So she’d given herself a break and she’d taken it easy, and when completely crazy things kept happening to her, she’d tried talking to a psychologist friend.
“For heaven’s sake, Regan,” Pat Freedman had said. “Give yourself some time. Jake was the only family you had. You can’t expect to bounce back and keep going a hundred miles an hour like that kind of loss is nothing.”
Regan found the consensus of advice from the medical community fairly humorous. Apparently it was perfectly okay to behave like a fruitcake as long as she was grieving for Jake.
Jake, however, would have kicked her in the keester if he’d seen her behavior these days. And it was hard to find a relationship between her love for Gramps...and finding herself in a car at ten o’clock at night on a road she’d never seen before...or walking into her apartment after work to see her furniture rearranged...or finding her lights on at two in the morning...or, the last straw last week, having her three Dutch uncles show up at her door for a dinner she had no memory of inviting them to.
Gramps’s partners had stood by her, as protective as avenging angels, since the funeral. They knew about her memory blackouts, the confusing hallucinations, the mortifying shaky spells. None of them had wanted her to make this trip to Arizona. They’d wanted her to check in at a funny farm.
They thought she was having a mental breakdown.
Dammit, so did she.
And it scared the living daylights out of her.
Beneath the blanket, Regan hugged her arms tight to her chest. At twenty-seven years old, she had occasionally lost at love. She’d definitely lost belts and keys and earrings. If she had to, she could imagine losing a hand or a leg. But it had never occurred to her—ever—that she was the kind of person who could lose her mind.
“We’re cleared to run, princess. You need anything before we bump this pop stand?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Cole glanced at her. “I always think you’re going to be as nervous on a takeoff as your grandfather was.”
She shook her head. Gramps had been in the same plane crash that had taken her parents’ lives. The accident happened when she was nine—old enough to be devastated by her loss—yet she’d never suffered a fear of air travel. The memories of her parents that sustained and comforted her were too linked with planes. Her dad’s hobby was flying—both parents loved it—and Regan could remember a dozen trips with the three of them in the air, traveling and happy because they were together.
It was Gramps who’d developed a gut terror of planes—Gramps, who’d spent his whole life traveling around the world. Gramps, who’d stayed stubbornly grounded even when the business required air travel...until he found the one pilot he felt safe with.
The plane was suddenly hurtling down the runway, with a speed and thrust that leveled her in the seat. Regan turned her head, watching Cole.
Gramps had found Cole through his flying record in the United States Navy, but initially their relationship was a business alliance, with Cole hauling gems for the company. She never knew how he’d coaxed Jake back in a plane. Bigger, fancier charter services were certainly available, and Shepherd Brothers was too new to have developed a proven record. Further, Jake trusted no man...yet on sight he’d trusted Cole.
On sight, five years ago, Cole had impressed Regan as a man who couldn’t give a hoot. Ask him, and he’d say he was a vowed coward—the same slogan that was printed on the coffee mug he carried around. She’d rarely seen him fresh shaven and his dark hair was invariably too long. Grooming took energy. Cole didn’t waste any of that rare stuff. He walked with a cocky, lazy stride, claimed to value nothing except his own skin, would probably be disrespectful to the queen of England—heaven knew, he was to everyone else—and was probably the sexiest man Regan had ever known.
She’d decided a long time ago that her attraction for him was based on the allure of the ‘bad man fantasy’. No woman with a brain in her head really wanted an unprincipled, amoral maverick in her life, but imagining one in her bed was a lot of fun. And Cole did such a wonderful job of exuding ‘bad’.
He wasn’t that tall, but he was lean and dark, with snapping dark eyes that lay on a woman like a sheet on a bed. His hair was a chestnut brown, thick, unruly, invariably rumpled, and framed a hard, lean-cheeked face with a road map of tiny squint lines around his eyes. His features were striking, strong, carved with humor and intelligence and an unignorable sexuality. He wore his clothes like an advertisement—his jeans were so old they were snug around the zipper, showed off his tight behind and muscular thighs—and he had a way of throwing back his head with a wicked crooked grin as if to say, “Come and get it, honey. No way I’ll be around in the morning, but I’ll make sure you have a helluva night.”
A huge yawn escaped her. Regan snuggled deeper into the blanket with no fear that Cole was paying her any attention. She’d watched him fly before—nothing else existed for him when he was going up. The pulse hammered in his neck, his breathing quickened; his face took on a flush of color and his dark eyes glazed with intense, focused concentration. He loved flying with a passion that bordered on sexual excitement. If he was half as responsive to a woman as he was to his plane, Regan mused, he’d be a dangerous lover in bed.
She yawned again.
She’d never know how Cole behaved in bed. It was how he behaved out of it that mattered to her. Gramps had instinctively trusted Cole, but that was a man-to-man camaraderie. Regan had taken much longer to win over. Over five years, though, he’d done just that. Cole was a ruthless tease, but he’d never once come on to her. His attitude about women was shameless and he made out as if he wouldn’t know a principle if it kicked him, but he never asked questions, never made a promise he didn’t deliver, and it was impossible not to feel safe with him in the air.
Her eyelids drooped, weighted by weakness and exhaustion. As desperately as she wanted to get to Arizona, Cole had been her only way to travel there. Chartering with a stranger or handling a commercial flight was out of the question. The stupid shaky spells hit her without notice, and then, like now, she invariably experienced feelings of confusion and disorientation.
Pinpricks of lights danced under her closed eyelids. In her mind, pictures jumbled together, hallucination bright. Gramps, in the hospital and the funeral. Reed, trying to explain all the things she had to legally sign. Trafer, patiently making conversation at two in the morning because she’d been so paranoid positive someone had been in her apartment. Dorinsky, looking so silly sitting in her fragile Queen Anne chair, determined to keep her company in case she had another ‘little’ memory blackout.
The men had been wonderful, but there was nothing they could do. Regan had never been afraid of anything before, had never imagined how paralyzing and primal the fear of losing one’s mind could be. Maybe it hit her harder because she’d always been a dreamer. Gramps had raised her to have the courage to follow her dreams, with no apologies and no backing down. Unfortunately, right now her whole life seemed to have turned into a surreal dream with blurred edges.
Just before sleep claimed her, she felt the weight of her patchwork leather purse against her ankle. Inside the bag was her private legacy from Jake. The legacy was the reason for her trip, and the only thing sustaining her through these past troubling weeks. It was her last link with her grandfather.
Pictures of gems floated through her mind. Not finished, polished jewels, but rough stones in their natural setting. Turn over the dull, ordinary volcanic rock known as kimberlite...and there could be the wink of a priceless diamond. Rubies were often hidden in a bed of murky limestone, just as sandstone concealed white opal. Topaz, true topaz, was protected under the ugly gritty crust of a mineral called lepidolite.
Nature hid her most precious secrets. In the gem world, if you didn’t look past the ordinary, you would never find the truth.
In the same way, the moment Regan saw the legacy from her grandfather, she understood that Jake had left her more than the value of a
gift. He’d left her something that terribly mattered to him—and the key to discover why. She had one last chance to understand the man who had meant so much to her, one last chance to touch him. The legacy had given her the strength to hold on.
The slight familiar weight of the purse reassured her for those few moments, and she fell asleep.
“Princess.”
Through a thick, drowsy fog she heard Cole’s languid tenor. His voice always made her think of smoky rooms and lazy jazz.
“I hate to wake you, honey, but I thought that it was wiser to let you know that we’re about to make an unexpected stop.”
She blinked hard against the sudden brilliant sunlight. “Where are we?”
“In a cute little backwater corner of Kansas,” Cole said lightly. “If you ever wanted to sightsee some wheat fields, this is going to be your big chance.”
She heard the lazy humor, the take-it-easy drawl. And then she caught a look at his face. “Lord, what’s wrong?”
“Absolutely nothing that you need to worry about. We just have a teensy little mechanical problem with the plane.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Trust me, Regan. We’re in no danger. I would tell you if we were. We’re slightly off course. It seems my navigational system has gotten creative this morning, but that’s all that’s wrong—”
“Okay.”
Cole reached down for the landing-gear lever, his voice calm, cool and steady. “I cut my flying teeth on archaic old birds that barely had a compass. No pilot worth his salt needs fancy electronic navigation to fly. We could easily keep going, but I’d rather go down and take a quick look—”
“Okay.”
“Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. You could probably have napped straight through the stop, but I didn’t want to risk your suddenly waking up when we were going down and thinking we were crashing or some fool thing—”
“Maybe you could relax, slugger? You don’t have to reassure the baby. The baby wasn’t scared to begin with. Don’t you think I trust your judgment as a pilot after all this time?”
Cole swallowed the rest of his calm, cool, reassuring lecture and whisked her a glance. Because of what had happened to her parents, he’d been positive Regan would panic at the threat of any mechanical problem with a plane. For the past two hours, she’d been sleeping like the dead, but apparently she didn’t wake up easily. She also didn’t look at all like a baby. Still snuggled in the blanket, her hair intimately tumbling every which way, her big green eyes dilated and luminous, Regan looked as if she’d just climbed out of a lover’s bed. A skilled, demanding lover. There was complete trust in her eyes.
Obviously she was still half zombie.
Some reaction would hit her later, Cole suspected, whipping his attention back where it belonged—on his plane.
They weren’t badly off course. He’d known for more than an hour that his compass readings couldn’t be trusted. Although he could have continued to compensate, the problem had nagged him like a bad tooth. Ten minutes ago he’d given in to the aggravation and located an out-of-the-way airstrip. It wasn’t much more than a crop duster’s landing pad, but the runway was long enough, and it wasn’t as if he needed high-tech mechanical assistance. Cole was his own mechanic.
Which was precisely why there couldn’t be a problem to begin with. When he took off, the King Air had been in shape to sing. Cole knew. He checked her, no one else. Most electronic navigational systems could be a little fussy. Not his.
Because Regan had to be more nervous than she let on, he brought in his honey softer than a bouncing whisper. The wheels stirred dust off the hot asphalt. Unlike the spring-cool morning in Chicago, Kansas was apparently suffering an early heat wave. The temperature was a chokable ninety, the sun was a blazing ball in the cloudless sky, and once he switched off the engine, the power to both heat and air- condition was lost.
“Probably won’t take me fifteen minutes,” he assured Regan.
It took three hours.
There was nothing around the baking little airstrip but miles of black, flat ground, with occasional dust raised on the horizon where a tractor was either plowing or planting. Initially the big-shot owner of the airfield—Hiram—came lumbering out to offer his expertise.
Hiram was in bib overalls, chewing Redman and hefting a fair number of Saturday-night beers in his girth. He knew planes from gut experience, which Cole respected. But he didn’t know Cole’s King Air—not like Cole knew his King Air—and eventually the heat wore down Hiram’s sense of country courtesy. He withdrew to the tiny air-conditioned hut that some might call a control tower.
That left Cole alone with the blonde, who was proving to be both an unholy source of amusement and an incredible trial. Regan, in the four-inch earrings and delicate lace blouse and still carting her mountainous purse, seemed to fancy herself a fellow mechanic.
“Just hand me the wrench, would you?” he asked her.
“This one?”
“Yeah, that one.” Sweat was pouring off his brow and his dark T-shirt and jeans were sticking to him. The sun beaming down was hotter than a laser.
“We’re checking on the fuel lines now, right?”
“Right.”
“Amazing. I had no idea that there was any relationship between fuel stuff and navigation.”
God. Women. “There isn’t any relationship. It’s just that we’re already on the ground. I’m just checking a few other things out since we’re already here—and for cripes sakes, get away from that grease. You’re going to get yourself all dirty.”
Grease didn’t seem to bother her. Dirt didn’t seem to bother her. And there was apparently no end to her curiosity—or her good humor. “I could have sworn we already tightened this fuel pump.”
“Fuel line, not fuel pump. And yeah, we did. I just thought I’d give it another quick look.”
“You don’t think you’re being slightly...compulsive?”
Cole lifted his head from the belly of the plane. “No one in this life, princess, has ever accused me of being compulsive,” he said clearly.
“Sorry.” Regan cleared her throat. “I know nothing about this.” It was her voice that aggravated him, he decided. She kept talking to him in that soothing sympathetic tone as if she was trying to pacify a big wounded bear. “I just thought...I mean, you already discovered what was wrong with the navigational system. And you haven’t found anything else wrong in the past few hours—”
“I promise it won’t be much longer, okay?” Cole ducked his head again, feeling guilty that he’d snapped at her—and aggrieved that she was dead right.
Two hours before, he’d found the navigational problem. A magnet stuck under the instrument panel in the cockpit. A damned magnet. A stupid, ordinary damned magnet. The kind anyone could pick up from a basic hardware store for a few cents. To put one near electronic navigational equipment wasn’t dangerous or destructive or lethal. It simply made the compass readings erratic. A cute practical joke.
Only Cole wasn’t laughing. Nobody messed with his planes.
Nobody.
Over and over, he’d replayed everything he’d done that morning. He’d been up at dawn, arrived hours early in anticipation of this run with the princess. He’d given the Beechcraft King Air more attention than a lover for a forbidden mistress. Now, though, he recalled leaving the plane three times. Coffee was his downfall; all three times he’d fetched it from the machine in the hangar, and he’d hung around talking with his brother at least two of those times.
Since the magnet couldn’t miraculously appear by the will of Allah, somebody had to put it there. It had to be when he was shooting the bull with Sam that the joker had slipped onto the plane, and Cole had racked his brain trying to remember who had been around the hangar that morning. A few strangers, but mostly employees. Probably the idiot knew Cole. Probably the idiot even knew that Cole didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body and never got angry.
And Cole wasn’t angry now.
>
He just wanted to find the joker and genially advise him to move to Bermuda. With a blackballed name—and nothing traveled faster in the industry than a blackballed name—the chances of the lad finding a job on another airstrip in the continental United States were slim to nonexistent.
All that, though, had to wait until Cole returned to Chicago. There was absolutely nothing he could do about it here except make damn sure the jerk hadn’t tinkered with anything else on his plane.
“Shepherd?” Regan asked gently.
“What now?” Damn, he was hot, from the inside out. He slapped at a mosquito on his neck.
“Although you might not believe this, I don’t care if we stay here all day. I’m finding this whole procedure fascinating.”
She should. She’d had her nose in most of it. Cole had tried to stash her in the air-conditioning with Hiram; he’d tried ordering her to eat the sandwiches in the cooler with her feet up. She looked as though a puff of wind would level her, but do you think he could get the woman to leave his side?
“But I really think you should call it quits. I’d bet a diamond that you’ve checked everything over ten times. And I’m getting strong psychic vibrations that it might help if you had a nice cold soda and gave yourself a chance to cool down.”
“You and your psychic vibrations,” Cole muttered. “You think I’m upset?”
“I think you’d bite the head off a hornet,” she said demurely.
“You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t need cooling down. I never need cooling down. I once finished a poker game in the middle of a tornado—does that sound like a guy who has a problem with stress? I—oh, hell.”
From the corner of his eyes, Cole saw her legs suddenly sway. It was all he saw—those slim, jean-clad legs doing a little swish—but it cocked a trigger of warning in his head. Instinctively he tossed down the wrench and scooted out from the plane’s underside.
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