Skip pursed his lips. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he plans to put up a string of beach houses.”
She glanced out the window. The man stared back at her as though he eavesdropped on their discussion. Surely, he wasn’t hoping to rezone the Riley place into a cluster of grandiose properties?
Skip shot her a wicked grin. “Let’s ask him. If he says yes, you can dump him in the Sound on the way home.”
Lee rolled her eyes. “Oh, that makes so much sense.”
At Skip’s laughter, she threw open the door and climbed from the plane. For all her huff and puff, she couldn’t tear her gaze away from Rogan as he walked toward them. Those big shoulders, that wind-messed hair, those deep-set gray eyes…The man was a walking, talking GQ cover.
Her brother-in-law stepped forward to introduce himself. “Skip Dalton. I hear you’ll be flying with Lee for a while.”
Rogan’s gaze flicked to her. “Guess news really does fly.”
Eyes narrowing, Skip observed the man waiting to board—and watching Lee. “For the record,” her brother-in-law said, “we’re a close family.” With that, he headed down the dock, whistling.
Lee stared after him. Talk about a testosterone standoff.
“Well,” Rogan drawled. “That was enlightening.”
She took his briefcase, set it on the seat behind the co-pilot’s chair. “Don’t mind him. As the only adult male in a family of females, he’s a little territorial. Especially now that my youngest sister is seven months pregnant. Why don’t you get in and we’ll head back?”
When they both settled in the cockpit, she reignited the engine. “You okay?” The color had left his face once more and his hands gripped his knees.
“I’m fine.”
He didn’t look fine. “Concentrate on my voice.” She steered the plane toward open water, went through her checklist. Rudders, flaps, fuel, wind velocity…. “If you’re this uncomfortable flying,” she advised when she saw him clench his fists, “you should seriously consider traveling by water, regardless of the schedule.”
“I won’t do that to my son. Schools can be terrifying for the new kid.”
Then maybe you shouldn’t have moved to our island.
As if their minds were linked, he said, “I don’t plan to do this much longer, anyway.”
“Oh?” Did he mean lawyering?
“I can’t explain—” He released a gut-deep groan as the plane lifted off the water and arrowed into the sky.
Issuing the coordinates to the tower, Lee kept vigil on her passenger. His mouth was a pale, stark line; his eyes focused on his knees jutting in the confines of the cockpit. Single prop planes were not vessels of comfort for a man with a lumberjack’s frame. Or, one with an apparent phobia.
“I’ll get you home safe,” she offered. “Weather’s clear. Great day for flying.”
Maybe if he talked about the root of his problems, he’d realize planes weren’t all bad.
“What happened to you to make you this nervous, Mr. Matteo?”
They were almost across the Sound when he finally pried his tongue loose. “I lost half my family when their plane used a forest as a landing strip.”
Ah, geez. “Rogan…” Lee felt sick at heart for what he must have suffered. “I don’t know what to say.”
For the first time he looked at her. An ocean of pain glimmered in his eyes. “It’s been three years and, hell, I don’t know what to say. I’m still trying to figure it out, still trying to fix what’s left of my family.”
Turning away, he focused on his knees again. “All night I kept thinking, What if something goes wrong? What’ll happen to my boy? He’s seven, just a baby. He needs me to stick around, be there until he can take care of himself. I also know the probability of dying in a car crash exceeds that of dying in a plane, and that my apprehension is all out of whack. But there you have it.”
Except he had experienced tragedy-by-plane. “I’m so sorry.”
He blew a long sigh, scraped at his hair. “Hell, it’s me who should be sorry, dumping on you like this.”
“No,” she said. “You have a right to feel the way you do.” And she meant it. Losing half a family…She shook her head, unable to imagine the horror, the grief.
“A defective fuel line is what they’re claiming,” he went on. “More like poor maintenance on the part of Abner Air.”
Abner Air? Oh. My. God. He’d lost his family in that plane?
Now it all came to her, the niggle in the back of her mind when he’d said his name. Matteo. Four months after she walked out of her marriage and Stuart’s company, news about her ex’s plane going down had filtered back to Lee.
She had recognized the pilot’s name, Bill Norton. But the names of the passengers had been unfamiliar…forgotten.
Yes, she’d sympathized from afar but by then, Stuart Hershel was already someone else’s husband—and an almost daddy. Because of the latter, because of the way she’d discovered Stuart’s betrayal, Lee had put the past, including the crash, wholly out of her mind.
Now she remembered snippets. A woman and child—with Rogan’s last name.
His family.
“Look,” he said, unaware her heart struggled like a wounded animal. “Can we start over?” This time his gaze was soft and gray as the morning mist.
With a nod, Lee forced her throat to open. “Sure.” For two elongated seconds their eyes held, and her heart emitted a solid thump against her breastbone. Start something with this man? No and no.
Quickly turning her concentration on navigating her seaplane—previously of Stuart’s fleet, oh, God—she forwarded her status to the tower and began reducing her elevation.
Minutes later, she taxied shoreward to her portion of pier extending from Burnt Bend’s boardwalk.
She couldn’t wait to leave again, make the run to pick up Skip. Anything to get away from Rogan and the pain she now knew hovered behind his eyes.
While she tied the plane to the wooden deck, he stood facing the shoreline meandering westward. A forest of hemlocks, cedars and willows traveled the land’s slope to the water, but Lee knew what lay on the other side of the natural buffer a mile from town. The Riley property, now his land.
He slanted a look over his shoulder toward the boardwalk’s shops and restaurants. “I hope to buy some office space there.”
A lawyer in Burnt Bend? Except…What had he said before takeoff? I don’t plan to do this for long.
“Are you changing careers?” she asked.
Again
