A Game of Chance by Linda Howard
Chance didn’t say anything. He concentrated fiercely on keeping the plane level, riding the air currents down, down, aiming for that long, narrow slit in the earth. The plane spiraled like a leaf, coming so close to the jagged mountainside on the left that she could see the pits in the dark red rock.
Sunny bit her lip until blood welled in her mouth, fighting back the terror and panic that threatened to erupt in screams. She couldn’t distract him now, no matter what. She wanted to close her eyes, but resolutely kept them open. If she died now, she didn’t want to do it in craven fear. She couldn’t help the fear, but she didn’t have to be craven. She would watch death come at her, watch Chance as he fought to bring them down safely and cheat the grim horseman.
They slipped below the sunshine, into the black shadows, deeper and deeper. It was colder in the shadows, a chill that immediately seeped through the windows into her bones. She couldn’t see a thing. Quickly she snatched off the sunglasses and saw that Chance had done the same. His eyes were narrowed, his expression hard and intent as he studied the terrain below.
The ground was rushing at them now, a ground that was pocked and scored with rivulets, and dotted with boulders. It was flat enough, but not a nice, clear landing spot at all. She braced her feet against the floor, her body rigid as if she could force the airplane to stay aloft.
“Hold on.” His voice was cool. “I’m going to try to make it to the stream bed. The sand will help slow us down before we hit one of those rocks.”
A stream bed? He was evidently much better at reading the ground than she was. She tried to see a ribbon of water, but finally realized the stream was dry; the bed was that thin, twisting line that looked about as wide as the average car.
She started to say “Good luck,” but it didn’t seem appropriate. Neither did “It was nice knowing you.” In the end, all she could manage was “Okay.”
It happened fast. Suddenly they were no longer skimming above the earth. The ground was there, and they hit it hard, so hard she pitched forward against the seat belt, then snapped back. They went briefly airborne again as the wheels bounced, then hit again even harder. She heard metal screeching in protest; then her head banged against the side window, and for a chaotic moment she didn’t see or hear anything, just felt the tossing and bouncing of the plane. She was boneless, unable to hold on, flopping like a shirt in a clothes dryer.
Then there came the hardest bounce of all, jarring her teeth. The plane spun sideways in a sickening motion, then lurched to a stop. Time and reality splintered, broke apart, and for a long moment nothing made any sense; she had no grasp on where she was or what had happened.
She heard a voice, and the world jolted back into place.
“Sunny? Sunny, are you all right?” Chance was asking urgently.
She tried to gather her senses, tried to answer him. Dazed, battered, she realized that the force of the landing had turned her inside the confines of the seat belt, and she was facing the side window, her back to Chance. She felt his hands on her, heard his low swearing as he unclipped the seat belt and eased her back against his chest, supporting her with his body.
She swallowed, and managed to find her voice. “I’m okay.” The words weren’t much more than a croak, but if she could talk at all that meant she was alive. They were both alive. Joyful disbelief swelled in her chest. He had actually managed to land the plane!
“We have to get out. There may be a fuel leak.” Even as he spoke, he shoved open the door and jumped out, dragging her with him as if she was a sack of flour. She felt rather sacklike, her limbs limp and trembling.
A fuel leak. The engine had been dead when they landed, but there was still the battery, and wiring that could short out and spark. If a spark got to any fuel, the plane and everything in it would go up in a fireball.
Everything in it. The words rattled in her brain, like marbles in a can, and with dawning horror she realized what that meant. Her bag was still in the plane.
“Wait!” she shrieked, panic sending a renewed surge of adrenaline through her system, restoring the bones to her legs, the strength to her muscles. She twisted in his grasp, grabbing the door handle and hanging on. “My bag!”
“Damn it, Sunny!” he roared, trying to break her grip on the handle. “Forget the damn bag!”
“No!”
She jerked away from him and began to climb back into the plane. With a smothered curse he grabbed her around the waist and bodily lifted her away from the plane. “I’ll get the damn bag! Go on—get out of here! Run!”
She was appalled that he would risk his life retrieving her bag, while sending her to safety. “I’ll get it,” she said fiercely, grabbing him by the belt and tugging. “You run!”
For a split second he literally froze, staring at her in shock. Then he gave his head a little shake, reached in for the bag and effortlessly hefted it out. Wordlessly Sunny tried to take it, but he only gave her an incendiary look and she didn’t have time to argue. Carrying the bag in his left hand and gripping her upper arm with his right, he towed her at a run away from the plane. Her shoes sank into the soft grit, and sand and scrub brush bit at her ankles, but she scrambled to stay upright and keep pace with him.
They were a good fifty yards away before he judged it safe. He dropped the bag and turned on her like a panther pouncing on fresh meat, gripping her upper arms with both hands as if he wanted to shake her. “What the hell are you thinking?” he began in a tone of barely leashed violence, then cut himself off, staring at her face. His expression altered, his golden-brown eyes darkening.
“You’re bleeding,” he said harshly. He grabbed his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to her chin. Despite the roughness of his tone, his touch was incredibly gentle. “You said you weren’t hurt.”
“I’m not.” She raised her trembling hand and took the handkerchief, dabbing it at her chin and mouth. There wasn’t much blood, and the bleeding seemed to have stopped. “I bit my lip,” she confessed. “Before you landed, I mean. To keep from screaming.”
He stared down at her with an expression like flint. “Why didn’t you just scream?”
“I didn’t want to distract you.” The trembling was growing worse by the second; she tried to hold herself steady, but every limb shook as if her bones had turned to gelatin.
He tilted up her face, staring down at her for a moment in the deepening twilight. He breathed a low, savage curse, then slowly leaned down and pressed his lips to her mouth. Despite the violence she sensed in him, the kiss was light, gentle, more of a salute than a kiss. She caught her breath, beguiled by the softness of his lips, the warm smell of his skin, the hint of his taste. She fisted her hands in his T-shirt, clinging to his strength, trying to sink into his warmth.
He lifted his head. “That’s for being so brave,” he murmured. “I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in a plane crash.”
“Landing,” she corrected shakily. “It was a landing.”
That earned her another soft kiss, this time on the temple. She made a strangled sound and leaned into him, a different sort of trembling beginning to take hold of her. He framed her face with his hands, his thumbs gently stroking the corners of her mouth as he studied her. She felt her lips tremble a little, but then, all of her was shaking. He touched the small sore spot her teeth had made in her lower lip; then he was kissing her again, and this time there was nothing gentle about it.
This kiss rocked her to her foundation. It was hungry, rough, deep. There were reasons why she shouldn’t respond to him, but she couldn’t think what they were. Instead, she gripped his wrists and went on tiptoe to slant her parted lips against his, opening her mouth for the thrust of his tongue. He tasted like man, and sex, a potent mixture that went to her head faster than hundred-proof whiskey. Heat bloomed in her loins and breasts, a desperate, needy heat that brought a low moan from her throat.
He wrapped one arm around her and pulled her against him, molding her to him from knee to breast while
Suddenly he jerked his head back. “I don’t believe this,” he muttered. Reaching up, he prised her arms from around his neck and set her away from him. He looked even more savage than he had a moment before, the veins standing out in his neck. “Stay here,” he barked. “Don’t move an inch. I have to check the plane.”
He left her standing there in the sand, in the growing twilight, suddenly cold all the way down to the bone. Deprived of his warmth, his strength, her legs slowly collapsed, and she sank to the ground.
Chance swore to himself, steadily and with blistering heat, as he checked the plane for fuel leaks and other damage. He had deliberately made the landing rougher than necessary, and the plane had a reinforced landing gear as well as extra protection for the fuel lines and tank, but a smart pilot didn’t take anything for granted. He had to check the plane, had to stay in character.
He didn’t want to stay in character. He wanted to back her against one of those big boulders and lift her skirt. Damn! What was wrong with him? In the past fifteen years he’d held a lot of beautiful, deadly women in his arms, and even though he let his body respond, his mind had always remained cool. Sunny Miller wasn’t the most beautiful, not by a long shot; she was more gamine than goddess, with bright eyes that invited laughter rather than seduction. So why was he so hot to get into her pants?
“Why” didn’t matter, he angrily reminded himself. Okay, so his attraction to her was unexpected; it was an advantage, something to be used. He wouldn’t have to fake anything, which meant there was even less chance of her sensing anything off-kilter.
Danger heightened the emotions, destroying inhibitions. They had lived through a life-threatening situation together, they were alone, and there was a definite physical attraction between them. He had arranged the first two circumstances; the third was a bonus. It was a textbook situation; studies in human nature had shown that, if a man and a woman were thrown together in a dangerous situation and they had only each other to rely on, they quickly formed both sexual and emotional bonds. Chance had the advantage, in that he knew the plane hadn’t been in any danger of crashing, and that they weren’t in a life-and-death situation. Sunny would think they were stranded, while he knew better. Whenever he signaled Zane, they would promptly be “rescued,” but he wouldn’t send that signal until Sunny took him into her confidence about her father.
Everything was under control. They weren’t even in Oregon, as he’d told her. They were in Nevada, in a narrow box canyon he and Zane had scouted out and selected because it was possible to land a plane in it, and, unless one had the equipment to scale vertical rock walls, impossible to escape. They weren’t close to any commercial flight pattern, he had disabled the transponder so no search plane would pick up a signal, and they were far off their route. They wouldn’t be found.
Sunny was totally under his control; she just didn’t know it.
The growing dusk made it impossible to see very much, and it was obvious that if the plane was going to explode in flames, it would already have done so. Chance strode back to where Sunny was sitting on the ground, her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around her legs, and that damn bag close by her side. She scrambled to her feet as he approached. “All clear?”
“All clear. No fuel leaks.”
“That’s good.” She managed a smile. “It wouldn’t do us any good for you to fix the fuel pump if there wasn’t any fuel left.”
“Sunny…if it’s a clogged line, I can fix it. If the fuel pump has gone out, I can’t.”
He decided to let her know right away that they might not be flying out of here in the morning.
She absorbed that in silence, rubbing her bare arms to ward off the chill of the desert air. The temperature dropped like a rock when the sun went down, which was one of the reasons he had chosen this site. They would have to share their body heat at night to survive.
He leaned down and hefted the bag, marveling anew at its weight, then took her arm to walk with her back to the plane. “I hope you have a coat in this damn bag, since you thought it was important enough to risk your life getting it,” he growled.
“A sweater,” she said absently, looking up at the crystal clear sky with its dusting of stars. The black walls of the canyon loomed on either side of them, making it obvious they were in a hole in the earth. A big hole, but still a hole. She shook herself, as if dragging her thoughts back to the problem at hand. “We’ll be all right,” she said. “I have some food, and—”
“Food? You’re carrying food in here?” He indicated the bag.
“Just some emergency stuff.”
Of all the things he’d expected, food was at the bottom of the list. Hell, food wasn’t even on the list. Why would a woman on an overnight trip put food in her suitcase?
They reached the plane, and he set the bag down in the dirt. “Let me get some things, and we’ll find a place to camp for the night. Can you get anything else in there, or is it full?”
“It’s full,” she said positively, but then, he hadn’t expected her to open it so easily.
He shrugged and dragged out his own small duffel, packed with the things a man could be expected to take on a charter flight: toiletries, a change of clothes. The duffel was unimportant, but it wouldn’t look right if he left it behind.
“Why can’t we camp here?” she asked.
“This is a stream bed. It’s dry now, but if it rains anywhere in the mountains, we could be caught in the runoff.”
As he spoke, he got a flashlight out of the dash, the blanket from the back, and a pistol from the pocket in the pilot’s side door. He stuck the pistol in his belt, and draped the blanket around her shoulders. “I have some water,” he said, taking out a plastic gallon milk jug that he’d refilled with water. “We’ll be all right tonight.” Water had been the toughest thing to locate. He and Zane had found several box canyons in which he could have landed the plane, but this was the only one with water. The source wasn’t much, just a thin trickle running out of the rock at the far end of the canyon, but it was enough. He would “find” the water tomorrow.
He handed her the flashlight and picked up both bags. “Lead the way,” he instructed, and indicated the direction he wanted. The floor of the canyon sloped upward on one side; the stream bed was the only smooth ground. The going was rough, and Sunny carefully picked her way over rocks and gullies. She was conscientious about shining the light so he could see where he was going, since he was hampered by both bags.
Damn, he wished she had complained at least a little, or gotten upset. He wished she wasn’t so easy to like. Most people would have been half-hysterical, or asking endless questions about their chances of being rescued if he couldn’t get the plane repaired. Not Sunny. She coped, just as she had coped at the airport, with a minimum of fuss. Without any fuss, actually; she had bitten the blood out of her lip to keep from distracting him while he was bringing the plane down.
The canyon was so narrow it didn’t take them long to reach the vertical wall. Chance chose a fairly flat section of sandy gray dirt, with a pile of huge boulders that formed a rough semi-circle. “This will give us some protection from the wind tonight.”
“What about snakes?” she asked, eyeing the boulders.
“Possible,” he said, as he set down the bags. Had he found a weakness he could use to bring her closer to him? “Are you afraid of them?”
“Only the human kind.” She looked around as if taking stock of th
She squatted beside her bag and spun the combination dial of the rather substantial lock on her bag. With a quiet snick the lock opened, and she unzipped the bag. Chance was a bit taken aback at finding out what was in the bag this easily, but he squatted beside her. “What do you have? Candy bars?”
She chuckled. “Nothing so tasty.”
He took the flashlight from her and shone it into the bag as she began taking out items. The bag was as neatly packed as a salesman’s sample case, and she hadn’t been lying about not having any room in there for anything else. She placed a sealed plastic bag on the ground between them. “Here we go. Nutrition bars.” She slanted a look at him. “They taste like you’d expect a nutrition bar to taste, but they’re concentrated. One bar a day will give us all we need to stay alive. I have a dozen of them.”
The next item was a tiny cell phone. She stared at it, frozen, for a moment, then looked up at him with fragile hope in her eyes as she turned it on. Chance knew there wasn’t a signal here, but he let her go through the motions, something inside him aching at the disappointment he knew she would feel.
Her shoulders slumped. “Nothing,” she said, and turned the phone off. Without another word she returned to her unpacking.
A white plastic box with a familiar red cross on the top came out next. “First aid kit,” she murmured, reaching back into the bag. “Water purification tablets. A couple of bottles of water, ditto orange juice. Light sticks. Matches.” She listed each item as she set it on the ground. “Hairspray, deodorant, toothpaste, pre-moistened towelettes, hairbrush, curling iron, blow dryer, two space blankets—” she paused as she reached the bottom of the bag and began hauling on something bigger than any of the other items. “—and a tent.”