"Can he be moved?"
"Lord, yes! The sooner you get him out of my hair, the better. I'll send some horse pills with him for the pain. He swallows one of those, and he's out for the count."
With that dubious assurance, Julie helped the vet transfer her wobbly partner to a wheelchair.
She contacted Alex again after stopping for gas and purchasing another phone charger. His first query concerned Dusty's condition. His second, what her partner was doing in the Texas Panhandle.
"He got a call from a soybean consortium that wanted a bid on a job," she answered with a glance at her slumbering passenger. He had the seat tilted back and was filling the pickup's cab with heroic snores. "He couldn't fly the Pawnee, so he took his truck."
"Why couldn't he fly the Pawnee?"
"It's leaking oil again."
Concern sharpened Alex's voice. "You're not thinking about taking it up, are you?"
"Sure, when Chuck and I get it fixed."
"I'll send DI's chief mechanic down," he responded, all brisk executive. "Let him look at the engine, see if it needs a major overhaul."
"Whoa! Back off there, Bubba. Agro-Air's chief mechanic and I are perfectly capable of deciding what, if anything, needs overhauling on our aircraft."
Silence answered her swift retort, followed a moment later by a careful reply.
"You better re-read those contracts, Julie. When Agro-Air merges with DI's aeronautical operations division, I'll have final decision-making authority on major issues. Safety ranks number one in my book."
The sheer arrogance of it took her breath away. She forced herself to count to ten, then ten again, but still ground out her response.
"Safety is number one at Agro-Air, too. And you can bet your bippy I'll re-read those contracts. They're not signed yet, Dalton."
Alex hung up, feeling every bit as steamed as Julie had sounded. He'd mishandled her, dammit. Mishandled the whole conversation. He could see that now. His only excuse was that he wasn't used to having his decisions challenged. Especially by the woman he now wanted standing beside him as a whole helluva lot more than a business partner.
He tried to shrug off her last, ominous threat. Refused to believe she would convince her partners to back out of a merger that would take Agro-Air out of the red for the first time in a long time. But she was just stubborn enough, just independent enough to buck any attempt to exercise corporate oversight.
Tough! Signed contracts or not, she wasn't getting out of this deal.
Jaw tight, Alex glared at the phone. A handshake was as good as a signature in Oklahoma courts. DI had already expended a good number of engineering hours in Agro-Air's interest. He'd also had the 602 flown in at considerable expense and agreed to its purchase. All with Julie's tacit consent and approval.
Then there was the matter of the unsigned, unspoken contract between the two of them personally. Alex was damned if he'd let her back out of that, either. The woman had all but turned him inside out. No way he intended to just sit back and wait for her to "get back to him whenever."
Ms. Bartlett might not realize it yet, but she'd run smack up against a will even more intractable than her own. She was his, Alex thought with a fierce, primal possessiveness that surprised but didn't daunt him. Now all he had to do was convince her.
He'd give her time to sort through this situation with Dusty, he decided. Let her cool off after their unexpected flare-up. Then he'd yank whatever chain he had to get her back in his arms.
Who the hell did he think he was?
The terse conversation left Julie simmering for most of the way back to Dusty's place. If Alex Dalton thought he could override her need to go with her gut in the air-or on the ground!-he had another think coming.
Thoroughly ticked, she speared a glance at her snoring partner. The sight of his cast forced her to apply the air brakes to her temper.
If she'd been the only one at the other end of the DI-AA deal, she would have told Alex to stuff it. But she wasn't. Dusty and Chuck needed her more than ever now. Like it or not, she'd have to throttle back. Professionally, anyway.
Personally …
She'd have to throttle back there, too. Alex Dalton had more than he realized of his overbearing, overpowering mother in him. Only now that Julie had put some distance between herself and his charismatic personality did she see how close she'd come to letting it dominate her. Her! The same woman who could hold her own in the air or on the ground in any country in the northern or southern hemisphere.
The thought of pulling away from Alex carved a hole in the pit of her stomach but she had to face facts. Maybe love wasn't enough. Maybe neither one of them could blunt or shape or otherwise alter the basic character traits that made them who they were.
That gut-wrenching thought stayed with her in the days that followed. She spent a good part of those days force-feeding Dusty horse pills and the spicy tacos both he and his obese feline were addicted to.
In between, she and Chuck got the Pawnee airworthy again-which she relayed to Alex in a terse voice mail. Good thing, too, as word that Dalton International was folding Agro-Air into its corporate family had spread. Customers who'd shied away from a one-plane, shoestring operation the previous planting season now came knocking. Job offers poured in.
With Dusty out of commission, Julie had to take up the slack. She was in the air from dawn to late summer dusk. At the end of each grueling, sixteen-hour day, she crawled out the Pawnee's cockpit and barely made it to her apartment before falling face first onto the bed.
Even then she couldn't sleep. All she had to do was close her eyes and she could see Alex, almost hear his breath pacing hers in the stillness of the night. Over and over she tried to reconcile the ways they differed with the irrefutable fact that she ached for him. But could she change the woman she was to become the wife he wanted?
It didn't help that they continued to play an irritating game of telephone tag. She finally got through to him on Thursday morning. She had just come down from an early run. Dusty sat ensconced in a folding lawn chair with Belinda draped across his lap and his arm in a sling, grumbling nonstop about being so useless while Chuck refueled the Pawnee and reloaded its hopper.
A near exhausted Julie tuned out both partners. Grasping a can of Boost energy drink in one hand, she dialed Alex's private number with the other. His executive assistant chirped an acknowledgment.
"Ms. Bartlett! Mr. Dalton is anxious to speak to you. He's in a closed door meeting with Ms. Hale at the moment, but he left instructions to put you through whenever you called."
Julie couldn't help herself. She had to ask. "Ms. Hale?"
"Barbara Hale. She's an attorney here in Oklahoma City. Hang on, I'll connect … "
"Wait!"
A swift, mental image seemed to magnify tenfold the doubts she'd been playing with. She could picture the sleek, sophisticated Barbara with her dark head bent close to his. Hear again the lawyer's unsubtle reference to their previous, intimate relationship.
If Molly hadn't dropped into his life …
If Julie hadn't surged to the top of his list of possible mothers …
The ache she'd carried around for the past few days became a sharp, lancing pain. Molly. Sweet, bubbly Molly.
Oh, God! She was too tired to deal with this right now!
"Don't interrupt him," she said sharply.
"But … "
"I'm getting ready to go back up. Tell him I'll call him later."
"But … "
She snapped the phone shut, cutting the woman off in mid-protest, and tried to convince herself she'd done the right thing. Dusty and Agro-Air needed her. Whether or not the merger with DI went through, whether or not she and Alex worked out their personal stalemate, she couldn't leave her partners in the lurch. It would be weeks, maybe months, before Dusty was well enough to fly again. In the meantime …
The phone was still in her palm when it gave an insistent tweet. She stared at it, jaw tight, and let it ring. When it finally went to voice mail, she looked up to find Dusty and Belinda regarding her with identical, unwinking stares.
"Something happen between you and Dalton you want to tell me about, Missy?"
"No."
The curt reply raised his brows. "Well, something's sure got your tail feathers in a twist. If it's not Dalton, what is it?"
The empty Boost can crumpled in Julie's fist. She sent it arcing into the old oil drum that served as their recycling bin. The loud rattle when it hit made Belinda hiss and Dusty stare.
"Look," he said with a furrow between his bushy white brows, "if you're worrying 'bout that bill from EMSA, don't. We'll get it paid. Same for the new load of fuel we just had delivered. When the merger with DI goes through, we'll have more contracts than we kin handle."
Swallowing a sigh, Julie scrubbed a hand across her sweat-streaked forehead. They needed to talk about the contracts. Later. When she wasn't hot and grimy and nursing the mental image of Alex in a closed door meeting with Barbara Baby. Jaw tight, she yanked her long-sleeved work shirt from the back of the lawn chair.