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“Damn right. I made Sevens full of Jacks on the turn and was about to get all of his chips. Instead….”
She held a hand up. “I’m sorry I messed up your little game for something as silly as trying to survive.”
“Little game?” He took a slow breath, willing himself not to tell her exactly what he thought of her. “That was no little game. It was a heads-up match to determine the future of this island! Or did you think those people you passed on the way in here were joking?”
“You’re not serious,” she said.
“I’m dead serious, Sticks. That’s how we decide things around here. Only fair way to do it, and a damn sight fairer than U.S. elections lately. And it saves us from being overrun with lawyers.” He let out a huff. “Little game. You know about as much about life as your mechanic knows about jet engines.”
She didn’t even smile. “He’s certainly going to be dead once I get back to Houston.”
He wanted to like her then. He really did. But he decided he didn’t need the headache.
“We’ll take a look at her,” he heard himself volunteering, then wanted to kick his own butt.
“Thanks. My company will pay, of course.”
“Of course.” Then something struck him. “Your company?” She bristled a bit, as if expecting a comment about how it was rare to see a woman who owned an aircraft company. It would never have crossed his mind if she hadn’t bristled. Now he needed to bite back the urge to tick her off.
“I own it.” Her voice was sterner than it needed to be, a sort of tacit offer of a duel at dawn. “Lamont Aircraft. We buy and refurbish private planes.”
“Looks like this one didn’t get refurbished enough.”
“Do tell.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
He unwrapped his cigar and stuck it between his teeth, deciding it was safer to bite tobacco than bite her head off. God should never have invented women. Or if he had to, then maybe he should have made them more like men: uncomplicated.
And now he found himself feeling almost sorry for her mechanic. Damn! “How long you had that mechanic?”
“He’s been with the company fifteen years.”
“You don’t look that old.” He was almost delighted when he saw her grind her teeth.
“I’m old enough. It’s my company. And I want to know what went wrong with that aircraft.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” he promised, which he shouldn’t have done, but when Delilah was in the room, men were known to do stupid, stupid things. “Craig and I are pretty good mechanics.”
Instead of saying something snappy, she merely said, “Thank you.”
Well hell. Now she was going to get nice on him? No thank you!
He rolled his cigar to the other side of his mouth and clamped down on it. “It’ll take a while, of course.”
Her eyes widened. “How long?”
“Well, I don’t exactly carry a parts store for Learjets. In fact, this’ll be one of maybe three or four times I’ve worked on one.”
“Oh, great.”
He grinned, enjoying her discomfiture. “So I’ll have to figure out what’s wrong, then fly out to get parts. And I can’t do that until after the storm passes.”
“Storm?” She looked even more unhappy.
“Don’t you pay attention to the weather reports?” That would be a mortal sin for any pilot.
She snapped. “Of course I do!”
“Then you can’t have missed the fact that we have a tropical storm headed our way. It might even be a hurricane by the time it gets here.”
“I was flying around that,” she said.
“Well, Hannah, get ready to meet Hannah, because you sure as hell flew right into her path.”
“THAT WOMAN IS a piece of work,” Buck told Craig as they stood staring up at the Learjet while waiting for the shop computer to download schematics of the plane.
“Yeah. All women are,” Craig agreed. And he was married and had three kids.
“Why do you suppose that is?”
“I dunno. I just know we can’t live without ’em.”
“I’m working on it.”
Craig snorted. “That woman volcanologist—Edna, isn’t it?—she’s got her snare set for you.”
Buck looked at him, and Craig finally shrugged. “Okay. Have it your way, boss.”
“Believe me, I intend to.”
Craig rolled his eyes. Buck chewed a little harder on his unlit cigar and wondered why it was that men who were married wanted every other man on the planet to be married, as well. It was almost like some kind of brainwashing.
“That Mary Jo must’ve really been something.”
For an instant, Buck froze. He couldn’t believe Craig had mentioned that woman. His former wife in his former life. The woman who had screwed around with all the available navy guys while her husband, Buck, was at sea as a carrier pilot.
“I told you not to mention that name.”
“Sorry, boss.”
That would teach him to have one too many beers. A slip like that and he was hearing about it for the rest of his life. He glared at Craig who held up both his hands.
“Sorry,” Craig said again.
“You better be.” He returned his attention to the jet, thinking he wouldn’t mind sitting in the left hand seat and taking her out for a spin. It had been a while since he’d flown anything that fast, and sometimes he still yearned for his fighter-jock days. The speed, the g-forces…they got into a man’s blood.
He sighed and went over to the computer to see how far along they were on printing out the fuel-line schematics. Sheesh, the thing was as slow as molasses at the North Pole.
“It’s the satellite uplink,” Craig said knowingly.
“Yeah? Then fix it.”
“Damn, boss, you don’t want much!”
“Then tell me why the satellite uplink should be so slow.” He rotated his unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth.
“Do I look like a psychic? Probably because of the approaching storm. Traffic is likely heavier than usual. I dunno. Maybe it’s not the satellite uplink at all. Maybe it’s the printer.”
Buck was acting like an ass and he knew it. Admitting it didn’t make him feel any better. But the truth was, it was getting late in the day, and the probability they would have those schematics in time to work on the plane today was highly unlikely.
And worse, his win against Anstin, his prime opportunity to save the island, had fluttered away in a blast of jet winds.
“Why don’t you just go home?” he suggested. “Unless the storm hits, we’ll start in the morning. And take the woman with you.”
“To that motel? No way. I wouldn’t put my worst enemy in that cockroach pit.”
“Then what am I supposed to do with her?”
Craig shrugged. “She can sleep on her plane.” He jerked his thumb toward it. “It looks posh enough for a sultan.”
“Except a real sultan would be buying a new one.”
“Quibble, quibble, quibble. You need to get laid, man. Then maybe you wouldn’t have all that energy to waste on stupidity.”
With that, Craig stalked out the side door, a man-sized door, that hadn’t been locked up yet. Buck stood alone in his hangar with two large planes and a couple of small ones that belonged to island residents, and wondered why he put up with Craig.
Of course, Craig was a natural-born mechanic. That helped. In front of him, the computer still hummed, a bar showing that the download had progressed eleven percent. Beside it, the big printer was busy drawing schematics. How complicated could it be?
Complicated enough. A plane, any plane, was a complex beast, and the newer they were, the more that complexity had been magnified.
So he had two choices. One of them involved going back to his office and facing the redheaded Valkyrie. The other meant sleeping out here on a battered recliner in the small parts office.
He decided the Valkyrie presented the lesser of two evils. He’d shoo her off to sleep on her plane, then peace would prevail, at least until morning.
He opened the door to the outside, rather than the one farther to the rear that joined with his living quarters behind the front office. Whenever he could, he preferred to walk outdoors.
But this time he froze on the threshold. Red sunsets weren’t unusual in the tropics, but this one blazed like fire, and it raged in the east, rather than the west, high in the sky because of the clouds of the approaching storm.
Magnificent. He soaked it up, filling his heart, mind and soul with the beauty. That was why he’d moved to this godforsaken island with its loony inhabitants and crazy casino. Because here he could live halfway up the side of a volcanic cone and be left pretty much alone while still running an adequate business.
Stepping out, he worked the mechanism that safely reinforced the door from the inside, then walked around to the front of the hangar to look west.
The sun was riding the rim of the Caribbean like an angry red eye. The water, usually a soothing Caribbean blue-green, was dappled in red and purple, and beginning to look choppy.
There was nothing in the world, he thought, like the sunset before a tropical storm.
Then, without warning, a different red filled his vision. It was silky, redder than red in the evening light, a fluffy cloud around a perfect face with challenging green eyes.
“Did you find out what was wrong?”
He might have sighed, except he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. Instead he clamped down on his cigar. “Nope.”
“Why not? I thought you said you’d find out what was wrong?”
Now he bit down hard. “Actually,” he said between his teeth, “I’m printing out the fuel line schematics right now. At the rate it’s going, it’ll probably take all night. You can thank the manufacturer for that.”
Her eyes flashed. In that instant, they looked like lightning reflected off the stormy gray-green shallows of the Caribbean Sea. But then, as if something flicked a switch in her, the flare quieted.
She nodded acknowledgement to him. “Thanks.”
To his surprise, it didn’t look as if she had to force the word out. Temperamental but in control. Despite himself, he was piqued.
At that moment, Craig roared by on his way down to his home in town. His Jeep kicked up a little loose gravel as he went by, waving at them.
Hannah Lamont waved back, then returned her attention to Buck. “I’ll sleep on the plane then.”
“Sure. No problem.” He pointed to the door. “Bar it when you get inside. No telling when that storm is going to hit.”
She nodded, but this time a flicker of uncertainty crossed her face. “See you in the morning, then.”
She started to brush past him, but then he had to deal with the fact that not only was he being a jerk, he was being a rude jerk. There were some courtesies he couldn’t ignore even in an attempt to avoid Delilah. “You got anything to eat on that plane?”
“I was supposed to be in Aruba shortly.”
Mentally kicking his own butt, he said, “Come on back to the office. If I have to make dinner for myself, I might as well cook for two.”
“You cook?”
He wasn’t sure if that was an intentional insult or just genuine surprise. So he opted for surprise. “Yes.” He rolled the cigar a little before adding, “Not all men are helpless without women.”
Her eyebrows arched. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t cook.”
No! He didn’t want to like her. No way. Instead of responding, he stalked past her toward the office and soothed himself with the reminder that she would vanish from his island the very instant he repaired her plane.
There was security and safety in that. A promise of the uncomplicated future he really wanted.
CHAPTER THREE
HANNAH WAVERED between wanting to strangle Buck Shanahan, and wanting to like him. He was as prickly as a pear cactus and seemed to have taken her in instant dislike. Other than ruining his poker hand (and she still did not believe that so many people could be insane enough to determine the fate of their island with a poker game) during her landing, she couldn’t imagine why. Well, she had been a little…upset when she deplaned, but any person with a half-ounce of common sense would understand what she’d just been through. Adrenaline tended to make you that way.
Still, he fed her. He didn’t invite her into the inner sanctum behind his office, nor did she especially want to go there, but when he emerged a half hour later he offered her cold potato salad, cold fried chicken and a healthy serving of steamed broccoli. All of it was savory. She gave him marks as a cook, if not as a mechanic or human being.
“That was wonderful,” she said when she’d sucked the last bit of meat off the bone. If it hadn’t been rude, she’d have licked the plate, too.
“Thanks.” He sounded gruff. Then he took their plates into the back, leaving her alone to look out at what was now getting to be a very dark night. She could see a portion of the earth’s shadow on the highest clouds, an arc of darkness moving toward zenith now, the red winking out behind it.
She supposed she ought to go out to the plane before it got any darker, but she felt strangely reluctant to move. So instead, she helped herself to another cup of coffee, and settled back in the chair.
She expected Buck to remain in his hermitage, but to her surprise he returned and sat on the far side of the counter from her. She could just see his head above the countertop.
She decided to try being sociable. “How long have you had this airport?”
“About eight years.”
“And before that?”
He looked at her. “Top Gun.”
She sat up straighter. “Really?”
He scowled at her. “Why would I lie about that?”
“I can’t believe you could give that up!”
That made him smile for the first time since she’d met him, and oh, what a smile it was. It transformed him completely.
“Eventually my back had enough of the g-forces. And I had enough of the Navy.”
“But you must miss it.”
“Yeah,” he admitted reluctantly. “Once in a while.”
“This must sometimes seem pretty tame.”
He cocked a brow at her. “Not when people try to take my head off with their wings. It reminds me of that Samuel Johnson quote. ‘Nothing concentrates the mind like the imminent prospect of being hanged.’”
She nodded, wondering if there was more to a man who could quote Samuel Johnson, but said only, “I wondered if I’d have to ditch her.”
He shook his head. “Not a good thing, ditching. Planes tend to fall apart in all the wrong ways.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Silence fell between them for a few moments. Then she asked, “Where did I land, anyway? There are so many small islands out here, and while I have a general idea where I am, I’m not sure which lump of rock I’m sitting on.”
He rotated his cigar to the other side of his mouth. “This lump is called Treasure Island.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. The first person known to have settled here was One Hand Hank Hanratty about eighty years ago. He was a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson, I hear.” The cigar bobbed as he resettled it. “Rumor has it the alligator bit off his hand.”
“The alligator?”
“Yeah. Apparently Hanratty brought him as a pet. Says something about the guy’s character. Anyway, Buster, the gator, is still around. Hanratty isn’t.”
“Well, if he brought only one gator, I can understand why the thing bit off his hand. Buster must be lonely.”
Buck shrugged. “He goes to Bridal Falls sometimes and scares the tourists when they’re having a tropical wedding. Mostly he just keeps to himself. Nobody wants to get him a mate, though. This isn’t his native habitat, and we don’t want the place crawling with gators, either. It’d scare the tourists.”
Hannah nodded. “What do tourists come here for?”
Apparently she’d asked exactly the right question, because Buck suddenly grew expansive. “Well, now, there are really cheap cruise lines. They like to pull into harbor here and let their passengers gamble at the casino. They market it as tropical charm, but what it really is is a bunch of big tiki huts with games, slots and a couple of bars. I guess it impresses people who come from way up north.”
Hannah nodded, envisioning it. “It would have a certain kind of charm, I guess.”
“If you’ve never been to Vegas or Reno, yeah. Anyway, they pull in for a day of gambling, and sometimes passengers will get married by the captain at Bridal Falls. I don’t reckon anyone knows who was the first person to do that, but it’s become a bit of tradition in these parts. Townfolk will attend to make it festive.”
“That’s nice.”
“It’s downright stupid, if you ask me.”
She felt herself bristling at his attitude, but tamped it down. She needed this idiot to repair the plane. She also needed to use his radio or phone or something to let her buyer know she would be late. Although after this he might not want the jet at all. She smothered a sigh. “What about the mountain? It looks like a volcanic cone.”
“It is.”
“Active?”
“That’s the story.”
Gloom began to settle over her. Could it get any worse? “How active?”
“It shrugs from time to time. Been awhile since the last eruption, though. Maybe five hundred years.”
“How often is it supposed to erupt?”
He suddenly grinned at her over the countertop. “Getting nervous, Sticks?”
“Absolutely not!” She had the worst urge to bean him with his cigar. Purposefully irritating, that was what he was. “Do you ever light that thing?”
He took the cigar from his mouth and studied it. “Why would I want to do something that stupid?”
“Then what is it doing in your mouth?”
He grinned again as he looked at her. “I have this oral fixation.”
To her horror, she blushed beet red. Quickly she looked away, out the window, hoping the last bit of red light would hide the blush.
“I’m going to bed,” she announced, rising quickly and putting her mug on the counter.
“Good idea,” he agreed. “You want to get some sleep before the storm hits.”
That froze her in her tracks. “Can we check the weather?”
“Sure. I’ve got a feed.”
She was relieved to hear it. At least this godforsaken airport had moved that far into the twenty-first century.
He turned behind the counter and flipped a dial. Soon a mechanized voice was reading the forecast. Then he flipped another switch and a fax machine began to print out a weather map.
Interested, as all aviators were interested in the weather, Hannah forgot her embarrassment and leaned over the counter, listening and watching.
“Tropical Storm Hannah has developed wind speeds in excess of sixty-five miles per hour. The storm has stalled at its current location and appears to be strengthening, with the barometer steadily falling….”
“Hell,” Buck said. Moments later he ripped the fax off the machine and stood up, putting it on the counter so they could both look at it. Their heads came close to knocking.
“Cripes,” he said, “look at those isobars. It’s tightening up.”
“Do you have an earlier map?”
He turned and pulled a sheet of paper off a shelf. “Here, see?”
Indeed the lines that measured barometric pressure were drawing closer together, around a circle that could swiftly become the eye of a hurricane.
“It doesn’t look good,” she said reluctantly.
“No, it doesn’t.” He took the cigar from his mouth and tossed it in the trashcan. “If she’d just kept moving, we’d have had a tropical storm. No big deal except for the casino. But if she stalls out there long enough, she could become a real beast.”
Hannah nodded and met his blue eyes. “I don’t like this.”
“Me neither. You might be here awhile, Sticks.”
“Is this place safe?”
“I built it to be. I didn’t want to lose everything every couple of years.”
“Well,” she said hopefully, “maybe even if it becomes a hurricane it won’t go past Category One.”
“We can hope.” He sighed. “Come on, I’ll walk you out to your plane. I forgot you don’t know your way around.”
The late evening was perfectly still, and growing darker by the second. The land had not yet cooled below the temperature of the surrounding water, so nothing moved. Later there would be a breeze, but right now the night was quiet and balmy. The air, full of moisture, felt soft to the skin. Hannah thought prosaically that in a climate like this, there’d be no need for moisturizers.
Buck opened the door to the hangar, letting her pass through first. He’d left a light on near the computer, so the cavernous space wasn’t completely dark. The printer was still humming, although the computer had gone into screensaver mode. Reaching out, he threw the switch that turned on the lights above Hannah’s plane. Then he went to look at the progress on the schematics.
He moved the mouse, and the progress bar appeared. “Nineteen percent. This is unreal.”
Hannah looked at the long stream of paper that was folding up on the floor. “No kidding. That’s my fuel system?”
“One and the same. And that’s less than twenty percent. We’re going to have our work cut out for us unless we find something obvious.”
“Well, it had to be some place the fuel could leak from fast. I didn’t have a whole lot of time.”
He nodded. “We’ll find it. In the meantime…”
“Yeah, get some sleep. You’ll wake me if things start to get worse?”
“Sure, why not? Worrying is a useful thing to do.”
She scowled at him. “I don’t want to worry. I want to enjoy the storm.”
“Enjoy?” He looked at her like she was crazy. “You’re kidding.”
“I love storms. Always have. I’d like to be awake for this one.”
“Well, if it decides to move this way,” he said almost sarcastically, “I doubt you’ll miss it.”
She cocked her head and put her hands on her hips. “Were you born a boor?” Then with a toss of her long red hair, she strode away through the dimly lit hangar to her plane.
“Wait a minute,” he called after her. “You have to lock the bar on the inside of this door after I leave.”
Annoyed that her high-dudgeon exit had been interrupted, she stomped back to him. He went to the door and pointed to a lever. “Throw this to the right. The bar will lock in place. Even Buster won’t be able to get in.”
Then he was gone, leaving her to fume. She threw the lever, glad to lock him out, then started back to her plane.
Not even Buster would be able to get in? All of a sudden she felt creeped-out. Why would he even mention it? Did that alligator actually sometimes come into this hangar?
Nervously she looked around as she hurried toward her plane. It was a relief to ascend the stairs, then pull them up behind her. Alone at last, she tumbled onto the bed in the tail without even pulling off her flight suit.
Enough was enough.
CHAPTER FOUR
HANNAH AWOKE in the morning to find herself eyeball-to-eyeball with a huge pair of reptilian eyes. For a few seconds, she was absolutely certain she was imagining them. Then the hair stood up on the back of her neck.
The alligator seemed to be grinning at her, his mouth hanging open. She froze as still as a statue, hoping he would think she was dead, not sure if that would work for an alligator, wondering how the heck he’d gotten on her plane, wondering how the heck she was going to get off her plane.
Then the alligator lifted his head and let out a deep, inhuman roar that seemed to bounce off the walls of the small cabin and shake her eardrums so hard it hurt.
Oh, Lord, was that a threat? Did alligators roar before they attacked? She felt the most childish urge to pull the covers over her head and convince herself she was hallucinating this.
Despite her best efforts not to move, a whimper escaped her and she pulled back. But, to her amazement, the gator didn’t leap at her in attack. No.
Buster looked wounded.
She shook her head, convinced her eyes were deceiving her, but nothing changed. The alligator looked hangdog. Hurt.
“Buster?” she said cautiously.
The gator’s head came up, and he eyed her with something that seemed like hope.