A Game of Chance

Chance let silence fall, occasionally glancing at her to see if she really fell asleep. About fifteen minutes later, her breathing deepened and evened out into a slow rhythm. He waited a few minutes longer, then eased the plane into a more westerly direction, straight into the setting sun.

Chapter 4

“S unny.” The voice was insistent, a little difficult to hear, and accompanied by a hand on her shoulder, shaking her. “Sunny, wake up.”

She stirred and opened her eyes, stretching a little to relieve the kinks in her back and shoulders. “Are we there?”

Chance indicated the headset in her lap, and she slipped it on. “We have a problem,” he said quietly.

The bottom dropped out of her stomach, and her heartbeat skittered. No other words, she thought, could be quite as terrifying when one was in an airplane. She took a deep breath, trying to control the surge of panic. “What’s wrong?” Her voice was surprisingly steady. She looked around, trying to spot the problem in the cluster of dials in the cockpit, though she had no idea what any of them meant. Then she looked out of the window at the rugged landscape below them, painted in stark reds and blacks as the setting sun threw shadows over jagged rock. “Where are we?”

“Southeastern Oregon.”

The engine coughed and sputtered. Her heart felt as if it did, too. As soon as she heard the break in the rhythm, she became aware that the steady background whine of the motor had been interrupted several times while she slept. Her subconscious had registered the change in sound but not put it in any context. Now the context was all too clear.

“I think it’s the fuel pump,” he added, in answer to her first question.

Calm. She had to stay calm. She pulled in a deep breath, though her lungs felt as if they had shrunk in size. “What do we do?”

He smiled grimly. “Find a place to set it down before it falls down.”

“I’ll take setting over falling any day.” She looked out the side window, studying the ground below. Jagged mountain ridges, enormous boulders and sharp-cut arroyos slicing through the earth were all she could see. “Uh-oh.”

“Yea. I’ve been looking for a place to land for the past half hour.”

This was not good, not good at all. In the balance of good and bad, this weighed heavily on the bad side.

The engine sputtered again. The whole frame of the aircraft shook. So did her voice, when she said, “Have you radioed a Mayday?”

Again that grim smile. “We’re in the middle of a great big empty area, between navigational beacons. I’ve tried a couple of times to raise someone, but there haven’t been any answers.”

The scale tipped even more out of balance. “I knew it,” she muttered. “The way today has gone, I knew I’d crash if I got on another plane.”

The grouchiness in her voice made him chuckle, despite the urgency of their situation. He reached over and gently squeezed the back of her neck, startling her with his touch, his big hand warm and hard on her sensitive nape. “We haven’t crashed yet, and I’m going to try damn hard to make sure we don’t. The landing may be rough, though.”

She wasn’t used to being touched. She had accustomed herself to doing without the physical contact that it was human nature to crave, to keep people at a certain distance. Chance McCall had touched her more in one afternoon than she had been touched in the past five years. The shock of pleasure almost distracted her from their situation—almost. She looked down at the unforgiving landscape again. “How rough does a landing have to get before it qualifies as a crash?”

“If we walk away from it, then it was a landing.” He put his hand back on the controls, and she silently mourned that lost connection.

The vast mountain range spread out around them as far as she could see in any direction. Their chances of walking away from this weren’t good. How long would it be before their bodies were found, if ever? Sunny clenched her hands, thinking of Margreta. Her sister, not knowing what had happened, would assume the worst—and dying in an airplane crash was not the worst. In her grief, she might well abandon her refuge and do something stupid that would get her killed, too.

She watched Chance’s strong hands, so deft and sure on the controls. His clear, classic profile was limned against the pearl and vermillion sky, the sort of sunset one saw only in the western states, and likely the last sunset she would ever see. He would be the last person she ever saw, or touched, and she was suddenly, bitterly angry that she had never been able to live the life most women took for granted, that she hadn’t been free to accept his offer of dinner and spend the trip in a glow of anticipation, free to flirt with him and maybe see the glow of desire in his golden-brown eyes.

She had been denied a lot, but most of all she had been denied opportunity, and she would never, never forgive her father for that.

The engine sputtered, caught, sputtered again. This time the reassuring rhythm didn’t return. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. God, oh God, they were going to crash. Her nails dug into her palms as she fought to contain her panic. She had never before felt so small and helpless, so fragile, with soft flesh and slender bones that couldn’t withstand such battering force. She was going to die, and she had yet to live.

The plane jerked and shuddered, bucking under the stress of spasmodic power. It pitched to the right, throwing Sunny against the door so hard her right arm went numb.

“That’s it,” Chance said between gritted teeth, his knuckles white as he fought to control the pitching aircraft. He brought the wings level again. “I have to take it down now, while I have a little control. Look for the best place.”

Best place? There was no best place. They needed somewhere that was relatively flat and relatively clear; the last location she had seen that fit that description had been in Utah.

He raised the right wingtip, tilting the plane so he had a better side view.

“See anything?” Sunny asked, her voice shaking just a little.

“Nothing. Damn.”

“Damn is the wrong word. Pilots are supposed to say something else just before they crash.” Humor wasn’t much of a weapon with which to face death, but it was how she had always gotten herself through the hard times.

Unbelievably, he grinned. “But I haven’t crashed yet, sweetheart. Have a little faith. I promise I’ll say the right word if I don’t find a good-looking spot pretty soon.”

“If you don’t find a good-looking spot, I’ll say it for you,” she promised fervently.

They crossed a jagged, boulder-strewn ridge, and a long, narrow black pit yawned beneath them like a doorway to hell. “There!” Chance said, nosing the plane down.

“What? Where?” She sat erect, desperate hope flaring inside her, but all she could see was that black pit.