They opened the plane door, letting in a gust of rain and wind, and gestured for them to get up. “We better get right out. This jet took a hell of a beating. No telling if there might be a fire that broke out. We’ll check around the perimeter, make sure it looks okay and that there are no signs of trouble before we do anything else.”
“I understand,” he said, reaching for his ugly suit jacket and putting his hand on Camilla’s elbow to steer her out before him. Her legs were shaky when she stood.
After losing it on the plane as she had, she shook off Mason’s hand, wanting to walk on her own down the stairs, though she had to grip the railing tightly to do so. When she got to the ground, she nearly slipped on the combination of the mud and her still shaky legs, righting herself at the last minute and glaring around to see if anybody caught it.
Only Talbot did, right behind her, watching her closely.
The pilots walked around the plane with flashlights, shielding their eyes from the rain as they examined the engines, talking in tones to each other she could not hear, before one of them said loudly, “Looks all clear.”
Camilla tipped her hot face up to the steady fall of the cooling drops as the pilots slapped each other on the back and grinned. She heard Mason in the background saying, “We really appreciate what you did up there.”
No etiquette lesson required.
He must need a potential plane crash to behave like a normal human being. Or when it counted, he knew the right things to say. And she hadn’t even thanked the pilots for the ultimately safe landing. She would. She absolutely would. As soon as she got herself together.
Cupping her hands to catch the rain, she splashed some on her cheeks and neck, consoling herself that she at least had not wet her pants, if nothing else. Well, she hadn’t barfed either she supposed. But other than that, she’d pretty much fallen apart while her boss stayed calm.
It said something about modern intimacy that she was more embarrassed by her weakness and her closeness with Mason during the harrowing plane descent than she was about having sex with him.
And she absolutely hated the crying thing. Anything but that. With seven girls, her parents were tired of tears by the time they got to Camilla, and she never indulged in the exercise of crying, since it did her no good.
She swiped her hands across her face a number of times, sure any traces of makeup were long gone, until she thought she looked as normal as a girl could look after a brush with death and everything, and then she went over to the others.
Starting with the pilots was easy. They were grinning now like little boys at a candy counter, patting the plane as if it was their faithful dog right beside them, and she said, “I can’t thank you enough for getting us through that.”
In the tough guy way pilots were supposed to do it, they minimized the feat with a lot of “doing our jobs” and so on. She never would have been able to be a pilot now that she thought about it and was surprised that the long ago dream, probably as long ago as kindergarten, had even come up when Mason had pressed her.
He stood quietly by, looking around, and only then did she take in that they were absolutely nowhere, in the middle of a jumble of mud and woods through which the pilots had miraculously detected a strip of land that might have been a runway once but now was far from the carefully laid out and tended pavement she was used to taxiing down and landing on. Crowded with drenched weeds and only just long enough to fit in the descent of their jet without crashing into the trees beyond or the black lake visible to the left, the strip afforded no lights, no painted markers to guide pilots, and most importantly, no traffic control tower or people of any kind manning one.
Mason smiled at her. “See, what did I tell you? We landed safely.”
The unreasonable resentment she harbored for the fact that he had stayed calm and she had fallen apart melted away. A flush of gratitude overtook her and she smiled weakly. “Yes, you were right.”
She was still shaking, but God, she was alive. They were actually alive.
Whether Camilla realized it, she was still crying. Tears leaked down her face and mixed in with the steady rain as she appeared to be trying to smile. It was nothing like the expression she was always naturally breaking into, even occasionally when she was angry with him on the plane, as if she couldn’t help herself. This expression involved only a tremulous stretching of her beautiful pink lips, an effort to smile, not a smile in itself. He felt tender toward her, protective, and at the same time proud of her brave effort to buck up, to shake off the near death experience and try to reclaim her feisty norm. Whatever fears and apprehensions he had—where the hell were they anyway?—melted away, and a surge of exhilaration coursed through him. They had made it, all in one piece, and they were here, now, together.