Carey turned to Ben triumphantly. “My five dollars,” she demanded.
“Bloody hell,” he said. “Are you always going to be right at the last minute?”
“Always,” she said positively.
“Great.” Ben sighed as he handed her the five-dollar bill. “I’m just beginning to wonder what I’ve let myself in for.”
An hour later the captain made the announcement which Carey had both anticipated and feared. Due to the heavy snow, the airport had closed. They expected flights to resume again in two to three hours.
“Three hours!” Ben looked at Carey in horror. “I really don’t want to hang around an airport for three more hours.”
“You won’t be hanging around the airport,” she told him. “They won’t let us off the plane.”
“You’re joking.”
She shook her head. “Once we’re boarded we can’t get off again.”
“What about deep vein thrombosis?” demanded Ben. “I can’t sit folded into this seat for an extra three hours.”
Carey grinned. “That’s what you get for being six feet tall,” she told him. “And you won’t get deep vein thrombosis simply by sitting around. I didn’t realize you were a hypochondriac!”
“I’m not,” he retorted indignantly. “Just cramped.”
“I know,” she said. “I sympathize, I sympathize, I really do. I don’t want to sit here either.”
He looked at her. “What are you going to do about work?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “Wait and see. I thought of asking them to let Dublin know I’d be late, but if we really do depart in three hours I’ll still have time.”
“You’ll be exhausted,” he told her.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t you have to be at the peak of physical condition all the time?” he asked. “After all, people’s lives depend on you.”
“Oh shut up.” She grinned at him. “I’m always in peak physical condition.”
“That’s true.” He nodded. “You’ve proved it over the last few days. Besides, I thought that from the first moment I saw you.”
“No you didn’t,” she said. “You thought I was going to throw up.”
“That wasn’t the first moment I saw you,” he told her. “The first moment was in the departure lounge at Dublin. You were reading the newspaper and you looked fantastic. You have a great profile. I only thought you were going to throw up during the flight.”
“I’m still not sure that wasn’t an excuse for putting your arm round me,” she said. “I was never going to throw up.”
“You looked a bit green,” he said. “Honestly.”
Her eyes sparkled. “I’m glad I didn’t have to go to the bother of being sick to make you put your arm round me.”
“Don’t tell me you were faking it.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I had awful indigestion. But that was all it was.”
“Or an ulcer,” he added.
“Even if I had an ulcer, it would’ve been worth it,” she told him. “I don’t know what else I could have done to get you to notice me.”
“You didn’t need to do anything,” he said. “I was always going to put my arm round you. Sooner or later.”
She smiled. It was hard to believe that it was less than a week since he’d first put his arm round her. It was already hard to imagine what her life had been like without him.
She hadn’t originally intended to go to New York at all. She hadn’t even been thinking of time off. But she was due some leave and Gina, her closest friend in the Irish Aviation Authority and with whom she shared a house in Swords, had suggested that Carey see if there were any available seats on a flight to the States because then she could come to the party Ellie Campion was giving in Manhattan. Ellie had been a stewardess for fifteen years, but she’d recently met and become engaged to a Wall Street investment banker and was dying to show him off. The Wall Street banker wanted to show Ellie off too, and not having had a social function in his apartment for some time, he was keen to pull out all the stops. So he’d told her to ask as many people as she could.
Carey didn’t know many stewardesses, since staff in the Aviation Authority didn’t often get to meet people in the airlines themselves, but Ellie and Gina had gone to school together and they occasionally went out with Carey in a threesome — or even a foursome when Finola Hartigan, an air traffic controller like Carey, also came along. Carey hadn’t been to New York in seven months, even though it was one of her top three shopping destinations. But she hadn’t planned anything special for her time off either, and the idea of going to NYC for some fun was suddenly very appealing. She’d always known, she told Gina, that Ellie Campion would land someone rich and handsome someday. Ellie was the adman’s dream of an air hostess — tall and thin, with honey-gold hair, sapphire-blue eyes, and bee-stung lips. Now that she’d landed her banker, she was giving up her job and moving to the States to live in his extravagant and phenomenally expensive Upper East Side apartment. And although her wedding would be in Dublin, Ellie wanted everyone to come to the States first. To brag, Gina had told Carey, but they agreed, reluctantly, that Ellie had something worth boasting about. After all, some stewardesses might be content with marrying pop stars or B-list celebrities and getting their names in HELLO! magazine, but Ellie was classier than that. Bill Stannick was worth millions and nobody even knew about it. Much better, Carey said, to be wealthy and not have anyone know about it. Gina had nodded and sighed and looked at the engagement ring on the finger of her left hand. Her fiancé, Steve, was a really nice guy and she was madly in love with him, but it would’ve been nice if he had even a tenth of Bill Stannick’s money!
Due to the timing of her shifts Carey hadn’t been able to fly out with the other girls, but she was quite happy to travel on her own. And even though air travel wasn’t everyone’s favorite method of transport anymore, she still loved it. It was, and always had been, a part of her life.
She’d noticed Ben while they were waiting at the gate. He was the sort of guy you couldn’t help noticing — tall, athletic, with a lightly tanned face and fair hair which was in need of a trim. The slightly too-long hair softened his angular features and emphasized his dark blue eyes. Carey looked away from him before he caught her staring. Anyway, she told herself as she checked her bag to ensure she had some dollars and her credit cards, she wasn’t interested in tall, athletic men who were exuding sex-appeal. She wasn’t interested in men at all right now. She was taking one of her regular breaks from them, especially ones who were too attractive for everyone else’s good.
Much to her surprise (because she normally got the seat next to the overweight man whose girth expanded onto passengers sitting beside him), she found herself sitting next to him on the plane. She didn’t usually talk to her fellow travelers, but he smiled at her and said hello and offered to put her bag in the overhead bin for her. She thanked him as he squeezed it into the cramped space and smiled when he made a comment about how little room they gave you and how, one day, he’d be able to justify splurging money on the first-class seats. Although not yet, he said regretfully.
“Are you traveling for business or pleasure?” she asked as she fastened her seat belt. “If it’s business you should get your company to pay up the next time, no matter how ridiculously expensive it is.”
“I nearly did once,” he told her. “I worked for an Internet company for a couple of months and we splashed money round like crazy, but the week before I was due to go to L.A.— very definitely business class, stretch limos laid on at the other end and everything — the outfit that was going to buy us went bust.”
“Not good,” she agreed. “What happened?”
He smiled ruefully. “Our own company went down in a blaze of glory three months later.”
“So what do you do now?” she asked.
“I run a health food store,” he said.
“You look far too healthy to run a health food store,” she said in surp
rise. “Usually people who are into tofu and vitamin supplements look as if a puff of wind would knock them over.”
“Only if they don’t eat properly,” he objected. “I do. Anyway, I’m not really a nut cutlet and tofu person. I eat meat too. It’s not written in stone that if you use herbal remedies you can’t enjoy a bit of chicken tikka from time to time.”
“I think it’s a load of mumbo jumbo myself,” said Carey robustly. “All this obsession with organic this and herbal that! And you think that you’re being way out by sucking on a chicken wing or something. Nothing I like better than a juicy steak washed down with a pint of red wine.”
He laughed at that, but then took a book from his jacket pocket. Clearly, Carey thought, he wasn’t the sort of bloke who could take a bit of criticism. Which didn’t actually surprise her since most men of her acquaintance had difficulty in accepting criticism. Even when it was justified. She tried to make out the title of his book but couldn’t. She pushed her glasses higher to sharpen her vision, but he suddenly folded back the pages of the book and hid the cover. Probably a tract about the evils of modern living anyway, she thought. Which meant he wasn’t really her type of guy.
She shook her head and reminded herself that she wasn’t in the market for chatting to guys, whether they were her type or not. In the past she’d frequently fallen into the trap of chatting to men when her heart was already broken, and it always ended in disaster. Her friends told her that she thought with her heart and not her head, and that she simply rushed in no matter what the consequences. She knew that they were right because the last attractive man she’d gone out with — having met him on the rebound from the not-too-bad but ultimately incompatible James — had turned out to be married with a two-year-old son. Of course, she hadn’t known about either the wife or the son when she’d started dating him. Or when she’d totally and utterly lost her heart to him. It was only when she realized (after a chance remark from her mother) that he never asked her to his place and that he always had to be somewhere at the most inconvenient times that she became suspicious. And then, of course, he’d rolled out the usual platitudes about Sandra being a great girl but that they’d married too young and it had never really worked out.
Carey gritted her teeth. She wasn’t going to think about Peter Furness anymore. It had ended three months ago, but she still felt raw and hurt whenever she remembered. Which was why she had to avoid situations where she’d talk to a stranger and suddenly think that he was the man she’d been waiting for all her life and then start the whole thing all over again. She needed to give herself a bit of breathing space. The girls, Finola and Gina, had been fully supportive of her stance for about six weeks, but lately had been on at her to get out there and meet someone new. She realized they were concerned that she’d been really rattled by Peter Furness, but somehow she couldn’t find the enthusiasm for throwing herself into the dating scene again just yet. Once a fixture at night-clubs and parties, she’d spent a lot of evenings at home on her own in the last few weeks. Anyway, she was tired of meeting guys, thinking that it was going somewhere, finding out that it wasn’t, and having to break up with them.
At least she didn’t get hurt all the time. She wasn’t a complete fool. Sometimes she realized that despite the fact that the man she was going out with was attractive or solvent or caring or had a good sense of humor, she just didn’t like him enough. Gina told her that she was too fussy. Finola said that she enjoyed being single too much, that she set her standards too high. Neither of those things were true, she told herself, as she pushed her wayward curls out of her face and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She just wasn’t a very good judge of potential boyfriends.
Oh well, she thought, as she flicked through her magazine without reading it, at least I always realize my terrible mistakes in time. And I might do stupid things sometimes, but I always get over them in the end. Still, she added to herself, it would be nice to get it right just once. To fall for the right bloke at the right time and for him to fall for her too. It was astonishing how it never happened like that.
The plane pushed away from the stand and began to taxi towards the runway. Carey glanced towards the control tower where today Stan Mullary was the ground movements controller. She could picture Stan sitting in his seat, bright green baseball cap backwards on his head, as he ordered the planes around the airport like huge, rumbling chess pieces. Sometimes Carey thought that Stan would really have liked to be a pilot himself. But he always said no, that he’d hate all that palaver with uniforms and starched shirts and peaked caps, and he’d pull his own cap further down on his head and say that air traffic control was a much better job.
She gazed out of the window as they taxied to their position at the end of the runway. At this point she knew that Stan would hand over control of the plane to the air movements controller, Jennifer O’Carroll, who’d clear them for takeoff. According to the pilots, Jennifer had the sexiest voice in air traffic control. A kind of Mariella Frostrup with honey, the British Airways guys told her. Carey knew what they meant. Face to face, Jennifer’s voice was lilting and mellow, but the mike added a huskiness that men found incredibly attractive.
“Fortunately they never get to see me,” Jennifer said when they teased her about it. Jennifer herself was short and slightly plump, with cropped red hair and a cheerful face full of freckles.
“The Americans would love you,” Stan often told her. “A kind of retro-colleen is what you are.”
The engines whined and they began rolling. Carey closed her eyes and yawned as the plane built up momentum. She visualized them in the tower, watching the huge airbus hurtle down the runway and lift into the air until it reached around 800 feet. At which point the tower lost interest in it completely and passed it over to the control center where the controllers (younger than most people ever imagined — she was a veteran at thirty-three) plotted their course out of Dublin airspace.
A sharp pain suddenly ripped through her stomach and she winced. She’d eaten a full Irish breakfast while she was hanging round the airport that morning. It had seemed a good idea at the time, but sausages, rashers, and fried eggs really didn’t do her digestion any good at all. She wondered why she did the wrong thing so often when it would be just as easy to do the right thing. Why it was that she ate things that were bad for her, or did things that were stupid, or generally behaved in a silly and possibly juvenile way for someone who was in her thirties. She wondered at what point in her life she’d turn into a grown-up.
The plane had lifted. She felt the jolt as the wheels were retracted and then a sinking feeling in her stomach as they turned westward. Between the air pockets and the indigestion she wondered for a moment if she was going to be sick. She hoped not. It would be totally embarrassing, absolutely humiliating, in fact, for Carey Browne to throw up on a flight. She winced again. It was then that she felt his arm round her shoulders.
She opened her eyes abruptly. The fair-haired vegetarian health-freak was smiling at her as he held the tops of her arms.
“What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
“Distracting you,” he said.
“From what?”
“From the fact that you’re clearly terrified.”
“I’m not terrified.”
“Of course you are,” he said confidently. “You’re about to squeeze that armrest into submission.”
She glanced at her hands. She’d grasped the armrest when her stomach had spasmed. Her knuckles were white. She made an effort to relax them.
“You know, there’s really no need to worry,” he said.
“Thanks for your concern.” She removed his arm from her shoulders. “But I’m fine, honestly.”
“You don’t look it,” he told her.
“Listen, Veggie,” she said crossly, “the only thing that’s wrong with me is that I have indigestion from my full fry-up breakfast. Not that you’d know what a fry-up is, but it was absolutely gorgeous and worth every pang.”
He grinned. “Feisty little thing, aren’t you?”
“Would you give it a rest!” She regretted the fact that such a good-looking guy was a total dickhead, but regrettably she’d found that was often the case.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m teasing you a bit. But I was worried about you.”
She looked at him in silence for a moment. “Apology accepted,” she said eventually. “You shouldn’t make snap judgments.”
“It was based on available information,” he said. “But I’m prepared to revise it.”
“Revise away,” she said dismissively.
He grinned. “So perhaps you’re really a pilot?”
She shrugged and he suddenly looked aghast.
“Don’t tell me you actually are a pilot,” he said. “Please don’t tell me that I’ve insulted one of Ireland’s only female 747 captains or something like that. I do have a habit of opening my mouth and putting my foot in it.”
“Relax,” she said. “I’m not a pilot.” She smiled suddenly and her face lit up. “Far more important than that! I work in air traffic control.”
“Do you really?” He stared at her and she nodded.
“I’ve always thought that must be a really cool job,” he said. “All that peering at radar screens and looking at those dots, knowing that they’re actually planes. What do you do?”
“Anything that’s necessary,” she told him, “but because I have an approach rating, that’s what I do most often. Which means bringing the aircraft in to land, basically.”
“You tell them what runway to line up on and all that sort of thing?”
She nodded cheerfully. “It’s great,” she told him. “All these macho pilot types have to do exactly what I tell them.”
He laughed. “And do you get off on that?”
“Naturally.” Her smile dimpled her cheeks.
Too Good to Be True Page 2