seemed strange, thinking of Dax as a child—with a mom and a dad and a ne’er-do-well uncle. She chuckled. “You know, Dax, I can’t picture you with a mom—or a dad, for that matter. Then again, everybody has one of each, right?”
He shrugged. “I hardly remember my mom. I was five when she died.”
She thought of her own mom, of Aleta’s innate goodness, her fierce love for each and every one of her nine children. “How sad for you,” she told him softly.
He sent her another glance and a faint smile in response, then turned his gaze back to the wide sky ahead.
The weather was perfect. Zoe put her camera away and settled back in the comfy leather seat. Through the windscreen, the sky was endless, not a cloud in sight, a gorgeous expanse of baby blue. The steady drone of the engine lulled her and the Dramamine made her sleepy. She let her eyes drift shut.
For a long time, she drifted, dreaming in snatches, coming slightly awake to the smooth, steady drone of the Cessna’s engine, to awareness that she was on her way to the jungles of Mexico with her hot-guy boss, Dax Girard, that she was going to meet Ramón Esquevar, taste some of the best coffee in the world, visit the ancient Mayan villages of San Juan Chamula and Zinacantán. She would tell herself she really ought to wake up, act like a decent assistant, make a little conversation, at least.
But Dax didn’t seem to mind if she slept. He flew the plane and left her alone and she felt so peaceful. Inevitably, after a few moments of wakefulness, she would fade back into her own pleasant oblivion again.
What woke her, finally, was the turbulence. All of a sudden, they were dipping and dropping, literally lurching through the sky.
Her eyes popped open as a volley of hail beat at the windscreen.
It was dark. When had that happened?
She glanced over at Dax. “Is it nighttime?”
He shook his head. “Just a squall. But a wild one. I’ve been trying to get above it, but it’s not working. And we seem to be in a dead space. I’m getting no response on the radio. Check your restraint. In a minute, I’m going to see if I can get below this.”
Check your restraint? She was not reassured. Still, she tugged on the belt to make sure it was fastened securely.
More hail pelted the plane and the wind screamed like the end of the world. They kept rising and dropping—hard—as if they’d actually hit some physical object, though she knew they hadn’t, that it was only the racing wind currents.
They would bottom out, the small plane shaking as if grabbed and pummeled by the hand of an angry god. And then they would rise again, only to fall once more.
Rain came—buckets of it. Beyond the cabin, she saw nothing but darkness and horizontal walls of water coming at them, racing by. The wind wailed and they lurched and bounced. The restraint held her in the seat, but in back, she could hear the strapped-in equipment. Even tied down with a cargo net, it was banging around, hitting the fuselage, battering the backs of the rear seats.
And the stomach-churning drops continued. The plane bounced like a ball, a toy tossed between the cruel hands of a madman.
Still, she refused to believe that they wouldn’t get through this. She was twenty-five years old. She had a wonderful family, a father who drove her nuts but who she knew adored her. A mother who had never wavered in her devotion, her loving support.
She’d finally found work she could do for years and only get better at it, never get bored. She didn’t have to be the slacker of the family anymore. Her whole life lay ahead of her, beckoning. It was all coming together, and it was going to be so good.
Surely, it couldn’t be snatched away now.
Dax kept trying to raise a response on the radio. Nothing. He spoke to her once. “Next time, I swear, we’ll fly commercial.”
He mouthed their coordinates into the unresponsive radio and yet again gave the distress signal.
The plane started down. At the last second, she saw that he had found a bare space in the wall of black and green below them. A very small clearing in the dense, never-ending forest—surely, that tiny cleared space was much too small for a landing.
She said what she was thinking, “Oh, God, Dax. Too small, too small.”
He didn’t answer. He was kind of busy. They hurtled toward the minuscule clearing as the wind and the rain tried to rip them apart.
Her last thought before they reached the ground was, I guess I won’t be meeting Ramón Esquevar, after all.
With a teeth-cracking bounce, they hit the ground. Dax couldn’t keep the nose up. The propeller dug into the soggy, black earth. It dug and held, the engine screaming. Huge clods of dirt were flying everywhere.
And the plane was spinning, spinning, the jungle that rimmed the clearing whizzing by in a circle, so fast she thought she might throw up. She heard cracking, shattering sounds. Something hit the back of her seat hard enough to force all the breath from her lungs. And then something bopped her on the back of the head.
She cried out. And then she sighed.
As blackness rolled over her, she knew it was the end.
Chapter Five
“Zoe? Zoe, wake up.” A hand slapped her cheek lightly. A delicate sting.
And her head hurt like crazy. She groaned, reached back, felt wetness. She opened her eyes, brought her hand in front of her face. Blood, but not much. She reached back a second time, probed the injury carefully. Already a goose egg was rising.
Goose eggs were good, she’d read somewhere, hadn’t she? If the swelling was on the outside, you were less likely to end up with a subdural hematoma, which could be bad. Very, very bad.
“Zoe?”
She blinked. Dax was craning toward her from the other seat. He’d taken off his headphones and his chest was bare. He held his shirt to his forehead, on the left side. The shirt was soaked through with blood.
“Thank God,” he said. “Zoe.”
“We’re not dead.” She spoke in awe. It was a miracle. Impossible. And yet, somehow, true.
Dax retreated to his seat, tipped his head back and shut his eyes. He still held the bloody shirt to his head. Really, he didn’t look so good. She realized he needed help. And she was just sitting there …
Blinking away the last of her dizziness, she went for the latch on her seat restraint. For a moment, she thought it was jammed, that somehow, in the landing, which had turned out to be something of a crash, it had been broken and stuck shut.
Panic tried to rise. She bit the inside of her cheek, focused on the sharp little pain, and worked at the latch some more.
A second later, it popped open.
She was out of the seat and ripping off her white shirt without even stopping to think about it. She wadded the cotton fabric into a ball and crouched over his seat. “Dax.” She caught his chin with one
