Hurricane Hannah

Several seconds passed before Hannah’s brain registered what her eyes were seeing. Pushing through the door was Buster the alligator, his mouth full of wildflowers.

Like a bouquet, she thought wildly as Buster took a step toward her.

That was it. Hannah leaped onto the counter and scrambled over it, landing in a surprised Buck Shanahan’s arms.

“Oh, my God,” Hannah whispered.

“Shh,” he said. He didn’t put her down.

Moving slowly, Buster edged his huge body into the office. His gaze never left Hannah as he made a relatively quiet groan and dropped the flowers on the floor.

“I don’t believe this,” Buck whispered.

Then, slowly, with great reluctance, Buster backed his huge length out of the office. Outside, he offered another mating roar.

“Wow!” Buck said. “Buster just brought you a bouquet.”

Hannah stared at him, seeking balance. “I’m underwhelmed.”

Also by Sue Civil-Brown

The Prince Next Door

Breaking All the Rules

Next Stop, Paradise

Tempting Mr. Wright

Catching Kelly

Chasing Rainbow

Letting Loose

Carried Away

Hurricane Hannah

Sue Civil-Brown

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AUTHOR NOTE

NO ALLIGATORS WERE harmed in the writing of this book. No humans were harmed by alligators in the writing of this book.

Poker is not advocated as a way to settle disputes or make money, except on Treasure Island.

Flights to Treasure Island depart regularly. Return flights are unpredictable.

Buster will meet you at the airport. Bring a chicken.

To the survivors of Katrina,

from survivors of Charlie, Frances and Jean.

Our prayers are with you all.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER ONE

HANNAH LAMONT DIDN’T have a whole lot of choices left, and she busied herself debating who she was going to skin alive: her mechanic, or the jerk who’d sold her this piece of junk claiming it was in A-one condition.

Because right now, she and the corporate jet she was ferrying were in serious trouble. Evening dimmed the sky, the clouds reddened with warning, the islands below looked too small and unpopulated, and her fuel was running low thanks to something that had blown about fifteen minutes ago. Her radio had quit, so she couldn’t call for help or direction, and her hands gripped the yoke as if they were throttling someone.

She bought and sold used corporate jets for a living. Never before had she ferried one in this kind of condition. Paranoid thoughts of sabotage began to swirl around the back of her brain.

She couldn’t imagine how Len, her mechanic, could have missed anything essential when he checked out this plane. She knew he’d spent four weeks bringing it up to snuff. And bringing these used jets up to snuff kept her in business. She took pride in delivering planes that were as good as new, even though they might have already been flown for a decade or more.

So what had gone wrong this time? Some kind of metal fatigue? Something that there was no way Len could possibly have noticed? Or just plain crazy bad luck?

But what the hell. She could always go out in a so-called blaze of glory.

Then she spied salvation. On an island that was mostly a volcanic cone, she saw not only signs of civilization, but, also, on a plateau, she made out an unmistakable airport. It was a small airport, and she could only hope she would have enough gas for the reverse thrust, because those landing strips looked awfully short.

But what choice did she have at this point? She couldn’t even warn them she was coming in. She just had to go. Dipping down low, she circled in and said a quick prayer. This or nothing.

As she descended to one hundred feet and circled the field in the standard oval approach pattern, she passed over the heads of a gaggle of people who looked at her like she was crazy.

Well, she was crazy. If she hadn’t been crazy she never would have taken over her dad’s business in the first place. No, she’d have found some sane job in an office somewhere where she didn’t have to put her life on the line on a routine basis. Because she couldn’t escape the fact that flying the Caribbean skies was asking for trouble, what with countries that wouldn’t let you land, smugglers who were trying to fly off the radar, commercial flights that thought they owned the airways and small, private planes piloted by people who shouldn’t be allowed to get both feet off the ground at the same time.

And of course, always the risk of being mistaken for a drug runner herself. But her luck there had been pretty good, when all was said and done. She’d only been shot at once, and held at gunpoint twice. So far the local police had been fairly decent to her. Once they ran their drug dogs all over her plane, that was.

And in some airports, she was even left alone.

This flight to Aruba should have been a piece of cake. She hadn’t even had to fly into the Bermuda Triangle, which always gave her the willies, wondering if this was the time some bubble of methane would decide to thaw and rise from the sea floor, thus depriving her plane of all lift.

But what should have been, wasn’t, and as soon as her wheels touched the runway, she threw on the reverse thrust for all it was worth. At least that worked. The shields immediately dropped behind her engines, redirecting the push forward.

But still the end of the runway raced toward her too fast. This was an airport meant mostly for small planes, and older prop jobs, not jets that had to come in faster in order to maintain lift. She had the brakes on for all they were worth, the flaps were at full, and all her hopes hung on the fact that she was light, having lost almost all her fuel.

She heard her tires screaming, and expected to hear them blow. The runway wasn’t smooth either, forcing her to jolt so hard her teeth banged together.

Oh, God! The runway disappeared almost right in front of her!

She wanted to close her eyes against her coming demise, when she realized that her plane was slowing so fast that her safety harness cut into her shoulders and lap like a knife.

Thank God!

Moments later, she and her plane came to a shuddering halt with only a few feet to spare.

For a long moment, she sat perfectly still, trying to catch her breath. Then the adrenaline turned to fury, and she wanted to kill someone. Now.

And anyone would do.

ON THE TARMAC below, Buck Shanahan’s adrenaline was also surging. He peeked at his hole cards again, though he didn’t need to. The two black Sevens were right where they’d been last time. Coupled with the Seven of Hearts on the table and the two Jacks on the table, that gave him a full house—three Sevens and two Jacks—and a chance to even things with the man who sat across the table from him.

Bill Anstin had become Buck’s nemesis. Treasure Island had been so perfect before Anstin moved here with his high-stakes dreams about turning the island into a major casino resort. Buck liked it just the way it was: sleepy, peaceful, an ideal place to hide from the world.

Each had a constituency. The old islanders, offspring of castoffs from neighboring islands and the earliest white settlers, tended to side with Buck. Anstin’s backers were the new arrivals, most of them Wall Street wizards on the run from the SEC and their investors, looking for a place to hide and launder their ill-gotten gains.

As with every controversy on Treasure Island, it was litigated at the poker table, the “Court of the Green Felt.” Buck versus Anstin, heads-up, no-limit Hold’Em, best two out of three games. Last week, at his casino, Anstin had hit a lucky flush to win the first match. This week they were playing on Buck’s turf, at the island’s small airport. And Buck was about to take him down and even the match.

When the jet came screaming in over the airport, Buck and Anstin and their audience instinctively ducked low and covered their ears. It passed right over their heads, the jet wash sending cards flying all over the tarmac, before the pilot circled back around and hit the runway with a screech of rubber and the roar of twin jet engines on full reverse thrust.

Craig, Buck’s mechanic, stared wide-eyed at the plane as it screeched and roared farther down the runway. “What the hell?”

Buck stood up and bit on the end of his unlit cigar tight enough to make his jaw hurt. “Idiot. Flying jackass!” He watched, somewhere between fury and fear as the pilot of the jet struggled for control, the tail fishtailing a bit as if the reverse thrust weren’t distributed evenly between the engines. In his heart of hearts he believed his runway wasn’t long enough.

“Get the fire fighting equipment,” he barked at Craig Thomas, and started trotting down the runway. “This is one pilot I want to save so I can strangle him.”

The list of offenses was long. Not radioing ahead to request permission, not checking landing conditions, not being sure the runway was long enough…. Not to mention scaring the hell out of him. And—by far the worst of the violations—scattering Buck’s winning cards.

The jet finally rolled to a stop, within twenty feet of the end of the runway. Behind him, Craig caught up in the golf cart that was their only fire engine. It wasn’t like they were a major airport. Buck caught the rail and bounded up, standing on one foot as they drew close to the plane.

The engines were winding down. Then, with an awful choke, one of them just stopped. Moments later the other choked, too.

Buck heard that sound and felt his heart slam. Okay, so maybe he wouldn’t kill the pilot. The guy had come in on fumes. But then his anger surged again. What the hell was he doing flying on fumes anyway?

What if he hadn’t found Buck’s airfield?

Worse yet, what if that jet had rolled off the runway and over the lip of the plateau?

And why couldn’t he have waited until Buck finished the hand?

HANNAH LAMONT SAT at the controls, her hands still frozen on the yoke. Ahead of her, just a few feet from the end of the runway she had almost run out of, spread a beautiful view. All of it sharply downhill. All of its tropical glory shouting: “Death!”

She actually wasn’t sure she was alive until she realized her hands hurt from gripping the yoke. Prying her right hand free, she reached for the throttles and pulled them back, shutting down the already silent engines.

Then she started shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. Adrenaline, which had carried her this far, fled like a rat off a sinking ship, leaving her all too mortal and filled with aftershocks.

It wasn’t that her life had never been on the line before. When you flew smaller aircraft, you often had a lot of near-misses. But this one was different somehow.

Different, she realized suddenly, because it never, ever, should have happened.

Anger sparked in her again, renewing the strength in her limbs. Unclasping her harness, she rose and stomped back behind the pilot’s cabin and hit the button that opened the door and dropped the steps. The hydraulics, working like a charm, hissed as the door opened from the top and descended, turning the steps right-side up.

She was just about to step on the first one when a golf cart carrying two men raced up.

She didn’t like the look of the guy who was standing on one foot and hanging onto the rail. He looked like an afternoon thunderstorm that had sprouted the stub of an unlit cigar. Handsome, yes, but angrier than an alligator that had missed dinner.

“What the hell,” he shouted, “did you think you were doing?”

“Choosing life,” she shouted back. “I suppose you’d have preferred I ditched it?”

“Radio,” he said. “You have heard of the concept?”

By this time he was off the cart and standing at the foot of the stairs, glaring up at her.

“It went out on me. Half an hour ago. Then I started losing fuel.”

“And you were idiotic enough to take this piece of crap into the air?”

That did it. The rats returned to the sinking ship and brought more adrenaline along with them. She stomped down the stairs, stopping on the bottom one so she could look this jerk in the eye.

“It wasn’t a piece of crap when I left. You got a problem, take it up with my mechanic. I sure intend to.”

Then she pushed past him and started striding back up the runway, going she knew not where, just needing to be away from this idiot until she had sorted through the last half-hour and decided just how she was going to kill Len, her mechanic.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the guy demanded. “This is my airport and you can’t leave this garbage on my runway.”

She turned and faced him, hands on her hips. “Just how do you propose I move it? There’s a leak in the fuel line somewhere, and there aren’t enough fumes left to taxi her. Maybe, Mr. I-own-the-airport, you can tow it? I’ll pay.”

Buck watched her storm away, and the funny thing was, all he noticed was the beautiful red hair and the way her rear end swayed. A beautifully shaped rear end, cased snugly in her green flight suit.

“Dammit!” he swore.

“Come on, Buck,” Craig said reasonably. “Let’s get the trash off the runway before someone else tries to land. Then you can argue with her some more, ’cuz she sure as hell ain’t going anywhere.”

Buck was in no mood to listen to reason. He bit down so hard on the end of the unlit cigar that his teeth cut through it. Swearing, he spit the pieces out and glared toward the woman’s retreating back as if she had caused it to happen.

Hell, she had caused it. If he weren’t so damn mad at her…. And who the hell did she think she was anyway? The Queen of England?

“Come on, Buck,” Craig said impatiently. “We gotta get this thing off the runway. It’s a hazard.”

Grunting, Buck hopped up on the golf cart and the two of them zoomed—well, as fast as they could in a golf cart, anyway—back toward the hangar.

She was a woman, he reminded himself sourly. A woman. God had put women on this earth to make life hell for men. They were trouble on two feet. Headache and heartache and every other kind of ache. He should have known there was a female at the yoke of that plane. It should have been obvious from the moment she zoomed over his head.

Craig spoke as they neared the hangar. The woman pilot was approaching one very angry crowd. “Whatever you’re thinking, Buck, just put it aside for now. This is business.”

“Yeah. Like my cards weren’t business?” Business. That’s all it was. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have to deal with idiots on a regular basis. Just because she’d scared the bejesus out of him didn’t make her a worse idiot than the rest.

But she had cost him a critical win. Now he’d have to play another match against Anstin to save the island, and he didn’t like having all of that riding on his shoulders. Another match. He swore savagely.

He felt his breast pocket and realized he didn’t have another cigar on him. Hell’s bells. Glumly he folded his arms and decided he could grind his teeth for a while instead. He wasn’t all that anxious to face that wasp again, and certainly not just for a cigar.

No, he’d rather take the whole thing on the chin at once.

HANNAH THOUGHT she had lost her mind, run over the edge of the cliff and landed in hell. H—E—Double-hockey-sticks, hell.

Because, as she approached the crowd that had been gathered around a small table, cards wafted on the breeze and people started yelling at her and each other.

“You idiot!” one man shouted. “He was gonna win!”

“I saw it,” yelled another. “He had a full house.”

“Yeah, right,” said a woman. “Like I believe your lying mouth.”

Then they all turned and glared at Hannah.

“You,” said a short, stubby man with the face of a bulldog, “may have just cost us our island!”

Well, someone was insane, she thought. Not knowing what else to do, she fled into the office beside the hangar before they could gather a lynch mob.

THE OFFICE was tiny but it was surprisingly neat. Hannah found a coffeemaker with a pot on the hot plate that looked freshly brewed. She sniffed it warily and realized that not only was it fresh, it was Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. Her favorite. She inspected one of the dozen ceramic mugs hanging on hooks from the wall, found it apparently clean, and poured herself a cup.

She sat on one of the plastic chairs before a window that gave her a view of the entire runway. Her blood was still boiling, and she could hardly wait to find a way to phone Len and tell him what she thought of him.

Then her hands started shaking violently. She had to put the mug down on a dusty table as shudders began to run through her. The adrenaline was letting up and reality was sinking in. She had come that close to dying. That close. Those engines had quit at the end of the runway. Too close.

Then the tug drove past the front window, and Mr. I-own-the-airport gave her a mocking salute. Anger flooded her again, saving her from her momentary weakness. It took a lot of effort not to flip him the bird in return.

That shocked her. She didn’t do stuff like that. She didn’t use those words or gestures. Maybe she was a little…crazy right now?

The anger had done her good, though. Her hands were no longer shaking, and she picked up her mug, determined to look as if she made emergency landings on a regular basis. As if not a single one of her feathers had been ruffled. She wouldn’t give that idiot male the satisfaction of knowing that she had, for even a few seconds, been terrified out of her mind.

The coffee was delicious.

CHAPTER TWO

BUCK AND CRAIG MANAGED to coax the dead jet back down the runway and into the already crowded hangar without so much as scratching the paint. They greased the job with some colorful language, but, at last, the shiny but dead Learjet 36 was parked next to Buck’s pride and joy: a fully refurbished, heavily pampered and polished DC-3 he used to ferry supplies to the island.

Unfortunately for Buck, the DC-3 didn’t have quite the charm when viewed beside the sleek, self-important jet.

“She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” Craig remarked as he came to stand beside Buck.

“She can’t fly, that’s the kind of beaut she is.”

“Aw, Buck, can the crap, will ya? The woman had no choice about landing. You heard those engines die. She’s a damn good pilot for pulling it off in one piece.”

That was the part Buck wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge. He wanted to stay mad for a while, especially when his mind insisted on resurrecting the image of her bottom as she walked away. He didn’t have room in his life for that kind of stuff. At least not the kind of stuff she was probably handing out with all the usual emotional strings as the price tag.

In fact, he’d moved to this godforsaken island to get away from all the Delilahs of the world. Last thing he needed was to get the hots for one who was not only beautiful, but a pilot, as well. Dangerous territory there.

“Let’s close up,” he said, refusing to respond directly to Craig. The daily afternoon thunderstorm was rolling in, and while he’d built this hangar to withstand almost anything, you never knew. But one thing was for sure, the reinforced steel doors had to be closed and barred for maximum security. He didn’t care about much, but he cared about his planes.

Outside again, with the hangar securely buttoned down, he paused to take in the golden glow of the late evening, and the reflection of it on the arcs of cloud that were approaching. Tropical Storm Hannah was edging toward hurricane force, last he’d heard. There was still a chance she would miss the island, but that chance was shrinking steadily.

From his aerie, Buck saw that the cruise ships had already vanished from their moorings, sailing off to friendlier, safer climes. Anstin’s casino, a series of huge tiki huts that sheltered the machines, tables and bars, was probably already moving everything into storage. The fishing town itself, of late containing more casino employees than fishermen, had started battening the hatches that morning.

But Hannah might pass them by. Even if she hit, the storm shouldn’t be too bad.

Shaking his head, he realized he couldn’t find an excuse to stand out here any longer. He was going to have to go into his office and work out the business details with the Valkyrie.

He still believed that Eve was the biggest joke God had ever played on mankind.

THERE SHE WAS, sitting on one of his plastic chairs, looking like she owned the universe, holding a cup of his finest Jamaican. Had he offered her coffee? He was sure he hadn’t. But then, a redhead who looked like that was probably used to having the world at her feet, used to having her own way. Delilah.

He wiped his hand on his pants, just to make a point of it, then extended it. “Sticks, I’m Buck Shanahan,” he said, adding nothing that might illuminate her.

“Hannah Lamont.” She shook his hand a little too firmly, as if she were used to the world of men and the handshake. Maybe to make a point.

“So what the hell happened, Sticks?” he asked as he rounded the counter and opened his humidor, seeking further dental protection in the form of a cigar to chew on. It was better than grinding his teeth.

“I don’t know. My mechanic signed off on that plane before I left. I was on my way to Aruba to drop her off for her new owner. All of a sudden I was leaking fuel like a hose. Then my radio went out. And while we’re talking, my name is Hannah, not ‘Sticks.’”

“Seems like you might need a new mechanic. And until I decide otherwise, you’re ‘Sticks,’ because that’s what I was holding, ready to even things up with that bastard Anstin, when you tore in here like a bat out of hell and killed the hand.”

“Pocket Sevens?” she asked.

“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.