and his appearance was no help whatsoever in pinning down who or what he could be.
The man didn’t have the look of a businessman for one thing; his dark hair was a little too long. His casual clothing—black denims teamed with a black silk shirt and grey fitted jacket—exuded none of the formal efficiency that businessmen who dealt with her father liked to adopt. Her father excluded, of course. But then, Rome was way past the stage of caring what sort of image he presented—to anyone! Perhaps Jonas Noble was in that kind of position, too…?
Danie shook her head even as she went through the mechanics of flying; she had never heard of Jonas Noble before, and if his photograph had ever appeared in any of the business journals her father subscribed to, then Danie knew she would have remembered him. His was not a face it would be easy to forget!
It wasn’t strictly a handsome face, was too angular for that; his jaw was square and determined, with a firmly sculptured mouth, and slightly aquiline nose. It was his eyes that were so arresting, Danie realised: a deep dark brown, filled with a warmth that softened all those other hard edges.
Careful, Danie, she chided herself, or you might actually start to consider Jonas Noble as an attractive man!
Well, possibly he was, she conceded, but she wasn’t fooled by a man’s good looks. She knew those looks invariably hid a calculating selfishness. Her experience with Ben had more than shown her—
Damn it, where had that come from? She never thought of Ben any more, considered him a part of her life that was firmly shut away from prying eyes—and prying minds. Jonas Noble was the subject under question here, not someone from her past who had cured her of wanting any romantic involvement for the last two years!
Her passenger had one piece of luggage with him, a small case, too small for a suitcase, too large to be a briefcase. So what did it contain?
Well, she wasn’t going to get any answers from the man himself, she conceded wryly, so she might as well put away her curiosity until she saw her father.
She reached up to press a button above her head. ‘We’re levelling out now, Mr Noble,’ she told him coolly over the intercom. ‘This is a non-smoking flight, but please help yourself to the refreshments,’ she added mockingly, a smile curving her lips as she recalled the expression on the man’s face when she’d informed him she wasn’t the flight attendant but the pilot! Not exactly speechless, but close enough. Obviously women didn’t step too far out of their expected roles in Jonas Noble’s world, Danie thought tauntingly.
But planes, and flying, had been loves of hers since she’d been a child, having travelled all over the world with her parents by the time she was five. Instead of dolls, she had had models of planes in her bedroom as she’d been growing up, rapidly progressing to ones that had worked by remote control, taking them outside and flying them for hours. Her father’s pilot at the time, an older man called Edward, had been quite happy for her to accompany him in the cockpit on flights, even found a pair of overalls for her to wear so that she’d been able to help him when he’d looked in the engines.
By the time she was eighteen she had already decided exactly what she was going to do with her life. There had been a little opposition from her father, of course. But as they had recently lost her mother to cancer, those objections had been only half-hearted. Rome was so devastated by the loss. If he had thought about it at all, he would have probably expected Danie would tire of the pursuit during the months it had taken her to get her full pilot’s licence, but he would have been wrong. She loved flying, it was as simple as that.
Men like Jonas Noble were a prime example of the prejudice she had come up against during the time it had taken to attain her licence! Playing at it, seemed to be most men’s opinion of her chosen career, backed up, no doubt, by what they considered to be Daddy’s money.
Well, she had taken enough of that over the years, Danie reflected; if she were playing at anything, it was being polite in the face of the chauvinistic intolerance she had encountered towards her chosen career from men over the last seven or eight years!
Including Ben.
Not again, she told herself impatiently. She hadn’t given the man a thought for months and now she had thought of him twice in half an hour. Unacceptable!
And it was all Jonas Noble’s fault, she considered. There was something about him that brought Ben to mind. She could well do without it, thank you!
She pressed the button above her head a second time. ‘We will be landing in ten minutes, Mr Noble,’ she told him abruptly. ‘I advise you to place any debris from your food and drink in the container provided, and to fasten your seat belt.’ With any luck, his visit with her father would, as he had said, be a short one, and once she had flown him back to town she might just be able to go shopping, after all!
Her father had sent Charles out in the Rolls, and not the Range Rover, to collect his guest from the private airstrip on the estate, Danie noted with some surprise as she brought the jet in to land. Curiouser and curiouser. Rome rarely used the Rolls Royce, had bought it a couple of years ago on a whim, and now considered it a little too ostentatious for his tastes. But it had been brought out of mothballs today in Jonas Noble’s honour. Which again posed the question: who was he?
‘Please remain in your seat until I’ve completely brought the aircraft to a stop, Mr Noble,’ she told him brusquely over the intercom. ‘I will then come back through to the cabin and open the door for you.’
She had done this trip dozens of times before, but, she had to admit, today was the first time she had found it slightly irritating to have a conversation—one way, at that!—with an unseen person. The only consolation was that Jonas Noble probably found it just as frustrating!
Not that any frustration on Jonas’s part was apparent when, a few minutes later, the plane parked on the end of the runway, she went back into the cabin area. Jonas Noble was fast asleep! From the totally relaxed look of him, he probably had been from the moment they’d taken off, Danie realised crossly.
He was still sitting in the chair he had dropped into as she’d gone through to the cockpit, although at least his seat belt was fastened. But there was no sign of him having had any of the food or drink provided, and he seemed completely unaware that they had actually landed at their destination, his lids closed, his breathing deep and even.
He looked younger in sleep than the forty or so Danie had thought him to be earlier, long dark lashes fanning out across the hardness of his cheeks, his face appearing almost boyishly handsome now that slightly mocking expression had melted from his face.
His clothes, she could see as she took her time to look at him, were tailor-made, and the black shirt was probably Indian silk. A wealthy man then?
He was really something of an enigma, Danie realised with an emotion akin to shock. Men, she had decided after her few attempts at relationships—which, for one reason or another, had always ended disastrously!—were a complete waste of her time. And she now resented having given Jonas Noble even a little of it!
She reached down and shook his arm vigorously. ‘Mr Noble, we’ve landed—’
‘I sincerely hope so,’ he murmured as he opened his eyes and looked directly up into her face. ‘Otherwise there would be no one flying the plane!’
For someone who had been fast asleep seconds ago, he was a little too much awake now for Danie’s liking, and she stepped back from him as if stung, putting her hands behind her back. ‘There is such a thing as autopilot, Mr Noble,’ she bit out in reply.
He straightened in his chair, looking out of the window beside him. ‘Not when you’re on the ground,’ he derided, releasing his seat belt to stretch languidly.
Danie’s mouth twisted even as she registered the tightening and relaxing of muscles. ‘Are we keeping you up, Mr Noble?’ she scorned.
He turned to look at her with brown eyes. ‘As a matter of fact—yes!’ He stood up. ‘That half an hour is the only sleep I’ve had in the last twenty-four,’ he explained.