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office and needed to go back for it. Then she’d heard Sam . . . and now here they were. Together. Talk about the law of unintended consequences.
    “So are you going to tell me why you’re so nervous about your first day on the job here?”
    She pushed the door open to the small office lounge. There was a snack machine and most importantly, a coffeemaker. Emily started a pot brewing, always keeping one eye on her companion. He seemed safe, but she wasn’t going to let her guard down yet. Thankfully, he stayed where she could see him, across the width of the room from her.
    Sam shrugged. “I guess I wanted to impress my new boss. The grapevine says she’s a stickler for protocol.”
    She liked that he would tease her yet keep his conversation on a professional level. If he kept it there, they’d get along just fine.
    “Yeah, she definitely likes all her i’s dotted and all her t’s crossed. I’d watch myself around her if I were you.” Laughing at herself helped ease her tension.
    “I’ll remember that. Thanks for the tip.”
    Too impatient to wait for the entire pot to brew, Emily placed one cup at a time directly under the stream of fresh coffee coming out of the filter compartment. When she had two reasonably full cups, she replaced the pot to collect the rest and headed toward the round table in one corner. She placed one of the cups of coffee in front of Sam, who had seated himself across from her.
    She was still suspicious of him and his reasons for being in the hangar at this early hour, but since being discovered, he’d been nothing but polite and considerate. She wouldn’t confront him about his presence here this morning any more than she already had—at least not until the hangar was full of people. She felt safe enough with him for now. She wasn’t going to push it, but she would keep her eyes open and her suspicions carefully to herself.
    She’d already asked one too many questions of the front office. Scott, the new CEO and majority shareholder wasn’t her biggest fan. Emily still had some clout as a minority shareholder but the questions she’d been asking had been noticed by the wrong person. As she’d left the last shareholders meeting at corporate headquarters, her car had been sabotaged. The brakes failed and she’d managed to crash the vehicle without killing herself in the process. It had been a warning. A potentially deadly warning.
    Since then, she’d been more careful. Something was definitely up with her beloved airline and she’d be damned if she’d let that weasel Scott ruin the company their parents had built. She just had to be more cautious in her queries.
    And she wouldn’t put it above Scott to insert a spy into the ranks to keep tabs on her. Sam could very well be a plant. Someone to watch her and report back to Scott if she put a toe out of line again.
    Or maybe Sam was exactly what he seemed—another good time fly boy pilot flirting with every woman he met. Well, maybe he wasn’t quite that bad, but he was certainly pouring on the charm with her. Of course, she was his new boss. Maybe he was trying to ingratiate himself with her for that reason.
    She couldn’t deny he was handsome and his offbeat sense of humor definitely meshed well with hers. But could he be trusted? Was he part of the drug ring or whatever it was that had her driving planes full of high tech lab equipment around the country?
    Yeah, she’d taken a few peeks inside the crates when she thought nobody was looking. She had a right to know what she was transporting, and the vague words on a few manifests had made her want to investigate. That hadn’t gone over well with Scott the Louse when she had brought it up at the shareholders meeting, but after that one rather obvious attempt to silence her permanently, she’d stopped questioning things. At least in public.
    Privately, she still kept her eyes open for an opportunity to learn exactly what was going on in the company and how to stop it. She