Match Made In Paradise by Barbara Dunlop (black female authors TXT) 📕

the loader?” Brodie asked, clearly baffled by the thought.

Raven nudged him in the shoulder with her elbow. “Quit asking stupid questions.”

“I did,” Mia said, meeting his gaze straight on.

“Saved my life,” Silas said. “Not to mention your PC-12. Rough Hills strip was flooded. I had no alternate and not enough fuel to go back.”

“I gotta see this,” Raven said, and started hiking up the access road.

Mia quickly fell into step beside her. “Did you see the bridge?”

“The bridge is gone,” Raven said. “Gone, gone. We had to ford the river down at the beaver pond.”

“I heard it go out,” Mia said. “At first I thought it was an earthquake.”

Silas came up on her other side while Brodie walked next to Raven.

“How’d you get here?” Raven asked her.

“I wanted to call into town. So, I jogged up for the wireless. Saw the bears.” The bear encounter had completely slipped her mind.

“On the road?” Raven asked.

“The big one charged at me.”

All three of them swiveled their heads to stare.

“I bear sprayed it,” she said. “And it ran away.”

“The grizzly?” Silas asked.

Mia nodded.

“With the cubs?” Brodie asked, looking flabbergasted all over again.

“That’s the one. I was dodging the puddles, then I looked up, and bam, there she was. And she was angry. So, I pulled out the bear spray, and when she got nice and close, I let her have it.” Mia felt a guilty for making herself sound braver than she was, but she didn’t want to admit she’d almost wet her pants. Well, maybe later she’d tell Raven that part of the story.

“Go, you,” Raven said. “That should keep that old bear out of town for a while.”

Brodie suddenly stopped in his tracks, staring at the strip ahead. “Wow.”

“Wow,” Raven echoed as she spotted the debris.

Staring from this angle at the giant hole she’d made in the pile, Mia’s thoughts proudly echoed their words.

Chapter Fourteen

It took three days to get the town and the airstrip back to working order and to get a temporary Bailey bridge set up over the river. But finally, Galina and WSA were back in business.

Silas and Brodie stood in the front of the WSA hangar watching the first Galina delivery trucks roll in.

“You’re suspicious,” Silas said to Brodie.

“I’m realistic,” he said back.

“Mia didn’t save your plane to use it as a bargaining chip for their matchmaking scheme.”

“That might not have been her plan. But the dust’s settled now, and you know they’re going to ask again. How do I say no?”

“Maybe you can negotiate,” Silas suggested, knowing Brodie was probably right. Silas hadn’t seen much of Mia or Raven during the cleanup, but Breena had told him it was still full steam ahead on the matchmaking plans. “They seemed open to cutting the number of women in half. Twelve? We could find a way to accommodate twelve.”

Brodie frowned. “My main point’s still the same.”

“Their main argument’s the same too. The guys do have trouble meeting women up here. And maybe it’ll work. Maybe we’ll get some new families started in Paradise.”

“Or maybe the guys will follow the pretty women back to California. Women get tired of living like this. You know they do.”

“Are you talking about my mother?” Silas’s mother was a solid case in point for Brodie’s side of the argument.

“I’m talking about women in general who, quite reasonably, like creature comforts.”

Silas tried for optimism. “Carl and Shannon are happy here. Reece’s wife, Kelly, came in from outside.”

“Shannon grew up here and Kelly grew up on a ranch. They weren’t city women to begin with. And you know the thing is going to distract everyone for days on end.”

Another delivery truck pulled into the parking lot. Xavier and Zeke were on deck waiting to load up a beaver for a flight to Wildflower Lake.

“Change the timeframe,” Silas suggested, wondering all over again why he was arguing Raven and Mia’s side. “Put it into October. That way, the workload is way down, people are gearing up for their winter holidays anyway, and the visitors will get a better look at the reality of Paradise.”

“There could be snow by then,” Brodie said.

Silas shrugged. “Good. If you can’t take the snow, you have no business dating an Alaskan bush pilot.”

He couldn’t stop his thoughts from shifting to Mia—the poster child for women who had no business dating an Alaskan bush pilot. Good thing she wasn’t dating him.

“We could free up a few staff units in October,” Brodie said.

Silas was surprised to hear the concession. “We could,” he agreed in an even tone, purposefully not making a big deal out of Brodie’s change of heart.

Kenneth and Xavier called out instructions to each other from across the parking lot, while T taxied the caravan to the strip. Hailey and T-Two were methodically filling the big cargo space in an otter.

“If there’s only twelve of them, we could make a single trip in the otter,” Brodie added.

“You’d get major brownie points with Raven.”

Brodie frowned. “Raven and I don’t work that way.”

“Oh. Okay. How do you two work?”

“She does her job. I do mine.”

“With Mia and me, it’s more of a free-for-all. Sometimes it’s an argument, sometimes she saves my life, sometimes—”

Brodie reared back. “What do you mean, Mia and you? Tell me you’re not one of those guys?”

“Those guys?”

“Guys who think they have something special going on with Mia . . . Zeke and Xavier, AJ, and who knows who all else.”

“I’m not like those guys.” Silas really did have something special going on with Mia. Or, at least, he had at one time. He had no idea what the status was now. “But we seem to wander into each other’s orbits a lot.”

“Just so long as you don’t get too close to her gravitational field.”

“It’s not a big deal.” Silas would prefer to be totally honest with Brodie about his feelings for Mia. But since nothing real was going on, it was better to just let it lie.

Brodie turned as another pickup entered the lot. “Is