The climax slammed into Laura Doyle so fast that she lost her mind. She heard Cameron groan as he let go and went with her, riding the bliss of pure lust. She threw her head back and laughed as the last shudder rolled through her. Making love to him was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her, and she didn’t ever want it to stop.
“That, my love, was amazing,” she said as she locked her fingers around his neck.
“Am I really your love?”
“Yes, yes, a thousand times yes...forever and ever,” she said as she pulled him down for one last kiss.
* * *
It was the scream of someone shouting Laura’s name that woke her, but within seconds she’d gone from the afterglow of a sexy dream to heart-pounding fear as she scrambled to tighten her seat belt. The private jet she’d boarded in Los Angeles was in trouble. An alarm was sounding inside the cockpit, and the pilot, Ken Price, was shouting at everyone to buckle up.
God in heaven, they were going down!
Marcy, her friend and coworker, who was sitting across the aisle, was crying as she tried to text someone on her cell phone. Laura thought of her sister, Sarah, and then of Cameron, but there was no time for goodbyes. She could hear someone praying, and the nose of the plane was no longer level with the horizon.
Marcy gave her a frantic look and tossed her a folded blanket. Laura caught it in midair and put it in her lap only seconds before she assumed the crash position. Her last conscious thought was that the blanket smelled like mouthwash, and then—impact!
* * *
It was pain, rolling, stabbing, unbelievable misery like nothing Laura ever felt, that woke her next. Something wet was running down the side of her face, and she couldn’t figure out why the house was so dark. She reached for the bedside table to turn on the light, felt hair and then the side of someone’s face, and imagined an intruder had broken into her house, and screamed until the back of her throat closed up from the panic.
The moan that followed was not her own, and that was when she remembered the plane crash. The fact that she was not about to be murdered in bed was a relief, but that she might die in this wreckage after living through the crash was not. The scent of an electrical short was strong, although she couldn’t see any flames. She heard another moan, followed by a short, choking gasp.
“Marcy, is that you? Dan? Ken? Anyone?”
No one answered.
“Please, God, don’t let this be happening,” she whispered, and then realized she was shaking, but not from shock.
It was cold-to-the-bone freezing inside the cabin. She didn’t know where they’d crashed, but it was February, and if they had gone down in the Rockies, her troubles had just grown exponentially.
She began fumbling at her waist, trying to undo her seat belt and find the blanket that had been in her lap. In moments she discovered she was flat on her back on the floor between the seats, which meant it was probably Marcy on the floor beside her. She shook her friend’s shoulder, trying to get her to wake up.
“Marcy! Where are the blankets? We need the blankets. Can you find yours?”
Marcy didn’t say anything, and Laura felt the first symptoms of hypothermia setting in.
“I did not survive this plane crash just to freeze to death,” she mumbled, and tried to get up, but her leg was caught, and it was too dark to see how to free herself. Moments later something shifted above her, and she threw her arms up in defensive mode just as a duffel bag fell out of an overhead compartment and onto her chest. The sudden impact sent a pain through her body that was so strong she passed out. When she woke up again, the bag was still on her chest and she was struggling to breathe. If her ribs hadn’t been injured in the crash, they were now. Every breath she took hurt, and she was getting light-headed from the pain. She had to find something to keep her warm, or next time she passed out, she might never wake up.
After a few moments of fumbling, she managed to unzip the bag and then began digging among the items until she found what seemed to be a heavy bath towel. When she felt an insignia embroidered in the terry cloth, she guessed this was the complimentary bathrobe that had been on the hook inside each hotel bathroom. This must be Dan’s bag. He was notorious for taking things from hotels and then wondering why his credit card bill was higher than everyone else’s.
Her hands were trembling as she covered herself with the robe. After that she began piling the rest of the garments from inside the bag on top of the robe, layer after layer. The scent of Dan’s aftershave was the last thing she smelled as she passed out again.
The next time she woke up it was morning, and Marcy had rolled away and was lying on her side just out of Laura’s reach.
“Marcy! Marcy! Can you hear me?”
Marcy didn’t answer.
Laura pushed aside the covers to look at herself and then gasped. Her arms and hands were covered in dried blood, and her fingers were trembling as she began a self-examination.
Her chest hurt—a lot. The blood on her forehead was dried, and her leg was still trapped and aching terribly. When she heard something scratching at the outside of the plane her heart soared. Surely that was their rescuers, already on scene.
“Help! Help! We’re in here!” she cried, but no one answered, and the scratching stopped.
When she realized it wasn’t people making that noise and they were not being rescued, she broke down in tears, sobbing from pain and disappointment. It took her a few minutes to get her emotions under control and focus on getting free. Now that it was daylight, she could see how to remove the debris under which she’d been trapped.
She sat up slowly, moaning as pain rolled through her midsection, then, one at a time, began moving things aside until she was finally free.
Her leg was throbbing with every heartbeat. She reached down to pull up her pant leg and check it out, then nearly passed out from the pain and stopped. Okay, bending over was a bad idea, but at least when she stood up, her aching leg held her weight.
But her relief was short-lived when she heard a snarl, and then a low, throaty growl from outside the plane and remembered the scratching from before. At that point she panicked again. The thought of falling victim to wild animals was horrifying, but a quick glance about the cabin told her it was still intact.
The good news was that no animals could get to her. The bad news was that Marcy was apparently dead. She began to cry as she set about looking for Dan, and quickly found his body crumpled up in a corner near the door to the pilot’s cabin. Her fingers were trembling as she felt for a pulse at the base of his neck. His skin was as cold as the air around them, and there were no signs of life. They had been more than coworkers with the Red Cross. They were her friends, and they were dead. Then she remembered the pilot, Ken Price. He had to be alive. She couldn’t do this by herself.
The door leading into the cockpit was ajar. She stepped inside, then slapped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Ken’s eyes were wide-open in a death stare that gave her the chills. All the rest of his facial features had been completely obliterated by the impact.
All of a sudden the walls began to spin around her. She staggered out of the cockpit and slid down the wall into a sitting position, quickly putting her head between her knees to keep from passing out. As the wave of nausea passed, she began