The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [93]
She patted his flushed face. “Listen to me, you need to get some sleep. Lend me your jet. I’ll fly it to Miami and bring it back Friday.” He winced skeptically at her. “Okay, look, I’ll make a deal. We’ll fly together to Atlanta. But then you go to your mom’s. I’ll go on to Miami alone. You need to get home and go to bed.”
“You’re a riot.” He patted her hand. “Lend you my jet.”
She felt his pulse. It was racing. “Come on, do this for me, Brad, come on.”
He stared at her hand on his, then looked her up and down again, head to foot. “You just look great. Life treating you okay, Annie? Well, I don’t mean now, with losing your dad…”
“I’m okay.”
“Sam says you could marry somebody else on the rebound from me.”
“Sam said what?” Annie glanced over at the ATM. The man in the blue T-shirt was no longer standing there. After a search, she spotted him in the crowd by a distant gate, walking away, speaking into his cell phone. “Brad, I’m not getting married again for a long time.” The man turned down a corridor and was gone.
Brad grinned at her. “Don’t get a divorce and then you won’t need to get married again for a long time. Good plan?”
She gave him a rueful smile. “Don’t you think I need a break?”
He looked hurt. “What happened wasn’t so bad.”
“Yes it was.” She gave his hand a quick squeeze. “Come on, I’ll drop you in Atlanta. Lend me the jet.”
Brad brought out the ring box from the pocket of his Italian suit jacket, showing her the diamond. “Marry me again?”
It was a much larger diamond than the first one he’d given her, which she’d liked and had, in fact, missed looking at after she’d returned it. Annie wore very little, and very good, jewelry—a small string of pearls, a plain gold bracelet. This new diamond setting was the sort of thing she didn’t want, and amazingly enough she was beginning to feel absolutely sure that she didn’t want Brad either. He had come to win her back, was even really helping her, but it was over. She shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry. No.”
“Okay,” he grinned. “But can we have sex?”
It made her laugh, as he’d hoped. “No. No sex either. Keep on being the good guy here.”
He gave an elaborate pretense of thought. “Okay, last offer. Will you slow up on this crazy divorce? Just one month. You wait one little month and you can fly my plane to Miami tonight.”
“Come on, that’s blackmail!” Their whole marriage had been negotiated this way, like clauses in contracts drawn up by hard-boiled lawyers.
“Yep, it’s blackmail.” Brad held out his hand.
She thought about it. “If you get off in Atlanta.”
He grinned. “I copilot.”
“As far as Atlanta.” She held out her hand.
“No divorce for a month?”
She sighed, then nodded.
His glance flickered sideways to two young laughing stewardesses hurrying in tight skirts down the corridor.
Chapter 28
Breaking the Sound Barrier
As CEO of Hopper Jets, Brad was persuasive when he assured the air traffic controller that, despite Lieutenant Goode’s earlier daredevil landing of the Piper Warrior, she was a serious, decorated military flight instructor with the proper license and endorsements; she was one of the best pilots male or female ever seen in the sky, a flyer ranked second at the Naval Academy and second at Fighter Weapons School at San Diego only to Brad himself. All Brad wanted was quick clearance from ATC. If the air traffic controller couldn’t trust the U.S. Navy…
“Why is it, A, I can talk anybody into anything except you and my mama?”
Annie pushed Malpy down inside the cloth carrier atop the courier case. “Because we know you better than anybody else.”
“You think?”
“I think. And take your hand off my butt.”
“Just trying to help.”
Annie shook off Brad’s hand as they climbed into the cockpit of Hopper Jets’ newest acquisition, the Cessna Mustang jet.
They waited for clearance on the taxi runway where Brad talked to her through their headsets. It had always been her