SAM WAS in mid-sentence when she realized the pilot was no longer listening to her. The look on his face made her blood run cold. “What’s wrong?” she asked, her heart pumping harder. “Is it the carburetor again? More ice? You can handle that, right? Ice isn’t a big problem, is it? You know how to handle it, right?”
“The electrical system is out,” he said, his words clipped. “I canna get a reading on anything.”
“The engine’s still running, isn’t it?” The engine had to be working. She didn’t even want to think of what it might mean if it wasn’t.
“We have nothing, lass.”
“Nothing? We can’t have nothing. We have to have something. If we don’t have anything that means—”
His expression was grim. “We’ll glide to a landing on the other side of this mountain. We have no other option.”
“Glide to a landing on the other side of the mountain! You can’t even see the mountain.” She leaned as far forward as the seat belt would allow and peered out the window. All she saw was dense, icy fog, swirling everywhere.
“Tis there, lass. Of that I’m certain.”
“And you think we’ll sail right over it and glide to a landing on the other side.” Did he also believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus?
He grunted something she assumed meant yes.
“Is there an airport on the other side of this mountain?”
“I wish I could tell you there was, but I’d be a liar.”
“I wouldn’t mind a lie right about now.”
If he got the joke, he didn’t smile. Her stomach twisted into a sailor’s knot
“You’re in the Highlands. The best we can hope for is some open land with room enough.”
She’d seen enough of the Scottish terrain to know that what he was hoping for was a miracle. The Highlands weren’t Texas. The odds of finding a flat, treeless plain were about a hundred to one.
The sailor’s knot in her stomach tightened.
The nose of the plane dipped into the top of an icy gray cloud. The cabin began to shake, as if gripped by a giant unseen hand. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Don’t cry, girl,” he said gently. “All is not lost.”
“I’m not crying,” she managed to say, determined to ignore the fact that she was lying through her teeth.
“You have no need to worry,” he went on in that whiskey-and-honey voice. “It can’t be my time yet. The beautiful Sophie saw me surrounded by children with a loving woman by my side, and none of that has yet come to pass.”
“I hope Sophie was right,” she said, closing her eyes as they dived deeper into the cloud cover in their glide toward earth. Random thoughts and disjointed images played leapfrog inside her head. Words of love from a man of strength and character, a lapful of babies, the kind of life no one in her family had managed to achieve—all the things she’d told herself she didn’t want or need suddenly rose up in front of her, beckoning her forward.
“You were right before,” the pilot said as the plane angled down toward the mountain. “I should have listened to you and waited for the weather to pass us by.”
“Don’t give me too much credit.” She forced a weak smile. “I’m a coward, remember? I would have advised the same thing during a spring shower.” Careful, cautious Samantha Wilde, still waiting for her life to begin.
“There’s nothing of the coward about you.”
“If you knew me better, you wouldn’t say that. I’m afraid of everything.” Planes and snakes and marriage, and that was just for starters.
“Maybe,” he allowed, “but nothing stops you.”
“Now you’re sounding like your friend Sophie. Unless you’re psychic, you couldn’t possibly know that.”
“I know what I see, and I see you here next to me despite your fears.”
“Maybe I’m crazy,” she said, feeling her carefully constructed defenses being to crumble.
“Or passionate.” He said the word the way it was meant to be said, all sibilance and heat. Too bad it had about as much to do with her as moon rocks.
“Nobody has ever called me passionate before.” Not even her former fiancé, John Singleton Reilly, which was one of the reasons he was her former fiancé. “I’m the practical one in the family.”
“Practical women don’t chase a man all the way to the Highlands.”
“I’ve never chased a man in my life.” She fairly bristled with indignation.
“You’re chasing one now.”
“It’s not the way you make it sound.”
“And how do I make it sound?”
“Like—” She hesitated, then decided to hell with it. In a few more minutes, none of this would matter any longer. They’d either be dead or so happy that neither would even remember this idiotic conversation. “Like I’m looking for a lover.”
“Are you?”
“Absolutely not.” She cleared her throat and tried again. “Definitely not.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“I wanted to make sure.”
He glanced at her hands, which were clasped tightly in her lap. “No rings.”
“I don’t wear jewelry other than a watch,” she said. Jewelry held none of the magical appeal for her that it did for most women. To her, it was just the family business.
“Is there a man in your life?”
“There was,” she said after a moment, “but John found someone else.” Her own words caught her by surprise. “You’re the first person I’ve told that to. The rest of my family thinks I broke the engagement because I love my work more than I loved John.” She laughed quietly, as much a sigh as anything else. “Too bad John thought so, too.”
“And was he right about that?”
“Oh, yes.” She couldn’t stop the words if she wanted to. “Poor John got out while the getting was good. He married his little girlfriend and they’re expecting a baby. And I have my work.”
A dark silence fell across them. Normally she sought to fill silences with empty words, taking on all the silences in the world as if they were somehow her fault. This time she let it be.
It had felt good, telling her secret.
