“No, Rusty,” he said through gritted teeth. And when he told her what they would be doing if she sat on his lap, she chastely remo
ved her hand.
“I don’t think that would be proper at all. For that matter, neither is what you’re doing. Maybe you’d better stop.” He withdrew his hand from her sweater. By now both her breasts were showing up hard and pointed beneath it. They gazed at each other, their eyes reflecting a sense of loss. “I wish we hadn’t been so stubborn. I wish we’d made love before last night.”
He sighed deeply. “I’ve thought about that, too.”
A sob rose in her throat. “Hold me, Cooper.” He clasped her tightly and burrowed his face in her hair. “Don’t let me go.”
“I won’t. Not now.”
“Not ever. Promise.”
Sleep claimed her before she got his promise. It also spared her from seeing the bleak expression on his face.
It seemed that the entire population of the city was waiting for their arrival at LAX. They had landed only briefly in Seattle and hadn’t had to deplane. None of the boarding passengers had joined them in first class. That takeoff had been uneventful.
Now, anticipating a mob scene, the senior flight attendant advised them to let all the other passengers disembark first. Rusty welcomed the delay. She was terribly nervous. Her palms were wet with perspiration. Jitters like this were foreign to her. At ease on every social occasion, she couldn’t imagine why she was sick with anxiety now. She didn’t want to release her grip on Cooper’s arm, although she kept flashing insincere, confident smiles up at him. If only she could slip back into her regular life without a lot of fuss.
But it wasn’t going to be that easy. The moment she stepped through the opening of the Jetway and entered the terminal, her worst expectations were realized. She was momentarily blinded by television lights. Microphones were poked into her face. Someone inadvertently bumped her sore shin with a camera bag. The noise was deafening. But out of that cacophony, a familiar voice beckoned her. She turned toward it.
“Father?”
Within seconds she was smothered in his embrace. Her arm was jostled away from Cooper’s. Even as she returned her father’s hug, she groped for Cooper’s hand, but she couldn’t find it. The separation left her panicked.
“Let me review the damage,” Bill Carlson said, pushing his daughter away and holding her at arm’s length. The reporters widened the circle around them, but cameras snapped pictures of this moving reunion. “Not too bad, under the circumstances.” He whipped the coat from around her shoulders. “As grateful as I am to the charitable Canadian government for taking such good care of you today, I think you’ll feel much better in this.”
One of his lackeys materialized and produced a huge box, from which Carlson shook out a full-length red fox coat exactly like the one she’d been wearing when the plane crashed. “I heard about your coat, darling,” he said as he proudly draped the fur around her shoulders, “so I wanted to replace it.”
Oohs and aahs rose out of the crowd. Reporters pressed closer to take pictures. The coat was gorgeous but far too heavy for the balmy southern California evening. It felt like chain mail weighting her down. But Rusty was oblivious to it, to everything, as her eyes frantically probed the circle of light surrounding her in search of Cooper. “Father, I want you to meet—”
“Don’t worry about your leg. It will be seen to by expert doctors. I’ve arranged a room for you at the hospital. We’re going there immediately.”
“But Cooper—”
“Oh, yes, Cooper Landry, isn’t it? The man who also survived the crash. I’m grateful to him, of course. He saved your life. I’ll never forget that.” Carlson spoke in a booming voice that was guaranteed to be overhead by the newspaper reporters and picked up by microphones.
Diplomatically his assistant wielded the long coat box to clear a path for them through the throng of media people. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll be notified if anything else comes out about the story,” Carlson told them as he ushered Rusty toward a golf cart that was waiting to transport them through the terminal.
Rusty looked everywhere, but she didn’t see Cooper. Finally she spotted his broad-shouldered form walking away from the scene. A couple of reporters were in hot pursuit. “Cooper!” The cart lurched forward and she grabbed the seat beneath her for balance. “Cooper!” she called again. He couldn’t hear her above the din.
She wanted to leap off the cart and chase after him, but it was already in motion and her father was speaking to her. She tried to assimilate his words and make sense of them, but it seemed that he was speaking gibberish.
She fought down her rising panic as the cart rolled down the concourse, beeping pedestrians out of the way. Finally Cooper was swallowed up by the crowd and she lost sight of him altogether.
Once they were inside the limousine and cruising toward the private hospital where Carlson had arranged for a room, he clasped Rusty’s clammy hand. “I was very afraid for you, Rusty. I thought I’d lost you, too.”
She rested her head on her father’s shoulder and squeezed his arm. “I know. I was as worried about how you’d take the news of the crash as I was about my own safety.”
“About our tiff that day you left—”
“Please, Father, don’t let’s even think about that now.” She lifted her head and smiled up at him. “I might not have survived the gutting of that ram, but I survived a plane crash.”
He chuckled. “I don’t know if you remember this— you were very young—but Jeff sneaked out of his cabin at Boy Scout camp one summer. He spent the entire night in the woods. He got lost and wasn’t found until well into the next day. But that little scrapper wasn’t the least bit scared. When we found him, he had made camp and was calmly fishing for his dinner.”
Rusty returned her head to his shoulder, her smile gradually fading. “Cooper did all that for me.”
She felt the sudden tension in her father’s body. He usually bristled like that when something didn’t meet with his approval. “What kind of man is this Cooper Landry, Rusty?”