Match Made In Paradise by Barbara Dunlop (the best books to read .txt) 📗

in the back. It was small and cramped with overloaded shelving along two of the walls. A wheeled chair sat at a small desk with two side tables, each at an angle to form a console.

“Have a seat.” Silas pulled out the chair and got out of her way.

“Cozy,” she said as she sat down.

“True. But it does stay warm in here through the winter.” He rested his hands on the back of the chair and leaned down. “Radio is in the middle. This is the microphone; push to talk. You can set the radio frequency to anything with the dial. For example, Fairbanks approach and departure is 118.3. But you’ll only need to use 120.1. That’s WSA’s private frequency. All the pilots will be on it.”

As he rattled off the information, he could smell her shampoo. It was incredibly distracting. The scent took him back to their night together, and he had to fight the urge to close his hands over her shoulders. The lace on her shirt was sexy where it decorated her chest. It wasn’t at all revealing, but he could imagine cleavage . . . and a whole lot more.

“What information do they need from me?” she asked, interrupting his fantasy.

“Let’s start with the tracking screen.” He pointed to the biggest computer screen on the left-hand table. “You can monitor the whole fleet from here, everyone who’s out with their locator on. Each of those little plane shapes has a corresponding alphanumeric locator. It’s their registration and call sign. For private company calls on the radio, you can abbreviate it, but it shows in full on the tracking screen.”

“So, there’s a plane here now?” She pointed to Viking Mine.

“Yes. That’s T and T-Two in one of the otters. These dots and the line show their path while they were flying out. When they come back, you can watch where they are along the way.”

“So, if anything bad happens?” She turned, and they were face to face. “Like when Hailey crashed.”

“Landed,” he corrected.

“Landed. This is how you knew where she was?”

“That’s right. Shannon had her on the screen and talked to her on the radio until we lost the signal behind the mountains. It gave us as much information as possible to find her.”

Concern crossed through Mia’s eyes, making her look sexier still. “That must have been scary for her, for all of you.”

“It was.” Silas hoped it was a long time before they had an incident like that again.

The emotion he felt that night came back for a moment, then it somehow blended with his attraction to Mia. An urgency surged inside him, a swell of desire had him wanting to hold her all over again, kiss her and—

“I can see where you’d have to keep your cool,” she said.

He sure wasn’t keeping his cool right now. His hands moved to her shoulders, feeling the heat of her skin through the thin fabric.

She closed her eyes, her head canting ever so slightly to one side.

Danger flashed in his mind, but the image of Mia was clearer: her eyes, her neck, her lips.

The outer door banged shut.

“Silas?” Cobra called.

Mia’s eyes popped open in alarm.

“You here?” Cobra asked.

Silas let go of Mia’s shoulders and moved swiftly through to the lunchroom. “Here in back.”

Luckily, she didn’t follow. Silas didn’t know how he would have explained her if she had. He didn’t want to advertise the fact that he was showing her the radio, but he didn’t want Cobra to get the wrong idea about the two of them—or what was the right idea, if Silas was being honest with himself.

“Glad somebody’s here,” Cobra said. “Can you give me a hand with a cowling? I can’t keep it in place without someone to balance the other end.”

“Sure,” Silas said, since there was nothing else he could say. He abandoned Mia and followed Cobra into the hangar.

*   *   *

After Silas left, Mia had found an instruction booklet for the MX-2000 radio and read it through. She was afraid to touch the tracking station, but the aviation weather application on the opposite table seemed to be running on a standard computer. So she entered the make and model of the tracking station and found a wealth of information from online sources.

The printer was easy to find, and by the time Silas came back, she had a stack of papers stuffed in her tote bag and a thousand questions for him.

“Sorry I had to leave.” He seemed to expect her to be annoyed.

She wasn’t annoyed. She was jazzed. “So, the signals use twenty-four satellites?”

“The . . . what?” He looked confused.

“I’ve been reading up on the GPS system.” She patted her tote bag. “There’s lots more to study, but I was wondering if you ever used the three-dimensional view. I couldn’t think of a practical application in this case, but it would be exciting if you did.”

“Mia?” Silas glanced around the room, suddenly looking wary. “What have you been doing?”

“I didn’t touch anything.” She held up her palms to show her innocence. “I wouldn’t touch anything. Well, the printer, but that wasn’t going to screw up any of WSA’s systems. So, you can tell lat and long, altitude, speed and direction all at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“Wow.”

“We should probably get going.”

“Sure. Yeah.” Shannon would probably be back soon since she clearly had important work to do here. Mia had read a paper list on the desktop. It showed the planned departure and arrival times for the aircraft that were out in the field. Some would be flying in soon.

She stood up and hiked her bag over her shoulder. “Can you pick up other air traffic?” she asked as they walked through the break room. “It was clear to me that you were set up to see all the WSA flights, but there seemed to be a process for interfacing with general aviation traffic. In bigger centers, it would just clutter up your screen. But up here, I have to think there’s not too many people flying by.”

“Commercial jetliners over the