The Rescue Pilot Read online

He was probably right about that. Between time and the risk of hypothermia, this plane wasn’t as cozy as it might seem. Cozier than being totally exposed, but hardly a safe haven.

  She jammed her feet into her boots, then reached for the laces as the light brightened and she realized that someone had brought a candle into the room. She glanced up long enough to see that it was Chase.

  “It’s not an emergency,” he said, reassuring her. “She just asked for you. Wendy doesn’t seem worried.”

  “Right.” As if she’d take anyone else’s word for that, except a doctor, and then only a doctor who had a chance to get to know all details of Cait’s medical history. Nothing against Wendy, but she hadn’t even known Cait twenty-four hours yet, and had no medical records to refer to. Those had all been faxed ahead.

  She finished tying her boots then stood, reaching for her parka. Chase moved out of the way so she could stride quickly into the cabin as she pulled her jacket on.

  She found Cait bundled in the same seat. Wendy had evidently lowered the back for her at some point, nearly making it flat, although she’d kept Cait’s torso elevated by a few inches.

  Rory squatted beside her and laid her hand on Cait’s shoulder. “How are you doing, sweetie?”

  “Okay.” Cait’s eyes fluttered with weariness, but she managed a faint smile. “They didn’t have to wake you.”

  “They knew I’d want them to. Nobody risks my wrath.”

  Cait’s smile deepened a shade. “Not even when we were little.”

  “Not even then,” Rory agreed. “Are you hungry? How about something to drink? Something hot?”

  “Wendy’s been taking good care of me. Just sit with me?”

  “Sure.” Moving carefully, Rory stepped over her sister to the adjoining seat next to the window. All the blinds had been pulled down—not that it mattered. There was probably not a thing to see out there except snow.

  She smiled at Wendy. “Your turn to get some sleep.”

  “I’m not going to pass on that offer. Billy Joe?”

  He poked his head out of the cockpit. “Yo?”

  “It’s our turn for bed.”

  “Damn that sounds good.”

  Rory watched the Yumas work their way to the back of the plane and slipped her hand under blankets until she found Cait’s hand and was able to hold it. She was grateful to discover that her sister’s fingers didn’t feel icy.

  Chase moved around the cabin, replacing some old candles with new ones, and even added a few more to hold back the cold. The cabin wasn’t freezing, by any means, but it wasn’t toasty, either. Blankets and lots of clothing were necessary. But it was warmer than the bedroom, and Rory was grateful that they had moved Cait out here. As sick as she was, she didn’t have the stamina to withstand the cold, or much in the way of stressors. If they had to try to carry her out of here in order to save her life, they’d be risking it, as well.

  Suddenly Cait’s fingers tightened around hers. “Rory? Don’t worry so much about me. It’s in God’s hands.”

  “That’s the part I’m having trouble with.”

  “You always have.” Cait’s voice grew fainter, as if speaking were an effort. But her eyes remained open, looking at Rory. Then, slowly, they tracked to Chase. “You’re the pilot, right?”

  Chase slid into the seat facing her. “That’s right, ma’am. Blame it all on me.”

  “I think you’re a good pilot. We’re still alive.” A smile flickered around Cait’s pale lips. “What’s that saying?”

  “A good landing,” he replied, “is any landing you can walk away from.”

  “That’s it. Very true.” Then her eyelids sagged and she slipped again into sleep.

  Rory turned her attention to Chase and found him frowning at Cait. He seemed to sense her attention, because he looked at her. “We’ll get her to that hospital,” he said quietly. “If I have to carry her out of here on my back.”

  Rory nodded, her throat tightening, even though she knew that might be too much for Cait. But if there was no alternative…

  Ah, she couldn’t think about that now. One foot in front of the other. How many times in life had she needed to do that? It ought to be a lesson well-learned.

  “Rory?” Cait had apparently only been dozing lightly.

  “Hmm?”

  “Remember Mom and Dad?”

  “Of course.”

  “I never told you, but I wanted to be like them. I shouldn’t have gotten married…?.” Then she trailed off as she fell back to sleep.

  That was surely one of the saddest statements she’d ever heard her sister make, enough to clamp a vice around her chest. Rory looked over and found Chase’s eyes questioning her. She needed a moment to find the breath to respond.

  “Our parents were both doctors. Once we grew up, they started working in underdeveloped countries with an international organization.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “Yeah. Except it killed them.”

  His brows drew together. “How?”

  “They both caught a rare hemorrhagic fever and died. Five years ago. Right before Cait started to get sick.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s life.” Her mantra, although it was getting harder to say of late. Life is unfair, she reminded herself for the hundredth time. “They knew the risks, we discussed them, I was proud of what they wanted to do. And they weren’t the only people who died in that outbreak. Lots of other grieving families.”

  “Does it help to think of it that way?”

  Rory shrugged one shoulder. “Not always. But Cait is all I have left to call family. She loved her husband. I can’t tell you how it hurts to hear her say she should never have married. That bastard deserves some come-uppance.”

  “From you?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t deal in vengeance. Which is not to say I wouldn’t like to—I just don’t do it. It would bring me down to his level.”

  “And you’re better than that?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But I try to be.”

  Chase nodded. “That’s the key, I think. Trying to be better people.” Then he gave her a crooked smile as if to lighten the mood. “I have the skinned knees and elbows to show for my attempts.”

  It worked. She felt herself smiling back a little. Just a little. Cait’s hand within hers stirred a bit, then quieted. Still warm.

  “So your parents were medical missionaries?”

  “No, not like that. They worked for a private foundation, purely secular. They paid their own travel and living expenses and worked as volunteers. Sometimes, I guess, they even bought medicine and equipment.”

  “Pretty noble. Interesting that Cait mentioned that now.”

  Rory thought so, too. She looked at Cait and wondered if her younger sister had always harbored such a desire, and falling in love had simply gotten in the way, or if this was something new. Rory had moved on to jobs far away by the time Cait got married, and had been in touch with her sister mostly during holidays while Cait was still in high school. Neither of them had been good correspondents, satisfied to send a single line of email, and Cait had been awfully busy, too. Friends, school activities, a very full social calendar.

  “She was a lot more outgoing than me,” Rory said, still watching her sister, remembering. “I was more of a nerd, always buried in a book or a project. My idea of a great summer was hiking around some mountains and mapping things.”

  “Not looking for oil?”

  “Not always. Sometimes I just enjoyed the rocks, and figuring out how things had come to be. Oil became my business later.” She looked at him. “What about you?”

  “Well, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to fly. I don’t think I left room for much else. If flying required being good at math, then I’d be good at math. That was the way I thought. For a while I had a thing for fast cars, but that got in the way of what I needed to do to get into the academy so I gave it up.”

  “You’re a
n academy grad?”

  “Ring-knocker, that’s me.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  He winked. “You’ll get over it.”

  “Probably,” she admitted, smiling. “Where did that term come from anyway?”

  “Academy class rings. I think it was a derogatory way of saying those who graduated from the academies never let it be forgotten. It’s an old term, though. I haven’t heard it in a while.” He shook his head a little, appearing amused. “I’m sure they’ve come up with better ones.”

  “People usually do when they resent something. I hear the academy is rough.”

  “Mostly in the first year. Then it gets better.”

  He didn’t seem to want to go into it, so she didn’t press him anymore. Heck, it wasn’t as if she wanted to sit here and reminisce about her college days. She looked at Cait, glad to see that her sister appeared to be sleeping comfortably.

  College seemed like an awfully long time ago now. The thought was almost wistful. “Things were so much simpler back then,” she murmured. “In college, I mean. I had so much hope, everything seemed possible.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Funny how we don’t often appreciate things until we’re past them. All those big, important things that concerned me back then? I’d switch them for the problems right now in a heartbeat.”

  “I think a lot of us would. Maybe it says something that our view of what’s a problem changes as we get older.”

  A sigh escaped her. “Too true. They do seem to get bigger and harder.”

  Cait murmured quietly and turned a little toward Rory. The movement made Rory’s heart squeeze. How long did she have left with Cait? A few hours, a few days, a few weeks? Not long unless the experimental treatment worked. Not long before she might lose the last of her family on this earth.

  She had to look away for fear that Chase would see the tears that had begun to sting her eyes. Didn’t want him to guess how afraid she was, or that for the last few weeks she’d been so angry that she could barely stand herself.

  But apparently she hadn’t looked away fast enough, because she heard Chase move, and the next thing she knew he had captured her free hand in both of his. Reluctantly, she looked at him.

  “We’re going to get her out of here if there’s any way humanly possible. I swear it.”

  She managed a nod. Then she admitted something she hadn’t said out loud, not once. “I hate myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t here. Because I was bouncing around the world doing my thing, and I lost all that time with my sister. I’ve hardly been back to see her since she was sick last time, and before that…not much better.”

  He stayed quiet for a while, not replying. But maybe there was nothing anyone could say. She’d screwed up. She’d gone off to live her own life without considering just how short life could be, especially so for her kid sister. Even after the last round, once Cait was in remission, she’d taken off again. She had promised herself she’d come home to visit every few months, but she hadn’t. She had failed to learn the lesson.

  “I’m stupid,” she said. “How many times do I need to be beaten over the head? Our parents died, then Cait got sick, and what do I do? As soon as the docs said Cait was in remission I went back to my old globe-trotting ways.”

  “What were you supposed to do?” he asked. “Stop living your own life and move in next door?”

  “No, but I should have come back more often. I should have gotten the message that tomorrows aren’t guaranteed.”

  “No, they’re not. But most of us couldn’t survive if we believed that. Counting on tomorrow is what keeps us going. And you had your own life, Rory. You were entitled to that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I think I did.”

  “Okay. But look at you now. You’ve dropped everything. I’m assuming that doing that has messed with your career a bit, since most people can’t just drop out of their jobs for weeks on end. I know I couldn’t. If I did what you’re doing, I’d practically have to rebuild my business from the ground up.”

  “It’s not quite that bad.”

  “Quite, huh. That tells me it is. But you didn’t hesitate, you came home to take care of your sister, and you’re not counting the cost. I can tell that from the fact that you hired me to get you halfway across the country to get her an experimental treatment. A lot of people wouldn’t do that. So quit beating yourself up. You’re here when she needs you.”

  “Late, but yeah.” He was making sense, but the sense wasn’t reaching her heart. She did appreciate the way he held her hand, though, and inevitably thought back to the time they had spent bundled in the bunk while he warmed her up. Her cheeks burned a bit as she remembered her burgeoning fantasies about him, and then it struck her that he was a generous man. He hadn’t hesitated to offer his body heat when he surely must have been more comfortable in his own bunk than holding a stiff, shivering woman. And while that might be simply a matter of survival imperative, he hadn’t been required to move over her way and take her hand when he sensed her emotional distress. Hell, most of the men she knew ran like sprinters from that sort of thing.

  In fact, in her job she’d had to become “one of the guys,” so much so that she never showed any emotion other than anger or humor. It almost surprised her to realize the tenderhearted part of her still existed.

  It surprised her almost as much to realize that she wasn’t exactly comfortable with it anymore, either. She wanted to fight for Cait with everything she had. She found it easy to get angry at the illness, easy to swing into action to reach for a last straw. What was not easy any longer was feeling the aching love for her sister, her fears, her pain.

  Her job had warped her, she guessed, but she wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. However it turned out with Cait, at some point she was going back to those oil fields and the world of machismo.

  She drew a deep breath, not exactly a sigh, and waited for her internal landscape to resettle into more familiar contours. She couldn’t afford to let herself fall apart. Not now, for Cait’s sake. Later, for her own.

  With effort, she removed her hand from Chase’s clasp, regretting the loss of contact immediately, but steeling herself against it. She leaned back a little in her chair, and he read her reaction accurately. At once he leaned back in his own seat, and the gulf between them widened.

  “Sleep if you want,” he said to her. “I can keep an eye on things.”

  “You need sleep, too,” she said. “We need you in top form. I’m no survivalist.” A logical explanation when in truth she just didn’t want to be unfair or selfish. They were supposed to share these watches.

  He nodded. “Call me if you need anything.” Then he rose and went to the cockpit.

  Leaving her feeling alone all of a sudden.

  Don’t, she told herself. Don’t go there. Given the circumstances, for all she knew she was experiencing some variant of the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages become attached to their captors. What did she know about this guy, anyway? That he had a military background? That the Yumas had been his friends for a long time? That under these circumstances he could be generous? What about the rest of the time?

  He had already admitted that he didn’t succeed at long-term relationships, that he was often, if not always, dumped. That should be a red flag.

  Yet as she looked at herself she saw the same experience. She hadn’t had anything approaching a long-term relationship since college, and in retrospect she could see that it had been motivated more by raging hormones than anything else.

  Her life now didn’t leave room for the long term. She traveled too much, and spent most of her life in places where she couldn’t establish a relationship that wouldn’t interfere with her job, or the perception of her workers.

  In her experience, too, she seemed to intimidate a lot of men. High drive and career preoccupation, not to mention being home only a few weeks a year, didn’t seem to appeal to the kinds of men who
wanted more than a quick roll in the hay.

  So who was she to think Chase’s track record meant he was somehow defective? Thinking about it, she could easily see that, being gone for such long periods, he’d be leaving behind girlfriends who would face a lot of temptation around military bases. Guys who were actually there. Unless the relationship evolved into something strong and permanent, it would be unlikely to survive.

  As for him having been cocky, well, she could imagine that might almost be a prerequisite for a military pilot. What else would make you take those chances again and again?

  She smothered a sigh and looked at Cait, acknowledging that thinking about who Chase was or wasn’t was a form of escape from her worry and fear. Much easier to ponder the characteristics of a near stranger than to actually think about how her sister’s life was hanging by a thread.

  A thread made all the thinner because she seemed to have given up.

  Sometimes Rory almost wanted to shake Cait, to tell her there was a life apart from Hal. But she didn’t have the right to do that. She couldn’t even address it from experience. She had no personal knowledge of what it was like to love a man enough to marry him and devote your life to him. To be dumped by him when you’d given him everything, all because you were sick. To be abandoned by love at the moment when you most needed it.

  Maybe she should get a voodoo doll of Hal and stick pins in it.

  Impotent anger seemed to ride her constantly and she hated it. At work she could solve nearly any problem. Now she was facing one she might not be able to do a damn thing about.

  The experimental treatment had been a slim straw. Now that straw was slipping away as they sat mired in a blizzard inside a crashed plane. It seemed as if life knew no mercy.

  Was she becoming bitter, too?

  But reality was looking ugly right now. Her parents had devoted their lives to doing good for the less fortunate, and had died because of it. Now her sister, who had devoted her life to a man, and dreams of a family with him, had been abandoned in her hour of need.

  Where was the good stuff? Did everything you reached for only turn to pain and loss?

  Yeah, she understood that bad things happened to good people. She wasn’t naïve. Her sister, and millions of others like her, didn’t deserve to get hit with such serious illness. Stuff like that just happened, governed by the randomness of fate. She got that. It wasn’t about what you deserved.