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” With a wicked smile, he pulled a white napkin out of his vest pocket and dabbed at the corner of her lip. She was just grateful he hadn’t licked it before he swiped. Tre had the mama hen routine down. If the mama hen was just a touch rabid …
Above her head, the fasten seat belt sign blinked on, followed by an announcement from the captain asking them to stay seated for the short remainder of the flight. A major storm system was affecting the Dallas–Fort Worth area, and they were going to be coming down straight through it, which meant the turbulence could get rough.
At his announcement, the last of Lyric’s sleep-induced lethargy dissipated, and the sick feeling that had taken up residence when she’d first gotten her mother’s phone call grew to monstrous proportions. Though she still had another short flight from DFW to San Angelo, setting down on the mainland made everything seem so much more real. As long as she wasn’t here, as long as she was just thinking about making it here, she could get away with not thinking about what was waiting for her. But now that she was a few bumpy minutes away from landing, there was nowhere to hide.
The reality of her father’s situation, along with the knowledge that she really might be too late, came crashing down on her.
Which, she supposed, was better than the plane crashing down, she told herself as they hit their first air pocket and dropped quickly. The dip must have brought them into the storm, because seconds later they started to shake like Bibb lettuce in a salad spinner.
In front of her, the Wranglers fan’s hand shot up and grabbed the seat in front of him so tightly that she would have sworn his knuckles had gone right past white and were now turning blue. His girlfriend started to whine a little, and all around her people gasped and muttered uneasily. A part of Lyric wanted to reassure them with a definition of turbulence and the statistics that proved there was a very low chance of anything happening to the plane. But years of always saying the wrong thing had taught her that sometimes she should be seen and not heard. She glanced down—then again, not seen would work pretty well for her right about now too.
Heath began to stir as the plane hit another patchy spot. And when they dropped, huge, he jerked into consciousness with a wide, wild-eyed look.
Not questioning the instincts that drove her to do it, Lyric rested a hand lightly on his knee. “It’s okay,” she murmured soothingly. “Just a little storm.” She started to say more, but Tre chose that moment to turn on the plane’s loudspeaker.
“Okay, people, here’s the deal. The storm’s getting worse by the second, and its center is hanging right over the airport. DFW is rolling up the red carpet for the next few hours, and we’re being diverted. I’m not sure to where, but you’ll know when I know. So, no questions. Just relax. This drink’s on me, as long as you like tequila, because we’re out of everything else.”
A collective groan echoed through the plane, but Lyric was too horrified to make a sound. They were being diverted? It could be to anywhere, hours and hours away from her father. And the only airport in the country that flew into San Angelo was DFW.
Goddamn SETI and Goddamn Hawaii. What the hell good was living on an island in the middle of the Pacific if you were thousands of miles away from everyone you cared about when something bad went down?
She had to get to San Angelo. She had to see her father before—
Her breathing was coming faster now, and the plane around her started to spin. She clutched at her chest, clawed at it. It felt like she was having a heart attack.
“Come on, Lyric. Take a deep breath.”
Heath’s voice came from far away. She could barely hear it over the pounding of her own heart, let alone focus on it. But suddenly his face was there, inches from her own. “You’re hyperventilating,” he told her. “You need to slow your breathing down.”
When she didn’t answer—or in any way acknowledge what he was saying—he took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Come on, Lyric. Breathe with me. Like this.” He took another breath, let it out in a measured, unhurried stream.
Deep inside, she knew he was right, but it was hard to do what he said when it felt like the whole world was crashing down around her. With her life falling apart in all directions, she was helpless. It wasn’t a feeling she was used to or one she wanted to show the world. She’d worked too hard to cultivate the tough outer shell she wore like armor. Letting it slip away was unacceptable … and, like so much else about her life right now, completely out of her control.
# # #
Heath leaned forward in his seat, trying to get Lyric to focus on him. She was about one step away from hysteria, and while many a lady had fallen at his feet through the years, having one pass out due to lack of oxygen did nothing to stroke his ego.
Too bad he didn’t have a clue how to snap her out of the panic attack. God knew his attempts to comfort her were failing, her breathing becoming more and more erratic as her eyes glassed over. When she started pulling frantically at the top of the duct-tape dress as if breaking free of the confinement would let in more air, he knew he had to do something. Fast.
“Tell me something cool. Right now.” With limited options, he once again went back to childhood and pulled out the one order he knew would reach her. “You’ve got a million useless pieces of information rattling around that gigantic brain of yours. Wow me with one of them.”
For long seconds, it didn’t look like she’d even heard him. Her eyes were unfocused and her breathing was growing more rapid and shallow with every moment that passed. Not knowing what else to do, he grabbed onto her shoulders and shook her a little. “Damn it, Lyric. Focus. Statistics. Now.”
It worked. Her gaze snapped to his, and words started pouring out of her mouth. “Approximately one hundred million tons of meteors strike the earth every day.” The tension in her shoulders eased. “Most are nothing but cosmic debris, but even a speck of dust at the right velocity can be devastating. Take air travel. While it has never been definitively proven that a meteor was responsible for the crashing of a plane, three thousand meteors with the requisite mass strike earth every day. Think of the probability.”
Was it his imagination or had her breathing evened out? “Well, that’s good to know. Meteorites have always been a worry of mine. What with them falling from the sky and all.” Heath shot her his twelve-million-dollar smile as the tension in his stomach slowly relaxed. As a kid, she’d used facts and statistics to self-soothe all the time. It was nice to see that one thing about her hadn’t changed.
“Me, too.” She nodded.
“Tell me something else,” he prompted when she started twisting her fingers in her lap.
“I find it fascinating that dust particles traveling anywhere from twenty-five thousand to one hundred sixty miles per hour rain down on us every day. With eighteen million flights a year and the thousands of meteorites hurtling toward earth, it’s amazing they’ve never collided before.” Her voice went into geeky lecturer mode as she recited the statistics she’d read a few years ago in Discover magazine. “For example, if we take a twenty-year period—let’s say from between 1989 to 2009, there are 720 million hours of flight time. If there are 3,500 planes in the air at any given moment, we would cover approximately two-billionths of the earth’s surface. Scientists put the surface of the earth at five-by-ten to the fourteenth meters square, which means that a commercial airliner actually has a target of 291 meters squared. Multiply that times 3,500 and then by 3,000 and you’ve got a one in twenty chance that a plane will be struck by a meteor.” She looked at him, brows raised. “Right? Do the math. It’s actually a recipe for disaster. We’re living on borrowed time.”
He nodded like he had any idea what she was talking about. She might as well have been speaking Chinese. Although, one thing she’d said did get through.
He shifted slightly and glanced out the window, hoping to God no meteors were currently on a trajectory for the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Who the hell could have guessed that incoming meteors were actually a flight risk? And why did Lyric sound so happy about it?
“Although,” she continued, “meteors are only a small problem in the grand scheme of things. Fifty-four percent of plane crashes are due to pilot error, and twenty-four percent are mechanical failure, while only eight percent are due to weather. For that matter, nine percent of place crashes are due to sabotage. The statistics are in our favor.” She shrugged. “Unless someone has been messing with our plane, our pilot is an idiot, or we’re on an old, not-well-maintained aircraft, I think we’ll be fine.”
