Angel in Armani (9 page)

Lucas should have known Alex wouldn’t mess around once he’d decided on doing something, but he hadn’t expected a message waiting for him when he stepped off the plane in Orlando, telling him that yes, Ice did have some helicopters in their fleet and that one could be made available if necessary.

It seemed too simple. Of course, the less simple part was still to come. The part where he convinced Sara Charles to be his personal pilot.

He still hadn’t figured out exactly what had possessed him to raise the idea back at Deacon yesterday, but despite several hours arguing with himself afterward, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to call Alex back and tell him to forget the whole thing. Not when he couldn’t stop thinking about Sara. Damn it.

Lucas handed the driver his overnight bag and climbed into the back of the car waiting to take him to Vero Beach. Then he pulled out his phone and found the number for Charles Air.

Where a polite female voice that wasn’t Sara’s informed him that the office was currently closed until further notice.

He frowned at the phone as he left a message for Sara, asking her to call him. Then, trying to ignore his rising frustration, he banished her from his mind and turned his attention to the trip ahead, hauling out his laptop to review the files on the players who were trying out.

They needed a pitcher. They still had Brett Tuckerson, their starter, but their second- and third-string guys had both accepted offers from other teams. So pitchers were a priority. Plus another couple of gun hitters couldn’t hurt things.

Pity that true gun hitters cost more than they could afford. So they needed to buy smart. That was what Dan Ellis and his staff kept telling him as they spouted statistics and theories ad nauseam.

It wasn’t until later in the evening, when he was back in his hotel room, that he had time to think about Sara again. And the fact that she hadn’t yet returned his call.

He pulled up the Charles Air website. But instead of the familiar image of a blue-and-silver chopper he was used to—okay, so he liked that their helicopters were kind of the Saints’ colors—there was a neat white page with only the company logo and a blue-bordered announcement that the company was not currently taking customers and providing a neat list of links to other charter firms.

That brought the frown back to Lucas’s face.

Not taking customers?

And for long enough that they were referring them to other companies. That wasn’t good business sense. If it was a short closure, then surely they’d have a date when they’d be reopened for business. And if it was for a longer period of time, then what the hell had happened?

His gut went cold.

Shit.

Had Sara been in an accident?

He’d never opened Google so fast in his life. But a few minutes of searching revealed no Sara Charles in a helicopter accident. No chopper accidents at all for a good few months. There was, however, a raft of stories about a Sean Charles in a crash. Almost twelve months ago.

Sara’s dad, he assumed. The stories all named Charles Air as the company involved.

It looked like bad luck to him. The chopper had been struck by lightning—and that explained Sara’s flat-out refusal to consider flying him in the storm—and according to the coverage of the story the electrical system hadn’t recovered the way it was supposed to.

But Sean Charles had survived. Looking at the images of the half-mangled chopper, Lucas couldn’t see how exactly. But that had been a year ago. Obviously Charles Air had survived, too. Because Sara had been flying him around perfectly happily just a few weeks earlier.

But not now.

Where had she vanished to?

It was too late to ring again but he found himself dialing the office number anyway.

Same polite voice. Same cool message about being closed.

“This is Dr. Lucas Angelo calling for Sara Charles,” he said. “Sara, please call me back.” He recited his cell and office numbers and hung up again.

He couldn’t do much more right now. So he would sleep on it. See if she called him back.

*   *   *

She didn’t call. And by the time Lucas got back to Manhattan, he was moving from frustrated to outright irritated. She was the one who’d slept with him then left him stranded, after all. Couldn’t she at least do him the courtesy of returning his calls?

There was no Sara Charles in the Staten Island phone directory. Not in Manhattan, either.

She apparently liked her privacy.

He should take the hint perhaps and give up. Hire another pilot.

And he would. As soon as he could stop thinking about her.

Finally, he called the airfield outside Sag Harbor that Sara had used and asked to speak to Ellen Jacek.

“Sara?” she said, sounding wary. “What do you want with Sara?”

She obviously didn’t remember him.

“Actually I’m looking to hire her. She flew me down to the Hamptons a few weeks ago, we landed at your terminal. I hired the Mercedes. It was the night of the big storm.”

“Ah.” Her voiced turned regretful.

“Is there a problem?”

“Charles Air is closed at the moment.”

“I know. I’ve been trying to contact them but no one is returning my calls. What I’d like to know is why.”

“You didn’t hear?”

He went cold again, fingers gripping the phone too tightly. “Hear what?”

“The night of the storm. Sara’s helo got damaged.”

“Damaged?”

“Yes.”

“Is Sara okay?”

Ellen sighed down the phone. “If she’s not returning your calls, then I have to assume she doesn’t want you knowing her business.”

Lucas gripped the phone harder, trying not to give in to frustration. Ellen was being sensible. Cautious. In her place, he wouldn’t give out information about a friend to a man she’d met for about five minutes, either. He could be a crazed stalker.

He was starting to feel a bit like one. “Okay,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “If you speak to her, could you please let her know I’d like to talk to her?” He once again recited all his details and heard Ellen typing, which gave him some hope she might actually be taking them down. And maybe, just maybe, she might even pass them on to Sara.

Though if he hadn’t heard from Sara by tomorrow, he was just going to go to Charles Air and see what was what. Someone at the airfield where they were based might know something.

*   *   *

“Wankers!” Sara pushed the phone across the desk, tempted to hurl it across the room. Damn insurance company. She’d just wasted another two hours on various levels of hold and being shunted around from person to person passing the buck and she still had nothing more than “Yes, we are pursuing the claim with the other party’s insurance company, and yes, we are hopeful of a timely resolution.”

Which meant, as far as she could tell,
You’ll get a check, maybe, but only when we’re good and ready
.

No check equaled no repairs to the A-Star.

No helo.

No helo equaled no customers.

No money coming in. Still quite a bit going out. Rapidly sinking bank balance.

And she was pretty much fresh out of ideas as to how to fix that other than her looking for work elsewhere.

Telling her dad she thought she should do that—that closing down Charles Air wasn’t going to be as short-term as she hoped—might just give him a coronary.

She kicked the trash can by her foot, which raised a
whuff
of protest from Dougal who was lying next to her chair.

She looked down and he pushed himself up, shoving his broad black head forward under her hand with a happy wriggle.

She rubbed his ears. But not even Dougal could make this better. Besides, he was happiest when he had Sara to himself. And Charles Air being closed meant no mechanics and other random men around. Which meant Sara could bring Dougal to the airfield with her instead of having to leave him with her parents.

Douglas was ninety pounds of big black softy, except when it came to men. Put him in the path of a guy and he turned into ninety pounds of overprotective barking, growling idiot dog. So far Sara’s dad was the only exception to the rule, and even that had taken years of Dougal staying with her parents before Dougal had stopped slinking around and barking at him as though Sean was a dog-eating monster.

God only knew what his issue was. She’d gotten Dougal when he’d been only three months old, right after Jamie had died. He was purebred and raised by a good breeder but at some point a man had obviously done something to scare him. That experience had lodged deep inside his doggy brain and wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how much training and conditioning they tried.

She sighed and rubbed his ears again. Right now, she had bigger problems than her anti-male dog.

She’d tried everything she could think of to move the insurance company along, but no dice. She couldn’t get them to commit to any sort of time frame.

So, decisions needed to be made.

If she shut everything down, then they could probably cover the hangar fees for a few more months and keep the A-Star from getting any worse than it already was. But shutting down for any extended period of time could be a death knell. Without new cash flow, once the money was gone, it was gone.

Her mom was already back working part-time but couldn’t do more than that with her dad out of action. He needed help with his therapy and other things, so he couldn’t be alone five days a week. Getting his leg functioning was as important as getting the A-Star repaired. He couldn’t work until his leg was better. Couldn’t fly a chopper if you couldn’t use the pedals.

And getting his leg better was racking up an ever-growing pile of physical therapy and doctors’ bills.

That was without thinking about the hospital bills or the rehab facility. He’d had health insurance, but it didn’t cover everything. And the company was arguing about some of the costs it was supposed to cover, which meant they might have even higher bills to pay.

She was beginning to hate even the word
insurance
.

But that still didn’t solve her problems. Nor would trying to stick her head in the sand and ignore the fact they couldn’t keep going the way they were. Nope. Time to woman up and talk to her dad about the whole freaking mess.

She copied the latest file from their accounting software to a flash drive and tucked it into her bag.

Then she locked up and headed for her parents’ house.

*   *   *

Her mom’s car wasn’t in the drive. Maybe that was better. It would be easier to tell her dad alone. Give him some time to come to terms before they had to tell her mom as well.

She sat in the drive, hands gripped around the steering wheel, hot lead weighing her stomach down.

Failed him.

She’d failed him.

She’d left the army to come home to keep Charles Air alive and she couldn’t do it.

Couldn’t even manage that much.

And even though she knew it wasn’t true … knew that it was her dad’s accident that had started this particular run of bad luck, it felt true. Deep in her gut, where she couldn’t shake it.

Her dad would look at her and he’d bow his head and he’d look that little bit older and grayer. More tired. Since the accident he looked tired a lot.

Hadn’t seen him laugh much, either.

Now she was letting him down. And he had to be thinking that it would have been better if Jamie were still here to run things instead of her.

She rested her head on the steering wheel for a minute, taken by the sudden sharp stab of pain thinking about Jamie. It had been six years and mostly she remembered him with joy but every so often the grief caught her by surprise, stealing her breath and turning the world gray and cold.

From behind her, Dougal whined softly, eager to be out of his harness now that she’d stopped the car in a place he knew. Eager to get inside and cadge some dog biscuits and claim his place by the heating vent in the kitchen.

The thought made her smile and she lifted her head and took a breath before turning around. “Just a minute, buddy.”

Dougal yelped and grinned at her in his doggy way. He liked coming here, liked the extra attention. He’d lived with her parents while Sara had been deployed and he had been thoroughly spoiled.

Just as well, because she was probably going to have to give up her tiny apartment in the city and move back to the island. She wouldn’t be able to afford Manhattan rent anymore. Not even rent-stabilized rent.

She’d taken the apartment on a whim, wanting to have a stake in the city and not just come back home to Staten Island when she’d left the army and Viv had found out one of the studios in her building was coming up for lease. It meant earlier starts and later nights but she loved the city. Loved the energy. Loved feeling like she was in the middle of something big and alive.

Maybe she could find a sublet … something short-term until she found work.

Someone, somewhere needed a pilot. Surely. There were helos all over the place in New York. Someone would hire her. She tried to quell the cold feeling in her stomach.

Think of something good
.

The only thing that came to mind, the last thing that had made her feel safe, was the feeling of Lucas’s arms around her as she fell asleep back in that damned motel room.

Which only proved she was crazy.

Because that was never going to happen again.

She’d heard the messages he’d left but hadn’t been able to make herself return his calls. Because if he wanted to hire her again, well, she didn’t have a helo. And if he wanted anything else then it was more likely to be to yell at her than because he’d decided he couldn’t live one more day without sleeping with her again.

It wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t matter how many times the memory of his hands on her stopped her thought processes, it wasn’t going to happen again. It had been one night.

One night that had ended badly.

Seeing him again would just bring another bit of crappy reality into her life.

Which made her a wimp for not dealing with him, but at least a pragmatic wimp. Life was not a fairy tale, and Lucas Angelo wasn’t Prince Charming. He just resembled him on paper.