Lost in Her by Sandra Owens Read Free Book Online Page A

the plane as if he didn’t trust it. “Mostly, I’ve just jumped out of them. It’ll be nice for a change to land in the same one I left in.”
    Oh, now he’d piqued her interest. “Are you a parachuter?”
    “No.”
    Okay, subject closed. Didn’t mean it was closed for her. The man intrigued her, and her imagination went to work as she returned to her inspection of the Cessna. When she’d first met him, she had pegged him as military. If he jumped out of planes, maybe he was a PJ, or had been one. Pararescue Jumpers were heroes, parachuting into war zones to save wounded soldiers. She was dying to ask if her hunch was right, but sensed it wasn’t the time.
    “Do you want to sit in the pilot’s seat?” Although the left seat was the one she normally took for the student’s first lesson, it didn’t really matter. She could control the plane just as easily from the right if necessary. What she wanted was to give him a choice, if he was a man who needed to feel he was in control, especially if he had the kind of experience she suspected.
    “Not even.” He glanced at the plane again, and it seemed to her that he gave it the stink eye. “You want to know the truth?”
    Yes, she did. Charlie waited for him to look back at her, and she thought she saw a bit of fear in his eyes. It had to be her imagination. “And the truth is?”
    “I’m not fond of airplanes. In my experience, they tend to get shot at.”
    So, it had been fear she had seen in his eyes, and he was or had been military. Something inside her melted a little at knowing this man, who seemed as if he should be afraid of nothing, was, in fact, human.
    Not sure where her boldness came from, she slipped her arm through his and tugged him to the side of the plane. “I can almost promise you no one’s going to shoot at us. You don’t really want a lesson, do you?” She almost fell on her face when he jerked her to a stop.
    “I don’t, but I’ll go up with you if you promise not to yell ‘go, go, go,’ and then smack me on the back of my thigh.”
    “And if I do?”
    “Then I’ll likely jump.”
    Lord, that grin of his curled her toes. “Then I best put a parachute on you.” She didn’t want to like him so much, but was finding it hard not to.
    After she harnessed both of them into their seats and put their headsets on, she taxied to the end of the runway to prepare for takeoff. If he didn’t want flyin g lessons, just what was he up to? Had he thought about their kiss as often as she had? Maybe, but she seriously doubted he’d doodled her name along the margins of a romance novel, as she had. The only time she’d been able to put him out of her mind was when she was flying, and that irritated her.
    The last thing she expected was to have him next to her in a plane. As she gained altitude, it occurred to her that she should have taken him up in her Citabria, turned the plane upside down, then refused to right them until he confessed his reasons for tracking her down.
    “You never said how you found me,” she said into her headset’s mike.
    He’d been looking out the window, and at her question, he turned those amazing eyes on her. “Saw you on the news the other night.”
    So he hadn’t even needed to put any effort into finding her. Just saw her and poof, here he was. He probably hadn’t even thought about her between the night he’d given her the most amazing kiss ever and seeing her interview on the news. Did he think he could still get in her panties? She’d certainly given him the impression that was possible at their first meeting—and it would have been if he hadn’t vanished like a wisp of smoke—but she was over it.
    He smiled, and her body parts called her a liar. Okay, apparently, she wasn’t over him, but he didn’t need to know that. Turning her attention back to piloting the plane, she flew them out over the gulf, her favorite aerial view. Would he appreciate the beauty below him?
    “Look, dolphins,” she