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abrupt static was all he detected, along with the sounds of the wind beating against the plane, the whine of the engines and his own heart rattling against his ribs. He darted a look at Merry and was surprised to see she wasn’t doing her bubble counting. She was gripping the sides of the seat, but her eyes were on him, filled with what looked like disbelief.
“What?” he asked when she didn’t speak.
With a shake of her head, she rasped, “You’re crazy.”
He didn’t know where that came from. “You won’t be the first to call me that, or the last.”
“I bet,” she managed before biting her lip hard when the plane shuddered from the wind.
“How did you come to that diagnosis, Dr. Brenner?”
“All I had to do was see that excitement in your eyes,” she said. “You’re actually enjoying this!”
He wouldn’t deny that, at least for now, and he hit her with his own question as the plane seemed to settle a bit. “Why exactly are you here?”
Very slowly, they were gaining ground on a southerly direction. “You know why,” she responded.
“No, I don’t know.” Make her talk. Keep her occupied. “You’re terrified of flying, yet spent a hundred dollars to get on this ‘small, fragile plane’—your words, not mine—just so you could get home a day earlier than if you waited for a commercial flight.” He read and reread the altimeter. “Now, don’t you think that unless there’s some certifiably pressing reason behind all of this, you might be a bit crazy to inflict torture on yourself by flying with me?”
When she didn’t answer, he chanced a glance away from the screens to her. She was staring straight ahead, her teeth busy worrying her full bottom lip. “I just want to get home.”
He’d blown it. All that anger was gone, and she looked as if she was on the verge of tears. He could kick himself for whatever he’d said that did this to her. “Okay, you’re just in a hurry.”
She was still silent and Gage felt the plane slide slightly as the altitude decreased enough for him to feel it. He hoped Merry wouldn’t feel it, too. Wrong again. “What was that?” she asked abruptly.
“Just an adjustment,” he replied, then tried the radio again. While he sent out his ID, it was met by the incoming contact. He went through a check, felt positive, and told the tower that they had stabilized and were now heading west. After giving their coordinates once again, he said he’d contact them at a designated time for an update and signed off.
While he settled back, letting the plane do the work now that circumstances were more normal, he had a thought, but didn’t know where it had come from. Merry was doing anything to get home and the logical reason was someone was waiting for her in Wolf Lake, someone she was willing to risk everything to get to.
He kept a check on the information, but wondered why the conclusion he’d drawn, almost annoyed him. After all, what did he care what her reasons for returning home were? He’d known her for an hour at the most, and she was a “client.” That brought a slight smile at the ridiculous way she’d managed to become a client.
“I told you, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she demanded. “You’re almost smiling.”
He wasn’t about to tell her why he almost smiled, that was for sure. So he went for sarcasm that usually served him well. “Yeah, I just love being in the middle of a storm with ice on the wings and a compass that can’t figure out which way we’re going.”
Wrong thing to say again. “We’re lost?” she blurted, his smile long forgotten now.
“No,” he reassured her. “We’re doing just fine right now. We’ll be out of this mess in a bit, and home in Wolf Lake soon after that.”
* * *
“GREAT,” MERRY SAID on a shuddering sigh, her relief a heady thing. That was why he was smiling. They were in the clear, despite the growing storm, and he had it all under control. She’d been wrong to say he was crazy, since she was crazier than him. She should have waited at the airport. “I’m sorry,” she muttered to him, trying to block out the noise outside. “Obviously you’re in control.” She closed her eyes tightly to stop the sight of the ominous grayness that surrounded them.
“We had a problem,” he said evenly. “But we got through it. So, just sit back and count your bubbles.”
She opened her eyes to glance at him at the same time he turned to her. Her heart lurched when she was met by a smile that crinkled the corners of his dark eyes and exposed a single dimple to the right of his mouth. For that moment, she forgot all about the storm and the wind and the plane. It all came back when the plane bucked, the action so abrupt that she felt as if her heart was in her mouth.
Gage quickly got the plane under control. “Merely fine tuning,” he said, as the plane evened out again.
“You...you’re doing fine,” she breathed, needing that encouragement as much as she thought he probably did.
“Thanks,” he said, flashing another grin in her direction. “I like that assessment better than the crazy one.”
She wasn’t sure if there was sarcasm or not in his response. “I trust you, I really do.” And she meant it.
That brought a look her way that was dead sober, the dark eyes considering her before glancing away. There was no response from him, only a soft whistling of a tune she couldn’t recognize. She reasoned if he could joke about their situation, then that meant things had to be okay.
She exhaled, speaking to herself as much as to him. “You know, I’m the crazy one. I’m going back when I should have been patient. I should have called and let—”
She bolted upright. She hadn’t called Marsala back! Since she hadn’t heard anything from her, the receptionist probably figured Merry was still in Pueblo waiting for the morning flight out. She tugged her cell phone out of her jacket pocket and hit the power button. Her heart sank when she saw the battery was low and that no signal was available.
“Oh, man,” she whispered, shoving her cell back into the pocket of her jacket.
“What?” Gage asked.
“Phone’s dead, totally dead and I don’t suppose you can jump out in midair and get my duffel bag out of storage?”
He barked a short laugh at that. “No, I’m not jumping out, but as a matter of fact, I can get to the luggage area over the backseats. But no one is getting out of their restraints until we’re totally in the clear from this storm.” He touched the screen twice, then turned to her. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re agreeing that you’re crazy, too?”
“We’re both going back when we should have stayed at the airport. You knew there was a storm, but you thought you could outrun it, and I knew they’d get me on a plane at ten o’clock in the morning, and I chose to flag you down instead. We both wanted to get to Wolf Lake badly enough to risk all this.”
“Whoa, no. I’m going now because I have business meetings and I didn’t have time to cool my heels in Pueblo. I really thought, from what I was told, that the storm was far enough away and on course to sweep to the east, not southwest.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “If I’d known, I would have stayed put, cancelled this trip and rescheduled the meetings.”
“You weren’t going home for your family?”
“It’s mostly business, but I do need to see my brother and my parents. I couldn’t get away at Christmas, and things are changing on the old homestead, so I decided to combine a business trip with a visit to the family.”
She’d heard about Adam Carson leaving with the woman he’d met at the inn in town. Something about heading to Chicago and they still weren’t back, so Adam obviously wasn’t the brother he was going to visit. “Jackson?” she asked as she leaned