Finn Barlow pushed at the carry-on bag he’d shoved under the seat in front of him. At six-foot-two, he needed more legroom than even First Class could offer, but on the budget of a firefighter from a small coastal California town, he was jammed into Coach. At least he had a window.
“Not much space for a tall drink of water like yourself, is there, Captain?” A woman who had to be sixty-five if she was a day leaned across the empty middle seat and filled Finn’s nostrils with the overpowering smell of liberally-applied perfume.
Finn’s mouth quirked into a smile as he glanced down to double-check whether or not he’d accidentally put on his Whitefish Fire Department softball team jersey, or if he’d somehow dressed in a way that made him look like a Federal Air Marshal or something.
“You can tell I’m a firefighter?” he finally asked, not finding anything about how he was dressed that might give him away.
The woman leaned back in her seat with a satisfied smile. “Well,” she said, letting her eyes flick over his hard chest and smooth face. “I figured either ex-military, firefighter, or cop. Lucky guess.”
With a laugh, Finn rubbed one hand over the knee of his olive green cargo pants. “Okay, I’ll give you that. There are tells, right?” He ran one hand over his short hair. “Similar haircuts. Orderly appearance.”
“Oh honey,” the woman said, tapping bright red nails on the armrest between the seats. “It’s more than that.” She sat up straighter, wiggling her shoulders as she spoke. “It’s the way you carry yourself. Your posture. Your physique. The way you wear a watch,” she said, nodding at his wrist, where a heavy-looking digital watch sat squarely against his tanned skin. “There’s a precision to your clothes. To the way you tie your shoes.”
Finn lifted up a foot—at least as much as he could in the tight space—and looked at the way his laces lay flat against his shoe, the bow made out of two identical lengths of lace.
“See?” the woman said, watching Finn as he inspected himself. “It’s not just one thing, it’s all the things. And they’re all very sexy things,” she added, dropping her voice.
Finn’s head snapped up in surprise. This woman was nearly old enough to be his grandmother. Is there something about me that sends off come-hither vibes to women twice my age? he wondered.
“Elise,” the woman said, offering him a soft hand. Finn stared at it for a fraction of a second before taking it in his own and giving it a gentle shake. There was no way he wanted to crush the fingers of a senior citizen on a flight to paradise. “I’m headed to St. Barts for the regatta. I want to find a rich man—a sugar daddy, if you will.”
Finn called on every fiber of his being to hold in the laugh that wanted to escape. If a sixty-five-year-old woman was looking for a sugar daddy, she’d need to find a man well into his eighties or nineties to fit the bill. Yikes, Finn thought. But at least I’m safe. Okay, I’m safe-ish, he corrected his train of thought, watching as Elise kept his hand in hers for several seconds more than was necessary.
“Finn,” he said, giving her hand a final squeeze and then slipping his fingers from hers.
“Captain Finn,” Elise said. She breathed in slowly and then released it, looking out into the distance dreamily like a woman who was trying on a fantasy of herself married to a young fireman.
This woman was a real ticket. Finn felt nothing but amusement as he watched her uncross and recross her legs in the small space. She turned her body so that it was angled in his direction in spite of the seat belt holding her in place.
“So you’re going to find a date at the regatta?” Finn asked politely, wishing they were already in the air and that the drink cart was nearby.
Elise laughed, a tinkling sound like a shrimp fork touching the rim of a champagne glass. Her pants were made of a royal blue satin, and her blouse was a colorful splash pattern with oversized pearl buttons. She reminded Finn a bit of the character Blanche Devereaux from his mom’s all-time favorite tv show, The Golden Girls.
“Not a date, sweetie,” Elise said, straightening the leg of her pants by giving the fabric a gentle tug. She swung one high-heeled foot around loosely as she talked, dangling the shoe from her toes as her heel slid out. There was no question in Finn’s mind that Elise would be a real catch for some divorced guy in a toupee, a man she would undoubtedly find in the hotel bar. “I definitely don’t need any more dates. I need a man. One who can afford me,” she said, pressing her lips together in a surprisingly practical way. The sexy ingenue act fell away as she slipped her foot fully into her shoe and uncrossed her legs. “I don’t have time to mess around.”
“Oh,” Finn said, for lack of any better response.
Elise caught herself and loosened up, leaning toward Finn confidentially once again. She put a hand on his forearm and spoke in a near whisper. “Look, Captain Finn,” she said, drawing in a breath. “I know we’re not even wheels-up on this journey yet, but you’ve got an honest face. You’re clearly a man of some distinction and integrity, so I’m going to be completely straightforward with you: I find myself in a pickle that love alone won’t undo,” Elise paused, putting both hands in the air as if in surrender, “It’s also gonna take some money.”
Finn blinked a few times. “I hear you.” Of course, at his age and in his present predicament, there was nothing he could imagine that love alone wouldn’t undo, but he wanted to try to see her perspective.
“Well, life has a way of turning you on your ear sometimes.” Elise shifted her body forward to face the seat in front of her, gripping both armrests in her hands. “But fortunately I found this trip online with a group called ‘The Holiday Adventure Club’—“
“Wait, you’re headed to St. Barts with the same group I am,” Finn said, frowning. When he’d read about the trip, he’d assumed that the word “adventure” in the title might indicate a more youthful, waterfall-hiking, rope bridge-walking, zipline-cruising clientele than the woman seated to his left.
Elise smiled at him, her bright red lips pulling into a happy grin. “Well, I’ll be damned!” she said.
As they talked, the plane taxied and took off and Finn relaxed and accepted the fact that Elise most definitely planned to talk to him throughout the duration of the flight. In short order, he learned that she was indeed over sixty (though she refused to say more than that), and that her first husband, Douglas Rittenhour, had passed away of a heart attack nearly twenty years ago. Elise was an executive assistant by trade, but fancied herself a bit of a gourmet chef slash ballroom dancer slash community activist. As she talked and laughed, she frequently leaned across the middle seat to touch Finn’s arm playfully.
When it was his turn to share, Finn told Elise about his first few years on the job with the fire department in Whitefish. He talked about how both his father and grandfather had been firemen, and the fact that he’d be turning thirty in a few months. Finn told her that he loved laying on his back and listening to someone read books aloud to him in his small cabin (his most recent favorite had been The Heart’s Invisible Furies, though he let Elise believe that it had been read aloud by some faceless narrator via audiobook, and not by a half-naked woman next to him in bed), and that he never ate sushi, but couldn’t get enough of his mom’s shepherd’s pie. Finn admitted that he lived in fear of being called to the scene of a crime or an accident where someone he knew had been badly hurt (an eventuality, given that he’d been born and raised in Whitefish and knew practically everyone), and that if his parents had asked him what he’d really wanted to do with his life, he probably would have chosen to go to college on the East coast and study literature.
As the plane banked and the captain let them know that they were beginning their approach to the Sint Maarten airport, Elise straightened her blouse and secured her tray table.
“You know, Captain Finn,” she said, casting him a sideways glance as he sat his seat upright and shoved at the bag under the seat in front of him again. “I feel like I already know you like a real friend.”
Finn smiled at her; they’d just talked for the entire three-hour flight from Miami. “Well, you know about as much about me as my friends do. But I do feel obligated to point out that I’m definitely not a captain—yet. I’m just a lowly firefighter.”
“Ain’t nothing lowly about fighting fires, doll,” Elise said with a wink. “But you know what I don’t know, Captain?”
“What’s that?” Finn lifted an eyebrow; he was pretty sure there was nothing he hadn’t covered as they’d raced through the sky toward their destination.
Elise leaned close again. “I don’t know why you’re going on a trip to St. Barts with the Holiday Adventure Club and not with a gorgeous broad who’s got a suitcase full of bikinis and a libido like a racehorse.”
Finn swallowed hard before answering. “I’m on this journey alone,” he said, finding the words difficult to spit out, “to get over a woman, not to find one.”
“Ah, young love gone wrong,” Elise said knowingly, patting his arm as the plane began to descend in earnest.
Finn was tempted to correct her, but instead he gave her a close-lipped smile. And it was true that at least one of them had been young, but the person who comprised the other half of the doomed romance was only about fifteen years younger than Elise, a fact that he didn’t particularly feel like disclosing at the moment.
“Yeah,” he said instead, leaning his head back against the seat. “Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, you know?”
Elise made a tsk-tsk sound as if she were personally disappointed in any girl who’d let Finn get away. He let her hold his hand all the way to their gate at the airport.