“So you grew up in California?” she asked at one point when they got going again after having stopped briefly for necessities, out of sight of each other of course, since she never wanted to be that casual with a guy. “Did you have a big house, small house, what?”
“My mother lived in an apartment, in Los Angeles.”
“And you went away to live at school during the school year?”
“Yes. And, ah, most of the time in the summers. The facilities were there anyway. They didn’t mind the extra tuition for boarding in the summer, too. I liked it better during those months actually.”
“Of course you did. No school.”
“No other kids.”
He bent to pick up a sturdy branch on the side of the trail and held it out to her. “Walking stick?”
She took it. “Sure. Thanks. So where did Marcia fit in? You said she was a friend of your mom’s?”
“Friend might be an overstatement. Marcia lived next door to my mother and, ah, tolerated her, I guess you’d say. Which in my mother’s case, made Marcia about her best friend.”
She shook her head, concentrating on coordinating her movements with the walking stick. “It’s so hard to think of someone like you having a mother like that.”
“Someone like me? You mean rich?”
“No. I mean sweet.”
He stopped dead in his tracks, and she was several strides ahead before she noticed. She looked back.
“What? You are sweet. I know some guys take that as a personal insult, but I didn’t mean it like that.”
He started up again. “I’m not insulted. I’m, ah, flattered I guess. Nobody’s ever called me sweet.”
She teased, “Not even Marcia?”
“More like a pain in the ass most of the time.”
“She cares for you. I can tell.”
He shrugged. “I guess she does.”
“And you care for her, too, don’t you?”
“I hired her, didn’t I?”
“Mason!”
He smiled and they walked along in silence for a while.
As the sun rose to the left of them, Mason diligent in ensuring that they stayed north with the help of the compass, the optimistic sense of the morning faded for Camilla. They walked farther and farther and still met no hikers, heard nothing from Boyd or Ray, and were still nowhere.
“They have to know we’re missing by now,” she said as they walked side by side, noting yet again how Mason kept perfect pace with her, always keeping up when she felt bursts of speed that qualified, despite her oversized boots, as trots, and then miraculously slowing when she felt depleted. Letting her set the pace.
“If we don’t run into something,” he assured her, “someone will be along, or else they’ll send someone after us.”
“Who will?”
“Marcia probably. Or the pilots if they get somewhere first. Don’t worry. Are you tired? Do you want to stop to rest?”
The suggestion had her increasing her speed.
“Guess not.” He smiled, adjusting his own, right beside her.
“I don’t understand why we can’t get them on this.” She waved the walkie-talkie in frustration. “They can’t be fifty miles away from us already.”
“They might be if they traveled through the night.”
A flush of guilt felt hotter on her face than the potent rays of the sun.
Glancing at her sideways, he laughed.
“It’s not funny. I feel horrible.”
“Why?”
“Because by now my parents must have heard, and they’ll be frantic.”
He took her hand and circled her palm with his thumb. “It’ll be okay. Think how happy they’ll be when they know you’re fine.”
“They’ll kill me!”
He stopped. “What?”
She tugged him along. “It’s just an expression. You know, how parents, or your mom I guess for you, get so worried that when they find out it’s okay, their first reaction is sometimes to get mad at you? They hug you and then when they find out you had a flat tire on a date, or claim you did, they start in with ‘you could have been lying in a ditch somewhere?’”
“No.”
“Well, ultimately they go back to hugging you, but the longer they had to worry about you being in a ditch, the longer you have to listen to them about it before they get back to the hugging.”
“You weren’t on a date. You were in a plane crash. You’d think they’d understand.”
His tight tone made her defend them. “They will. Don’t get me wrong. I just feel bad about causing all this trouble. No, that’s not right. It hurts me to think of them hurting right now.”
He shook his head, not saying anything, and she brought up the elephant in the room again. “I know you don’t get along with your mom, but surely Marcia will tell her you’re missing and she’ll be worrying.”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
“That Marcia will tell her or that she’ll worry?”
“Both.”
“Hmmm.” The woman sounded like a real bitch. She kept her observations to herself, though, her mind wandering back to her own parents. The air was warmer now, the sun full strength and glinting off the turning leaves, an occasional gold and red peeking out from the relentless green.
“Tell me about the one brother,” he urged.
“Joey?” She could almost see Joey’s blond crew cut and wide smile, his heavy glasses perpetually slipping off his nose. “The best way I could describe Joey is something one of my sister’s boyfriends told us once. I think he was Buddhist. He said there are some people who have lived so many lives and gotten so evolved that they have nothing left to learn on Earth. So they can go on to Nirvana.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar, but I haven’t studied eastern religions.”
“The point is that of those people, only a few are so cool, so advanced, that they choose to go back and live one more life, not so they can learn something but so that others can learn something from them. Those people are special.”
“So Joey’s a Buddhist?”
“No. Joey’s special.”
She walked faster. Another mile or so of the same and he insisted on stopping, fishing some snacks out of the backpack and a bottle of water for them to share as the supply was depleting.
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered, sitting on a boulder just off the trail. “How big did they say this park was? One hundred and fifty-six miles? How do we know we weren’t at the very south of it? It might take us days to walk it.”
He downed another handful of trail mix. “It is what it is.”
“How can you be so calm about all this?”
“Didn’t you say let what happens, happen?”
A rustling in the nearby trees brought a surge of hope—another hiker maybe who had a more detailed map of the park or something equally useful, like a car parked nearby?—but when no one appeared, it unnerved her.
“Hello?” she called out loudly. “Is someone there?”
The noise continued, moving closer, and Mason moved in front of her. “Shhh,” he said.
She looked at him in alarm and whispered, “Why?”
“Stay still,” he said softly and picked up her discarded walking stick before raising it.
Her heart beat faster. She had been in such a rush that she hadn’t given much thought to the fact that the terrain was wilderness and there might be something scary lurking within it. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
“Hello!” The walkie-talkie she had been trying on and off sounded loudly, making them both jump. “Are you there?”
The sound came closer, and Mason grabbed the walkie-talkie and held the speaker against his shirt to mute it.
A lumbering shape became visible in the trees as it got nearer, something black, and Mason whispered, “Back away slowly.”
“Are you there?” the walkie-talkie sounded again, muffled, projecting into his shirt.
“I’m here,” he said in
to it, low. “Wait a minute.”
“Oh! There you are! We got you!”
The sound of a helicopter came faintly from the west, the frantic rustling at the sudden noise driving the hidden shape into full visibility.
Fuck! She froze in place as a black bear, smaller than she would have thought, but hey, a fucking bear emerged onto the trail.
Mason raised the stick higher. The clamor of the helicopter as it approached got louder and louder, and the wind stirred up by the blades beat against the treetops.
“We see you!” came through the walkie-talkie. Her would-be savior pushed her back farther behind him, trying to face the bear alone, but she resisted.
It would have to eat them both, goddamit, and would that fucking helicopter land already!
After what may have been no more than a second, but felt a lot longer, the bear, on all four legs, loped back into the safety of the trees as the helicopter descended and both she and Mason breathed an audible sigh of relief.
He grinned at her as the helicopter landed on the trail in front of them, and Boyd, still in his uniform, considerably the worse for wear, stained and dirty, got out and ran to them.
“Nice timing. You made it to something on the west side of the park, I take it?” Mason asked.
“Sure did. We were getting a little worried about you, actually, because it turns out the distance going north was a lot less than going west, so when you didn’t turn up before us—”
“We stopped,” Mason said.
“A lot,” she added. “On the trail, I mean. I’m afraid we were probably pretty slow due to me. And did you see there was a bear right there? Mason held him off.”
Mason shook his head. “I did not. The helicopter did.”
“A bear? Was that what that was?” Boyd asked.
“That or an extremely big wolverine,” she joked. “But did you call somebody I hope? To make sure people knew we were safe?”
“Sure did. As soon as we got to the ranger’s station we called Miss White.”
“Good. Good.”
“She arranged for the bird. Come on.”
They went back to the helicopter, bending to make it under the still whirling blades, and then it took off, another pilot, not Ray, at the controls. Ray was there, though, shaking their hands and giving them headsets so they could communicate.
He picked up a radio transmitter and spoke into it. “Hello, there. I’ve got good news for you. Your boss and the lady are aboard.”
Marcia’s voice came over the radio. “Whew! That’s a relief! Welcome back! Listen, they’re going to take you to a hotel so you can all get some rest.”
“My parents?” Camilla asked. “Do they know?”
“I’ve taken care of everything. We’ll talk when you land.”
The helicopter traveled east until a short while later buildings and water came into sight. They landed on a helipad next to a small Mounties station and climbed out. A sign in front read Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
When they got inside, no more than a few desks and uniformed police around, Mason looked at the screen of his cell phone. “I have service now. I’ll call Marcia on my cell. Are you going to call your parents?”
She glanced at her phone, also receiving service, and saw no missed voicemails or messages. Maybe they hadn’t even learned of the incident. The large handed clock by the Mounties’ desks said it was close to three. “I don’t want to worry them if they don’t actually know. Marcia said she’d taken care of everything, but I’m not sure what she meant by that. Can you ask her if she called them? That’s the only way they’d find out, I think, unless they left me a message I didn’t answer, which it doesn’t look like they did.”
She saw a ladies’ room. “I’m going to clean up for a minute. You go ahead and speak to her.”
Warm water and some paper towels under her armpits did wonders, but there was nothing she could do about her makeup, or lack thereof. She hadn’t brought that along in their survival kit of course. She thought about the long trudge through the woods, the bear, the temporary shelter. Mason had been so sweet, so protective…so hot. All she needed to survive as it turned out was her new boss.
Her lover.
She put the thought away, not sure how to deal with it just yet, and took care of some other necessary business—toilet paper was a marvelous invention, leaves not half so convenient—and emerged from the rest room a few minutes later.
Mason was over pacing by the window, still on the phone with Marcia.
“Is that all there is?” he asked into it when she was close enough to hear. “You’re sure? Maybe we should go on all the way into Halifax.”
A faint smile as he listened and then he said, “I’m just asking. Don’t get all huffy. If that’s it for tonight, then that’s it. Just text me the address so I can plug it into the GPS, and we’ll get there…what? Oh, okay I’ll tell her.”
He hung up and the faint smile became a big one. “You look a lot better,” he said.
“Thanks. I feel better.”
They stood there awkwardly and he added, “Marcia’s got us rooms for the night at the closest hotel so we can all get some rest.” He nodded over at the pilots, one of whom was answering his cell. “She’s calling them now about that and some other things. Logistics for coordinating with Halifax on getting another jet. We should be on our way tomorrow best-case scenario.”
She doubted there was a best-case scenario for her now that it was sinking in that they were back to the real world. She had a lot to think about. And she sure as hell didn’t want to get on another plane for five hours. She supposed driving to the UK was out of the question, but it was almost how she felt. She knew she had to get back up on the horse, but was glad she wasn’t facing that until she got a good night’s rest. If she never had to fly in a plane again for the rest of her life, that would be fine with her. Unfortunately, until they invented teleporting, which probably wouldn’t be less fraught with potential danger anyway, that wasn’t practical.
Of course she was probably quitting this job anyway. So why bother to go to the UK at all. Screw the two week’s notice thing. Could she drive from Nova Scotia, wherever the hell that was, back to the office so maybe she could see it, her actual office, that is, before she had to turn in her resignation and start looking for another job?
She almost forgot. “Oh, what about my parents?”
He frowned and she knew he had neglected to ask Marcia. “She didn’t say anything. Oh wait, she did say—”
One of the pilots came up. “There’s a van that’s going to take us to the hotel if we want to head out front.”
“I told Marcia I wanted to rent a car.”
“There aren’t any car rental places nearby.”
Mason glanced around them, as if noticing the limitations of the small station and annoyed somebody hadn’t taken care of those problems before now to make his life easier. He looked very much like the man who had gotten into the limousine with her yesterday—pre-occupied, aloof, whiz-kid billionaire—and not the one who had gotten off the plane with her hours later.
“Marcia says you’d have to take the van to a car rental place anyway,” the pilot continued, “and at that point it makes more sense to go directly to the hotel. Do you want me to call her back?”
“No. Fine. That’s fine. Give us a minute please.”
Suddenly, whatever Camilla wanted to say to Mason, and whatever he wanted to say to her, she didn’t want either of them to say it here where there was no privacy. They needed to talk this thing out between them when they were alone, without an audience.
“No, that’s okay,” she interjected. “I’ll call Marcia myself when we’re on our way and ask her about my parents. Let’s just go to the hotel.” Until she turned in her resignation, she was still supposed to be on the job.
Walking over to where the other pilot waited, she didn’t look back to see if Mason followed, but he did, and they all got in a big, black van.
His phone
rang almost as soon as they were off. He answered it with, “You didn’t rent a car.” But after a second he said, “I was about to tell her, but she was going to call you anyway.” He held the phone out.
She took it.
“Hi, kid. Some first day, huh?”
She rubbed the back of her neck. “An understatement.”
“You okay? Mason sounds fine. Better than fine. See, I knew you’d be good for him.”
She glanced at Mason, who was watching her. She hoped he hadn’t dared to tell his assistant just how good his new lawyer was to him. She would be mortified by the personal disclosure.
“All things considered, I guess I’m okay. Listen, did you talk to my parents? Do they know about the crash?”
“Don’t you worry about calling them, hon. I felt duty bound to notify your parents.”
“Oh, no! I was worried about that. I hope you called them back and told them I was fine. I’ll call them as soon as I get to the hotel. They’re probably sick with thinking that I might have crashed.”
“Relax! They know you’re okay. But there was a whole stretch where we were still trying to make sure. We knew the plane was missing by morning, and though we didn’t let it leak to the news, we were trying to narrow down where it went off course. That beacon thingy, when they did whatever they had to do to track it down.”
“They must have totally freaked.” She didn’t know who she was sorrier for. Her parents or Marcia for having to deal with them in that state.
“Yeah, I couldn’t quite calm them down at the time, so I did the next best thing.”
A Best Western Dartmouth sign beckoned, and the van turned into the drive.
“I arranged for a jet to bring them on site, but the minute I heard you two were safe I let them know you’re okay and everything’s fine.”
“What? On site where?”
They pulled into the unloading space in front of the hotel and climbed out.
“They’re right there at the hotel. They arrived at Halifax maybe an hour or so ago, and I had them sent right there. And when I called them just a few minutes ago to say you’d been found and were on your way, well I tell you I almost cried. And your mama was bawling like a baby. That mother of yours is a doll.”
Tempting the New Boss Page 11