Expect the Sunrise (25 page)

Who would have thought she’d be a bonnie lass? Her mouth quirked up for a second, only to morph into a cringe. Yes, she liked him way, way too much for the secret she possessed. Even if they did manage to become friends—or more—when he discovered she had been the pilot who’d rejected his call for help, well, she could probably survive if they never had that conversation.
“I thought if I could just get in the face of MacLeod, the pilot who let my brother die, and tell him what he’d done—I might have some closure.”

Andee had wanted to slink away then, to close her eyes and ears to the texture of pain in his voice. She’d wanted to climb into a plane and lift off, away from the earth and its pinnings, until the hum of the motor and the shiver of the cockpit numbed her mind and gave her heart a new rhythm.

Maybe she’d just keep flying.

I don’t want to tell him, Lord. Please.

“Emma!” The panic in the voice made her pivot on the rock. Nina ran up the shoreline. “Sarah needs you!”

Andee stood, knife in one hand, fish in the other. “What?”

“She’s awake!”

Andee dropped the breakfast and sprinted toward the shelter, wiping her hands on her pants.
Please, God, let her be okay!
She saw Mac enter the small tarp she’d rigged against some rocks and his outline bump against the roof.

She lifted the edge of the tarp, letting in light. Mac was kneeling beside Sarah.

“Is she okay?” Andee let the tarp fall from behind her, blanketing them in semidarkness. She knelt beside Mac, felt for Sarah’s pulse.

“Andee? Andee?”

Andee leaned forward, tears scraping her eyes. “Yes, yes, I’m here, Sarah. Do you know where you are?”

Sarah’s eyes were open and searching for her.

Andee leaned past Mac into Sarah’s view. “You’re okay. You hit your head, so don’t move. But we’re going to get you out of here. Just hang on.”

“What happened?” Sarah’s voice sounded feeble and scratchy.

Andee reached for water, attached a straw, and ran it into Sarah’s mouth. “We crashed. But we’re all alive.” She pressed her lips to Sarah’s forehead. “We lived.” She closed her eyes, feeling those words to her marrow.
We lived.
So far.

“I’m cold. My head hurts. And I can’t move.”

“Can you feel my hand on your leg?” Andee asked.

Sarah held her gaze. “Yes. Yes, I can.”

Andee felt Sarah’s legs move, and relief filled her eyes. “I’m leaving your neck braced until we get to safety.” She took Sarah’s hand, held it in hers. “We’ll take care of you, I promise. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“Andee, what about Hank? Does he know?”

“No. We haven’t been able to get help. And the plane exploded, so the ELT blew up. But we’re hiking out. We’re about a day away from Disaster. Just hang on, okay?”

Sarah closed her eyes.

Andee turned to Mac. “We need to get going.”

Mac didn’t move. His eyes were dark, holding hers, void of emotion. His fierce expression sent a shiver down her spine. “Andy MacLeod,” he said evenly.

She blinked at him. Then dread filled her body. She sank back onto her ankles and sighed. “Yeah. That’s me.”

Mac stared at her for a sharp and brutal moment when she felt everything sweet and warm between them shatter like the ice on a highland stream.

Then he stood, flung back the tarp cover, and stalked away.

“Mac!”

Mac kept walking, past Phillips tending the fire, past Ishbane huddled on a rock, past Nina standing with a worried expression and rubbing her arms as she watched him.

“Mac!”

He felt like a fool, and he let that moniker fuel him as he ground his teeth and walked downriver away from them all.

Women were terrorists to the heart. He couldn’t believe he’d lowered his defenses to cautionary instead of high, where they should be permanently affixed. Obviously that crash had knocked loose more than his grip on reality. It also jarred his common sense.

“Mac!”

Andy MacLeod. No … Andee MacLeod. Female. He didn’t know why he hadn’t considered that before. It felt deceitful—her calling herself Emma all this time and hiding her identity. Yes, he knew that most pilots went by a call name when they flew. Crowbar Pete or Aces or Buckeye Joe. But Emma? He thought it was her
name.

Not only that, but she knew about Brody. Knew that he grieved his brother, knew that he’d wanted to confront the pilot—He’d told her that he’d blamed himself, that Brody’s death was his fault. No wonder she hadn’t come clean. He’d enabled her lie.

He needed therapy. What was it about him that the first woman he let into his life betrayed him? Independent and feisty only translated into deceitful and heartbreaking.

“Mac!” He felt a hand on his arm, gripping, yanking.

He let himself be turned, fury still fueling his steps, his expression.

He stopped short at the look on Andee’s face. Tears streamed down her cheeks, her expression torn. She stared at him, shaking her head.

He saw her struggle for words. He said nothing.

“Mac,” Andee whispered, her voice shaking, “I wanted to tell you.”

He felt his anger simmer right below his skin.

“I felt sick about your brother—then and now. You have no idea how I wanted to land that day to pick him up. And when I found out he died, I … I couldn’t go to bed at night without asking God to forgive me. I felt sick.”

He
felt sick listening to her relive that day. He heard himself again, pleading for her to land.

“You have to know that I was faced with an impossible choice. I had a woman on board who’d been mauled by a grizzly. She had four little children. She was bleeding out, and I had to get her to Fairbanks. She had already arrested once. There wasn’t time to pick up your brother—she would have died.” She put her hands over her face. He watched her shoulders rise and fall. “I had to choose.”

You chose poorly
, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t dredge the words from his mouth. They felt sour in the face of her obvious grief. Still, he couldn’t reach out to her, couldn’t release the anger that pinned down every other emotion inside him.

He’d longed for this moment, an opportunity to face the person who’d killed his brother.

For the first time he realized that maybe it wasn’t Andy/ Andee MacLeod he had to face at all. And maybe it wasn’t Andee he had to forgive—at least for Brody’s death.

“When I realized you were the man I’d talked to on the radio, you have to know I died inside. I wanted to tell you, to explain and beg your forgiveness, but I needed you. I couldn’t risk having you hate me so much you wouldn’t assist me—or worse, try to get help alone. I had five other lives at stake, and I gambled.” She looked away. “Maybe I didn’t make the right choice. Maybe I should have trusted you. I know it wasn’t right to deceive you. You have to know how I longed to tell you.” Her voice dropped to a soft, nearly inaudible rasp. “And how very sorry I am.” She wiped at her eyes. “Please, please forgive me.”

He listened to her apology, to her broken voice and realized he’d heard it before. Many times, in fact, over the past few days. Yes, she’d known who he was. What she’d done. And in spite of her choice to keep it from him, she had started apologizing long ago.

He felt something unwind from his soul. Still, he couldn’t speak. Instead, he turned and walked away from Andee MacLeod and everything she’d done to him.

“Mac!”

He let her voice bank against the mountains, echo down the flowing river. The air smelled of fall, with a hint of snow. His feet already felt damp as they crunched on the broken rocks. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stopped walking, stood on the edge of the river, not looking back.

This really hurts, Lord.

He didn’t know exactly where those words came from. They bubbled up from some stopped-up place inside, some long-ago wound he’d thought he’d stitched over but had only poorly bandaged.

He closed his eyes, probing for a place that
didn’t
hurt.

“I’m so sorry, Mac,”
Emma—no,
Andee
—had said as she sat on the scree hill watching the northern lights. He’d heard the pain in her voice even back then.

“Do you ever regret the choices you’ve made?”
she’d asked as the night had enfolded her. He’d watched her shiver, knowing that she’d given her blanket to Ishbane.

“God does believe in you, Mac. That’s why you’re here with me. He knew that Sarah needed you.”
She’d leaned back on her hands, tugging up a smile as they sat in the grass on the hill overlooking the camp under the fall of stars.

He saw Andee, thanking him for carrying Sarah, putting up their tents, making dinner, caring for Flint and Sarah.

“I trust you, Mac. And I’d like you to trust me too. I’m not a terrorist.”

Mac ached with each memory, aware that, despite his best efforts, he’d let another kind of terrorist sneak inside to blow to bits with her servant’s heart every line of defense he’d built over the years.

She’d made him slow down, see her as a friend, trust her.

Lord, I believe everything happens for a reason. But I admit I have a hard time seeing how things fit together from this viewpoint. I thought You’d put me on that plane for a second chance.
His eyes burned.
But this wasn’t the second chance I was looking for. I’m not ready to forgive anyone … yet.

Mac crouched on the rock. He splashed water on his face, letting the shock reawaken him and wash away the realization that for the first time in years he had to forgive the terrorist in his life.

Chapter 14

ANDEE PUT ONE foot ahead of the other. She hated her chapped cheeks and the way the others looked at her, especially after Mac had returned to camp without so much as a glance toward her. She’d cooked the fish she’d filleted, and after eating in a silence that felt colder than the descending front, they’d packed up camp.

Thankfully, Mac had resumed his post at Sarah’s head, taking his end of her stretcher onto his wide, capable, unforgiving shoulders.

At least he hadn’t left them all alone in the woods for her to take care of by herself. Then again, with this cold demeanor, she shouldn’t count on him for help. She swallowed a rush of pain and kept her eyes fixed on her footing.

She still couldn’t believe that he’d suspected her to be a terrorist—or any of them for that matter. However, with her little news bomb, he could label her a terrorist, on a par with someone who inflicted pain and chaos.

“How long have we been traveling?” Sarah’s voice lifted from her stretcher.

“This is day three.”
Or four? Or two?
Andee frowned at her own answer. It seemed every day of struggle had merged into the next. “I think.”

“Then I missed your birthday.”

Andee let that thought bring her upright, and then she smiled. Trust Sarah to remember the one day Andee always tried to dodge. “No, actually, it’s today.”

“Happy birthday, Andee. I wish I had a cookie for you.” Sarah had started a tradition years ago of sending an oversized chocolate-chip cookie in the mail to the Team Hope members for their birthdays. “I’d get one that read
My Hero
.”

“Wait until I get you out of here before you start singing me anthems.”

“I think she’s a hero,” Phillips said from behind them. He and Nina held Flint between them. Ishbane trailed them, picking his way on the rocks, bemoaning his wet feet. “Happy birthday, Emma.”

“It’s Andee,” Mac growled so low that probably only Andee caught it.

“My name’s Andee,” she corrected Phillips. “My call name is Emma. It just seems easier in the summer for people to call me Emma.” And it perpetuated the feeling that here in the northland, she could be someone different, perhaps someone she’d always wanted to be, at least part of the time. Someone who didn’t let people down or destroy their lives.

“Her friends call her Andee,” said Sarah, a little bird of information. “And I’ll bet that Conner is waiting for you when you get to Fairbanks. He mentioned your birthday in his last e-mail.”