Fly Away with Me Page 3

  His experience with family had left him convinced that concepts like love, marriage, and a happy home weren’t in the cards for him. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to go about creating them. He was perfectly happy as he was, going through life with a hey-how’s-it-going relationship with most of the islanders and no one expecting him to be anything more than he was. The only strings in his life were to Miranda and little Ariana. And those strings were complicated ones, with his two-years-younger half sister making stupid choices and being pigheaded about accepting help, letting her misguided notion of independence come between them.

  He needed to call her again. Recently, she’d responded to his texts with brief ones saying things were fine, but she’d ignored his last voice mails. She lived in Vancouver and he flew there once or twice a day, yet it had been ages since he’d seen her and Ariana. He sure hoped everything really was okay. Refocusing on Eden, he asked, “Is that what you want? Marriage and kids?”

  She glanced over, her eyebrows raised. “Eventually. I did learn something from Ray, though. Right now, I only have time for two priorities, and those are my family and my job. It’s hard enough juggling them and trying to do them well. And if you commit to doing something, you need to take responsibility and do it to the best of your ability.”

  Eden sure had high standards. It also seemed to him that she was confirming what Ray had said: She didn’t have the time or emotional energy to be in a relationship. He wasn’t about to point that out to her. “How about this week? You’re away from your family and your job.”

  “My priority is finding out what happened to Lucy. My mom . . . well, it’s really important to her. She’s been feeling, uh, intimations of mortality, I guess you’d call it.” Her voice firmed. “Not that she’s going to die. She’ll be just fine. But she gets worried and depressed, and it’s been nagging away at her that she hasn’t seen her sister for half a century. She needs to know Lucy’s okay, to reconnect their lives. She wants my aunt to know my dad and my sister and me and she wants to know Lucy’s family, if she has one.”

  He respected that Eden wanted to help her mother. “I get it. But is there any reason you can’t have some fun while you’re trying to track down your aunt?”

  “Fun?”

  He glanced over, saw her scrunched-up forehead, and figured she was well on her way to getting a frown line. “You sound as if you don’t know the meaning of the word.”

  When she frowned even harder, he laughed. “Relax, Eden. Let me help you. Help you find your aunt and help you loosen up and have a good time. You’ve had a tough year and you could use some R and R.”

  “I’m not sure what you have in mind,” she said stiffly.

  “You’re an interesting, attractive woman. I’d like to spend some time with you, show you the island, see where things go. Things, to clarify, meaning man-woman things. Just for this week. You don’t want to invest in a relationship, and I am, to use that trite expression, a confirmed bachelor.”

  “Oh.” He’d clearly taken her by surprise. “Oh, I, uh . . . I don’t know what to say.”

  “You could say you find me interesting and attractive. That you’d like to spend time with me and see where things go.”

  The corners of her mouth tugged upward and a spark of awareness flamed in the amber depths of her eyes. “You don’t waste time, do you, Aaron Gabriel?”

  Smiling as he refocused on the sky, he said, “Think about that expression. Waste time. What’s the point in wasting anything?”

  “Hmm. You make a good argument.”

  “Is it a winning argument, lawyer lady?”

  “Will you respect my priorities? Not try to pressure me into doing what you want instead?”

  “Agreed.” No pressure, but that didn’t rule out efforts to tempt or persuade her. Not to be arrogant, but he’d always had a lot of success with women. “Here’s the thing about Destiny Island: People come for one reason but often find something completely different.” He and Miranda had been forced to live with their begrudging grandparents, but the natural setting had won him over, and flying made him happy. When his grandparents decamped to Florida, he’d realized the island was a place where he could feel at home. The islanders’ quirky personalities and live-and-let-live tolerance suited him.

  “There’s only one thing I care about finding,” Eden said, sounding lawyerlike again.

  “Ah, but the island may have another destiny in store for you.”

  Chapter Three

  Eden had to laugh. “Seriously? Your destiny awaits you on Destiny Island? Can you be any cheesier?” Still, she had to admit Aaron was charming as well as hot, and there was something incredibly tempting about the fun he was offering. He was right that she was stressed out from all that had happened this past year. Not to mention she was almost thirty and it was going on five years since she’d dated, much less had sex with any man other than Ray. Five years!

  Her twenty-one-year-old sister Kelsey would say, “Go for it, girl!” Kelsey was the free-spirited, spontaneous one. Responsibility slid off her shoulders like water off a duck’s back. When Eden had told her about the breakup, she’d recommended a rebound fling.

  Was there, for once, some merit to Kelsey’s advice? Eden weighed the pros and cons of spending time, maybe time that would lead to sex, with Aaron Gabriel. Pro: He was hot, very hot! Pro—and a major one she really should put first: He could help her meet islanders who might have known Lucy. Pro: As best she could tell, he seemed genuine about wanting to help her find her aunt and about respecting her boundaries. Pro: There should be no negative consequences for either of them.

  Con: A fling wasn’t Eden’s style. She was a serious woman with serious goals, and when it came to relationships, the ultimate goal was a loving marriage, a home, and a family.

  Counterargument to the con: She didn’t have time for that kind of relationship, not until her mom’s physical and emotional health had improved a lot. Aaron wouldn’t make demands on her time or her emotional energy, not after this one week was finished.

  Query: Was there any harm in, for one short week, acting out of character and having a meaningless flirtation, maybe leading to sex, with a hot man who seemed like a decent guy?

  “There’s a lot of serious thinking going on over there,” Aaron said.

  “That’s me. Serious thinker. I need to analyze situations before I make decisions. It’s the only sensible way.”

  “Because being sensible’s so much fun,” he said dryly.

  “Life’s about more than just fun.”

  “Yeah, but it’s also about fun. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  She firmed her jaw and stared at him. “Being a good person. Looking after the people you love and helping others who aren’t as fortunate as you.”

  “You’re pretty sexy when you get all earnest like that.”

  She puffed out air in exasperation. About to shoot off a snippy retort, she stopped herself. So he wasn’t the same kind of person she was. It wasn’t a sin to prefer fun to living a more responsible life. She wasn’t going to go all self-righteous on him. After all, it wasn’t as if she were considering the man as a potential boyfriend.

  Flirtation wasn’t a skill of hers, but she gave it a try. “Okay, being totally earnest here, and therefore sexy, you might be interested to hear the result of all that analysis.”

  “I just might.”

  “I’m opting in. I’m grateful for your offer of assistance and I accept. I’m also open to the concept of fun and seeing where that may lead us.”

  He took his right hand off the steering yoke, rested it on her hand where it lay on her thigh, and squeezed gently. “Good places. It’ll lead us to good places, Eden. I promise you that.”

  From the tingly warmth that spread up her arm, she figured he’d live up to that promise.

  He lifted his hand to point out the windshield, to a rocky shore fringed with tall evergreens. “There’s your first view of Destiny. I’ll fly over and point
out the landmarks. Blue Moon Harbor’s on the south side.”

  “The island looks pretty rugged.”

  “The Pacific Northwest is like that. Nature has a rawness, which the indigenous people who lived here respected. What we think of as civilization is a fairly new thing. Destiny was first settled around 1860.”

  “By Europeans?”

  “Mostly, but there were also Chinese, Japanese, freed slaves from the States, people from just about every country you can name. Destiny has a colorful history. I’ll tell you about it if you’re interested, but right now let me show you the lay of the land.”

  “Okay.”

  “The island’s shaped roughly like an hourglass, with the north part a bit smaller than the south. The north end is more rocky and mountainous and less inhabited. That bay to the west—the right—with the grouping of three dozen or so houses, is Sunset Cove. Yes, it does get lovely sunsets. The pub’s a great place for dinner. We’ll go there one night.”

  “That sounds nice.” After all, she had to eat. She couldn’t spend every minute on her quest to find her aunt. Surprised by how sparsely settled this part of the island was, she asked, “What’s the population of Destiny Island?”

  “Around fifteen hundred.”

  “That’s tiny.”

  “That’s permanent residents, with maybe three hundred in the north part of the hourglass and the rest in the south. Lots of other people, mostly from Victoria and Vancouver, have cabins or houses they use for holidays. And we get a lot of tourists, especially in summer.”

  Intrigued by the scenery unfolding below them, she said, “It’s lovely.”

  “Best place on earth.” He flashed a grin. “But I guess most of us think that when it comes to the place we live.”

  “Yes. Ottawa is, for me. I grew up there and it’s home, I love my job, but mostly it’s where my parents are.” Her heart would always lie with her parents.

  Aaron pointed out a lake with cabins beside it and boats scattered across it, a couple of campgrounds, and a beachfront summer camp run by a church. The farther south they flew, the more development she saw. Now he was indicating the schools, a medical clinic, and a community center. “And that’s Blue Moon Harbor—the village and the bay,” he told her.

  The bay was like a teardrop-shaped bag with a drawstring neck, but the string hadn’t been pulled tight. She guessed the narrow neck reduced ocean swells to provide a calm harbor. Houses and a few apartment and town-house buildings were scattered among trees along the sides of the bay, stacked on two levels: one down close to the ocean and another above, clinging to the rocky hillside. At the head of the bay was the village, not much more than four blocks long and two blocks deep. Here there were no office towers; the tallest buildings were two stories. A green space indicated a park, with a parking lot beside it.

  Below the village, docks were lined with boats, and more boats were anchored out in the harbor. On the west side of the bay was another web of wharves with boats—a marina, she guessed. On the other side was a huge dock with a parking lot that would hold thirty or more cars. “What’s that big dock?”

  “It’s for the ferries. They run among the Gulf Islands, as well as over to Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island.”

  “Not to Vancouver?”

  “No. You have to take the island ferry to Swartz Bay, then the big one to Vancouver. Or, of course, fly.”

  “If you live on an island, you can only get on and off by boat or plane.” She gave a snort. “Duh, that’s so obvious. It’s just not something I’d really thought about. Don’t you start feeling claustrophobic?”

  “Not if you can fly a plane.”

  “Good point.”

  He flew over the harbor out toward the neck of the bay and spoke into his headphone, announcing their arrival to someone he called Kam. Eden recognized the name; that was the obliging man she’d spoken to earlier on the phone.

  The plane banked in a graceful turn and came back, dropping altitude as it soared down a clear stretch of water between a variety of pleasure craft, some anchored and some in motion.

  “I was nervous at first,” she said, “but this is cool. Does it ever wear thin, like driving a bus over the same route every day?”

  The plane’s floats caressed the water like lips touching lightly and then sinking deeper into a familiar kiss.

  “Nope. For one thing, it’s never the same. The routes change depending on passengers’ needs, and the weather’s always a bit different. And the more experienced a pilot gets, the better he knows his plane, the whole thing kind of goes to a different level. Deeper.” He gave a self-deprecatory laugh. “That Zen kind of thing.”

  His comment reminded her of something she’d overheard when she was a teen. Her mom had been talking to a friend who’d gotten engaged. The other woman had said she worried that, after years with one guy, their sex life would go stale. Eden’s mom had said that if the couple really loved each other and was doing things right, making love went to a whole different level of intimacy. For the most part, Eden had been horrified to have heard that. Yet she was sensible enough to know that of course her parents had sex, and she was happy it was still meaningful for both of them.

  She’d hoped for that with Ray. The sex had always been good but never amazing, and she’d hoped that once they married they’d find that deeper level of intimacy.

  “You sighed,” Aaron said as they approached a dock and she saw the Blue Moon Air logo on a small wooden building above it, up a ramp. “Sorry the flight’s over or worrying about whether you’ll find your aunt?”

  Lying went against her moral code. “I was thinking about my breakup. I know we weren’t right for each other, but every now and then I feel a moment of regret.”

  “Regrets are a waste of time. You gotta leave the past behind you and move on.”

  “You can learn from the past. But yes, I agree about moving on. I’m doing that, Aaron.” A sense of optimism and a thrill of excitement made her smile. “And you’re going to help me.”

  He returned the smile and then concentrated on jockeying the plane up to the dock behind an even smaller plane painted with the airline’s colors and logo. Waiting to assist was a slender young man with black hair and light brown skin, wearing the same blue, logoed T-shirt as Aaron. When a float nudged the dock, Aaron jumped out and the two men secured the ropes. Aaron then pulled down the ladder, said, “I’ll see you up in the office, Kam,” and extended a hand to help Eden out.

  The dock certainly wasn’t solid land. It moved gently and it took her a moment to find her balance. Boats of all sizes lined the surrounding wharves, two of the larger ships looking like commercial fish boats. Up above, the village was picturesque, the jumble of architectural styles and paint colors creating an intriguing tapestry.

  Aaron had her wheelie bag in one hand and her briefcase in the other. “Where are you staying?”

  “The Once in a Blue Moon B and B.” Her dad had booked it for her. “They’re supposed to be within walking distance.”

  “That’s it on the hill.” He nodded toward a big, old-fashioned house just past the west end of the village. “You’ll like it.”

  “It’s charming.” She was no expert on architecture, but the three-story building struck her as kind of Victorian, with lots of interesting details like shutters and trim. Funky Victorian, though, with its paint in multiple shades of blue: a soothing grayish tone for the walls, indigo for the front door, robin’s egg blue for the shutters, and a purplish-blue for the trim. She’d never have put those shades together herself, but the result was perfect.

  “I’ll help you get your luggage over there and you can get settled in. Maybe have a nap. I’ve got a flight to Victoria in the Cessna 180—that’s the smaller plane—and then I’m done for the day. How about I pick you up just before seven? We’ll have dinner, you can tell me whatever you know about your aunt, and we’ll work out a strategy.”

  “Sounds good.” Much better, in terms of fun as well as productivity
, than an evening alone in her room with her laptop computer.

  She followed him along the dock, so used to toting her briefcase as well as her purse that she felt unbalanced not having its weight on her left shoulder. Not that she was about to protest. Nor did she complain when Aaron mounted the skid-stripped ramp ahead of her. No woman would complain about following a world-class butt and a pair of long, lean, denim-clad legs.

  He poked his head through the open door of the Blue Moon Air office, a small building made of weathered wood with bright blue trim. “Kam, I’m taking Ms. Blaine over to the Once. Back in ten for my next flight.”

  It seemed an informal way of checking in, but obviously, things were done differently on Destiny Island.

  Aaron led her at a brisk pace down the main street of town, which a carved and painted wooden sign told her was Driftwood Road. It was lined with restaurants and an eclectic and intriguing array of stores, everything from a marine supply shop to one selling fancy soaps and lotions. A bookstore called Dreamspinner, a clothing shop, and several arts and crafts stores drew her eye, and she hoped she might have some free time to explore them.

  When they arrived at the Once in a Blue Moon, which looked as appealing close-up as it had from a distance, Aaron avoided the wheelchair ramp and hefted her bags up the ten or so front steps. He wasn’t the slightest bit winded when he reached the top, though Eden had trouble keeping up. “I’ll leave you now,” he said. “Give me your cell number and I’ll give you mine.”

  Though she hadn’t known him long, she’d noted that he had a habit of making statements and issuing orders rather than offering suggestions. Still, what he said made sense, so she didn’t protest. After they’d exchanged numbers, she said, “Thanks. See you just before seven.”

  “Don’t forget that nap.” He winked. “You want to be rested up for when the fun starts.”

  Honestly, the man was incorrigible. How strange that, rather than being annoyed by it, she was amused and, let’s face it, kind of turned on.

  Inside the reception area, the air smelled of lemon and the furniture was either genuinely old or artificially distressed, but the blue-striped upholstery was fresh and the wood gleamed. There was no one behind the writing desk that was signed “Reception,” but a brass bell sat alongside a computer, so she rang it.