On Wings of Love

“I’m not interested.” Noah breathed in a lungful of ocean air laced with the distinct scent of jet fuel.

“Right. Then why do you keep staring at her?”

Okay, so maybe he was a little interested, and it scared him. He hadn’t thought of another woman since his wife died, and he didn’t plan on starting to even though this one caused a tiny blip on his radar screen. Noah wouldn’t risk his heart and put himself through the pain and agony of falling in love again and losing her like he’d lost Michelle.

Brad spoke quietly again. “You have to admit she’s appealing in a girl-next-door way.”

“Not my type.” Noah’s gaze betrayed his words as it lingered on the blonde coordinator again. Now he knew how the moths that fluttered around his back porch light felt.

“Then what is?” Brad asked.

“I don’t know. Not someone like her.” Noah ground out. He forced his fingers to uncurl. Even if the only thing that remained from his fighting days was a crooked nose and a few tiny scars, Noah knew better than to tangle with the taller, heavier and younger Brad again. Still his gaze lingered on the woman jumping inside the white and blue ambulance behind the rest of her team. Her hesitant wave before her blond head and white lab coat disappeared inside sucker punched his gut. Anger wrestled with disgust.

The lights flashed against the metal of the hangar to his right. He couldn’t shake the image of a big black bird hovering over the emergency vehicle as the sirens echoed in his ears. He continued to watch until it passed through the gate and out onto the street running parallel to the small airport.

“Let me have the dinner list. I’ll go pick it up.” Brad grabbed the slip of paper Ruth had given him and took off to find the flight-based operation’s courtesy car.

Noah’s fingers gripped the strap of Houston’s leash when he and the dog descended to the tarmac. A walk in the strip of grass would do both of them good after being cooped up in the plane. It might also release the tension tightening his neck and shoulder muscles.

“Come on, boy, we’ve got some time to kill.” He frowned at his choice of words. “Make that some time to waste.”

Not really. As if he hadn’t learned that every second was precious and not to be frittered away. All those years flying commercial aircraft had eaten away the hours he could have been spending with his family. Now he had the time, but his family existed only in photographs.

His shoes crushed the grass beneath his sneakers as Houston did his business. Why did his partner agree to this contract? Maybe because Brad had recognized what Noah hadn’t. He hadn’t come to terms with the death of his wife and son.

Too bad. Noah would face his nightmares by himself, not be forced into it by someone who didn’t understand. Tomorrow he’d flip the pilot schedules so he wouldn’t be called out to do any more organ recovery fly-outs.

Once the distant siren melted into the hum of early evening traffic, Noah relaxed.

Slightly. They still had to get the team and whatever piece of human anatomy they’d removed back to Phoenix. But for now, it was him and his dog. Noah knelt down and scratched the dog his son had picked out behind his ears. The only thing he had left from his happier days. The days when he was half of a whole. Now he wandered around as one of those left behind.

Houston’s body wriggled in delight while the dog licked Noah’s hand. The adjustment hadn’t been easy for him, either, and every once in a while before they’d moved from the house, Noah caught Houston staring into Jeremy’s empty room.

Waiting for a boy who would never come home.

He picked up the dog and held his body close to his chest. The dog’s heat permeated the thin cotton of his shirt. The nightmares rose to the surface, clawing their way through layers of protective coating meant to shelter his heart. Noah buried his face into the dog’s fur. When would the pain go away? When would he feel normal again?

Enough.

He opened his eyes as the almost full moon peeked over the horizon. A light breeze kicked up some of the litter by the chain link fence. With the onset of dusk, he retreated back inside his airplane. Then he settled back in the seat Ruth had occupied because it gave him quicker access to the front.

Her warmth and scent lingered, creating an unwanted longing for female conversation he’d thought was buried behind three years of bitter emotions. He closed off the tap feeding the thoughts and forced them back to the dry recesses of his brain.

With over an hour before Brad, Ruth and the medical team came back, he decided to rest.

As best he could under the circumstances. Noah closed his eyes and almost immediately fell into that bottomless nightmare that had become a part of him.

“Just sign here, Mr. Barton.” A jumble of words wavered before his eyes.

“No!”

“There is nothing else we can do, sir. Your son is brain-dead. But there is something you can.” The bright red lipstick worn by the garish woman dressed in hospital garb reminded him of an old Japanese movie. The one dubbed over in English where the lips moved independently of the words.

“You want to carve up my son and dole him out like pineapple slices,” Noah spat back. Guilt over not being able to do enough to save his son coursed through him like a jolt of electricity.

“Sign the paper, Noah. It’s what Michelle would have wanted.” His sister spoke softly and rubbed his back. “You know it’s the right thing to do.”

The clipboard dangled in front of his vision. The line marked with an X tormented him but not as much as the shame. He’d failed his son. A hand he recognized as his own grabbed the pen and scribbled his name.

“Thank you, Mr. Barton. This will save someone’s life.”

But what about my life?

Noah jolted awake to find Houston licking the tears from his face.

Chapter Two

“Are you okay, Ruth?” Nancy asked as she strapped herself into the seat in the rear of the ambulance to ride back to the waiting airplane.

“I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

Exhaustion seeped into her pores again. Child donors were always the hardest. And not very common, which was why so many sick children died while waiting for organs. A fact she tried to change with each donation she coordinated, but sometimes she felt like a hamster trapped inside one of those wheels getting nowhere fast. There weren’t enough organs to go around.

She stared out the tiny window in the back over Nancy’s shoulder. No need to let the staff know this particular donation had affected her. She wouldn’t fall apart in front of the team that depended on her to be the calm one. The reliable one. Boy, did she have them fooled.

But that wasn’t what made her unusually quiet. Her silence stemmed from the glimpse she’d caught of the donor’s parents’ faces as she passed them in the hallway on the way to surgery. A look her own parents had once worn when they realized one of their children was dead. Grief curled around Ruth’s heart and opened the door for memories to flood in, carrying debris and fallout from an earlier time.

She’d hoped and prayed for a miracle for her sister that never came. Sometimes she didn’t understand God’s ways. But she never questioned His intentions, which was why she followed His calling and dedicated her life to making sure every possible donation was a success.

Digging into her purse, she grabbed two pain relievers and plopped them into her mouth with hopes that they would deaden the pain emerging behind her eye again. The heart Dr. Cavanaugh carried in the cooler was two decades too late to help her twin, but another child would have a second chance at life.

“How about you? How are you holding up?” Ruth asked Nancy. The fatigue lines bracketing the first assistant’s mouth mirrored her own. The surgery had gone well once they’d finally had their chance to operate.

“Fine, though things could have gone a little quicker.”

“That kidney team sure took their sweet time,” one of the med students announced. “I didn’t think they’d ever get finished. Why did it take so long?”

With six years’ experience as an O.R. nurse before becoming a coordinator, Ruth had been involved in hundreds of operations—many successful, others not. Since the heart was the last organ recovered, her team had to wait almost an hour and a half before they could operate.

Things had gotten tricky during the surgery, too, but Dr. Cavanaugh pulled it off. Ruth’s team had not lost an organ yet.

“Sometimes things don’t quite go as planned. I’m not familiar with that surgeon, but from his appearance, I’d say he doesn’t quite have the experience Dr. Cavanaugh has.”

“He sure was good-looking though.” The other med student piped in. “Too bad that team was from L.A. and not Phoenix.”

Ruth leaned against the padded bench and closed her eyes to the inane conversation swirling around her. She put pressure on her eyelid in hopes of alleviating the pain made worse when she realized she still had to get inside a plane and fly back to Phoenix. Instead of finding relief, she saw a sad Noah Barton staring back at her.

“Ready to fly back, Ruth?” Noah’s question sounded more like a sigh once she’d picked up her food from the cardboard box next to the door.