Chapter Sixteen

Bridget sat at the top of the short flight of cement stairs leading to the tarmac, hands wrapped around the ceramic green Captivity Air mug she’d borrowed from the coffee niche, inhaling the warm steam rising from it. Winds from the west at less than three miles per hour lifted the ends of her hair while the first beams of morning sun blazed over the ice-crusted peaks guarding Captivity Cove.

The automatic door whooshed behind her, followed by unhurried footsteps. At this hour she didn’t need to look over to identify them.

A nimble body lowered beside hers, blocking the wind.

Without looking, she said, “Morning, Archer.” Miraculously, her voice betrayed none of the simmering stress his presence elicited. Why, she didn’t know. Stress, for her, arose as a byproduct of conflict or complications. This thing with Archer was neither. A short-term exchange of creative orgasms, what could be less complicated?

“Morning.” Long fingers sorted through the items on the step between them, bypassing her phone, her insulated metal coffee Thermos, and picking up a baggie containing loose, mossy green bundles. “Strictly medicinal?”

She laughed and looked over at him. His smile put attractive little crinkles at the corners of his eyes. The sunlight turned his irises a startling, crystalline green. Forget about the baggie of weed, it was the man holding it that ought to be illegal. “No prescription necessary here in Alaska.”

“Spoken like a true enthusiast. Do I need to find you a program?”

She lifted the baggie from his hand and tucked it into the pocket of her coat. “It was a gift, if you must know. From Ray. He says it has anti-inflammatory properties and will take care of any pain troubling me.”

Archer’s grin notched higher. “And yet, I’m still here.”

“Ha-ha. If I lit up, I bet you’d leave.”

“You’d win that bet, since I have to be in the sky, and not higher than it, in”—he checked his watch—“forty minutes. I’d just as soon not run passengers to Anchorage with a contact buzz. I’m sure the passengers feel the same.”

“And our insurance company. Since I can’t interest you in Ray’s cure-all, perhaps you’d like some of the calcium or vitamin D Lenna’s making me take, or the Captivity Inn sore muscle salve Wing gave me, or…” She trailed off when he leaned close and inhaled.

“Is that hot chocolate?”

“Yeah. Lenna’s limiting me to one jumbo mug of coffee per day until this fracture heals, so I had to improvise.”

“I’ll take a hit.”

She handed him her mug. Her expression must have told him she thought he was crazy to choose a kid’s beverage over caffeine at that time of the morning, but he drank, swallowed, and then handed it back to her. “You’re lucky.”

“Me? The chick with the broken ass? How do you figure?”

“A lot of people love you.” His gaze clicked with hers. “Including me.”

Boom. Stress detonated in her gut, and along with it, some slippery anger she wasn’t sure she could get a hold of. “Don’t.”

He didn’t even try to misunderstand, just stared at the horizon, and shook his head. “Can’t help it.”

“Yes, you can. You always could. You proved that by leaving, remember?” Sudden, intense fury roared through her. Irrationally disproportionate fury. She wanted out of this conversation. Now.

Instead, a firm hand caught her chin and turned her to face solemn green eyes. “My leaving back then had nothing to do with not loving you.”

“It’s ancient history. It has nothing to do with me now. In a nutshell, Archer, I…don’t…care.” She didn’t. Four long, full years separated her from that shattered girl she’d been when he’d upended her world so suddenly, she hadn’t known how to stabilize herself. She’d crawled into Shay’s arms when he’d flown down to Stanford to check on her. He’d brought her home, and she’d fought her way to functional like someone shaking off a long, debilitating illness. She’d reassembled her self-sufficiency and sense of purpose. After all that pain and struggle, she had absolutely no intention of letting anyone hurt her again. Least of all, him. Resolved, she put the mug down too hard on the step, and it broke. “Dammit!”

He caught her hand before she could go after the shards. “Leave it. Let’s get this done. It’s overdue.”

“I don’t want to do this.” She tugged her hand free. “Nothing you say will change anything. You made a choice, years ago, for whatever reasons you had, and I had no option but to accept it and move on. Which I did. You have to accept that.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

Her heart slammed against her chest so hard she wondered if it would break again, regardless of her best efforts to protect it. “Right. We spent three years bullshitting each other about our future. Then you graduated, and holy crap”—she flung her arm up in mock surprise—“you had to go. Family obligations to fulfill. Stupid me, thinking you wanted me.”

He ran his thumb over her cheek, making her realize her face was hot to the point of feverish. “I did want to stay. So much so, I let myself imagine it could happen. I figured my father was focused on the business and grooming my sister for her role in Ellison Enterprises, he’d never notice if I spent an extra semester or two at Stanford. But I was wrong. A week before I took my last final, he let me know, in no uncertain terms, he expected me at the corporate headquarters in seven days. He reminded me that he’d invested in me, to the price of four years of undergrad and three years of graduate studies, and now he required a return on that investment. I was not my own man and wouldn’t be until I’d jumped through all his hoops.” His voice wasn’t angry or pleading, just resigned and slightly bitter. “He made damn sure I understood that.”

This was old news. The day he’d bailed, he’d just kept telling her he had to go, and she had to stay. “Well, hell, Archer. I wouldn’t have wanted you to forfeit anything on my account.” Angry and desperate, she defaulted to accusations. “Did you even consider it, for an instant? Seems to me like you made your decision real fast. One afternoon I walked into your apartment and you were done. You were standing in front of me, but you were already gone. Didn’t I deserve a heads-up? How about giving me a lousy week to adjust to those new plans of yours that affected both of us?”

“You think it was easy? You’re wrong.” His eyes flashed with something. Frustration, maybe. Regret? Before she could decide, he went on. “Part of me wanted to tell you sooner, but you were in the middle of finals, too, and I didn’t want to mess you up. I decided the cleanest, most painless approach would be to do it at the last possible minute. Do it fast. Get it done. Get gone.”

“You sucker punched me. That’s what you did.”

“Did I?” Those keen eyes bored into her. “Really? We were together for three years and never met each other’s families. Never shared that aspect of our lives. It was a deliberate decision, on my part, because I was trying to stay off my father’s radar, but what about you? Why did you keep our relationship under wraps when it came to your family?”

Oh, fuck no. He wasn’t going to shift any responsibility for this to her. She charged forward to her own defense, certain the right words would come. “Because…” Shit. The words didn’t come. “Because…”

Because she’d known her attachment to Archer would cause conflict with her family. Her parents wanted her to get an education. They’d proudly sent her off to Stanford to get an excellent one, but they absolutely expected her to return to Captivity afterward. If she’d been open about things with Archer, they would have worried she planned to turn her back on Captivity Air for a guy who clearly wasn’t available to relocate to a remote town in Alaska and become a bush pilot. She’d played a game of dodgeball with that confrontation, in part because she, herself, hadn’t been ready to face up to the future. She’d chosen to stay firmly in the then-and-there and ignore the rest. And she’d done it well, until Archer had run out of time and been forced to make painful unilateral decisions. Still, owning up to her part in the train wreck of their relationship required more maturity than she was willing to muster. He’d broken her trust, and her heart. She hadn’t smashed herself to pieces on her own. “I…I took my cue from you.” Ultimately, that rang true. Had he pushed her to let him in to that part of her life, she would have caved, for him. But he hadn’t pushed, so they’d floated along in their fragile state of grace.

He sighed, conveying his disappointment with her answer, which only pissed her off all the more. More still, when he voiced the same conclusion she’d only just admitted to herself. “We spent our time together living in a bubble, and we both knew it. Or we both felt it, at any rate.”

“Uh-uh. No. You don’t get to tell me what I knew or how I felt.”

“Fair enough,” he said quietly.

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and stared at the mountains, narrowing her eyes against the long fingers of sunlight reaching between the peaks. “You sucker punched me by making your choices without me and dropping them on me at the last minute.” She thought that’s all she had to say about it, but more words tumbled out. “You didn’t even ask me to come with you. You didn’t give me any choice at all.”

Good God. Where had that come from? And how pathetic that she would have thrown her college plans over in a heartbeat to be with him, if only he’d asked?

He laughed, but it held no humor. “Jesus, Bridget. I wouldn’t have done that to you. I wouldn’t have wanted it for you.”

Oh, no. He didn’t get off so easy, as if he’d made noble choices for her benefit. “You didn’t want it for you.”

To her surprise, he nodded. “Okay. If you need to position it like that, fine. I wasn’t ready—on so many levels. I wasn’t ready to break with my family the way it would have gone down if I’d done it back then. I definitely wasn’t ready to be responsible for you not finishing school. Both our parents had certain expectations, and not meeting them held consequences.” He looked at her. “Your parents expected you to graduate from college in order to earn control of your trust. My father expected me to report for duty. You decided you were okay with the consequences of not meeting your parents’ expectations. I wasn’t. Not for you or for me.” He looked off into the distance, not unlike the way he’d turned away that day. “Failing to meet my father’s expectations wasn’t an option.”

She refused to give voice to the question choking her tight throat. She would not. It didn’t matter. She opened her mouth to say something cutting. “Why not?”

Dammit. It still hurt, knowing he’d chosen his father—a man he’d never expressed any particular affection for—over her. She thought about Rose and Lilah. “He would have disowned you because of me?”

“Disowned? If it would have ended there, I might have risked it. Bridget, he would have ruined me, ruined both of us, without a moment’s hesitation. I accepted his money for my education knowing it came with strings attached. At eighteen, I figured I wanted the same things, so I never questioned the fairness of it. Then came life, a taste of independence…you, and my goals changed.”

He ran his hands through his hair. “But my goals didn’t matter. I was indentured, as far as he was concerned. His plans involved molding me to succeed him. He expected me to follow his dictates, including, at some point, committing myself to whichever woman he deemed advantageous. I had nothing of my own to fall back on and no way to protect you, which made it easy for him to enforce the obligation. Worse, the obligation was real, to a certain extent. I didn’t owe him a lifetime of subjugating my wishes to his, but I did owe him. I had to be able to look myself in the mirror.”

He followed that admission with a small, hollow laugh that suggested maybe he still struggled with the mirror. “I also knew given enough time I could maneuver my father into giving me what I wanted, on terms I could live with. And then”—he looked over at her, and all the air left her lungs—“I’d win you back.”

“By making an underhanded attempt to buy Trace’s half of the airfield?” Yeah, it was a nasty accusation, but she had reasons to be mad, to stay mad, and an urgent need to remind both of them of the fact.

Except he wasn’t mad. He simply lifted a corner of his mouth in a self-deprecating expression and took in the sunrise. “Had I succeeded, you would have been tied to me until your trust vested.” Giving her hand a small jiggle, he added, “I would have had five years to win you back, instead of four weeks. I’m sorry I wasn’t ready for you when you walked into my life, but I’m ready now, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to prove it to you.”

No. Nyet. Absolutely not. She said all this, silently, to the dumb butterflies that tried to take flight in her stomach and withdrew her fingers from his before they started to shake. She picked up her phone, slid it into her coat pocket, and then picked up her Thermos. “Five years, four weeks—doesn’t matter, either way.” Using the cold metal stair rail for help, she pulled herself to her feet. “I’m not ready. I’m never going to be ready. Walk away, Archer. You know how. Find someone else.”

He got up as well, looking wholly unperturbed by her statements. “There is no one else. You’re it for me, Bridget Shanahan.”

The stress came back in full force, putting the threat of a headache behind her eyes. “You think I find this stubborn streak charming? I don’t.”

“We’ll see.” Looking for all the world as if she’d just paid him a compliment, he leaned in, kissed her forehead, and drew away a few inches. “I’ll tell you something else.”

“I don’t want to hear anything else.”

That gained her nothing, except a cocky smile. “I’m it for you, too.”

“There is no ‘it’ for me. I’m not that kind of girl, anymore. Let go before I punch you.”

“I’m not holding you.” Still smiling, he kissed her cheek. “The attachment you feel? It isn’t physical. It’s something deeper. I’m not even going to need four weeks to prove it to you.”

“You’re reading way too much into a blow job, Archer.”

His smug smile didn’t budge. “Which one?”

“Aw, geez,” Wing’s disgruntled voice came from the tarmac below them. “Do you two have to do this here? I have noise-canceling headphones, but I didn’t expect to need them to protect my ears from conversations.” To Archer, he said, “The Anchorage passengers are here. Gear’s loaded. You’re good to go.”

“Thanks,” Archer said without looking away and calmly kissed her other cheek, then fiddled with a collar button on her jacket. “Wally’s in your office. I’ll pick her up tonight when I get back, and we can continue the blow job discussion.”

Wing clapped his hands over his ears and walked away, singing, “Lalalalala.”

And voila, a new low in supervisor dignity achieved. “Congratulations,” she muttered to herself as she returned to the terminal to get the broom and dustpan and clean up the broken mug. “You’re really doing yourself proud here, Boss Bridget.”

But her lack of professionalism wasn’t what shook her to the core. No, that privilege belonged to Archer, because a small, weak part of her feared he was absolutely right.