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Breakaway

Page 15

by Nancy Warren


  Max felt foolish standing there with roses in one hand and his flight bag in the other. Clearly, she wasn’t going to take the flowers. It seemed equally obvious, based on her expression, that they were about to have a heated discussion.

  Max figured a guy who could invent a climate-control system for spaceships ought to be able to manage to have a private conversation without unwanted roses in his hand.

  So, when Lynette drew close enough, he said, “Could you take these?” and thrust the flowers into her hand.

  Lynette didn’t look as hostile as her granddaughter, which was good, but she didn’t seem like she was altogether thrilled to see him, either. He figured he’d deal with the granddaughter first, then talk to Lynette.

  “Can I talk to you privately?” he said to Claire.

  “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t even know who you are.”

  He gave her a look, the look of a man who’s been inside a woman’s body and shared the most intimate experience possible with her. She could say whatever she liked, but on the most basic level they knew each other.

  Her color rose slightly. Seemed her thoughts had gone along the same path.

  “Let’s go for a walk. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  20

  “I WANT TO know why you lied to us.”

  “I never lied to you,” he said.

  She snorted. “Not telling the truth is pretty much the same thing as lying.”

  He started walking, not sure if she’d join him but completely certain he didn’t want an audience for this conversation. To his relief she did follow, stomping along at his side. She didn’t ask where they were going, merely started a rant that had clearly been boiling up for a while. “I was at my friend Laurel’s place. She did a Google search on you. I can’t even tell you how I felt, how, how, betrayed I felt when I found out who you really are. What are you doing here?”

  “I—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He got close enough to his place to toss his flight bag onto the front porch and then, feeling a little more in control with both hands free, started guiding them in the direction of the path that ran along the headlands above the ocean. He loved it there, loved watching the endless, restless waves. He found it soothing and very much hoped his irate companion did, too.

  He let her continue her tirade, knowing there was no point trying to stop her. Clearly she had things she needed to say to him.

  When she stopped to take a breath, he turned to her and said, “I only have one thing to say.”

  She turned to him, crossed her arms. “What?”

  “I love you.”

  If he thought those magic words would have her opening her tightly crossed arms and throwing them around him, he was sadly mistaken. The thing was, he’d never said those words to any woman but his mom. Maybe his sister on a birthday card. He wasn’t a person who threw out deep sentiments like cheap candy. It was hard to say them. Even now, he felt as though he’d taken a huge risk. Breathing felt like something he had to concentrate on. He’d actually said I love you.

  “If you love me, why did you lie to me?”

  “I—” No point in saying he hadn’t lied. In her eyes, omission of information was the same as a lie. And he supposed there was some evasion of the truth in what he’d done.

  He thought about what Dylan had said. “Do you ever watch a show called Undercover Boss?”

  She glanced at him with scorn. “No.”

  “Well, it’s a reality show where the boss goes incognito into—”

  “You’re not my boss.”

  “Right, but the point is—”

  “You are my employee. And it seems to me that you have, in fact, been acting as a corporate spy.”

  “Look, Varo Enterprises doesn’t need—”

  “Then why did you come here? You clearly don’t need a job as a bush pilot.”

  He let out a breath. Stared out at the ocean and thought about that very question. Why had he come? “I think I was bored. No. I know I was bored. Everything was working too well, too smoothly. I need challenges. I have more money than I can ever spend, employees who are so amazing nobody needs me for anything except to approve their excellent decisions and sign some deals. Polar Air came up as a possible turnaround or buyout.” He shrugged.

  “I’m sorry, Claire. People talk. There were rumors that bills weren’t being paid and the airline was in trouble.” He rubbed a spot on his forehead as though it would ease his thought process. “This is a tiny deal for us, obviously, but we liked the reputation of your airline and its strategic location. We could link up with some other interests and maximize economies of scale. Maybe get a regional airline going. Lots of options.”

  “Except the option of talking to us first.”

  “Look, we aren’t bad people. We don’t do hostile takeovers and put people out of business. But there was obviously something going wrong. The project manager suggested it would be nice to have eyes and ears on the ground, just to get an idea of what was going on before we committed ourselves.”

  “So you sent in a corporate spy.” She still seemed pretty pissed. “You.”

  He blew out a breath that was immediately carried away by the breeze, the way he felt his hopes for the future were going.

  “I can see why it could look that way to you.” In fact, when she phrased it that way it looked sort of like corporate espionage to him, too. What the hell had he been thinking?

  He took one look at her angry face and knew he had to think fast. He had a genius brain, didn’t he? Some of the best education money could buy. How could he not come up with a reasonable answer for why he’d chosen to come to Alaska and fly bush planes?

  And then he knew. “I love to fly. I was born for it. I’ve loved the idea of space travel ever since I was a geek.” He caught her expression and amended his statement. “A younger geek than I am now. I know this sounds stupid but I feel like I belong in the air. You know how some people love to swim and sail and scuba dive, and others are tethered to the earth, they hike and climb and garden. But for me, I’ve always felt most at home in the sky. I should have been a bird.”

  He caught the sympathetic look that crossed her face and knew, as he’d known from the very beginning, that she felt exactly the same way. Of course, she wasn’t going to say so since she was currently steaming mad at him, but he knew she understood in a way few people did.

  “That’s probably when I started falling in love with you, when I realized you were also born to fly.” He found, now that he’d said it once, throwing out the love word was getting easier. Or maybe it was simple desperation driving him.

  Losing Claire would be right up there with finding out he could never be an astronaut. A dream buster, a life changer, a blow that would be extremely difficult to recover from.

  “I came here to check out the airline from the inside, it’s true, but never with any malicious intent. I didn’t want to raise false hopes. If I liked the operation, I was planning to get my company to make you a fair offer.”

  “What if we don’t want to sell?”

  This was more difficult. He’d met with his people in Seattle and he knew, probably better than Claire, that Polar Air was in serious financial trouble. Sure, it was the fault of the former manager, but now that he was dead, it was unlikely they’d ever get any of their money back. And even if they did, it wouldn’t come fast enough. He gentled his voice. “I think you’re going to have to consider selling. Or getting an angel investor.”

  “Angel investor seems like one of those—what is that term for when you put two words together that don’t belong?”

  “Oxymoron.”

  “Right. I don’t think someone who gives us money in order to control our business is much of an angel, frankly.”

  “But you do see that you’re in a tough spot? Through no fault of your own,” he hastened to add. “Frank Carmondy was stealing from you, taking money that should have gone to supplier
s, so you thought everything was paid up. And because Polar Air has such a great reputation, suppliers were willing to wait longer to get paid.”

  “They trusted us.” She looked sad and angry. “They trusted Polar Air because my grandmother and grandfather are the kind of people who’d deprive themselves to make sure all their bills were paid on time.” She looked out to sea. Her profile was beautiful, he thought. “This is going to be so hard for Lynette.”

  “Look, I want to make a suggestion.”

  When she turned back to him her eyes were hard. “I don’t think so, Max. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it. What I want you to do is pack your bags and get back on your plane and go back to your fancy office and your billions. You’ve had your fun slumming it, you got to ride toy planes, now you need to go back to your real life.”

  “But—”

  “Really. You need to go.”

  He could see that she was fighting emotion and as much as he wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her until she could see reason, could see what was in his heart, he knew he couldn’t do that.

  If she wanted him to leave, he was going to have to leave.

  * * *

  “WHERE’S MAX?” Lynette asked when Claire came stomping into the house.

  “He’s gone.”

  “He just got back. Now where’s he gone to?”

  “Back to Seattle, I guess. I fired him.”

  Lynette didn’t act shocked or even surprised. Instead, she fussed with the roses. She’d put them in a pretty crystal vase that her husband had given her on one of their anniversaries. “He brought roses.”

  “He came here under false pretenses and he wanted to buy Polar Air.”

  “Well, at least he’s got good taste.”

  “How can you say that?”

  Her grandmother ruffled her hair the way she’d done when she was a teenager. “Because he also wants you.”

  “It was probably a ruse. Get close to me and get closer to stealing our airline.”

  “So young and so cynical.”

  “Lynette, you are not taking this seriously.”

  “At my age, honey, you learn to take everything less seriously. And maybe I’m old enough to understand that everything isn’t as black-and-white as it seemed when I was as young as you are.”

  “He lied to us.”

  “Well, he didn’t tell us exactly who he was or why he was here, but I’m not sure he actually lied.”

  “Are you on his side? Just because he flew in some damned roses?”

  “No. I’m not on his side. But I think a man who is smart enough to love my granddaughter must have some redeeming features. What was his offer?”

  Claire was so shocked she took a step back. “He didn’t offer me anything. And if he did I wouldn’t—”

  “Not you. I meant, what was his offer for Polar Air?”

  “I have no idea. I told you, I fired him.”

  “Hmm. Might have been interesting to find out what he was offering.”

  “But—you’d never sell the family business. You started the airline.”

  “No. I don’t plan to sell. But I’m a businesswoman. Best way to gauge the value of your business is to find out what someone else is willing to pay for it.”

  * * *

  CLAIRE HEADED to the ice rink. With the frame of mind she was in, pucks were going to be punished tonight. She went an hour early so she could practice with the Spruce Bay Vixens, the team she’d played for from her senior high school years to her mid-twenties. The team always welcomed her at practice. She enjoyed the other young women and was able to give a few coaching pointers.

  After the girls hit the showers, she remained on the ice alone. She still hadn’t skated her mad off. She tried not to picture the way she and Max had faced off on this very rink. How they’d toyed with each other and challenged each other and enjoyed a crazy kind of courtship on the ice.

  She’d recruited the Vixens’ goalie to come out and try to stop her shots. She lined up pucks. Every time she focused, she imagined the puck had his face on it and was saying, “I love you.” Then she’d whack that sucker so hard the poor goalie didn’t have a chance.

  They were both breathing hard and she had an ache in her shooting arm when they called it quits.

  “Nice work,” she said to the goalie, whose name was Jennifer.

  “I barely stopped half your shots.”

  “I know. If you can stop half my shots, you’re doing okay.”

  The younger woman took a pull from her water bottle and wiped her sweaty forehead with her arm. “I guess so. You’re pretty famous around here. How come you didn’t go to the Olympics?”

  She remembered the heady days when she’d imagined playing hockey for her country. She’d been so excited. As had Lynette and her grandfather.

  She was still happy that he’d been around to get the news. He’d been so proud he’d called his travel agent and booked tickets right then and there for Lynette and him to fly to Turin for the 2006 winter Olympics.

  He’d died before the tickets could be delivered. Lynette hadn’t fallen apart. And she hadn’t even hinted that Claire should miss her chance at glory and stay home. But she’d known that her grandmother was holding herself together with determination and chewing gum. And Claire had stayed to help her run the airline and to grieve.

  There were moments when she thought maybe, just maybe, if she’d been part of the women’s Olympic hockey team the Canadians wouldn’t have had such an easy victory. But she also knew in her heart that her grandfather would have given her a gold medal for doing the right thing.

  And that was worth more than Olympic gold. Her grandparents had taken her in when she was a grief-stricken teenager and they’d helped her through her sadness, anger and confusion. She found, when the time came, it was an easy decision to return the favor to her grandmother.

  “My grandfather died. I needed to stay home.”

  “You missed the Olympics. That blows.”

  “Not as much as losing my grandfather.”

  “Yeah,” said the worldly wise eighteen-year-old. “Sometimes life just sucks.”

  She thought of Max off in some boardroom buying up airlines as though they were penny candy before escorting Lady Prunella Pink-eye Jones to some charity event. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Sometimes life completely sucks.”

  21

  THE SPRUCE BAY SENTINEL was published on Thursdays.

  The paper didn’t bother with world or national news since everyone had satellite TV and read the big papers online. Instead, the Sentinel focused on Spruce Bay, which the New York Times and USA TODAY and network news almost never did. Once, they’d gained notoriety because an escaped murderer had turned up in town, eaten at Peg’s Diner, which had been closed now for more than a decade, and been arrested after spending a night at the Inn.

  If the murderer hadn’t used the victim’s credit card all over town, he might never have been apprehended.

  Since then, Spruce Bay had dropped off the news map. So the Sentinel filled in the gaps. This was the paper that everyone in town read. It was the place to find vitriolic exchanges in the letters-to-the-editor section. Where road closures were news. As were social events. Births and deaths got pretty big coverage. Family weddings were news, as were stories about the children and grandchildren who’d left (most of them) to pursue life elsewhere.

  Frank Carmondy’s death and Claire and Max’s airline crash had created a news bonanza the paper hadn’t seen for some time. Since she had no interest in reading about either one, Claire had avoided looking at the Sentinel this morning. It was almost a week since she’d fired Max. He hadn’t bothered to contact her or her grandmother, though she woke every morning wondering if this was the day Varo Enterprises would attempt a takeover.

  She was on her way to the grocery store the first time she was stopped. “So? You going?” Albert Fonse asked her.

  Albert operated a menswear store with a barbershop in the back. He was ou
tside enjoying the sunshine since, presumably, he didn’t have any customers.

  “Going where?”

  Instead of answering, he broke into laughter. “Oh, missy. I’m getting a ringside seat, I’ll tell you that.”

  Wondering if Albert had been in the sun too long, she nodded politely and moved on.

  In the grocery store, the strange behavior continued. People she barely knew pointed at her and whispered. There were giggles and when Pearl Nahanee rang up her order, she said, “Sure is a lot of excitement about the big game.”

  Once more, she nodded. Claire didn’t always keep up on all the local sports. No doubt the Elks were having a bonspiel and she’d forgotten.

  With her grocery sacks stowed in the Yukon, she stopped by the Inn on impulse. It was three in the afternoon, a quiet time. Laurel was supervising a couple of busboys who’d been hauled out of the kitchen to wash windows. But when she saw Claire, she said, “I’ll be back in a half hour. I better not find any streaks. And I want all those cobwebs gone, too.”

  Then she grabbed Claire’s arm and dragged her down the hall to her office.

  “Oh, my God. I was going to drive over to your place as soon as I got off work. I can’t believe you didn’t call me right away. The suspense is killing me. Are you going to do it?”

  “Do what? Everybody is acting so weird today. What’s going on?”

  “You mean you haven’t seen it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Laurel looked like she was trying with all her might not to laugh. There was a telltale dent in her cheek that suggested she was biting the inside of her mouth to control some kind of bottled-up hilarity.

  Laurel wasn’t given to uncontrolled mirth, so Claire said, “What?”

  Laurel grabbed a copy of the Sentinel, which would have been published that very day, and pushed it at her.

  She glanced up and back down. “I know I was interviewed after the crash. I don’t want to read it.”

  Laurel shook her head. “It’s not that.”

 

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