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“I wish I had a cool ten million to spring on LearJet or Dassault, but…” He patted his Skyhawk again. “Even she was a stretch. And she’s the only plane I have. What were you expecting? A private jet?”
“No, but…” She’d dug her feet in, and he couldn’t help but wonder what she’d do with a horse who was being as balky as she was.
From some shadowy corner of his brain, a voice saidwhip it.He almost laughed, imagining how that would go over. Definitely not well. Luckily he was more of a carrot kind of guy, rather than the sort who liked sticks. “Afraid this is all I’ve got, Ladybug, but it’s more than big enough to fly away home in.”
“You know that nursery rhyme doesn’t exactly have a happy ending, right?” The wind gusted again, lifting her hair. He wanted to get in the air, now. Five minutes ago. The sooner the better, because the wind wasn’t dying down, and the forecast said it wasn’t going to. It wouldn’t have mattered if she wasn’t nervous, but now he knew she was, waiting would only make things worse.
“Look. This is one of the safest airplanes you can fly in. It’s used by flight schools, that’s how safe it is. It has a”—at the last second he stopped himself from uttering ‘fatal’—“accident rate of .56 per 100,000 hours. That’s half the industry standard. And, you’ve got something even better than everyone else who flies in one.” He stopped and waited. He could see she was sinking into herself, going somewhere in her head that wasn’t good. He needed to get her talking again. The moment dragged and he cleared his throat, just the tiniest bit.
Her eyes flew to his. “What?”
“You’ve got me. A decorated combat veteran. And I’m a diamond under pressure.” Plenty of his friends didn’t like to talk about that part of their service. Or, in Heath’s case, any part of it. But the service had taught him he was at his best when the peanut butter hit the fan. “What I’m saying, Carissa, is I’ll keep you safe.”
“Is that a promise?” She was back: the same feisty woman who’d been ready to fight the instant he’d woken her up.
“One hundred percent.” He met her gaze and held it so she’d know he meant it, and then he watched as she took a deep breath, pulled her shoulders back, and steeled herself.
“Okay. But I’m holding you to it.”
He knew he shouldn’t say the words that popped into his head, but she was more fun riled up than nervous. “You can hold me any time.” He just caught her eye roll as he opened the passenger door, stepped on the foothold on the landing gear, set her bags in the back row of seats, and turned to offer his hand to her.
“You’re terrible, Big Nick.”
“Yeah, but nah. I’m the best, Ladybug. You’ll see.”
“I better.” And then, she put her hand in his.
3
AWAY THEY BOTH FLEW
Carissa hated it. Maybe Lachlan thoughthewas the best, but his plane was the worst contraption she’d ever been forced to sit in. For one thing, the cockpit was full of a ridiculous number of dials and switches and gauges that no single human could possibly monitor properly. For another thing, just sitting in the tiny space while Lachlan did all his pre-flight checks was sending her blood pressure sky high, pun absolutely intended. Every time he moved, his arm brushed against hers, and that wasn’t helping the blood pressure issue either.
To distract herself, she shimmied, struggling to get her arms into the shoulder belt. Despite her best efforts to stay entirely on her side of the plane, her elbow crashed into his.
“Sorry, Big Nick, I was really not expecting this to be so small.” She was putting on a brave face, but it was hard. Between the fact that the little plane had what looked like a climbing harness for a seatbelt and the cockpit was a zillion times more complicated than she’d even imagined, she didn’t know how she was going to keep from a having a heart attack once they were actually moving.
He kept on with his checks, not even looking her way. “You know what they say about size…”
“I think in this case it does matter. What if I bump you in the middle of the flight and we go off course?”
He shook his head, still touching various toggles and levers. “Not going to happen. You can bump me all you like and we’ll still survive. I told you, Ladybug, I’ve got this.”
Ladybug. It was the third time he’d called her that, and she hated the fact that it made her feel melty. How had this guy already come up with a nickname for her? Because he was a charmer, which was all well and good, but she didn’t trust charmers. And yet, she was going to have to entrust her whole life to him.
She let out a long sigh, a sure sign she was stressed, and started counting all the things on the instrument panel as a way to distract herself. She was approaching number seventy-three when he reached his arm into her field of vision and held out a headset to her. “Put this on.”
She fitted the headset over her ears, and her stomach took the opportunity to do a barrel roll. The nauseous feeling must’ve shown on her face because his voice, warm and steady and with that accent, was right there in her ears, “Breathe, Carissa. The flight’s going to be louder than what you’re used to, and the headset is just so we can hear each other better. That’s all.”
“What about this?” She pointed to the controller that jutted out of the dashboard on her side of the plane, identical to the one in front of him. “Do I have to do anything with it?”
“You don’t have to do a thing except sit tight. You ready?”
“No!” The answer popped out of her mouth, the whole truth.
“You tell me when.” And he just sat there, waiting for her.
She took another steadying breath. They had to go some time. She wanted to see Lena and meet her boyfriend Heath—the one who had made Lena’s insane move-to-Australia plan worth all the trouble. But what she hadn’t come all this way to do was sit on the tarmac at some small-time Sydney airport in what was practically a toy airplane.
