She turned to him and smiled. “Just making sure I’ll be able to breathe if your ego takes up all the oxygen.”
From a cruising altitude of thirty-nine thousand feet, the vivid blue sky stretched on forever. Far below, the rugged Rockies jutted up like toy mountains. The snowcaps looked little more than dots of vanilla ice cream.
Elizabeth leaned back and drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. She was eager to get back to Richmond and away from Hawk, but for now she savored the freedom of soaring.
“Isn’t the view gorgeous?”
Hawk glanced at her. “Stunning.”
Her heart kicked, hard. Her throat tightened. “Don’t, Hawk, okay? Not now.” They sat too close, had too many more hours alone together. As it was, she couldn’t breathe without drawing the scent of him deep inside. “Can’t we just enjoy the flight?”
The corners of his mouth curved into a smile. “Whatever you say, sweetness.”
Off to the right, a swirl of gauzy clouds curled like a comma. “Thank you.”
If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn he stiffened. “Just doing my job.”
“For letting me fly with you,” she clarified. For not treating her like a child. Nicholas barely let her drive.
Hawk turned toward her. Mirrored sunglasses concealed the deep butterscotch of his eyes, but she knew they’d be gleaming. “I taught you, didn’t I?”
The question rushed through her. He’d taught her, all right. A lot. Lessons she would never forget.
Hawk Monroe was the best pilot, the best instructor, she’d ever known. He’d mastered flying while in the Army, piloting Black Hawks into hostile territory in faraway places most people only heard about on the news. He never talked about the missions, but from the aftermath she’d witnessed in his eyes, she knew they’d been beyond dangerous. She wondered if he still thought about the years he’d given to his country, if sometimes he still woke up in a cold sweat.
Call me a fool, but “Be all you can be” actually meant something to me.
A smart woman would have turned away, looked straight ahead. Maybe even closed her eyes. But Elizabeth found it hard to look away. He looked deceptively casual sitting there with his headset on, faded jeans hugging his long legs, and the sleeves of his khaki shirt rolled up. On a glance he looked like a thousand other ex-military corporate pilots…except for the Glock shoved snugly into his leather shoulder holster.
“What do you think about when you fly?” she asked before she could stop herself.
Hawk took a long sip from a bottle of water. “I try not to think at all. I prefer to savor.”
Elizabeth smiled. Hawk loved flying every bit as much as she did. Before their relationship had become overly complicated, he’d taken her up often, sharing with her the promise of an early-spring dawn and the vibrancy of a late-summer sunset.
“Have you been up much since the shooting?”
“You know what they say about not keeping a good man down,” he answered with a grin. “I was back up—”
The change was subtle at first, a yaw like brakes on ice. They lurched forward, then backward. Then came the deafening roar of silence. The swirl of amber lights. The drone of buzzers.
And the plane went from fast forward to slow motion.
“Shit!” Hawk grabbed the yoke and immediately launched into the emergency procedures he’d drilled into her.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. “We’re losing altitude!” It wasn’t a dizzying rush or a spiraling plummet, just a gentle sinking in the air, drifting.
The hallmark of an aircraft with no power.
Chapter 4
“Pull up! Pull up!”
“Shut up!” Hawk gritted out, but the mechanical female voice droned on.
“Pull up! Pull up!”
Nothing. The free fall continued with deceptive gentleness, like a toy plane whose batteries had suddenly gone dead.
Amber lights flickered from the instrument panel, warning the obvious. They were going down. From the high altitude corporate aircraft occupied, they had five minutes, seven tops.
“Get on the radio.” He kept his voice calm despite the adrenaline spewing nastily. “Tell ATC we’ve lost both engines.”
“Both?”
He shot Elizabeth a quick look, found her face devoid of color. “Do it. Now.”
A fierce will to live kicked through him. The Army had trained him for situations like this, drilled him relentlessly. In Kosovo, drills had become reality. But he’d never thought to need that training somewhere over nowhere Montana with Elizabeth’s life on the line.
“Billings Center,” he heard her say, and despite the fear sparking in her eyes, her voice rang strong and confident. “November Two Three Niner Bravo declaring an emergency.”
“Three Niner Bravo,” came the calm male voice of the air traffic controller. “State nature of emergency.”
“Three Niner Bravo has lost both engines…”
Someone had gotten to the plane. He knew that as sure as he knew there would be no miraculous restarting of the engines. He’d had the hangar protected, damn it. Armed guards on duty. But Hawk didn’t believe in accidents, or fate, or bad damn luck. He believed in instinct and motivation and revenge. Every man created his own destiny.
He wouldn’t let a coward like Zhukov put an end to his.
Or Elizabeth’s.
The memory flared before he could stop it.
The door to Ambassador Carrington’s richly paneled office opened, and she strolled into his world with a grace and confidence that knocked the breath from his lungs. A black pantsuit sheathed her killer body, but it was her smile that grabbed him, her smile that slayed, wide and knowing, yet at the same time, mysterious. Vulnerable. “You must be Hawk.”
Then, he’d sworn to give his life for hers, to take a bullet if necessary. A knife. An anything. But there was no line of fire to step into now, no attacker to fend off, just a disabled plane carrying them both down.
He wouldn’t let it happen. He wouldn’t let her meet a fiery grave, alone in the remote mountains of Montana. The glide didn’t fool him. Within minutes gravity would take over, and then there’d be nothing gentle at all.
Shoving aside everything but training, he focused on the emergency maneuvers he could rattle off in his sleep.
“Throttle,” he muttered, shoving them all the way back. “Cutoff.” Sweat beaded on his brow. His pulse blasted relentlessly. “Spoilers, gear, flaps, all up. Airstart…” He tried, no go. The engines were cold, dead.
The cemetery was serene, peaceful, row upon row of gently tended graves, shaded by an army of maples. Elizabeth knelt before her sister’s tombstone, a hand to her heart, tears swimming in her eyes.
His gut twisted. No, damn it. No. He was a man who thrived on the unexpected, who believed that’s when the majority of living occurred. But sweet Mary, not like this. Not like this. Clenching his teeth, he switched the fuel system to emergency, refusing to consider that in less than two minutes, he and Elizabeth might be dead, too. Failure was not an option.
The snow-capped mountains dominated his line of vision, closer, larger, with every frenetic riff of his heart.
“Pull up,” the aural warning kept insisting. “Pull up!”
Looking