drawl. “Wasn’t it?”
He nodded and managed to find his voice somewhere. Even though he’d figured out that day at the airport who she was, he’d been hoping that she wouldn’t remember him. “You look like you came through it pretty well.”
She smiled a little, then looked down and he realized he was still holding her hand. He quickly let go.
“I was lucky,” she said. “Just a sprained ankle.”
“So, I’m guessing you two have met.” Tanner sounded amused.
Emily looked away from Max to his boss. She’d tucked her hands in the pockets of her blazer, Max noticed, and that abrupt swell of pleasure he’d felt at first dimmed. Probably not used to touching the lower class unless she was being pulled from beneath a collapsed roof by one.
“He rescued me after the tornado,” she was telling his boss. Her gaze slid toward Max. “But we never did get around to introductions.” She smiled again, and tucked-away hands or not, Max felt another jolt.
“It was the rescue workers who pulled you out,” he reminded.
“Yours was the voice that kept me going,” she countered. “I’ll never forget it.”
He didn’t want her gratitude. He’d done what anyone would have done. There was no point in admitting that he hadn’t forgotten it, either. If she’d been just an average girl, maybe. But she’d turned out to be a Fortune. One of the FortuneSouth Fortunes.
They had money and class and first-class educations followed by first-class careers.
Way, way out of his league.
So he’d stuck the moments they’d shared while she’d clung desperately to his hand and stared into his eyes while a halfdozen rescue workers lifted what seemed half a building off of her in a box and tried not to think about it. Only now, as a favor to her new brother-in-law, she was supposed to teach Max how to do his job.
He looked at his watch. “We should get to it, I guess.”
Her confident smile seemed to falter a little. She looked back at Tanner. “He’s right. Time’s money and all that.” She pulled her hands from her pockets. “I know you didn’t ask me to,” she told Tanner, “but I toyed around with some website ideas. I can show you that, and then we’ll take a look at the marketing materials you’re using now and we can go from there.”
“Actually,” Tanner said, pushing back from his desk, “that all sounds great, including the website stuff, but I’m going to have to leave all that for you and Max to go over.” He rounded the desk. “I’m going with Jordana to her O.B. appointment.” He gestured at the small, round conference table in the corner of his room. “Make yourselves comfortable here, if you want. I know there’s more room there than in Max’s office.” He squeezed Emily’s shoulder as he passed by. “If you want a tour of the place, Max can give you one. He knows every nook and cranny around here by now. Right, Max?”
Max nodded, but as his boss left the office, he couldn’t help wondering what Tanner was thinking, leaving it all in Max’s lap.
“Why don’t we start with the tour, then? It would help if I can get a little bit of a feel for this place.” Emily was looking at him, her eyebrows lifted a little. If she had any suspicion that her expertise would be wasted on someone like Max, at least she didn’t show it.
“Sure.” He stepped out of her path so she could exit the office. “Do you know anything about flight schools?”
She laughed a little, and the sound seemed to send heat straight down his spine. “Not a single thing,” she admitted as she walked past him. “You’re the expert, here.”
He grimaced. Evidently, Tanner hadn’t told his sister-in-law much at all. Maybe she’d have refused to help if she knew how unqualified he was. “I’ve only been working for Tanner for a month,” he said. There was no point in putting any varnish on it. The truth was what it was. He’d started out—officially—on a part-time basis, but just a few weeks ago, Tanner had asked if he’d be willing to take on more.
Max still had a hard time believing it.
“I don’t know diddly-squat about marketing,” he told her.
She stopped in her tracks and looked at him. “Tanner said you are his marketing assistant.”
He hated titles. Mostly because they’d only ever pointed out that he was low-man on the totem pole, which he’d been perfectly aware of. “Assistant … whatever,” he said. “The marketing stuff is just a priority right now. A long time before he actually hired me, though, I was mopping floors and cleaning toilets around this place.” She might as well know that truth, too. “Did anything and everything, pretty much, in exchange for flying lessons.”
Her head tilted slightly. The silky end of her ponytail slipped over her shoulder. “How’d you learn about the flight school in the first place?”
He shrugged. “Everyone around Red Rock’s heard of the flight school.” He had, even before the day he’d actually walked through the front door.
“But how,” she pressed. “Radio spots? Signage?” A faint smile played around the corners of her lips, which only meant he was studying them too closely for politeness. “Good old word of mouth?”
“Word of mouth.” He dragged his attention away from her mouth.
“Never underestimate the power of good word of mouth. It can make or break the success of any number of things,” she said. “You’re lucky, actually. You’ve got a unique perspective, Max.”
Again, he felt heat slide down his spine. “How?”
“You’ve already been your own prospective customer.” She turned again and headed along the tiled hallway that led from the front door of the business office to the rear that opened out into the hangar. “You know what brought you to Redmond Flight School.”
He was pretty sure that “desperation” wasn’t the angle that Tanner wanted them to promote. Fortunately, Emily was unaware of his thoughts as she continued.
“So now what you need to think about is what would have brought you here even more quickly.” She glanced at him.
“Money.” It was an obvious answer. One that hadn’t exactly applied to him at the get-go but sure had ever since.
She sent him a smile over her shoulder again, obviously not shocked by his blunt tone. “Part of your job, then, is to convince the masses that money isn’t the object. Learning to fly is.”
“If everyone knew how it felt to be up there, we wouldn’t need to advertise.” He reached past her to push open the heavy metal door and got a whiff of something soft. Almost powdery.
Nothing around the hangar smelled like that, including him. Which just left her.
He would have been happy to stand there a long while breathing in that completely feminine fragrance, but she was already moving through the door, that long ponytail of hers swinging.
If he’d ever thought anything was particularly sexy about
