Flirting with Disaster (22 page)

Lisa’s lifestyle couldn’t be more different. Disappearing at a moment’s notice. Refusing to be tied down. Scoffing at responsibility and soaring into the clouds.

The irony was almost painful. The things that attracted him to her—her passion, her independence, her free spirit—were the very things that had led her to the life she lived, a life she’d made very clear that she had no intention of giving up.

Last night she’d given him every man’s dream—hot, breathless sex with no strings attached. He’d even gotten to play the bonus round, but now the game was over. If he were smart, he’d consider himself lucky and get on down the road.

chapter thirteen

Two hours later, Dave and Lisa took off from a commuter airport in Monterrey in a tiny single-engine four-passenger plane. Dave wasn’t altogether thrilled about flying in an aircraft so small, but the day was bright and clear and the plane was comfortable and Lisa certainly seemed to know what she was doing. In spite of the fact that she still wore his shirt, which was several sizes too large for her, she sat with the confident bearing of a person who was born to be in a pilot’s seat. As the city of Monterrey fell away beneath them and they climbed toward the clouds, he felt how much she loved to fly. Exhilaration seemed to ooze right out of her.

“This is the first time you’ve flown since your crash,” he said. “Any problem with that?”

“Nope.”

“Confidence still there?”

“Why not? It wasn’t my screwup. Give me a flyable plane, and I’ll keep it aloft. Give me one with water in its fuel tanks, and there’s not much I can do.”

“That’s how they sabotaged you?”

“That’s sure what it felt like. The engine cut out until I swapped the fuel tanks. It was okay for a while, then cut out again. Eventually I had no engine at all. I didn’t see water on the preflight, but if they’d tinted it blue, I wouldn’t have.”

“That’s pretty insidious.”

“It’s Robert Douglas, through and through.” She turned to face him. “So, Dave. Ever fly in a private plane before?”

“Nope. This is a first.” He looked around, then pointed to the stick beside her. “Is that the throttle?”

“Right. Push to increase power; pull back to decrease.”

She showed him the various gauges—altimeter, fuel, oil pressure, heading and airspeed indicators, and about ten others he couldn’t keep track of.

“And here are the flaps,” she said. “They allow you to stay aloft at slower speeds for landing. And the yoke,” she said, patting her hands against the thing that looked like a steering wheel, “is to bring the nose of the plane up or down. Push it forward to tip the nose down, and pull back to bring the nose up. But not too far, or you’ll stall.”

“Stall? What’s that?”

Without a word, she eased the yoke back, tipping the nose of the plane up.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She kept pulling back. The nose kept rising. Soon Dave felt as if they were climbing the first hill on a roller coaster, and he’d always been able to do without roller coasters.

“Lisa?”

She pulled back more. The plane climbed through a low bank of clouds. Then Dave felt a slight shudder. “Uh . . . Lisa?”

The shuddering intensified. They kept climbing. All at once an alarm went off, a deafening
booop, booop, booop
noise that Dave translated as:
We’re going to die.

“Lisa. This can’t be good.”

She continued to climb.

“Lisa!”

Still they were climbing, with the plane at an even sharper angle than before and the alarm still wailing. Dave held his breath, closing his fingers around the seat in a death grip.
My
God. You knew she was impulsive. You didn’t know she had a
death wish.

Then she pulled back the tiniest bit more, and all at once it was as if they’d hit the top of that roller coaster. There was a momentary feeling of floating. Then the plane’s nose tilted down hard, and they were falling.

“Holy
shit
!” Dave clutched the door beside him, his stomach soaring right up between his ears in a nauseating rush. As the plane plummeted through the clear blue sky, he was sure he was on the verge of drawing his last breath.

“Lisa!” he shouted. “What’s happening?
Lisa!
”

She reached for the throttle and pushed it forward. The plane’s engine
vroomed
, and they pulled out of the dive and leveled out from the gut-wrenching drop in a huge parabolic swoop.

After a moment, they resumed flying as they had before, with everything calm and sedate and blessedly removed from the jaws of death. It took Dave a good ten-count to pry his fingers away from the door and relax the expression of sheer panic that had frozen onto his face.

He turned to Lisa. “What the hell was
that
?”

“A stall.” She looked at him innocently. “You asked what one was, didn’t you?”

“Did I ask you to
demonstrate
it?”

“No,” she said. “That was a bonus.”

“That was dangerous as hell!”

“Nope. Not dangerous at all. Well, I suppose it could be if the plane was a little too close to the ground. You’ve got to watch it on landing. Go too slow with the nose too high, and it’s all over. At greater angles, the wing produces less lift and more drag. The more drag, the slower the speed, so the wing gives even less lift. Pretty soon you’re not flying anymore.”

“Hence the nosedive.”

“Exactly.”

Dave let out a long breath. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Lisa, but I’m not exactly one to engage in thrill-seeking behavior.”

She flashed him a smile, apparently thinking she was quite the humorist. “Maybe you need to expand your horizons a little.”

“I just want to keep from crashing
into
the horizon.”

“Not a problem. Just settle back and enjoy the ride.”

“Which was exactly what I was doing before you put this thing on red alert.”

“Yeah. It really got the old blood rushing, didn’t it?”

There was nothing about this woman that didn’t get his blood rushing. Absolutely nothing.

But now, in the aftermath of adrenaline shooting through every molecule in his body, he’d relaxed into a pleasant kind of state where his awareness felt heightened—colors seemed brighter, sounds sharper, and he swore he could smell the peach shampoo that Lisa had used this morning drifting across the cockpit. In the past couple of days, in spite of everything that had happened, or maybe because of it, he felt more alive than he had in a very long time.

“So do you do that to the doctors you fly into Santa Rios?”

“No. I figured if I scared the hell out of them they might not come back.”

“So what led you to fly for a humanitarian organization, anyway?”

“Adam was the one who recruited me. He was my gynecologist, and he hit me up during my annual exam. He told me it wasn’t often he got a woman with a pilot’s license in a compromising position, one who just might be crazy enough to fly a handful of doctors seven hundred miles into the middle of nowhere. I thanked him for the left-handed compliment and started to get up. He grabbed my feet and told me he wasn’t going to let me out of the stirrups until I said yes.”

Dave grinned. “I thought I had power as a cop. Maybe I need to consider gynecology.”

She smiled. “You know, I might not have let any other man live long enough to get those words out of his mouth. But Adam . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know. There was something about him. I’d always thought that all doctors were egotistical snobs, but I liked him from the beginning. These days most women would rather go to a woman gynecologist, which has hurt some of the male ones. But Adam had patients lined up around the block. And you should have seen him at the clinic. His patients loved him, and little kids hung on him like fleas on a dog.” She paused. “Listen to me,” she said quietly. “I’m talking about him in the past tense.”

“We don’t know for sure that he’s dead, Lisa. We don’t know what happened to him.”

“Yes, we do,” she said. “Robert got to him. I know he did. But I don’t know how he could hurt Adam. He’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who was really good at heart, and that
bastard
killed him. Just like he tried to kill me.”

“Adam must have really been a good friend.”

She glanced at him, and he was surprised to see tears welling up in her eyes. “The truth? Maybe my best friend.”

Her best friend? He knew she was worried about Adam but didn’t realize just how far that concern went. “You didn’t tell me you were so close to him.”

She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “I know.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I just . . . I guess I was afraid of this.”

“Of what?”

“Falling apart.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes again. “I can’t do this,” she said, tightening her grip on the yoke. “I’ve got a plane to fly here.”

“You and Adam,” Dave said. “Were you ever . . . ?”

She glanced at him as if she didn’t understand, then shook her head. “N-no. It was nothing like that. It was just . . . he was like a brother, I guess. Or how a brother should be.”

“Almost like family.”

“Yeah. He was. I even spent a couple of holidays with him and his sister’s family in San Antonio. They were such nice people.” Her eyes dropped closed. “Oh, God. I can only imagine how his sister feels right now. And she thinks he died in an accident. She needs to know the truth about that. But I guess I’m not sure exactly what the truth is.”

Dave reached across the tiny cockpit and took Lisa’s hand in his. She clung to it tightly.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she said.

“Because he was someone you cared about.”

Lisa closed her eyes, her jaw tight, and he could tell she was trying desperately not to cry.

“You okay?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Closing her eyes, she drew herself up with a deep breath, then slowly let it out. When she opened her eyes again, her tears were under control.

“It’s just a fact of life I need to accept,” she told Dave, slipping her hand away from his. “People come. People go.”

“Don’t make light of it. You loved him.”

“Yes, and sometimes I think it’s just not worth it.”

“Would you have traded not knowing him just to spare yourself the heartbreak of losing him?”

“I don’t know. I only know how I feel now.” She turned to him. “Is it worth loving somebody, even if he can be ripped away from you in the blink of an eye?”

“Yes. Of course it is.”

“So is that how you felt when Carla was killed?”

Dave physically recoiled at the mention of Carla’s name. “I felt a lot of things when Carla was killed. And I don’t want to talk about any of it.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what you told me last night.”

He felt her gaze on him, and suddenly the cockpit of this plane felt way too small.

“You must have loved her a lot,” Lisa said.

Dave’s jaw tightened involuntarily. “Of course I did.”

“Everyone said you were the perfect couple.” She paused. “I remember being so jealous of her in high school.”

“You? Jealous of Carla?”

“Of course. Everybody liked her. She was pretty. She was popular. All the guys wanted girls like her.” She paused. “Including you.”

He stared out the windshield, his heart beating wildly, memories flooding inside him that he wished would disappear forever. “Sometimes things aren’t always what they seem to be.”

She gave him a sideways glance, and he could see the questioning look on her face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that Carla and I had our problems just like everyone else.”

“Like what?”

He was silent.

“You don’t want to talk about it.”

Yes. He did. He wanted to tell her everything about their marriage. All of it. But most of all, he wanted to tell her about the night Carla died—what he’d thought, how he’d felt, every dark, horrible detail. God, he wanted to
shout
it. But he’d never voiced any of that. Not once. To anyone. How was he supposed to explain something that he could barely acknowledge even to himself?

“Never mind,” Lisa said, turning away. “It’s just as well. It’s really none of my business.”

“Lisa—”

“No. Really. I mean, who am I, anyway? Somebody who popped into your life for a few days and is going to be popping right back out of it? Why would you want to spill your guts to me?”

“That’s not it.”

“Then what is it?”

What was it? Maybe it was the fact that she had no idea who she was talking to. Her image of him was so skewed that she’d probably never believe the truth. But she wasn’t the only one. His friends, his family, his coworkers—not one of them understood what was inside his head. Not one.

“You think I’m a pretty nice guy, don’t you?”

Lisa shrugged. “Of course you are.”