“But Crenshaw—”
“Is not the bogeyman, Leo,” Mattie interrupted him with a sigh. “You said this isn’t war. That might not be accurate, but it is true that this isn’t like any battle that you’re accustomed to fighting. There are no blatant hostilities. It’s more subtle than that. It’s words and newspaper articles and even sideways glances.”
“Mattie—” Once again, Leo made her name sound like a prayer, but she wasn’t about to answer his plea.
“I’m flying tomorrow, Leo. Nothing will change my mind on the matter. Now I am going to go and eke out what little sleep I can manage to cobble together.”
She turned and prepared to sweep back into the hotel in a flutter of silk and sequins. However, a large sandcastle foiled her dramatic exit. Instead of making a graceful departure, she pitched forward into the mound. She took out two turrets before she managed to catch herself with her hands. Leo, being Leo, immediately rushed to her side. He reached down, but she clambered to her feet.
“Thank you, Leo,” she told him crisply, “but I won’t be needing your assistance. I can stand on my own.”
Then, with a painful ripping in the vicinity of her heart, she marched toward the glowing lights of the inn.
Leo stood in the ruins of the sandcastle, watching Mattie’s retreating figure. The dark always seemed on the verge of swallowing her up, but somehow between the moon and the lights of the hotel, he could still track her shadow moving ever farther away.
He’d handled the discussion poorly, but then again words had never come easily to him. Mattie seemed convinced that she was caught up in some grand metaphysical battle between the sexes. But it wasn’t some amorphous danger that he was worried about.
Although Leo doubted Crenshaw believed that women should fly, he wasn’t goading Mattie into a race just to prove gals belonged at home rather than in the air. This was personal to him. Mattie had publicly rejected him, unmanned him, stolen his job, and again made him the fool. Crenshaw didn’t just want her grounded; he wanted her destroyed. This was about payback—and not just for Mattie’s own triumphs but for her brother’s as well. Even though Alfred had died months beforethe war had ended, his record still outshone Crenshaw’s. So did Leo’s, but he hadn’t lorded it over Crenshaw like Alfred had.
With the fanciful turrets of the sandcastle still crumbling around his feet, Leo glanced out toward the inky waves. A cloud partially hid the moon now, and the scene had plunged even further into darkness. The salty tang of sea air rushed past him, as if in a hurry to join the breezes across the ocean. With the sounds of the speakeasy muffled by walls of stone and piles of sand, he heard nothing but the sea pummeling the sandy ground.
Leo was the methodical one. He needed to push aside the throbbing ache, move past the gnawing worry, and concentrate on keeping Mattie safe. Although he agreed that Fabin Flyer would not provide Mattie with an inferior plane, he didn’t trust Crenshaw not to tamper with it. The man might be thoroughly unpleasant, but he was a wiz when it came to mechanics.
Leo needed, somehow, to ensure Mattie’s plane wasn’t sabotaged. He owed it to Alfred, to himself, and to Mattie. Checking his wristwatch, he saw it was already nearing two in the morning. Unlike Mattie, he doubted he’d sleep. Leaving behind the shore and the crushed sandcastle, he headed toward the parking lot where the flying circus’s trailers were. Inside he found the motorcycle.
Keeping his body low over the handlebars, Leo concentrated on moving as quickly as possible to Oceanbreeze. He barely noticed the moonlit water to his right or the flash of lights from the seaside towns on his left. No other vehicles traveled in the darkness, although he thought he’d caught the faint but rich sound of jazz floating out from one or two of the establishments. With his blood heated, Leo only faintly registered the cool wind slapping against his cheeks. He ignored everything but his need to reach the plane Mattie planned on flying in just a few short hours.
Unfortunately, when Leo arrived at the airplane hangar, he found a burly, barrel-shaped security guard at the fenced entrance. Clearly, FabinFlyer was taking no chances with outsiders tampering with their aircraft, but were they as vigilant with the pilots operating their machines?
“What’s your business here?” The night watchman barked out the words in a loud growl that matched his enormous physique.
“I’m a mechanic for Mattie McAdams.”
“Who?” The man seemed decidedly grumpy at being forced to handle Leo’s unexpected arrival in the wee hours of the morning.
“Mattie McAdams. She’s the pilot who will be racing Earl Crenshaw tomorrow. I’m here to check over the aircraft she’ll be flying.”
“My job isn’t to play butler or to host events. My shift ends at five thirty a.m., so I am not privy to what’s happening tomorrow. I only know who is allowed to be on the grounds tonight, and a mechanic for Mattie McAdams isn’t on the list.”
“My name is Leo Ward. I’m a pilot too. You might have heard of me.” He hoped the guard followed aviation enough to recognize his name.
Leo’s last attempt at persuasion was met with a decidedly cross glower. “I don’t pay attention to flyboys any more than I do to petticoat flyers.”
“Is there someone else I could talk to?” Leo asked, realizing the man wouldn’t relent.
“At this hour?”
“Please. It’s vital that I look over the plane Miss McAdams is going to fly. There could be sabotage.”
That was evidently the wrong thing to say. The night watchman appeared to miraculously double in size, muscles bulging in places that seemed rather superfluous. “Are you insinuating that I haven’t done my job properly?”
“No.” Leo shook his head quickly. “It’s just—”
“Do you take me for the gullible sort? You show up in the middle of the night and bandy about the wordsabotage, thinking you’ll scare or fool me into letting you enter?” The man’s ire wasn’t just a performance.
“Fine, sir. I’ll just come back in the morning.” Leo made a show of backing away.
“You do that, and don’t even think about creeping in here. All the planes are locked up inside the hangar, and the only door is right behind me.”
