Sally Carleen - A Gift For The Groom

Analise folded her arms, right under her rounded breasts, pushing them up, thrusting them forward, pulling the smooth turquoise silk taut over them, emphasizing every curve. He’d thought the summer evening was cooling off, but that was before Analise folded her arms under her breasts.

“There’s no motel or car-rental place closer than Casper,” she said firmly. “The man inside told me that. There used to be a motel in Thunder Bluffs, but it burned to the ground when lightning struck it four years ago, or maybe it was five, depending on whether you believe him or the cowboy who came in while I was there. So unless you plan to make me spend the night out here on this hard, cold ground where there are probably rattlesnakes—why else would they call this place Rattlesnake Corners?—you’ll have to take me to Nebraska.”

With a sinking feeling, Nick realized she was right His plans for a peaceful, restorative, solitary trip fluttered away into the night. At the moment he had no choice. He lifted his hands in resignation. “All right, all right! I’ll take you to Nebraska and tomorrow morning you’ll make arrangements to get home.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going with me traipsing around the countryside looking for Abbie Prather.”

“I said okay. What’s your problem?”

He wasn’t sure he believed her. He was both dreading and looking forward to flying to Nebraska with her in that itty-bitty plane. Those were his problems.

“As long as we understand that you’re not going to be present when I find Abbie Prather.”

She didn’t say anything.

“That’s the job you hired me to do. If you hire somebody to paint your house, do you insist on taking up a brush and helping him?”

“I live with my parents. They’re the ones who hired that painter. He had a fear of heights and our house has three stories and sits on top of a hill besides. So of course I helped him.”

Somehow her answer didn’t surprise him.

“Well, you’re not going with me tomorrow, and that’s that.” He climbed into the cockpit and slid into his familiar seat. But it seemed to have developed new contours and no longer fit him so well, as if Analise’s intrusion into his haven had altered it physically.

She got in beside him and closed the door. Odd that he’d never before noticed how small this cabin was, how close his seat was to the passenger’s.

He fastened his seat belt and focused on his starting checklist, making a concerted effort to ignore his passenger.

Just as the engine growled to life, Analise pulled a bag of chips out of that huge purse of hers, ripped them open and began to crunch.

“Could you keep it down? You’re making more noise than the engine.”

“Sorry. Flying makes me nervous, so I eat to distract myself.”

Oh, great! “Do you have a candy bar in there or something a little quieter?”

She stuffed the chips back into her purse. “I hope you’re not going to be this cranky the whole way to Nebraska.”

“I am,” he assured her. “In fact, it’s probably going to get worse. By the way, you never did tell me how you got into my plane. I know I left the door locked.”

She peeled the wrapper off a candy bar. “Picked the lock. I learned how to do it in college.”

“You learned to pick locks in college? Where did you go? Burglar U?”

She lifted an eyebrow at his absurd question. “I went to school in Austin. I dated a guy who taught me to pick locks, among other things.”

“Other things?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear those other things, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“We ran together, five miles a day. Physical fitness. Then there was scaling six-foot fences, playing poker and blackjack, dealing off the bottom of the deck, shooting a .38 revolver—”

“Shooting a-you dated a criminal?”

“Of course not! Richard was an undercover cop. Would you like a candy bar? I have plenty.”

“No, thank you,” he muttered. His neck muscles had tied themselves into tight knots again, and he could feel a headache building behind his eyes.

He tried to focus on the things he loved about flying, especially flying at night—the sense of freedom, of isolation and serenity. For the next hundred or so miles, the land below would be totally dark except for the occasional car or house. No city lights. Nothing around anywhere...north, south, east, west, up or down.

Nothing but Analise Brewster with her lush, generous lips wrapped around a candy bar, her long legs tucked demurely to one side and looking anything but demure. Analise Brewster sitting inches away from him, touching him with the combined, oddly compelling scents of honeysuckle and chocolate.

“Put your legs down and fasten your seat belt,” he barked.

She complied so hastily he felt a little guilty for snapping at her.

He taxied to the run-up area and went through his instrument check then took up the microphone to announce his intention to take off to any planes that might be within radio range.

This was going to be a long, long flight

Analise took a large, desperate bite out of her candy bar as she felt the plane lift off the ground, and her stomach gave a corresponding lurch right into her throat. This was the scariest and most exciting part of flying, that moment of actually going up into the air, unsupported by anything but magic. She understood how butterflies flew and how it was impossible for bumblebees to fly even though they did. But the unlikelihood of a bumblebee’s flight didn’t even come close to the impossibility that tons of metal with wings that couldn’t flap should be able to stay aloft.

She ate more of her candy bar, ignored those butterflies . that had taken up residence in her lurching stomach and resisted the urge to chatter, something she was prone to do when she was nervous. Nick had indicated he needed silence while he got everything going and she certainly didn’t want to cause him to do something wrong, something that would break the magic spell and send them plummeting to earth.

She’d done enough chattering tonight, anyway. By the time he’d arrived, she’d been pretty nervous, had begun to think she was going to have to spend the night in the plane. In fact, from the time she’d walked into the airport, her rented plane already on its way back to Tyler, only to find that Nick wasn’t waiting for her, she’d been getting progressively more concerned.

This latest impulsive act, charging across the country a week before her wedding, might not prove to be one of her better ideas. In fact, it would probably go down in the column of incidents that reinforced her parents’ incessant worries about her. It seemed the harder she tried to be the perfect daughter, the worse things got.

Her parents weren’t happy that she’d taken so long to make up her mind about marrying Lucas Daniels. Their wedding was wedged in next Saturday between morning and evening ceremonies and their rehearsal was scheduled for today, a week early, the only time they could get the church.

And the closer it got to that rehearsal, the edgier and more claustrophobic she got. Somewhere around four o’clock this morning, she’d decided that what she really needed to do was come to Wyoming to be certain Nick was able to garner enough evidence to clear Lucas’s father’s name before the wedding so his parents would come. Her concern over that issue had doubtless been causing her distress.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now Nick’s pointed questions made her wonder about her motivation. It wasn’t exactly logical.

One foul-up after another. The story of her well-intentioned, ill-fated life.

As she desperately devoured her candy bar, she stole a glance at Nick. The shadowy, uneven light from the instrument panel accented the craggy planes of his face, giving him an even more intriguing, dangerous look than when she’d first met him. His shaggy brown hair, just a little too long, touched the collar of his faded denim shirt. The top buttons of that shirt were undone, allowing springy tufts of that same hair to escape.