Playing for Keeps

D
anica Cross wheeled the drink cart down the narrow aisle, heading back to the galley. The cabin of the 737 was hotter than usual, and she blew her bangs off her clammy forehead as passed through the cabin. While handing out drinks with plenty of ice, she assured the passengers that the problem with the heat would soon be resolved.

She’d reported the passengers’ complaints to the captain an hour ago, but she didn’t feel a noticeable decrease in the temperature at all and tempers were rising with the heat.

God only knew Captain Marks was an ass, but she doubted he’d leave the temperature this high intentionally. She wasn’t usually fanciful, and Danica hated to even think it, but something was wrong. She’d had a vague niggle of disquiet from the moment Flight 723 had taken off from South America two hours before, and the sensation only became stronger as time passed.

With a quiet sigh of relief, she pushed the drink cart into the small galley and locked it in place, then tugged her white uniform shirt away from her the small of her back. Of course, as soon as she let go, it molded to her sweaty skin again. The uniforms were as formfitting as possible, without actually hindering movement.

“Did you give Monster Kid his ninety-ninth apple juice?” Angie Hotchner asked, handing Danica a cold soda.

“Like they couldn’t hear the kid whining the past ten thousand miles?” Angie rolled her eyes. “Oh, to give some parents a piece of my mind! Are they freaking deaf? Who lets a seven-year-old get away with behavior like that?”

“This heat’s getting to everyone.” All 148 seats occupied by sweating members of President Palacios’s staff, and one of those passengers was his very bored, very spoiled son. It had been a long, long flight from San Cristóbal to Miami with an all-male, all-demanding, all-women-are-servants contingent of macho jackasses who made her think longingly of things like parachutes. Emergency exits. Tasers. Still, the heat, coupled with the loud demands of a cranky, whiny child, didn’t help anyone’s disposition.

Dani, Angie, and the first officer, Jean Harris, were the only females on board. Lucky them. The crew would receive a hefty bonus for the twenty-four hour Miami/South America/Miami turnaround. Danica had her eye on a nice little condo in Delray Beach. Thoughts of that bonus kept her moving and biting her tongue as she’d worked her way through the cabin.

“He’s President Palacios’s only son,” she added, after gulping the rest of the soda and savoring the icy burn down her dry throat. “Guess the little guy’s used to getting what he wants. Spoiled. Especially since his mother left to live in Miami.”

“Yeah?” Angie took a lipstick out of her pocket and uncapped it. “If he were my kid, long distance mother or not, I’d blister his arrogant little butt so bad he wouldn’t be able to sit down for a wee—Jay-sus! Is it menopause, or is it getting hotter in here?”

Danica tossed her empty can in the trash. “Everyone’s still complaining. I’ll go speak to the captain again.”

The other flight attendant ran cold water on a cloth napkin, wrung it out, then slapped it on the back of her neck. “May the Force be with you.”

Danica grinned as she pushed through the curtain and turned to the secure door into the cockpit. She pressed the buzzer then stood there with the sensation of every dark eye behind her checking out her butt. Should’ve grabbed a diet soda. “Come on you guys, open up,” she mumbled under her breath, glancing through the portal in the exit door at the blur of murky browns and faded greens thirty thousand feet below. They were already flying over the Everglades. She’d be home in just over an hour. A dip in the apartment pool sounded heavenly.

She jabbed the buzzer again.

Jon, her soon-to-be-ex, was a white-knuckle flier. Perhaps in some perverse way that’s why she’d became a flight attendant a year ago when she seen the writing on the wall. So much for soul mates.

“Open up, Jean,” Danica muttered under her breath, frowning at the closed and locked cockpit door. Dean Marks was an arrogant, womanizing jerk. And if the copilot had been any woman other than Jean, Danica would’ve been convinced they were boinking in the cockpit, which Marks had almost been caught doing on a flight to Singapore last year. However, since Jean was a happily married grandmother of five, he wouldn’t get to first base. Okay. So no mile-high club in the cockpit. Why weren’t they opening the friggin’ door?

Glancing at the small gold watch on her wrist while she waited, Danica sighed. Still another twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds to go on this flight from hell. She pressed the buzzer again with a little more force than necessary. The bonus, remember the bonus.

The door between the cockpit and the main cabin didn’t open, and she felt a spurt of something elemental in the pit of her stomach. Instinctively, she knew the door wasn’t going to open. It wasn’t her imagination. Something was wrong. She pasted a reassuring smile on her face for the passengers and hotfooted it back to Angie in the galley.

“Ange, someth—”

“We’re going to crash.” Angie said it so flatly, so calmly, it took Danica a second to compute the words that she herself had been thinking. She strode over and touched her friend’s shoulder. The sensation of the floor shimmying under their feet was followed by a small pop. Both women grabbed the countertop to keep their balance. Their eyes met.

In the cabin, the passengers shouted in alarm. The president’s son started shrieking in terror.

A terrible calm came over Danica-her weird way of reacting to trauma. The back of her neck tingled-a sure sign of impending doom. She’d felt that same tingle the night Jon staggered into their home, bleeding like a sieve a year and eight days ago.

And felt it again the day she told Jon she wanted a divorce.

“No, we are not crashing,” she told Angie with more confidence than she felt. The more her friend panicked, the calmer Danica became. It was a gift. “Just turbulence.” Wind shears were a bitch to fly through, requiring skill and attention from the cockpit crew. Which explained why the pilots hadn’t responded and why–she swallowed as her gut clenched–the plane suddenly lost what felt like about five thousand feet of altitude.

“Come on. Let’s go strap in the inmates.” Just because there wasn’t a cloud in the sky didn’t mean the thermals weren’t surging against the body of the aircraft. She forced a smile. “Angie. Come on.”

“It’s a faulty rudder system,” Angie said, barely moving her lips. She’d flown for TransAir for thirty years. She could probably fly the aircraft herself. She grabbed Dani’s arm in a white-knuckled grip. “I’m the one who’s been stealing your M and M’s. And I told Gracie how much you paid for those–”

Another popping sound-not nearly as happy as that of a champagne cork releasing-rang through the cabin, this one louder and more ominous than the last. Dani’s feet slid on the carpet as the nose of the craft dipped. Call-button lights flashed on the bulkhead panel above the jump seats. Off. On. Off. On. Flicker. . .

Shit. “We’ve got to go out there and calm the passengers, Ange. Now. Come on.”

Danica tore through the drape and headed into the cabin where pandemonium reigned. Half the passengers were out of their seats. All of them were yelling, screaming like girls, or crying. Ha! Where was all that superior machismo now?

She unhooked the PA mic and spoke calmly and quietly until the hysteria subsided a little and they could hear her. She listened to her own voice, amazed how cool and calm she sounded when she knew, absolutely, unequivocally knew, they were all about to die.

“Gentlemen, please. There’s no need to panic. Everyone, take your seats.” She motioned them to sit down. “All seats must be in their upright position with tray tables up and locked. Please keep your seat belts firmly fastened. We’re just experiencing a little air turbulence. Captain Marks assures us we’ll be landing safely a few minutes ahead of schedule.”

And while she was BSing the passengers and asking herself rhetorical questions, where were Kent and Cisco, the other two flight attendants? She glanced back to check on her friend. Angie, white-faced but professional, was helping calm the passengers. Holding on to seat backs to remain on her feet, Danica pulled herself row by row against the downward pitch of the aircraft, toward the back of the plane.

“Please remain calm and stay seated.” She shouted without the benefit of the mic. No one was listening. “The plane will level shortly.” By which time it would be too late for anyone to care.

Damn it. I’m too young to die.

As urgent as her need to check on the aft attendants was, the passengers had to come first. She checked seat belts and stowed tray tables as she went along the narrow aisle. All the while, maintaining what she hoped was a serene smile.

The pain-in-the-ass kid, spiffed up in his too-adult black suit to meet his mother in Miami, huddled in his aisle seat, his face white, black eyes wide and terrified. Danica crouched in the aisle beside him and took his sweaty, sticky little hand between both of hers. “You are being a very brave boy. It’s going to be all right, little one,” she told the wild-eyed child in Spanish.

He flung his arms around her neck in a stranglehold then burst into hysterical tears as the nose of the plane dipped farther, rocking Danica back. She grabbed his seat arm with a white-knuckled grip, supporting him with her other arm.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay,” she lied in English then Spanish to both of them. Neither she nor the boy believed it for a second. Instead of staying in his seat, he snapped the buckle open and practically climbed her torso, as if shimmying up a tree.

“No.” She tried to lift him back into his seat, but he was like a little monkey, wrapping himself around her as if attached with Velcro.

An incredibly loud boom reverberated through the cabin. The plane bucked and bounced, then did the aeronautic equivalent of the hula. Lights went out, plunging the cabin into twilight gloom. The overheads popped open, spewing coats, luggage, and papers about the cabin like mobile flotsam. The oxygen masks dropped automatically, but most people were too panicked to use them.

Oh, shit, shit, shit. Hello? Anybody? Need a little divine intervention here.

She and the boy were thrown like dice beneath and around the seats, as the plane seemed to go end over end, tossing humans and baggage like a salad. She buried the little boy’s face against her chest, locking her arms around him as tightly as she could while they rolled back and forth in the aisle like a yo-yo in the hands of God.

She tried to protect him from projectiles, even though she knew that when they hit the ground, thirty thousand feet below, there’d be nothing left of any of them.

Her last cognizant thought before sheer terror overcame her was that she’d lied the night her husband came home to bleed on her new cream carpet. She didn’t hate him at all.

She’d never stopped loving Jon Raven.

W
hat the hell do you mean, she’s gone?” Jon Raven demanded, intentionally looming over the doctor who was all of five feet six inches tall in his lifts. “The FAA hasn’t talked to her. Hell. Forget the FAA-the NTSB hasn’t even finished cordoning off the site yet. So, I repeat, where is Danica Raven?”

Dr. Delmonico took a step back. Not backing down, Raven noted, probably just getting downwind. He knew he stunk like week-old garbage. Hell, even he didn’t want to be near him. He didn’t care. Not now. Not until he saw Danica with his own eyes.

He’d gotten the call while he was on an undercover surveillance in DC. A few strings pulled him a flight into Miami and the use of a chopper on arrival. It was the longest flight of his life. The helicopter rushed him directly to the crash site. No time for showers. Hell, no time to even wash the grit from his eyes.

The 737 had looked like a kid’s discarded toy tossed into the trees.

Jon Raven puked. The big, bad, obscenely expensive, private security consultant puked his guts out at the scene of the crash. Only after hearing that his wife had walked out, then been rushed to Mercy General in Miami, had he managed to get his shit together and fly back to the city.

“Miss Cross was released early this morning, Mr. Raven. I’m sorry, I—”

“I get that she was released.” Raven took the man’s elbow and marched him down the overly bright, sterile corridor and out of sight of three nurses pretending not to listen. He had to get a grip here. By some miracle, Danica hadn’t been among the scattered body parts gathered in labeled bags and laid in neat rows at the scene. Thank you God.

“She survived a fuc—a damn plane crash. She didn’t just walk out of here, did she?” God, knowing Dani, yeah, she probably did. When she had a stick up her ass about something, it was impossible to reason with the woman. Under “stubborn” in the dictionary was a life-sized picture of his wife. The woman who thought she was getting a divorce.

The doctor gave him a patient look. The guy had probably seen it all. “She departed in a wheelchair.”

“A wheelchair?” God. He couldn’t think it. Danica crippled? Worse? Better?

“Patients must always be wheeled out of the building,” the doctor, a mind-reader, told him. “Hospital policy, you know.”

Yeah. He did. Been in enough of them to know what pains in the asses they were about regulations. “She didn’t leave under her own power, I know that much. So? She was accompanied by—?” Raven demanded through his teeth. A lover? A boyfriend? One of the couple of hundred bottom-feeding, photo-flashing press people outside in the parking lot?

“I’m not at liberty to sa—”

“Now Doc, see this?” Jon whipped out his semiautomatic and jabbed it into the man’s rib cage. “My friend here says you are at liberty to say. So talk.”

The doctor, looking less than impressed by both the size of Raven’s weapon and the clear and present danger of a rank-smelling, longhaired psycho holding said weapon, actually laughed. “Sir. You’re standing in the ER of one of the busiest hospitals in the country. The busiest and the most dangerous. Half our patients come in here wielding guns and knives. Bigger guns and bigger knives.” The doctor’s lips twitched. “And many of them smell almost as bad as you do.”

Raven shook his head and stuck the weapon back in the shoulder harness under his grease and God-only-knew-what-else-stained windbreaker. He had to pay seventy-five bucks for the damned thing off a real bum just so he could get near the back door of the restaurant he’d been staking out.

“Look, Doc. Give me a break here, would ya? I haven’t slept in seventy-two hours, you’ve noticed I haven’t been close to either soap or water in a lot longer, and my wife survived a plane crash. Just tell me how she was when she left, and who she went with.”

Where are you, Dani? Where the hell are you?

“Miss Cross and a child were the only two survivors of the accident. . .are you all right, sir? Do you need a chair?”

Hell, no, he wasn’t all right. Reality slammed into his gut with the force of a pile driver. Raven braced a hand on the wall and drew a ragged breath.

He’d nearly lost her. This time for good. Forever. Kaput. Finito. No do-overs.

“But you said she was released. She couldn’t be hurt bad.” He looked at the doctor and ground out the question. “Is she hurt bad?” Had she been moved to another, more specialized facility?

“No, sir. Other than a mildly sprained wrist and severe insect bites, both Miss Cross and the boy are, miraculously, fine. The child has a broken ankle. Miss Cross carried him to safety.”

Raven thought for a sec he was going to pass out with relief. A sprained wrist? Only Dani. The woman walked under a magic umbrella. The only screw-up she’d ever made in her life was marrying him. And she’d rectified that mistake PDQ…or was about to.

The last, the very last thing Danica wanted was to get back on a plane. Fortunately, the hospital doped her to the gills with some very good stuff. When they carried her on board, she immediately fell into a dreamless sleep. She finally woke to find herself in an opulent bedroom, with a woman in a nurse’s uniform sitting beside the bed.

She blinked but didn’t bother moving. It was all she could do to raise and lower her eyelashes. So far, so good; time to see if she could talk. “Where—” she croaked.

The woman immediately rose to bring her a glass of water. You are in San Cristóbal, Miss Cross. She placed the straw between Danica’s parched lips.

Danica frowned as she took small sips of the cool water. The last thing she remembered was some man in a suit looming over the gurney in the ER. She thought he was Raven, and she’d been so happy, so stupidly relieved to see him, and then. . .

Frowning hurt San Cristóbal? What am I doing back here? Had the crash been a dream? How weird. She always thought Raven would die in the line of duty. How ironic if she died first, instead-in a plane crash. The thing he feared most. Fate had a wicked sense of humor.

The brain fog lifted and numerous aches and pains made themselves felt all over her body as she began to remember. The terrifying fall from the sky. The little boy in her arms. The hideous screams and groans of the passengers, and the shriek of metal tearing asunder. No dream. All too real.

Mostly, Danica remembered the vile smell of jet fuel and the sudden realization that she wasn’t dead. Yes, that was what she remembered most.

Being alive.

And very, very itchy. The mosquitoes in the Everglades were the size of hummingbirds. Vampire hummingbirds. Her arm itched so badly she just had to move to scratch. It was an effort, but she managed to connect nails with. . .eeew! Her skin was slathered with some disgusting sticky gunk. If it was itch medicine, it was a sad disappointment.

Had she asked the woman what she was doing back in San Cristóbal when she only left there-how long ago? Frowning gave her a headache, and she drifted back to sleep without having a good scratch or getting any answers.

They had Danica sequestered on President Palacios’s estate; a lush, fifty-acre, park like setting on the outskirts of San Cristóbal. It took Raven five hours to get past the phalanx of security at the gate, and that was only with U.S. intervention; to keep from killing someone to gain entrance he’d called in a few chits.

Five hours, only to end up pacing this overblown frigging chichi sitting room on the ground floor for almost an hour before a tall, gaunt man in a well-tailored black suit entered. Six armed guards in crisp navy blue uniforms flanked the guy, who looked like a Disney villain. Raven didn’t give a flying fuck who this guy was or how many gun-toting toy soldiers he had in his wake. His temper climbed with each minute he was forced to wait. If somebody didn’t produce Danica real soon, things were going to get ugly.

The doctor in Miami bartered Danica’s X-rays in exchange for a shower and a change of clothing for him, for which Raven was grateful. He might smell better than he before, but his temper was now riding an all-time high. “I want to see my wife. Now,” Raven said flatly, turning from his position at the window which overlooked the circular driveway and a fountain grand enough for an Italian piazza, and tacky enough for Las Vegas.

“Your wife is in excellent hands, Mr. Raven.” Bypassing the ugly-ass, shiny, cat-pee-yellow sofas, the man strode forward, all military bearing and officious pomp, fake smile in place. “Good day. I am Edgardo Villalba-Vera, chief of security for el presidente. How may I be of help?”

“You weren’t listening. Unless you want me to tear this damn place apart, take me to my wife. Pronto.”

“I understand that you’re very upset—”

“Pal, I’m way past upset and smack-dab in the middle of homicidal. My wife. Now.”

“El médico is with her at the moment. Her nurse will alert me when he has departed. I will then have you escorted to her suite.”

Raven wasn’t waiting one more minute. His need to see Dani—to touch her, to ensure she was whole and healthy—had become his driving force in the last twelve hours. “The FAA and the NTSB representatives are looking for her,” he told the a-hole tightly. “The authorities investigating the accident want to talk to her.” Not as fucking badly as I do, he though savagely.

“She shall be made available as soon as she is well enough to have visitors.”

Raven’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, yeah? And just who’ll decide when Dani’s ‘well enough’?”

“Mr. Raven, I assure you. . .”

“No, I assure you. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board don’t consider themselves visitors, Ed.”

Thin lips pinched, and something snapped to life in his dark eyes. They do not have jurisdiction in San Cristóbal, señor.

“Danica is an American citizen, so she is their jurisdiction—and even if that wasn’t the case-she sure as hell is mine. And while we’re having this private little get-to-know-you chat, what is she doing here, and by whose authority was she removed from the hospital in Miami?”

The man pulled himself up as importantly as he could before saying officiously, “Miss Cross saved el presidente’s precious only son, Rigo. He, accompanied by his father’s most trusted security staff and many advisors, was on the TransAir flight to Miami. All but your wife and Rigo died in the unfortunate accident last night. When I heard of the interest of your American press regarding the survivors of the crash, I took it upon myself to mobilize my staff and have both Miss Cross and Rigo returned immediately to the palace, where they would be under my protection.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll feel better when my wife is under my protection and in the hospital under a doctor’s care.”

She is, señor, Villalba-Vera tried again to placate him. El presidente’s private physician is tending to her as we speak. She is receiving the best of care, I assure you.”

“Yeah? Well, I’d like to see for myself. Let’s go, pal.” Raven stalked to the monstrous double doors, easily two stories high, and out into the marble vestibule beyond. He turned to look at the guy, who was walking swiftly to catch up. “Which way?” Damn place was probably fifty thousand square feet.

“If you would but wait a m—”

Raven wasn’t waiting. He was tired of waiting. Hell, he’d been waiting for Danica for years, in one way or another. He’d reached his saturation point. He charged across the ridiculously ornate entry hall, blocking out the guy in mid bullshit.

“Hell with it.” He took the red carpeted, marble stairs two at a time, yelling at the top of his voice: “Danica? Where the hell are you? Dani, Goddamn it, answer me!”