Second Chance for Romance

PROLOGUE

Trip and Wren were already at the private terminal when we arrived. So were my parents. I hated to arrive last, but life didn’t always go the way I planned.

The girls opened their doors as soon as the SUV stopped moving.

“Whoa!” I said before they could leap out. “Take your bags with you.

Dad’s taxi doesn’t do luggage.”

They reached over the back seat and pulled out their backpacks. Then they jumped to the ground and ran inside to talk to Trip and Wren’s kids.

“This is just a big adventure to them,” I said after they’d gone.

“They’re young,” my wife said. “No one close to them has died before.”

She looked at me for a moment. “Are you okay?”

“No. But yeah.”

She nodded.

“I guess I still can’t believe she’s gone. I mean, one minute she’s part of our life, and the next…? Bam! Gone.”

“She’s still part of our life.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I know I say this all the time, but I love you. And it’s times like now that I really appreciate all we have together.”

“I love you too. And I can’t imagine life without you.”

I leaned across the center console and gave her a kiss. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Laurie come out of the terminal. She took one look at us through the windshield and went back inside.

“We’d better get going,” my wife said with a laugh, “before the girls tell them we’re making out.”

“Oh, no! They might think we’re married or something.”

She rolled her eyes.

“All right, all right. Let’s go.”

In the terminal we exchanged hugs and greetings. And for the first time I could remember, I thought my mother looked old. Her eyes were puffy from crying.

“Don’t say a thing,” she warned.

“Wasn’t even thinking it.”

My father joined us with a very excited Emily under his wing.

“You want to fly left seat?” he asked me.

He’d been retired from the airline for less than a year, and his current

“job” was chief pilot for a hotshot design firm that happened to have his son’s name on the building. It wasn’t a sinecure, but his boss was easy to work with and the hours were good.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You take it.”

He nodded and then glanced down at Emily.

“Can I fly the right seat?” she asked me. “Grandpa says it’s okay with him if it’s okay with you.”

“Are you sure?” I asked him.

“Are you kidding? She handles the radios and nav better than you do.”

I laughed and agreed.

“Come on, Short Stuff,” he said to her. “Let’s go do the preflight walk-around.”

“Hey! Who you callin’ Short Stuff?”

“Sorry, First Officer Short Stuff,” he corrected.

“Much better.”

I smiled as they walked out to the flight line together.

Even at ten years old, Emily already knew what she wanted to be: a Navy pilot. She’d do it, too! I was sure of it. She was the most willful child I’d ever met. She never, ever let go of an idea once she decided to do something. And heaven help anyone who stood in her way, deliberately or not.

As I watched her, I thought of all the women who’d come before her.

Those trailblazers had cleared obstacles from her path before she ever knew they existed, much less encountered them.

Thinking of them made me think of the women in my own life. They

hadn’t blazed any trails for me, but their influence had shaped me in so many ways. Oh, men like my father and Laszlo Joska had played a part, but I owed much of my personality to the women in my life. My mother was the most important, but I was so much like her that I couldn’t think of a time when she hadn’t influenced me. The others had come into my life later.

Susan was the first, obviously. She’d opened my eyes to sex and relationships. And she’d introduced me to the radical idea that men and women were equals and should be treated that way.

I’d learned about love and heartbreak from Gina, and even how to handle a second chance when it came around. I’d also learned the meaning of compassion and the value of public service.

Kendall had taught me to take off my blinders and learn from my mistakes. And for the record, she wasn’t the mistake. She was just the unfortunate woman who’d suffered because I’d been paying too much attention to the “what” and not enough to the “why.”

With Wren I’d learned that things happen for a reason. And when they didn’t go the way I wanted, I could sulk about it or make the most of the situation. Leah had played a big part in that lesson too.

And then Christy had taught me the value of patience, as well as the equally radical idea that my perspective might not be the only right way to look at things. And I’d probably changed her as much as she’d changed me.

I stared out the terminal windows for several minutes before I felt someone beside me. My wife and I shared a smile, and I put my arm around her.

“Thinking about her?” she asked softly.

“Yes. And you, in a roundabout way. But mostly the past.”

She fell silent for a long moment. “Did you ever think…?”

“That we’d end up together? No. Well, not at first.”

“Me neither.”

“I’m glad we did.”

“Me too.” She breathed a deep sigh. “I can’t believe it’s been twenty years.”

I chuckled. “Nineteen.”

She furrowed her brow.

“Trust me,” I said. “It was 1983. That fall. School was about to start, and…”

Book 1