The Complete Mackenzie Collection

by Linda Howard

  Suddenly he jerked his head back. “I don’t believe this,” he muttered. Reaching up, he prised her arms from around his neck and set her away from him. He looked even more savage than he had a moment before, the veins standing out in his neck. “Stay here,” he barked. “Don’t move an inch. I have to check the plane.”

  He left her standing there in the sand, in the growing twilight, suddenly cold all the way down to the bone. Deprived of his warmth, his strength, her legs slowly collapsed, and she sank to the ground.

  Chance swore to himself, steadily and with blistering heat, as he checked the plane for fuel leaks and other damage. He had deliberately made the landing rougher than necessary, and the plane had a reinforced landing gear as well as extra protection for the fuel lines and tank, but a smart pilot didn’t take anything for granted. He had to check the plane, had to stay in character.

  He didn’t want to stay in character. He wanted to back her against one of those big boulders and lift her skirt. Damn! What was wrong with him? In the past fifteen years he’d held a lot of beautiful, deadly women in his arms, and even though he let his body respond, his mind had always remained cool. Sunny Miller wasn’t the most beautiful, not by a long shot; she was more gamine than goddess, with bright eyes that invited laughter rather than seduction. So why was he so hot to get into her pants?

  “Why” didn’t matter, he angrily reminded himself. Okay, so his attraction to her was unexpected; it was an advantage, something to be used. He wouldn’t have to fake anything, which meant there was even less chance of her sensing anything off-kilter.

  Danger heightened the emotions, destroying inhibitions. They had lived through a life-threatening situation together, they were alone, and there was a definite physical attraction between them. He had arranged the first two circumstances; the third was a bonus. It was a textbook situation; studies in human nature had shown that, if a man and a woman were thrown together in a dangerous situation and they had only each other to rely on, they quickly formed both sexual and emotional bonds. Chance had the advantage, in that he knew the plane hadn’t been in any danger of crashing, and that they weren’t in a life-and-death situation. Sunny would think they were stranded, while he knew better. Whenever he signaled Zane, they would promptly be “rescued,” but he wouldn’t send that signal until Sunny took him into her confidence about her father.

  Everything was under control. They weren’t even in Oregon, as he’d told her. They were in Nevada, in a narrow box canyon he and Zane had scouted out and selected because it was possible to land a plane in it, and, unless one had the equipment to scale vertical rock walls, impossible to escape. They weren’t close to any commercial flight pattern, he had disabled the transponder so no search plane would pick up a signal, and they were far off their route. They wouldn’t be found.

  Sunny was totally under his control; she just didn’t know it.

  The growing dusk made it impossible to see very much, and it was obvious that if the plane was going to explode in flames, it would already have done so. Chance strode back to where Sunny was sitting on the ground, her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around her legs, and that damn bag close by her side. She scrambled to her feet as he approached. “All clear?”

  “All clear. No fuel leaks.”

  “That’s good.” She managed a smile. “It wouldn’t do us any good for you to fix the fuel pump if there wasn’t any fuel left.”

  “Sunny…if it’s a clogged line, I can fix it. If the fuel pump has gone out, I can’t.”

  He decided to let her know right away that they might not be flying out of here in the morning.

  She absorbed that in silence, rubbing her bare arms to ward off the chill of the desert air. The temperature dropped like a rock when the sun went down, which was one of the reasons he had chosen this site. They would have to share their body heat at night to survive.

  He leaned down and hefted the bag, marveling anew at its weight, then took her arm to walk with her back to the plane. “I hope you have a coat in this damn bag, since you thought it was important enough to risk your life getting it,” he growled.

  “A sweater,” she said absently, looking up at the crystal clear sky with its dusting of stars. The black walls of the canyon loomed on either side of them, making it obvious they were in a hole in the earth. A big hole, but still a hole. She shook herself, as if dragging her thoughts back to the problem at hand. “We’ll be all right,” she said. “I have some food, and—”

  “Food? You’re carrying food in here?” He indicated the bag.

  “Just some emergency stuff.”

  Of all the things he’d expected, food was at the bottom of the list. Hell, food wasn’t even on the list. Why would a woman on an overnight trip put food in her suitcase?

  They reached the plane, and he set the bag down in the dirt. “Let me get some things, and we’ll find a place to camp for the night. Can you get anything else in there, or is it full?”

  “It’s full,” she said positively, but then, he hadn’t expected her to open it so easily.

  He shrugged and dragged out his own small duffel, packed with the things a man could be expected to take on a charter flight: toiletries, a change of clothes. The duffel was unimportant, but it wouldn’t look right if he left it behind.

  “Why can’t we camp here?” she asked.

  “This is a stream bed. It’s dry now, but if it rains anywhere in the mountains, we could be caught in the runoff.”

  As he spoke, he got a flashlight out of the dash, the blanket from the back, and a pistol from the pocket in the pilot’s side door. He stuck the pistol in his belt, and draped the blanket around her shoulders. “I have some water,” he said, taking out a plastic gallon milk jug that he’d refilled with water. “We’ll be all right tonight.” Water had been the toughest thing to locate. He and Zane had found several box canyons in which he could have landed the plane, but this was the only one with water. The source wasn’t much, just a thin trickle running out of the rock at the far end of the canyon, but it was enough. He would “find” the water tomorrow.

  He handed her the flashlight and picked up both bags. “Lead the way,” he instructed, and indicated the direction he wanted. The floor of the canyon sloped upward on one side; the stream bed was the only smooth ground. The going was rough, and Sunny carefully picked her way over rocks and gullies. She was conscientious about shining the light so he could see where he was going, since he was hampered by both bags.

  Damn, he wished she had complained at least a little, or gotten upset. He wished she wasn’t so easy to like. Most people would have been half-hysterical, or asking endless questions about their chances of being rescued if he couldn’t get the plane repaired. Not Sunny. She coped, just as she had coped at the airport, with a minimum of fuss. Without any fuss, actually; she had bitten the blood out of her lip to keep from distracting him while he was bringing the plane down.

  The canyon was so narrow it didn’t take them long to reach the vertical wall. Chance chose a fairly flat section of sandy gray dirt, with a pile of huge boulders that formed a rough semi-circle. “This will give us some protection from the wind tonight.”

  “What about snakes?” she asked, eyeing the boulders.

  “Possible,” he said, as he set down the bags. Had he found a weakness he could use to bring her closer to him. “Are you afraid of them?”

  “Only the human kind.” She looked around as if taking stock of their situation, then kind of braced her shoulders. It was a minute movement, one he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been studying her so keenly. With an almost cheerful note she said, “Let’s get this camp set up so we can eat. I’m hungry.”

  She squatted beside her bag and spun the combination dial of the rather substantial lock on her bag. With a quiet snick the lock opened, and she unzipped the bag. Chance was a bit taken aback at finding out what was in the bag this easily, but he squatted beside her. “What do you have? Candy bars?”

  She
chuckled. “Nothing so tasty.”

  He took the flashlight from her and shone it into the bag as she began taking out items. The bag was as neatly packed as a salesman’s sample case, and she hadn’t been lying about not having any room in there for anything else. She placed a sealed plastic bag on the ground between them. “Here we go. Nutrition bars.” She slanted a look at him. “They taste like you’d expect a nutrition bar to taste, but they’re concentrated. One bar a day will give us all we need to stay alive. I have a dozen of them.”

  The next item was a tiny cell phone. She stared at it, frozen, for a moment, then looked up at him with fragile hope in her eyes as she turned it on. Chance knew there wasn’t a signal here, but he let her go through the motions, something inside him aching at the disappointment he knew she would feel.

  Her shoulders slumped. “Nothing,” she said, and turned the phone off. Without another word she returned to her unpacking.

  A white plastic box with a familiar red cross on the top came out next. “First aid kit,” she murmured, reaching back into the bag. “Water purification tablets. A couple of bottles of water, ditto orange juice. Light sticks. Matches.” She listed each item as she set it on the ground. “Hairspray, deodorant, toothpaste, pre-moistened towelettes, hairbrush, curling iron, blow dryer, two space blankets—” she paused as she reached the bottom of the bag and began hauling on something bigger than any of the other items. “—and a tent.”

  Chapter 5

  A tent. Chance stared down at it, recognizing the type. This was survivalist stuff, what people stored in underground shelters in case of war or natural disaster—or what someone who expected to spend a lot of time in the wilderness would pack.

  “It’s small,” she said apologetically. “Really just a one-man tent, but I had to get something light enough for me to carry. There will be enough room for both of us to sleep in it, though, if you don’t mind being a little crowded.”

  Why would she carry a tent on board a plane, when she expected to spend one night in Seattle—in a hotel—then fly back to Atlanta? Why would anyone carry that heavy a bag around when she could have checked it? The answer was that she hadn’t wanted it out of her possession, but he still wanted an explanation of why she was carrying it at all.

  Something didn’t add up here.

  His silence was unnerving. Sunny looked down at her incongruous pile of possessions and automatically emptied out the bag, removing her sweater and slipping it on, sitting down to pull on a pair of socks, then stuffing her change of clothes and her grooming items back into the bag. Her mind was racing. There was something about his expression that made a chill go down her spine, a hardness that she hadn’t glimpsed before. Belatedly, she remembered how easily he had caught the cretin in the airport, the deadly grace and speed with which he moved. This was no ordinary charter pilot, and she was marooned with him.

  She had been attracted to him from the first moment she saw him, but she couldn’t afford to let that blind her to the danger of letting down her guard. She was accustomed to living with danger, but this was a different sort of danger, and she had no idea what form it could, or would, take. Chance could simply be one of those men who packed more punch than others, a man very capable of taking care of himself.

  Or he could be in her father’s pay.

  The thought chilled her even more, the cold going down to her bones before common sense reasserted itself. No, there was no way her father could have arranged for everything that had happened today, no way he could have known she would be in the Salt Lake City airport. Being there had been pure bad luck, the result of a fouled-up flight schedule. She hadn’t known she would be in Salt Lake City. If her father had been involved, he would have tried to grab her in either Atlanta or Seattle. All the zig-zagging across the country she had done today had made it impossible for her father to be involved.

  As her mind cleared of that silent panic, she remembered how Chance had dragged her bodily from the plane, the way he had draped the blanket around her, even the courtesy with which he had treated her in the airport. He was a strong man, accustomed to being in the lead and taking the risks. Military training, she thought with a sudden flash of clarity, and wondered how she had missed it before. Her life, and Margreta’s, depended on how well she could read people, how prepared she was, how alert. With Chance, she had been so taken off guard by the strength of her attraction to him, and the shock of finding that interest returned, that she hadn’t been thinking.

  “What’s this about?” he asked quietly, squatting down beside her and indicating the tent. “And don’t tell me you were going to camp out in the hotel lobby.”

  She couldn’t help it. The thought of setting up the tent in a hotel lobby was so ludicrous that she chuckled. Seeing the funny side of things was what had kept her sane all these years.

  One big hand closed gently on the nape of her neck. “Sunny,” he said warningly. “Tell me.”

  She shook her head, still smiling. “We’re stranded here tonight, but essentially we’re strangers. After we get out of here we’ll never see each other again, so there’s no point in spilling our guts to each other. You keep your secrets, and I’ll keep mine.”

  The flashlight beam sharpened the angles of his face. He exhaled a long, exasperated breath. “Okay—for now. I don’t know why it matters, anyway. Unless I can get the plane fixed, we’re going to be here a long time, and the reason why you have the tent will be irrelevant.”

  She searched his face, trying to read his impassive expression. “That isn’t reassuring.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “When we don’t show up in Seattle, someone will search for us. The Civil Air Patrol, someone. Doesn’t your plane have one of those beacon things?”

  “We’re in a canyon.”

  He didn’t have to say more than that. Any signal would be blocked by the canyon walls, except for directly overhead. They were in a deep, narrow slit in the earth, the narrowness of the canyon limiting even more their chances of anyone picking up the signal.

  “Well, darn,” she said forcefully.

  This time he was the one who laughed, and he shook his head as he released her neck and stood up. “Is that the worst you can say?”

  “We’re alive. That outcome is so good considering what could have happened that, in comparison, being stranded here only rates a ‘darn.’ You may be able to fix the plane.” She shrugged. “No point in wasting the really nasty words until we know more.”

  He leaned down and helped her to her feet. “If I can’t get us going again, I’ll help you with those words. For now, let’s get this tent set up before the temperature drops even more.”

  “What about a fire?”

  “I’ll look for firewood tomorrow—if we need it. We can get by tonight without a fire, and I don’t want to waste the flashlight batteries. If we’re here for any length of time, we’ll need the flashlight.”

  “I have the lightsticks.”

  “We’ll save those, too. Just in case.”

  Working together, they set up the tent. She could have done it herself; it was made for one person to handle, and she had practiced until she knew she could do it with a minimum of fuss, but with two people the job took only moments. Brushing away the rocks so they would have a smooth surface beneath the tent floor took longer, but even so, they weren’t going to have a comfortable bed for the night.

  When they were finished, she eyed the tent with misgivings. It was long enough for Chance, but…She visually measured the width of his shoulders, then the width of the tent. She was either going to have to sleep on her side all night long—or on top of him.

  The heat that shot through her told her which option her body preferred. Her heart beat a little faster in anticipation of their enforced intimacy during the coming night, of lying against his strong, warm body, maybe even sleeping in his arms.

  To his credit, he didn’t make any insinuating remarks, even though when he looked at the tent he must have d
rawn the same conclusion as she had. Instead, he bent down to pick up the bag of nutrition bars and said smugly, “I knew you’d have dinner with me tonight.”

  She began laughing again, charmed by both his tact and his sense of humor, and fell a little in love with him right then.

  She should have been alarmed, but she wasn’t. Yes, letting herself care for him made her emotionally vulnerable, but they had lived through a terrifying experience together, and she needed an emotional anchor right now. So far she hadn’t found a single thing about the man that she didn’t like, not even that hint of danger she kept sensing. In this situation, a man with an edge to him was an asset, not a hindrance.

  She allowed herself to luxuriate in this unaccustomed feeling as they each ate a nutrition bar—which was edible, but definitely not tasty—and drank some water. Then they packed everything except the two space blankets back in the bag, to protect their supplies from snakes and insects and other scavengers. They didn’t have to worry about bears, not in this desertlike part of the country, but coyotes were possible. Her bag was supposedly indestructible; if any coyotes showed up, she supposed she would find out if the claim about the bag was true, because there wasn’t room in the tent for both them and the bag.

  Chance checked the luminous dial of his watch. “It’s still early, but we should get in the tent to save our body heat, and not burn up calories trying to stay warm out here. I’ll spread this blanket down, and we’ll use your two blankets for cover.”