Back ramrod straight, she turned huge eyes on her pilot. His face was grimmer than the Grim Reaper and the death grip he had on the joystick didn’t fill her with a lot of confidence. “What?”
“Dammit, don’t just sit there,” he snapped, his hands flying over the instruments. “Grab the fire extinguisher.”
“We’re on fire?” Eve felt her mouth drop open. She stared at him in horror. They were fifteen hundred feet above the sea, for God’s sake. They couldn’t be on fire. She was not going to fry in a flying fireball.
“Flames are coming out the damn control panel, woman,” he barked. “Of course we’re on fire. Now, get the extinguisher.”
“I thought you said we were going to be okay. You promised!” Eve could hear herself, but she was unable to move or keep the abject horror and panic from her voice.
She—who never panicked—was about to lose it.
“Dear God, we’re going to die. I knew this was a bad idea. But did I listen?”
“We are not going to die. And I always keep my promises.”
He caught her horrified gaze with his, and the burning intensity of his eyes was strangely hypnotizing.
“Always,” he growled fervently. “Now, snap out of it and get the damn extinguisher.”
In a daze, Eve fumbled for the buckle and wondered if it was such a good idea to leave her seat. Maybe the fire would go out on its own. Maybe he could smother it with his damn ego. Besides, her hands were shaking so badly it was several seconds before the mechanism gave and her safety harness snapped open.
She hadn’t signed up for this, she told herself, struggling to hang on to her composure. It was all just a bad dream. She was supposed to be in London, sitting in a posh hotel, attending the Women and Birth conference. Actually she had been in London—for all of two hours—before catching the first flight out of Heathrow because her sister had left a message saying she’d met someone and was getting married.
Married! To a guy she’d only just met. In the South Pacific, for crying out loud. Had Amelia lost her mind? Had she learned nothing from their dysfunctional childhood?
There would be no marriage, Eve vowed fervently. At least not yet. Because if her sister had lost her mind, as the older twin it was up to Eve to help her find it again. Besides, Eve had a lifetime’s experience of watching over her sweet, trusting sibling and she wasn’t going to stop now. Especially with the kind of men Amelia seemed to attract. Men quick to take advantage of her naive and generous soul. Like the men parading through their mother’s life.
Clearly being on a tropical island was messing with Amelia’s mind just as it had their mother’s, when she’d met and fallen head over heels in lust with their father. Just another man in a long line of users and abusers. All Eve had to do was fly out there, talk some sense into her twin and fly back to London in time for the last three days of the conference...preferably with her sister in tow. It would be just like their childhood. Just the two of them against the world.
Only now she might not make it to the conference. Or to Tukamumu to stop the wedding. Or was it Moratunga?
Oh, what the heck difference did it make, anyway? She wasn’t going to make either of them because she was headed for a watery grave.
Feeling drunk in the violently pitching craft, she lurched upright and staggered to the fire extinguisher mounted behind the pilot’s seat. Not an easy task in three-inch heels.
“Dammit, woman. Move!”
The words were delivered through clenched teeth, and Eve would have liked to tell him to stuff it. But what if he took her at her word and bailed out with the only working parachute? She didn’t even want to consider what would happen then.
She yanked at the cylinder, shrieking as the plane took a nosedive. Lurching backward, she hit the cockpit wall and sent foam spraying everywhere.
Everywhere but the fire.
“What the seven levels of hell are you doing?” he bellowed, reaching back to grab a fistful of her silk blouse and yanking her upright.
She would have liked to tell him that he was manhandling two hundred dollars’ worth of silk, but staying on her feet was more of a priority.
“The fire,” he snarled, looking more scary than comical with foam in his hair and dripping off his nose and chin. “Aim the nozzle at the damn fire.”
“Maybe you should keep the damn floor from moving,” Eve snapped with extreme provocation, and slapped at the hand dangerously close to her breasts. Only it turned out to be a mistake when the floor abruptly tilted again and she tumbled into his lap—a tangle of arms, legs, nozzle and extinguisher.
Eve shrieked and attempted not to conk him on the head with the canister, because an unconscious pilot was something she wanted to avoid. At all costs. She whacked herself instead, instantly seeing stars and wondering if her life really was flashing before her eyes.
Dammit. It figured that she’d die in the arms of a man more interested in shoving her away than wrapping her close.
Yelping, she let the extinguisher go to slap a hand over the injury and thought, Great—another bruise to go with the one I already have thanks to Mr. I’m-your-pilot, Chase. There was a soft grunt, followed by a vicious oath, and the next thing she was being dumped on her ass. Through tearing eyes she saw him aim the nozzle at the controls with one hand while yanking at the yoke with the other. Within seconds the instruments were covered with a thick layer of foam.
The fire gave one last defiant fizzle before dying.
Kind of like her last relationship, she thought dazedly from her position on the floor. Actually, kind of like all her relationships, if she was being perfectly honest, because watching her mother flit from one man to the next had soured her when it came to love. She snorted. As if whatever her mother had had with her countless men had been love.
Relief, however, was short-lived, because no sooner had Chase tossed the canister aside than he wrapped both white-knuckled hands around the yoke, looked at the instruments now oozing white foam and cursed.
Again.
Eve didn’t like the look on his face.
“Now what?”
His expression was taut and grim, his eyes narrowed in fierce concentration. A muscle twitched in his lean, tanned cheek.
“Don’t you dare tell me we’re going down,” she informed him tightly. “Because you’ll have a hysterical female on your hands. And you do not want to see me hysterical.”
He shot her a look that said she’d sailed past hysterical a half hour ago. She ignored him. They were going down. She knew it. He knew it. He was just too darn stubborn and macho to admit that Saint Chris had abandoned them.
She swallowed a sob.
And here she was in the prime of her life, on the verge of a promising career—the realization of all her dreams after years of hard work.
She had every right to be hysterical, darn it.
Grabbing
