Expecting the Boss’s Baby by Christine Rimmer Page B

not reassured. Still, she tugged on the belt to make sure it was fastened securely.
    More hail pelted the plane and the wind screamedlike the end of the world. They kept rising and dropping—hard—as if they’d actually hit some physical object, though she knew they hadn’t, that it was only the racing wind currents.
    They would bottom out, the small plane shaking as if grabbed and pummeled by the hand of an angry god. And then they would rise again, only to fall once more.
    Rain came—buckets of it. Beyond the cabin, she saw nothing but darkness and horizontal walls of water coming at them, racing by. The wind wailed and they lurched and bounced. The restraint held her in the seat, but in back, she could hear the strapped-in equipment. Even tied down with a cargo net, it was banging around, hitting the fuselage, battering the backs of the rear seats.
    And the stomach-churning drops continued. The plane bounced like a ball, a toy tossed between the cruel hands of a madman.
    Still, she refused to believe that they wouldn’t get through this. She was twenty-five years old. She had a wonderful family, a father who drove her nuts but who she knew adored her. A mother who had never wavered in her devotion, her loving support.
    She’d finally found work she could do for years and only get better at it, never get bored. She didn’t have to be the slacker of the family anymore. Her whole life lay ahead of her, beckoning. It was all coming together, and it was going to be so good.
    Surely, it couldn’t be snatched away now.
    Dax kept trying to raise a response on the radio. Nothing. He spoke to her once. “Next time, I swear, we’ll fly commercial.”
    He mouthed their coordinates into the unresponsive radio and yet again gave the distress signal.
    The plane started down. At the last second, she saw that he had found a bare space in the wall of black and green below them. A very small clearing in the dense, never-ending forest—surely, that tiny cleared space was much too small for a landing.
    She said what she was thinking, “Oh, God, Dax. Too small, too small.”
    He didn’t answer. He was kind of busy. They hurtled toward the minuscule clearing as the wind and the rain tried to rip them apart.
    Her last thought before they reached the ground was, I guess I won’t be meeting Ramón Esquevar, after all.
    With a teeth-cracking bounce, they hit the ground. Dax couldn’t keep the nose up. The propeller dug into the soggy, black earth. It dug and held, the engine screaming. Huge clods of dirt were flying everywhere.
    And the plane was spinning, spinning, the jungle that rimmed the clearing whizzing by in a circle, so fast she thought she might throw up. She heard cracking, shattering sounds. Something hit the back of her seat hard enough to force all the breath from her lungs. And then something bopped her on the back of the head.
    She cried out. And then she sighed.
    As blackness rolled over her, she knew it was the end.

Chapter Five
    â€œZ oe? Zoe, wake up.” A hand slapped her cheek lightly. A delicate sting.
    And her head hurt like crazy. She groaned, reached back, felt wetness. She opened her eyes, brought her hand in front of her face. Blood, but not much. She reached back a second time, probed the injury carefully. Already a goose egg was rising.
    Goose eggs were good, she’d read somewhere, hadn’t she? If the swelling was on the outside, you were less likely to end up with a subdural hematoma, which could be bad. Very, very bad. “Zoe?”
    She blinked. Dax was craning toward her from the other seat. He’d taken off his headphones and his chest was bare. He held his shirt to his forehead, on the left side. The shirt was soaked through with blood.
    â€œThank God,” he said. “Zoe.”
    â€œWe’re not dead.” She spoke in awe. It was a miracle. Impossible. And yet, somehow, true.
    Dax retreated to his seat, tipped