Page 63 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

It took a bit of figuring out, but they found the connector for land power and managed to scrounge up an electrical cable to plug in the plane. After they fetched their gear bag, they climbed aboard and closed the door.

Mike went into the cockpit, seriously unhappy, while she took their gear aft and began sorting it. After a while, the heat came on and soon, thankfully, she could no longer see her breath.

“Well done,” she shouted forward.

“Go jump in a billabong with a gang of your salties, Harper.”

Mike actually cursing her with Australian salt water crocodiles as the threat? She wanted to go and hug him. Hell with that; she wanted to jump him. Mike never let her down.

Holly stopped what she was doing and stared at his back fifty feet away.

Seriously? She tried to remember and couldn’t think of once.

Had she ever let him down? The knot in her stomach answered that far too well.

“Hey, Mike.”

He didn’t respond, but he probably didn’t hear her. It came out as little more than a whisper.

She laughed at herself. He was busy trying to inhale enough knowledge to not kill them when he had to fly the plane. She’d tell him later.

Unless there wasn’t a later. The odds on this working were still longer than a roo’s tail.

Her walk forward turned into a trot, then a run though they weren’t all that far apart.

When she reached him, leaning forward to study one of the screens he’d managed to power on, she grabbed his head and turned him to face her.

Then she kissed him hard. Kissed him with all her apologies and fears and hopes.

Slowly at first but, getting with the program plenty fast, his hands came up to frame her face.

After five years of living together, there shouldn’t be new levels to something as simple as a kiss, but there were. It escalated and swirled about them. Not like sex, though there was plenty of that electricity between them. More as if, for the first time, she really meant it.

When it shifted from kiss to awkward embrace—he was deep in the pilot’s chair and she was leaning over the central control panel that filled the space between the two cockpit seats—she nuzzled his ear and whispered.

“I love you, Mike. I just wanted you to know that.”

“Love you, too, Harper.” The first person to say it, who she believed, since the death of her brother.

“For as long as we both shall live.”

He chuckled, actually chuckled. “Let’s just make sure that’s longer than today, okay?”

“Deal!” She slid back enough that they could shake on it. Then she pictured the couch at the very rear of the plane. Shifting away, she didn’t release his hand. He clambered out of the pilot’s seat and followed her aft.

They didn’t make it as far as the couch.