William and another man returned moments later. “Everyone, this is Lucas Hopper.”
Lucas was clean-cut and college age, Daria guessed. He waved his greeting without offering to shake hands then quickly took his place behind the controls. She bit down on a smile.
“One more thing. Lucas was talking to a pilot who flew in from Salt Lake a few minutes ago. He said there’s a weather system over the Rockies that might give us trouble. Hopefully we can get over it without a problem, but we need to hurry. So…” William said, switching into flight attendant mode. “Let’s go over the safety and emergency features and rules. Have you flown before?”
“We went to Italy last summer,” Miranda boasted.
“On a big, big, big plane,” Hailey added, spreading her arms wide to demonstrate.
His gray eyes widened. “Oh-ho, I’m carrying world travelers. Very well, then. No mere pretzels and sodas for you. Good thing I tucked in some Pellegrino and baguettes.”
“Whatsa baguette, Mommy?”
“Skinny bread, dear heart. Very chewy and yummy with cheese.”
“I like cheese.”
“Good,” William said. “You’ll find an assortment of choices. And wine for your mum.”
“You talk funny.”
“Hailey,” Daria scolded. “Don’t make rude comments.”
“Sorry.”
“Apology accepted. I was raised in England. That’s a few countries north of Italy. We’re practically neighbors.” He smiled kindly at Hailey then looked at Daria. “Make sure their seat belts are nice and snug. Hopefully, the tower will clear us quickly. At least there’s no fog.”
She’d watched the weather channel religiously the past week, hoping and praying for a clear day. Lucky for her, Fresno was experiencing a drought. No rain meant no thick blanket of gray fog that grounded planes.
Within twenty minutes, they were airborne. The plane was noisy but not deafening, and her seat was more comfortable than the recliner in her family room. She was starting to think they might have made a clean break when her cell phone, which she’d forgotten to turn off, beeped, indicating she had an incoming text message.
She made sure the girls were distracted before covertly checking. It was from Bruce.
Had he hired a detective to follow her, she wondered? Why else would Hester suddenly decide to drop by for a visit? Her paranoia kicked up a notch, adding to the discomfort in her belly.
What if he has someone waiting in Rapid City?
She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, willing her nausea to recede. Even if she asked William to turn the plane around, which she was certain he’d do in a heartbeat if that was her wish, she knew Bruce wouldn’t be placated. He might even feel provoked to do something they’d all regret for the rest of their lives.
No,
she told herself, pushing her fears into a small, dark corner of her mind.
We need distance—for all our sakes.
He adjusted his mike and looked at his copilot. Lucas Hopper had come highly recommended by the flying service he’d used before he and Cooper and Shane bought the plane. “You got the controls?”
The young redhead grinned as if he’d been handed the keys to the city of Las Vegas. “You bet, sir.”
“Holler if anything comes up,” William said, removing his headphones and unsnapping his safety belt. He maneuvered out of his seat and stepped to the side bench across from where Daria was sitting. “Is everything okay?”
She tried to smile but it was clear by the look of anxiety in her eyes that something was wrong. Maybe she was having second thoughts.
“You look pale. Some water maybe? Libby keeps some motion sickness pills onboard if—”
She shook her head. “No, thank you. Just nerves. I need to ask you something.”
He waited, certain he was going to hear, “Can you turn the plane around? I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
She held up her phone. “I forgot to turn this off. I didn’t screw up your instruments or compromise our safety, did I?”
He let out the breath he’d been holding. “No. We’re fine. Did you receive a call?”
“A text message. From my ex.” She paused, probably debating how much information to share with him. “My mother-in-law stopped by the house after the girls and I left. She called Bruce, who called the school and discovered the girls were absent.”
He could tell by the slight tremble in her hand that the message must have upset her.
“Why’d he call the school?”
She shrugged. “Apparently I’m so predictable that any variation from my normal routine sends up a red flag. He called me several times but I’d turned off the ringer. I was afraid my voice might give something away or he’d overhear Hailey and Miranda talking in the background and guess something was afoot.”
“Unfortunate timing can happen in even the best laid plans,” William told her, not liking the way she blamed herself for something beyond her control.
She looked at the phone again. “I turned this off, of course, but I was wondering if it would be safe to send him a reply now?” She quickly added, “My lawyer has a signed release saying he was okay with us visiting my grandfather who is elderly and in poor health—I might have stretched the truth a wee bit—but I wouldn’t put it past him to call the police to issue an Amber Alert. He could probably make the media portray me as a deranged kidnapper.”
He gave her credit for thinking things through before acting. It helped reassure him that she wasn’t an impulsive diva, creating an emotional firestorm for the attention. “We won’t drop out of the sky if you send a text, I promise. But whether or not you have service depends on your phone. My hunch is it won’t work at our current altitude.”
She pressed the on key and waited a few seconds before typing something onto the tiny keypad. “Bruce and I text more than we talk,” she muttered without looking up. “When you watch CNN and see congressmen and representatives intently focused downward, it’s because they’re texting their wives or girlfriends.”
“Does your husband have a girlfriend?”
She glanced up. “Ex-husband,” she corrected. “And not that I know of. This breakup wasn’t—isn’t—about infidelity. His or mine.”
“What is it about?” he asked, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Her motives for divorcing her husband were none of his business, but he couldn’t help wondering. She didn’t fit the profile he had in his head of what a battered wife should look like. Her daughters seemed well-adjusted and happy, and to the casual observer, she appeared to have the kind of life he’d always fancied for himself.
She let out a sigh of frustration. “You were right. Delivery failed.”
Her lips were pressed tightly together, and he could tell she was thinking hard, probably running any number of scenarios through her mind. He did the same thing when he received bad news. After a few seconds, she shrugged. “What happens happens.”
“It’s not too late to turn around.” He wasn’t surprised when she shook her head and sidestepped his suggestion.
“I’ll call him from Rapid City…right after I call my lawyer,” she added softly, glancing over her shoulder to check on her daughters. Both were wearing headphones attached to a portable DVD player. “You asked what went wrong in my marriage? A thousand things. Many of them my fault, but the biggest thing was Bruce changed. I wish I could blame politics, but honestly I think the job merely exacerbated tendencies that were already there. Personality flaws I managed to overlook when he was courting me, promising me the moon.”
“The moon is a pretty big piece of real estate. Is that what you wanted?”
“What girl doesn’t?”
He tried to picture her as greedy and avaricious, but the image simply wouldn’t materialize in his mind.
“The sad fact is, Bruce gave me everything I really wanted.” She nodded toward her daughters. “And more. A lot more. But nothing’s ever free. And all that stuff came with a price tag I wasn’t willing to spend my life paying.”
She shrugged. The gesture seemed to say she might wish things were different, but this was her lot at the moment.
“I’m going to see if the girls need anything. Thanks again.”
He watched her pause to have a word with each of her children. She was an attractive woman—even dressed in inexpensive jeans and sneakers. Her wardrobe cried Witness Protection, but there was no disguising her grace and dignity. Her shoulder-length hair was thick and wavy, not exactly brown, not exactly blond.
Hailey, the young one, took off her headphones and yawned. Daria immediately dropped to one knee and dug around under the child’s seat for her bag. A second later, she produced a scraggly-looking stuffed animal that might once have been a bunny. Or a bear. William honestly couldn’t tell.
The little girl curled sideways in her seat, hugging the treasured beast to her chest. Her right hand inched upward toward her face, thumb sticking out, but her mother gently redirected the thumb to close around the stuffed toy as she kissed Hailey’s cheek.
A blanket,
a voice in his head prompted, but before William could reach into the overhead storage compartment, Daria shrugged out of her sweatshirt and tucked it in around the child.
A small kindness, motherly. But for some reason, it irked the hell out of him.
Selflessness was well and good, but how difficult would it have been to ask for a blanket? She was a good mother, he got that, but what about
her
needs? What was she going to do if she got chilled? And why in heaven’s name did he care?
It also bothered him that she was so fair-minded toward her ex. Instead of bad-mouthing the guy to a perfect stranger—as most people of William’s acquaintance would do—she shouldered her share of the blame and took responsibility for her decision.
He didn’t like it when people failed to behave as he expected them to. He made a small adjustment in the cabin temperature then returned to his seat.
Or maybe, the thought struck him, the problem was that he liked her. Admiration was fine as long as it didn’t go any further, he decided. Doing a good deed for a friend was one thing. Getting drawn into a stranger’s drama was something altogether different.
His clients were constantly trying to pull him into whatever current crisis seemed to be reshaping their worlds. For the most part, he was able to provide comfort and advice without actually giving a damn. Morgan called him a master of compartmentalization. He took that as a compliment; he’d learned the hard way what happened when you broke your own rules. A rare few got past his we-are-business-associates-not-friends filter. Like Morgan. And Bianca Del Torres.
He fumbled with his seat belt, drawing a curious look from the young man sitting next to him. Once he had his headset in place, he heard his copilot ask, “Everything okay?”
William nodded. Everything was fine and would continue to be fine so long as he didn’t let himself be drawn down memory lane. Particularly
that
street, where the loss still felt fresh and there was never a shortage of regret.
“Where are we?” he asked.
Lucas gave him their current coordinates.
“Good. That tail wind is giving us a nice little bump.” And the sooner he got them to their destination the better. For everyone’s sake.
“Don’t think you’ll get away with this. I will never. Ever. Let. You. Go.” He growled the words, pausing to punctuate each one. “Do you hear me, Daria? You’re mine. All mine.”
Daria awoke with a start, sweating and shaking. Her breath made a hollow, raspy sound as she gulped in air. A dream. She was safe. In the air, flying away. He had no power over her. But if she closed her eyes, she could feel the heat and iron force of Bruce’s grip.
She stretched her jaw to loosen the tense muscles of her neck and upper torso. Her skin felt icy—as if he’d cut off circulation from the chin down. Symbolic? Or prophetic, she wondered as her breathing returned to normal.
She checked her watch, surprised to see that she’d only been asleep for thirty minutes or so. She’d hoped the respite would serve as a power nap. Between nerves and worry and a thousand what-ifs, she hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. And she had a great deal to do once they landed in Rapid City: rent a car, drive to her grandfather’s in Sentinel Pass, and, of course, call Bruce to explain why she hadn’t responded to his text.
“I can’t live in fear, Bruce,” she’d say. “You’ve created a hostile environment that affects every aspect of our day-to-day lives. We’re going to live with Cal until you and I have a custody agreement in place.”
He’d be furious, of course. He’d want to choke her. But Bruce wasn’t the type to get his hands dirty, and he was far too afraid of a scandal to risk hiring a hit man.
She hoped. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize arriving in Sentinel Pass and seeing her grandfather for the first time in way too long. Bruce had refused to let her go to Mary’s funeral, despite Grandpa Cal’s offer to pay her way.
“She was frigging ancient,” Bruce had said. “Everybody knew she was going to kick the bucket eventually. What’s the big deal? I need you here to work the phones.”
Bruce wasn’t up for re-election until next year, but he’d insisted on dragging Daria and their daughters to help campaign for other candidates within his party. He’d never bothered to ask her whether or not she was a member of his party.
She wasn’t. And she voted against him every time, on every issue, strictly on principle. She smiled at her small, secret rebellion.
“Daria?”
She looked up to see William coming toward her, a worried look on his face.
Something was wrong. Adrenaline brought her fully awake. “What’s wrong?” she asked, quickly releasing her seat belt so she could turn around in her seat and look at the girls. Hailey was still asleep and Miranda barely glanced up from the movie she was watching.
Her heart rate was almost back to normal when she swung around to face William, who lowered his long, graceful self into the seat across from her. Even at a respectable distance, her awareness of him continued. She could smell his cologne—rich, subtle and sexy as hell. It was interfering with her ability to think; that is, until she heard him say, “It appears we’re going to run into some weather up ahead.”
As if to punctuate his point, the plane rose and dropped, making her stomach swirl uncomfortably.
“That kind of weather?” she asked, swallowing hard.
“Exactly. A storm front has dropped farther south than expected. I’m IFR—that’s instrument rated—so we could go up and over, but apparently the precipitation started as sleet and changed to snow, making road conditions impassable. They haven’t closed the airport in Rapid City yet, but there’s a good chance they will. Rather than risk arriving with no place to land, I think we’d be wise to set down and stay put until it passes.”
She looked out the small portal to her left. The sky seemed as blue as it had when they’d boarded. The thick white blanket of soft clouds appeared innocently benign below them. “It doesn’t look bad.”
He stood and leaned across her to point in the distance. His proximity should have made her nervous but didn’t. She found that puzzling but didn’t have time to dwell on her reaction once she spotted the voluminous dark purple thunderhead he was showing her. “Ugly.”
“My thought exactly.” He returned to his seat. “Lucas suggested we stop in Durango. His aunt lives there, and he did his ground school and first solo there. We’ll refuel and cross the Rockies tomorrow. What do you say to that?”
Her mind immediately started calculating the cost of three motel rooms, five meals, and two cabs to and from the airport. It would be a pretty hefty blow to her finances, but she didn’t see any way around it. “Do you suppose the girls and I could sleep in the plane?”
He tilted his head as if not quite clear what she was asking.
“I’m on a pretty tight budget and I don’t have a lot of extra cash,” she explained. “I’m going to reimburse you for the cost of this flight as soon as I can, but it might not happen until after my…um…settlement,” she whispered the word in case Miranda was listening. Daria had tried her best not to involve the girls in the financial details of the divorce. “In the meantime, I need to pinch pennies.”
“I’ve always found that such an odd and outdated saying, since people rarely seem to care about one-cent coins any more,” he said, a bemused look in his eyes. “But, I need to make one thing clear. I fly the plane. Shane handles the finances. You can bring that up with him, but he probably won’t take your money. He’s very fond of your grandfather. Libby and Cooper were married in your grandfather’s garden, and I believe Shane said the setting was magical. He’s going to use it in the show next season.”
“Libby and Cooper are getting married? I mean, their characters are?”
He blinked and pulled his lips to one side. “Hmm, now you know why I didn’t go into foreign service. No torture necessary to get me to blurt out state secrets. I don’t believe that tidbit was meant for public consumption.”
His chagrin was so real, so charming, she would have melted in a pool if the plane hadn’t suddenly dropped and pulled sharply to the right.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered, jumping to his feet. “Damn sorry. That’s what I get for flirting with the passengers.”
He was flirting? With me?
“Mommy? What happened? Is the plane okay?”
A handsome man was flirting with me and I have so little self-esteem, I didn’t even know it.
She put the thought out of her mind and stood, gripping the back of her seat so she wouldn’t fall. She needed to keep her mind on her daughters and her present situation. Period. “Everything is fine, sweetie. Let Mommy make sure your safety belt is nice and tight. We’re going to land soon.”
“Are we at Great-Grandpa’s?”
“Not exactly, doll.” She made certain Hailey’s seat back was upright and then gave her belt an extra tug. “We have to make a detour because of the weather. I’ll let William tell you all about it when we land. But don’t worry. We’re perfectly safe and we’ll be back in the air tomorrow.”
“Oh, jeez,” Miranda said, groaning. “Dad was right. You can’t do anything right. Now, we won’t get to see Great-Grandpa for another day.”
Her daughter’s criticism stung, but Daria ignored it. She’d put off making this decision for too long and now she was going to have to pay the price. “Turn off the DVD player, Miranda,” Daria said. “The pilots will need to be able to communicate with the airport control tower. All electronic devices, remember?”
She didn’t know for certain that included portable movie players, but she’d flown enough to know the drill. So did her daughter, who groused but complied.
Once back in her seat, Daria let out a halting sigh. She’d done well to keep her emotions under control to this point, and she wouldn’t give in to tears now—even though William’s and Shane’s generosity had created a lump the size of Kansas in her throat. Kindness and compassion hadn’t been a part of her life for a long time, and she vowed to pay it forward as soon as she had the wherewithal to do so.
She didn’t dare look too far ahead. Life was going to get tougher over the next few weeks and months, and her main goal was to protect the two sweet, fragile souls she loved more than life.
Would she ever be brave enough to risk falling in love again? Maybe. If, by then, she’d figured out what real love was supposed to be. At least now, she knew what it wasn’t. Love was not abject control over another person.
And if it turned out that she was some sort of magnet for controlling men who needed to dominate her to feel good about themselves…well, forget it. She’d rather be single for the rest of her life.
As depressing as that sounded, a part of her brain couldn’t quite let go of that funny flutter in her chest that happened every time she was in William Hughes’s presence.
I might never marry again,
she thought.
But I could take a lover. When the girls are older and off at college. Maybe one with an English accent.
She closed her eyes and tucked the dream in a small, dark corner of her mind. Dreams were a luxury a divorced mother of two could not afford. She’d do well to remember that. Once she had her feet on the ground, they needed to stay firmly planted because, like the big bad wolf, Bruce would huff and puff and try to blow her back into the controlling net of his world, his family.
Fighting Bruce, fighting for her daughters would take all of her focus. So no more fantasizing about handsome, inscrutable Englishmen. Period.