Page 198 of Modern Romance Collection March 2025 (1-4)

She was, frankly, trapped with a man who exuded the kind of sexual temptation that she had never once been exposed to.

Like being tossed into the sea to learn how to swim, rather than being able to slowly get her feet wet in the kiddie pool.

It would be a terrible shame to practice chastity in the face of our inevitable demise…

She shut that off. The man was…injured. She had no call objectifying him so. Though, he had sort of objectified himself, in truth.

Angrily, she stepped out of the plane, and watched as he leaned forward, planting one pole down in the snow, and then another, before using the entirety of his upper-body strength to vault himself out of the plane, and land on one foot.

“Thank you,” he said. “This works.”

“Don’t stab yourself through with one,” she called, as he disappeared into the woods. His movements might be slow, but they were deliberate, his coordination unquestionable.

She would’ve said that he was a man who had never done a day’s worth of labor in his life, and yet he seemed at ease with the physicality of what was asked of him now.

He was an enigma.

She decided that she would worry about him in five minutes. And until then, she would focus on the fire.

She went back into the plane and began to scrabble around the different boxes. Inside, she found a lighter. There weren’t even any Girl Scout shenanigans required.

She laughed as she took hold of a flat piece of bark and began to clear snow away to create a bare patch of earth. There, she began to lay out the necessary tinder to get a fire started.

In the plane she found a pot in the cargo, and though she wasn’t entirely sure how she was going to suspend it in the fire, she knew she would figure it out. At this point, things were going shockingly well.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to go looking for him, because he reappeared just as she was trying to decide whether to pause and go after him, or continue on in her fire starting.

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

“I’m never anything but busy.”

“It seems so.”

“Well, what’s the alternative? Sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.”

“I feel like I would be quite good at that.”

He grinned.

Everything about him just then absolutely made a mockery of that. He was standing out there in the snow in what still looked like a very nice suit, cut open, looking quite at ease.

“You are… You are the strangest man that I have ever met.”

“It’s fair, then. Because you’re the strangest woman that I’ve ever met.”

“How am I strange?”

“For a start, I’ve never met a female cargo pilot before.”

“Well. What do you do for work?”

“I invest.”

She snorted. “Don’t even get me started on the stock market. It’s an unnecessary game that we don’t have to play that creates poverty and financial crisis.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And then every corporation has a primary job to their stockholders, it isn’t to their customers or their employees.” She snorted. “Shameful.”

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