Page 9 of Stranded with the Billionaire
Chapter Two
Sterling felt her head. Her fingers came away warm and wet. There was a ringing in her ears. Something was crackling. A coughing fit overcame her.
Smoke. There was smoke.
Where there was smoke, there must be a fire.
Fumbling with her seatbelt, Sterling managed to unhook herself. The plane was on a forty degree slant so she fell onto Jake who moaned. Sterling looked at him. He was breathing and still alive. However, he was unconscious. Sterling tapped the side of his face but got no reaction.
“Jake?” she shook his shoulders. “Jake?”
Nothing.
With firm resolve, she hauled back and slapped him hard.
“What the?” Jake blinked in surprise. He felt his red cheek with a hand as his eyes focused on Sterling who was half sitting on his lap. The world was at an odd angle.
“The plane crashed,” she said unnecessarily. “How bad are you hurt?”
Jake dragged in a shallow breath and thought about it. His ribs were very sore but everything else felt fine. “I’ll be okay, I think. Is it warm in here?”
Sterling looked toward the cockpit doorway. Flames were creeping along the frame. Wincing from her knee, she managed to lunge across the tilted aisle and grab the fire extinguisher.
“PASS. Pull pin, aim at base of fire, squeeze trigger, sweeping motion,” she muttered to herself as she extinguished the flames.
The fumes set off another coughing fit for her and Jake. It took them a while to get their breath. A cold wind swirled through the air and Sterling reflected that couldn’t be a good sign. She stepped up to the doorway to see where the cold air was coming from.
“Do you always do that?” Jake grunted as he unclipped his seatbelt and slid, landing against the side of the plane with a thump. He grimaced and tried not to curse as a wave of pain took over his ribs. He’d been brought up better than that. His mother Beverly Ramesly did not allow swearing from her sons. Jake sucked in a slow breath to try to minimize the pain.
“Do what?” she asked distractedly as she realized the entire rest of the plane was missing. It was gone! They were miraculously in the cockpit which was not in good shape, but in one piece. After the missing cockpit door, there was maybe three feet of plane before complete and empty air, swirling snow and evergreens came into view.
Sterling stared at it, shocked.
“Say instructions as you do a task,” Jake clarified. He gently propped himself up on an elbow as the pain settled into a throbbing. Jake tried to right himself so that he could crawl over the pilot chair. “Where’s Richard?”
“Gone,” Sterling replied. He’d probably disappeared with the rest of the plane. Could that be right? He’d been in the cockpit with them. Maybe he was in the snow out there somewhere. Sterling didn’t know.
“He can’t just be gone,” Jake managed to get to his feet. He slowly made his way down the aisle to see what Sterling was looking at. His mouth gaped open. “The plane…”
“Gone,” Sterling reiterated. She was starting to shake. From cold or shock, she didn’t know. “We need to try the radio.”
Jake nodded and backed away from the missing part of the plane, returning to the edge of the pilot seat. He had an arm around his ribs.
He was hurt. Great. They were in a mess of trouble and both of them were hurt. Sterling limped to the radio and tried to get it to work.
Nothing. The battery was dead. Or fried. Or completely missing. She just didn’t know.
“We should stay with the plane. They’ll send someone to rescue us,” Jake reasoned.
“We’re hours off course. They don’t know where we are,” Sterling shivered. “If we stay, we’ll freeze to death.”
“We had a fire a minute ago,” Jake pointed out unhelpfully. The loss of the fire was now making way for the bitterly cold wind.
Sterling looked at him with a glare reserved for people she generally found wanting in the intelligence department. “So burning to death is preferable to freezing to death?”
“We aren’t going to die,” he stated resolutely. There had to be a solution to this. There was a solution to everything. That was the way Jake did business. Everything could be resolved with the right amount of time, energy, resources and patience.
Tell that to Richard, Sterling thought. She lurched her way back to the cockpit door and had a look. “No!”
