Brenda gasped as her stomach lurched again. She glanced down at her fingers gripping the arm rest of the luxurious leather seat, and saw the knuckles turning white.

{This is ridiculous, Brenda. Get a grip on yourself. You’ve flown enough times before to realize that it’s just a little turbulence.}

Brenda relaxed as the ride once again became smooth as silk. {Why couldn’t there be another passenger today? Why do I have to be the only one on this whole plane?}

She tried to settle in her seat and do some yoga breathing exercises to calm her nerves. It wasn’t like she hadn’t flown before. Brenda Barrett was a busy executive with L&B Records, the hottest growing label in the recording business. Based out of Los Angeles, she and her partner Lois Cerullo had turned a sleepy little record label into one of the most respected labels in the recording business in just a few years. They had snared some of the hottest new talent in years and made an impressive showing at the previous year’s Grammy Awards, winning for Album and Single of the Year.

Added to that success was her "part-time" job as a model for the perfume company Deception. As she became busier with things for the record label, her time spent in modeling had dwindled lately. So when Lucy Coe, the president of Deception, asked her to go to Australia to do a quick photo shoot, she had felt obligated to agree.

When Lois called to let her know they were having trouble with one of their temperamental new artists, Lucy had suggested that she book passage home with J&J Charters. Brenda and Lois had been using J&J Charters since Lucy recommended them the year before, and Brenda had always been pleased with their "air taxi" service in the past. Their fleet consisted of all Lear jets, and many of the world’s executives frequently were passengers. Contributing to that fact was that the owner of J&J Charters was one of the world’s wealthiest men, a ruthless business shark who just as ruthlessly guarded his privacy and rarely was photographed.

Brenda had agreed to take the charter flight to Los Angeles from Sydney so that she could get home in a hurry to help Lois. She was surprised to see that she was the only passenger on the flight, but at first she found it kind of fun having the plush seats and wood-paneled cabin to herself.

The plane bounced hard again, and Brenda began to re-think her opinion. She was wondering why the captain hadn’t come over the PA and made some kind of apology for this rough trip. If he didn’t soon, she would certainly log some kind of complaint with the management of J&J Charters when they reached LA about this pilot’s manners. All of the other ones had always been so polite.

{The pilot. What a shame – such a good-looking man turning out to be such a Neanderthal.} She remembered when they were preparing for take-off and she saw him come on board. He was wearing a light blue cotton shirt, navy trousers, and a navy double-breasted blazer. There was a name tag pinned to the lapel, but she didn’t get a chance to read it. He smiled at her briefly as he confidently strode through the cabin, but he appeared to be in a hurry to get the jet in the air. She did have a chance to notice how the blue of the shirt brought out the blue in his incredible eyes, and as he went by, she dared to glance after him and appreciated the rear view just as much. The man certainly did wear his trousers tight, and after seeing him from behind, she could understand why. He had plenty to flaunt.

At that moment, the plane bounced again, and suddenly seemed to take a nosedive. Brenda held her breath, waiting for it to pull out, and began to panic when it didn’t. She was about to scream toward the cockpit when the captain’s voice finally came through the speakers.

"We’re experiencing severe mechanical problems, Ma’am. I’m going to have to try to set this baby down. I see a small island ahead, and …bloody hell!" His monologue was interrupted by a severe shaking in the body of the plane. Brenda gripped the handles of the seats tightly after checking to make sure that her seatbelt was securely fastened. After a few more minutes of shaking, she heard the pilot’s voice again. "OK, I’m gonna try to set her down as best I can. Put your head between your knees and pray!"

{I can’t believe this! I’m going to be in a plane cra….}. Brenda never got to finish the thought as she felt a violent jolt and then her world went black.

The birds definitely knew the giant silver machine was an intruder. As they heard it sputter and crackle in the air, they got out of its way as it came hurtling into their territory. Taking refuge in the trees of the island, they watched as the giant silver bird came in at an incredible speed, smoke pouring out of its wings, skimming the tops of some of the other trees as it came.

The plane was still shimmying when it hit the soft grass of the island. It bounced gently one time, and then slid along the grassy knolls until it came to the sandy, white beach. Digging a long furrow, it finally came to rest with a hard thump in the sand.

Jax’s hands were shaking even after the jet had stopped moving. He had a death grip on the steering column of the jet, and he had to remind himself to let go. Taking deep breaths, he finally realized that it was over.

{Hot d*mn! I actually landed it! The Lear held together and I actually brought it down in one piece!} After allowing himself a few more moments of self-congratulations, Jax suddenly realized that he couldn’t savor his victory for long. The smell of death was in the cockpit. Leaking hydraulic fluid.

He shook himself quickly and then ripped his seatbelt off. Grabbing his blazer from the pilot’s seat and wrapping it around his head for protection from smoke, he forced his way into the passenger cabin by throwing his weight against the jammed door. {Got to find the passenger and get her off the plane before it blows.}

As he broke through into the cabin, he saw a lot of the furniture had been thrown around by the force of their landing, but the over-stuffed leather seats remained bolted to the floor in place. He made his way cautiously to one of the seats, and saw her, slumped over, her head resting on a small pillow between her knees.

Jax crouched down in front of her and gently put his first two fingers on her neck. {A pulse! She’s alive!} Then he carefully placed his fingers beneath her chin and brought her head up to rest against the seat back. {D*mn, she’s beautiful, too!} Jax felt an involuntary reaction in his body to her appearance, and had to remind himself that there wouldn’t be time for any of that unless he got both of them off the plane before it exploded.

He reached down and unfastened her seat belt, and then placed his arms beneath her knees and around her shoulders to lift her out of the seat. {She’s light as a feather. Probably because she’s so petite. All skin and bones, too.} His body reminded him again that she wasn’t ALL skin and bones, and had some curves in just the right places. Her raven black hair skimmed against his cheek, and he smelled the scent of jasmine. He shifted her weight slightly and was about to turn to carry her out of the emergency exit when her eyes shot open and she stared into his.

Her eyes were a deep, rich shade of brown, but they grew wide in fright. She waited about 3 seconds, and then let loose with a scream that was probably heard all the way back to Sydney.

"Stop it, lady!" Jax exclaimed. "You’re going to get us both killed if you don’t stop wiggling like that!"

"Then PUT ME DOWN!" Brenda spat in return, and to her surprise, Jax let her drop with a thud back into the leather seat on her behind. She eased her bruised posterior briefly, and then looked into his blue eyes. "You’re the pilot!" she said in realization.

"Yeah, lady, charmed," Jax replied cynically. "Now can you get your pretty little behind out of that seat so we can get out of this plane before it explodes, or do you need me to carry you?"

"I’m fine, thank you," Brenda returned sharply. Jax nodded wordlessly and turned to go toward the emergency exit. She watched him for a moment, and then began looking around the floor of the plane near her seat.

{My bag….my tote bag! Where did it go? I’ve got to find it! I can’t leave the plane without it!}

Jax, meanwhile, had moved to the emergency door of the plane. He tried opening it once, and when it wouldn’t budge, he cursed loudly. He looked back then to see Brenda crawling on all fours around her seat.

"Hey, princess, the door’s THIS way." She turned around to look at him, but stayed on all fours. "Although that’s a charming view of your behind, could you possibly tell me WHAT THE HELL YOU’RE DOING?!!"

She rose to her knees. "Well, hot shot, since you don’t have the door open yet, I’m looking for my bag. After all, once you get it open, I don’t exactly think I’ll need to wait in line for my turn to get out!!" She saw him mouth another expletive, and she huffed and spun back to search for her bag.

Jax placed his shoulder against the door and gave a mighty push, and the door gave way easily. At that moment, Brenda came all the way around the seat and spied her Louis Vuitton tote bag crammed under a table. Grabbing the long shoulder strap, she flung it across her chest and scrambled up to the opening in the plane.

Jax, having put his blazer back on, was standing on the wing of the plane, impatiently holding his hand out to her. "Come on, princess. We need to jump, and then get away as fast as we can. This baby’s gonna blow."

Brenda climbed out on the wing with him, placed her hand in his, and they both jumped into the soft white sand under the belly of the plane. Jax recovered from the drop first, and he looked at Brenda, who was still a little unsteady on her feet. He noticed that she had left the jacket of her burgundy business suit behind in the plane, and was clad only in some kind of sheer pink silk blouse, a burgundy vest and a matching, short, tight, slim-fitting business skirt. "What now?" she asked, regaining her breath.

"Now, princess – we run!" Jax shouted, and grabbed her hand to pull her along with him up the beach. They began running together, the large canvas bag bumping against his side as they ran. Brenda prided herself on being fit, but the Italian heels she was wearing and the soft sand under her feet soon conspired against her. She landed wrong, and one ankle twisted and gave way.

"Hey!! What do you think you’re doing? Those are Ferragamo originals! They cost …."

Brenda never finished the sentence because she felt her body being lifted again like a baby. "Sorry," Jax rasped. "You can pray that a big piece of steel doesn’t land on them when the plane blows. Right now, we need to MOVE!"

Brenda wiggled a little, but realized that he was probably right when she began to smell smoke and turned around and saw a thick black cloud coming from the backside of the plane. Jax had begun running again, cradling her to his chest.

Jax prided himself on being in good physical shape for a man at the ripe old age of 36. He worked out regularly and loved to swim and occasionally even tried to get up on a surfboard again. But he had only gone a few steps when his lungs began to burn, and he realized that the beautiful brunette in his arms wasn’t what was causing the strain on his heart.

"D*mn, princess, that bag weighs a ton! I hope that whatever’s in it is worth risking our lives for!" Brenda wrapped her arms tighter around his neck as she suddenly felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up and the air around her go still. Although he had been threatening that the plane would explode, it hadn’t seemed like a real threat to her until right now.

Jax felt it too. Perhaps because he had been flying almost ever since he could walk. Perhaps it was an ingrained habit from years spent in the heavens at the controls of a jet. Whatever the reason, Jax knew that the plane was ready to blow, and they weren’t nearly far enough away.

Brenda chanced to look back at the plane, and she saw the fireball just it blew to the heavens. She screamed, but her scream was drowned out by the tremendous roar of the explosion. This black smoke surrounded them, and a wave of hot air picked them up like dead leaves in a gentle fall breeze.

The accursed tote bag was ripped from Brenda’s arms by the force of the blast and hurtled on to its own destination on the beach. Once they were airborne, Jax’s instincts took over again. He was the man – the protector and provider. He wrapped both of his arms tightly around Brenda and shifted his body in mid-air.

When they came to a landing on the beach, his body hit the sand first, taking most of the jolt of the impact. His head hit a dead log that was embedded in the white sand, and his world went black. Brenda’s body slammed into his in the sand, and the impact knocked the air from her lungs and she lost consciousness too.

As the two of them lay on the white sand beach, a gentle rain came from the heavens – nature’s own fire extinguisher for the blazing inferno they had survived.

*~*~*~*

{Sonny, stop shaking your hair and making me all wet! I’ll get up now, I promise! Stop! The water is running down my chin…} Brenda’s eyes flew open with a start. She looked around and realized she had been dreaming. She wasn’t in her bed at home with Sonny standing next to her, trying to rouse her. As she felt the water on her face, she realized that it was rain.

{The plane! The explosion! I remember now! We were running on the beach and then there was this big fireball and….We! The pilot!} As the thoughts tumbled through her brain, she realized that he was still holding her. In fact, she was resting on him and he still had his arms locked around her waist in a death grip.

She struggled to free herself from his arms, and as she sat up, she was amazed to find that she hadn’t been hurt when the plane exploded and sent them through the air. Probably due to the pilot’s quick thinking, he had taken the brunt of the impact on the sand. She looked around for a minute, and all she could see was white sand beach, palm trees, and some denser shrubbery in the distance. Her prized tote bag lay on the beach about 15 feet from where they landed.

{They! Brenda Veronica, are you sitting on your brains?} Brenda gasped and then spun around and knelt next to the pilot’s unmoving body. {Oh, God, don’t do this to me. Please don’t let him die now. Not after we’ve come through the crash!} She leaned over him and placed her two fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse. She breathed a sigh of relief when she felt a strong throbbing there, but his eyes were still shut.

Feeling a little like a voyeur, she unbuttoned the blazer and almost was distracted by his broad chest. {Brenda, get your hormones in control, girl. This isn’t the time to be admiring that hard wall that cradled you as he was carrying you.} She saw his chest rising and falling in even breaths, and was a little more relieved.

But why wasn’t he awake like she was? Maybe he had some kind of internal injuries because he hit the ground harder. It was then that she noticed the log beneath his head. At first, she thought comically that at least he had something to rest on, but then she noticed jagged broken edges.

Biting her lower lip for courage, she put her hand beneath the pilot’s head. While she got a little spark of excitement running her fingers through his luxurious blonde locks, she gasped loudly as she felt something warm and wet. She pulled her hand away, and tears began to run down her cheeks when there was his blood on her fingers.

{Oh, Mr. Pilot, I’m not very good at this. Please don’t have a really bad wound. I have no idea what to do and we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, here.} She stripped off her vest and wadded it into a kind of pillow. She lifted his head gently and placed it on the vest/pillow so that it wouldn’t have to rest on the hard log any longer.

Then, Brenda tried to gather her intestinal fortitude, and after wiping her hand on her skirt, took his chin in her fingers and turned his head to the side. She slid her fingers into his thick blonde hair again, and could feel a goose-egg starting to form, but was relieved when she only found a small cut at the base of his hairline.

{OK, Nurse Brenda. Now what? What did mom always do?} She thought for a minute. She had never been good at emergency first aid. {Clean the wound. You should probably clean the wound.} She stood, and trying to balance on the ankle that hadn’t been sprained, she wriggled out of her half slip. She ran down the beach to the water’s edge, wet the slip in the surf, and then ran back up to where the pilot lay.

She methodically cleansed the cut as well as she could. She was no Florence Nightingale. Playing nursemaid to prima-donna rock stars was no preparation for this. {That’s really funny, Brenda. You’ve spent almost the entire last 18 months in the hospital, and now you don’t know what to do for a simple cut.}

But those 18 months hadn’t been easy ones, and she certainly hadn’t learned much first aid watching Julia die. The only thing she could do for her sister was hold her hand as the chemotherapy slowly dripped into her veins. She held her head when the nausea became too intense. She called the nurse when Julia needed a shot of morpheine. And then, she had to try to understand when Julia told her that there would be no more special efforts to stop the leukemia that ravaged her body. She watched her slip away and couldn’t do a thing to stop it.

Her tears began to flow again as she remembered Julia, but then she shook her head soundly. {You’re alive, Brenda. You should be thankful for that.} Then she remembered WHO she should probably be thankful to – the pilot. His expertise had landed them on this rock, and his quick thinking had gotten them off the plane before it exploded.

Brenda rose and ran to the water to soak her slip again and brought it back to him. She now sponged his face, and took hope when she saw his color improving. He began to moan a little, and his head moved back and forth on her makeshift pillow, but he still didn’t open his eyes.

{OK, Ace. Now it’s time to wake up. You’ve scared me enough for one lifetime, and I’m sick and tired of it. So wake up…..please?} Brenda sat back on her haunches for a minute, trying to think of a way to bring him around. {Smelling salts? Nope. Wait….St. Bernards….brandy….} She looked around again, and gave a little cry of happiness when she spotted her precious tote bag.

She limped over to where it lay and began dragging it back to the pilot, making a deep rut in the sand. No wonder he had complained about it – carrying her and the bag would have required Herculean strength, even from a normal man. She opened the bag and began to pull out the main cause for the weight. There were two large decanters of rum, and several bottles of red wine which had been part of gift sets that Lucy had tried to foist on her before leaving Sydney.

Lucy had gotten the gift sets from some of their retailers who had been pleased with a good year for Deception. Brenda had refused at first, but then relented and took the wine and cheese-and-crackers sets. She figured that maybe she and Sonny would share the wine some evening in front of a crackling fire back in Port Charles, New York.

She looked down at the still-unconscious pilot. Instead, she would be sharing the rum with God-knows-who on a deserted tropical island God-knows-where. She scooted herself under the pilot’s body, trying to raise his head and cradle it in her lap. Once she accomplished that, she carefully opened the rum and then tried to lift his chin, drizzling the rum into his mouth.

After a few seconds, some of the rum must have seeped down into his throat, because he came coughing and sputtering back to consciousness. She tried to cradle him, but he was coughing so hard that she thought it was better to have him upright until he could catch his breath. She scooted around again so that when he looked up, the first thing he saw was her beautiful brown eyes, wide with fright.

After locking gazes with her for a few seconds, he brought his right hand up to cover his eyes. "Bloody hell, I wasn’t dreaming. It IS you."

Her feelings, held in check to this point, bubbled to the surface. "WELL, EXCUSE ME! I called some Playboy bunnies, and they were going to join us, but then my cell phone battery went dead and they never got the directions!" He grimaced at her sarcasm, and she decided it might be better not to bait the man until his head stopped hurting. She sat back on her heels and watched as he slowly rubbed his head and then rose to get his bearings.

He was a tall man, but she really didn’t realize just how tall until now. His open blazer flapped in the gentle breeze, and as he did a complete circle, taking in all aspects of their surroundings, she took in a complete view of him. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and as he turned, she admired the rear view again in his tight trousers. In fact, when he turned to face her again, his height combined with her sitting position on the beach gave her an up-close view of the tight fit of his trousers in the front. Brenda blushed, and readjusted her position so that it wasn’t so close to him.

"I did it! I landed the plane!" he breathed. He sat down hard on the sand next to her. "Hot d*mn, I’m good!"

"Congratulations, ace. I’ll nominate you for an award when we get back to civilization," she said sarcastically.

He looked at her and rubbed his head, which was beginning to throb. "Listen, princess, if I hadn’t done such a great job of landing that bird, the buzzards would be eyeing us for tomorrow’s lunch!"

She shivered a little, and realized he was right. The island they occupied appeared to be little more than a speck in the horizon. All she could see for miles was water, and she suspected that landing the jet on a small island like this without hydraulic power was little less than a miracle.

"I’m sorry," she finally said quietly. But then, neither one spoke for a long time. Jax rubbed his head and looked around them, and then rose to his feet.

"We’ve got to get going," he said succinctly.

"Going? Where?" she asked, not moving from the spot.

"Not where…..going, as in get our behinds moving on setting up a camp and finding food and water."

"Why?" she asked, the reality of their situation still having not sunk in.

He looked at her as though she was a toddler asking why there was air. "Because……judging from the position of the sun in the sky over there, we’ve only got about 3 more hours of light before this entire place is in pitch darkness." He looked back at the still smoldering remains of the Lear. He turned back to her and bowed at the waist grandly.

"Welcome to our new home, princess."

To be continued…..