About the Author

RACHEL LEE was hooked on writing by the age of twelve, and practiced her craft as she moved from place to place all over the United States. This New York Times bestselling author now resides in Florida and has the joy of writing full-time.

Her bestselling CONARD COUNTY series (see www.conardcounty.com) has won the hearts of readers worldwide, and it’s no wonder, given her own approach to life and love. As she says, “Life is the biggest romantic adventure of all—and if you’re open and aware, the most marvelous things are just waiting to be discovered.” Readers can e-mail Rachel at RachelLee@ConardCounty.com.

The Rescue Pilot

Rachel Lee

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To all the quiet heroes who do whatever is

necessary to care for others

Prologue

Thunder Mountain opened its snowy maw and swallowed the crashing plane. The business jet, its engines dead, not designed to glide without the assistance of power, descended almost like a stone, but the pilot struggled manfully.

The wild creatures, those not slumbering for winter, heard it come in, cutting through the air with a too-quiet but unnatural whoosh, heading for the only treeless space for miles. Those nearby froze and watched the thing slide, burying itself deeper in the snow as it went, metal screaming as it twisted, leaving a trail behind that would vanish quickly as the arriving blizzard blew mightily and dumped its heavy load. Then they turned and fled.

All fell silent. The flakes continued to swirl madly, the wind to gust powerfully. Wise creatures found hiding places from the storm’s fury.

And Thunder Mountain began to devour all the evidence of the crash.

Chapter 1

Chase Dakota stared at cockpit windscreens buried in snow, dirt, rocks and branches. Only the flickering light from his dying console allowed him to see anything at all. Moments later, to his relief, the emergency lights turned on again. Dim but essential.

For long seconds he didn’t move, but instead listened. Listened to a world gone oddly silent, muffled by snow and the plane’s own soundproofing. No screams reached him. That could be good, or very bad.

He was sweat-soaked from the effort of bringing this damn plane down. The instant the engines had cut out, he’d begun to fly a boulder not a bird, and his battle to optimize the aerodynamics and prevent a fatal dive had been Herculean. Hitting the mountain’s downslope had been a boon.

Now he cut off the fuel pumps. Although they’d had a dramatic drop in fuel level, he couldn’t be sure something else hadn’t caused the dual flameout of his engines and that there might be more than fumes left. Next he switched off everything else that was nonessential now that they were no longer in the air. Mission accomplished.

He took just a moment to do a mental self-check. He wasn’t aware of having lost consciousness at any point, but he might not have known it even if he had. Everything still seemed to be in working condition. Good.

He didn’t have time for shock. He reached for the buckles of his harness and released them. His first priority was to check on his four passengers. Everything else could wait.

Even as he rose and stepped through the small cockpit, his feet told him the plane had been seriously bent on impact. But looking back through the cabin as he pulled aside the accordion door, he saw with relief that the rest of the plane seemed to be intact. All of it. That meant his passengers were still with him. All of them.

At first all he could hear was panicked breathing. Then a familiar voice said, “That was a helluva landing, Chase.”

Billy Joe Yuma. An old buddy.

“Not my preferred type,” Chase managed, working his way back through the narrow-bodied business jet. “Anyone hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Yuma said. “So’s Wendy.”

“Ms. Campbell?”

“I … think I’m okay. My sister …”

“I’m checking right now.”

He passed the three people, still tightly buckled into their seats, and made his way to the small bedroom in the tail where the sick woman lay. He’d insisted that she be strapped in, overriding the Campbell woman’s objections, and never had he been gladder that he’d been willing to go toe-to-toe over something. He grabbed a flashlight from a wall compartment as he passed the small bathroom, and flicked it on.

He saw her, still strapped in place, still too thin to be believed, but blinking. Awake. Aware. Panic filling her face.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We came down in one piece.” “Fire?” she asked weakly.

“Nope. None. You’re going to be okay.” An easy, hopeful lie. At this point he didn’t have the foggiest idea just how bad this was. He was counting the good things right now, and the good things were that his passengers were alive and his plane intact enough not to present additional problems.

He paused, feeling the aircraft shift a bit as if the wind banged on its side. A quiet groan of metal answered, but nothing more.

“My sister?” the woman on the bed asked, her voice faint.

“She’s fine. Everyone’s okay. I’ll send her back, all right?”

He didn’t even have to do that. As soon as he turned around, he was face-to-face with the imperious young woman who had hired him to take her and her sister to Minneapolis. If she weren’t so damn bossy, she’d have been an attractive Celtic beauty, with her black hair and deep blue eyes. “Cait,” she said.

“She’s asking for you.”

He stepped into the W.C. to give her room to pass. Then he headed back up the aisle. With every step he felt the torture the plane had gone through as it had slid along the mountain slope. The deep snow had helped, but it wasn’t enough to completely shield the plane from the ground underneath, especially boulders. This baby would never fly again.

But now it had one last duty: to help them survive. Glancing out the portholes that weren’t yet fully covered by snow told him the blizzard conditions he’d been flying above had begun to reach them. Rescue lay a long way down the road of time and this mountain.

He sat in an empty seat facing Wendy and Billy Joe Yuma. He’d known them both most of his life—the advantage of living in a small town. And he knew he was going to need them both now. They belonged to Conard County’s emergency-response team, Wendy as chief flight nurse, Yuma (he hated to be called Billy Joe) as the primary rescue chopper pilot.

Wendy, now a gorgeous redhead of nearly forty, was much younger than her husband. Yuma had learned to fly choppers in Vietnam, and despite the years maintained an ageless appearance. Or maybe he’d done all his aging during the years of war, and afterward when he’d lived in these very mountains with a bunch of vets who couldn’t shake their PTSD enough to live around other people.

“You’re sure you’re both okay?” he asked now.

“Believe it,” Wendy answered.

“Been through worse,” Yuma replied, “and walked away.”

Chase didn’t doubt that for a minute. He, too, had flown for the military.

“I’m gonna need you both,” he said frankly. “We’ve got a really sick woman in the tail we need to take care of, Wendy. And Yuma, I need you to help me find out what still works, and how we’re going to cope with this blizzard.”

He received two answering nods, and both unbuckled their seat belts.

“I’ll go back and find out what’s going on,” Wendy said. “Why do I think it’s going to need more than a first aid kit?”

“Because I was supposed to fly them on to the hospital in Minnesota.”

“Oh.” Even in the poor light he could see Wendy’s face darken. “That doesn’t sound good.” She rose, slipped past the two of them and headed to the rear of the plane.

Chase turned back to Yuma. “We need to make sure we can get one of the exit doors open, and keep it clear. And a walk-around would be good before we get buried any deeper.”

“Agreed. Then we’ll check the electronics. But first things first.”

As they began to pull on their outdoor gear, Chase noted that the air inside was already becoming stale. The downside of having an airtight shelter. He was going to have to figure out how to exchange the cabin air without freezing them to death.

He gave a small shake of his head. As Yuma said, first things first.

Aurora Campbell, known as Rory to family and friends, sat on the edge of her sister’s bed in the rear of the plane and clasped her hand as tightly as she dared. Her sister had grown so thin from her lymphoma and the treatments for the cancer that holding her hand was like holding the delicate bones of a small bird.

She hoped her face betrayed nothing of her terror. She’d deal with that later when she gave their pilot what-for. Right now she only wanted to calm Cait.

“The hard part is over,” she lied reassuringly. “Hey, Cait, we were just in a plane crash but we’re still in one piece. What are the odds, huh?”

Cait managed a weak smile. Even that simple expression seemed like it wearied her. “Yeah,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “And people will come to help.”

“Yes, they will.” Despite the blizzard raging outside, despite the fact that she was fairly certain they were in the middle of nowhere. “And I’ve got enough medications to hold you until they do.” Four days’ worth. She had thought she wouldn’t need even that much, because Cait had been slated for immediate admission at the hospital they were going to. Had been going to until this freaking jet had crashed on a mountainside in what was starting to look like a damn blizzard.

But for now she shoved her frustration, fear and fury to the background. “Need anything? Maybe I can rustle up some soup… .” God, she hadn’t even thought about that yet, either. Did this plane have anything on it besides snacks and liquor? Anything that didn’t require a microwave to cook it? Because she suspected that was one of the things that probably wouldn’t work now.

She didn’t know much about planes, but she knew most of their electricity was generated by their engines. And this plane had no engines anymore.

“No,” Cait sighed. “As long as we’re okay … I just want to sleep a bit.”

Rory reached out and stroked the pale fuzz that was all that remained on Cait’s head. “You do that.” Cait was sleeping more and more of the time. Her heart squeezed, but moments later as Cait slipped away into sleep, she rose and walked out of the little bedroom.

The other woman passenger was waiting for her. Wendy, Rory seemed to remember. On such small business jets, it was hard not to at least exchange introductions before takeoff.

“I’m a nurse,” Wendy said. “Let’s sit and talk a bit about your sister so I can help.”

“You can’t help her,” Rory said brusquely. “I have her medicines. What she needs is a hospital, a clinical trial on a new drug. Doesn’t look likely right now, does it?” Then she eased past Wendy and returned to her seat, blindly watching the snow build up outside the small window.

She hardly even paid attention to the two men who were forward in the cabin, working to open the exterior door behind the cockpit. She noted that the air was getting heavy, but at the moment she wasn’t worried about that.

All she was worried about was Cait, and right at this moment, with the world outside invisible in swirling snow, she was fairly certain there wasn’t a damn thing she could do. And she hated, absolutely hated, being helpless.

Wendy didn’t give her long to sit in hopeless solitude. The woman came forward and sat in the seat facing her. “Cancer?” Wendy asked.

“Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Aggressive, this time.” The words were painful, but she’d never been one to shy away from telling it like it was. No matter how much it hurt.

“This time?” Wendy’s voice was gentle.

Rory almost sighed, realizing that she could either choose to be unutterably rude and say nothing, or just dump it out there and shut this woman up. She decided on the latter. “She went into remission four years ago. Unfortunately, she didn’t tell me she had a relapse five months ago. I was in Mexico, and she didn’t tell me.” That hurt as much as anything.

“So you came home to find her like this? Why wouldn’t she tell you?”

“She’d given up,” Rory said. “Her husband dumped her the minute he heard and moved in with another woman. Kinda cuts out your heart, don’t you think?”

“It would.”

Rory heard the sympathy in Wendy’s voice, but she didn’t want sympathy. Sympathy didn’t help. All it did was make her want to cry. She didn’t answer.

“You have medication for her.”

Rory finally looked at her, her eyes burning. “Enough for four days. More than enough for a freaking four- or five-hour flight from Seattle to Minneapolis. Only that’s not happening, is it?”

To her credit, Wendy didn’t offer any false cheer.

“What’s she on?”

“Immunosuppressants. Some other drugs. She’s been through radiation, obviously. But as I said, the disease is aggressive.”

“So you’re pinning your hopes on a clinical trial of something new?”

“Yes. I was.” That was sounded final. But right now everything felt final.

“They’ve got some great stuff now, I hear, but I’m not up on the disease.” She leaned forward and laid her hand over Rory’s.

Rory wanted to jerk back, but she couldn’t because that touch somehow didn’t offend her. Maybe because she needed not to feel entirely alone. “That’s what they tell me.”

Wendy nodded. “The important thing is to keep her going right now. Food. Warmth. Keep her resistance up. I’ll help every way I can. But I promise you, I’m part of the Conard County emergency-response team. As soon as this weather lets up, they’re going to pull out all the stops to find us.” “Because you’re here?”

“Because all of us are here. And we’re damn good at what we do.”

“How do you know we aren’t someplace else?”

“Because Chase was going to drop us at the Conard County Airport on the way to Minnesota. You knew that, right?”

Rory nodded. “A brief fueling stop.”

“Well, my husband was looking out the window as we came in. He said this is Thunder Mountain, maybe sixty miles out of town.”

It was a slender lifeline indeed, but for once in her life, Rory was willing to grab it. What else did she have?

Turning her head, closing the conversation, she gazed out a window that snow rapidly covered, and fought down the rage, panic and tears.

The exit door behind the cockpit also served as steps. The fact that it opened out and down should have made it easier to move. But the plane’s shape had been torqued by the crash, and things weren’t meeting the way they used to. And the steps themselves, carpeted for that extra bit of luxury, hampered the effort to shove.

“Maybe we should try the rear exit,” Yuma said, wiping sweat from his brow.

“I’d rather not open the door back there if I can avoid it. Any cold air we let in—and there’ll be quite a bit of it—is going to hit our sick passenger first. I’d rather let it in as far from her as possible.”

“Good point. Well, I doubt the snow is the problem.”

“Not hardly,” Chase agreed. “Not yet. Not with this.”

But the snow was a problem all right, one that promised to grow even bigger in the next few hours. “We’ve got to get out,” he said again. “Find out what our condition is, whether we’ve got anything else to worry about. And we’re going to need to build a fire to heat food.”

“In this?” Yuma cocked a brow. “That’s always fun.”

“I have plenty of alcohol onboard.”

Yuma chuckled. “Imagine starting a fire with Chivas. Or Jack.”

“I just hope it works. Alcohol burns cold.”

“A handful of pine needles” was all Yuma said.

“Sure. I see tons of them out there.” But Chase knew that even though the snow buried them, finding them wouldn’t be the most difficult task they’d face. But first this damn door. Preferably in a way that wouldn’t leave it permanently open to the cold.

“You know,” he said as he and Yuma again put their shoulders to the door, “I should have painted this damn plane chartreuse or international orange.”

“By tomorrow I don’t think it’ll matter if it were covered in blinking neon lights.”

Chase paused, wiping his own brow. “Yeah. It probably won’t.”

“Transponder?” Billy Joe asked as they pushed again.

“Damned if I know right now. My instruments were acting like twinkle lights. But first things first. The transponder isn’t exactly going to get much attention at the moment.”

“That’s a fact.”

“At the very least we’ve got to check our situation, make sure we don’t slide farther, and then get some hot soup and coffee going. Then I’ll worry about everything else.” “Agreed.”

On the count of three, both men shoved again, and this time the door opened. Not far, just a couple of inches at the top, but enough for Chase to see the problem. One of the heavy-duty locking bolts hadn’t slid fully back and it ripped at the door, tearing a small hole but not enough to cause any heartache.

“I need a sledgehammer,” Chase muttered. And he needed it right now, because he wasn’t going to go outside and leave that door open, freezing everyone in the plane.

He pulled up a service panel in the floor and went hunting. There it was, a heavy-duty hammer. He hadn’t ever needed it, but you never knew. He carried a lot of items just for that reason. If he’d learned one thing in the military, it was to be prepared for just about any situation. What you dismissed as unnecessary could wind up costing you a whole lot … like your life.

Yuma leaned back while Chase started hammering on the locking bolt.

“Do you have to make so much noise?” the Campbell woman said sharply. “My sister …”

“Is going to freeze to death if I can’t close this door, okay?”

He didn’t have to look at her because he could hear the snap of her jaws closing just before he banged again with the hammer.

To his vast relief, it only took a half-dozen blows. He tossed the hammer back in the hatch, closed it and then faced the door with Yuma again. Already the plane was cooling down, but the fresher air was welcome.

They counted to three again and shoved. This time the door flew all the way down to the packed snow beneath. Another scarcely acknowledged fear slipped away from Chase’s mind. They weren’t trapped inside. They had a functioning door.

The two men scrambled out quickly over the horizontal steps, which were useless at this angle, then shoved the door up behind them, leaving it open the tiniest crack.

Outside the world looked like a snow globe gone mad. Wind whipped them viciously, howling its fury, and the flakes were becoming icy needles. Chase ignored the discomfort, all his attention focused on finding out how the plane was situated. He didn’t want to learn the hard way that they were on the lip of another slide and some little thing could set it off.

He headed straight for the plane’s nose. In this heavy snow, it was hard to see very far. He could make out only the faintest of gray shadows of trees around the clearing, but as he approached the front, he saw with relief that there were trees not very far ahead of them. Maybe a hundred, two hundred feet at most. Thick foresting that would stop them if they slid, no dark shadow indicating a deep gorge in the way. Thank God.

The nose was completely buried and he left it that way. Every bit of insulation would do them good until this blizzard passed, cutting the wind, keeping the inside temperature up.

But he felt something very close to sorrow as he walked back along the plane’s length. Even with deepening snowdrifts he could see buckled metal on the fuselage, and that the engines had vanished from under the wings somewhere upslope, leaving behind their twisted pylons. Any fuel that was left would be seeping into the snow from broken lines, but he couldn’t see any melting to indicate it.

God, what had happened? He hadn’t had time to wonder before. He’d gone from half-full tanks to empty so fast it had seemed almost impossible. His fuel pumps must have been spewing precious liquid as fast as they could from somewhere. Just where he wouldn’t be able to tell now.

He’d had the damn thing overhauled and checked out last week. That’s why he’d been in Seattle. All he could think now was that some mechanic somewhere had failed to do something right. Make some connection. Tighten some clamp, whatever. Somewhere between pumps and engines, there had been a critical failure.

By the time he’d known things were going wrong, they’d been over the mountains with a storm catching up. At forty thousand feet, that was no big deal, but it sure cut his options. He’d had no choice but to hope they’d make it to the Conard County Airport. There was nothing closer that hadn’t already been closed by the storm.

He supposed he ought to get down on his knees and thank God they were in one piece. But right now he wasn’t feeling all that thankful. He was feeling furious, and worried. Most especially worried about that sick woman in the back of his plane.

Chapter 2

Rory had added more blankets to cover Cait as the cabin temperature dropped a bit because of the opening and closing of the cabin door. She was grateful the air felt fresher now, but worried, too. How were they supposed to keep warm?

Cait barely stirred as Rory tucked blankets around her all the way up to her ears. A knit stocking cap would probably be good, she thought, since Cait didn’t have enough hair left to keep her head warm.

She went out to ask Wendy about it. Maybe the other woman had one.

“Actually, I do,” Wendy said. “And I’m glad to tell you it’s in the overhead bin. Let me get it out. Didn’t you bring something like that for when you got to Minnesota?”

“An ambulance was going to meet us. I wasn’t expecting Cait to be exposed at all.”

Wendy nodded as she rose to open one of the overhead bins. She wore a baggy sweater and jeans, and a very sensible pair of work boots. Just like Rory herself. Accustomed as she was to being on work sites, Rory dolled up only for business meetings, and this trip hadn’t qualified for that.

“What about you?” Wendy spoke as she fought with the bin door, at last managing to yank it open.

“I have a parka I dug out before we left.”

“Good. I don’t usually carry spares of those.”

Wendy pulled a thick-knit cap out of a leather duffel and passed it to her. “There you go.”

“Thank you so much!”

Wendy smiled, and the expression reached her eyes. “Hey, we’re all in this together.”

Cait murmured quietly as Rory put the stocking cap on her, but then settled back into sleep. Rory stood looking down at her sister, wishing that for just a few moments she could see that spark again in Cait’s expression, but it had vanished long before Rory got home.

Tears pricked at her eyes, but she couldn’t afford to let them fall. Not now, not ever. She had to remain strong for Cait’s sake, no matter how tough it got. And right now it was tough. All her worst imaginings for Cait’s future had just been compounded by a plane crash in the wilderness. In a storm.

Sometimes she thought the gods enjoyed a laugh at human expense. If so, they must be finding this all hilarious.

Time. There was so little time for Cait now. And this accident was eating away at it like a miserable rat. Just enough meds for four days. Then what? Not that the meds were doing much but holding the beast at bay, and not doing a very good job at that. In the days since she’d gotten back to Seattle and had gathered the information and recommendations that had led her to the decision to fly her sister halfway across the country for experimental treatment, she’d watched Cait drift away further and further. Losing even the energy to smile, or whisper more than a few words.

Days, hours, minutes were precious right now. And they were slipping uncaringly between her fingers like the finest of sands.

Her spine stiffened suddenly, and she turned around to march back into the main cabin. There was a pilot who had a lot of explaining to do, and she was going to get her answers the instant he came back inside.

She might not be able to change the situation, but she was sure as hell going to understand it and all that they were up against. She didn’t function well in the dark and she refused to be kept there.

Chase and Yuma returned to the plane after a mere thirty minutes. Long enough to assess their situation outside, long enough to dig through the snow at the forest’s edge to find some wood and pine needles. They’d even dug a place near the plane to build a fire safely, although that was going to be difficult in this wind.

But Chase had candles onboard, and chafing dishes for those fancy flights where people expected exquisite meals. Plenty of candles. He could heat some soup, maybe even brew some coffee, but open flames in the plane made him uneasy, and they’d suck up the oxygen.

He was holding an internal debate as he and Yuma closed the door behind them. And the first words he heard were:

“Why the hell did this plane crash?”

He turned slowly, his cheeks stinging from the cold outside. He stared at the Campbell woman, reminding himself that she was undoubtedly edgy because of her sister. And, yes, because of the crash. Plenty of reason to be truculent.

He pulled off his leather gloves while staring at her, and threw his hood back. “Well,” he said slowly, “that’s the question, isn’t it? We ran out of fuel. Unexpectedly, inexplicably. All of a sudden. And since I had the plane in Seattle for an overhaul, I’m going to guess that somebody screwed up. But once that fuel started draining like Niagara Falls, there wasn’t much I could do except try to get us down in one piece.”

He waited, expecting to get his butt chewed about something, but amazingly, it didn’t happen. Then she nodded. “Okay. What now? What are our chances?”

He unzipped his jacket and shrugged it off, tossing it over a seat back. “The charts I looked at before takeoff suggest the storm might last two days. That was then. It wasn’t supposed to catch up to us as fast as it did. That’s now. It’s a helluva blow, and we aren’t going to stir from the safety of this plane until it lets up.”

“Two days,” she said, and sounded almost frightened.

“Two days,” he repeated. “If the emergency beacon is working, rescue should come soon after.”

“If?”

“We didn’t exactly make a soft landing. The body of the plane is twisted pretty badly. I don’t know how many electrical connections are out, or what hidden damage we have. Just after we crashed, it looked like my sat-nav went out. GPS to you. And the emergency beacon needs that to tell rescuers where we are, after the storm passes. The standard transponder, which I also have, broadcasts from the underside of the plane, so we can pretty much count that out. Regardless, the storm itself will probably interfere with all radio communications, so I can’t say for sure whether the problem is the weather or something is broken. I’m going to check on that right now, if you don’t mind.”

No objection emanated from the beauty, although her expression suggested that she’d have loved nothing better than a fight. Of course. To work off the adrenaline, probably. Or maybe she just hated the sight of him. He didn’t care either way. He started to turn but her voice caught him.

“Won’t they know where we are from the flight plan? From our last recorded position?”

He faced her again. “We were traveling at over six hundred miles per hour. From the time things started to go wrong, we traveled a long way. And we didn’t exactly stay on the flight path while I tried to get us down on some open ground rather than in the forest. So they’re going to have to search quite a wide area.”

“Then you’d better make sure that beacon is working.”

Chase ground his teeth. Now he was absolutely certain he didn’t like her. “That thought has occurred to me as well, ma’am.”

Stiff now, he turned toward the cockpit. When he got there, he closed the accordion door behind him. This, he thought, was not going to make anything any easier.

Rory watched the pilot close the door behind him. What was his name again? She’d paid scant attention … Oh, yeah, something like Hunter. No, Chase. Chase Dakota. He was a large enough man, well-built, with ruggedly chiseled features that hinted just a bit at a possible Native American heritage somewhere in his family tree. Gray eyes that reminded her of steel.

And not especially friendly. Although she supposed she wasn’t exactly inviting friendliness at the moment. But why should she? Her sister’s life was hanging in the balance, and whether this crash was his fault hardly seemed to matter. Bottom line: They had crashed and they were stuck for two days. At least two days. She would have given her right hand for some assurance that was all it would be.

She realized that Wendy had risen and was moving around toward the rear of the plane, in an alcove just behind the passenger seating but forward of the bedroom in the tail. Rory took a few steps to look and saw the redhead opening lockers above a microwave. The plane’s small galley.

Needing to do something, Rory joined her.

“I’m looking at our supply situation,” Wendy said, smiling. “Chase always stocks well, but it would sure be nice if I could manage to make us all something hot to drink. Soup, tea, maybe coffee.”

“We can’t cook. Not without a fire.”

“Ah, but we might be able to manage something with candles and these chafing dishes.”

“True.” Rory allowed herself to be distracted by one of her favorite things: problem solving. She took a quick look at her sister and found Cait still sleeping, and gently breathing. Did parents hover over new babies like this, she wondered, waiting for the gentle rise of a chest to indicate that life continued?

She gave herself a little shake and turned back to help Wendy in the galley. “Coffee might be beyond reach,” she said. “How many candles does it take to boil a pot?”

“Darned if I know. But I want my coffee, and there’s a whole lot of candles. Besides, we only need to make one pot. I think the guys will build a fire outside soon. We’re going to need it.”

“That’s for sure.”

“And I’m sure if we’re patient, we can heat a pot of this dried soup.” She turned on the faucet and, wonder of wonders, water came out.

“Must be a gravity tank,” Rory said.

“Whatever it is, it’s a plus. Better to have water right now than have to melt snow on top of everything else.”

While Rory worked with chafing-dish holders to elevate them enough to put fat, squat candles beneath them, bending legs and stacking a few of them, Wendy found the pieces of the drip coffeemaker and assembled them, then put coffee in the filter. “First pot of boiling water goes for coffee,” she said firmly. “I need a hot drink and some caffeine.”

“If you watch it, it’ll never boil,” Rory remarked, lighting a candle beneath her assemblage. The women shared a quiet laugh at the old joke, then together balanced a chafing dish full of water on the structure.

“I think it’ll hold,” Wendy said.

“It looks like it, but this time I’m going to watch it boil anyway. Too dangerous to do otherwise.”

“I agree. And maybe I should speak to Chase about this.”

“Why?”

Wendy tipped her head. “Because we’re burning oxygen back here, and this plane is probably pretty airtight.”

Rory hadn’t thought of that, but as soon as Wendy spoke, she knew she was right. Planes had air exchangers, but they probably worked on electrical power like everything else. Power they didn’t have now. “Go ask. I’ll babysit.”

Much better to have Wendy ask. Not that Chase Dakota had spared her more than a few words, but she got the feeling he didn’t much care for her. Ordinarily, she didn’t turn tail in the face of men like that, but right now she was acutely aware that she wasn’t the person in charge. That put her on the defensive, and for now that meant stirring up as little trouble as possible.

“Houston,” she muttered under her breath, “we have a problem.”

Except they weren’t halfway to the moon. Although they might as well have been at the moment. She heard some noise from up front and stuck her head out of the galley. Chase and Wendy’s husband were pushing the door open a crack. Just a crack. Then they disappeared in the men’s compound, so aptly named a cockpit, she thought sourly, and went back to their machinations with the machinery.

No emergency beacon? She refused to believe that was possible. Weren’t those damn things supposed to work no matter what? Or maybe that was the cockpit race recorder she was thinking of. All of a sudden she wished she knew more about planes and less about finding and drilling for oil. Or more about cancer and her sister’s condition.

She was so used to being on top of things that it killed her to consider all the things she didn’t know anything about—like planes and cancer and how long it would take that damn water to boil. Because she sure would like a cup of that coffee.

Wendy rejoined her. “We might get a little chilly. They tried to open the door to a minimum so we don’t suffocate, but …” She shrugged. “Nobody said camping in a blizzard in a crashed plane was going to be easy.” “What do you know about the pilot?” Rory asked.

“I mean …”

Wendy’s face gentled. “It’s okay. He’s a stranger to you and here we are in a mess. But, trust me, Chase was a military pilot before he started his charter service. He knows what he’s doing, and if we lost fuel, then he’s right about why. He’s not the kind of guy who would authorize any maintenance shortcuts. And, as for right now, I can tell you the military gave both him and my husband a lot of survival training.”

“Okay.”

Something in Wendy’s face changed. “Billy Joe—oh, he’d kill me if he heard me call him that to someone else—”

“Why?”

“He’s just never liked his given name. He prefers everyone to call him Yuma.”

“I can do that.”

Wendy smiled. “I’m sure you can.” “You were going to say?”

“Yuma lived up here in these mountains for a few years after he got back from the war. Post-traumatic stress. He knows how to survive these mountains in the winter.”

“That’s good to know. That he’s experienced, I mean, not the other.” “I understood.”

“How did you two meet? Were you just neighbors?”

Wendy smiled again. “Oh, it’s a much more interesting story than that. Billy Joe was a medevac pilot in Vietnam. The experience left him with a lot of nightmares, so for years he lived up in these mountains with some other vets. They just couldn’t handle the bustling world at times. So they kind of built their own hermitage.”

Rory nodded. “That must have been rough.”

“Oh, it was. Anyway, my dad was a Vietnam vet, too, and when Billy Joe got well enough to try to return to life, Dad got him hired as our medevac pilot. Our first one, actually.”

“That was nice of your dad.”

“He lived to regret it.” Wendy laughed quietly, letting Rory know it wasn’t a bad thing. “Anyway, I had a crush on Yuma from the time I was sixteen. He was so much older and so aware of his flaws that he ran from me like a scared rabbit. And finally my dad told me to stop torturing the man.”

“Ouch. That must have hurt.”

“It did at first. But, you know, it finally got through my thick head that my dad was right. I was too young, too inexperienced, and Billy Joe had every reason to avoid me, and not just because I was a kid.”

“So what happened?”

“I went off to nursing school, then worked in a bigcity hospital for a few years until I practically had my own PTSD. When I came back here it was to become the flight nurse with the Emergency Response Team.” She gave a little laugh. “You could say I wasn’t exactly welcome on that helicopter.”

“But something must have changed.”

Wendy nodded, her gaze becoming faraway for a few minutes. “It was rough, but here we are now … together forever as Yuma likes to tease me.” She turned a bit. “Is that water heating?”

Rory looked back. “I see a bit of steam on the surface.”

“Good, we’ll make it yet.”

Even the little bit that Wendy had told her had given her an inkling of what her husband had suffered. And some of it, at least, had to be replaying in her heart and mind.

Rory sighed, realizing she wasn’t the only person on this plane who had serious concerns. Yes, Cait’s life hung in the balance, but surely Wendy must be worrying about Yuma and whether this would affect him.

Yet Wendy soldiered cheerfully on, confident that things would work out. Rory found herself wondering, for the first time, when she had started to lose hope for Cait. Because that’s what was going on here: the loss of hope.

Not just the threat of being stranded, but the loss of hope. Did she really think nothing could save Cait now?

The thought appalled her. She shook it away, mentally stomped it into some dark place she couldn’t afford to look at. Not now.

Twenty minutes later the four of them were sitting in the passenger lounge savoring hot cups of coffee. Cait still slept, but Wendy and Rory had agreed that their next task would be making soup for her.

“The way I see it,” Chase said, “we need to get a fire going outside for at least a little while. We can’t keep that door open too long or we’ll freeze. And cooking with candles is not only slow but could be deadly.”

Rory nodded agreement. No argument with him on that score.

“The wind is a beast, though, so it won’t be easy. We’ll need to cook, and cook fast before the fire gets buried in snow.”

Rory glanced toward one of the few windows still not covered by snow, and could see nothing but white. “It’s that bad?”

“Oh, yeah,” he answered her. “I don’t want to burn any more candles than we absolutely must because of fire danger, but we’re going to have to burn some, obviously. We’ve got protection against the wind, our body heat will help in a space this small, but it’s still going to get pretty cold.”

Rory couldn’t help but glance back at the tiny bedroom where her sister slept. “I hope she can handle it.”

“She’s my top priority,” Chase said flatly. “Cancer?”

Rory nodded. “Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. NHL for short. She hasn’t got a lot of reserves left.”

“I can see that. We’ll keep her warm and fed if I have to light a fire in the aisle, okay?”

“I’m not sure going that far would help anyone.” But for the first time she met his gaze, truly met it, and felt a pleasant, astonishing shock. It wasn’t because those gunmetal eyes for the first time looked gentle, though. No, it was something else, something that heated places she was ashamed to even be aware of at such a time.

A sexual reaction at a time like this? She almost wanted to hang her head until a quiet voice in the back of her mind reminded her that adrenaline, shock and danger did funny things to a person. Life asserted itself in the most primitive way imaginable.

Plus, she was dependent on this guy. It was probably a cavewoman response, nothing more. At the same time, it felt good, shocking though it was, so she just let it be. Something in her life needed to feel good.

But it also put her on guard. She couldn’t afford to lose her mental footing now—most especially now—and not to a primitive impulse to forget all sense and escape into a few moments of hot pleasure.

“What do you do?” Chase’s question shocked her out of her internal dissection.

“What? Why?”

“I’m just wondering if you bring any additional skills to the table here. Yuma and I are trained in survival, and he’s a huge advantage for us in that he lived in these mountains during weather like this, without so much as a cabin. Wendy’s a nurse and can help take care of your sister. So what do you do?”

For the first time in her life, Rory was embarrassed to admit the truth. “I’m a petroleum geologist. I know about finding oil, and I know about drilling for it. The closest I’ve ever come to survival conditions was when I told the men working for me to stop drilling because they were going to hit a pocket of natural gas, and they didn’t listen. And it wasn’t my survival that was at stake.”

Chase nodded, but didn’t look scornful. Instead, all he said was, “You probably know more than you think.”

“Well, I do know the air is getting stale in here and apparently you have to open the door to let in fresh, and that cools us down, too.”

He nodded. “We’re in a fairly airtight tube. That has advantages and disadvantages, obviously. Something I need to work on.”

“And the beacon?”

“Something else I need to work on. But that’s not all, Ms. Campbell.”

“Call me Rory, please.” Formality felt utterly awkward right now.

“I’m Chase then. Anyway, an emergency beacon works great when someone’s looking for it. Assuming, of course, it’s one of the things on this plane that’s still working, and little enough is.”

Rory felt her chest tighten with anger and something approaching despair. She had only one goal right now: get Cait into that trial before it was too late. So, of course, everything possible had gone wrong. Listening to Chase, it was hard to remember they were lucky the plane had come down reasonably intact and that no one was injured. Or maybe not just lucky. Maybe she needed to acknowledge this man’s piloting expertise. But she wasn’t ready to do that. Not with every new bit of information hitting her like a body blow.

Chase continued, his tone quietly emphatic, as if he were determined to make her understand. “Nobody’s looking for us right now because of the storm, and we’ve got an additional complication … we’re down in the mountains. That limits range. I don’t have a satellite downlink, either, maybe because of the storm, but GPS is down, so that means the beacon can’t transmit our location. And with every minute we’re getting buried deeper in snow. I doubt the trail left by our slide along the mountain is going to be visible for long, if it even still is.”

Her heart knocked uncomfortably. “So we’re invisible.”

“Right now, yes, and we’re also inaccessible, so we need to conserve everything we can. After the storm passes, we might get satellite back, but I’m not going to keep trying until after the storm because I need to preserve what batteries I’ve got. I’ll work on checking the beacon. With any luck it’s still working and will work for days.”

“And after the storm?” she asked. “I can’t just sit here waiting indefinitely for rescue. My sister … my sister only has four days of medicine.”

His answer was quiet. “I understand. Believe me. I understand.” Then he dropped another bomb. “I’m going to have to turn off the emergency lighting. That’s running on batteries, too.”

It was already dark in the plane. And now it was going to get even darker. Rory suppressed a shudder and tried to find the steel will that had helped her rise in what was most definitely a man’s world.

Right now, however, it had deserted her. All she could do was look toward the back of the plane and her sick, dying sister, and wonder if she was going to fail Cait.

All because she’d tried to spare Cait a fatiguing, uncomfortable commercial flight. All because she’d wanted to get Cait to the hospital the fastest way possible.

Maybe sometimes fate just wouldn’t let you take charge.

Chase watched the expressions play over Rory’s face as she absorbed the bad news. It took real effort to read her, as if she practiced keeping a straight face, but her guard seemed to be down at the moment. She truly worried about her sister, of that he had no doubt, and her acceptance of his risk assessments suggested that she wasn’t one who argued for the sake of argument. Once she had accepted that someone knew what he was doing, she didn’t waste energy fighting it.

That made her fairly unique in his experience. But no less troublesome, because she really was a rare beauty, though she did nothing to enhance her looks. Not even a smidgeon of makeup highlighted her eyes, lips or cheeks. Nor did she need them. And those bright blue eyes of hers appealed to him at a deeper level than thought. A level he told himself he couldn’t afford to pay attention to right now. Rescuing passengers and indulging in passions couldn’t possibly mix well. Besides, as he ought to know by now, women didn’t seem to like him for very long.

He shook himself free of reverie and looked at Yuma. “You said something about the wind when we were outside.”

“Yeah,” Yuma said. “We need to get ready to build that fire. The wind won’t entirely stop, but it will change direction after sunset. It always does in these mountains, even in a storm. I don’t know why that is, but it’ll get calmer for a while and we need to be ready to take advantage of it. Ideally, we should try to make a firebox with metal, if we can find enough in here.”

“We can,” Chase said firmly. “The galley doors are aluminum. And there are other things, too.”

“Good. Let me get one more cup of that coffee before we go out again. Damn, I’d forgotten how cold this mountain can get.”

Chase saw Wendy lay her hand on Yuma’s forearm, and thought again about how hard this could turn out to be for the man. Not just the plane crash, but all the resurrected memories of his time in these mountains, hiding from the demons of war that wouldn’t leave him alone.

The only solution for any of them right now was to keep busy, to feel that they were accomplishing something. First rule: Leave no room for despair. Paralysis would accomplish nothing, and despair could be a killer.

“Okay,” he said briskly. “Let’s see about making that firebox. A hot meal would do us all some good.” He noted that Rory went first to check on her sister. Understandable. Unfortunately, the fact that she looked more worried when she emerged concerned him.

“Is she too cold?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. It’s just that she’s sleeping so much. Too much.”

“We need to get some calories into her,” he said. “Can she hold down food?” “Mostly liquids.”

“Then we’ll get her some soup first thing.” With that he picked up a screwdriver and started helping Yuma pull down the galley doors.

“What can I do?” Rory asked.

Chase’s instinctive response was to tell her to keep an eye on her sister. Then he realized that she needed something far less passive to do. Something that made her feel like she was doing more than holding a death watch.

“There are some aluminum doors up front, too. They’re faced with wood veneer, but they’re aluminum. There’s another screwdriver in the service hatch I left open.” He wasn’t sure she’d be able to work the screws—they’d been mechanically tightened—but she might surprise him. He and Yuma weren’t exactly finding it impossible to loosen the screws in the galley doors.

She didn’t say a word as she eased past him, but as his gaze followed her briefly, he could see a sense of purpose in her posture and step. Good.

Then he watched Wendy slip back into the bedroom to check on their patient. Rory, he suspected, hadn’t wanted to let anyone else touch her sister. A born guard dog. He liked that.

Chase and Yuma carried the aluminum doors outside into the blizzard to hammer them into the shape they needed. Neither of them wanted to do it in the confines of the plane because the banging would be deafening.

Ignoring the cold and the snow that stung like small knives, they battered the doors into a box with a top. Removing a couple of the inset latches created for air to circulate.

“Instant stove,” Chase remarked an hour later.

“Hardly instant,” Yuma replied. “I’m soaked with sweat.”

“That’ll teach you to wear warm clothes in the dead of winter.”

Yuma chuckled. “Better than being out here in rags with ratty blankets.”

“Guess so.” Chase paused after shaking the firebox to ensure it was sturdy. “You doing okay?”

“I’m fine. Yeah, I’m remembering, but the memories of being out here aren’t memories of Nam. It’s too damn cold.”

Chase laughed. “I guess I can see that.”

Yuma stood straight and looked toward the almost invisible trees that surrounded the clearing. “Can I be honest, Chase?”

“Hell, yeah.” But Chase felt himself tightening inwardly, ready for criticism he felt he deserved.

“You did an amazing job of bringing us down. I’m not sure how you managed it. We’re alive because of it.”

Chase waited, sure there was more, but it didn’t come immediately. Finally, Yuma sighed, the sound almost snatched away by the wind.

“I’m grateful,” he said. “More grateful than I can tell you because honest to God, Chase, I’m not sure I could survive without Wendy.”

Chase felt his chest tighten in sympathy, but didn’t know what to say.

“Do you know I used to be an alcoholic?”

“I was probably too young to hear that rumor.”

Yuma chuckled and looked at him. “Yeah, probably. But I was. It was a way to hide. Anyway, I got my act cleaned up before Wendy came back to town to take her second swing at my bachelorhood. Thing was, even then I kept a bottle in my desk drawer.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to do that.”

“I wasn’t.” Yuma’s mouth tightened a bit. “It was my security blanket. I knew it was right there if I ever couldn’t fight off the urge for a drink. For me, anyway, it kept the craving from going over the top.”

“I never would have thought that of you.”

Yuma shrugged. “It wouldn’t work for most folks, I guess, but it worked for me. Never even broke the seal on the bottle. And then Wendy … well, I haven’t needed to keep a bottle around since.”

Chase nodded, getting the message. Or at least he thought he did. “You’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

“Actually, no, I don’t,” Yuma said flatly. “Pride doesn’t figure into it at all. What I have is a lot to be grateful for, like that woman in there.” He paused. “We gotta save Rory’s sister, man.”

“I know.”

“I know you do.” Yuma took a step toward the trees. “That’s why I respect you. Now let’s got get some wood and some pine needles.”

Two hours later they had the firebox assembled and working outside. From the window of the plane, Rory watched as the fire burned within the three-sided box. It had taken some effort to make a chimney so it would draw air up and through, but it was working now.

Dimly in the swirling snow, she could see the men looking for more wood to keep it going. It was getting darker out there now, as night closed in on them.

She ordinarily liked the night, but not this time. The plane had gone dark to save battery power. The only light came from a lone candle sitting on the large work or dining table in the center of four of the seats.

As business jets went, this was a comfortably sized one, capable of carrying twelve or more passengers, with room to move around. She wondered what kind of traffic Chase could carry to pay for a plane like this, then let the thought wander off. What did it matter? There were apparently enough people left in the world who could afford this kind of transportation, and given that it was a plane, being based out of some invisible town in Wyoming was hardly a hindrance to him.

Reluctantly, she tore her gaze from the fire, experiencing a gut-deep understanding of why fire had been so important in times past. Probably since ancient times. It promised life, light, warmth. It held the night at bay.

Nothing inside this plane did that except for a single candle.

It was time to wake Cait and get her to take her medicine. Rory had hoped to feed her soup at the same time, but she couldn’t wait any longer. Wendy had heated enough water to make a couple of cups of tea, but no more because they had to be careful.

“Lots of sugar in it,” she said to Rory now as she passed her a mug. “And there’s another if she wants it.”

“Thanks.”

She accepted the mug, testing the temperature of the tea with her upper lip. Not hot enough to burn. Good.

Then she grabbed the small nylon bag in which she kept Cait’s meds, and headed back, aware that Wendy followed with the candle. A candle in the dark.

Cripes. She needed more than that.

Once in the bedroom, Wendy set the candle on the small bedside table, then slipped away to leave the sisters alone.

“Cait. Cait?” Gently she shook her sister’s shoulder.

“Cait?”

Slowly, Cait’s eyes opened, and she sighed. “Why don’t you just let me go?”

Rory’s heart stuttered. “Because I can’t. Not until we’ve tried everything.”

Cait’s eyes fluttered. “I guess.”

“Cait, just because Hal left you doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to live for. You don’t need me to tell you that. Now I’ve got a fresh cup of sweet tea for you.”

“And medicine. Always medicine.”

“Yeah, medicine. I’m glad I have it. Do you think I can help you sit up a bit?”

“Sure.” Cait sounded utterly listless. Rory didn’t let that stop her. She lifted her sister carefully, propping her up on pillows.

“Try some tea first,” she suggested. “It’ll give you energy.”

Holding the cup to her sister’s lips, she got half of it down her, tiny sip by tiny sip. And as the sugar hit her system, Cait seemed to gain a little energy. Just a little.

Then came the pills. This part sucked, because Cait wasn’t finding it all that easy to swallow anymore, not since the radiation treatments. But they got those down, too.

“Great,” Rory said, with a smile she didn’t feel. Talk about a small handful of pills being an ordeal. “There’s another cup of tea for you. I’ll go get it.”

“I already have.”

Rory turned to see Wendy standing in the doorway with another mug in hand. “Hi, Cait, I’m Wendy.”

Cait gave a little nod. “So there are other passengers on the plane?”

“Me and my husband,” Wendy said, moving forward to exchange mugs with Rory. “When you get a little more rested, you’ll have to join us in the cabin. I’ll bet we’ve all got interesting stories to trade.”

Rory expected Cait to decline, but instead was astonished to see her sister smile, however weakly. “Sounds like fun.”

“It will be. All of us have had some crazy experiences. I’ll bet Rory has had more than her share. And you can keep her honest for us.” Wendy winked and slipped out again.

“I like her,” Cait whispered.

“Me, too. More tea?”

The second cup went down easier than the first. Unfortunately, almost as soon as it was gone, Cait’s eyes fluttered closed and she slipped away again. A few words and a couple of cups of tea had been enough to wear her out.

That was not good, not good at all. Rory had the awful feeling that she could almost see the darkness gathering around her sister, waiting to claim her.

No. God, no. She jumped up, forcing the vision away. She couldn’t afford to let such thoughts even cross her mind.

You ‘re not getting her, she thought between anger and despair. You’re not taking my sister away! The silence seemed to mock her.

Chapter 3

Dinner worked out quite well, given the arduous conditions outside. At least they weren’t going to starve, Rory thought. Cait even managed to swallow a cup of soup and another cup of heavily sweetened tea. This time she asked to join them in the cabin.

Rory’s heart swelled almost to breaking. As soon as she bent to lift her sister, Chase appeared and did it for her.

“Nice you can join us, little lady,” he said as he carried her, wrapped in her blankets, to one of the chairs near the table. “You get too tired, just let me know, okay? And if you want, the seats recline all the way so you can lie down out here.”

“Thanks,” Cait managed.

Rory could only look at Chase with gratitude. He had stepped in at the right moment and said exactly the right thing. Not too much, not too little.

And Cait looked content for the first time since Rory had come home to learn how sick she was. These plane seats were wider than normal and deeply padded, so Cait seemed to have no difficulty curling up in a way that made her feel comfortable. She didn’t say much, and occasionally she seemed to doze, but she also paid more attention than usual to the conversation around her. She even accepted another cup of tea, and this time held it herself.

There was hope, Rory thought. There was definitely hope. She glanced toward Chase and saw the same expression in his eyes that she was feeling. He, too, seemed to see something promising in Cait’s effort.

But the wind and the cold soon reminded them that this was no social occasion. The plane groaned loudly again as a particularly strong gust buffeted it, but nothing moved. They’d be buried by morning, Rory thought. Completely and totally buried in snow. Then what? Panic fluttered through her in a single quick wave.

“Let’s get down more blankets,” Chase said. “Then I think we should bundle in for the night. I’ll take first watch.”

“Watch?” Rory asked.

He nodded. “We’re going to burn at least one candle all night—more if necessary. Someone has to keep an eye on it. We also need to watch the cabin temperature so we don’t turn into popsicles overnight.”

Cait had dozed off again. “She’ll be warmer here, won’t she?”

“Probably,” he answered. “As long as she’s comfortable, I’d leave her.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Wendy said. “Yuma and I are just going to curl up together on these seats right behind her. Why don’t you take the chance to stretch out in the back for a bit?”

“I don’t feel sleepy,” Rory admitted. Not in the least. Her mind wouldn’t stop racing; she had too many worries.

“Fine,” Chase said. “You can come up front and keep first watch with me. Make sure I don’t fall asleep.”

She almost offered to stand watch in his stead, but caught herself just in time. He was the captain of this plane, after all, and she suspected that meant pretty much the same thing in the air as at sea. And while she didn’t defer to men simply because they were men, she did defer to rank unless given good reason not to. There was just no point in stepping on some toes.

“Thanks, I think I will.”

Maybe it would ease the terror at the back of her mind, the terror that they wouldn’t be found in time to save Cait. She’d seemed better for a while, but Rory knew how illusory that could be.

They settled in the two cockpit chairs with the accordion door closed behind them. There was no light at all, except one small red one.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Control for the emergency lights. I can operate them manually when I need to. Thank goodness.”

Thank goodness indeed. She suspected that if all those cabin lights had been left burning, the ones that guided the way to the emergency exits, they’d have gone dark for good by now. “Everything else is down?”

“For now. No point wasting any resources yet.”

“I suppose not.” Then, “So you really think a fuel line broke or something?”

“Or something,” he agreed. In the dark, he kept his voice quiet. “We have wing tanks, but there’s a central compartment where the fuel meets and mixes so that the tanks can be balanced. Make sense?” “Yes.”

“We could get in trouble if one tank or the other got used up too fast. We’d not only be struggling to balance ourselves, but we might lose an engine. So everything meets in the middle and fuel is passed back and forth. Considering that we lost fuel from both tanks simultaneously and rapidly, I figure something went wrong in the central holding tank. And at the rate we were losing fuel, I suspect it was being pumped out of the plane.”

“There’s a mechanism for that, right, to empty the fuel?”

“Yes. We can dump fuel for an emergency landing.”

“So that might have gotten screwed up?”

“Maybe. Something sure as hell did, and we won’t know until the NTSB takes a look. I know I got no cockpit warning of any kind until the fuel started to get too low. I’d already noticed the gauges were falling too fast, but no indication as to why.”

“And there should have been?”

“The way these babies are designed, this plane shouldn’t hiccup without giving me some kind of alert. What’s more, once I noticed the fuel dropping, we were over the mountains, airports behind us were closed and I still thought for a while I’d have enough. I never cut it that close, despite the weight of excess fuel.”

“So maybe two things went wrong.”

“So it would seem. But it did happen awfully fast. I’m just glad I was able to get us down in one piece. For a while there, I didn’t think I was going to.”

“I’m glad you did, too.”

She heard him shift, and as her eyes adapted to the near absence of light, except for the tiny bit of red from dash, she could see that he looked her way as he spoke.

“Look, I’m worried about your sister, too. Seriously worried. But if we had to crash in a blizzard, having an intact plane is about as cozy as it could possibly be.”

“I guess. Right now it feels like a damn prison.”

“That, too.” He didn’t argue with her, and for a moment she felt a bit embarrassed by her ingratitude. But then she let it go. Right now this plane was a prison as much as it was a shelter.

“So what exactly do you do?” he asked her.

“I own a consulting firm. We prospect for oil, and supervise initial drilling to ensure that our clients locate the well optimally. Most of my work these days is in Mexico.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“It’s like a great big treasure hunt, in one way. In another it’s a pain.” “Why?”

“Because it’s a man’s world, why else? More so south of the border.”

He was silent for a minute. It was a silence so intense she could hear their breathing. Apparently, between the soundproofing of the plane and the mounding snow, nothing else could penetrate this cocoon.

“That would be rough,” he said finally. “I watched plenty of women pilots face that stuff in the military. At least they had regulations on their side. You wouldn’t.”

“And a whole culture against me. Well, not entirely, but you know how that goes. At one job, I had a curandera come out and promise to place a curse on anyone who gave me a hard time. It was a last resort, but it worked.”

“Can you work anywhere else?”

“Most of the oil in the world seems to be in the wrong places for women to go.”

“But you get hired anyway?”

“I’m good at what I do. It may be a boy’s game, but I play it with the best. So I charge enough to pay some bodyguards, and sometimes to get a bruja, a witch, on my side.”

“Sounds almost like being in a war zone.”

“Sometimes. It’s not the pros who give me trouble, it’s the local hires. Usually they settle down with time. They know where the pay is coming from.”

“But what about that blowout you mentioned?”

“Ah, that. Well, a couple of guys with more machismo than sense didn’t listen when I told them our seismograph readings indicated that we were about to hit a pocket of natural gas. You always hit some gas, and there are precautions to take. I mean, depending on the depth, that stuff explodes out of the well under some huge pressure and a single spark is enough to cause a conflagration. We weren’t ready to open the gas pocket, I told them to wait, but they had some kind of incentive or bet on the line and ignored me. I’m just glad I got everybody else out of the area. Then, of course, we had a messed-up rig and a roman candle to put out.”

“And the guys?”

“They lived. Nice burns, though. I don’t think they’ll ignore orders again.”

She saw him shake his head, though she couldn’t read his expression. “You live an exciting life.”

“Sometimes. Ah, I mostly like the people I meet down there. I love the little towns, the pace of life, the color, the music. Roughnecks are just a tough group anywhere. When I’m viewed as a tourist I have a great time. The problem starts when I’m the boss.”

“I guess I can see that.”

“And it would happen just about anywhere. It’s like anything—you take the good with the bad. So you were a military pilot?”

“Yeah. I flew off carriers.”

She leaned back a little and twisted, trying to see him better. “I read a story about that once. A true story.”

“What’s that?”

“It was in Korea, I think. Some navy and air-force pilots were arguing about whether the navy pilots had a tougher landing to make, and the air-force pilots claimed they could land on a carrier no problem.”

At that a snort escaped him. “Why do I know how this is going to end?”

“Probably because you’ve landed on carriers. I guess they went out and drew the outline of a carrier deck and took turns landing. Needless to say …”

“I can imagine. And the navy guys probably crowed that the deck wasn’t even moving.”

“I believe that was part of it.”

“There’s a part they probably left out, though.”

“Which is?”

“The tailhook.”

Rory wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but she laughed out loud. “You’re right. I don’t think that was mentioned.”

“Of course not,” he said drily. “Look, I won’t tell you it’s easier landing on a moving deck, but with the navigational aides we’ve got and the tailhook, it’s not as hard as trying to land in that amount of space on flat ground without a tailhook.”

“I don’t need a map to get that one.” She hesitated, then asked, “Why’d you leave? You seem too young to have retired.”

“I failed my flight physical. And before you get all upset because I’m still a pilot, let me explain. Flight physicals in the military are rigorous beyond belief. Most guys will fail before they reach thirty-five. So some little glitch shows up, one that won’t keep you from flying, won’t prevent you from getting a job with a commercial airline, but it will prevent you from flying combat missions or doing carrier landings. Those are the rules. We’re still allowed to fly, to keep our flight status, but we’re off the books for actual missions.”

“That seems extreme.”

“Probably not. We do pull a lot of high Gs. Anyway, once I couldn’t make carrier landings anymore, I didn’t want a desk job so I resigned.”

“And built your own little airline.”

“One plane and me, a long way from my own airline, but basically, yeah.”

“And now your livelihood is lying buried in snow on the side of a mountain.”

“So it is.” His voice sounded tight, but then he let out a breath. “The important thing is getting everyone out alive. Then I’ll deal with the NTSB, the company that did the overhaul and my insurance carrier. By the time all that’s taken care of, I would almost bet I’ll be ready to kill someone.”

“You’ll certainly be older.”

A quiet laugh escaped him. “Goes without saying.”

Concern for her sister, which had been eating her alive for weeks now, cracked open just a little, allowing her to feel for him. “I’m sorry. I know how miserable that crap can be. I went through it on the blowout. I don’t know what was worse—dealing with the investigators or dealing with the insurers.”

“They were probably both equally bad. They have the same goal after all—to give somebody else a hard time.”

Another chuckle escaped her. “Oh, yeah. And to pin blame, preferably somewhere that doesn’t cause them any problems.”

“So what did they decide on that blowout?”

“I feared it was going to be pinned on me as long as the roughnecks stuck together. Easier to blame the gringa than the guys you have to work with. I was more than a little surprised to find out that a certain amount of gratitude made them tell the truth, how I had ordered the drilling stopped, and then, when I was disobeyed, cleared the area. At least nobody tried to say I should have halted the drilling myself.”

“Could you have?”

“Short of shooting two men, no. And by the time I got back to the site, it was too late. I’d ordered the drilling stopped that morning, then I had to run over to another site where they were complaining that the hole was dry, and by the time I got back … well, we were minutes from disaster. All I could do was tell everyone to clear out.”

She paused to sigh. “Oil wells stink when they’re pumping oil. Gas is mixed in, of course, but the hydrogen sulfide smell—rotten eggs—is enough to make you gag. There was no smell. They drilled into a pocket of pure methane, and it was odorless. That is so freaking rare. I had no idea they had already broken through when I started shouting for everyone to get away, and screamed again for those guys to stop the drill. No idea. I expected the smell. Maybe they did, too. I don’t know.”

“So the gas was everywhere?”

“Damn near. It couldn’t have been long, though.

Methane is heavier than air. It sinks to ground level. If enough of it had been out there, people would have started getting asphyxiated, and the flash fire would have singed everything at ground level. Instead, we just blew the well.”

She twisted toward him. “That’s why we have to burn off the escaping gas if we can’t manage to capture it. Because it sinks, and when it sinks it’s deadly. In the case of that well, we may have been saved by a good breeze. I don’t know. I’ll never know. I wasn’t there when they initially busted into the pocket so I have no idea how much gas just dissipated on the wind or how little escaped right before the explosion.”

“But why would those guys press on against orders?”

“Because I’m not the only boss. I’m the geologist. I find the oil, I try to keep them on track until they get the field open. There are other bosses, there isn’t anything like unions for those workers, people get paid crap, and if the guy running the drilling operation, say, is getting paid by the well, and not by the hour, he’d have a lot of incentive not to want things to slow down. And he might create incentives for his crews to push on, regardless of safety. I don’t know. I really, truly don’t know. I know what they want me to know, and I know what I can figure out from my explorations. Beyond that …” she shrugged. “The actual business end of what’s happening is opaque to me. I hear rumors, sometimes, but that’s it.”

“Sounds like a dangerous situation to be in.”

“Not usually. Most drillers are cautious and good at what they do. Most of the people working these jobs want to bring in a sound well, not a rocket. We have more problems from faulty equipment than from greedy people. For all I know, the entire thing may have happened because someone didn’t want to take orders from a woman.”

“Will you be going back when your sister recovers?”

She appreciated the way he posed that question. Her chest tightened a bit, but she squelched the feeling. She’d been alone for a long time, and she could handle this situation on her own. She couldn’t afford to show weakness because a stranger was being kind. “I’m not sure,” she said finally. “We’ll have to see how it goes.”

She heard his seat creak as he shifted. “I’m going back to check on the candle, make sure everyone’s okay.”

“I’ll go with you.” She couldn’t stand the thought of sitting here alone in the dark with that one red, unblinking eye. And checking on Cait had become an absolute compulsion for her.

“How come you have so many candles?” she asked him just before he opened the door.

“I’ve got even more in my hangar. An errant order got me a lifetime’s supply, and the restocking fee was huge beyond belief.”

That brought a smile to her lips and lifted her spirits a bit. It seemed that life happened to everyone.

“They make great gifts,” he said quietly, a note of humor in his voice. “Well, they did until people started running when they saw me coming.”

Everything in the cabin seemed fine. Rory bent over her sister, touching her cheeks, finding them cool but not too cool. She waited a moment, until she felt the flutter of her sister’s breath. All was good for now.

The wind’s buffeting made the plane creak a bit, but quietly now, not as loudly as earlier. Rory guessed that meant they were getting buried.

“I need some coffee,” Chase said. “And since it’s cooling down in here, we need to burn a couple of extra candles anyway.”

“Oxygen?”

He pointed to the door. “I think enough can get in through that hole the lock left, but if it starts to feel at all stuffy, let me know. The candle seems to be burning normally though, which is a good sign.”

Maybe the only sign they’d have, Rory thought. If the candle flames dimmed, they’d know they were in trouble. Like canaries in a coal mine. And a darned good reason to keep watches.

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