Third Time's the Bride! Read Free

and a five-thousand dollar loan from his father-in-law. The first years hadn’t been easy. He was fresh out of the Corps with a new bride and more enthusiasm than business smarts.
    Thank God for Caroline, he thought with an all-too-familiar ache. She’d provided long-range vision while he supplied the engineering muscle. Together, they’d grown Ellis Aeronautical Systems from the ground up. She hadn’t lived to experience the thrill when EAS hit the Fortune 500 list, though. She’d barely made it to their son’s first birthday.
    Smothering the ache with a sheer effort of will, Brian greeted his chief pilot at the jet’s rear steps. “Thanks for the quick turnaround, Ed. Mrs. Wells made the flight back to the States okay?”
    “She did,” the pilot confirmed. “So did the Italian medical team you hired to attend to her during the flight. They said to thank you for the extra week in California, by the way. After they got her settled, the first stop on their agenda was Disneyland, followed by the vineyards in Napa Valley.”
    “Why am I not surprised?” Brian drawled while the pilot bent to bump fists with Tommy.
    “Hey, kid. How’d you like Italy?”
    “It was great! Me ’n...” Nose scrunching, he made a quick midcourse correction. “Dawn ’n I took a gondola ride in Venice ’n I went to the Colosseum in Rome with Dad. He got me a sword ’n helmet ’n everything.”
    “Cool.” The pilot straightened and held out his hand to the third passenger on his manifest. “Good to meet you, Ms. McGill.”
    “Dawn,” Tommy corrected helpfully. “She’s, like, a hundred years younger than Mrs. Wells so it’s okay for us to call her Dawn. She’s gonna come live with me ’n Dad.”
    “She is, huh?”
    “Until Mrs. Wells gets back on her feet,” Brian interjected smoothly.
    Ed Donahue had flown executive-level jets too long to show anything but a professional front, but Brian knew interest and speculation had to be churning behind his carefully neutral expression. One, the auburn-haired beauty could get a rise from a stone-cold corpse. Two, she was the first living, breathing sex goddess to fly aboard EAS’s corporate jet.
    As she demonstrated when she followed Tommy up the steps and ducked into the cabin. The slinky, wide-legged pants she’d worn to the ceremony at the Trevi Fountain clung to her hips and outlined a round bottom that made Brian’s breath hiss in and Ed’s whoosh out.
    Gulping, the pilot made a valiant recovery. “I’ll, uh, recompute our flight time once we reach cruising altitude and give you an updated ETA.”
    “Thanks,” Brian said grimly, although he’d already figured that no matter what the ETA, he was in for a long flight.
    * * *
    He’d figured right.
    Over the years he’d worked hard to minimize his time away from his son by combining business trips with short vacations whenever possible. They’d taken a number of jaunts to Texas, where EAS’s main manufacturing and test facility was located. Several trips to Florida so Brian could meet with senior officials in the USAF Special Ops community, with requisite side trips to Disney World. The Paris Air Show last year. This summer’s excursion in Italy.
    As a result, his son was a seasoned traveler and very familiar with the Gulfstream’s amenities, every one of which he was determined to show Dawn once they’d gained cruising altitude. Brian extracted his laptop and set it up on the polished teak worktable while the eager young guide started his tour by showing her the aft cabin.
    “It’s got a shower ’n toilet ’n the beds fold down,” he announced while Dawn surveyed the cabin through the open door. “Watch.”
    “That’s okay, I... Oh. Cool. Twin beds.”
    “One for me ’n one for Dad. There’s another bunk up front. Ed ’n his copilot take turns in that one on long flights. But you kin have my bed,” he offered generously. “I sleep in my seat lotsa times.”
    Brian glanced up from the spreadsheet