Читать книгу Stranded With The Boss - Elizabeth Lane - Страница 7
ОглавлениеTessa caught the displeasure—and the surprising flicker of panic—in the stranger’s glacial eyes. Most people dissolved into smiles and silly talk at the sight of her adorable twins. But this man was staring at them as if she’d just wheeled in a pair of ticking bombs.
He cleared his throat in the silence. “Well, this is unexpected,” he said.
Tessa lifted her chin to meet his gaze. “It’s not like I can just leave them behind. And you did tell me you had plenty of room.”
He exhaled a long breath as if mentally counting to ten. “So I did. Your bags are already on the plane. But I don’t know if that big stroller will fit. And you can’t hold your babies on the flight or let them run loose. They’ll need to be strapped into the rear seats. Can you manage that?”
“No problem. Their stroller seats double as car seats. They can be lifted free and buckled into place. With the seats gone, the stroller folds flat.”
“I see.” He glanced at the twins.
Maddie was struggling to wiggle out of her harness but Missy returned his gaze, looking up at him with a smile that would melt a heart of ice.
This stranger’s heart, however, must’ve been carved from solid granite. “We’re wasting time,” he growled, turning away. “Weather’s moving in. Let’s get going.”
He held the door while Tessa pushed the stroller outside to the nearby plane. The sleek silver-white craft, with its long, tapered nose, looked new and expensive. During her six years of work in Anchorage, she’d seen plenty of bush planes—mostly Beavers, Otters, Cessnas and Pipers—but never one quite like this, with a custom undercarriage that featured both floats and wheels.
He opened the passenger door. “Unfasten the stroller seats. Then climb in. I’ll pass them up to you.”
He was clearly accustomed to taking charge. Tessa saw no reason to argue with him when his suggestion made sense. And, anyway, she was still relieved he hadn’t kicked up more of a fuss about allowing the twins on his plane. She released the levers that fastened the seats to the strollers then stepped onto the float to boost herself into the cockpit.
“Careful.” He reached out a hand to steady her, his fingers strong and cool. Tessa clasped them for balance as she swung upward, feeling the electric contact between them. By the time he let go, her pulse was fluttering. Between her pregnancy and caring for the twins, she’d almost forgotten what a man’s touch felt like.
Had the compelling stranger been thinking of seduction when he’d offered her a lift? If so, she could thank her twins for dousing that idea. She wasn’t looking for a hot one-night stand. If and when she let a man back into her life, it would be someone kind and responsible, someone who wanted to make a life-long commitment and who’d be a good father to her little girls.
Inside, the plane smelled like a new car. The seats were butter-soft beige leather, the wood-grained instrument panel a polished array of dials and gauges. Whoever her rescuer was, he wasn’t poor.
Looking down from the doorway, she waited as he lifted Maddie in her car seat and carried her toward the plane. The twins were old enough to recognize a strange situation and react. Maddie broke into an ear-splitting howl. Her sister followed suit.
“Good God! Here, take her!” He thrust the screaming baby upward into Tessa’s outstretched hands. Setting the car seat safely down, she turned to take a frantic Missy from the man’s arms. The pained look on his lordly face left no need for words.
Tessa busied herself with buckling the twins securely into the two rear seats of the plane. They were still howling, their little cherub faces splotched with tear stains. Tessa wiped their runny noses, kissed them and murmured a few vain words of comfort. When she looked out the open door, the plane’s owner was wrestling with the stroller frame. Scowling, he glared up at her. “How the devil do you fold this thing?” he demanded.
“There’s a release button on the handle. Try pushing it,” Tessa said.
He tried again and managed to make it work. After stowing the stroller and closing the door, he walked around to the other side and took his place in the pilot’s seat.
“You’re flying the plane?” she asked, surprised.
He glanced back at her, one dark eyebrow quirked upward. “Do you have a problem with that?”
Tessa shook her head.
“Then sit down and buckle up.” He indicated the seat next to him. “We’re about to take off.”
Willing herself to ignore the twins’ cries, Tessa slid into the front passenger seat and clicked the belt buckle.
In profile, her pilot looked even more familiar than before. Who was he? This was getting ridiculous. Once they were in the air she would have to ask him.
“Here.” He handed her a set of headphones with an attached mike. “Put these on. They’ll cut down on the engine noise and let us talk without having to shout.”
Tessa took the headphones. Before slipping them on, she glanced back at her daughters. They were still crying but she could tell they were winding down. They’d been awake long enough to be exhausted. With luck they’d soon fall asleep.
Her mysterious pilot had put on his own headphones. He checked the gauges and then switched on the power. The propeller spun to life with a roar of smooth-running power. Tessa glanced back at the twins. They were wide-eyed but didn’t seem upset by the noise. Maybe it was like riding in a car, which usually tended to settle them down.
Humming like a high-end European sports car, the plane taxied past the hangars and out onto the runway. Tessa’s pulse skittered. She held her breath as he opened the throttle and pulled back on the wheel. The sleek craft rocketed down the runway, left the ground and soared into the air.
As it climbed, wind battering the fuselage, doubts assailed her mind. What if she’d made a foolish mistake, trusting her life and the lives of her precious children to this arrogant stranger? What if he meant them harm, or lacked the competence to get them safely to Anchorage? She should have held out for a charter flight. Surely they would have been able to find something to accommodate her if she’d given them enough time.
As the plane leveled off from its steep climb, she began to breathe again. The man at the controls appeared to be a skilled pilot. His hands moved with a sureness born of experience. His expression radiated calm confidence. She still wasn’t certain he was safe, but at least he was competent.
As if sensing her gaze, he glanced toward her. In that brief instant something about the light on his face and the set of his mouth struck her like a thunderbolt.
She knew who he was.
Until today she’d never met him face-to-face. But she’d seen his photo on company bulletins when she’d worked for Trans Pacific. He was the CEO, secretly referred to as “The Dragon” in part because of his name but mostly because of his management style.
He was Dragan Markovic, the man whose company she was suing.
* * *
Dragan leveled off at ten thousand feet and eased the Porter to a cruising speed of one hundred and thirty-two miles an hour. If the weather held, they should make it to Anchorage before dark. The time included a stop in Ketchikan for refueling and maybe a quick snack, eaten on the run.
He’d been flying since his late teens and was no stranger to handling small planes. In the past couple of summers he’d flown big-money clients to the company-owned lodge on a hidden inlet northeast of Petersburg for salmon fishing. But this was his first long-distance flight in the new Porter. So far, so good. At least as far as the plane was concerned.
He glanced to the right, where his pretty, redheaded passenger sat in grim silence, hands clasped in her lap. Was she nervous about the flight or was something else bothering her?
Dragan had hoped to draw her into a conversation. But the lady wasn’t making things easy. “Are you all right?” he asked, speaking into the mike. “Not getting airsick, are you?”
“I’m fine.” He could hear the tension in her breathing. “But I can’t help wondering what you have in mind for us, Mr. Markovic.”
So she had figured it out—and she wasn’t happy.
Dragan weighed the wisdom of speaking in his own defense then rejected the idea. He’d learn more if he let her take the lead.
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” she demanded.
He stalled for time, checking the instrument panel. “If you’d known, would you have come with me?”
“Certainly not. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. My lawyer would have a fit if she knew about this.” Turning in her seat, she glanced back at the twins.
“Knowing your lawyer’s reputation, I can imagine that. How are your babies doing?”
“Fine. They’re fast asleep.” She settled back into the seat. “Would you have invited me along if you’d known I came with so much baggage?”
She was sharper than he’d expected. Dragan managed an edgy laugh. “I plead the Fifth.”
“I saw the look on your face when I showed up with my twins,” she said. “You don’t like children much, do you?”
Dragan blocked the images that sprang up in his memory—sharp-boned faces, haunted eyes—images he’d spent the past twenty years trying to forget. “No comment,” he said.
“Then what do you have to say about tricking me onto your plane?” Her tongue gave a disapproving click. “You said you own the charter company...did you have something to do with my flight being canceled?”
There was no good way for him to answer, so he stayed silent.
Her voice was even frostier when she spoke again.
“Kidnapping’s a federal offense, Mr. Markovic, especially now that you’ve crossed the U.S. border. That’s Canada down below us.”
“I didn’t kidnap you. I offered you a lift to Anchorage. You accepted, and that’s exactly where we’re headed. We’ll be landing before nightfall. Call me Dragan, by the way.”
She was silent, her rose-petal lips pressed together in a thin line. Dragan could sense the tension building in her, the outrage, the fury. When the explosion came he was braced for it, but her words still stung.
“Of all the arrogant, low-down, presumptuous, high-handed tricks—” The words ended in a sputter. She stared down at her clenched hands. “How could you do this with a clear conscience? How could you just manipulate me into coming with you?”
“The question you should be asking isn’t how. It’s why.”
“All right. Why?” She gazed straight ahead into the sky-scape of drifting clouds. “Suppose you tell me.”
Dragan made a show of checking the altimeter while he thought out his answer. “There are two sides to every story,” he said. “Before we face off in front of a judge, I wanted to hear yours.”
“You could have just offered to take me out to dinner.” Her voice was flat, stubborn.
“Would you have accepted? You said you weren’t supposed to talk to me—a restriction that I find absolutely absurd. How are we supposed to settle matters if I can’t even find out what’s truly bothering you until it’s all dragged out in court? As it is, you have a captive audience here. You can say anything you like—swear at me, call me every vile name in the book if you want.”
“Don’t tempt me. I don’t work for you anymore.”
“That’s a shame, considering your great performance reviews. Somebody must’ve thought you were doing an excellent job.”
“You read my file?”
“Of course I did.”
“Then you know that before I was fired for supposedly not being able to handle the work attached to my position, I applied for a desk job in the Seattle office. It would’ve been a step down, but with the babies coming, I couldn’t travel and I wanted to be closer to my parents in Bellingham. I filled out the papers but I didn’t even get an interview. The next thing I knew I’d been fired.”
“Actually, I didn’t know that. None of that was in your file.” Dragan remembered noticing what had appeared to be missing information.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “Maybe you should pay more attention to what’s going on in your company, Mr. Markovic. It’s not just about the bottom line. It’s about the people.”
Her words burned like the jab of a hot poker. Stunned for an instant, he recovered his voice. “It’s Dragan. And I hope you’re prepared to explain what you just said.”
She shrugged. “You’ll hear it all tomorrow—in court.”
Dragan held his tongue, hoping she’d say more. But she’d lapsed into stubborn silence. The lady was tougher than he’d expected—and smart. Too smart to discuss the case with a man she saw as the enemy. He had to give her points for that.
Not that he was about to give up. Whatever it took, he was going to crack Tessa Randall’s protective shell and discover the real story behind her lawsuit.
But wanting to settle the lawsuit wasn’t all that was motivating him. Tessa had gotten to him in a way few women did. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he knew what made the sexy redhead tick.
* * *
Tessa gazed downward through the cockpit’s wrap-around window. She’d taken a fair number of flights between Seattle and Anchorage, but always by commercial jet and usually with her nose in her laptop. Only now, at a slower speed and much lower altitude, did she realize what heart-stopping views she’d missed.
Glacier-carved peaks, dotted with jewel-like hanging lakes, rose out of pine-carpeted slopes. On the right, the ocean stretched to the horizon. The coast between was a maze of wooded islands and sun-sparkled inlets. “Magnificent,” Tessa murmured, forgetting she was wearing a mike.
“Isn’t it?” Dragan’s deep, gravelly voice came through the headphones, startling her. “Amazing what nature can do, given a few million years.”
“Seeing country like this makes me want to forget all the ugliness and pettiness in the world.” Tessa forced a chuckle. “Of course, that’s not possible these days, is it?”
He banked the plane to give her a dizzying view of a waterfall. The wing tilted then leveled again. “How did you come to speak Japanese?” he asked.
It seemed a safe enough question for her to answer. “I was an air force brat. Our family was stationed in Japan for a few years. We had Japanese babysitters and watched Japanese TV. Later on I went part-time to a Japanese school.”
“We?”
“My big brother and I. He’s married now, works for a bank in London. My dad and mother live in Bellingham.” Tessa knew he was trying to draw her out, probably hoping she’d slip and give him some detail he could use against her. She would have to weigh everything she told him. But talking about her family seemed a harmless enough way to pass the time.
“I take it your parents are enjoying their granddaughters,” he said.
“Oh, yes. My mother was going to watch the twins while I went to Anchorage, but she broke her foot. Now that the girls can walk, it takes a lot of chasing to keep up with them.” She glanced back over the seat to make sure her daughters were still sleeping.
“What are their names?”
“Madelyn and Melissa, but we call them Maddie and Missy.” Tessa loved talking about her twins. She was so proud of them.
“They look exactly alike to me. How the devil do you tell them apart?”
“It’s easy. Missy has a little mole on her ear. But even without that, once you get to know them, you can tell by their personalities. Missy’s the snuggly one. Maddie’s the little explorer. Turn your back and she’s gone. Now that they know their own names, it’s even easier to tell which one is which.”
He paused a moment, as if weighing the next question. “Would it be too personal if I asked about their father?”
Yes, Tessa wanted to say. But if she gave a dismissive answer, he might imagine that the full story was something he could use against her, like a married lover or a pick-up in a bar. The truth would serve her best.
“He was my fiancé, a journalist. We’d planned to get married when he came back from his assignment in the Middle East.” Tessa swallowed the lump that rose in her throat. Even after two years it hurt to talk about Kevin. “He was killed in Yemen, in a car bombing. At the time it happened, I didn’t even know I was pregnant.”
“I’m sorry.”
“After he died, I didn’t want to go on. But my babies pulled me through. They gave me something to live for.”
“You’ve been through a rough time.”
“Rough in more ways than you can imagine. That’s the reason I’m suing your company.”
* * *
Her words silenced Dragan like the click of a closing door. For now, it was time to back off. She’d be more likely to open up about her side of the lawsuit if he kept things friendly and didn’t push her.
He’d already learned a few things about Tessa Randall. She struck him as an honest woman, interested in more than just grabbing easy money. But what part did her pretty face and seductive figure play in his assessment? Was he thinking like a CEO, protecting his company’s reputation, or did he just want to lure the lady into his bed?
Clouds were moving in along the coastline, but the sky ahead looked clear. Like any competent pilot, Dragan had checked the weather forecast before taking off. There was a storm brewing out in the Pacific, but it shouldn’t make landfall before tomorrow morning. He had an ample window of time for the flight to Anchorage; and the Porter was performing beautifully, its engine purring like a contented cat.
There was no way to explain the premonition that ran along his spine like the stroke of an icy fingertip; the sense that something dire was about to happen. It was a feeling Dragan recognized from his boyhood years in Sarajevo when shells and mortars would rain out of the sky to explode in hellish bursts of flame. Back then, that danger sense had kept him alive. But why should he feel it now? Everything was fine.
By the time they sighted Ketchikan the twins were awake and fussing. The floats skimmed the water as Dragan landed the plane and taxied to the fuel dock by the small airport. Across the harbor, the town lay along the narrow edge of pine-forested mountains. Autumn was already setting in. The cruise ships were gone, the dockside souvenir shops closed. Fishing boats plied the waters for the last of the seasonal catch.
While Tessa changed her little girls and fed them snacks from her bag, Dragan ordered the tank filled and walked uphill to the terminal to pay for the fuel. At the snack bar he picked up a couple of sandwiches and some bottled water. On his return, he found Tessa sitting in the cockpit, her babies once more buckled into their safety seats.
“Hungry?” He held up the wrapped sandwiches. “Chicken or ham and cheese. Your choice.”
“Either one, thanks. But first I could use a restroom. And I need to dump these somewhere.” She held up a plastic bag sagging with the damp weight of what smelled suspiciously like dirty diapers. “Could you keep an eye on my girls for a few minutes? I’ll be right back.”
Without waiting for an answer she opened the passenger-side door, climbed down to the float and stepped onto the dock. Dragan watched as she tossed the bagged disposable diapers into a trash can and strode up the long ramp to the terminal, her purse slung over her shoulder.
As he wolfed down the ham sandwich, Dragan watched her, admiring the confidence in her long, easy strides. She was a strong woman. She would have to be, to survive what she’d been through. And she was intelligent. He liked smart women—the bland, clingy ones were no challenge. The thought of getting Tessa Randall into bed and driving her wild with pleasure was enough to stoke a simmering blaze in his loins. But it was time for a dash of cold water. He couldn’t let his attraction to her distract him from why they were there. Tessa and her lawyer were out to drag the name of his company through the mud. He’d be a fool to let himself forget that.
A cooing sound from the rear caught his attention. He turned in his seat to see Tessa’s twins gazing up at him. A nap and a meal had transformed the pair from little screaming monsters to cherubs from a Renaissance painting, with Titian curls and sky-blue eyes.
Dragan tended to avoid children. Their innocence tore at his heart, stirring shadowed memories, sights and sounds he wanted only to forget. He’d vowed never to have children of his own. There was too much suffering in the world, too much danger.
He scowled over the seat at the little girls. The twin on the right smiled and giggled. The one on the left scowled back at him. Tessa had told him they had different personalities. He could see that already.
“So what are you two thinking?” His voice startled the smiling twin. Her blue eyes grew even bigger. Her sister’s suspicious frown didn’t change. “If you could talk, what would you say to me?”
“Da.” The smiling twin—by now he’d guessed she was Missy—began to jabber, making little nonsense sounds that were her version of conversation. When she turned her head, Dragan could see the tiny mole on her earlobe. He’d guessed right.
“So how about you, Maddie?” He addressed her sister. “What do you think of all this?”
“Phhht!” The flawless raspberry was punctuated by an impressive spit bubble.
Dragan couldn’t hold back a chuckle. At last, a female who spoke her mind!
“I see you’re getting acquainted.” Tessa climbed back into the plane and closed the door.
“You’re right, they do have different personalities.”
“See, I told you. Maddie’s quiet and restless like her father. I guess Missy is more like me.”
“Snuggly—that was how you described her. Are you snuggly, too?” It would be fun finding out, he thought.
“No comment.” She fastened her seat belt and slipped on her headset, as if to shut him out. “Let’s get going.”
Dragan taxied away from the dock and swung the nose into the rising wind. The plane skimmed across the water and roared skyward. The air was getting rougher now, turbulence buffeting the wing and the fuselage. It was nothing that couldn’t be handled, but he’d be relieved when they touched down in Anchorage.
Yet he knew that the time was limited for him to learn all he wanted to know about Miss Tessa Randall. So far he wasn’t making much progress.
She’d finished her sandwich and sat silent as the plane rose above the turbulence and leveled off in calmer air. Was she nervous about the flight or had he crossed the line when he’d asked if she was snuggly? Maybe she’d had a talk with herself in the terminal and concluded that she was being too friendly with a man who was planning to rip her apart in court.
The only sound from the twins was Missy’s contented babbling. The twins, thank heaven, seemed to like the drone of the engine and the motion of the plane. He could only hope the tranquility would last.
They’d passed over the old Norwegian fishing village of Petersburg and were headed in the general direction of Sitka when Dragan happened to glance at the fuel gauge.
His heart dropped.
The indicator was almost on empty.
