Authors: Jenna Mills
CROSSFIRE (7 page)
"Everything's in good shape," he said, coming around the plane with a clipboard in hand. The cool morning breeze ruffled his slightly long hair. "Did you file the flight plan?"
"All done," she said, finishing off her coffee. The breeze whipped up, but, tucked inside a newly purchased Ski Banff sweatshirt and a pair of stiff jeans, she didn't shiver.
"Then let's get this baby off the ground." Hawk signaled to the ground crew, then headed for the stairs leading to the jet.
Elizabeth
didn't move.
"Something wrong?" he asked, turning to face her.
She squinted into the sun, lifting a hand to shield her eyes. "Where's your copilot?"
Hawk's smile was slow, gleaming. "I'm looking at her."
The breath jammed in her throat. "Me?"
He shrugged. "Unless you're not up to it."
Excitement surged. "Of course I'm up to it," she answered quickly, but shock pierced deep. She hadn't taken to the skies since Miranda's kidnapping. "I just thought after last night I didn't think you'd take any chances. I figured you'd have men crawling all over the place."
In one lethally quick movement Hawk slipped off his sunglasses and destroyed the distance between them.
"Chances?" he asked in a dangerously soft voice that made her chest tighten. "Let's get something very straight, right here, right now." All that simmer and amusement that had sparked in his eyes last night … gone, replaced by a hardness she'd rarely seen. "I take my job seriously. I don't play fa
st and loose
with your life, not on the ground or in the air." He gestured toward the roof of the terminal, where three snipers lay on their bellies, rifles in hand.
"See those men?" He pointed to the ground crew, all sporting discreetly concealed MP50s. "And those? Of course I have men crawling everywhere, but once we're airborne, it won't matter if two or twenty people are onboard. As long as we can fly the plane." His eyes hardened. "Call me a jerk, but I thought you'd jump at the chance to fly this baby."
Too late
Elizabeth
realized she'd insulted him.
"Unless, of course," he added lazily, "it's not your life you're worried about, but your virtue."
Heat flashed through her. "Don't be ridiculous."
"I mean, think about it," he drawled. "It's not like I can drag you into the cabin for a quickie at twenty thousand feet." He stepped closer, lowered his voice. "Someone's got to fly the plane."
She cut him a look. "How reassuring."
With stunning speed, the hardness dissolved into a smile laced with dare. "Of course there's always autopilot," he mused, boxer-dancing out of the way.
A very unladylike noise escaped before she could stop it. "You haven't flown on autopilot a day in your life."
He tucked the clipboard under his arm. "What do you say, then? You up for flying?"
More than he could possibly know. She hadn't realized how confined, how grounded she'd felt.
"Careful," she said, breezing past him and heading up the stairs. "I might just push you out of the way and take this baby up all by myself."
"Not in this lifetime, Ellie. You need me too much."
She stepped into the cool, plush confines of the corporate jet and headed for the cockpit. "Dream on."
From behind her, she heard his rough laughter. "Trust me, sweetness. You don't want to know what a man like me dreams about."
No, she didn't. That was true.
"You forget," he added, catching up with her. He slid into his seat and began checking the controls, making sure the yoke moved in all directions. "I know you. Flying by the seat of your pants isn't your style, and the Lear is a two-pilot plane. If you want to get home today, in this plane, you're stuck with me."
Elizabeth
said nothing, just blithely reached up and checked the oxygen mask.
"What are you doing?" he asked, as she'd known he would.
She turned to him and smiled. "Just making sure I'll be able to breathe if your ego takes up all the oxygen."
* * *
From a cruising altitude of thirty-nine thousand feet, the vivid blue sky stretched on forever. Far below, the rugged
Rockies
jutted up like toy mountains. The snowcaps looked little more than dots of vanilla ice cream.
Elizabeth
leaned back and drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. She was eager to get back to
Richmond
and away from Hawk, but for now she savored the freedom of soaring.
"Isn't the view gorgeous?"
Hawk glanced at her. "Stunning."
Her heart kicked, hard. Her throat tightened. "Don't, Hawk, okay? Not now." They sat too close, had too many more hours alone together. As it was, she couldn't breathe without drawing the scent of him deep inside. "Can't we just enjoy the flight?"
The corners of his mouth curved into a smile. "Whatever you say, sweetness."
Off to the right, a swirl of gauzy clouds curled like a comma. "Thank you."
If she didn't know better, she would have sworn he stiffened. "Just doing my job."
"For letting me fly with you," she clarified. For not treating her like a child. Nicholas barely let her drive.
Hawk turned toward her. Mirrored sunglasses concealed the deep butterscotch of his eyes, but she knew they'd be gleaming. "I taught you, didn't I?"
The question rushed through her. He'd taught her, all right. A lot. Lessons she would never forget.
Hawk
Monroe
was the best pilot, the best instructor, she'd ever known. He'd mastered flying while in the Army, piloting Black Hawks into hostile territory in faraway places most people only heard about on the news. He never talked about the missions, but from the aftermath she'd witnessed in his eyes, she knew they'd been beyond dangerous. She wondered if he still thought about the years he'd given to his country, if sometimes he still woke up in a cold sweat.
Call me a fool, but "Be all you can be" actually meant something to me.
A smart woman would have turned away, looked straight ahead. Maybe even closed her eyes. But
Elizabeth
found it hard to look away. He looked deceptively casual sitting there with his headset on, faded jeans hugging his long legs, and the sleeves of his khaki shirt rolled up. On a glance he looked like a thousand other ex-military corporate pilots … except for the Glock shoved snugly into his leather shoulder holster.
"What do you think about when you fly?" she asked before she could stop herself.
Hawk took a long sip from a bottle of water. "I try not to think at all. I prefer to savor."
Elizabeth
smiled. Hawk loved flying every bit as much as she did. Before their relationship had become overly complicated, he'd taken her up often, sharing with her the promise of an early-spring dawn and the vibrancy of a late-summer sunset.
"Have you been up much since the shooting?"
"You know what they say about not keeping a good man down," he answered with a grin. "I was back up—"
The change was subtle at first, a yaw like brakes on ice. They lurched forward, then backward. Then came the deafening roar of silence. The swirl of amber lights. The drone of buzzers.
And the plane went from fast forward to slow motion.
"Shit!" Hawk grabbed the yoke and immediately launched into the emergency procedures he'd drilled into her.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. "We're losing altitude!" It wasn't a dizzying rush or a spiraling plummet, just a gentle sinking in the air, drifting.
The hallmark of an aircraft with no power.
Chapter 4
"
P
ull up! Pull up!"
"Shut up!" Hawk gritted out, but the mechanical female voice droned on.
"Pull up! Pull up!"
Nothing. The free fall continued with deceptive gentleness, like a toy plane whose batteries had suddenly gone dead.
Amber lights flickered from the instrument panel, warning the obvious. They were going down. From the high altitude corporate aircraft occupied, they had five minutes, seven tops.
"Get on the radio." He kept his voice calm despite the adrenaline spewing nastily. "Tell ATC we've lost both engines."
"Both?"
He shot
Elizabeth
a quick look, found her face devoid of color. "Do it. Now."
A fierce will to live kicked through him. The Army had trained him for situations like this, drilled him relentlessly. In Kosovo, drills had become reality. But he'd never thought to need that training somewhere over nowhere
Elizabeth
's life on the line.
"
"Three Niner Bravo," came the calm male voice of the air traffic controller. "State nature of emergency."
"Three Niner Bravo has lost both engines…"
Someone had gotten to the plane. He knew that as sure as he knew there would be no miraculous restarting of the engines. He'd had the hangar protected, damn it. Armed guards on duty. But Hawk didn't believe in accidents, or fate, or bad damn luck. He believed in instinct and motivation and revenge. Every man created his own destiny.
He wouldn't let a coward like Zhukov put an end to his.
Or
Elizabeth
's.
The memory flared before he could stop it.
The door to Ambassador Carrington's richly paneled office opened, and she strolled into his world with a grace and confidence that knocked the breath from his lungs. A black pantsuit sheathed her killer body, but it was her smile that grabbed him, her smile that slayed, wide and knowing, yet at the same time, mysterious. Vulnerable. "You must be Hawk."
Then, he'd sworn to give his life for hers, to take a bullet if necessary. A knife. An anything. But there was no line of fire to step into now, no attacker to fend off, just a disabled plane carrying them both down.
He wouldn't let it happen. He wouldn't let her meet a fiery grave, alone in the remote mountains of
Shoving aside everything but training, he focused on the emergency maneuvers he could rattle off in his sleep.
"Throttle," he muttered, shoving them all the way back. "Cutoff." Sweat beaded on his brow. His pulse blasted relentlessly. "Spoilers, gear, flaps, all up. Airstart…
"
He tried, no go. The engines were cold, dead.
The cemetery was serene, peaceful, row upon row of gently tended graves, shaded by an army of maples. Elizabeth knelt before her sister's tombstone, a hand to her heart, tears swimming in her eyes.
His gut twisted. No, damn it. No. He was a man who thrived on the unexpected, who believed that's when the majority of living occurred. But sweet Mary, not like this. Not like this. Clenching his teeth, he switched the fuel system to emergency, refusing to consider that in less than two minutes, he and Elizabeth might be dead, too. Failure was not an option.
The snow-capped mountains dominated his line of vision, closer, larger, with every frenetic riff of his heart.
"Pull up,"
the aural warning kept insisting.
"Pull up!"
Looking at her was a mistake. He saw her seated next to him, continuing her dialogue with Air Traffic Control, beautiful even in a cheap sweatshirt, but the steely resolve in her gaze barely registered.
A slow light gleamed from her eyes. Her mouth curved into a smile. "Im not dreaming, am I?"
"No, sweetness," he said. They broke through a bank of clouds and cruised into endless blue. "You're flying."
Sable hair, loose around her face, caught on her mouth and fired his blood. "I've never felt so alive."
God. "The best is yet to come."
Hawk shoved the image aside, searched the rugged terrain for somewhere to put down the plane. They still had options. He was a skilled pilot. Any flat surface would work.
"Come on, come on. There's gotta be a ski slope somewhere."
Maybe in the movies, a voice deep inside snarled, but this was real life and smooth landing strips didn't just appear in the middle of nowhere. Trees cluttered the landscape, taller by the second, thicker. A glistening lake in the distance.
A lake.
"There!"
Elizabeth
pointed toward the horizon.
Hawk squinted against the glare of sun and saw what she did. Beyond the lake, a valley sprawled against the base of a cruel mountain. If he could hit the grassy area, they had a chance.
