Summer Fling

by Sarah Morgan

  He’d stood, braced, ready for another door to slam shut in his face, practicing his “I don’t give a fuck” look, but instead of telling him to pack up his things, Philip had driven him to the small airfield on the far side of the island.

  Twelve-year-old Zach had slumped, sulky and rebellious in the front of the Cessna, waiting for the ax to fall, wondering what was so bad that he had to be flown out of here and not take the crowded ferry like everyone else. Maybe Philip Law was planning to take him up high and then push him into the ocean.

  Yeah, do it. Why not?

  Who the hell would care?

  He knew no one would miss him.

  He wasn’t even sure he’d miss himself.

  As Philip had put his hands on the controls and taxied along the short runway, Zach had wondered whether he’d die when he hit the water or drown slowly. And then the small plane had lifted into the air and Zach, who had lived with fear all his life, had known a moment of breath-stealing terror closely followed by soaring excitement as the sparkling sea and the emerald green of the island shrank beneath him.

  His stomach had swooped and his eyes had almost popped out of his head.

  “Holy shit.” He’d watched hungrily, dazzled by the complexity of the instrument panel, absorbing every move of Philip’s hands, envious of the knowledge that gave them flight. He’d wanted that knowledge and skill more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. In a blinding flash he realized there was a world outside the one he inhabited.

  Years later Philip had told him that was the moment he’d known he’d made the right decision in offering what some might have viewed as a reward for bad behavior. He could have delivered a lecture, sanctions, even expulsion, but all that would have done was harden a boy who was already solid steel. At twelve years old, Zachary Flynn had seen more than most people saw in a lifetime. Authority slid off him, instructions and orders bounced back like a ball from concrete. Nothing penetrated.

  Until they reached six thousand feet.

  There, up in the clouds, the mask of indifference had slipped away, revealing an excitement too raw and real to be contained.

  For Philip it had been a way of giving a jaded, disillusioned boy a glimpse of another life.

  For Zach, it had been love at first flight.

  They’d flown over the island of Vinalhaven and towards Bar Harbor, over forest, lakes and the glittering expanse of Penobscot Bay where yachts peppered the ocean. Absorbed by a different view of a world that had so far delivered nothing but bitter blows, Zach had fought to stop himself from whooping like a little kid.

  Look up, look up, he’d yelled inside his head as he saw cars the size of matchboxes winding along the noodle thin coast road. Look up and see who’s bigger now.

  By the time they’d landed his whole body had been shaking.

  He’d felt like the king of the world.

  “Oh man—can we do it again? I want you to take me up again. I’ll do anything.” He’d all but begged and hadn’t cared. Not even when he’d seen the look of satisfaction on Philip’s face.

  “You want to learn one day?”

  Zach had dragged his palm over his sweaty brow, feeling like an addict shown a whole new way of getting a fix. “To fly? Yeah.” What sort of a stupid question was that? Who the hell wouldn’t want to? It was the coolest thing ever.

  “Then stop dicking around.” Philip had pinned him with his gaze. “Stop wasting your brain, stop living down to everyone’s expectations and do something with your life.”

  Zach almost swallowed his tongue. He didn’t know which had shocked him most. The fact that someone had noticed he had a brain, or that the camp director had used the word dick.

  Confused, he’d responded in the only way he’d known. By attacking.

  “I didn’t ask for my life to suck. It’s not like I walked into a place and ordered a supersized misery burger served with a side of crap.”

  “Just because someone serves you something, doesn’t mean you have to eat it. People can dish it up and hand it to you, but you don’t have to swallow it. Folks can tell you you’re useless and nothing and you can believe them or you can prove them wrong. What happened in the past wasn’t your fault. What happens in the future is your decision. You can make good ones, or you can watch it all slip away and spend the rest of your life blaming everyone else for the things that happened to you.”

  He’d made it sound so easy, as if all Zach had to do was pull an Abercrombie sweatshirt over the scars and the cigarette burns to become one of the cool crowd.

  Zach knew it didn’t work that way. He could have dressed in Armani and it wouldn’t have changed the facts. He came from nowhere and he was going nowhere.

  Except now he wanted to get there by plane.

  He’d stared ahead, mutinous, conflicted, the urge to kick and defend himself deeply ingrained. Against his will his gaze had slid to the instrument panel of the Cessna and he’d almost purred with longing. He’d wanted to reach out, stroke and touch. He’d wanted to take her soaring high above the water and bank into the clouds. It was more than want. It was need.

  And because he knew people, and loved flying, Philip had seen that need and understood it.

  “I have an instructor qualification. I can teach you.”

  It was like holding out a freshly baked loaf to a starving man.

  Zach had all but drooled but years of mistrust had held him back. “What’s the catch?”

  Philip’s gaze hadn’t wavered. “Does there have to be a catch?”

  “There’s always a catch.” The cynicism was entrenched, cold hard layers of fuck you protecting him from do-gooders who eventually gave up on him when “doing good” proved unrewarding. Zach didn’t see why he should help anyone feel good about themselves when most of them went out of their way to make sure he knew he was worthless.

  “The catch is that you have to clean up your act. No more skipping classes. It’s a shame to waste a brain like yours. You come back here every summer and when the time is right, I’ll teach you. And you can pay me.”

  There, right there, was the catch.

  “I don’t have money.” But he’d get it. He was figuring out the best way of stealing what he needed without getting caught when Philip shook his head.

  “I don’t want your money. I want your commitment.”

  Zach had looked at him blankly. He had no idea what the word meant. “Sure. Whatever.”

  “I want you to help out at camp. Every summer for the whole summer. Start taking some responsibility.”

  Help out at camp?

  It had taken a moment for the words to sink in and Zach reflected that it was just as well they were inside a plane or a million insects would have flown into his open mouth while he’d been gawping. He tried to imagine how Mr. and Mrs. More-Money-Than-Sense would react to the news that Zach would be helping.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not kidding. And just in case you don’t recognize it, I’m giving you something life hasn’t given you before—a chance. Up to you whether you take it.”

  “So it’s not going to cost me?” Life had taught Zach that good things didn’t happen for free. In his experience, good things didn’t happen at all. Had he been wrong about Philip? Maybe the smiling wife was a front. Maybe he liked young boys and was planning to fly Zach somewhere they wouldn’t be caught.

  Panic drenched him as various hideous scenarios played through his head, none of them worth the thrill of a plane ride.

  One of the many disadvantages of being worthless was that when you disappeared no one cared or asked questions.

  Philip had looked at him steadily. “It’s going to cost you. You’re going to scrub out toilets and clean up boats until you’re old enough to take on more responsibility. After that you’re going to train to be a camp counselor. You like the forest, so I’d suggest wilderness training. You’ll learn survival skills. Not the sort you’ve learned so far, but how to live alongside nature. The
re’s no catch, Zach. No one is trying to screw you over. I’m offering to teach you to fly, that’s all. At your age my dad took me up. I wanted to do the same for you.”

  “Why?” The suspicion refused to die.

  “Because everyone needs a break now and then, and no one needs it more than you.”

  The one thing he’d never been given in life was a break. Black eyes, swollen lips, broken bones—he’d been given all those things several times over, but this—this was something else.

  For a horrible moment he’d thought he was going to break down right there and howl like a baby. It was years of practice at burying his feelings that saved him from humiliation.

  “Right.” His throat had felt swollen and thick, as if he’d been caught in the neck by an insect with a big fat stinger. “Whatever makes you feel good.”

  “There are rules.”

  Rules had never stopped him doing anything. Mostly he stepped over them. Sometimes he kicked them in the teeth, but they never got in his way. Noticing Philip’s serious expression he’d decided the least he could do was look as if he cared. “I’m listening.”

  “No more taking things that don’t belong to you, no more being a badass. Flying a plane is serious business.”

  Flying. The word made his mouth dry and his heart pound.

  The guy was serious. He really was offering to teach him to fly. He probably thought it would change his life or something, which meant here was another do-good jerk he was going to disappoint, but who cared?

  Zach figured that wasn’t his problem. To fly he would have promised anything.

  How hard would it be to clean up his act?

  So he had to stop stealing. Most of the kids here didn’t have shit worth taking anyway. Zach stole to ward off boredom and because it was his way of hitting back at them, not because he wanted what they had. He wouldn’t have been seen dead in a fancy sweatshirt.

  “Sure.” He’d kept his tone casual. “I guess I can do that.”

  And he had.

  From that moment on, his life had a purpose and that purpose was flying.

  Everything he did, he did for that one reason.

  Math and physics had seemed pointless and boring taught in a classroom to thirty kids with glazed expressions, but math and physics applied to the science of flying gripped him. Hungry for knowledge, he’d studied it all and his brain had come alive.

  But what he loved most of all was the plane.

  Philip had taken him up every summer until he was finally old enough to learn. The first time he’d been allowed to take the controls his hands had shaken so much he’d been sure he was going to ditch the thing in the ocean.

  When Philip had told him he was a natural he swelled with something he’d never felt before.

  Pride.

  The praise had fed him, nurtured him and ultimately freed him.

  On the ground his life was a dead end with no way out, but in the air he saw more than sunshine and fluffy clouds beyond the horizon. He saw a world without limits, full of possibilities.

  He saw hope.

  With the aircraft he achieved a depth of understanding he’d never reached with another human being.

  A social worker had once told him the only thing he was good at was screwing up. Given that she’d caught him breaking into her office to make his own additions to the case file she had on him, he hadn’t disagreed. He would even have considered it a fair summary of his talents. Until he’d put his hands on the controls of a plane. Then he’d known immediately there was something else he was good at.

  From that moment on flying was the only thing that mattered.

  Flying satisfied his need for adventure and excitement and it leveled the field. Up in the air, he was equal to anyone. Not just equal, superior. Most times passengers didn’t speak to the pilot so he did what he loved and some stupid fucker with more money than sense paid him to do it.

  For the first time in his life, he’d pushed himself. Challenged himself.

  He’d dragged all the information he could from Philip and thirsted for more. Even when Philip had taken him in and given him a home, he’d still thirsted. After spending his formative years trapped and helpless, something in him needed to be free. Why stay in Maine when there was a whole world out there waiting to be discovered?

  He’d flown in places most pilots chose to avoid, places with more land than people, including remote parts of Alaska with no runway and enough ice to freeze a plane out of the sky, until finally he’d returned to the island that on a good day he almost regarded as home.

  His reputation as a pilot was such that he’d immediately been offered a job by Maine Island Air, the company that flew freight and passengers round the islands.

  Zach didn’t want that life.

  To him, flying was freedom. He didn’t want his days dictated by someone else’s schedule and demands and anyway, thanks to a stroke of luck and his instinct to live life closer to the edge than most people, he now owned his own plane.

  So instead of taking the job, he’d used that sharp brain Philip had identified and noticed the number of superwealthy individuals who owned property around Penobscot Bay. Those people flew into Boston on their Citation or Gulfstream and then needed something private and personal to transport them onward to their beach house or yacht. They needed a pilot skilled enough to land anywhere, on land or sea.

  For a fee that made him laugh out loud, Zach offered that service.

  Personal?

  Yeah, he made it personal. Hell, he offered bottles of chilled champagne and caviar on silver platters if that’s what they wanted, although he didn’t recommend it because with the crosswinds across the Bay the one thing he couldn’t guarantee was a bump-free ride.

  It never ceased to amaze him how much people were willing to pay for the privilege of picking the time, the place and, most importantly of all, exclusivity. For one flight ferrying a rich banker and his family from their private jet to their private island, he made enough to ensure he didn’t have to work for the next month.

  It was robbery, but for once he was on the right side of the law.

  He picked and chose the jobs he took and had sufficient funds to play with projects that interested him.

  If all the people who had written him off could see him now, they’d choke on their good intentions.

  Looking back, he always divided his life into two parts. Before flying and after flying. Before flying was a time he chose to forget, a time when his world had been small and terrifying with no escape. After flying—after flying was the world he chose to live in now, and it was a world he loved.

  Zach smiled as he completed his preflight check.

  It was a bright sunny summer morning in Maine and today the man bankrolling his lifestyle was Nik Zervakis, a Greek-American billionaire who was landing in Logan and wanted one of his female guests flown direct to Puffin Island. Which meant that in exchange for flying one rich pampered princess across the bay, Zach was going to make an obscene amount of money.

  The businessman in him was satisfied.

  The badass was laughing his head off.

  “I WANT TO fly this way for the rest of my life.” Cocooned by the feather-soft leather seat of the Gulfstream, Brittany closed her eyes. “No more tedious queues, no more screaming toddlers wriggling in the seat next to me, no more lost baggage and no more trying not to breathe while strangers cough all over you. Push Lily out of the window, Nik, and marry me instead. We can make it work, I know we can. You own four properties—we don’t even need to see each other. You can live in San Francisco. I can live in New York.”

  Bronzed, handsome and filthy rich, Nik Zervakis was scrolling through his emails with one hand while with the other he kept a possessive hold on Lily.

  It made Brittany smile to see them together.

  She was sharp enough to know that her own laughably brief experience of marriage colored her judgment and careful enough not to apply that judgment to others. Even she had to ad
mit she’d never met two people more perfect for each other than Nik and Lily. And if a small part of her felt wistful, she chose to ignore it.

  Lily almost hummed with contentment. “You love your independence.”

  “You’re right, I do. And even a Greek-American billionaire with a private jet isn’t going to persuade me to give it up. All the same—” She glanced around at luxury living and shook her head in disbelief. “You’ve won the lottery, Lil.”

  “I know.” Her friend smiled up at the man who had swept her off her feet and he lowered his head and delivered a lingering kiss to her mouth.

  Brittany was fascinated by the sight of the notoriously ruthless business tycoon softened to the consistency of butter by her sweet-natured friend. There was no doubt in her mind that they shared something deep and special.

  “Hey, you need to watch out—you’ve turned into a pushover, Zervakis. If your competitors find out, your shares will plummet. Economies will shatter.”

  Without shifting his attention from Lily’s mouth, Nik made a rude gesture in her direction and Brittany grinned.

  “Don’t mind me. You guys go ahead and make a baby right here and now. I’ll look the other way.”

  Lily pulled away with a murmur of embarrassment. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. It was decent of you to give me a lift. The good news is I’m getting off at this stop and the two of you can rip each other’s clothes off all the way to New York.”

  “We’re spending a few days in Boston first. Nik’s meeting isn’t until Tuesday, so if you need anything, call. Then we’ll be in New York for a few days and I’ve arranged to meet up with Skylar.” Lily touched her fingers to the necklace at her throat and her gaze slid briefly to Nik’s. “We’re going to her exhibition in London in December. Will you be there?”