Ainsley

My phone chimed and I looked down.

I had a text message from Daddy.

DADDY: Did you find a hotel? 

Wi-Fi? The plane had Wi-Fi?

Of course it did. Obviously satellite.

But right now I had bigger concerns.

I put on my headset and pressed the button. “Why are we going to Wyoming?” I asked again.

“Because I have to get home.”

“Home.” I said to myself. I hadn’t bothered to ask where exactly Wyatt was taking me.

I took a deep breath. The main thing was to get away from this storm.

Once we landed in… where that airport in Wyoming was, I could find my way to Houston.

Daddy texted again.

DADDY: Bailey hasn’t been able to find anything. 

ME: Caught a flight out. Will be in touch when I land. Sorry. It was the last flight out. Didn’t have time to communicate.

Daddy wouldn’t expect to hear from again until I landed.

We always just assumed there was no cell service in the air. That cut down on a lot of worry when we didn’t hear from whoever was flying.

I took another deep breath.

It served me right for not asking questions.

I’d actually never done anything like this before. But then, I’d never been in this kind of situation before either.

I practiced deep breathing. Something I would never admit to doing. It would give my psychologist sister too much satisfaction.

Closing my eyes, I pressed my head back against the headrest.

Then made a mental list of things I needed to do when we landed.

Dog food was at the top of the list.

In fact… I needed to get the dog some water. And I needed water.

“Going to the back for a minute,” I said.

Wyatt nodded.

I unbuckled and went into the back. Beau stood up, shook himself, and followed me.

The fully stocked kitchen area had refrigerated water bottles and snacks and a fully stocked bar. I found a bowl big enough for him to drink from and filled it with water from one of the bottles.

Beau got artisan water today.

As he lapped up the water, I opened a bottle of water for myself and drank deeply. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I’d gotten. But then flying always made me thirsty.

The plane wasn’t as big as I’d expected, but it had a lot of open space and had elegant furnishings.

I sat down on the sofa to finish my water.

And I wondered just who Wyatt was.

If I had his last name, I could google him on my cell. But without a last name, I’d be wasting my time.

Since I didn’t have any other choice at this point, I’d just go along.

It wasn’t like Wyatt was hard to be around.

In fact, I had a feeling he and I could be friends.

And he was nice to look at.

Besides, I was curious about who he was and what he called home.

It was possible that this wasn’t actually his plane.

Some pilots went in together and bought planes. That would certainly be more feasible that just one person owning a plane like this.

Unless, of course, you were Noah Worthington. But even he didn’t have this kind of airplane.

It was possible that Daddy and Wyatt knew each other.

I hadn’t given Wyatt my real last name. I’d given him my mother’s maiden name. Richards.

Anyone with the Worthington last name was far too easy to find on the Internet.

Especially an unusual name like Ainsley.

There was only one Ainsley Worthington in the world as far as I knew.

Feeling more centered, I put away what had become Beau’s water bowl and made my way back to the cockpit.

Wyatt

Ainsley stayed gone longer than I’d expected.

Just when I was about to give up on her, Ainsley came back to the cockpit, her dog at her heels.

She was most definitely a mystery.

We flew through some clouds just as she was about to sit down and hit some turbulence.

I instinctively put out an arm to steady her.

When I did, it tipped her toward me and with my arm around her, she grabbed my shoulders to steady herself.

The turbulence only lasted a handful of seconds. It was over in a blink.

But I had my arms around her and her fists were in my shirt.

She smelled like honeysuckle and vanilla.

Normally I wasn’t bothered much by turbulence. I knew how to handle it. It was common in the high altitudes around the mountains, so I had a lot of experience with it.

But my heart was pounding like I’d been running a race.

Ainsley pushed back, steadying herself.

Our eyes met and for a moment, we didn’t move.

It was like we were frozen there.

But in reality it only lasted a fraction of a second. She straightened and went to her seat, buckling herself in.

I adjusted the altitude to get us above the clouds.

Ainsley took out her phone and kept her gaze focused on it, thought she didn’t appear to be doing anything.

Then she blew out a breath and, looking over at me, gave me a little smile.

That little smile sent my heart racing again.

I shifted in my seat.

When she’d practically been in my lap, I’d been enveloped in her scent. Something like honeysuckle and vanilla. Maybe some undertones of jasmine.

It hadn’t smelled like heavy perfume at all. More like soap. Or maybe it had just been her essence.

At any rate, whatever it was, it made my thoughts foggy. That and the way she’d looked at me.

She was like some kind of mermaid calling me toward the rocks. Or whatever mermaids did.

It had been a long time since a woman had this effect on me.

But then I’d gotten good at keeping my distance. I had something one of them had described as an icy wall that I throw up in an instant.

But if anyone else had been through what I’d been through, they’d probably not only have a wall to throw up, they’d probably live behind it.

So all in all, I considered myself to be managing fairly well.

I picked up my clipboard, made a show of flipping through the pages, then casually laid it in my lap.

Just in case my cock decided to embarrass me by choosing this particular time to come alive again.

Ainsley

I held my phone tightly in my hands just to keep my hands from trembling.

It wasn’t the turbulence. Turbulence didn’t scare me one bit.

I knew how to handle it as did any competent pilot. And Wyatt seemed more than competent.

It was way he’d looked at me. And God help me, I’d liked the feel of his arms around my waist.

I didn’t date pilots.

At least, not any more.

I’d broken my own rule once and it had led to a moratorium on men.

Which I was still on, by the way.

I wasn’t about to make an exception for Wyatt.

He was still a man even if he wasn’t a pilot by trade. Flying a jet like this told me he wasn’t.

Pilots couldn’t afford this kind of plane.

He did something else for a living. Or maybe he was independently wealthy. An inheritance maybe.

Or maybe he was a high-powered executive. He didn’t act like an executive. I’d seen my share of them, too.

No. Whatever he was, he was a mystery.

I tried to focus my thoughts on something else.

But sitting here in the cockpit next to this handsome pilot—and at the moment he was a pilot—there wasn’t much space to think about anything else.

I wondered if I should let somebody know where I was.

I wasn’t on this man’s manifest. At least not under my real name.

If we crashed, no one would know I was onboard.

That thought jarred me a bit.

I clicked open my phone and put on my headset. Pressed the button to talk.

“What’s our flight number?” I asked.

He rattled it off.

I typed it into a text and sent it into cyberspace.

The Wi-Fi wasn’t so good right now for some reason. But I felt better just letting someone know where I was.

I sat back and forced myself to relax and enjoy the flight.

Just as my heartrate had gotten back to a steady state, Wyatt’s voice came though my headset.

“Where did you need to go?” he asked.

I sighed. So much for relaxing and enjoying the flight.

“Houston,” I said. Houston was a big city and wouldn’t tell him much.

I wasn’t so sure it mattered anyway if he knew who I was.

“I see,” he said. “Guess I’m taking you in the wrong direction.”

“Just a little,” I said with a little smile.

It wasn’t his fault I’d jumped on his plane.

He had gotten me out of a bad place. With my own plane down for who knows how long and the storm coming in, and no rooms available in town, I could have been in a mess.

“Guess we’ll figure something out,” he said.

“I’m sure we will,” I said.

We sat in silence a few minutes.

“I just got another weather report,” he said. “Looks like the storm is bigger than they’d expected. You might be stuck in Wyoming for a while.”

I looked blankly at him. “How long is awhile?”
He shrugged. “A few days.”

I didn’t have a few days to sit in Wyoming waiting out a storm.

I had family obligations.

“I’ll figure something out,” I said with a bravado I didn’t feel.

There were a lot of things we could control.

But weather wasn’t one of them.

Weather was the great equalizer in the aviation world.

It brought pilots back down to the level of those who had to travel on the ground.