Page 20 of Plane Passion

Millie had far too many adoring fans. It was irritating. As he watched the crowds, he remembered all the reasons Mr. Dickson said they needed to get her to quit. They didn’t need a celebrity on the team. It created too much of a stir. They had a job to do, for heaven’s sake. Couldn’t she see how much of a distraction she was from their important work?

While so far her flying had been up to snuff, her celebrity status was still a concern. Ernie shook his head as he looked out over the audience.

Vera clasped his arm and snuggled against his shoulder. “Isn’t it just too exciting? I’ve seen her three times. I never would have thought a woman could fly like that.”

“You know, some of us men can fly too,” he said a little too defensively.

“Don’t I know it,” she said, giving him a wide grin that made him wish they could leave the crowds behind and go somewhere private right then, although there was a hint of something more than flirtation in her gaze that made him uneasy. But it was probably nothing.

She squeezed his arm, and he flexed, knowing she would say, “Mmm.”

It worked like a charm. She looked like she wanted to take a bite out of him.

Good. This was a date. He wanted Vera’s attention on him, not his distractingly alluring stunt-flying nemesis.

A roar went up from the crowd, and Vera’s gaze turned to the sleek monoplane on the green and the tiny figure walking over to it.

“That airplane is one of a kind, you know,” Vera said, her eyes glued to the field below. “Glenn Curtiss made it for her.”

Ernie rolled his eyes, knowing Vera was looking elsewhere. “It looks like a very nice plane,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, which wasn’t much.

Of course, Millie had her own plane. Of course, it was custom made just for her by the best airplane manufacturer in the country.

Some people had all the luck. Nobody handed him a plane. He learned to fly during the war, on airplanes that saw so much use, they barely held together. Two years later, he was still flying those planes, thanks to the airmail operation’s minuscule budget. And damn it all, he set a record in one of those planes.

Ernie from Brooklyn was never going to have a custom Curtiss, and that suited him fine. He didn’t need some shiny machine to show his skill as a pilot. Let her have her private plane and her adoring crowds. What mattered wasn’t the plane, but the skill of the pilot.

Millie climbed into the cockpit, and he did his best to ignore the way his heart beat faster at the sight of her. A second woman he didn’t recognize walked out and climbed into the second cockpit. Millie was carrying a passenger while she did her death defying stunts? It was irresponsible in the extreme.

A man gave her propeller a swing and hurried out of the way as she opened the throttle.

She took off like a shot. How fast was that thing going? The planes he flew typically went seventy-five miles per hour at best. She looked like she must be going more than one hundred as she climbed in a steeply banked circle up and up from the crowds below.

When she was a mere speck in the sky, she turned and dove. Ernie gripped his seat despite himself. She was going too fast. How could she possibly pull out in time?

The crowd gasped all around him. Ladies raised gloved hands to their mouths. Vera squeezed his arm with fierce strength.

At the last possible moment, the plane pulled up, buzzing the field and rising once again.

Vera’s grip relaxed, and he realized with embarrassment he’d been holding his breath.

Then Millie turned upside down, and his fingers clutched the bench again. He’d been to his fair share of air shows and seen loop-the-loops before, but never had he feared for the pilot the way he did now. Millie was upside down in an airplane, for heaven’s sake. Didn’t she care for her life at all?

She looped once, twice, three times. With each circle, his stomach clenched, and his jaw dropped a little bit farther.

“Isn’t she magnificent?” Vera whispered beside him.

“Uh-huh,” he answered before he could stop himself.

He watched, incredulous, as she performed stunt after stunt, his insides twisting into a knot.

When she dove toward the crowd while doing a barrel roll, he dropped his cup of cider. It spilled all over his shoes. He hardly noticed.

Though he’d never been a stunt flier, Ernie foolishly assumed up to this moment that he was the better pilot. But he had to admit he could never match the precision of her turns, the control of her dives. She flew like a hawk hunting its prey, as if she was born to this, as if the wings were part of her.

He thought he’d given her a challenge landing at Heller Airport. Now he knew better. That was child’s play compared to the complex and precise twists and turns of her aerial acrobatics.

For an entire hour this madness went on, and he could only seem to breathe in gasps and gulps as she defied death time and again.