by JoAnn Ross
“Not as beautiful as you.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Of course I do. But we’re not going to argue it, because the sooner we get it over with, the sooner we can get on to where I point out all the gorgeous, scenic stops on my Tori Cassidy tour.”
She took a deep breath and willed her mind to focus even as her body began to respond to his nibbling mouth and words. “She married a much older man, solely for his fortune. Unfortunately, he stayed alive longer than expected.”
He glanced up at her. “So they conspired to kill him?”
“No. If for no other reason than No Name wouldn’t have the nerve. So, they had this long affair. Then finally Covington III, who has a strong sense of dynasty, gave him an ultimatum. If he didn’t marry and start producing a new generation of heirs by the end of the year, he wouldn’t get control of the cruise line and assorted other businesses. Which would mean that for the first time in a hundred years, an outsider would be brought in to take the helm.”
“That’d be an incentive for some people.”
“But not you.” She leaned over and pressed a kiss against his lips. “Because you’re not one of those rich, cheating billionaire playboys who only cares about spending money you did nothing to earn.”
“No,” he said, “that’s not me. So, why were you chosen as the candidate?”
“That was accidental. He was with friends at a club where I was singing. He remembered my crush—”
“Which made you a sitting duck. So to speak.”
“Exactly to speak. But not for the reason he thought, because, as I said, I was already over him. But I was also ready for a family, so his proposal seemed logical. He’d get what he wanted, and I’d get what I wanted. What I hadn’t realized was that he planned to divorce me as soon as the business takeover was completed. That way, his mistress could divorce her husband without worrying about losing her prenup, because she’d still be marrying into money.”
“Wow.” Finn blew out a long breath. “Those two are really cold.”
“As cold as this place probably gets in January,” she agreed. “I only found out because I heard him talking to her the night before we were going off to Vegas to get married. Then we were coming straight up here.”
“Why here? He doesn’t seem—or sound, from what you’ve said—like a guy who’d get off on a frontier honeymoon.”
“He wanted to get it done before his mother found out he was marrying me.” And wasn’t that the only part of the sordid story that hurt? Because it had reminded her of exactly how disposable she’d been considered.
“He never deserved you,” Finn said. “Sounds like they deserve each other, and I hope the older guy lives forever.” He drew her into his arms, then moved his body over hers. “So, they’re forgotten?”
“Forgotten,” she agreed, and followed him into a storm of their own making.
* * *
It was his phone that woke them. Not the usual alarm but the tone signaling a call. Getting out of bed, Finn fumbled around in his jeans.
“I’m on my way,” he said once he’d unearthed the phone. “I didn’t realize I was on early shift this morning.” For a guy who’d never missed a flight time, he was finding himself more and more distracted by Tori.
He’d made the decision, lying beside her, listening to her sleep, that he was going to trust his judgement, like Knox had advised, tell her that he loved her, and spill the beans about who he was.
He wasn’t anything like IV. He and the fucking douchebag had nothing in common. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Surely she’d understand that. And if she didn’t immediately, he could win her over. He knew the reasons she’d guarded her heart, because his own were much the same. So, they could meet on common ground and work things through.
That was what he’d decided. He’d also come up with the idea of making her breakfast in bed beforehand. How hard could scrambled eggs, OJ, and toast be?
“You’re not late,” Mary said. “A plane disappeared last night. A Piper Navajo with a family of five disappeared on the way from Fairbanks to Wasilla. It was last seen flying over Nenana shortly before that storm hit.”
“That’s seventy-eight miles to here.” With Denali in between.
“Exactly. Every charter airline’s cancelling flights for today for the search. We’ll do shifts. Everyone’s working on divvying up the search area. I said we’d take between here and Healy.” Which might only be twelve miles, but, like everything in Alaska, it was much larger than it sounded.
“What about the ELT?”
“Either it was too old to work or it didn’t trigger,” she said. Which could have been the case if it had crashed enough to damage the tail, where emergency locator transponders were usually placed.
“I’ll be right in.”
Tori, who’d heard the conversation, came back from the kitchen with a travel mug of coffee. “I can make up some breakfast for the searchers,” she volunteered.
“Another plane went down right after I got up here,” he said. “The Caribou took care of it, but Barbara Ann would probably appreciate the help.”
“You go ahead and go,” she said, rising up on her toes to kiss him. “I’ll get ready and drive into town.”
He paused. Then decided this was the worst moment to share his truth. Timing, Finn thought as he drove away, was everything.
* * *
Mary was behind a long table made from pushing desks together, her schedule book in hand with a geographical map laid out in front of her. When she saw Finn come into the office, she came out from behind the table.
“I’m putting you with Yazz in one of the Cessnas,” she said.
“Okay.” Given that the other pilot had a lot more experience with this landscape, that made sense. Her next words were, “He’ll be your spotter. You’ll be at the yoke.” His surprise obviously showed on his face because she tacked on an explanation. “He had a few too many beers at the tree house raising,” she said. “He’s mostly fine, but I’m not letting him fly with a hangover. Besides, it works. He knows the terrain better than you. He can look for a plane in those creases and valleys you’d have no way of knowing about.”
“Okay,” Finn repeated. Years in the military had taught him to accept orders from superior officers. Which, under these circumstances, Mary was. He also knew that all the pilots in the office, even ones who didn’t fly for Osprey, were her pilots. She cared for each and every one of them in the protective way a mama grizzly cared for her cubs.
“I also need to talk with you. Alone.” She tilted her dark head toward the door to her private office.
“Something wrong?” Finn asked once she’d shut the door behind them.
“Did you tell her?”
Seriously? That was what was on her mind right now with a plane with a pilot and five passengers missing? “Not yet.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to hammer you on that because it would be a case of the tea kettle calling the frying pan black.”
Finn wasn’t even going to go there. Instead, he waited.
“First, you have to promise me that whatever I tell you won’t get you upset.”
“I flew a mission the day after I nearly drove a jet into the sea and found out my dad had died,” Finn said. “If the U.S. Navy can trust me to get back into the air after that, I doubt there’s anything you’re going to say that’ll prove a flight risk.”
“Good point. So, since I don’t want to risk you crashing out on that mountain, looking for a lost plane without knowing the truth, here goes.” She drew in a deep breath. Blew it out. Then went through the sequence again while Finn struggled for patience. “Did you ever wonder why your father brought you up here that summer?”
“Sure. Especially since I’d never felt like a favorite son.” That would’ve been James. At least looking in from the outside, which Finn had always been. “I figured, once we went up with Mike, that he knew I liked flying, so he decided I was the only one of his kids who�
�d enjoy it.”
“That was part of it,” she allowed. “Because it was in your blood.”
“No way.” Finn didn’t want to talk about his relationship, or lack of it, with his father when there was a plane missing out there. “The only flying he ever did, that I can remember, was in his private jet.”
“Not your father. Your uncle.”
“My father was an only child.” A thought suddenly struck like that thunderbolt that had shaken the cabin last night. “Are you talking about Mike?”
“He was Colin’s half-brother,” she confirmed. “Your grandfather Brannigan had come up here fishing, and gotten a local girl pregnant. Since she was a native, there was no way he was going to take her back to the lower forty-eight. So he just left.”
“Like that? He didn’t even arrange to take care of his child?” Mike Muldoon, he thought. The man who could’ve lived in the air. Just like him.
“Appears not. Anyway, since we’re on the clock here, fast forward to the year your mother died. Your grandfather’s lawyer’s son was going through his father’s office, in order to clean things out to move to a new place, when he found a codicil to his original will, leaving a bequest to a Mike Muldoon.
“Your father, being curious, came up here and met Mike. The two hit it off, right away, partly because Mike had had a good life and wasn’t one to hold grudges, but more importantly, Colin finally understood why you’d been drawing planes since you were old enough to hold a crayon. Blood tells, I remember him saying.
“Even after your mother passed, although he didn’t know how to show it, he cared for all his boys. Deep down, family was the most important thing to Colin. Which is why he came up here every year to spend two weeks with his brother. Who didn’t want to be acknowledged, because, quite honestly, Mike didn’t want to land in the Brannigan spotlight.”
“Which was why Dad came up here under an assumed name,” Finn said.
“In the beginning, I suspect Colin didn’t want Mike to know who he was. But yeah, after the first few days, when he admitted who he was and they got along like gangbangers, he kept the ruse up because it allowed him to be himself, away from the image his father had originally created and he’d built on.
“He waited until you were old enough to appreciate flying in these mountains to bring you up here to meet your uncle. But I have to tell you that, every summer, we’d hear about all your accomplishments. Both before and after that trip. He was proud as punch about you.”
Even as his head was being hammered with this generations-old family secret, Finn noted that, for once, Mary had gotten the phrase right.
“Well.” He nodded, deciding he’d chew on all this later. “Thank you for telling me that.” He would not allow himself to be furious at his father for having kept him from getting to know his uncle. Didn’t he know, firsthand, how difficult some secrets were to share? And wow, his father’s was a doozie. “I’d better get out there.”
“Be careful,” she said as they left the room. “You’ve got a woman waiting for you.”
Finn hoped.
25
One thing Finn had discovered about flying in Alaska was that, one minute, blue skies went on forever, then the next, Mother Nature could slap out a giant grizzly paw and remind you who ruled these mountains.
He and Yazz had been in the air for about twenty minutes, after reaching a comfortable cruising altitude, when a sudden wind blew off the face of the mountain, bringing with it a black cloud that shot out rain like bullets.
“Shit,” Yazz muttered. “It’s as dark as a December midnight. Let’s go back along the lake’s coastline to see if we can get some clearance.”
Since they were flying under VFR (visual flight rules), Finn dropped to eight hundred feet, which was low even for a bush plane. Low enough to see beavers lumbering along the rocky beach and seagulls picking at a dead salmon. “Odds are against finding the plane here,” Finn said.
“True. But at least we’ve got enough visibility not to crash into the side of the mountain. That’s all the team needs. To be out looking for us. There should be a valley up ahead. Shoot for it.”
Three minutes later, Finn found the cut blocked with another wall of dense clouds. “Not going to happen,” he said, banking a hundred and eighty degrees and turning back the way they’d come. With any luck, the wind would’ve blown away the clouds behind them.
The radio traffic picked up, pilots reporting both clearances and clouds, but no sign of the Navajo. “I’m going to try to follow the river,” Finn said. “If I were in trouble, that’s what I’d do.”
“Might as well give it a try.”
He dropped even lower, pushing the ceiling limits at six hundred feet. The lower level was safer, but it was like being back home in California, trying to get from Burbank to San Diego using side roads instead of the freeway. He’d throttled back to save fuel, but that also slowed him down, which could be trouble if they suddenly came upon a hill covered with tall trees.
For the first time since landing in Caribou, he was missing his carrier deck.
“That’s why I chose the Air Force,” Yazz said when Finn shared that thought with him. “Unlike you Navy flyboys, we were smart enough to build long, straight, flat runways that don’t run away from us.”
Finn couldn’t argue that. “Right now I’d just settle for some blue sky.”
And then, as if taking pity on him, the granite clouds parted like in some old Bible movie in a way that had Finn almost expecting to see Moses on the mountain, holding up a pair of golden tablets.
He exchanged a look with his spotter. “Maybe,” Yazz suggested dryly, “you could have asked for that about thirty minutes ago?”
They continued on, following the river through a saddle in the mountain, over meadows and lakes and rocky uplifts. They’d been in the air a little over two hours when Finn started doing the math. Under optimum conditions, the Cessna had enough fuel for three hours of flying, but these conditions were less than optimal. He’d been fighting headwinds much of the way, which ate up fuel, and no pilot, whatever he was flying, would ever head home with the idea of having just enough. The rule was to always keep more in the tank than needed.
“Five more minutes,” he said. “Then we’re going back.”
“Works for me,” his spotter, who knew these mountains far better than Finn did, agreed. They’d just crested over another rise when they spotted the plane, caught up in some trees next to a lake.
“Well, it didn’t break apart,” Yazz observed.
“Or burn,” Finn said, thinking back on the sight of his Hornet exploding into a fireball over another very different range of mountains.
He swooped lower to get another look while Yazz called in their position for a fresh plane to come retrieve them. Given the timbered terrain, he suggested a floatplane.
The pilot and passengers had cut up what Finn guessed to be clothes and spelled out SOS. All OK on the rocky ground. When he saw three kids, two adults that had to be the parents, and the pilot all jumping up and down waving their arms, he dove lower, circled three times, and wagged his wings to let them know he’d seen them and would send help. Then, mission accomplished, headed back for home.
* * *
Tori was going crazy. Although everyone else in the place seemed amazingly calm under the circumstances, she’d been listening to the radio calls that reported hard wind, dense clouds, and rain. For the first time the mountain, which Kendra had painted in such pretty sugar colors, which greeted her every morning with a dazzling view, whose flowered meadows she’d seen from the air, and whose trails she’d hiked in her new red boots, took on an entirely new character. It had turned dangerously malevolent, like the Misty Mountains in The Hobbit, inhabited by goblins and rock-throwing giants.
“He’ll be okay,” Mary assured her over and over again. It didn’t help.
She was finally able to breathe when she heard Finn’s voice, sounding no different from when he’d first flown her here
from Anchorage, saying that they were headed home. But she still wasn’t going to fully relax until she saw the Cessna taxiing up the runway to the hangar.
The place had broken out in applause when Yazz reported they’d found the plane, with all aboard safe and waiting for a pickup. Jackie Johnson, a sixty-something native who Mary had told her had practically grown up flying planes, had taken off in the Beaver to fetch them.
“Not a bad day’s work for a billionaire’s kid,” a grizzled old man Tori remembered being the owner of Caribou’s hardware store drawled.
“He’s a former naval aviator,” she corrected politely.
The room had gone as silent as a church on Sunday morning. Oddly, no one was looking at anyone else. Only Mary was looking at her. The sympathy in her eyes said it all.
It couldn’t be! Tori realized that disbelief and denial must be written all over her face when the man, Doug something, she recalled, drove his point home. “His old man, Colin Brannigan, used to come up here every summer. One year he brought one of his kids. Though he’s grown up, I recognized him right away. He looks like his old man. And his uncle. Who took him flying.”
Uncle? But Mike Muldoon had taken Finn flying.
“It’s true,” Mary said quietly. “Colin Brannigan and Mike were half brothers.”
Could this day get any worse? Why didn’t anyone in the room seem surprised by that?
“And Finn knew?” And had told her the story about owing Mary and never mentioned that she was his aunt by marriage? Because then, the thought hit home through her whirling mind, he’d have to admit to being a member of one of the wealthiest, most famous families in the country. Far wealthier, she suspected, than the Covingtons.
“Not until today,” Mary admitted. “Colin wanted to keep his identity a secret.” She shot a hot, accusing glare at the man who’d blown up Tori’s life. In front of what appeared to be half the town. Along with a TV news crew from Anchorage.
“Secrecy seems to run in the family,” Tori managed as she realized the final betrayal. She’d learned over the years that the most effective lies were wrapped in enough truth to give them credibility. Finn had told her he’d grown up in Calabasas. Carter had grown up in a mansion in Holmby Hills. Los Angeles might be huge and sprawling, but such wealth was concentrated in the hands of a privileged few. Their paths had to have crossed.