The Stormriders Read online

  "Wasting your time? I like that. You never had it so good."

  "Oh, right, every girl's romantic fantasy. To be stuck in an arctic wasteland with a husband whose idea of fine entertainment is watching a three-week-old boxing match on television—when he bothers to come home at all!"

  "Oh, so we're going to get personal, are we?"

  Meg's face was hot and her hands were clenched around the coffee mug and her stomach was tight, and the most infuriating thing of all was that Red wasn't even angry. Sure, his eyes were beginning to take on a spark and if she pushed him much further he would be angry, but he could throw those barbs at her without even working up a sweat, and that was what infuriated her. He had always been better at fighting than she was. Why did she keep letting him do this to her?

  She set the mug down with a thud on the corner of the desk and said tightly, "You're a jerk."

  "Jerk, Megan?" He lifted his brows, his eyes dancing with amusement. He was enjoying this. "Is that the best you can come up with? Jerk?"

  "That," she told him deliberately, "is what you've reduced me to."

  He laughed, and if she had not already put the mug down she probably would have thrown it at him again.

  Meg glanced at Joe, who was now watching them with bright-eyed interest. "I hope you got all that, Joe. Now, radio Juneau and give them our flight plan. I'm out of here."

  Joe glanced at Red as though for confirmation, and Red tried to cover his grin by rubbing his chin. "Well now, about that..." he said.

  Meg glared at him. "Don't start your little games with me, Red Worthington. I'd rather spend two weeks in a cage with a giant iguana than four hours in that cockpit with you, but we're going to Juneau. You knew when you took this run what the return fare was, so don't jerk me around. Get your hat and coat and let's go." She turned on her heel.

  She had her hand on the door when Red's voice stopped her. "Believe me, sweetheart, you can't be any more anxious to get this show on the road than I am, but it looks like we might have a little problem here."

  Meg turned back around slowly to look at him, every muscle in her body defying him to give her bad news.

  He did, anyway, and with a cheerful ease that made her want to launch herself at his throat. "Seems there's a little storm front moving in from the north," he said. "Flight advisories from here to Juneau." He hooked his foot around the leg of a chair and pulled it out. "Looks like you and me—" he sat down and leaned back, crossing one arm over his chest as he sipped his coffee, looking very pleased with himself "—are going to be stuck with each other for a while longer."

  *************

  Two

  Meg could not believe that less than an hour ago she had actually felt regret about leaving this place; she had been looking for ways to delay—hoping Red would call. Red hadn't called, he had come, and now he was keeping her here and she knew she couldn't stand this place one minute longer. He couldn't do this to her, she couldn't stay here another second...

  Crazy, she thought a little dazedly. That's what he's done to me. He's made me completely crazy.

  She strode across the room and snatched the top sheet from Joe's Out basket, where he routinely placed all incoming weather information. Her eyes scanned the paper. Low pressure system...winds forty knots... heavy snows...

  She looked from the paper to Red to Joe accusingly. "You're making this up!"

  Joe protested, "Now wait just a minute, Ms. Worthington—"

  "Forrest," Meg snapped. "My name is Forrest!"

  "Not yet, it's not," Red reminded her mildly.

  Meg stepped around Joe's chair to examine the radar screen on his left for herself. Even she could recognize the steady blip that tracked a storm front—and a front of considerable size, it was plain to see.

  She turned on Red. "All right, even if it's true, what's the problem? The storm is over two hours away! You've flown in worse weather than this—you make a damn career out of flying in worse weather than this! What are you trying to pull? Get out there and start your instrument check. I'll get the bags."

  She headed for the door again, and Red replied simply, "Nope."

  Meg turned and leaned against the door, fixing her gaze on him and trying to count to ten. He was sprawled in the chair, jeaned legs comfortably apart, hat tilted at a cocky angle, looking relaxed and unconcerned. Perhaps one of his most irritating habits was that ability to make himself perfectly comfortable no matter where he was, to remain completely at ease no matter what the situation.

  Meg said, "You're doing this on purpose."

  "Right. I woke up this morning and I said to myself, now what can I do today to make Meg's life miserable? I know!" He snapped his fingers. "I'll conjure up a storm so she'll miss her flight home!"

  Meg pushed away from the door and advanced two angry, controlled steps toward him. "You know damn well what I mean. You're sitting here wasting time arguing when you know you could outrun that storm if you left right now—and you would leave right now if it was anybody but me telling you to!"

  He just grinned.

  Meg turned to Joe with a snap of her head. "All right," she demanded, "what's the delay time? How long am I going to be stuck here?"

  Laconically, Joe flipped a few switches on the radio, turned a few dials. "Well, I been monitoring it up and down the line. Lots of damage already, and it's gonna get worse when it crosses the tundra. They're talking about closing down the Fairbanks airport, wouldn't be surprised if they did the same to Juneau." He looked up at Meg. "Could be a couple of days if we get iced in."

  Meg fixed a cold, accusing gaze on Red. "I turned in the key to my apartment," she said, trying very hard to keep her voice even. "I don't even have a place to sleep tonight."

  "There's always the couch in your office," he reminded her cheerfully. Putting aside his coffee cup, he got to his feet. "Of course, that doesn't leave any place for me to sleep, but we never had much problem working that out before, did we?"

  Out of the corner of her eye, Meg saw Joe smother a grin, but she ignored him. "You are so predictable," she told Red coldly.

  "Why, Megan, I'm hurt."

  He started toward the door of the common room, but Meg grabbed bis arm. "Let me tell you something, hotshot," she said. "One of these days you're going to go too far. The FCC has rules that were made just for people like you, and I've got enough dirt on you to have your license jerked in a heartbeat."

  He regarded her with twinkling eyes and made no effort to pull his arm away. "I love it when you talk tough."

  "Just because you can fly doesn't make you God, and somebody's going to catch on to you someday— you and every other little Caesar like you, sitting up there so high and mighty in your cockpits, calling your own shots, making your own laws—"

  ' "There never was but one way to shut you up,'' Red said, and pressing her face hard between his hands, he covered her mouth with his.

  Meg's fingernails dug into his arm, but only for an instant, and then all the strength left her body and was replaced by a wave of heat—no, flame—that started in her toes and swept upward to her brain and she hated herself for it but couldn't stop it because Red had always been able to do that to her and after all this time he still could.

  All of her was infused with him: the smell of warm cotton and Old Spice-- no one wore that anymore and no one but Red could get away with it-- the coarseness of his slightly stubbled chin against hers, the calloused hands pressing into her cheeks, fingers threading their familiar way into the hair at her temples ...

  And his mouth, possessive and sure, weaving its heat through her throat and her breasts and her stomach in shivering, breathless waves, making her want to part her lips and drink him in, making her want to wrap her arms about him and draw him close, to be filled and possessed and completely overwhelmed by him... Red.

  She thought she had missed him as much as it was possible for a woman to miss a man, longed for him and ached for him to the fullest extent of her body's capacity for craving, bu
t not until this moment had she realized what hunger really was. Nor how great was the power he still wielded over her.

  And yet, when he released her, she managed to stiffen her muscles despite the fine trembling that coursed through her, to ignore the heat that burned her face and the dizziness that still swirled in her head, and to face him without gasping for breath. Because she could feel Joe's appreciative, delighted grin as he unabashedly watched the master at work, because she could still feel Red's breath on her cheek and taste him in every pore of her body and she was furious with him, because he could still make her want him, because he had deliberately started what he had no intention of finishing and because she knew, suddenly and without a doubt, that this was what he had flown three hundred miles for.

  What she really wanted to do was slap his face, but she would not be reduced to that kind of childish dramatics, nor would she give him the satisfaction. So she hardened her face, looked him straight in the eye and said mildly, "Funny. And to think I used to believe you'd improve with practice."

  She saw the muscle in his jaw start to knot, and that was all she wanted. She turned on her heel and strode out of the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

  Red watched her leave the room, shoulders back, head high, legs stretching in the peg-legged jeans, and it was with as much self-control as he had ever exercised in his life that he stopped himself from going after her. He used to accuse her of walking like a military commander charging into battle, but it wasn't until this moment that he realized her walk was one of the things he missed most about her.

  "Damn that woman," he muttered, and didn't turn away from the door.

  Her walk? Hell, he missed everything about her. Her blazing eyes, her quick mind, that sharp tongue of hers that could cut him to ribbons without half trying... her hair, when it was loose upon the pillow, and the way she looked just before bedtime, in one of his old flannel shirts and wool socks, a pair of heavy glasses perched on her nose as she studied a pile of papers. He missed just being able to turn around and see her there, to say something to her and hear her retort, he missed fighting with her and making love with her. One would think that a thirty-eight-year-old man who had done as much living as he had would have figured out by now how to get over a woman he was sure he had never liked very much in the first place.

  He swung around and snatched up his half-empty coffee cup, but he forgot it was disposable and his tight fist crushed it. He cursed again as lukewarm coffee spurted through his fingers and down the front of his shirt.

  Joe commented, "You could have, you know."

  Red shot him a dark glance as he mopped at the front of his shirt with a handful of paper napkins.

  "Outrun the storm," Joe explained. "You've done it before."

  "Yeah, maybe." Red scowled as he tossed the soggy napkins at the trash. "But I should risk my plane for a witch like that?"

  Joe nodded sagely, understanding. He wouldn't have understood if Red had told him the truth. If it had been cargo Red was transporting to Juneau— mail, packages, electronic parts, even contraband booze and cigarettes—he wouldn't have hesitated; he would have thrilled to the challenge. If it had been a doctor with life-saving serum in his bag, he wouldn't have thought twice about the risk and he would have damn well gotten him through without so much as a wrinkled suit to testify to the hazards of the journey. But the truth was with Meg it was different. With Meg he just didn't have it in him to take chances.

  Robert "Red" Worthington was one of the most notorious bush pilots of the Alaskan frontier. He had built a reputation on the kind of daring that bordered on recklessness, and he had done it for nothing more than the sheer fun of it. He had set his plane down in places a chopper wouldn't even go; he had skimmed between mountains with ice caking on the wings so thick he could see it; he had flown through the blackest of nights with a dead instrument panel and nothing but static on the radio and had loved every minute of it.

  He loved the rush of adrenaline, the heart-stopping, dry-throated fear, that moment of certainty when he knew he wasn't going to make it and that little voice inside that urged him to push a little further, challenge a little higher, just take one more insane chance...and he loved winning, cheating the odds, triumphing over the impossible, getting that chance to do it all over again. Some said he was the kind of pilot who looked for trouble, and he guessed maybe they were right because he sure didn't turn away when trouble found him. Playing it safe, to him, was not much different from playing dead.

  But when Meg came along, things began to change. Gradually at first, so that he hardly noticed it, and then more alarmingly. No one but another pilot would understand how much of flying was done on instinct; instruments were fine and the tower was someone to talk to when you got lonely, but the real flying was done by feel—the throb of the engines, the response of the controls, even the weight of the air. The plane became an extension of his own body and nothing should matter up there except the pilot and his machine.

  But when someone was waiting at home, other things mattered. He was no longer alone in the air, he wasn't sure he could trust his own instincts, and the plane was no longer his only lover. The edge was gone, and so was the thrill. That was why he couldn't take chances with Meg in the plane, but Joe wouldn't have understood that. And worse, neither would Meg.

  Still scowling, he made one last brush over his damp shirt, then spied the coffee cup Meg had left on the edge of the desk. He picked it up, and it was still warm. Somewhat mollified, he resumed his chair and settled back, sipping the coffee. She took it black, the way he did. And she never left lipstick stains on the cup. That was one thing he had always liked about her.

  Joe jotted down a message from one of the radio channels, then pushed the earphones down around his neck. He turned the swivel chair to look curiously at Red. "Say, Red, can I ask you something?" „

  Red looked up quickly. He had almost forgotten about Joe, and he was grateful for the distraction because he had been contemplating doing something crazy—such as going after Meg and trying to talk to her. "Yeah, sure."

  "Why did you marry her?"

  Red's lips curved into a rueful half smile. "If I had a nickel for every time I'd asked myself that question..."

  He dropped his eyes to the coffee cup, as though studying its depths for an answer. After a moment he shrugged. "She was the smartest woman I'd ever met. And the meanest. And the sexiest..." He managed a grin, but it faded, because there was more, and those were the things he couldn't tell Joe. He could barely understand them himself.

  Because being with her made fighting a storm at three thousand feet with a sputtering engine seem like a ride on an amusement-park carousel. Because she was thunder and lightning, fireworks and high tide, and he could get high just looking at her. When she walked into a room he could feel it, static electricity tugging at the hairs on the backs of his arms, a low thrumming in his blood, the taste of excitement in his throat. She consumed him, day and night; he hungered for her, literally and figuratively. Why had he married her? How could he not have?

  Or at least, that was how it had seemed to Red at the time.

  He glanced at Joe, who was still looking at him expectantly, waiting for the rest of his answer. Red smiled. "For her cooking," he explained. "I married her for her cooking."

  That Joe understood. He nodded, satisfied, and turned back to the radio, lifting the earphones as another message came in.

  The expression on Meg's face as she came out of the radio room must have been enough to The expression on Meg’s face as she came out of the raido room must have been enough to remind even the most depraved of the curious onlookers of their manners, because the occupants of the common room quickly turned their attention away from the radio room—where they had no doubt heard every word, as well as studied with fascinated attention the shadows on the frosted panel of the door—and back to the television. Meg observed sourly that they had probably had a pool going on who would strike whom first, or which one
of them would come out bleeding.

  She swept them all with a look of contempt laced with the fury she now felt for the whole world, and she snapped, "There's a storm moving in. Gilly, check the fuel levels. Shark, you and Lewis get me an emergency inventory. The rest of you secure the area and don't forget the hangar. Come on, move it!"

  "Yes, ma'am," Gilly drawled, and leaning forward for one last look at Godzilla before switching off the television set.

  Meg glared at them until they all got to their feet with the kind of shuffling indifference that could only be appropriately compared to inmates of a cell block being mustered out to the exercise yard. Meg knew, of course, that her orders were not a matter of life and death; storms such as this were routine to them and they had more than an hour to prepare. But none of that was the point. When she gave an order she expected obedience, period.

  "Guess this means you'll be staying on a while," commented Lewis innocently as he passed. Then he grinned and elbowed his companion. "Guess so," he said, and both men laughed. Meg didn't see what was funny, but then she had never understood male humor—or anything else about this particular group of males.

  Meg did not even notice that Dancer was in the room until she hopped down from the desk on which she had been perched. "Hi," she said. "Just came by to pick up the car."

  Dancer was a long-legged, impossibly angular woman dressed in bright orange, sweater-knit leggings, a tight leather skirt and a rhinestone-spangled satin shirt. Her spiked, peroxide-blond hair showed dark roots, and she was never without a wad of gum in her mouth. She paid the rent by working part-time at the Blue Jay, and the rest of the time she... had a good time. Dancer was what, in another century, might have been called a "light-skirt." Meg wasn't sure what the appropriate term was in this century, except to say that in a town where the population was three-quarters male, Dancer had a very good time indeed. It sometimes worried Meg that Dancer was one of the few women she had ever really liked.

  But at the moment she was not in the mood for Dancer, or anyone, for that matter, who was on speaking terms with any man. She said curtly, "The car's parked out back."