“What do you want me to do? I can’t very well get into it now,” Cory threw back at him in an exasperated whisper. “She’s gonna be back in here in a minute.”

“Yeah, well…don’t think I’m letting you off the hook on this one, pal. First thing when we get to Zamboanga-okay the second, but once we’ve got a couple of cold brewskies in front of us, I want the whole story. I’m not kiddin’, man.”

Cory let out his breath in a gusty sigh.

Of all things to happen, he thought. On this, of all assignments. It had to be the mother of all coincidences.

Or maybe just fate, catching up with him.

Outside on the steps, Sam paused with one hand braced on each side of the door as if she were preparing to withstand a gale-force wind. Which she supposed she was in a way, or at least the emotional equivalent. And so far she wasn’t pleased with the way she’d held up in the face of it. No excuses, she’d had plenty of time to prepare. She should have had her emotions battened down a whole lot better than this.

One thing, one small triumph she could cling to: the look on Cory’s face when he’d realized who his pilot was. Hah-complete and total shock. His face had gone ash-white. You might be able to control your expressions and voice, Pearse, but there’s not much you can do about your blood vessels.

He’d had absolutely no clue, she was sure of it. And his reaction to seeing her again told her one thing: The man still had some feelings for her.

Okay, so she was probably never going to know exactly what those feelings were, but at least she knew he wasn’t indifferent.

A little buzz of something-excitement? Triumph?-zinged through her and a smile curved her lips. Indifferent? Not by a long shot.

The smile stayed put while she got the steps pulled up and stowed away and the door secured. The smile was still in place, feeling as if it had been molded out of clay and drying fast, as she started up the aisle, nodding at Tony Whitehall, who had turned to look at her with an expression of unabashed curiosity, and a glint in his exotic golden eyes.

She wondered what Cory’d been telling him; she knew Tony had to have asked about her the minute she was out of earshot. And what an internal battle that must have been, she thought, between Cory’s two selves: On the one hand, the reporter, who’d made a life and a career out of finding out secrets, getting to the bottom of things, solving mysteries, telling the story. On the other, the intensely private man who’d mastered the art of protecting his own secrets.

He, naturally, seemed completely unperturbed by her presence, or anything else, for that matter, sitting square in his seat, face forward, head back against the headrest. He looked as if he might even be enjoying a little nap.

But she knew better.

Or did she? Had she ever been sure what was going on behind those deep, all-seeing eyes?

“Air controllers at Davao City airport have cleared us for takeoff. If you-all wanna fasten your seat belts, we’ll be getting underway in a few minutes,” she announced in her this-is-your-captain-speaking voice, pausing to check that the two men’s bags had been properly stowed in their compartments. “We should be in Zamboanga in about an hour and fifteen minutes.” She threw Tony Whitehall a smile and a wink.

She didn’t look at Cory, but to her great annoyance, felt a distinct prickling sensation between her shoulder blades as she continued up the sloping aisle to the cockpit, an awareness of eyes watching her with unfathomable intensity…

From his seat Cory could see clearly through the open cockpit door. He watched as she ran through her preflight checklist, and try as he would to deny it, felt a little burr of admiration, even pride, begin to hum beneath his breastbone. He’d never flown with Sam at the controls before.

The baseball cap had been replaced by a bulky set of white headphones that left her sun-streaked hair in the kind of sweaty disarray he’d always found particularly sexy. Sexy even now, cut short like this, shorter than he’d ever seen her wear it. Her strong hands and long-boned fingers moved nimbly over the complicated array of dials and switches in a way that brought back vividly the no-nonsense, straight-ahead way she’d always had about her, even when they’d made love. The way she’d had of touching him that was uniquely hers, without shyness or hesitation, with a certain bold edge and a hint…just a hint of wickedness.

And it was that more than anything, he thought, that had ignited the fires in his blood back then. Maybe that part of her had connected with the secret danger-lover and thrill-seeker within him, like two live wires touching…

Come off it, Pearse. It’s over. It was over long ago.

One after the other, the twin engines fired with a deep-pitched growling sound that hummed in his bones and put him in mind of old black-and-white war movies, or something he’d watch on the History Channel. The plane sat vibrating in place while the engine rpm’s climbed and the growling changed in pitch and intensity. Then it slowly began to move forward.

Cory felt his own pulse pick up speed as he watched the hands that had once stroked him to feverish arousal skillfully manipulate the throttles while she steered the plane in a tight right turn onto the runway, then tight left to straighten out. He saw her reach down with one hand to lock the tail wheel in place. The growling sound continued to grow in volume and intensity and he could feel the vibrating now in his belly as the plane began to accelerate down the runway.

Tearing his eyes away from the open cockpit door, he glanced over at Tony, who looked back at him and hummed the first few bars of “Off We Go, into the Wild Blue Yonder,” grinning like a madman. He felt his stomach drop and his body press heavy into his seat, and he jerked his gaze to the window in time to watch the scorched grass and palm trees and tin-roofed buildings drop away under him.

“Hot damn,” said Tony with a gleeful chortle.

Cory didn’t reply. He leaned forward to stare through the window as Davao City came into view, slowly spreading out below him, with the glittering blue of the water beyond. His stomach dropped and the earth tilted as the plane banked sharply, and when it slowly rotated back into position, he could see Mount Apo draped in haze on the horizon.

And still the plane climbed steadily, the deep growling of its powerful twin engines creeping into his bones and invading his brain until he almost felt as if he were a part of the plane himself, as if he were the one laboring skyward with the sun in his face and the wind solid beneath his wings. He felt a soaring, lifting inside himself, too, to think of the woman he’d held soft and naked and trembling in his arms, in control of such awesome power.

He found the notion damned exciting…a pure turn-on, in fact. Which surprised and unnerved him more than a little.

When he felt the plane level out and the engine growl ease off to a steady purr, Cory unbuckled his seat belt. He got a look from Tony when he got up and stepped into the aisle, but something Tony saw in Cory’s face must have warned him, because whatever it was he’d been about to say never got said.

Sam glanced back at him as he stepped through the radio operator’s compartment, lips curving in a smug little Sammi June smile he remembered well. He couldn’t see her eyes because of her sunglasses. He wished he could have seen them, though he wasn’t sure why. Was he remembering the way they’d once lit up at the sight of him, wondering if the glasses were hiding that same glow now?

Wishful thinking, he told himself.

She tilted her head toward the right-hand seat. “Hey, Pearse-have a seat.”

He eased past the controls and settled himself gingerly, his fascinated gaze sliding over the bewildering array of gauges and levers and dials to the view through the wide rectangular windshield. “Wow,” he said.

Sam said lightly, “I guess this is a first.” She threw him a smile. “You’ve never flown with me before.”

“With you at the controls, you mean. No,” he said, gazing once more at the hazy horizon, remembering other times when she’d seemed unknowingly to echo his thoughts. “I guess not.”

There was a pause before she asked, with a slight edge of impatience, “Well, what do you think?”

He hedged, naturally, since there wasn’t any way he could have told her the truth. Which was that he’d lost the ability to think the moment he’d set eyes on her, standing there beside the old World War Two airplane, wearing the arrogance that had always captivated him so, that was like her very own signature perfume.

In that first moment, the years since he’d last seen her had evaporated and it was as if she’d never been gone from his life or his mind, not for an instant. It was all there, in total recall-her face, her body, her voice, her laugh…the way her skin felt, its texture and heat…its softness and its tiny imperfections…the freckles, the way she smelled, the way her hands felt touching him…the way she tasted.

“Of the airplane,” he dryly asked, “or you?”

She laughed, that husky chortle he’d always liked. “The plane, of course.” Once again her smile quirked sideways. “Me being a pilot isn’t exactly news.”

“I never had a problem with you being a pilot. You know that.”

“Yeah, right.”

He shifted in his seat and changed the timbre of his voice, the way driving a car he might have shifted gears to gain traction through a muddy patch. “Somehow I never would have pictured you flying World War Two prop planes for a dumpy little back-water charter outfit in the Philippines, though. The last I heard, you were crewing on passenger jets to China. How in the hell did you wind up here?” He let go of an incredulous huff of laughter. “I’m still trying to get my mind around the coincidence of that.”