Crash Landing Read Online Free PDF

go.”
    “Will your companion be joining us?” Sophia asked.
    “Who?” he asked, and then realized she was talking about Stacy. “No. She’s got spa treatments and whatnot to keep her occupied while I’m gone.”
    “Do you have luggage?”
    “No time. Don’t need any.”
    “Don’t you at least want to change?” She waved at his business suit.
    “I’m good. Let’s hit it.”
    Sophia held out her palm. “I will require payment up front.”
    He handed over a credit card, and couldn’t help noticing what pretty hands she had. Long, slender fingers, nails painted a soft salmon color. It was unusual for a petite woman to have such long fingers.
    “I will be right back.” She trotted off again, headed toward the airport’s employee entrance.
    His palms were unexpectedly sweaty and his knees felt slightly shaky. Was he that nervous she would turn him down? Or was he simply amped up over Scott’s crazy news? Either way, the shakiness was disconcerting. Why did he care so much about what Scott decided to do with his life?
    Sophia returned a few minutes later with his credit card and a sunny smile.
    He pocketed his card. “Now can we leave?”
    “Almost. I must finish my flight check first.”
    Gibb got into the passenger seat and impatiently drummed his fingers against the dashboard as she went through the checklist. He kept thinking of Scott and his project and how if he couldn’t talk his buddy out of marriage it was going to upend all his plans.
    Sophia climbed into the cockpit, doffed her pink cowgirl hat, tossed it in the back and donned a headset. She communicated with the airport in Libera and a few minutes later they were rolling down the narrow dirt landing strip. Just when it seemed they were about to run out of road and fall off the mountain plateau, the plane was smoothly airborne and they were flying through a thick white mist.
    The resort was at five thousand feet. Gibb knew small planes like this one maxed out at ten thousand feet, but Sophia didn’t even take them that high. She leveled off their ascent so they were just skimming over the cloud-shrouded mountain range.
    It was a mystical sight—the smoky clouds, wafting lazily around them, parting here and there to reveal shades of deep tropical green or craggy blue-gray rock formations. The view took his breath away.
    Sophia sat relaxed in the seat, her dark hair curling sexy tendrils around her face, an otherworldly smile on her full pink lips, her hands loose on the yoke. The pink-and-white V-neck quarter-length T-shirt that she wore clung snuggly to her smallish but firm breasts. Tanned, shapely legs worked pedals on the floor that controlled the rudders.
    He moved his left arm at the same time she moved her right, and their elbows bumped. A staggering streak of lust shot from his elbow to his shoulder and arrowed straight down to his groin. Instantly, he jerked his arm away.
    So did she.
    “Sorry,” he mumbled, his heart punching hard against his chest.
    The seats in a plane this small were disturbingly close. He should have sat in the back. Why hadn’t he sat in the back?
    Sophia stared intently out the windshield. She had a delicate profile—a diminutive nose, gently sloped forehead, small but well-formed chin—that complimented her petite stature. Not a complex face that an artist might find a challenge to sketch, but a fun face, an open face, a happy face.
    Looking at her made him smile. He did not want to smile.
    There was no swelling of peppy music, no Ferris Bueller, “Oh Yeah” deep-based chorus, but the feeling that his life was about to change and change big, dug into Gibb and clung tight.
    She guided the plane with what seemed to be an innate ease. Gibb had never thought of flying as anything more than a skill that anyone who put their mind to it could learn, but right now, watching her, his old belief disappeared, replaced by a deep certainty that there was such a think as a natural born pilot. She had an effortless,