hi,” he said. “Seems like I’ve seen you before.”
“Seems as if.”
He took her aside and laid down the rules. It was okay; this was one of the old pros. The new crop, the brash, temperamental ones, got in her hair with their insolent assumption of superiority. They could be infuriating with their barked commands: “I don’t want you sitting in the lounge. You know the rules, girls.”
Sure they knew the rules. A lot of them had more flight time than the captains.
“Looks like it will be choppy about an hour out,” Captain Robertson said. “Keep that in mind, honey. You’re a pretty girl … Everyone tells you that, right?”
“Always grateful for a kind word. I hear you have a newcomer to the family.”
“Three months old now,” he said, and got out some color snaps of the newest Robertson. “Smart as a button. Am I boring you, honey?”
“No. Good luck to all of you,” she said, sincerely.
But time was passing. “Got your girls assigned to the slides?” he asked, looking at his watch. “If so, I guess we’re all set.” He turned and saluted, with a pleasant grin, the rest of the girls. “Let’s have a good trip,” he drawled, and left the room.
“I’m Kelly Jones and I know two of you. Hi, Lucille. Hello, Mimi. Will the rest of you please introduce yourselves?”
“Margot Miller.”
“Doris Michaels.”
“Wendy Warren.”
“All right, let’s get with it,” Kelly said, and added the inevitable, “Let’s have a good trip.”
She was the head stewardess, responsible for the cabin crew. It had its onus, no doubt about it, but it paid well, about double that of an ordinary stewardess, which was very good money indeed. You could sock plenty away.
Not like a model, admittedly, but the next best thing to it.
The spring evening was balmy, not really very warm yet; it was only the middle of May. The sky was that lovely color that looked pink one second and violet the next. You didn’t want to leave all that dusky beauty and get inside the plane to spend the long, busy night catering to the public. But it was a job, your job, and you did it, if not automatically, at least capably. You put in your time and occasionally you foxed the Establishment.
Air Time averaged around thirteen or fourteen days a month; if you worked it right you managed, at precious intervals, to pull a fiddle, which was, in effect, to outsmart the management. You figured it out painstakingly, studying your monthly patterns, so that every once in a while you had almost half a month layoff time all in one stretch. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t cottoned to by the lines, but you could swing it two or three times a year if you were a smart cookie. Kelly was up, on the terminaion of this New York-Madrid flight, for twelve days time off.
A few days in Madrid, and then a short hop to Malaga, after which she would hire a car and tour Andalusia, from Torremolinos to Sevilla. Then she would take an Interline flight to Lisbon and resume duties on the Monster, a 747 headed back to the States.
She would be technically on call, but she could beat that too. Four years’ service and expertise helped a hell of a lot. She checked off the new coffee makers with a light heart and heard the welcoming stewardess give her first greeting.
“
Good
evening. May I have your seat number, please?”
• • •
Passengers were labeled, unbeknownst to themselves, “the geese” (or in the case of certain smart alecs of masculine gender, “the goosers”). There were a few standard specimens on tonight’s trip. Kelly knew at once, for example, that the party of six in economy (three and three with the aisle between them) were this flight’s lushes. Fairfield County … one of them had a copy of the latest novel about hi-jinks in suburbia on his lap. They liked to read about wife-swapping. Maybe they did it and maybe they only dreamed about it, but certainly they enjoyed flipping through the pages to find the really dirty parts.
That little coterie would be hard to take; at least one of them would vomit up the contents of his stomach around three in the morning. “Oy veh, my head,” Mr. (or Mrs.) Westport would moan while soliciting her sympathy in the galley. “God. Have you got an icebag or something?”
Then there were the two pinchers. One was traveling alone. A bull-necked beast with white socks and a cheap attache case. “I always did say the ITA girl was the hostess with the mostes’,” he’d said to Wendy Warren, with a furtive feel of her backside. “Watch him, he’s death,” Wendy warned the others. “He’d screw his own mother.”
The other satyr was accompanied by his wan, tired wife. A salesman: you could smell it. A small-timer, probably sent economy and paying the difference for first class, out of his own pocket. A real sport. “Listen, let’s meet later,” he told Kelly. “I can get away, don’t worry about that. Where are you staying?”