CHAPTER ONE
JONAH
This was the stupidest thing I’d ever done. “Take an adventure,” they said. “Do something wild,” they said.
Flying in a floatplane to a tiny town in nowhere, Alaska, was definitely wild. At least, for me. I was a Florida boy, born and raised. Getting the job at Heart2Heart corporate in Miami had been a dream come true. Creating digital content and traveling around the country to cover local Heart2Heart events in various cities was both exciting and exhausting.
But lately, it had become more exhausting than exciting, and I wasn’t sure I was up for this “adventure” in Alaska.
The assignment was to write about something I’d never done before. The company was kicking off an event with a “Never Have I Ever” theme, and they wanted us to create content to support the launch. When my boss had asked me what was on my “never have I ever” list, I’d blurted out one of my lifetime goals.
Never have I ever been to Alaska.
Now that I was on an ancient toy airplane bumping across the Chugach and Talkeetna Mountains to the Alaska Range, I was beginning to think not having ever ventured here was a good thing.
The grumpy pilot had only said two words to me when he’d picked me up on the water in Juneau. “Buckle up.”
Now that we were in the air, I realized how silly it must seem to him that I needed a ride from Juneau instead of Anchorage. I tried explaining. “There was a misunderstanding with the travel department,” I shouted into the headset. Since I was the only passenger on his plane, I sat in the co-pilot’s seat. I kept my hands balled together in a tight clasp in my lap to keep from accidentally steering us to our deaths with my very own steering wheel yoke thing.
“Don’t care,” he said back in a too-calm voice, considering the plane felt like it was going to break apart and drop us from the sky at any minute. “A fare’s a fare.”
“Nice,” I muttered. “Great. Good. Awesome.”
I tried not to look over at him, but I couldn’t help it. When he’d hopped out of the little plane on the wooden dock in Juneau, I’d noticed his muscular thighs displayed perfectly in snug jeans and the soft, worn T-shirt lovingly gripping his toned chest.
He was a sexy grump. My Kryptonite. Fuck.
“What’s your name?” I asked, out of nerves more than anything. I’d hired a company called Knockwood Aviation for the interior flight, which should have clued me in about the quality of the equipment they used, but the pilot himself wore a T-shirt with a faded Valentine Air Taxi logo on it.
“Pete.”
I nodded stupidly. “Pilot Pete. Got it.”
He turned narrowed eyes at me, and I noticed sexy little crow’s feet probably caused by the sun. “Just Pete.”
“Just Pete,” I muttered with a sigh.
The silence fell again, only, it wasn’t silent so much as horrifically loud like a gargantuan rattling buzz saw right in my ear.
“I’m Jonah,” I said after a few more minutes. I couldn’t keep quiet.
“Yeah.”
“I’m here to write an article about trying new things. Things I’ve never done before. Like… I don’t even know. Fly fishing? Or…” I looked around the death trap I was in. “Dying in a fiery plane crash.”
No response.
I threw up my hands in frustration and knocked the yoke steering wheel thing. Pete’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist in a firm grip, but his words remained as calm as ever. “Don’t do that.”
I bit my top lip to keep from laughing or crying. My stomach hurt. My head hurt. I hadn’t slept in two days because of deadlines and travel stress. All I wanted was to land and pour myself into a bed for at least twenty-four hours.
“Sorry,” I said quickly, trying to clasp my hands back in my lap again. Pete’s grip stayed firm on my wrist, and I could have sworn his thumb slid the slightest bit over the back of my hand as he finally pulled his arm back.
My stomach flipped over, and I almost vomited. Instead, I gagged a little, and Grumpy Pete noticed. He shoved an air-sickness bag at my chest.
“Don’t fuck with my baby.”
I looked around at the cabin that looked like it had been made in a Pinewood Derby contest in the 1800s. Pete should have been wearing leather goggles to drive the damned thing. There was more duct tape than actual metal.
“Your baby is more like a geriatric patient on his last legs, Pilot Pete,” I informed him. “Not sure I trust the old guy to get us down safely.”
The corner of his lip curved up the slightest bit, even though it was hard to see from this angle. “She’ll get us there.”
“She? Sorry I misgendered her.”
“Edwina.”
I stared at him until he repeated it. “Her name is Edwina. From the Lily Tomlin movie.”
“There’s a movie called Edwina? With the lady from that Netflix show?”
Pete closed his eyes and sighed, not a thing you really wanted your pilot to do mid-flight. “All of Me,” he said.
I opened my mouth to make an inappropriate comment when he quickly added, “The movie was called All of Me. My grandpa had it on VHS.”
“A VHS tape? Jesus. You know there’s new stuff now in the modern world, right? Streaming.”
Pete’s face crinkled in confusion. “You mean, people don’t watch movies on their VCRs anymore?”
I stared at him before noticing him roll his eyes. “Oh. You’re fucking with me,” I muttered.
After a few moments of awkward silence in which Pete seemed to have zero regrets about trolling me, he finally did the courteous thing of asking me what I was doing in Alaska.
“I’m writing an article for a website,” I said.
“Imagine that.”
I stared at him again. It wasn’t a hardship, but figuring him out certainly was. “What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. Good for you. If you need a guide for anything, let me know. You can find me at the bar.”
Great. He was the local pilot and the local drunk.
It figured.
I began to pay close attention to how he was flying the plane in case I needed to take over, but it didn’t take long for the scenery to distract me.
“This is amazing,” I said, staring out at the never-ending layers of steel-blue mountains capped in white, meandering silver rivers and the varied green of summer trees.
“It’s not bad,” Pete admitted. I could hear the affection in his voice.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Born and raised. Moved to California for a couple of years and hated it.”
I pointed out a startlingly blue alpine lake in the distance. “What’s that?”
“The runway,” he said.
I closed my eyes and prayed.
CHAPTER TWO
PETE
He was certainly the sexiest greenhorn I’d seen in a while, I’d give him that. But the kid wasn’t at all prepared for how rough life was out here. His shoes were too clean and his clothes too perfect. The man actually had an Apple Watch.