When their gazes met, he paused, his eyes frosting slightly. She sighed. Okay, so maybe everything wasn’t entirely kosher. Turning away quickly, she opened the clamshell cargo door.
“Come on, B.J.,” she muttered to herself as she tossed her bag haphazardly into the belly of her plane. “You’re the queen of casual. You treat everyone the same. Just imagine he’s everyone else and not Grady Rawlings.”
Yeah, imagine she hadn’t spent a third of the night pissing the hell out of him, another third of the night screwing his brains out, and then the last third of the night sobbing like there was no tomorrow because of him. Sure. No problem.
She sucked in a breath and turned back. He’d drawn close enough for her to see the tired yet wary lines around his eyes and mouth. He looked about as ready for another confrontation with her as she felt about apologizing to him, which pretty much meant neither of them would be doing any talking for the next hour.
“Ready?” she asked.
He nodded and opened his mouth. No words came out.
Her stomach did a flip-flop, but she amazed herself by keeping it cool. Arching a brow, she asked, “Yeah?”
He closed his mouth, shook his head, and then glanced away, obviously horrified with himself for chickening out.
“Then let’s head out,” she answered brusquely. “I just finished my inspection.”
Not bothering to touch his luggage this morning, she deserted him and made her way to the cockpit. Behind her, the cargo doors shut and seconds later, Grady slipped into the seat next to hers. A wave of déjà vu hit. Hadn’t they already played this game before? Uncomfortable silence. Awkward attempts at conversation. Stolen glances.
Except this time around, B.J. knew what he looked like naked.
She didn’t think she could do it. There was no way she could act like nothing had happened. On the other hand, there was no way she could talk to him about what happened either. And there didn’t seem to be any kind of happy medium.
Briefly she wondered what he’d do if she politely said, Hey, would you please step out of the Cessna and find your own way home? I can’t take the sexual tension and all this guilt I’m feeling.
B.J. shook her head and started the plane.
Okay, so they were obviously going to go with the whole memory-loss plan and pretend neither of them could recall attacking each other less than eight hours ago and ripping the clothes off their bodies.
“Here goes nothing,” she muttered under her breath.
From the corner of her eyes, she saw him turn his head her way as if he’d heard her speak but hadn’t caught the words. When he didn’t comment, she blocked him and proceeded to get them in the air.
Five minutes later, they’d climbed as far into the sky as she was going to go, and B.J. pushed the limits of their speed. But it didn’t help. As much as she loved going fast, today it didn’t seem to give her the rush she craved. Instead, she kept staring at Grady’s knee from the corner of her eye. His thigh was incased in tight Wranglers, and she wondered if she reached over and set her hand on it, if it’d still be as hard as she remembered it being last night.
God, she really needed to get her mind away from that. If she was going to do anything about their evening together, she should be giving an apology instead of partaking in a little air action. This was so not the day to join the mile-high club.
She had an awful feeling if she tried to eat crow, though, and own up to her mistake of pushing him into the sack—er, against the door, as was the case—then she’d somehow turn the tables around and demand to know why he’d ditched out on her just when things were getting good.
Okay, so she knew why, and she didn’t blame him a lick. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
Gritting her teeth, she commanded herself to stop thinking about it altogether. There wasn’t going to be any kind of resolution if she tried to bring up the topic, not that she wanted to anyway. So, ignoring the tension was going to have to be her best bet. But, hell, there was no way she could ignore it, especially when he shifted in his seat and stirred the air around them, rustling up his scent so her body responded and the insides of her thighs tingled.
B.J. couldn’t do it any longer. She glanced over. “Want to learn a couple of things about flying?” she blurted out, not even realizing what she was going to ask.
He lifted his face. His blue eyes showed surprise, but other than that, she couldn’t read anything. The nerves in her guts knotted and then tightened painfully. She ripped her gaze away.
“The basic concept is pretty simple,” she started in, ignoring his lack of response and the growing ball in her stomach. She needed to get her mind off. . .well, you know. And nothing could grab B.J.’s attention like talking planes.
So, she talked planes.
“There’re four forces at work when flying. Lift, weight, thrust and drag.”
Oh, God. Did she just say thrust?
“To take off, your thrust, uh, has to be more powerful than your drag and your lift has to be more powerful than your weight. To land, it’s vice versa. Drag dominates thrust and weight dominates lift.”
When he didn’t say a word in reply, she shrugged and continued. No way was she going to drive herself nuts, just sitting there, letting her thoughts take over. So she blubbered on.
“Weight and drag are natural forces. You see, weight is merely gravity trying to yank the plane back to earth, and drag is like the wind on your face when you’re running. It’s air pushing against you when you’re trying to go forward. Therefore thrust and lift are fashioned by the plane mechanically to get it up and going.”
And here came thrust and get it up in the same sentence. Jesus.
“The propeller makes up our thrust to. . .to work against the drag and keep us heading forward, and lift happens when air blows above and below the wings, helping us go up and down.”
Grady remained stonily quiet; she didn’t have a clue whether he was listening to her prattle or not. There was no way she was going to glance over again though. Her hormones had nearly fried themselves out the last time she’d snuck a peek.
“So, once you’ve got your lift and thrust overpowering weight and drag,” she droned on, sounding more like an encyclopedia than herself, “you’re in the air. Now once we’re sky bound, we deal with pitch, roll and yaw to keep the plane going in the direction we want.”
Lifting her hand to demonstrate, B.J. held her hand flat, palm facing down.
“Pitch is moving the nose of the plane up and down.” She lifted her fingertips higher than her wrist. “Roll steadies the wings.” She moved her thumb higher than her pinkie and then rotated back to dip her thumb lower than her pinkie. “And yaw,” she finished, “is controlled by moving the rudder to change the direction of the plane left and right.” She kept her palm flat and twisted her hand at her wrist, moving the tips of her fingers to the left and then to the right.
“So, what’re all those meters for?” Grady asked, surprising the spit out of her when he pointed to the gauges in front of her.
For a moment, she was too startled to speak. But Holy Lord, the man was actually listening to her boring lesson. She quickly licked her lips and dove headfirst back into the tutorial.
“This here’s called the instrument panel. And this. . .” She motioned to six round gauges in front of her. “. . .is the basic T arrangement. The attitude indicator is always the top center gauge.”
“Attitude indicator?”
B.J. grinned and risked an ornery grin his way. “Yeah, it tells us if the plane’s in a bad mood or not.”
When he just stared at her, she rolled her eyes. “Okay, so it really shows the plane’s pitch and bank. It tells us if the wings are even and where our nose is according to the horizon.
“Here,” she offered. “Let me just roll us a little to the side, and you can watch the change on the indicator.”
When she tipped them over toward the right, Grady immediately snaked his hand out and latched his fingers
around the edge of his seat.
B.J. cleared her throat. “Sorry about that,” she offered and leveled the plane back to rights.
Grady remained stiffly quiet.
“Anyway,” she went on, rubbing at the back of her neck, “to the right of the attitude indicator is the altimeter. Right now, it’s adjusted to measure feet above sea level. And to the left of the attitude indicator is the airspeed indicator, comparable to a speedometer in a truck. See this white band here? That’s the normal speed for operating when you’re landing and the flaps are open. The green range is for normal operation without the flaps all the way out. And yellow is for smooth air operation, only you don’t make any abrupt control movements when you’re going that fast.”
B.J. sucked in a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Then there’s this small little red line,” she concluded.
As she pointed at it, she glanced Grady’s way. “Never redline it,” she told him seriously.
The red line showed the maximum airspeed and was never to be exceeded for any reason. B.J. liked to fly in the caution zone under the yellow band, pushing her limits. But she’d never redlined it before. Certainly not like she’d done last night in the hotel when she’d pushed a certain someone beyond his limits. What had resulted was a complete malfunction of a total gentleman. Redlining a plane was a lot like the explosion that had happened to Grady when she’d pushed him past his yellow zone.
“So, where’s the gas gauge?” he asked before she could finish explaining the basic T arrangement.
“Oh, it’s right—” As her finger landed on the gauge, she paused and frowned. “What the hell?”
Instantly alert, Grady whirled from inspecting the panel to studying her face. “What?”
“We’re low on gas.”
“What?” he said again, a little more anxious this time.
“We shouldn’t be this low,” she murmured to herself. “I filled up before we left yesterday, and a single tank should be able to get us—damn,” she muttered, clicking the mike of her headphones to a different frequency.
It took her nearly a minute to make contact, but finally her father’s voice called out, “B.J., what’s the problem?”
“I need to talk to Leroy,” she responded. “Now.”
Once again, a white-knuckled segment of time passed in uncomfortable silence. B.J. could almost see her father bustling from the tower and yelling at his brother to get his butt into gear. He knew full well she wouldn’t be contacting base yet unless there were problems. Pop was probably having a coronary right now, wondering what was wrong with her.
As they waited, the tension nearly poured off her passenger in waves. B.J. was thankful he was keeping quiet, though. She didn’t want to explain what she thought the problem was. She didn’t want to look him in the eye and tell him they might not make it home.
Finally, Leroy’s static-filled voice growled through the speakers. “What?”
“Hey, Bub,” she greeted casually. “Remember when I asked you if you changed that fuel line, because I thought it looked a little ragged?”
“Oh, yeah. Forgot.”
Her blood congealed in her veins. “You forgot? But you said you’d already switched it.”
“I was going to, but. . .”
“But what, damn it?”
Leroy only muttered a lame, “Sorry.”
B.J. clenched her teeth. “Leroy, when I get home, I’m going to kick your butt to New York and back.” If she made it home.
She glanced over and caught Grady’s face. His features had turned ashen, his upper lip beaded in sweat.
“Just sit tight,” she said in a grim voice.
“Anything I can do?”
Before she could tell him no, Jebediah Gilmore’s voice came back on the line. “B.J., what’s the situation?”
For a second, she couldn’t answer. The engine shuddered; Grady sucked in an audible breath while she cursed.
This was all wrong. There hadn’t been any puddles leaking from the plane when she’d done her pre-flight inspection this morning. No torn hoses. No sign of trouble. The line must’ve finally come loose after they’d already gone wheels up. Damn it.
“We’re leaking gas like a sieve,” she told her father after she spent a moment steadying the wings. “We were three-quarters full when we headed out of Houston, but now it’s less than three-quarters empty.”
“How far away are you?” Pop asked calmly.
B.J. glanced toward Grady. “Halfway there, maybe.”
For a minute, her dad didn’t answer. They were all doing the math in their heads, all realizing she’d be short making it home a quarter of a tank.
“Okay,” Jeb’s voice responded. “Just take ’er easy. Keep me updated.”
“Will do,” B.J. answered.
Once it was just Grady and B.J. again, he finally said, “Is there an airstrip nearby where we can land?”
She shook her head numbly. Not in this part of the state. “We can either head back or keep on toward home.”
“Which is closer?”
“Probably Houston. But it’ll take a lot of gas to get us turned back around.”
“So, we’ll keep on toward Tommy Creek,” he stated more than asked.
B.J. nodded. After a tense moment, she finally glanced over. “If worse comes to worse, we’ll run out of fuel and have to dead stick somewhere.”
He nodded. “What does that mean?”
“It means we’ll have to land somewhere without engine power. . .” Maybe like in an open field somewhere.
Though he’d already been pale enough, Grady’s face drained of the rest of its grayish tinge. “That’s possible?”
“Hell, yeah.”
He glanced toward her, his blue eyes full of hope. “And you’ve done it before?”
She swallowed. “Uh. . .no. Sorry.” Wincing, she knew she should’ve joined in when Buck and Leroy had that dead stick landing competition a few years back.
Grady’s head bobbed again. He was taking this awfully well. For all the trouble she’d caused him in the last twenty-four hours, the man should be cussing her up one side and down the other.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, feeling the apology from the bottom of her heart. “About everything.”
Sorry she’d pushed him into cheating on his dead wife and then for maybe killing him today in her plane.
Grady didn’t answer. He just looked out the window at the earth he no doubt didn’t want to crash into. “I shouldn’t have left,” he said and swung his head around slowly to pin her with an intense look. “I shouldn’t have left your room without. . .”
Good Lord, he was going to apologize to her? After all the things she’d put him through—was still putting him through—he actually thought he’d done something wrong.
Though it did B.J.’s heart good to hear him say such, it only caused her own guilt to multiply.
She shook her head and lifted her hand to shut him up. “Don’t worry about it.” She definitely didn’t want to talk about this right now. If she was going to die in a few minutes, she’d rather just take it all to the grave with her.
But Grady was obviously more into the deathbed confession thing than she. “I was wrong,” he insisted. “I was raised better than to—”
“Look,” she cut in. “We can talk about it on the ground.”
“But—”
“I’ll land us safe and sound, Slim. Don’t go thinking this is it. All right? Neither of us is going to die today.”
He didn’t answer, and she glanced over at him. “We’re not going to crash.” When she noticed he wasn’t strapped in, she scowled. “Put your damn seatbelt on.”
He blinked. “I thought you said it wouldn’t make any difference.”
B.J. sighed. “It was a joke, Rawlings. Can’t you take a joke?”
Grabbing the protective strap, he muttered under his breath, “Next time you want to tell a joke, try knock, knock or why did the chicken cross the r
oad.”
She heard him, but decided to act like she hadn’t. “If we have to make a hard landing, that harness just might save your life and keep you from being jostled around and getting the shit beat out of you.”
Grady clicked the belt into place and then tightened the straps for good measure.
“If you’d feel safer, you can get into a seat in the back,” she offered.
“What about you?”
She was about to come back with a sarcastic crack about who’d fly the plane if she cowered in the back with him, but then the engine cut out momentarily, and she clenched her teeth as the stick became harder to control.
“I’ll be fine.” She held on tight as the engine stopped, sputtered, and then roared to life again.
Grady didn’t move away from her side, and she didn’t want to think about how much that reassured her.
“How are we on gas?” he asked.
“Lower,” was her vague answer.
He looked too pale. She didn’t like scaring him, so, having pity, she reached over and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back and wasn’t going to let go. B.J. would’ve thought his fingers would be freezing, but they were warm and comforting, and she wanted to hang on forever.
But. . .“Okay, I need my hand back now,” she finally admitted.
He immediately let go, and she wrapped her fingers around the throttle.
The next half hour held some of the most nerve-wracking minutes of her life. The engine kept coughing and wheezing, not getting the gas it needed, and the gauge level kept sinking closer and closer to empty. Her father got back on the radio and started asking for updates more frequently. As B.J. calmly relayed how the steering was getting choppier, she wished Pop would shut up so she didn’t have to say aloud what was going on, letting Grady know how bad things were getting.
When their hangar finally came into view and she could read the large black letters spelling “T. Creek” painted on the silver tin roof, she’d never been so relieved.
“We’re going to make it,” she said and grinned at Grady. . .just as the engine died.