Star-Crossed Lovers

Amanda gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and trotted down the steps. Jessi watched her retreating back, tendrils of warm feelings twining through her chest. Amanda plodded in from the summer school bus every day as if each step were an effort, and dragged herself to wherever Jessi happened to be, and then she threw herself against her aunt and sucked in the love, surveyed the place she loved best on earth and, revived, usually bounced to do whatever job had been assigned to her for that day.

Even at her tender age, Amanda had a sophisticated knowledge about airplanes, and she was capable of flying a single prop, though she would not be able to solo legally until she was sixteen.

Jessi confined herself to her office until Chaz left to give lessons, and then she moved down to the counter, for it was the busiest time of day in late afternoon when the weather was good and people came off their jobs to take lessons or simply fly around the area.

There was a lull about six o’clock and she wandered through the lounge to look for Amanda across the field among the east hangars. Jessi stood at the windows, aware suddenly that the door had opened and closed. When she turned, she was staring at Kale Noble as tense and as beautiful as a classical Roman statue, still and straight, errant strands of black hair slashing over his forehead, eyes so dark the pupils were lost in them, his jaw tight, making him look even more rugged up close than he had from the second floor.

If he smiles, his face will crack like dry clay, she thought, although even if he never smiled she would still think him the best-looking man she had ever known.

Her heart raced as a charge of something hot jolted from her scalp to her socks and she wondered what he would say, or do. She hoped he would not attack with sharp words. She wanted to be polite, to say hello, but she envisioned him turning even that into some kind of evil suggestion and slamming her greeting, whatever it might be, with clever sarcasm.

And so she said nothing, but she stared at him across the lounge. He responded by raising an eyebrow, a facial gesture he had obviously perfected in the last decade or so.

“Hello, Jessi,” he said. It seemed more a challenge than a greeting.

She tried twice to speak and on the second try said, “Hello, Kale.”

He pulled a key from his pocket and flung it to the side with casual accuracy so that it landed on the countertop. “I brought your car back.”

“Yes,” she murmured, her insides churning with uncommon wildness. “I kind of figured that you had.”

He was very still as he studied her, then he quietly offered belated condolences on losing her sister and her husband, after which she thanked him.

His face was unreadable. “Nice place,” he said. “Imagine my surprise to find you here.”

She moved toward him, knees trembling and palms sweating. There were forms to be completed and signed now that he had returned the car. She walked up to him and faced him and saw the fine lines in his skin, too many for a man who was only thirty-one. She wanted to reach up and brush aside the strands of hair that had broken loose from where they were supposed to be, but, of course, she would never do that, not when everything about him screamed “forbidden.”

She brushed past him and slipped behind the counter, found the form, completed the last few blanks, signed it, and pushed it across the counter with the pen. He turned, picked up the pen with long tanned fingers and signed it.

“Imagine my surprise to see your company plane landing here,” she said, watching his tanned hands, one holding the pen, the other holding down the form. “Your business must be doing well.”

“Extremely well,” he said, tearing off the back sheet. “We have projects in several states.”

She transferred the amount due to his credit card charge, adding it to the gas charge, then totaling, adding tax, before pushing it toward him to sign.

“Congratulations on your success,” she said. “How are your parents? Has your father retired?”

He signed the second form. Then she tore off his copy and stapled it to the car rental form. He looked up. “My father barely recognizes me, and my mother’s life is hell, trying to take care of him. I’ll tell her you inquired.”

She abruptly stopped, feeling guilt. “I’m sorry,” she told him softly. “It must be difficult.” She remembered that Matthew Noble had withdrawn into a shell of grief after the accident and Regina had been desperate to rescue him. Apparently, her efforts had failed.

Kale’s eyes narrowed, his hostility barely harnessed. “Difficult?” It was a scoff. “You can’t imagine what ‘difficult’ has meant to my family over the years.”

She watched him walk toward the door, watched him hesitate and then stop and look at her. “So you own all this now. The whole thing. Airport, flight service, restaurant.”

“Not the restaurant,” she corrected, hating the huskiness in her voice.

“Well, I’m sure you know how to get that if you want it,” he said, his voice low and hard. “See you next trip, Jessi Caldwell,” he added as he walked away.

“It’s Morris!” she called after him. “It’s Jessi Morris now!”

“Don’t I know it,” he answered quietly. Then he was gone.

She banished the guilt. She had no reason to feel responsible in the tragedy that had torn apart both their families. She had not played the Jezebel, as he thought.

She had simply been in love, and suffocating in a mire of good intentions gone bad.

She didn’t blame him for his resentment, however. She had been an innocent sixteen-year-old too shocked and hurt to defend herself against his accusations. When anger had set in at his perceived betrayal, she had fled without explanation.

And now it was too late by at least a dozen years.

At last report there hadn’t yet been a single successful attempt at turning back the clock to replay the past with a revised script. Regrettable, she thought, feeling again the old sharp pain, for she would have done quite a few things differently if given a second chance.

Two (#ulink_acbaa7db-00cd-5eb4-9721-bebf9aa64094)

Kale Noble looked out the window of the Bonanza as Phil Bergerson lifted the twin-engine craft expertly off the runway. He watched the line of tidy hangars race by in a blur, and then he looked back at the two-story building, the second floor with dark-tinted windows on all four sides, resembling a sprawling, oversize control tower.

It was a prosperous fixed-base operation and it belonged to Jessi Caldwell. If he’d known, he might have thought twice about bidding on the Point Six. Hell, the project was going to be a pain in the posterior anyway, without having to deal with one of the Jezebel sisters. He should have his brain examined for taking on a revolutionary design that, if there were significant flaws, could ruin his business.

He looked down as the plane swung to the left into the flight pattern at the end of the runway, and then left again. He heard the gear retracting, and he saw the field and the buildings from the air once more before they angled away.

She must be a wealthy woman, he thought, and all she’d had to do was sleep with an old guy named Rollie Morris, then marry him and wait for him to die. It was what he’d come to expect from a Caldwell.

It was the anger, he told himself for the twentieth time that afternoon; it was the anger that was making his blood race.

She had changed. He could see that right away. She had matured well into a softly rounded woman. There was something luscious about her, even in her khaki shorts and militarystyle shirt. It was a masculine outfit, but the belt nipped in her waist and left no doubt she was a woman with nicely pert breasts and rounded hips.

She still had big brown eyes—fawn eyes, he used to call them—and baby doll cheeks with dimples so deep when she smiled, a full wide mouth and sandy blond hair that frizzed and curled with unruly defiance. He wondered whether she was still soft-spoken, or whether her bent toward deceit and manipulation had let her true character show itself.

Hell, she’d only been fifteen at the time of the accident, and sixteen the last time he saw her, after their blowup. He had been ashamed because he’d fallen for her phony innocence and her soft touch. But it was his first time in love and he would have given her anything. It was when he learned only a fool trusted a female, and he had been the worst kind of fool.

It had cost him, learning that lesson, just as it had cost his parents. But Paul had paid the ultimate price.

And the Caldwell sisters had sailed blithely out of their lives with no consequences, anxious to be Up North by their Fancy Acres summer retreat, now that they had both found better “catches” than the Nobles. Kale tried not to think about when Rollie Morris had caught Jessi’s attention.

He had smarted for a long time from humiliation, and he experienced a peculiar, lasting pain very high in his gut, very close to his heart.

She was the first girl he had ever kissed.

Why had he thought of that when he saw her, silhouetted against the window in the base lounge? Why had he remembered that she had swept his breath away when he kissed her? Why, when she came close to him and faced him, did he remember how his randy teenage body had ached for her, how he had denied himself even touching her because he thought she was too innocent and precious, and he wanted to marry her someday when they grew up?

But when she went about her business there at the base, efficiently filling out the forms, he remembered how she had, at such a tender age, sweetly deceived him about a number of things that were important to him.

It was anger, he told himself again, that made his body feel as though he had been running a great distance; his pulse pounded in his ears, and he felt the sweat running down the middle of his back in spite of the cool air in the plane. And a crazy kind of anger it was, because it stirred his groin and left him with an insane inclination to pull Jessi by the hair until she was so close to him he could imprison her with his body. And then what? Ravish her? Make love to her?

He didn’t know. It had hit him like a blow from an unseen assailant. He hadn’t seen it coming. It had happened when he saw her, when she walked to him, and brushed past him and coolly took care of his paperwork at the counter. He didn’t want her, he told himself. It wasn’t desire or attraction. It was some crazy manifestation of the resentment he had harbored all these years.

It was unhealthy to think about Jessi Caldwell.