Only Mine (25 page)

 

“C
OIN TOSS
?” Bill asked.

Finn stared out the office window. The first storm had blown through, but there had been a second one behind it. This one was bigger and headed directly for South Salmon.

Storms out here weren't like those down in the lower forty-eight. They were a lot less polite and plenty more destructive. Normally all flights would have been grounded, but a call had come through from a desperate father. His sick child needed to be flown out as soon as possible. The medical planes were all out on other calls. No one else could get there.

Now dark clouds rose fifty or sixty thousand feet into the heavens. There were wind shears and flashes of lightning. Flying in something like that was like daring the hand of God.

“I'll go,” Finn said, grabbing his backpack and walking toward the parked planes. “Radio the family that I should be there in about three hours. Maybe a little longer.”

“You can't go around the storm.” It was too big. There was no “around.”

“I know.”

Bill grabbed his arm. “Finn, wait. We'll give it a few hours.”

“Does that kid have a few hours?”

“No, but…”

Finn knew the argument. People who chose to live outside the civilized world risked situations just like this. Most of the time, the gamble paid off. Every now and then, fate exacted a price.

“That kid isn't going to die on my watch,” Finn said.

“You don't owe them anything.”

He owed them trying. That's what this job meant to him. Sometimes you had to take a risk.

He crossed to the plane and walked around the outside. The preflight routine was something he could do in his sleep, but today he took extra time. The last thing he needed was a mechanical problem complicating an already difficult situation.

By the time he was ready to take off, the first fingers of the storm were trying to grab him. Wind gusted and there were raindrops on his windshield.

The problem wasn't the flight out. He would be heading away from the storm. It was getting to Anchorage that was going to be the trick.

Six hours later, he knew he was going to die. The parents and the kid were in the plane, the worried father next to him, the mother sitting next to her son. The winds were so strong, the plane seemed to be standing still
instead of moving forward. They were buffeted and tossed. A few times they were caught in a small wind shear and dropped a few hundred feet.

“I'm going to be sick,” the mother called to him.

“Bags are next to the seat.”

Finn couldn't take the time to show her. Not when all their lives depended on him getting them safely landed.

Despite the fact that it was afternoon, the sky was black as night. The only illumination came from the lightning strikes. Wind howled like a monster out to get them, and Finn had a feeling that this time the storm might win.

He watched his warning lights, checked the altimeter and made sure they were on course. Without wanting to, he found himself mentally drifting to another flight very much like this one. A flight that had taken his parents and changed his world.

There'd been a storm, dark and powerful. The lightning had flashed around them, dangerous shards of destruction. Finn remembered one cutting so close, he'd been able to feel the heat. He'd been flying, his father in the copilot's seat. The wind had growled and thrown them around like a kid with a softball.

They'd swooped and bucked, and then a single flash of light had hit their engine. The plane had shuddered as the engine was fired into a useless molten part, and the plane had dropped like a rock.

There'd been no controlling the descent. It had been
too dark to know where to land, assuming there had been somewhere safer than the forest where they'd crashed. Finn didn't remember much about the impact. He'd awakened to find himself lying on the ground, in the rain.

His parents had both been unconscious. He'd cared for them as best he could, then he'd hiked out to get help. By the time he returned, they were gone. They'd probably died within an hour of his leaving, but he didn't like to think about that.

Lightning flashed next to the plane, jerking Finn back to the present. The mother screamed. The boy was probably terrified but too sick to make a sound. Next to Finn, the father clutched his seat.

No one asked if they were going to die, although he was sure they were thinking the question. Probably praying. Finn waited for a sense of regret, a voice that said nothing was worth this, that he should have waited.

And then he felt it. A sense of something other than himself. Even though he knew it was impossible, he would swear his parents were there with him, helping him. It was as if someone else took control of the plane, guiding his hands.

Not knowing what else to do, he listened to the silence, turning left, then right, dodging lightning and the wind shears, finding the calmest part of the storm. He flew lower when the invisible forces indicated he should, veered left, then up.

For the next hour he flew as he'd never flown before,
and gradually the power of the storm faded. Fifty miles outside of Anchorage, he saw the first hint of sunlight. A voice from the control tower crackled in his headset.

They landed less than thirty minutes later. An ambulance was waiting to race the boy and his family to the hospital. At the last second, the father turned back to him.

“I don't know how to thank you,” the man said, shaking his hand. “I thought we were going to die. You saved us. You saved him.”

Then he was running after his wife and climbing into the back of the ambulance.

Finn stood by his plane and watched the sun break through the clouds. Automatically, he checked the plane. Everything was fine. There wasn't a single mark to indicate what they'd been through. He climbed back inside, knowing whatever he was looking for wasn't there.

Maybe it had been his parents, maybe it had been something else. Flying was like boating. If a man did it long enough, he experienced things that couldn't be explained. For whatever reason, he'd been spared the night of the crash. He'd always thought it was to raise his brothers, but maybe there was another purpose. Maybe he'd been saved so that he could find his way to Dakota.

He loved her. Having to go through a near-death experience to figure that out made him an idiot, but he could live with that. As long as at the end of the day he got the chance to tell her.

He loved her. He wanted to marry her and have lots of babies with her. Hell, he needed to call Hamilton and tell the old coot he wanted to buy the business. Then he should let Bill know he was selling. Most important, he had to get back to Fool's Gold and tell Dakota how much he loved her and wanted to be with her.

He pulled out his cell phone and called Bill.

“I've been worried,” his partner said. “I had to hear it from the tower that you arrived? You couldn't call?”

“I'm calling.”

“You've been on the ground ten minutes. What have you been doing? Shopping?”

Finn chuckled. “Getting my passengers into the ambulance. Look, Bill, I'm out. You can buy me out of the business. I have to go back to Fool's Gold right away.”

“This is about that woman, isn't it?”

Finn thought of Dakota and grinned. “Yeah. I'm going to figure out how to convince her to marry me.”

There was a pause, then Bill said, “She's going to be really happy to hear that.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she's standing right next to me. If her smile is anything to go by, I'm going to guess she'll say yes.”

 

D
AKOTA USED
binoculars to scan the sky. Bill had told her in which direction to look, and when she saw the tiny speck of a plane appear, she began to jump up and down.

Finn landed and guided the plane off the runway. She was already running toward him.

They met on the grass by the tarmac. While there were a thousand things she had to say, right now she only wanted to be in his arms. Then she was, and he was holding her and kissing her and nothing had ever felt so right.

“I love you,” he told her, then kissed her. “I love you, Dakota. You and Hannah and our unborn baby. I should have told you that before.”

She was so happy, she wasn't sure she even needed to breathe. “You needed time.”

“I got scared and then I took off.” He cupped her face in his hands. “I want to marry you. I want us to be a family.”

She searched his face. “Even though that means a lot of responsibility?”

He nodded, then kissed her again. “Who am I kidding? I was born to be responsible.”

“You were a wild guy.”

“For about fifteen minutes. I want to be with you.”

Beautiful, amazing words, she thought happily. Perfect words, from the man who was exactly right for her.

“I love you, too,” she whispered.

“You'll marry me?”

“Yes.”

“We'll live in Fool's Gold?”

She wanted him to be happy. “Your life is here.”

“No, it's not. I'm selling my half of the business to Bill. My brothers don't want it and I can use the money
to buy Hamilton's company. I belong where you belong and that's Fool's Gold.”

She flung herself against him. Being in his arms felt right.

“Hannah is going to be thrilled,” she whispered. “She's really missed you.”

“I've missed her, too.” He touched her belly. “Soon she's going to have a baby brother or sister to boss around.”

“One day you're going to have to show us all Alaska,” she told him.

“I will, but right now, I'm ready to go home.”