“Is her plane safe?”
“Yes. It is. She gets it checked regularly.”
Still, Rogan’s stomach clenched. Every day he thanked all the deities for the earache that had kept Danny from boarding that fated flight. But, oh God, why had he not listened to Darby’s intuition? Why had he pushed his wife to make that journey back to the City of Forks for her mother’s sixtieth birthday?
The morning of the flight had been foggy. I don’t feel good about this, Rogan, she’d said, and he’d replied, It’ll be fine. You’ll be there before you know it. I’ll call you at lunch, okay?
But she and Sophie, their eight-year-old daughter, had never made it to Forks. And now he was putting a case together against the airline company.
He stroked his son’s hair. “We’ve talked about this, remember? Dad’s opening his own office here on the island. Then I’ll never have to leave home again, and when I am at the office I’ll be practically around the corner from your school. Flying with Captain Tait is not forever. Just a few days this week, and maybe next. Just until Uncle Johnny and I get things settled at the old office.”
“Why can’t Uncle Johnny move here, too?”
Rogan sighed. “Because he likes the big city.” Although Johnny would never admit it, Rogan believed the fast life was his younger brother’s validation as the family rebel, a label their parents had hung on him at fifteen.
On the pillow, the boy curled a hand under his cheek. “Promise you’ll come back?”
“I promise.”
Silence. Then, “Maybe that’s why Mommy never came back. She didn’t promise.”
“Oh, Danny. No one expects bad things to happen.” It’s always the other guy who’s unlucky.
“You mean if she’d promised she’d be alive now?”
“No, buddy. Promises don’t mean bad things won’t happen.”
“But you just promised.”
“Shove over, okay?” Rogan lay down beside his child and pulled him into a hug. “Promises are sort of like agreements. They mean you’ll do your best to fulfill them. But once in a while things get in the way…and the agreement is broken.”
“Like the mountain got in the way of Mom and Sophie’s plane?”
“Yeah.” Rogan closed his eyes on a flash of pain. “Sort of.”
“Are there mountains between here and Renton?”
Mount Rainier. “Not one we’ll be flying over.”
A quiet fell. “Okay,” came the soft reply.
“You about ready to sleep now, pal?”
“Hmm. ’Night, Dad.”
“’Night, tiger.”
Rogan eased from the mattress. He pulled the door to a five-inch gap and headed for the cabin’s living room. Shrugging into a wool-lined vest, he stepped quietly out the door and onto the tiny front porch. Beyond the trees, the ocean swooshed against the shore with the rhythm of a metronome.
He liked the cabin, liked the secluded woods, away from the old Victorian that was the main house. Here he could think without the interruption of other guests or the owner/hostess, Kat O’Brien, and her son. Not that he didn’t like the single mother. He did; she had given him a respectable two-week deal while he waited for his recently purchased farmhouse to undergo repairs and reconstruction.
Thinking of the ninety-year-old structure a mile from town, Rogan smiled. Farmhouse, indeed. Once, long ago, it had overlooked a sixty-acre sheep farm. Today, the acres totaled fifteen and contained a house and barn in dire need of paint and repairs and a mare with a three-week-old foal.
Taking Danny to see the horses had cinched the deal. One look at that fuzzy-chinned baby gamboling beside its great-bellied mother, and the boy had been a goner.
I wanna live here, Daddy, and pet the baby horse every day.
After a thousand tears and months of heartbreak following the deaths of his wife and daughter, Rogan hadn’t been able to refuse the boy anything. Not even a farm. So he’d bought the place, hired the island handyman Zeb Jantz to do enough repairs to make it livable, and moved from Renton to this B and B cabin in order to settle Dan into the elementary school as well as oversee the renovation.
But on nights like this…nights when his little guy questioned Darby’s crash, Rogan wanted nothing more than to turn back the clock three years to the exact moment he had booked that charter flight to Forks. And the moment he heard Darby’s premonition. He’d cancel the flight and tell her to stay home.
He’d say he loved her one more time.
Scratching his stubbled cheeks, he sat on one of the porch’s two wicker chairs. The spice of sea clung to the night’s breeze and stars glittered like crushed glass in the sky.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, listening and waiting for what he didn’t know, before the ping-ping of the cell phone on his belt shot through his musings. Caller ID indicated a text message from his younger brother in Renton, where Rogan had once lived with Darby and set up a law office with Johnny.
Hey guy, the message began. Hope ur not in the sack. Rogan’s mouth lifted into a smile as he checked the watch at his wrist and realized that already an hour had passed. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” he muttered. He continued to read: Got some news re case. Need 2 discuss. Tomoro at 9 work 4 u? jkm
Tomorrow? That meant contacting Lee Tait tonight and flying in her floatplane well before he’d planned. Before he had a week to psych himself up for the ordeal. Because as much as he pretended otherwise, for him flying would be an ordeal.
Cant u call now? he wrote. Within sixty seconds he had an answer: In L8 meet. See u tomoro. Rogan grunted. He could imagine Johnny’s late meeting. No doubt it involved a long-legged blonde.
Contemplating, he replied, Ill call u at 9. He did not want to get on that plane this soon.
No, came the return. B HERE at 9!
Rogan stared at the message. What the hell could be so important that they had to meet in person?
With a sigh he shut the phone. One way or another, he’d find out tomorrow. He only hoped it was something positive in the suit he was building against the charter airline company that killed his family.
Don’t think of that now, he thought, staring at the night sky with its canopy of stars. Or you won’t get to sleep tonight.
He forced himself to relax. Three hundred yards away, the ocean lapped against the shore and he turned his memories to his encounters with Lee Tait a few hours before.
Her womanly charms surprised him. All that red hair in a thick wavy tail trailing down her back, and those eyes, green as the budding leaves on the farm….
The freckles across her skin had surprised him further. At a distance she appeared pale and thin, but within arm’s length her complexion glowed like the setting sun, and her shape had the litheness of a willow.
But what caught him most was the heat in his groin when his name tumbled from her lips in a voice made for the night.
Shame slashed through him. How could he think of another woman? Darby had been the love of his life for seventeen years. No one could replace her.
Shoulders lifting on an extensive breath, he returned to the wicker chair. Slouching forward, he shoved his hands into his hair.
He was so goddamned tired. Tired of the loneliness, of hurting and grieving, and wishing time was reversible. He needed to move on, really move on. For Danny and for himself. Living like a monk wasn’t the answer.