It didn’t, as she learned during a stop at the town’s quick-shop/feed-and-grain store. Apparently the only person with medical credentials within a fifty-mile radius was a retired-vet-turned-rancher the locals called in emergencies.
“I’m still licensed to practice,” Dr. Hightower said with a shrug. “Comes in handy on occasion.”
Julie could understand why. Out in these parts, the grizzled, gray-haired vet might well make the difference between life and death for two-and four-legged accident victims alike.
Dusty was a case in point.
“Damn fool crashed head-on into a stand of mesquite to avoid hitting a deer,” Dr. Hightower advised as she led the way from her living quarters to the surgery. “I got him stabilized, kept a close eye on him until EMSA got here. They patched him up and wanted to haul him to the hospital down to Dalhart. He kicked up a fuss, said he didn’t have insurance…”
“He does,” Julie countered, her throat tight. “Our company policy covers personal injuries. The deductible’s pretty hefty, though.”
“Guess he didn’t want to run that up. EMSA left him pretty sedated, and I kept him that way. He didn’t know who or where he was for days after it happened.”
“Will he…?”
She fought back a thick gob of fear. Dusty was the closest thing she had to family. Dusty and Chuck. Their lackadaisical approach to the business end of flying irritated the heck out of her at times. And Dusty’s penchant for gambling raised a tight knot of worry. Yet her heart stuck halfway down her throat as she voiced the fear that had haunted her all the way from Oklahoma City.
“Will he be okay?”
“Should be. He’s been in and out since it happened, though. Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t recognize you,” the vet cautioned.
After that dire warning, Julie sagged with relief when Dr. Hightower pushed through a door marked “Private” and a bandaged Dusty opened one bruiser of a black eye to glare at her.
“’Bout time you got here.”
“I… I…”
Her throat closing, Julie astonished herself, the vet and her partner by bursting into loud, noisy sobs.
“Missy! I’m okay. Jest got a few busted ribs.”
“And an ulna fractured in two places,” Hightower put in, nodding to the plaster encasing his right arm.
“Not a problem. You got…me all fixed up, Doc.” Punctuating his sentences with grunts and grimaces, Dusty pushed himself upright. “Soon’s as Julie, uh, gets me home, I’ll be right ‘n—gol dang it!—tight.”
The white lines that bracketed his mouth said just the opposite. Aching for him, Julie turned to the vet.
“Can he be moved?”
“Lord, yes! The sooner you get him out of my hair, the better. I’ll send some horse pills with him for the pain. He swallows one of those, and he’s out for the count.”
With that dubious assurance, Julie helped the vet transfer her wobbly partner to a wheelchair.
She contacted Alex again after stopping for gas and purchasing another phone charger. His first query concerned Dusty’s condition. His second, what her partner was doing in the Texas Panhandle.
“He got a call from a soybean consortium that wanted a bid on a job,” she answered with a glance at her slumbering passenger. He had the seat tilted back and was filling the pickup’s cab with heroic snores. “He couldn’t fly the Pawnee, so he took his truck.”
“Why couldn’t he fly the Pawnee?”
“It’s leaking oil again.”
Concern sharpened Alex’s voice. “You’re not thinking about taking it up, are you?”
“Sure, when Chuck and I get it fixed.”
“I’ll send DI’s chief mechanic down,” he responded, all brisk executive. “Let him look at the engine, see if it needs a major overhaul.”
“Whoa! Back off there, Bubba. Agro-Air’s chief mechanic and I are perfectly capable of deciding what, if anything, needs overhauling on our aircraft.”
Silence answered her swift retort, followed a moment later by a careful reply.
“You better re-read those contracts, Julie. When Agro-Air merges with DI’s aeronautical operations division, I’ll have final decision-making authority on major issues. Safety ranks number one in my book.”
The sheer arrogance of it took her breath away. She forced herself to count to ten, then ten again, but still ground out her response.
“Safety is number one at Agro-Air, too. And you can bet your bippy I’ll re-read those contracts. They’re not signed yet, Dalton.”
Alex hung up, feeling every bit as steamed as Julie had sounded. He’d mishandled her, dammit. Mishandled the whole conversation. He could see that now. His only excuse was that he wasn’t used to having his decisions challenged. Especially by the woman he now wanted standing beside him as a whole helluva lot more than a business partner.
He tried to shrug off her last, ominous threat. Refused to believe she would convince her partners to back out of a merger that would take Agro-Air out of the red for the first time in a long time. But she was just stubborn enough, just independent enough to buck any attempt to exercise corporate oversight.
Tough! Signed contracts or not, she wasn’t getting out of this deal.
Jaw tight, Alex glared at the phone. A handshake was as good as a signature in Oklahoma courts. DI had already expended a good number of engineering hours in Agro-Air’s interest. He’d also had the 602 flown in at considerable expense and agreed to its purchase. All with Julie’s tacit consent and approval.
Then there was the matter of the unsigned, unspoken contract between the two of them personally. Alex was damned if he’d let her back out of that, either. The woman had all but turned him inside out. No way he intended to just sit back and wait for her to “get back to him whenever.”
Ms. Bartlett might not realize it yet, but she’d run smack up against a will even more intractable than her own. She was his, Alex thought with a fierce, primal possessiveness that surprised but didn’t daunt him. Now all he had to do was convince her.
He’d give her time to sort through this situation with Dusty, he decided. Let her cool off after their unexpected flare-up. Then he’d yank whatever chain he had to get her back in his arms.
Who the hell did he think he was?
The terse conversation left Julie simmering for most of the way back to Dusty’s place. If Alex Dalton thought he could override her need to go with her gut in the air—or on the ground!—he had another think coming.
Thoroughly ticked, she speared a glance at her snoring partner. The sight of his cast forced her to apply the air brakes to her temper.
If she’d been the only one at the other end of the DI-AA deal, she would have told Alex to stuff it. But she wasn’t. Dusty and Chuck needed her more than ever now. Like it or not, she’d have to throttle back. Professionally, anyway.
Personally…
She’d have to throttle back there, too. Alex Dalton had more than he realized of his overbearing, overpowering mother in him. Only now that Julie had put some distance between herself and his charismatic personality did she see how close she’d come to letting it dominate her. Her! The same woman who could hold her own in the air or on the ground in any country in the northern or southern hemisphere.
The thought of pulling away from Alex carved a hole in the pit of her stomach but she had to face facts. Maybe love wasn’t enough. Maybe neither one of them could blunt or shape or otherwise alter the basic character traits that made them who they were.
That gut-wrenching thought stayed with her in the days that followed. She spent a good part of those days force-feeding Dusty horse pills and the spicy tacos both he and his obese feline were addicted to.
In between, she and Chuck got the Pawnee airworthy again—which she relayed to Alex in a terse voice mail. Good thing, too, as word that Dalton International was folding Agro-Air into its corporate family had spread. Customers who’d shied away from a one-plane, shoestring operation the previous plant
ing season now came knocking. Job offers poured in.
With Dusty out of commission, Julie had to take up the slack. She was in the air from dawn to late summer dusk. At the end of each grueling, sixteen-hour day, she crawled out the Pawnee’s cockpit and barely made it to her apartment before falling face first onto the bed.
Even then she couldn’t sleep. All she had to do was close her eyes and she could see Alex, almost hear his breath pacing hers in the stillness of the night. Over and over she tried to reconcile the ways they differed with the irrefutable fact that she ached for him. But could she change the woman she was to become the wife he wanted?
It didn’t help that they continued to play an irritating game of telephone tag. She finally got through to him on Thursday morning. She had just come down from an early run. Dusty sat ensconced in a folding lawn chair with Belinda draped across his lap and his arm in a sling, grumbling nonstop about being so useless while Chuck refueled the Pawnee and reloaded its hopper.
A near exhausted Julie tuned out both partners. Grasping a can of Boost energy drink in one hand, she dialed Alex’s private number with the other. His executive assistant chirped an acknowledgment.
“Ms. Bartlett! Mr. Dalton is anxious to speak to you. He’s in a closed door meeting with Ms. Hale at the moment, but he left instructions to put you through whenever you called.”
Julie couldn’t help herself. She had to ask. “Ms. Hale?”
“Barbara Hale. She’s an attorney here in Oklahoma City. Hang on, I’ll connect…”
“Wait!”
A swift, mental image seemed to magnify tenfold the doubts she’d been playing with. She could picture the sleek, sophisticated Barbara with her dark head bent close to his. Hear again the lawyer’s unsubtle reference to their previous, intimate relationship.
If Molly hadn’t dropped into his life…
If Julie hadn’t surged to the top of his list of possible mothers…
The ache she’d carried around for the past few days became a sharp, lancing pain. Molly. Sweet, bubbly Molly.
Oh, God! She was too tired to deal with this right now!
“Don’t interrupt him,” she said sharply.
“But…”
“I’m getting ready to go back up. Tell him I’ll call him later.”
“But…”
She snapped the phone shut, cutting the woman off in mid-protest, and tried to convince herself she’d done the right thing. Dusty and Agro-Air needed her. Whether or not the merger with DI went through, whether or not she and Alex worked out their personal stalemate, she couldn’t leave her partners in the lurch. It would be weeks, maybe months, before Dusty was well enough to fly again. In the meantime…
The phone was still in her palm when it gave an insistent tweet. She stared at it, jaw tight, and let it ring. When it finally went to voice mail, she looked up to find Dusty and Belinda regarding her with identical, unwinking stares.
“Something happen between you and Dalton you want to tell me about, Missy?”
“No.”
The curt reply raised his brows. “Well, something’s sure got your tail feathers in a twist. If it’s not Dalton, what is it?”
The empty Boost can crumpled in Julie’s fist. She sent it arcing into the old oil drum that served as their recycling bin. The loud rattle when it hit made Belinda hiss and Dusty stare.
“Look,” he said with a furrow between his bushy white brows, “if you’re worrying ’bout that bill from EMSA, don’t. We’ll get it paid. Same for the new load of fuel we just had delivered. When the merger with DI goes through, we’ll have more contracts than we kin handle.”
Swallowing a sigh, Julie scrubbed a hand across her sweat-streaked forehead. They needed to talk about the contracts. Later. When she wasn’t hot and grimy and nursing the mental image of Alex in a closed door meeting with Barbara Baby. Jaw tight, she yanked her long-sleeved work shirt from the back of the lawn chair.
“I’d better help Chuck with the mix.”
Dusty pursed his lips, barely noticing when Belinda rolled over on his lap. He tickled her belly absently until Julie climbed back into the cockpit and taxied out to the grass strip for her third run of the morning. Then he used his good arm to push out of the chair.
Julie was too experienced a pilot to risk her life and her aircraft to bone-aching weariness. She could feel it pulling at her, though, as she swooped over a just-planted field to lay a wide stream of fertilizer. Although the sun was still well up in the sky, she wouldn’t make another run today. Six had maxed her out. Her and the Pawnee both. The plane was putting out almost as much oil as fertilizer.
She checked her gas to make sure she had enough to make it back to base after dumping the last of her load. She did, barely, and came skimming in with the gauge nudging close to empty. Tail bumping on the grass strip, she was taxiing to the hangar when her radio cackled and a voice pierced the static.
“Agro-Air, this is Delta Indigo six-six-niner. I have your strip in sight.”
Delta Indigo?
DI!
Julie made the connection at the same moment Dusty acknowledged the transmission.
“Roger six-six-nine. You’re cleared to land.”
Swinging the Pawnee’s tail around, she killed the engine and searched the horizon. A moment later she spotted a bright yellow speck winging through the blue sky. Speechless, she watched the Lane 602 put down in a smooth glide.
She was out of the Pawnee when the 602 rolled up. Still stunned, she waited while Alex shut down, folded back the canopy and climbed out.
Her first wild thought was that he looked as good as she did bad! No oil patches on his jeans. No sweat ringing the armpits of his shirt. Then all she could see was the cool determination in his eyes when they met hers.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Dusty called and told me to get my butt in gear. He seems to think we have some personal issues to settle.”
She threw a fulminating glance at her partner. Dusty returned it with bland innocence.
“He’s right,” she admitted reluctantly, scowling as she tried to articulate the doubts that had gnawed at her. “I’ve had time to think since I got back from Oklahoma City, Alex. Not a lot of time, admittedly, but enough to know I don’t fit into your world.”
“What world is that?”
“C’mon, Dalton! Don’t make this harder than it already is. You have a corporation to run and a child to raise. I have two partners and a business that requires my total concentration for the foreseeable future.”
“Wrong.”
She blinked at the hard, flat response. “’Scuze me?”
“You have three partners. Make that five, including Blake and Delilah. According to the terms of our contract they…”
“Agro-Air hasn’t agreed to the contract yet!”
“Yeah, it has. Your senior partners faxed their concurrence this morning. You’re outvoted, Julie.”
“What!”
She spun around, eyes blazing, but Alex’s next comment preempted her hurt, angry protest.
“They also faxed a blunt recommendation to get my head out of my ass.”
He gripped her elbow, brought her back to face him.
“Dusty reminded me—very correctly—that DI’s acquiring a helluva a pilot in this merger.”
“You got that right,” she spit. “And I…”
“Which is why we negotiated an additional clause to the contract.”
Her brows snapped together.
“Agro-Air needs another pilot while Dusty’s laid up,” he continued, his eyes holding hers. “I need a better understanding of what you do. The ins and outs of the business, the tricks of the trade, the risks. So I fly as your back-up for the next few weeks. Learn from you. Trust your instincts. In the process, I hope you’ll come to trust mine.”
He held out a hand, palm up.
“What do you say? Do we have a deal?”
He was meeting her halfway. More than halfwa
y. Could he actually rein in his take-charge personality? Listen and learn without butting heads?
Could she?
Maybe not completely. But she knew in that instant she’d be a dead fool not to try. An offer like this—a man like this!—didn’t come around twice in a girl’s life.
With a tremulous smile, she laid her hand in his. “We’ve got a deal.”
“Whooeee!” The gleeful cackle erupted from the lawn chair. “When’s the wedding?”
“You mean merger?” Julie corrected.
“Hell, Missy, I ain’t blind. When’s the wedding?”
“I… Uh, we…”
She threw Alex a helpless look. Grinning wickedly, he yanked her into his arms.
“As soon as possible.”
The kiss bent her over his arm. When he tilted her upright again, she had to fight for breath.
“Now that we’ve got that settled,” he said, still grinning, “you want to check out the new nozzles we welded on to the 602’s dispersal system?”
She nodded, her legs as quivery as her heart, but couldn’t get as jazzed about the nozzles as she had just a week ago. Delilah’s caution still stuck like a burr in her head.
If she married Alex… Correction, when she married Alex, she would have to seriously limit her exposure to fungicides and pesticides. One, she couldn’t risk bringing residue home on her clothing that might irritate Molly’s tender skin. Two, she didn’t need to be breathing even safe levels of toxins if she decided to get pregnant. That would come someday in the future. A year or so down the road. When Dusty was back in the cockpit and Agro-Air was turning a healthy profit.
She hadn’t factored in Delilah’s single-minded determination to see her sons settled. Within twenty minutes of being apprised of the pending mergers, the matriarch took charge. With a decisive snort she steamrolled any notion of a long engagement. Molly, she declared emphatically, needed a father and a mother.
A little more than three weeks later, she pulled off what every newspaper in the state would later gush was Oklahoma’s version of a royal wedding.
The Paternity Proposition Page 14