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Crusty jammed the last half of the candy bar in his mouth. He definitely made a better fling candidate. Except for a few minor problems.
She didn’t date military men.
She wasn’t attracted to Crusty.
And she still wanted Max.
Darcy opened her fight bag and pitched aside her checklist. Digging deeper, she shoved through charts, an orange, the gun she’d been issued prior to the first flight to Taiwan because of looting riots after the earthquake. Finally she found the half-mashed peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Pain stabbed her palm.
She whipped her hand out. A spider scurried across her wrist. A big, ugly spider the size of a small dog—or a half-dollar—latched on. Darcy flicked her fingers.
Flinching, Crusty barked, “What was that?”
She didn’t want to think about what it was. She just wanted it off of her.
Now.
Darcy grabbed her checklist. A quick swipe sent the spider to the floor. The hairy eight-legged spawn of Satan scuttled toward the rudders. Toward her feet.
The last thing she needed was that mini-monster climbing up her leg during landing. Darcy stomped. Hard. Ground the toe of her boot until spider guts oozed. Gross, but vengefully reassuring.
“Wow, Wren. If this Air Force gig doesn’t work out for you, maybe you should consider a career as an exterminator.”
“Probably pays better.” Darcy forced the lighthearted answer.
“Are you okay?”
She examined the bite. Two tiny puncture marks. Red but not swollen, they seemed benign enough. “Positively zippy.”
Darcy eased her boot off the spider.
She hated bugs. Truly hated them with a passion born of smothering fear. Not that she would ever admit such a wimpy feminine weakness to the rest of the aircrew. Survival training after flight school had been nightmarish with all the creepy-crawlies, but at least she’d steeled herself to expect them. Being caught unaware, however, sucked.
The headset crackled again as Bronco called, “Well, Crusty, who do you have flying now, the loadmaster?”
Darcy depressed the interphone button. “Just a little upset in the cockpit thanks to a surprise stowaway.”
“Little,my aunt Emmy Sue,” Crusty barked. “A nasty ol’ Guam spider crawled out of Renshaw’s bag and bit her.”
“Spider?” Cutter interrupted from the other plane, his serious doctor tones overriding more easygoing pilot tones. “What kind?”
“A dead one.” Darcy eyed the glob of spider pâté by her boot. The latest of many she’d stomped in the past week. There’d obviously been some kind of insect infestation since she’d been here last, either that or she’d become a bug magnet.
“Renshaw,” Cutter clipped through the headset. “Quit playing around and describe the thing to me.”
Fear tingled up her spine like an encore spider bite. Most of the bugs on the island weren’t poisonous. Right?
Darcy whipped off her glove and swept up her cuff to examine the two puncture wounds more closely. “I was too busy shaking the thing off to do a scientific classification, but I guess it was about the size of a fifty-cent piece. Hairy. Kind of colorful, green and brown. A red stripe maybe.”
Cutter’s sigh drifted over the headset. “Okay, no sweat, that sounds like an Orb-Web spider.”
“Which is good?”
“Yeah. Mean-looking fella with long fangs for a big-time bite, but harmless otherwise,” he clipped through the prognosis. “Just to be on the safe side, though, let’s scratch the touch-and-go landings, and do a full stop so I can take a look at that bite.”
Relief soothed the sting to her nerves as well as her skin.
