Jessica Hart - Birthday Bride

When she snapped the mirror shut and dropped it back in the bag with her lipstick, David allowed himself to hope that she would relax, but no! Now she had got out an emery board and was touching up a nail, the next minute it was hand cream, the next refreshing herself with a spray of perfume. The subtle, expensive, undeniably sexy scent that he already associated with her drifted towards him, but he resolutely ignored it and, putting down his pen, pretended to consult the index.

Then—of course!—she had to comb her hair. Tipping her head forward, Claudia ran a comb through the silky mass and then tossed her hair back so that it bounced softly around her face. David tried not to notice how soft it looked, or how the sun through the window glinted on the gleaming strands and turned them into spun gold.

At last it seemed as if she was finished. The comb was put away, the bag pushed under the seat once more. David offered up a silent prayer of thanks and picked up his pen again.

Claudia was bored. David was still resolutely ignoring her and she had run out of ways to provoke him. It was no fun if he wouldn’t respond, anyway. She glanced at her watch. Still an hour and a half to go. Amil was talking to his neighbour, and the magazine just seemed full of articles expressly designed to remind her how old she was getting. With an impatient sigh, she began drumming her fingers on the arm of the seat.

For David, it was the final straw. He threw down his pen. ‘Can’t you sit still for two seconds?’ he demanded between clenched teeth.

‘I am sitting still,’ objected Claudia, offended.

‘You’re not,’ said David, hanging onto the shreds of his temper with difficulty. ‘If you’re not chatting up complete strangers, you’re tarting yourself up, combing your hair, admiring yourself in your mirror, or fossicking around in that bag, and then, when you’ve exhausted all those intellectual activities, you sit there and make that extremely irritating noise with your fingers!’

Claudia looked huffy. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I don’t want you to do anything! Why can’t you just sit quietly?’

‘I hate just sitting,’ she said sulkily. ‘I’ve got a very low boredom threshold. I’ve got to do something.’

‘Why don’t you try thinking?’ David suggested with an unpleasant look. ‘That ought to be a novel experience for you. The effort of using your brain ought to keep you occupied for a good five minutes!’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Claudia, very much on her dignity.

‘You amaze me!’ He shook his head in mock admiration. ‘And what have you been thinking about?’

‘Well, mostly I’ve been wondering how Patrick came to give a job to anyone quite so arrogant and unpleasant,’ she pretended to confide.

David looked at her for a moment. ‘What makes you think Patrick gave me a job?’

‘I know he’s the senior engineer on the project, so if you’re involved with the negotiations you must report to him, and if he knew how badly you represent GKS I don’t think he’d be very pleased. Patrick may seem very easygoing,’ she swept on, ‘but I’ve known him a long time, and I can tell you that if he felt that you were giving the wrong impression of GKS he would want to do something about it.’

‘You don’t think he’ll sack me before the meetings, do you?’

There was a look in David’s eye that Claudia didn’t quite like, and she tossed her head. ‘I would have thought that depended on you,’ she said tartly.

‘So if I’m nice to you for the rest of the journey he might let me stay?’

‘I wouldn’t want to put you to so much effort,’ she snapped. ‘Being nice obviously doesn’t come naturally!’

‘That rather depends on who I have to be nice to,’ said David, but before Claudia could frame a suitably crushing retort her attention was caught by a spluttering noise from the silver wing stretching out from below the window.

‘You know, I’m sure there’s something wrong with that engine,’ she said worriedly. ‘It keeps making funny noises.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said David. ‘What could possibly be wrong with it?’

‘I don’t know!’ she snapped. ‘I don’t know anything about engines.’

‘Then what makes you think you know whether it’s making a funny noise or not?’ He made a great show of leaning forward and cupping a hand to his ear. ‘It sounds fine to me.’

‘That’s what they always say,’ said Claudia darkly. ‘It’s just like a disaster film. They always start off showing people doing ordinary things, just like us.’

‘There’s nothing ordinary about the way you’ve been behaving since you got on the plane,’ David put in, but she ignored him.

‘They’re all having cups of coffee and chatting, and none of them realise that something terrible is about to happen—but they’re all right because they’ve got Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise or some other hunk to spring into action and save them, and all I’ve got is a paper-pushing engineer whose only advice is to sit still and keep quiet!’

David had been listening to her with mounting exasperation. ‘I have never met anybody who could whip themselves up into a frenzy about absolutely nothing before!’

‘It’s not nothing! I’m telling you, there’s something wrong, I can feel it!’

‘For the last time,’ said David between his teeth, ‘there is nothing the matter with the engine!’

With that the engine spluttered and cut out, and the plane veered sharply to one side. Immediately there was a babble of panic-stricken voices in Arabic as the other passengers were caught unawares by the sudden deceleration.

Instinctively, Claudia clutched at David’s hand. He winced as her fingers dug into his flesh, her eyes wide and dark with terror as he enfolded her hand in a warm, strong clasp to forestall any hysterics. ‘There’s no need to panic,’ he said firmly. ‘The pilot’s bringing the plane round now. Everything’s under control.’

The plane had straightened, and the pilot opened the throttle to increase the power to the remaining engine so that it picked up speed once more. There was a burst of Arabic over the intercom and to Claudia, not understanding a word, it sounded terrifying. David was listening closely, and she noted with detached surprise that he spoke Arabic.

‘What’s he saying?’ she whispered.

‘He says there’s nothing to worry about. We’ve lost an engine, but there’s no problem about flying with one engine, so he’s going to head for the nearest airstrip as a precaution and try and sort out the problem there.’ David’s voice was calm, infinitely reassuring. ‘Now you can relax and say “I told you so”.’

Claudia moistened her lips. ‘I don’t think I’ll relax until I’ve got two feet firmly on the ground,’ she said unsteadily. ‘I’ll say it then.’

Afterwards David told her that it had only taken twenty minutes for the pilot to make a long, straight approach and land at a dusty airstrip in the middle of the desert, but for Claudia it seemed that they sat there for an eternity. David kept talking in the same quiet, steady voice, and she clutched at the immeasurable reassurance of his cool presence without hearing a word that he was saying. All she could think about was how much time she had wasted agonising about turning thirty when she might never make it after all.

When the undercarriage went down with a clunk, she jerked and braced herself for an emergency landing, but in the end the plane touched down so lightly that it was only when the screaming engines quieted and they turned to taxi slowly back down the runway that Claudia let herself believe that they had landed safely. Closing her eyes and letting out a long breath, she slumped back in her seat.