The Rescue Pilot. Rachel Lee

gave herself a little shake and turned back to help Wendy in the galley. “Coffee might be beyond reach,” she said. “How many candles does it take to boil a pot?”

      “Darned if I know. But I want my coffee, and there’s a whole lot of candles. Besides, we only need to make one pot. I think the guys will build a fire outside soon. We’re going to need it.”

      “That’s for sure.”

      “And I’m sure if we’re patient, we can heat a pot of this dried soup.” She turned on the faucet and, wonder of wonders, water came out.

      “Must be a gravity tank,” Rory said.

      “Whatever it is, it’s a plus. Better to have water right now than have to melt snow on top of everything else.”

      While Rory worked with chafing-dish holders to elevate them enough to put fat, squat candles beneath them, bending legs and stacking a few of them, Wendy found the pieces of the drip coffeemaker and assembled them, then put coffee in the filter. “First pot of boiling water goes for coffee,” she said firmly. “I need a hot drink and some caffeine.”

      “If you watch it, it’ll never boil,” Rory remarked, lighting a candle beneath her assemblage. The women shared a quiet laugh at the old joke, then together balanced a chafing dish full of water on the structure.

      “I think it’ll hold,” Wendy said.

      “It looks like it, but this time I’m going to watch it boil anyway. Too dangerous to do otherwise.”

      “I agree. And maybe I should speak to Chase about this.”

      “Why?”

      Wendy tipped her head. “Because we’re burning oxygen back here, and this plane is probably pretty airtight.”

      Rory hadn’t thought of that, but as soon as Wendy spoke, she knew she was right. Planes had air exchangers, but they probably worked on electrical power like everything else. Power they didn’t have now. “Go ask. I’ll babysit.”

      Much better to have Wendy ask. Not that Chase Dakota had spared her more than a few words, but she got the feeling he didn’t much care for her. Ordinarily, she didn’t turn tail in the face of men like that, but right now she was acutely aware that she wasn’t the person in charge. That put her on the defensive, and for now that meant stirring up as little trouble as possible.

      “Houston,” she muttered under her breath, “we have a problem.”

      Except they weren’t halfway to the moon. Although they might as well have been at the moment. She heard some noise from up front and stuck her head out of the galley. Chase and Wendy’s husband were pushing the door open a crack. Just a crack. Then they disappeared in the men’s compound, so aptly named a cockpit, she thought sourly, and went back to their machinations with the machinery.

      No emergency beacon? She refused to believe that was possible. Weren’t those damn things supposed to work no matter what? Or maybe that was the cockpit race recorder she was thinking of. All of a sudden she wished she knew more about planes and less about finding and drilling for oil. Or more about cancer and her sister’s condition.

      She was so used to being on top of things that it killed her to consider all the things she didn’t know anything about—like planes and cancer and how long it would take that damn water to boil. Because she sure would like a cup of that coffee.

      Wendy rejoined her. “We might get a little chilly. They tried to open the door to a minimum so we don’t suffocate, but …” She shrugged. “Nobody said camping in a blizzard in a crashed plane was going to be easy.” “What do you know about the pilot?” Rory asked.

      “I mean …”

      Wendy’s face gentled. “It’s okay. He’s a stranger to you and here we are in a mess. But, trust me, Chase was a military pilot before he started his charter service. He knows what he’s doing, and if we lost fuel, then he’s right about why. He’s not the kind of guy who would authorize any maintenance shortcuts. And, as for right now, I can tell you the military gave both him and my husband a lot of survival training.”

      “Okay.”

      Something in Wendy’s face changed. “Billy Joe—oh, he’d kill me if he heard me call him that to someone else—”

      “Why?”

      “He’s just never liked his given name. He prefers everyone to call him Yuma.”

      “I can do that.”

      Wendy smiled. “I’m sure you can.” “You were going to say?”

      “Yuma lived up here in these mountains for a few years after he got back from the war. Post-traumatic stress. He knows how to survive these mountains in the winter.”

      “That’s good to know. That he’s experienced, I mean, not the other.” “I understood.”

      “How did you two meet? Were you just neighbors?”

      Wendy smiled again. “Oh, it’s a much more interesting story than that. Billy Joe was a medevac pilot in Vietnam. The experience left him with a lot of nightmares, so for years he lived up in these mountains with some other vets. They just couldn’t handle the bustling world at times. So they kind of built their own hermitage.”

      Rory nodded. “That must have been rough.”

      “Oh, it was. Anyway, my dad was a Vietnam vet, too, and when Billy Joe got well enough to try to return to life, Dad got him hired as our medevac pilot. Our first one, actually.”

      “That was nice of your dad.”

      “He lived to regret it.” Wendy laughed quietly, letting Rory know it wasn’t a bad thing. “Anyway, I had a crush on Yuma from the time I was sixteen. He was so much older and so aware of his flaws that he ran from me like a scared rabbit. And finally my dad told me to stop torturing the man.”

      “Ouch. That must have hurt.”

      “It did at first. But, you know, it finally got through my thick head that my dad was right. I was too young, too inexperienced, and Billy Joe had every reason to avoid me, and not just because I was a kid.”

      “So what happened?”

      “I went off to nursing school, then worked in a bigcity hospital for a few years until I practically had my own PTSD. When I came back here it was to become the flight nurse with the Emergency Response Team.” She gave a little laugh. “You could say I wasn’t exactly welcome on that helicopter.”

      “But something must have changed.”

      Wendy nodded, her gaze becoming faraway for a few minutes. “It was rough, but here we are now … together forever as Yuma likes to tease me.” She turned a bit. “Is that water heating?”

      Rory looked back. “I see a bit of steam on the surface.”

      “Good, we’ll make it yet.”

      Even the little bit that Wendy had told her had given her an inkling of what her husband had suffered. And some of it, at least, had to be replaying in her heart and mind.

      Rory sighed, realizing she wasn’t the only person on this plane who had serious concerns. Yes, Cait’s life hung in the balance, but surely Wendy must be worrying about Yuma and whether this would affect him.

      Yet Wendy soldiered cheerfully on, confident that things would work out. Rory found herself wondering, for the first time, when she had started to lose hope for Cait. Because that’s what was going on here: the loss of hope.

      Not just the threat of being stranded, but the loss of hope. Did she really think nothing could save Cait now?

      The thought appalled her. She shook it away, mentally stomped it into some dark place she couldn’t afford to look at. Not now.

      Twenty minutes later the four of them were sitting in the passenger lounge