by Linda Howard
“You’re a charter pilot?” She couldn’t believe it. It—he—was too good to be true. Maybe she did qualify for two miracles in one day after all.
He looked down at her and smiled, making a tiny dimple dance in his cheek. God, he had a dimple, too! Talk about overkill! He held out his hand. “Chance McCall—pilot, thief-catcher, jack-of-all-trades—at your service, ma’am.”
She laughed and shook his hand, noticing that he was careful not to grip her fingers too hard. Considering the strength she could feel in that tough hand, she was grateful for his restraint. Some men weren’t as considerate. “Sunny Miller, tardy courier and target of thieves. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. McCall.”
“Chance,” he said easily. “Let’s get this little problem taken care of, then you can call your boss and see if he thinks a charter flight is just what the doctor ordered.”
He opened the door of the unmarked office for her, and she stepped inside to find the two security officers, a woman dressed in a severe gray suit and the cretin, who had been handcuffed to his chair. The cretin glared at her when she came in, as if all this were her fault instead of his.
“You lyin’ bitch—” the cretin began.
Chance McCall reached out and gripped the cretin’s shoulder. “Maybe you didn’t get the message before,” he said in that easy way of his that in no way disguised the iron behind it, “but I don’t care for your language. Clean it up.” He didn’t issue a threat, just an order—and his grip on the cretin’s shoulder didn’t look gentle.
The cretin flinched and gave him an uneasy look, perhaps remembering how effortlessly this man had manhandled him before. Then he looked at the two airport policemen, as if expecting them to step in. The two men crossed their arms and grinned. Deprived of allies, the cretin opted for silence.
The gray-suited woman looked as if she wanted to protest the rough treatment of her prisoner, but she evidently decided to get on with the business at hand. “I’m Margaret Fayne, director of airport security. I assume you’re going to file charges?”
“Yes,” Sunny said.
“Good,” Ms. Fayne said in approval. “I’ll need statements from both of you.”
“Any idea how long this will take?” Chance asked. “Ms. Miller and I are pressed for time.”
“We’ll try to hurry things along,” Ms. Fayne assured him.
Whether Ms. Fayne was super-efficient or yet another small miracle took place, the paperwork was completed in what Sunny considered to be record time. Not much more than half an hour passed before the cretin was taken away in handcuffs, all the paperwork was prepared and signed, and Sunny and Chance McCall were free to go, having done their civic duty.
He waited beside her while she called the office and explained the situation. The supervisor, Wayne Beesham, wasn’t happy, but bowed to reality.
“What’s this pilot’s name again?” he asked.
“Chance McCall.”
“Hold on, let me check him out.”
Sunny waited. Their computers held a vast database of information on both commercial airlines and private charters. There were some unsavory characters in the charter business, dealing more in drugs than in passengers, and a courier company couldn’t afford to be careless.
“Where’s his home base?”
Sunny repeated the question to Chance.
“Phoenix,” he said, and once again she relayed the information.
“Okay, got it. He looks okay. How much is his fee?”
Sunny asked.
Mr. Beesham grunted at the reply. “That’s a bit high.”
“He’s here, and he’s ready to go.”
“What kind of plane is it? I don’t want to pay this price for a crop-duster that still won’t get you there in time.”
Sunny sighed. “Why don’t I just put him on the line? It’ll save time.” She handed the receiver to Chance. “He wants to know about your plane.”
Chance took the receiver. “McCall.” He listened a moment. “It’s a Cessna Skylane. The range is about eight hundred miles at seventy-five percent power, six hours flying time. I’ll have to refuel, so I’d rather it be around the midway point, say at Roberts Field in Redmond, Oregon. I can radio ahead and have everything rolling so we won’t spend much time on the ground.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “With the hour we gain when we cross into the Pacific time zone, she can make it—barely.”
He listened for another moment, then handed the receiver back to Sunny. “What’s the verdict?” she asked.
“I’m authorizing it. For God’s sake, get going.”
She hung up and grinned at Chance, her blood pumping at the challenge. “It’s ago! How long will it take to get airborne?”
“If you let me carry that bag, and we run…fifteen minutes.”
Sunny never let the bag out of her possession. She hated to repay his courtesy with a refusal, but caution was so ingrained in her that she couldn’t bring herself to take the risk. “It isn’t heavy,” she lied, tightening her grip on it. “You lead, I’ll follow.”
One dark eyebrow went up at her reply, but he didn’t argue, just led the way through the busy concourse. The private planes were in a different area of the airport, away from the commercial traffic. After several turns and a flight of stairs, they left the terminal and walked across the concrete, the hot afternoon sun beating down on their heads and making her squint. Chance slipped on a pair of sunglasses, then shrugged out of the jacket and carried it in his left hand.
Sunny allowed herself a moment of appreciation at the way his broad shoulders and muscled back filled out the black T-shirt he wore. She might not indulge, but she could certainly admire. If only things were different—but they weren’t, she thought, reining in her thoughts. She had to deal with reality, not wishful thinking.
He stopped beside a single-engine airplane, white with gray-and-red striping. After storing her bag and briefcase and securing them with a net, he helped her into the copilot’s seat. Sunny buckled herself in and looked around with interest. She’d never been in a private plane before, or flown in anything this small. It was surprisingly comfortable. The seats were gray leather, and behind her was a bench seat with individual backs. Carpet covered the metal floor.
There were two sun visors, just like in a car. Amused, she flipped down the one in front of her and laughed aloud when she saw the small mirror attached to it.
Chance walked around the plane, checking details one last time before climbing into the seat to her left and buckling himself in. He put on a set of headphones and began flipping switches while he talked to the air traffic control tower. The engine coughed, then caught, and the propeller on the nose began to spin, slowly at first, then gaining speed until it was an almost invisible blur.
He pointed to another set of headphones, and Sunny put them on. “It’s easier to talk using the headphones,” came his voice in her ear, “but be quiet until we get airborne.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, amused, and he flashed a quick grin at her.
They were airborne within minutes, faster than she had ever experienced on a commercial carrier. Being in the small plane gave her a sense of speed that she had never before felt, and when the wheels left the ground the lift was incredible, as if she had sprouted wings and jumped into the air. The ground quickly fell away below, and the vast, glistening blue lake spread out before her, with the jagged mountains straight ahead.
“Wow,” she breathed, and brought one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.
“There’s an extra pair of sunglasses in the glove box,” he said, indicating the compartment in front of her. She opened it and dug out a pair of inexpensive but stylish Foster Grants with dark red frames. They were obviously some woman’s sunglasses, and abruptly she wondered if he was married. He would have a girlfriend, of course; not only was he very nice to look at, he seemed to be a nice person. It was a combination that was hard to find and impossible to beat.
“Your wife’s?” she asked as she
put on the glasses and breathed a sigh of relief as the uncomfortable glare disappeared.
“No, a passenger left them in the plane.”
Well, that hadn’t told her anything. She decided to be blunt, even while she wondered why she was bothering, since she would never see him again after they arrived in Seattle. “Are you married?”
Again she got that quick grin. “Nope.” He glanced at her, and though she couldn’t see his eyes through the dark glasses, she got the impression his gaze was intense. “Are you?”
“No.”
“Good,” he said.
Chapter 3
Chance watched her from behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses, gauging her reaction to his verbal opening. The plan was working better than he’d hoped; she was attracted to him and hadn’t been trying very hard to hide it. All he had to do was take advantage of that attraction and win her trust, which normally might take some doing, but what he had planned would throw her into a situation that wasn’t normal in any sense of the word. Her life and safety would depend on him.
To his faint surprise, she faced forward and pretended she hadn’t heard him. Wryly, he wondered if he’d misread her and she wasn’t attracted to him after all. No, she had been watching him pretty blatantly, and in his experience, a woman didn’t stare at a man unless she found him attractive.
What was really surprising was how attractive he found her. He hadn’t expected that, but sexual chemistry was an unruly demon that operated outside logic. He had known she was pretty, with brilliant gray eyes and golden-blond hair that swung smoothly to her shoulders, from the photographs in the file he had assembled on her. He just hadn’t realized how damn fetching she was.
He slanted another glance at her, this time one of pure male assessment. She was of average height, maybe, though a little more slender than he liked, almost delicate. Almost. The muscles of her bare arms, revealed by a white sleeveless blouse, were well-toned and lightly tanned, as if she worked out. A good agent always stayed in good physical condition, so he had to expect her to be stronger than she looked. Her delicate appearance probably took a lot of people off guard.
She sure as hell had taken Wilkins off guard. Chance had to smother a smile. While Sunny had gone back to her gate to check on the status of her flight, which Chance had arranged to be cancelled, Wilkins had told him how she had swung her carry-on bag at him, one-armed, and that the damn thing had to weigh a ton, because it had almost knocked him off his feet.
By now, Wilkins and the other three, “Ms. Fayne” and the two security “policemen,” would have vanished from the airport. The real airport security had been briefed to stay out of the way, and everything had worked like a charm, though Wilkins had groused at being taken down so roughly. “First that little witch damn near breaks my arm with that bag, then you try to break my back,” he’d growled, while they all laughed at him.
Just what was in that bag, anyway? She had held on to it as if it contained the crown jewels, not letting him carry it even when she was right there with him, and only reluctantly letting him take it to stow in the luggage compartment behind them. He’d been surprised at how heavy it was, too heavy to contain the single change of clothes required by an overnight trip, even with a vast array of makeup and a hairdryer thrown in for good measure. The bag had to weigh a good fifty pounds, maybe more. Well, he would find out soon enough what was in it.
“What were you going to do with that guy if you’d caught him?” he asked in a lazy tone, partly to keep her talking, establishing a link between them, and partly because he was curious. She had been chasing after Wilkins with a fiercely determined expression on her face, so determined that, if Wilkins were still running, she would probably still be chasing him.
“I don’t know,” she said darkly. “I just knew I couldn’t let it happen again.”
“Again?” Damn, was she going to tell him about Chicago?
“Last month, a green-haired cretin snatched my briefcase in the airport in Chicago.” She slapped the arm of the seat. “That’s the first time anything like that has ever happened on one of my jobs, then to have it happen again just a month later—I’d have been fired. Heck, I would fire me, if I were the boss.”
“You didn’t catch the guy in Chicago?”
“No. I was in Baggage Claims, and he just grabbed the briefcase, zipped out the door and was gone.”
“What about security? They didn’t try to catch him?”
She peered at him over the top of the oversize sunglasses. “You’re kidding, right?”
He laughed. “I guess I am.”
“Losing another briefcase would have been a catastrophe, at least to me, and it wouldn’t have done the company any good, either.”
“Do you ever know what’s in the briefcases?”
“No, and I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter. Someone could be sending a pound of salami to their dying uncle Fred, or it could be a billion dollars worth of diamonds—not that I think anyone would ever ship diamonds by a courier service, but you get the idea.”
“What happened when you lost the briefcase in Chicago?”
“My company was out a lot of money—rather, the insurance company was. The customer will probably never use us again, or recommend us.”
“What happened to you? Any disciplinary action?” He knew there hadn’t been.
“No. In a way, I would have felt better if they had at least fined me.”
Damn, she was good, he thought in admiration—either that, or she was telling the truth and hadn’t had anything to do with the incident in Chicago last month. It was possible, he supposed, but irrelevant. Whether or not she’d had anything to do with losing that briefcase, he was grateful it had happened, because otherwise she would never have come to his notice, and he wouldn’t have this lead on Crispin Hauer.
But he didn’t think she was innocent; he thought she was in this up to her pretty neck. She was better than he had expected, an actress worthy of an Oscar—so good he might have believed she didn’t know anything about her father, if it wasn’t for the mystery bag and her deceptive strength. He was trained to put together seemingly insignificant details and come up with a coherent picture, and experience had made him doubly cynical. Few people were as honest as they wanted you to believe, and the people who put on the best show were often the ones with the most to hide. He should know—he was an expert at hiding the black secrets of his soul.
He wondered briefly what it said about him that he was willing to sleep with her as part of his plan to gain her trust, but maybe it was better not to think about it. Someone had to be willing to work in the muck, to do things from which ordinary people would shrink, just to protect those ordinary people. Sex was…just sex. Part of the job. He could even divorce his emotions to the point that he actually looked forward to the task.
Task? Who was he kidding? He couldn’t wait to slide into her. She intrigued him, with her toned, tight body and the twinkle that so often lit her clear gray eyes, as if she was often amused at both herself and the world around her. He was fascinated by her eyes, by the white striations that made her eyes look almost faceted, like the palest of blue diamonds. Most people thought of gray eyes as a pale blue, but when he was close to her, he could see that they were, very definitely, brilliantly gray. But most of all he was intrigued by her expression, which was so open and good-humored she could almost trademark the term “Miss Congeniality.” How could she look like that, as sweet as apple pie, when she was working hand in glove with the most-wanted terrorist in his files?
Part of him, the biggest part, despised her for what she was. The animal core of him, however, was excited by the dangerous edge of the game he was playing, by the challenge of getting her into bed with him and convincing her to trust him. When he was inside her, he wouldn’t be thinking about the hundreds of innocent people her father had killed, only about the linking of their bodies. He wouldn’t let himself think of anything else, lest he give himself away with some nuance of exp
ression that women were so good at reading. No, he would make love to her as if he had found his soul mate, because that was the only way he could be certain of fooling her.
But he was good at that, at making a woman feel as if he desired her more than anything else in the world. He knew just how to make her aware of him, how to push hard without panicking her—which brought him back to the fact that she had totally ignored his first opening. He smiled slightly to himself. Did she really think that would work?
“Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
She actually jumped, as if she had been lost in her thoughts. “What?”
“Dinner. Tonight. After you deliver your package.”
“Oh. But—I’m supposed to deliver it at nine. It’ll be late, and—”
“And you’ll be alone, and I’ll be alone, and you have to eat. I promise not to bite. I may lick, but I won’t bite.”
She surprised him by bursting into laughter.
Of all the reactions he had anticipated, laughter wasn’t one of them. Still, her laugh was so free and genuine, her head tilted back against the seat, that he found himself smiling in response.
“‘I may lick, but I won’t bite.’ That was good. I’ll have to remember it,” she said, chuckling.
After a moment, when she said nothing else, he realized that she was ignoring him again. He shook his head. “Does that work with most men?”
“Does what work?”
“Ignoring them when they ask you out. Do they slink away with their tails tucked between their legs?”
“Not that I’ve ever noticed.” She grinned. “You make me sound like a femme fatale, breaking hearts left and right.”
“You probably are. We guys are tough, though. We can be bleeding to death on the inside and we’ll put up such a good front that no one ever knows.” He smiled at her. “Have dinner with me.”
“You’re persistent, aren’t you?”
“You still haven’t answered me.”