“You are?” she teased. “You’re walking around butt-naked and it’s only forty or fifty degrees up here. Why not go down and stand by the stove while I finish dressing?”
He slipped the flight suit off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. He tried to take off the thermal underwear top and undo the clasps of her athletic brassiere, then decided not to wait. He dropped her thermal underwear bottoms, then grasped her by her still-covered breasts, smothering her with kisses, licking the side of her neck slowly, nibbling on her ear …
“Ed, c’mon, it’s getting late.” This was an almost monthly ritual between the two of them. Ed usually waited until she was almost completely dressed in her flight uniform, then he’d playfully try to seduce her. Sometimes it worked.
“Oh, God,” she murmured. “Ed, please … I’ve only got twenty minutes to catch the ferry. If … I’m … late.”
Ed, big and strong and completely awake, was working his magical touch all over her, making it increasingly harder for her to resist. The only thing she could say about him, she aggravatingly mused, was that he knew how to make her most hardened resolve and resistance crumble.
“Ed …”
He wasn’t listening.
“Oh, what the hell …” she moaned. “But hurry!”
When they were finished, she had to really hustle.
“I’ll call you tonight, Ed,” she said as she rushed out the door. No reply — he was already sound asleep again. She grabbed her winter-weight flying jacket, watch cap, and wool-lined leather gloves, poured one more cup of coffee, and headed out the door as fast as she could to make the six-twenty ferry.
Thankfully the engine-block heater and trickle battery charger had done their jobs. Her eight-year-old Chevy Blazer four-by-four started right up, and she put it into four-wheel-drive immediately after leaving the garage. The snowplows had not yet been down her lakeside street, so a four-wheel-drive was a necessity. A half mile of four-wheeling on Hyde Log Cabin Road got her to Highway 2 south, where she could feel the crunch of the road salt under her all-terrain tires and put the truck back into two-wheel drive. Four miles south on Highway 2, right on Highway 314, and five miles to the ferry landing. Furness knew the sights of a snowy morning on Grand Isle were beautiful, but she had no time to notice them — the ferry was due to leave at any moment, and she could not be late.
She wasn’t. The deck crews were just beginning to hop on board and raise the ramp when she showed her commuter pass, and they stopped when they saw her familiar truck speeding down the road. A few minutes later they were pulling away from shore and crunching through the thin layer of ice on Lake Champlain for the twelve-minute trek on their way to the Cumberland Head landing on the New York State side.
The snack bar on board the Plattsburgh Ferry, which normally served an excellent egg sandwich in the morning, was closed because of the cold, so Rebecca had to stay in the truck, drink cold coffee, and gnaw on a piece of beef jerky she had left in the glove compartment for snowbound emergencies. Enjoying the ferry ride from the inside of her truck, looking out into the black, sooty interior of the ferry, at least gave her a few quiet minutes to think.
She was still feeling that warm postsex satisfaction that went through her after being with Ed, but as fond as she was of him, as wonderful as their sex life could be, she really wished her relationship had remained on a professional level with him. Caldwell was a Burlington banker whom she had met while investigating financing sources for her proposed fleet of turbine-powered planes. Their meetings at the bank had changed to meetings over lunch, then dinner, then Lake Placid … finally, to her place. He was, by most women’s standards, a real catch. Good-looking, professionally turned-out without coming across as stiff, athletic, and occasionally, when the time really called for it, sensitive.
A bit, anyway.
Ed still had a long way to go in really understanding women. Sometimes she felt he simply indulged her in her passion of flying. He did get her a bank loan of one million dollars for her first fully equipped Cessna Caravan turboprop, after she had to sell three piston Cessnas and collateralize Liberty Air Service to the hilt. But he did come through. But sometimes she couldn’t help but feel Ed thought of her company as an expensive diversion from doing things like staying in the kitchen and making babies. She sighed. Even in the 1990s, some men — Ed included — would prefer women to stay out of the workplace, stay out of business in what they felt was a man’s world. God knows they would never, ever admit it. But they felt it. She knew they did.
As she gazed out of her truck as it made the crossing by ferry, Rebecca visually drank in the beautiful early-morning surroundings and realized that as content as she should be, something was missing in her life.
What it was, she did not know.
As the ferry moved across the water, she thought back to what had happened to her during the past few years … little did she know during those opening days of Desert Storm that her time on that KC-10 Extender, the Air Force’s supertanker, were numbered. Thinking about it now, she still resented the chain of events that led her back to Plattsburgh and this new military-civilian career. Although the recent months had been some of the most fulfilling in her Air Force career, Desert Storm — specifically that incident with the FB-111 bomber — had badly tarnished her reputation. She never knew exactly what was going on that day with that navigator named Daren, but whatever it was had been big: the FB-111 incident had been classified to the highest levels in the Pentagon, and the rumors about her only intensified: Furness was a maverick, a lone wolf. A woman who didn’t follow Standard Operating Procedures. A woman who put her crew and plane in danger unnecessarily. Yes, Sam Marlowe, the prick, had filed the report he’d threatened to do that day. After that, no one wanted to hire someone like that. In the ensuing RIFs, she lost her assignment at March Air Force Base, then lost her regular active-duty commission, then was turned away from all the major airlines.
So she did two things: one, she decided to start the company, Liberty Air Service, and two, something she had never done before — she called on her uncle, Senator Stuart A. Furness.
It was in his Washington, D.C., office, and for the first time in her life she asked him for a favor.
“I have the skills, I have the training, I have the credential, I have the experience,” she remembered telling her uncle. “But I’m getting doors slammed in my face everywhere. I either accept the lowest level of step-pay or go somewhere else. Is there anything you can do?”
The senator from Vermont was tall and wiry, with a lean angular face and short, bushy white hair. Cataract surgery forced him to wear thick glasses, which he removed in anyone’s presence, even his niece’s. He was always impeccably dressed and carried himself with grace and authority at all times. The photos on his wall told of a man with powerful international connections, both in business and politics. It was sometimes hard for Rebecca to believe this man was a close relative.
But despite his obvious power and command, Stuart Furness was uncomfortable discussing the subject of sex discrimination with his young niece. He didn’t seem like the kind of man to fidget, but he was doing a bit of it as he addressed his niece: “Flying is a man’s game, Rebecca,” he had said. “Why not let them handle it? You’re young, and pretty, smart, well-spoken, and a war veteran.”
“All of which has added up to zero, Uncle Stuart,” Rebecca interjected.
“It may seem that way, Rebecca, but remember the Northeast still is in the grips of a recession — whether it is real or contrived, it is perceived as real and it is affecting businesses everywhere. Perhaps a change of perspective would do some good.”