Chapter One
Isabelle Marcano was hard up.
She freely admitted as much as she clung to her rattling armrests and clenched her equally rattling back teeth. She hadn’t participated in two-party, sheet-tangling, flesh-slapping sex in so long that her best friend Danny insisted she’d attained a second virginity.
But no amount of dick, not even copious amounts of “bear-daddy dick” Danny had promised would be as rugged, untamed, and plentiful as the land in which it allegedly roamed free, was worth this…this…
She couldn’t even call it a flight.
This slingshot ride through seven levels of hell.
While the cloud-packed horizon tilted sharply to the left, her mind flashed back to her discussion with Danny that morning after a client meeting. Before she’d rushed to LAX to catch her solid, safety-feature-laden commercial flight for the Los Angeles to Seattle leg of her journey.
Danny, I object, on principle, to any phrase that includes the words “daddy” and “dick” in close proximity.
Oh, honey, relax. A bear daddy is an archetype, not an actual father. He’s a big, bearded beast who will bend you into whatever position you like best and have you screaming “Daddy!” by the time he’s done with you. A place like Captivity, Alaska? That’s bear daddy central, Izzy. You could trap yourself a fresh one every night of the week. Go wild in Captivity.
It had sounded too good to be true at the time, but a mere eight hours later she would happily forfeit Danny’s wildest bear daddy fantasies for solid ground. They weren’t worth the risk of becoming a small aircraft fatality statistic.
Nor is a promotion, her frantic mind added as the horizon reeled back to the right. Not even a promotion to junior partner at the Los Angeles law firm where she’d dutifully put in eighty billable-hour weeks for the last five years.
The vibrating sardine-can of a bush plane took a hard bounce, launching her stomach into her chest, then suddenly dropped, as if whatever magical forces which enabled flight had instantly and decisively evaporated, and the stunning freefall lodged her heart into her throat, choking off a scream.
Sweet magnetic Jesus on the dashboard! A card-carrying member of all the major airline clubs didn’t scream out loud from turbulence. She might sweat through her favorite Max Mara suit. She might ruin her one-day-old manicure. And as soon as she could reach her purse, she would sure as hell dry swallow the ashwagandha-based natural anti-anxiety tablets she’d bought at the airport store in L.A. But she would not scream.
The man at the controls beside her cursed under his breath, as if their plummet to earth amounted to a minor annoyance. He did something that shot them out of the downward funnel and put the craft into a shivering climb. She risked a full breath and a glance in his direction.
Danny was the expert, but to her admittedly untrained eye, her pilot checked all the bear daddy boxes. His scent, an unapologetic combination of bar soap and testosterone, dominated her senses. His thick, black hair had missed more than one trim, and waved over an angled forehead, complimenting a complexion that boasted the all-season tan of someone who spent a great deal of time outdoors. A strong, straight nose punctuated his profile, and a beard-darkened jaw closed the deal. The man oozed bear daddy. Even the silver-rimmed aviators hiding his glacier-blue eyes failed to add a veneer of urbanity. His lumberjack build filled the cockpit just as fully as his air of raw masculinity.
Unfortunately, he was her firm’s client and Captivity Air’s CEO, Trace Shanahan, which put him off-limits according to professional ethics. Also, when he’d met up with her in Anchorage to fly her to their final destination of remote Captivity, he’d looked her up and down with that riveting gaze that had struck her as a little sad. Then, his eyes had narrowed, filled with consternation and—unless she’d read it wrong—disapproval.
What he might disapprove of, she couldn’t fathom. They’d only exchanged enough words to confirm each other’s identities and get her and her large, monogrammed trunk loaded into the winged coffin he currently labored to keep airborne.
Maybe Trace distrusted a female attorney to handle his side of the proposed sale of his interest in Captivity Air and Freight to the larger, California-based carrier, Skyline Air? Whatever the reason for his forbidding demeanor, it factored into her determination not to scream, or otherwise embarrass herself, as she confronted her doom.
It was a crying shame. A shame he was a client, possibly a chauvinist, and she was about to die a reclaimed virgin, because inhaling his down-market soap, or pheromones, or both, while watching him manhandle the little plane, made her imagine brawny, uncivilized Shanahan manhandling her. He wouldn’t even have to speak. He could just grunt heavily while fucking her brains out.
All of the men in her world were highly civilized. They fell into two categories—attorney at law, gay, or, like Danny, they occupied that overlapping segment of the Venn diagram encompassing both. Such was her life as a single girl in West Hollywood.
The plane leveled out with a nauseating shimmy.
Thanks to Trace’s rush to depart ahead of the storm now threatening to spit them out of the sky, she just might hurl a gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian Alaskan Airlines business class lunch all over the limited edition suit she’d planned to exchange for casual traveling clothes after her breakfast meeting. Sadly, the meeting ran long. Then she’d hoped to change upon arriving in Anchorage, but her flight had hit delays. Shanahan had stressed the need to get back in the air ahead of the blizzard, so she’d let it go. Assuming she survived this death-spiral into the Great North, she hoped her white-glove dry cleaner could erase an afternoon’s worth of abject panic from the suit.
Another air pocket sucked the plane downward in two bone jarring drops.
This is it, Izzy. Your abrupt and tragic end. She peered out the side window. A couple jagged, snowcapped peaks jutted through roiling gray clouds. You don’t want to be here for it.
She didn’t. Eyes squeezed shut, she dug through the slouchy Gucci bag that had gobbled up a ridiculous chunk of her first-year bonus, now shoved unceremoniously under her seat. Finally, she snagged the supplement bottle. She didn’t need to read the label to recall the dosage instructions—one tablet, as needed, to restore natural calm and balance to the body. True, she’d consumed a glass of cabernet on her prior flight and the makers of the product probably didn’t recommend enhancing the effects with alcohol, but all bets were off in the face of impending death. Especially painful, terrifying impending death. She wrenched the cap open, brought the bottle to her lips, and let the jostling of the plane tumble a tablet into her mouth. The next sudden drop had her gulping it down with barely a gasp. She screwed the cap on and tossed the bottle into the purse that had once been a trophy of her hard work and accomplishments. Soon to be a burned, battered artifact of a bush plane crash on the crest of some godforsaken mountain.
The aircraft went into another dive, perhaps deliberate this time, since the maneuver felt slower and more measured. Over the rattle and hum of the engines she realized Shanahan spoke. To her?