The Heir's Runaway Pilot

The billionaire who threw me away is on his knees. Crying. Begging me to come back. Five years too late. He didn't mind that I was poor. He would have burned the world down for me.

He kissed me once on a private airstrip, slow, like he meant it. I thought that was love. Then his childhood sweetheart flew home.

He threw out the gift I'd given him and spent the whole night laughing with her, like I had never existed. I can take a hint. I vanished that same day. For five years.

He got exactly what he wanted. He should be happy. So why is he crying?

Chapter 1 Five years after I disappeared, I watched Dorian Sinclair stand in front of three hundred students and warn them about girls exactly like me.

He had no idea I was in the third row. He looked good. That was the first insult. Tailored suit, that jaw, the kind of face the airline had built its whole ad campaign around.

The whole recruiting hall leaned toward him like he had his own gravity. "Everyone's clawing to get into Meridian," the girl beside me whispered. "It's him.

It's all him." "He's only a year older than us." Somehow that made it worse. Twentythree. Airline heir. Up front, cool and unbothered, taking every question like it bored him.

I remembered a different version of him. Cold. Cruel.

A pretty mouth that only ever opened to leave a mark. "God, look at her throwing herself at him." Josie elbowed me. "Does she not see the girlfriend standing right there?" The girlfriend.

Vanessa Whitmore.

Old money, an aviationmaterials dynasty, the kind of beautiful that photographs better than it lives. "They grew up together," someone sighed. "Childhood sweethearts.

Perfectly matched. It's honestly disgusting." "Wait." Josie tipped her head at me. "Lark. You kind of look like her." The whole row turned to check.

I kept my face level and picked at the strap of my bag. Kind of. That was the punchline of my life.

A poor girl out of Coal Hollow doesn't catch the eye of a boy like that on her own.

Five years ago he had tutored me, taught me how a plane holds itself in the air, kissed me once on a private airstrip with the engines screaming around us.

He handed me a whole life. Only because I had her face. Up front, the Q&A opened.

Josie's hand shot up first. "Hi, no question, I just wanted to say Miss Whitmore is stunning—" Vanessa smiled, all cameraready warmth. "Thank you.

Please support Meridian." "Oh—" Josie wasn't finished. "Also, I have a friend who looks just like you." The room turned. All of it. Including him.

Dorian's gaze swept our way and stopped. I folded down to retie a shoe that didn't need retying, my pulse going hard in my throat. Then it passed. Josie hadn't pointed at anyone.

He looked away. Someone else took the mic. "Mr. Sinclair, what kind of applicant would Meridian never hire?" "People who put on a show." It came out of him instantly.

No thought behind it at all. The hall went quiet. "I don't like performers," he said. "I don't like liars.

When one applies, I cut them on sight." "Sounds personal." "My ex was one of them." The crowd made that low, delighted sound, already hunting for the story, and for the rest of the session they traded whispers about Dorian Sinclair and his mysterious lying ex.

Nobody noticed the girl in the third row folding a Meridian flyer in half, and in half again, saying nothing. My roommates were flightattendant majors.

I was the one who actually flew the plane. Top of my program. The only girl in it. They would have killed to pin Meridian's wings to their collars. I'd sooner never fly again.

Josie was the loud one. The one who'd almost handed me over without knowing it. My best friend in the world. She thought I had a shot at Meridian that no sane girl would turn down.

She didn't know the truth about me and the man up front. He had given me the whole sky once. Not because he loved me. Because I had her face.

Chapter 2 The morning before our written exams, Josie slumped over the desk next to mine. "Lark, I'm so jealous of you.

You're a lock for Meridian." "What makes you say that?" "You're the only girl in your entire program, and you're first in it.

They'll trip over themselves to take you." "Don't count on it.

Nobody's fighting over women pilots." "No, see, that's backwards." She jabbed a finger at me. "Girls test a little lower on the physical stuff.

So if you clawed your way to number one anyway, it means you outworked every guy in that room. If I can see that, Meridian can." I smiled. "Doesn't matter.

I'm not applying to Meridian." "…What? Why?" Because Meridian paid better than anyone alive.

Because no sane person walked away from that kind of money. "I'm going with another airline," I said. "Lark.

Are you insane?" She looked physically wounded. "What Meridian pays its pilots, I don't even let myself dream about.

Who else is going to touch that number?" It wasn't about the money. I didn't say that part out loud.

I walked Josie to the exam hall, and then the campus was just mine, quiet, the light coming down soft and gold. Funny thing.

Eight years ago, the first time I ever saw Dorian Sinclair, the weather was exactly like this. Back then my name was Mara. Mara Hale.

My parents died the year I turned ten and left behind nothing but debt. After that it was me and my grandmother, holding on to each other in a town the maps had given up on.

The summer I finished middle school, a director came through Coal Hollow. He was shooting a documentary, he said.

Three years, one camera, following a rural kid as she moved in with a rich family in the city. They'd already chosen the family. They just needed the girl.

Miss Hollis put my name forward. Before I left, she took me aside. She didn't smile. "Mae. You know why I picked you? Because you're first in your grade, and because you're a girl.

You are going to get into college. You are going to get out of here. I've taught you everything I can teach you. There will be better teachers where you're going. Learn all of it.

Don't waste this. Do you understand me?" "I understand." "Miss Hollis." I really didn't get it. "Everybody calls me Mara.

Why do you call me Mae?" "Because Mae is prettier." She looked at me a beat too long, and there was something in her face I was too young to have a word for.

It looked a lot like grief. I flew to Atlanta for the first time and was sick the whole way there. The director laughed at me. "You can't do that, kid.

You even know what the family taking you in does for a living?" I shook my head. "See those planes out there? Every last one of them is theirs." I looked up.

A jumbo jet was peeling off the runway, and the wash off its engines rolled across the terminal glass and straight into my chest, and my heart went wild.

Years later, that same wind would blow all the way into my eighteenth birthday and rearrange my whole life. The Sinclairs took me in.

They threw a party in a house the size of my entire town. They put gadgets in my hands I didn't have names for.

It was supposed to be my welcome, and I stood in the middle of it, the quietest, most outofplace thing in the room. Then I spotted the one other person who didn't fit.

A boy in black, up on the secondfloor landing, looking down at me. I had never seen a boy that beautiful. I had never seen eyes that cold.

That was the first time I met Dorian Sinclair. Only son of Chairman Sinclair. Sole heir to Meridian Airways. He didn't like me.

I figured he thought I was something the city had dragged in off the road. I ended up at his school. In his class.

And the first thing he ever asked of me was to pretend, in front of everyone, that I didn't know him at all. Chapter 3 They didn't film me every day.

The shoots ran on Chairman Sinclair's schedule, and he and his wife were always busy.

Most days it was just Dorian and me in that enormous house, not speaking, the quiet sitting between us like a third person. Things thawed after the first round of exams.

I came dead last in English. The teacher made me stand and read aloud. Coal Hollow never had a real English teacher, and my accent was a joke. The whole class howled.

I went home and cried in my room. Then Dorian kicked my door open. I thought my crying had bothered him. That he was angry again. Instead he tossed something at me.

A candy. "Eat it and come to my room." "What?" "Just come." Flat. A little impatient. It was a lemon drop. I'd never had one.

I peeled off the wrapper and set it on my tongue, and the sour hit first, and then the sweet came up underneath it and spread. From that night on, Dorian taught me English.

And somewhere in there, how a plane holds itself together. By finals my grades had shot up. I spent my savedup allowance on a little keychain shaped like a bird and gave it to him.

Dorian looked at it. "Ugly chicken." "It's a bird," I said, with no conviction at all. The corner of his mouth twitched. Once.

But it was enough to show me there was something gentler underneath.

He clipped it to his backpack. "Thanks, Mae." "Why do you call me Mae too?" "What else would I call you?" Dorian never dressed anything up. "Mara's nothing much on its own.

But a girl born dirtpoor in a town that wanted a son, and they hang a name that bitter on her? Your parents didn't want you. Did they." He'd nailed it. Our village ran on sons.

My parents were cold to me my whole life. More than once, before they died, they'd said it to my face. A girl is just money walking out the door.

Better if you'd died and saved us the cost. So Miss Hollis had seen it too. A long time ago.

He kept tutoring me, and slowly the ice went out of us, and I started to understand why he'd turned soft. He was just lonely. His parents didn't raise him.

Before I came, the only thing waiting for Dorian after school was a housekeeper.

When I first arrived, he'd bared his teeth at me, because he thought his parents were about to take what little love they had and hand half of it to me.

Then he worked out that I was the only one who ever stayed. The night his fever spiked, I was the one who got him to the hospital through a snowstorm.

When his appendix went, I was the one outside the operating room. The surgery ended. His parents never came.

On Dorian's sixteenth birthday, the Chairman and his wife promised they'd be home. By midnight they'd stood him up.

He sat out in the garden that night with a cigarette, dinner cold and untouched on the table. Sinclair house rules said no smoking. But who was left to care?

I wanted to comfort him and didn't have it in me. I never had the pretty words. So I just hauled him out to ride bikes in the dark.

He had a car and a driver for everything; he almost never rode a bike.

But we took the empty streets with the night wind in our teeth, loose and weightless, and I told him about the country and taught him to tell a hawk from a buzzard.

Dorian looked up at the sky, his eyes dark and wet, and said it. "One day I'm going to fly a route all the way out to your town." He said it like it was already true.

Like a thing you could reach up and hold. And I was young enough to believe every word. That was how it came to me. Young. Simple. On fire.

I didn't know yet that the simple things are the first to break. Chapter 4 From fifteen to eighteen, we were never apart. A boy at school liked to mock my accent.

Dorian walked over and put him on the ground with one punch. Nobody touched me after that.

When cramps had me folded in half and I still had to smile for the camera, Dorian would be just offframe, quietly warming my hand inside both of his.

The summer we finished high school, he took me to see his eighteenthbirthday present. A private jet.

His airstrip sat so close to the night sky you felt like you could put your hand up into it.

Under the roar of the engines, the wash of air pulling the breath out of both of us, Dorian kissed me.

If nothing went wrong, we'd land at the same college, graduate together, get married, have kids. So when did something go wrong?

Around the time I saw the first photo of Vanessa Whitmore, probably. "Excuse me—" The familiar voice dragged me back to now. "You here to interview too?" Dorian was standing in front of me.

I hadn't seen him move. His eyes went over me, unhurried. A minute ago I'd been trailing Josie to her Meridian interview.

A recruiting round, nothing more, and somehow the heir himself had turned up in person. And noticed me. I shook my head and played it calm.

I had a mask on for pollen season, the big kind that covers you up to the eyes. I used to be halfstarved, thin as a reed.

Now I was tanned and solid, a little muscle on me, the build of a decent pilot. He couldn't place me. He couldn't. Then Dorian's brows pulled together. "What's your name?

Where are you from?" The waiting room went dead silent. I didn't answer. I was running options.

That was when Josie came out of the interview room and caught the tail end of his question. "Oh, she's my roommate, from some mountain town, last name Hale, her name's—" She didn't get to finish.

Dorian's eyes went dark, and his hand closed around my arm. "Mae