Dare Me Read online
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First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Playing for Keeps copyright © Cherry Wilkinson, 2005 Nothing to Lose copyright © Jill Shalvis, 2005 Dare to Desire copyright © Julie Leto Klapka, 2005 All rights reserved
ISBN: 0-7394-5043-3
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Playing for Keeps
by Cherry Adair
Nothing to Lose
by Jill Shalvis
Dare to Desire
by Julie Elizabeth Leto
To Rachel Kizer, my favorite .5
You go above and beyond, and I love you for it.
Mahalo.
Danica Cross wheeled the drinks cart down the narrow aisle, heading back to the galley. The cabin of the 737 was hotter than usual, and she blew her bangs off her clammy forehead as she walked. While handing out drinks with plenty of ice, she assured the passengers that the problem with the heat would soon be resolved.
She'd reported the passengers' complaints to the captain an hour ago, but she couldn't feel a notice-able decrease in the temperature at all and tempers were rising with the heat.
She wasn't usually fanciful—and God only knew Captain Marks was an ass, but she doubted he'd leave the temperature this high intentionally. Danica hated to even think it, but something was wrong. She'd had this vague niggle of disquiet since Flight
723 had taken off from South America two hours ago, and the sensation had only become stronger.
With relief she pushed the drinks cart into the small galley and locked it in place, then tugged her white uniform shirt away from her damp skin at the small of her back.
"Did you give Monster Kid his ninety-ninth apple juice?" Angie Hotchner asked, handing Danica a cold soda.
While the more experienced flight attendant looked as hot as Danica felt, she didn't appear concerned. Danica tried to ignore the butterflies doing takeoffs and landings in her tummy. Forcing a smile, she accepted the drink, rubbing the icy can over her forehead. "Shh, someone will hear you." Popping the tab, she rested her butt on the cabinet behind her as she drank.
"Oh, like they couldn't hear the kid whining for the past ten thousand miles?" Angie jerked her head toward the cabin. "Have you ever seen anyone kiss up to a seven-year-old like that?"
"This heat's getting to everyone." All 148 seats were occupied by sweating members of President Pa-lacios's staff. And one of those passengers was his very bored, very spoiled son. It had been a long, long flight from San Cristobal to Miami with an all-male, all-demanding, all-women-are-servants contingent of passengers. The heat, coupled with the loud demands of a cranky, whiny child, didn't help any-one's disposition.
Dani, Angie and the first officer, Jean Harris, were the only females on board. Lucky them. The crew had been offered a hefty bonus to do the round-trip from Miami to South America and back in one day. Danica had her eye on a nice little condo in Delray Beach. Thoughts of that bonus had kept her moving, and biting her tongue, as she'd worked her way through the cabin.
"He's President Palacios's only son," she finally answered after gulping the rest of the soda and savoring the icy burn down her dry throat. "Guess the little guy's used to getting what he wants."
"Yeah?" Angie took a lipstick out of her pocket and uncapped it. "If he were my kid I'd blister his arrogant little butt so bad he wouldn't be able to sit down for a wee— Jay-sus! Is it menopause, or is it getting hotter in here?"
Danica tossed her empty can in the trash with studied nonchalance. "Everyone's still complaining. I'll go speak to the captain again."
"May the Force be with you."
Danica grinned as she pushed through the curtain and turned to the secure door into the cockpit. She pressed the buzzer, then stood there with the sensation of every dark eye from the cabin checking out her butt. Should've grabbed a diet soda. "Come on, you guys, open up," Danica mumbled under her breath, glancing through the portal in the exit door at the blur of murky browns and faded greens thirty thousand feet below. They were already flying over the Everglades. She'd be home in just over an hour. A dip in the apartment pool sounded heavenly.
She jabbed the buzzer again.
Jon, her soon-to-be-ex, was a white-knuckle flier. Perhaps in some perverse way that was why Danica had become a flight attendant a year ago when she'd seen the writing on the wall. So much for soul mates.
"Open up, Jean," Danica muttered under her breath, frowning at the closed and locked door to the cockpit.
Dean Marks was an arrogant, womanizing jerk. And if the copilot had been any woman other than Jean, Danica would have been convinced they were boinking in the cockpit—which Marks had almost been caught doing on a flight to Singapore last year. But since Jean was a happily married grandmother of five, he wouldn't get to first base. Okay. So no mile-high club in the cockpit. Why weren't they opening the friggin' door? Bile churned in Dani's stomach.
Glancing down at the small gold watch on her wrist while she waited, she sighed. Still another twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds to go on this flight from hell. She pressed the buzzer again with a little more force than necessary. The bonus, remember the bonus . . .
The door between the cockpit and the main cabin didn't open, and Danica felt a spurt of something elemental in the pit of her stomach. Instinctively she knew the door wasn't going to open. It wasn't her imagination. Something was wrong. She pasted a reassuring smile on her face for the passengers and hotfooted it back to Angie in the galley.
"Ange, someth—"
"We're going to crash." Angie said it so flatly, so calmly, it took Danica a second to compute
the words that she herself had been thinking. She strode over and touched her friend's shoulder. A small pop was immediately followed by the sensation of the floor shimmying under their feet. Both women grabbed the countertop to keep their balance. Their eyes met.
In the cabin, the passengers shouted in alarm. The president's son started shrieking in terror.
A terrible calm came over Dani. Her weird way of reacting to trauma. The back of her neck tingled—a sure sign of impending doom. She'd had it the night Jon had staggered into their house bleeding like a sieve a year and eight days ago.
She'd had it the day she told Jon she wanted a divorce.
"No, we are not crashing," she told Angie with more confidence than she felt. The more her friend panicked, the calmer Danica became. It was a gift. "Just turbulence." Wind shears were a bitch to fly through, requiring skill and attention from the cockpit crew. Which explained why the pilots hadn't responded and why—she swallowed as her stomach rushed to her throat—the plane suddenly lost about five thousand feet of altitude.
"Come on. Let's go and strap in the inmates." Just because there wasn't a cloud in the sky didn't mean the thermals weren't surging against the body of the aircraft. "Angie. Come on."
"It's a faulty rudder system/' Angie said, barely moving her lips. She'd flown for Transair for thirty years. She could probably fly the aircraft herself. She grabbed Dani's arm in a white-knuckled grip. "I'm the one who's been stealing your M&M's. And I told Gracie how much you paid for those—"
Another popping sound—not nearly as happy as that of a champagne cork being released—rang through the cabin, this one louder and more ominous than the last. Dani's feet slid on the carpet as the nose of the craft dipped. Call-button lights flashed on the panel on the bulkhead above the jump seats. Off. On. Off. On. Flicker . . . Shit. "We've got to go out there and calm the passengers, Ange. Now. Come on."
Danica tore through the drape and into the cabin, where pandemonium reigned. Half the passengers were out of their seats. All of them were yelling, screaming like girls, or crying. Ha! Where was all that superior machismo now?
She unhooked the PA mic and spoke calmly and
quietly until the hysteria subsided a little and they could hear her. She listened to her own voice, amazed at how cool and calm she sounded when she knew, absolutely, unequivocally knew, they were all about to die.
"Gentlemen, please. There's no need to panic. Everyone, take your seat." She motioned them to sit down. "All seats must be in their upright positions with tray tables up and locked. Please keep your seat belts firmly fastened. We're just experiencing a little air turbulence. Captain Marks assures us there is no danger."
And while she was asking herself rhetorical questions: where were Kent and Cisco, the other two flight attendants? She glanced back to check on her friend. Angie, white-faced but professional, was helping to calm the passengers.
Holding on to seat backs to remain on her feet, Danica pulled herself row by row against the downward pitch of the aircraft, toward the back of the plane.
"Please remain calm and stay seated." She shouted without benefit of the mic. No one was listening. "The plane will level off shortly." By which time it would be too late for anyone to care. Damn it. I'm too young to die.
As urgent as her need to check on the aft attendants was, the passengers had to come first. She checked seat belts and stowed tray tables as she went along the narrow aisle, all the while maintaining what she hoped was a serene smile.
The pain-in-the-ass kid, spiffed up in his too adult black suit to meet his new stepmother in Miami, huddled in his aisle seat, his face white, black eyes wide and terrified. Danica crouched in the aisle beside him and took his sweaty, sticky little hand between both of hers. "It's going to be all right, little one," she told the boy in Spanish.
He flung his arms around her neck in a stranglehold, then burst into hysterical tears as the nose of the plane dipped farther, rocking Danica back. She grabbed his seat arm with a white-knuckled fist, sup-porting him with her other arm.
"It's okay. It's okay. It's okay," she lied in English and then Spanish to both of them. Neither she nor the boy believed it for a second. Instead of staying in his seat, he snapped the buckle open and practically climbed her torso, as if shimmying up a tree.
"No." She tried to lift him back into his seat, but he was like a little monkey, wrapping himself around her as if attached with Velcro.
An incredibly loud BOOM reverberated through the cabin. The plane bucked and bounced, then did the aeronautic equivalent of the hula. Lights went out, plunging the cabin into daylight gloom. The overheads popped open, spewing coats, luggage and papers about the cabin like mobile flotsam.
Oh, shit, shit, shit. Hello? Anybody? Need a little divine intervention here.
She and the boy rolled like tossed dice beneath and around the seats, and the plane seemed to go end over end, tossing humans and baggage around like a salad. She buried the little boy's face against her chest, locking her arms around him as tightly as she could while they rolled back and forth in the aisle like a yo-yo in the hands of God.
She tried to protect him from projectiles, even though she knew that when they hit that ground, thirty thousand feet below, there'd be nothing left of any of them.
Her last cognizant thought before sheer terror overcame her was that she'd lied that night her husband had come home to bleed on her new peach carpet.
She'd never stopped loving Jon Raven.
"What the hell do you mean, she's gone!" Jon Raven demanded, intentionally looming over the doctor, who was all of five feet six inches tall in his lifts. "The FAA hasn't been in to talk to her. Hell. Forget the FAA—the NTSB hasn't even finished cordoning off the site yet. So I repeat, where is Danica Raven?"
Dr. Delmonico took a step back. Not backing down, Raven noted, probably just getting downwind. He knew he stunk like week-old garbage. Hell, even he didn't want to be near him. He didn't care. Not now. Not until he saw Danica with his own eyes.
He'd gotten the call while he was on surveillance in D.C. A few strings had pulled him a flight into Miami and the use of a chopper on arrival. It was the longest flight of his life. The helicopter had rushed him directly to the crash site. No time for
showers. Hell, no time to even wash the grit from his eyes.
The 737 had looked like a kid's discarded toy tossed into the trees.
Jon Raven had puked. The big, bad, obscenely ex-pensive private security consultant had puked his guts out at the scene of the crash. Only after hearing his wife had walked out, then been rushed to Mercy General in Miami, had he managed to get his shit together and fly back to the city.
"Miss Cross was released early this morning, Mr. Raven. I'm sorry I—"
"I get that she was released." Raven took the man's elbow and marched him down the too bright, too sterile corridor and out of sight of three nurses who were pretending not to listen. He had to get a grip here. By some miracle, Danica hadn't been among the scattering of body parts gathered up in labeled bags and then laid out in neat rows at the scene.
"She survived a fuc—a damn plane crash. She didn't just walk out of here, did she?" God, knowing Dani, yeah, she probably had. When she had a stick up her ass about something, it was impossible to reason with the woman. Under "stubborn" in the dictionary was a life-sized picture of the woman he'd married. The woman who thought she was divorcing him.
The doctor gave him a patient look. The guy had probably seen it all. "She departed in a wheelchair."
"A wheelchair?" God. He couldn't think it. Danica crippled? Worse? Better?
"Patients must always be wheeled out of the building. Hospital policy, you know."
Yeah. He did. Been in enough of them to know what pains in the asses they were about regulations. "She didn't leave under her own power, I know that much. So? She was accompanied by—?" Raven demanded through his teeth A lover? A boyfriend? One of the couple of hundred bottom-feeding, photo-flashing press people outside in th
e parking lot?
"I'm not at liberty to sa|—"
"Now see this?" Jon whipped out his semiautomatic and jabbed it into the man's rib cage. "My friend here says you are at liberty to say. So talk."
The doctor, looking suitably impressed by both the size of Raven's weapon and the clear and present danger of a rank-smelling, long-haired psycho holding said weapon, actually laughed. "Sir. You're standing in the ER of one of the busiest hospitals in the country. The busiest and the most dangerous. Half our patients come in here wielding guns and knives. Bigger guns and bigger knives." The doctor's lips twitched. "And many of them smell almost as bad as you do."
Raven shook his head and stuck the weapon back
in the shoulder harness under his grease-and-God-only-knew-what-else-stained windbreaker. He'd had to pay seventy-five bucks for the damn thing off a real bum just so he could get near the back door of the restaurant he was staking.
"Look, Doc. Give me a break here, would ya? I haven't slept in seventy-two hours, you've noticed I haven't been close to either soap or water in about that long, and my wife was in a plane crash. Just tell me how she was when she left and who she went with."
Where are you, Dani? Where the hell are you?
"Miss Cross and a child were the only two survivors of the accident—are you all right, sir? Do you need a chair?"
Hell, no, he wasn't all right. Reality slammed into his gut with the force of a pile driver. Raven braced a hand on the wall and drew in a ragged breath.
He'd nearly lost her. This time for good. Forever. Kaput. Finito. No do-overs.
"But you said she was released. She couldn't be hurt bad." He looked up at the doctor and ground out the question. "Is she hurt bad?"