Lost in His Arms
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Carla Cassidy
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Chapter One
Talbot McCarthy was not a happy camper.
Seated in his single-engine Cessna, ready for takeoff, he glanced quickly at the woman in the seat next to him. Her tawny hair shone with rich highlights as the last of the day’s sun danced in through the windows.
It had been almost a year since he’d seen her, but time hadn’t dulled the intense blue of her eyes or softened the determined thrust of her chin.
Elizabeth McCarthy.
His brother’s ex-wife.
Before they’d left her apartment, she’d changed from her feminine, tailored dress into a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a windbreaker to ward off the coolness of the early-autumn evening.
The jeans clung to her long slender legs, and the pale tangerine-colored T-shirt reflected the color of peaches onto her cheeks. He tried not to notice the thrust of her breasts against the cotton fabric.
She looked totally relaxed and self-possessed as they awaited takeoff. Then he spied her hands. They were clasped together in her lap, connected so tightly that her knuckles and fingers had turned white.
“You don’t like to fly?” he asked, guessing at the cause of her obvious distress.
“Not particularly,” she replied, her voice breathy with tension. “If I must fly, I prefer big commercial planes, not planes no bigger than my bathroom.”
“Don’t worry, I’m an excellent pilot,” he said.
“Yeah, and the Titanic was unsinkable.”
At that moment the tower gave him the okay for takeoff. He turned onto the runway and taxied to a high enough speed to begin his ascent.
He didn’t speak to her again until they had reached their cruising altitude. “You can relax now. It should be smooth sailing from here to Branson.”
Her hands unclasped and she drew a deep breath, audible above the drone of the engine. “Do you fly often?”
“Fairly regularly,” he replied. “As CEO of McCarthy Industries, there’s always a meeting to attend or some troubleshooting to be done at one of our branch offices. I got tired of depending on airline schedules, and I like the independence of flying my own plane.”
He could tell she was only half listening to him and knew her thoughts would be for her nine-year-old son, Andrew, and her ex-husband. “I wish I could tell you what Richard was thinking when he pulled this latest stunt.”
A small smile curved one corner of her generous mouth, and Talbot tightened his grip on the controls, trying to ignore how the gesture softened her features and made her more beautiful than he’d have thought possible.
“You and I have never had much luck at second-guessing Richard and his stunts.”
“That’s an understatement,” he agreed. He focused his attention away from her and frowned. He had no idea what his younger brother was up to this time. All he knew was that Richard had picked up his son from school that afternoon, without checking with Elizabeth, on a weekend that wasn’t his usual visitation time.
When she’d gotten home from work, Elizabeth had found a note on her kitchen table that indicated Richard wanted her to go to Twin Oaks, Missouri, a small town just outside Branson, where Richard and Talbot had spent their childhood.
Elizabeth had called Talbot to see if he knew what was going on. Talbot insisted he fly from his home in Morning View, Kansas, to Kansas City. He’d picked up Elizabeth at her apartment and they were now on their way to Twin Oaks.
Talbot suspected that, as usual, they were victims of his impetuous brother and one of his spontaneous thoughtless stunts.
Next to him, Elizabeth shifted position, and he caught a whiff of her perfume. Subtle yet sexy. She’d worn that scent for as long as he could remember. In fact, she’d been wearing it the very first night he’d met her, when she and Richard had come to Talbot to tell him she was pregnant and they were getting married.
Richard had looked scared to death, but Elizabeth’s blue eyes had radiated strength and purpose, and to Talbot’s shame, he had felt a flicker of envy that his younger brother had found such a beautiful, strong young woman to claim as his own.
He’d been appalled by that momentary stab of jealousy, and had consciously attempted to hold himself distant from her in the years of her marriage to Richard. In fact, he’d often been cold and brusque with her.
He’d hoped that attraction had died, but catching the scent of her familiar perfume, he was acutely aware of her presence next to him and of a tiny flame of heat that had ignited somewhere in the pit of his stomach.
Richard’s woman, he reminded himself. And even though she and Richard had been divorced for a year, she would never be anything other than Richard’s woman.
“I should be beside myself with anger at Richard for this,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “But I’ve always found it hard to sustain anger toward Richard for any length of time.”
This time Talbot felt a smile curving his lips. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Despite Richard’s immaturity and thoughtlessness, there was something endearing about him that made it difficult to get really angry with him. He was like a little boy who probably needed a spanking, but usually got away with nothing more than a sigh of exasperation from the adults around him.
Talbot’s smile faded and he frowned thoughtfully. “But he hasn’t been himself this past week.”
“What do you mean?”
Talbot felt her gaze on him, but didn’t turn to look at her. He’d learned through the years that looking at her was dangerous. It often resulted in inappropriate thoughts.
“I don’t know… He’s been unusually quiet, and when he does talk, lately all he talks about is our childhood…the past.”
“Maybe he’s doing some growing up, at twenty-seven. He’s still working for you at McCarthy Industries, right?”
Talbot nodded. “He’s a good personnel manager. He’s good with people.”
Talbot wondered if perhaps Richard was regretting his divorce from Elizabeth, and if this trip to Twin Oaks might not be an attempt to forge a reconciliation.
Richard probably hadn’t expected Elizabeth to call his older brother. But she had, to see if he knew what Richard was up to.
It had been Talbot’s idea to fly her to Branson where they could rent a car and drive to the tiny town of Twin Oaks. She’d readily agreed, preferring an hour-long plane trip to a four-and-a-half-hour trip in a car.
He wondered if Richard did want reconciliation, would Elizabeth be willing to try the marriage again? Certainly Andrew would be pleased if such a thing happened. Although he seemed well-adjusted to the divorce, wasn’t it every child’s dream to see his parents together?
And certainly all Talbot had ever wanted was for his brother to be happy. He’d promised his father a long time ago that he’d do everything in his power to take care of Richard.
He started as a shrill alarm screamed through the cockpit.
“What’s that?” Elizabeth gasped.
Talbot stared in horror at the gas gauge. Almost empty. But that was impossible; he’d refueled before he left Morning View “I don’t know. It looks like we’re losing fuel.”
“But we’re still miles from Branson,” Elizabeth protested, an edge of hysteria in her voice.
“Look outside your window and see if there’s a clearing where I can put down.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
At that moment the engine of the plane coughed once, then stopped running.
The only sound was the rush of the wind buffeting the plane from side to side. “No, I’m not kidding,” he said softly.
“What’s happening?”
“The engine has stopped.” Talbot worked to maintain control of the small aircraft. He picked up the microphone, but with only seconds to radio for help, he dropped it and kept his hands on the controls as the plane began to descend far too quickly.
“What do you mean, the engine has stopped?” Her voice rose slightly.
“I mean I’m no longer in control of this plane.”
“That’s ridiculous!” she cried. “You’re always in control of everything.”
At some other point in time, her comment would have warranted further discussion, but at the moment, he needed all his energy, all his focus, to keep the plane in the air. And it was a battle he was losing.
“We’re going down,” he said.
“I’ll never forgive you for this, Talbot McCarthy!” she exclaimed just before they hit the trees.
Elizabeth had always believed there’s a moment before death when your life flashes before your eyes, and all the pleasures, all the regrets mingle together for one shining moment of profound truth.
She was wrong. What flashed through her head as the plane fell from the sky were two things—a deep mourning for her son and the embarrassment of knowing she’d put on her most ragged panties that morning.
The noise when they hit the trees was deafening. Metal screeched, glass shattered, and it took a moment for Elizabeth to realize she was adding to the cacophony by screaming at the top of her lungs.
She clung to her seat as the fuselage was smashed from side to side. Her stomach heaved, as if she was riding a roller coaster and had just gone down the biggest drop. Vaguely she was aware of Talbot adding a string of colorful oaths to the thunderous noise.
Without warning, the fuselage veered sharply, then flipped on its side. Something hit Elizabeth on the side of her head, and blackness descended. Her last conscious thought was that death was surprisingly anticlimactic.
“Elizabeth?”
A male voice penetrated the black fog and disrupted her peaceful sense of nothingness. The voice came again, irritating her with its sense of urgency.
“Elizabeth!” This time she recognized the voice. Talbot. How on earth had Talbot McCarthy managed to gain entry to heaven?
Her next thought was even more disturbing. What if she hadn’t made it to heaven? What if her afterlife consisted of sharing space in hell with Talbot?
A protest formed on her lips and her eyes snapped open. A new vision of hell greeted her. The darkness was pierced by a strange flickering illumination. Tangled metal…acrid smoke…a tree branch jutting through what had once been the front window.
The plane. A sharp stab of pain pierced the right side of her head as she oriented herself to where she was and what had just happened.
They’d crashed. She jerked her head to the side to look at Talbot. In the flashing light, she saw his gaze on her.
“Thank God,” he said. “For a minute there, I thought you were dead. Are you all right?”
She winced and reached up to touch the side of her head, where a goose egg had risen and was incredibly tender to the pressure of her fingertips. “I think so, although for a minute, I thought I was dead, too. What about you?”
“I’m okay. But something is burning. We need to get out of here as quickly as possible.” He unbuckled himself. “We’ll have to go out your door. Mine won’t open.”
Elizabeth unfastened her seat belt and stood, unsteady on her feet as her head reeled with a sick pain. She managed to push her door open, then turned back to Talbot, who still sat in his seat.
“Are you coming?” she asked, worried now that she saw flames flaring in what was left of the plane behind them.
“My left leg seems to be trapped,” he said between clenched teeth as he used his hands to tug on his leg.
Elizabeth watched him working to free himself. As the flames grew hotter, illuminating the cabin, she saw dots of perspiration above his upper lip. He cursed and yanked, half falling from his seat as the leg finally came free.
“Go!” he shouted, and pushed her toward the door.
She hesitated and stared out the opening at what was left of the plane. The wings had been torn away, leaving only the small fuselage, which was now wedged between two towering trees and suspended about eight feet from the ground.
“We’re caught in the trees,” she said.
“How far to the ground?” he asked, urgency apparent in his voice.
“I don’t know for sure. About eight or nine feet—” Before the words had completely left her mouth, he shoved her from behind. She screamed and flailed her arms for an instant, as if by some miracle she might take flight.
She hit the ground and her knees buckled, throwing her facedown into the ground. Before she could lift her head, she heard Talbot hit the earth nearby. His landing was punctuated by a loud groan.
A moment later, he was towering over her. He grabbed her by the arm and yanked her to her feet. “We’ve got to get away from the plane,” he said. “I don’t know if it will explode or not, but we can’t take the chance.”
He took a step, then crumpled against her.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m all right—it’s just my leg. It got wrenched or something.” He tried to take another step, then cursed soundly as he nearly fell. “We’ve got to get some distance. You’re going to have to help me.”
She positioned herself beneath his arm, allowing him to lean heavily on her shoulder. Step by step, they inched away from the plane, deeper into the dense forest that surrounded them.
Trees were everywhere, as were mangled parts of the plane, and as they walked away from the smoldering crash site, Elizabeth marveled at the fact that they had escaped with their lives. A few inches to the left or the right, they would have hit a tree trunk head-on, and neither of them would have survived.
“Okay, we should be far enough away now,” he said when they’d moved about a hundred feet from the wreck. He eased himself to the ground, and Elizabeth sat down next to him.
Both of them stared at the burning aircraft. Flames licked hesitantly as if unwilling to fully commit to consuming the plane.
“How long before it explodes?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know for sure that it will. There wasn’t any fuel left, so it might not. Pray it does.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Why?”
He turned to eye her, his taut features visible in the orange glow of the flames. “An explosion might be the only thing that gets somebody’s attention and brings help faster. Otherwise, who knows how long it’ll take for somebody to find us.”
They sat watching the flames flickering here and there without actually bursting into a full inferno. With each minute that passed, the adrenaline and the shock that had momentarily gripped Elizabeth began to ebb.
Andrew. Her son’s name was her first rational thought. She shivered as she realized just how close he’d come to being motherless.
She was aware of body pain where she hadn’t known she had body, and her head ached with a nauseating intensity.
The night was silent, other than the crackle of the dwindling flames. And as the flames grew dimmer, the blackness of the night grew more profound. The sky wasn’t visible through the tops of the trees, so no moonlight broke the descending darkness.
For the first time since the crash, she felt a flutter of fear in her stomach. “Where are we?” she asked.
“My best guess is somewhere between Kansas City and Branson.”
“Well, that certainly narrows it down,” she said. With the fear came a healthy dose of anger. “I thought you said you were an excellent pilot.”
“I am. You aren’t dead, are you?” He didn’t look at her, but instead, kept his gaze focused on the last of the fire. “I’m sorry I can’t be more specific about where we are.”
“I guess we aren’t going to make it to Twin Oaks.” She desperately attempted to embrace her anger, finding it more palatable than the fear she was desperately fighting. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you crashed the plane.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said dryly.
Her cheeks flushed and she drew a deep breath. “Of course you didn’t. I’m sorry,” she said grudgingly. “I’m upset.”
“It must be contagious, because I’m a little upset myself.” He drew a deep breath and plucked at the torn sleeve of his suit jacket. “This was my favorite suit, and now it’s ruined.”
She stared at him in disbelief, then saw a small curve at the corner of his mouth. “Talbot McCarthy made a joke?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I do have a sense of humor.”
“You could have fooled me,” she replied. “In all the years I was married to Richard, I don’t think I saw you smile once.” In fact, she’d always found him rigid, cold and slightly disapproving—and exceptionally attractive. That dichotomy had made her extremely uncomfortable. “So what do we do now?”
“If I had my cell phone, I’d call for help. Unfortunately it must have slipped from my pocket during the crash or when I scrambled out of the plane. So now the smartest thing to do is stay here close to the plane and hope help is on the way.”
But what if help wasn’t on the way, she wanted to ask. But she was afraid of what the answer might be. She scooted back so she could lean against a tree trunk, unsurprised when he followed her example and joined her.
She cast him a surreptitious glance as he leaned back and closed his eyes. Under different circumstances, she would have taken pleasure in his disheveled state.
In all the years she’d known him, she’d never seen him in such a state of disarray. His rich dark hair was tousled beyond style, and a smudge of smoke or oil decorated a cheekbone. His suit jacket was ripped and dirty, and the shirt that had been so pristine when they’d taken off was now wrinkled and blackened.
She frowned, remembering how he’d looked when he’d first appeared on her doorstep earlier that evening. He hadn’t just stood in her doorway, he’d filled it with his presence. At six foot two, Talbot had the body of a natural athlete. Broad-shouldered, slender-hipped, he carried himself with a masculine grace that drew women’s attention.
However, he wasn’t handsome in the traditional sense. He had bold features, dark eyes that revealed nothing of the inner man, a thin mouth that rarely smiled and a hawklike nose that gave his face a cool arrogance.
She gasped as her gaze now drifted over his legs. His slacks were torn, exposing his knee. The skin had been slashed open and the deep wound still oozed blood.
“Talbot, your knee is really hurt,” she said. “It’s bleeding.”
He opened his eyes and looked down at his knee. “It’ll be all right. It’s not bleeding that badly.” One eyebrow lifted as he turned his gaze to her. “Of course, if you feel the need to rip off your T-shirt and wrap my wounds, go for it.”
“As if I’d sacrifice a perfectly good T-shirt for you,” she scoffed. “I’ll make you a deal,” she continued. “If you can tear off a bunch of tree limbs and construct us a nice little lean-to to sit in while we wait for help, then I’ll rip up my shirt for your leg.”
He laughed, and the unfamiliar sound of his laughter sent a familiar heat spiraling through her—a heat that was distinctly uncomfortable.
From the moment she’d met Talbot, she’d felt a crazy pull toward him that had been frightening. And for the nine years of her marriage to his brother, she had fought it. She had consciously never spent any time at all alone with Talbot. And now they were stuck alone together in the middle of nowhere. She tried to ignore her disquiet.
“I think we’ve both seen too many movies,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t waste a good lean-to on you.”
Although he was merely returning Elizabeth’s comment in kind, she was grateful for the slight coolness in his voice, a coolness that reminded her she had never been sure she even liked Talbot McCarthy.
A light flashed someplace in the distance. Elizabeth shot to her feet. “Did you see that?” she asked. Excitement and relief ripped through her. “Maybe it was the light from a search helicopter.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, a loud rumble resounded overhead. Not the rumble of a search plane, but rather the result of cold air meeting warm.
“I don’t think it’s a search helicopter,” he said. “I believe we’re in for a storm.”
As the first fat raindrops fell from the sky and splattered on her upturned face, Elizabeth glared at her companion. “I think I hate you, Talbot McCarthy,” she stated emphatically.
“Trust me, Elizabeth, before this is all over with, I believe the feeling just might become mutual.”
