“You have a passenger now, that’s all. Everything else is the same.”
Yeah, he had a passenger. A shaking, unnerved, freaked-out desperate one.
Give him a thunderstorm in Cabo any day over this…
“There’s no need to panic, or do anything rash,” she said, and he wondered if she was talking to him-or herself.
“Yeah, well, if you’re insisting on coming along, then sit.” He jerked his chin toward the copilot seat next to him, because he wanted to see her, wanted to know exactly what he was up against.
“I’m fine right where I am.”
Hell if he’d have her at his back with a gun jammed against him for the next hour. “Sit. Down.”
As if for emphasis, they hit a pocket of air, and the plane dipped. With a gasp, the woman fell backward into the seat behind him.
Noah smiled grimly. He wasn’t stupid, and he hadn’t been born yesterday. Actually, he hadn’t even been born in this country at all, but in England. He’d ended up here, orphaned as a teen, where he’d proceeded to beg, borrow, and steal his way to his dream.
A life of flying.
And she was not going to take that life away from him.
“You did that on purpose.” Her voice was tight and angry. “Don’t do anything like that again.”
He hadn’t done it in the first place, but he could have, and would if he got the chance and could manage it without getting his head accidentally shot off, because he really hated it when that happened. “Who the hell are you?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What’s in Mammoth?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Great. A stubborn female. Who happened to have a gun. Never a good combination.
He glanced back and wasn’t happy to see her standing again, directly behind him so that he still couldn’t get a good look at her.
“Don’t.” Once again she shoved the gun into his back, a situation of which he was quickly tiring. Right before his crash, adrenaline had pumped through him, but it was nothing compared to what flowed through his veins now.
Then he’d been scared, to the bone.
Now he was pissed. To the bone. His radio crackled, and then Shayne’s voice filled the cabin. As a team called Sky High Air, they had a fleet of three jets, three Cessnas, two Beechcraft, a Moody, a Piper, and a Cirrus, and access to others via a leasing network, and had just constructed a building to house them all instead of working out of a very expensive leased wing at LAX. It gave them their own hub, a fixed operating base for their picky, finicky clientele, complete with maintenance and concierge services.
Not bad for three punks who’d once been nothing more than sorry-ass teenage delinquents.
“Noah?” Shayne asked via radio. “You there?”
“I have to answer that,” he told his hijacker. “Or he’ll know something’s wrong.” Without waiting for her response, he pushed the button on the radio. “Here.”
“Just checking in on your inaugural flight.”
He was doing fine. Great.
If he forgot about the gun digging into him.
“You okay?” Shayne asked.
Noah hated that his friend even had to ask, but could admit, at least to himself, that the past six months had been just rough enough that Shayne felt he had to. “I’m…” He pushed back at the gun. “Hanging in.”
His kidnapper remained silent, tense.
“Brody’s flying Mrs. Sinclair to Aspen,” Shayne said. “At least so she says, but she’s had us ready-up four times this past week, only to correct at the last minute. I don’t see today being any different.”
The idiosyncrasies of the rich and famous didn’t bother him any, as long as they paid for it, but just the words “Mrs. Sinclair” made the butterflies in his stomach tap-dance.
Mr. Sinclair had been a forty-year-old trust-fund baby who’d built huge resort complexes in every party town along the West Coast while showing off his much younger trophy wife, Bailey Sinclair, an ex-model, a woman who screamed sophistication and elegance.
Not to mention her muy caliente factor.
But her husband had bitten the big one three months ago in a mysterious hunting accident, and they hadn’t seen much of the missus since then. She was probably off spending her husband’s billions of dollars, and…and hell.
Bailey Sinclair was intelligent, and sexy, stubborn as hell-three of Noah’s favorite qualities in a woman. She had strawberry blond, wild flyaway hair that framed her face in a way that seemed as if maybe she’d just gotten out of bed and wasn’t averse to going back. Her baby blues were deep enough to drown a man, and her mouth…
Christ, he’d had entire day-long fantasies about her mouth. Truth was, she was his living secret crush.
It was pathetic, really. Getting weak-kneed over another man’s wife.
Even if that man was dead.
But he was a little busy today, so it was probably time to get over Bailey Sinclair.
Cold turkey, pal.
“She’s already on board and locked up in her stateroom,” Shayne said. “And if the rumors are true-”
“Rumors?”
“That she’s selling everything off…then she’s probably going for one last hurrah. Said she was taking a sleeping pill and just to wake her after arrival.”
Noah could picture the sleek honey of a plane on the tarmac. It didn’t take much for his imagination to go farther and see the gorgeous, lush stateroom on board, the huge king-sized bed covered in the best of the best silk, and Bailey sprawled on it, her hair streaming across a pillow, her long, willowy body barely wrapped in satin and lace-
Scratch that.
No satin, no lace.
Nothing but Bailey. Yeah, that might help him get over himself real quick.
If he lived through this, that was.
“Be careful,” Shayne said.
“I will be, Mom. Thanks.”
“Mom?”
“Better than old lady,” Noah said, checking the horizon, ignoring his “passenger” while Shayne huffed out a low laugh.
“Smart-ass,” he muttered, and clicked off.
Yeah, that was him: Noah Fisher, smart-ass. Among other things. And actually, he’d heard them all: selfish bastard, good-for-nothing lout, cocky SOB…
That most of them were completely one-hundred-percent true didn’t keep him up at night. Nope, he saved that for the nightmares, of which he now had a new one.
He glanced at his altimeter and airspeed indicator. Everything looked okay. Everything was okay, because he’d checked and double-checked over the static-system vents and Pitot tube for foreign bodies, like the bird that had fucked him just before his crash. All was clear right now. Good to know. He would not be crashing tonight.
“Thanks,” said the woman at his back, “for not giving me away.”
He did some more ignoring, and the silence filled the cockpit. Reaching out beside him, he lifted the brown bag from which came the most heavenly scent on earth-his burrito. Bless you, Maddie, he said silently to Sky High’s concierge. She always stocked him with his favorite fast food. “Hungry?” he asked his hijacker. He hadn’t had a real mother, but he still knew how to mock politeness.
“Just fly.”
“Suit yourself.” He opened the bag and stuffed a bite into his mouth. His taste buds exploded with pleasure, and to be as annoying as possible, he moaned with it. “You have no idea what you’re missing.”
“Looks like I’m missing a boatload of calories.” She sounded tense enough to shatter. “Can’t you fly
