Jennifer Greene - Sunburst

“Listen here. I expected a lot of praise for packing so light-”

“You did, Erica. You packed lightly for snow, rain, tropical conditions, illness, health, starvation, plague, snakebite…” He vaulted lightly into the seat beside her. “You even remembered to put on a blouse.”

She thought he was giving the little white camisole a lot of status. Nevertheless, she smiled. His door was closing; they were going. Kyle started the plane’s engine and she could feel a thrill of anticipation in her stomach. He held up the mike to announce his departure to the terminal, and let the engine rev for a moment as he handed her a stick of gum.

“Thank you. By the way, you do remember how to fly one of these?” she asked blandly. “It’s been a few years…”

“You are nervous.”

“I’m not. Really. You know what you’re doing,” she said easily.

“Fine. Do you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing, Erica?”

Somehow they were no longer talking about planes. “Do you really want to know?” she asked absently.

“Yes.” The word was short, succinct and chill.

She took a breath, looking at him painfully. “Shaking inside, Kyle.” So much for prepared speeches.

“Erica…” He ran a rough hand through the hair at his neck, all anger and impatience. In that quick silence, she sat frozen, but when he finally turned to her there was a half-smile on his lips. “You can stop shaking.”

“All right.”

“We’re going to have a nice easy flight. Lots to see. Neither of us will worry about anything while we’re in the air.”

“All right.”

He sighed, leaning back. “So buckle up.”

She buckled up.

“Put the smile back on. A real one.”

The smile hovered, became real when he reached over to kiss her mouth. A minute later, the plane trembled as Kyle forced power to the engine, anticipating takeoff. Very few minutes after that it was gliding down the runway, then up. She could feel everything, every vibration, every hum, in the little Cessna. It was a sensual feeling, almost as if she had a bird’s freedom to fly.

They were both quiet for a time, simply taking in the landscape as Kyle piloted the Cessna toward Wisconsin’s generously harbored shore on Lake Michigan. Along the way, the rich-colored earth and forests intrigued Erica. From the air, the small country towns seemed to pop out of nowhere, as if pioneers had just cleared the forests yesterday to make room for them and their fields and buildings. But when Lake Michigan suddenly spread across the whole eastern horizon, she could not hold back an audible gasp of pleasure.

Kyle’s hand suddenly covered hers. She just looked at him.

“You like that little pond down there?”

She chuckled. “I’ve seen smaller.” He didn’t let her hand go until her fingers relaxed in his. The contact seemed to soothe some of his own taut feelings, because he talked more easily then.

As they flew, hugging the coast, Kyle identified for her the wealth of cargoes in the freighters below-iron and iron ore, copper and steel, cars and automotive products, wheat. Erica found herself leaning forward, trying to hear above the hum of the plane’s engine. She had never associated the world of business with the water, yet the congestion below was not unlike a city’s hustle and bustle. Fortunes were being carted in every direction, the very basics of modern life: fuel, food and transportation.

“I read somewhere that the Great Lakes contain sixty-seven trillion gallons of water,” Kyle said idly. “Would you like to tell me why that crazy figure stuck in my head all these years?”

“You had a mean fifth-grade geography teacher?”

He grinned. “I did at that. But her scare tactics must have been worth something; I’ve still got the statistics. The lakes take up some ninety-five-thousand square miles-God almighty, there’s the Wilfred Sykes. ”

“Pardon?”

Kyle motioned below to a huge ship. “It’s the biggest ship ever to travel on fresh water, capacity of more than twenty tons-”

“Come on, Kyle. I don’t even see how you can identify what ship it is. I mean, I can see it’s huge, but…”

Kyle grinned, and the next thing Erica knew she was thrown forward in her seat as Kyle nose-dived to zoom in closer. Wilfred Sykes was printed on the side of the huge ship, and Erica’s stomach did a somersault.

“See?” he questioned.

“Yes. Thank you, Kyle. Remind me never to doubt you again,” she said dryly.

In another twenty minutes, they were soaring toward Green Bay. “Its original name was Bay of the Stinkers.” Kyle tossed the comment to her.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Stinkers was the French name for the Winnebago Indians,” he explained.

She lifted her eyebrows. It was difficult if not impossible to view the scene below as ever having been unsettled. Fisheries, limestone quarries, shipyards, paper mills…and right next to the massive paper factory was a harbor in which floated piles of wooden planks that looked like toothpicks.

The landscape changed rapidly as they headed farther north. First there was Marinette and Menominee, small shipping harbors northwest of Green Bay, and then Escanaba, Michigan, on the northern shore of the lake. Then…

Wilderness. It was as if they were going back in time. Forests stretched as far as her eye could see, dense spruce and balsam. There was an atmosphere of sudden quiet, as if their small aircraft were the only intruding sound.

Kyle had teased her about the black bears around Newberry, but now she could picture them. Bear and moose, beaver and mink, living just as they must have for centuries, totally unaware that civilization threatened the rest of their species. Endless streams and lakes curled into the wild country, sparkling in the sunlight beneath them. For short periods, they couldn’t see a stretch of road, not a sign of human life.

It was wild, raw country. The look of it unconsciously evoked a shiver in Erica, half an uncomplicated anticipation at seeing and experiencing something completely new, and half an unconscious awareness of the beauty around her. She was not a pioneer woman and had hardly been raised as one. It was not a place she would want to visit alone, even if the adventuresome spirit struck her.

She raised her eyes to Kyle and studied him. The thought was immediate; there was no place she would hesitate to go with him. Morgan’s face flashed in her mind, and when she put aside the memory of his assault, when she tried to remember the best qualities in Morgan and the best qualities she’d thought existed in their friendship, she wondered swiftly why she never had been tempted. He had everything she had grown up to value: money, charm, personality, an extravagant lifestyle and all-American good looks. Other women strayed. Other women with apparently very good marriages seemed to stray…

It all seemed so simple, looking at Kyle. She liked his eyebrows; she liked his stride; she liked his knees. During that one hurricane they’d weathered in Florida a long time ago, he’d become exasperated with her when he couldn’t get her to move quickly. She’d found it extremely difficult to get alarmed. She’d known he would always put her first; it was difficult to feel fear, knowing that. He was protective and strong and-a little-bull-headed. She loved all of that. Integrity, honesty…all those little things that made up such enormous love, right down to what a bear he was when he had a cold. A total bastard when he was ill, really. She loved that, too…

Kyle, as if suddenly aware she was staring at him, turned to her and raised one eyebrow. “What on earth are you thinking about?”

“That I don’t give a simple damn what you saw. It wasn’t like that.”