Slow Hand (Hot Cowboy Nights, #1)

Slow Hand (Hot Cowboy Nights, #1)

Victoria Vane



For Jill.

   Thank you for spurring me into the twenty-first century.





Chapter 1


The fasten seat belt sign glared like a malevolent beacon.

Clutching both armrests with clammy palms and white knuckles, Nikki diverted her terrified gaze from the sign to the window, where lightning slashed the black clouds. She then looked in panic to the seat pocket in front of her, vainly seeking the little white paper bag.

Dear God, don’t let me get sick! Breathe, Nikki. Just breathe.

As if on cue, the plane took another turbulent lurch, sending bile to the back of her throat.

Was this foul weather some kind of dark omen? What would happen if lightning struck the plane? Or would they just run out of fuel while circling the blackened skies above Denver?

She hated flying. Always had. Maybe it was irrational, but she despised any situation that placed her fate under anyone else’s control. On a normal day she didn’t even like being a passenger in a car. Flying, however, literally put her life in a perfect stranger’s hands, so she avoided it at all costs.

Until now.

But Atlanta to Sheridan, Montana, was over two thousand miles, an impossible drive with only a three-day bereavement leave.

She closed her eyes, willing away the nausea churning her stomach, wishing she had never received the fateful phone call, and hoping that this entire episode was just a very bad dream. She didn’t know why she’d felt such a strong obligation to get on the damn plane in the first place. He’d bailed out when she was only seven, after all. Followed by over twenty years of stone-cold silence.

Then the letter arrived.

It had come to her with a Bozeman, Montana, postmark, but no return address. Still, she had known it was from him. She hadn’t opened it, but she hadn’t destroyed it either. Instead, it sat in a state of purgatory in her desk drawer—untouched for eighteen months. Well, that wasn’t quite right either, for she had touched it often enough. Picked it up, turned it over, smelled the familiar Marlboro scent, and thrown it back in the drawer again. Everything short of actually opening it. The letter represented a virtual Pandora’s box of heartaches that she just wasn’t willing to experience again. So, she’d buried it. Chapter closed. Until the blasted phone call with news that unleashed a gale of emotions about a man she’d hardly known.

Hours later she’d torn the letter open, devouring every line as if starved. She wished she’d never read it because then she wouldn’t have cared. But she had, and she did. But now it was too late.

He was gone.

They would never get to say what needed saying. She would never see his face again. The letter left her with a relentless ache in the middle of her chest, a pain that she suspected would continue to eat at her until she followed this through. In the end, she’d had no choice but to suffer the motion sickness and face her near-paralyzing fear of flying.

The garbled voice of the captain jarred into her wildly rambling thoughts. Three precious words were all she understood, but also all she cared about—cleared for landing.

*

Nikki anxiously waited another fifteen minutes before the plane actually hit the tarmac. It had barely reached the Jetway before she flipped the seat buckle and snatched the shoulder strap of her oversized purse, the one she’d barely managed to cram under the seat to begin with. A struggle to release it ensued, eating up valuable seconds before she could escape from the flying deathtrap. One last tug and it lurched free, only to have the contents spill helter-skelter all over the floor.

“Help me, sweet Jesus,” she murmured, more curse than prayer.

She scrambled to collect her cell phone, tubes of lipstick, feminine products, and miscellaneous other objects that littered the floor. By the time she’d gathered everything up and crawled out from under the seat, passengers were jamming the aisle.

Shit! With nothing else to do but stand there with her neck craned to avoid the overhead compartments, she turned on her cell phone to check for messages, but the digital clock sent her heart lurching into her throat. Double shit! Her connection to Bozeman was scheduled to depart in eighteen minutes! Even if she could squeeze out of this sardine can, she’d never make it across the behemoth Denver airport to her next gate. Could this trip possibly get any worse?

Hell yes, was the answer when she arrived, winded and flustered, at gate fifty in Terminal C to find stranded passengers camping around the counter.

*

“Please, you’ve got to help me,” Nikki pleaded with the gate agent. “I didn’t even want to make this trip to begin with, but my father has passed away. I have to get on this flight.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, miss.” The agent’s gaze barely flickered up from the computer monitor. Although the words were sympathetic, the voice was anything but. “I have done all I can. The next flight is already overbooked due to the inclement weather and all the earlier cancellations. I have you on standby, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I can confirm you on our noon departure tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? You mean I’ll be stuck here overnight?”

The woman glanced up with an exasperated sigh. “We can provide a room and meal voucher.” She gazed over Nikki’s shoulder and beckoned to the next passenger.

“Wait! You don’t understand! I have to be there.”