The Runaway Bride - A Captive Flame Book One (2 page)

I staggered away,
looking around and trying to decide what to do with myself. I
looked down at the wedding dress I was wearing and thought that the
first order of business was to get rid of that. I found a loud,
cheap-looking boutique and rushed in, hoping that no one had seen
or noticed the redhead in the wedding gown while I had been
walking. I grabbed at the cheapest things I could find on the sale
racks, knowing that I didn’t have very much money—less than a
hundred for sure, and I thought possibly less than fifty dollars. I
had to make it count. I struggled getting out of my dress in the
dressing room and into a bright, almost neon-pink blouse and a
tight skirt to go with it, a pair of chunky boots completing my new
ensemble. It wasn’t the best look I’ve ever had—and my professional
makeup and hair style looked very much out of place next to the
club-wear I could afford—but it would get me through the moment,
until I could get somewhere else, and find a way to get to my money
in the bank.

The outfit, cheap as
it was, nearly wiped out the last of my money, so I walked out of
the store with my dress in a heavy-duty zipper bag, stuffed into a
shopping bag, and made my way through the town on foot. Johnny and
I had picked the place where we were getting married out of some
romantic attachment to the small-town allure; I was kicking myself
for that now, because the town didn’t have a single branch of my
bank, and there was not much I could do for getting myself out of
there. I kept walking in spite of the steady throb that started up
in my feet the longer I kept on them; surely there had to be
somewhere for me to go, I thought. The town couldn’t be completely
bereft of transportation options. I could have hitchhiked, but in
my outfit I knew that whoever would pull over for me would have
completely the wrong impression about the type of woman I was. I
was desperate, but definitely not desperate enough to be treated
like an unlucky prostitute.

I wracked my mind as
I moved out of the center of town and just kept going. Obviously I
couldn’t keep walking indefinitely. While I had some survival
skills, and I had gone camping on multiple occasions in the past,
the idea of sleeping out in the open, with nothing to cushion me,
no food or water, was far from appealing. If I managed to make it
to the city limits, I’d get a look around and ask whoever I had to
for information on getting to the next town, or I’d head back
towards the center of the town. It wasn’t worth being a headline in
the news for dying in the middle of nowhere to get away from Johnny
and my wedding. The day started to heat up, and the synthetic
materials of my cheap clothes were not exactly designed to be worn
outside on a long hike. I pulled and tugged at the polyester or
rayon—whatever it was—to unstick it from my skin, trying to vent
the wet, sticky sensation of my pooling sweat out to the hot, dry
air around me with little success.

Just when I thought I
couldn’t take another step further—when I was starting to regret my
impulsive decision to run away, my feet aching where the new boots
rubbed me, my legs sore from walking for miles—I noticed I was
coming up to a private airstrip. That was at least moderately
promising, and my flagging spirits lifted as I scanned the area on
the other side of the fence. There wasn’t an abundance of options
available to me; I saw exactly one private jet on the tarmac, being
fueled and prepared for a trip. I wandered along the fence, trying
to think of what I should do. Finally, I found a gap—a place where
the chain-link wasn’t firmly attached to the ground. I looked
around, remembering fleetingly that private airports like this one
were usually pretty up-to-date on their security; for a moment I
hesitated, thinking that the only thing worse than being a runaway
bride would be to be a runaway bride that was captured by the
police trying to flee the town by breaking onto a private airstrip.
But my need to get away outweighed the risk of being caught. I
pulled up the flap of fence and managed to get under it quickly, my
clothes almost, but not quite, catching. The polyester had done
nothing to wick the sweat away from my body and I felt gross—dirty,
dusty, sticky from perspiration—but maybe I could do this.

I sneaked up towards
the plane, looking around every moment but trying to keep my face
as composed as possible. I knew better than to run—security guards
on the lookout for someone acting guilty, would spot me
immediately. There was a slight chance that if I kept my cool and
walked as if I belonged on the property, that the guards wouldn’t
pay attention to me. A quiet day would have already hopefully
lulled them into a sense of security and boredom. It seemed to be
working; I got closer and closer to the plane sitting out on the
tarmac without anyone raising the alert. I hung back as some men in
uniforms loaded luggage onto the jet, talking amongst themselves,
utterly oblivious to my presence. They left after a few moments and
I saw my chance. Probably at any moment, people would be back to
finish preparing the plane for departure. If I could get onto it
and hide, I might be able to hitch a ride somewhere else; hopefully
by the time they found me, whoever was on the jet would just let me
go on my way wherever they landed, and I’d figure things out from
there. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I had hopped a plane
without knowing where I was going—though in this case the stakes
were much higher than they had ever been.

I climbed up into the
luggage compartment and headed back, deep into the bowels of the
plane. I could feel the liquor I’d downed still sloshing around
inside of me; the mixture of my exertions and the whiskey were
making me clumsy as I headed into the warm darkness, and I dropped
the bag with my wedding dress in it somewhere, not caring so much
where it was. There was enough luggage already loaded that I
thought no one would possibly notice a shopping bag tucked away
somewhere. Before I could think about the situation more, my sense
of exhaustion began to catch up with me. I was on the plane; that
was the important thing to take care of first. I heard a truck
approaching and knew I had to hide as effectively as possible.

I grabbed a couple of
pieces of luggage and rearranged them, forming a little curved wall
around a spot in the luggage compartment that was removed from
everything else. I slipped behind the wall of luggage and curled up
on the floor, my head spinning from heat and alcohol. I was so
tired; I was also more than a little tipsy—I was actually, I
realized with a giggle I stifled as quickly as possible, completely
drunk. My legs were throbbing, my feet aching as I shifted around
into a comfortable position on the floor. I listened carefully; I
couldn’t hear anyone in the compartment itself. I looked around and
slipped another piece of luggage into position over the top of me—I
wanted to be completely concealed, or as concealed as I could
possibly be. Before I sealed myself in, I grabbed a towel that
someone had left hanging on a shelf, and wadded it up into a
makeshift pillow. I rested my head on it, and the darkness in my
luggage-fort, combined with the heat and closeness and my own
intoxication, lulled me quickly into a deep and impenetrable sleep.
As I fell into the deep, velvety darkness, I barely had time to
consider what I would do when I found out where the plane was
going. Fleetingly I hoped that I had not managed to somehow choose
a plane that would be heading into a foreign country—I had a
passport among my things, but it would only open up more and more
questions, and it would be much harder to figure out what to do
with myself outside of the country.

Chapter Two

~

The deep and
drunken sleep I had fallen into was interrupted by a sudden shock
of movement around me. I heard something rattling, and one of the
suitcases I had positioned to hide me tumbled down. I dodged it
even as my head began to pound from the alcohol in my system, and
realized quickly that the plane was up in the air—I had missed
takeoff completely. I pushed the luggage aside and sat among the
pieces I had arranged around myself for a moment, trying to decide
what to do. My stomach was growling faintly, and the air in the
baggage compartment was stale, but it wasn’t as dangerous as I knew
it would have been on a commercial plane. I couldn’t exactly waltz
out into the main passenger area; I had no idea whose plane I was
on. A feeling of guilt crept up inside of me but I put it aside.
Whoever had the means to rent a private jet was not in a position
to really mind that someone had stowed away, were they? It’s not
like I was depriving someone from a seat—I was tucked away from any
of the passengers.

It occurred to me
that I had no idea where the plane was even going; I could end up
any number of places. It could be snowing, it could be another
country. I shivered, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t overly
cold in the luggage compartment. I wasn’t in any real danger—at
least not until the plane landed. I’d have to think fast once that
happened. Suddenly the impact of the situation hit me. I had no
idea where I was headed, no idea who was on the plane, nothing.
Surely, if it were someone really important, like a politician,
they’d have had better security. For the moment, however, I told
myself that I was at least mostly safe.

As I looked down at
my loud, tacky clothes I remembered I had put the shopping bag with
my wedding dress in it down, and I wasn’t sure where. A flash of
panic worked through me, and in that moment my hangover was
suddenly the least important thing in the world. I struggled to get
up in spite of the lingering nausea and my pounding head, and
another bout of turbulence took me down onto my knees. I pressed my
lips together to muffle the grunt that pushed up out of me at the
impact of my knees with the less than soft floor of the
compartment. The pain passed in a moment, reassuring me that it had
been more of a shock than an injury; I hadn’t even broken the skin.
The plane shuddered again and I grabbed at the walls ineffectively,
trying not to fall flat on my face. It would probably have been a
wiser idea to just stay curled up on the floor, but there were more
important issues on my mind. The plane finally smoothed out once
more and I staggered onto my feet. I managed to keep upright, and
started looking around quickly.

It was difficult to
see anything too well in the compartment, since there wasn’t a lot
of light, but I thought to myself that it shouldn’t be that
difficult to find a shopping bag. The compartment was much smaller
than it would have been on a commercial flight—I was briefly
surprised I’d been able to hide at all, and wondered how many
people were actually on the plane for there to be so much luggage
onboard. I tripped over something and covered my mouth as a curse
rose to my lips, giving myself a moment to recover my sense of
equilibrium and orientation. It shouldn’t take long to find
something like a simple shopping bag, I told myself again and
again. I just had to make sure to do it quietly; the last thing I
wanted to do was alert someone to my presence, and if things
thumped and shifted too much, some kind of flight attendant or a
curious passenger would decide to have a look in the luggage area
and then there I would be, caught and without a single story to
cover myself.

I
moved and shifted the luggage, climbing over things to try and see
if I could spot the bag. It was nowhere, and as I disarranged every
last suitcase and item in the compartment, my heart was beating
faster and faster.
Where is it?
I
looked around every few moments, straining my ears to try and hear
whether or not someone was approaching. The loud hum of the plane’s
engines made it difficult to hear anything, but my instinct
remained nonetheless. I piled the luggage up to one side, shoving
it against the wall, climbing over it, moving it back into the
positions it had been in before.

Shit. Shit. Shit.
I combed over every inch of the compartment, even the little
alcoves tucked away near the ceiling, trying to find some trace of
the bag I had brought with me. Why had I been so stupid? I should
have made keeping the bag at my side a priority way above hiding
myself—if I’d been caught before I’d managed to hide I probably
could have talked myself out of it, convinced whoever found me to
let me go on my way, that I was just some jilted woman looking for
a little adventure. But the bag. What had become of it? My
breathing became faster and shallower, as I desperately tore apart
the luggage compartment looking for it. If I could honestly think
that someone had just thrown it out, I wouldn’t mind that much; the
dress had been expensive, but I had only been planning on wearing
it once anyway. But I was consumed with the uncertainty of what had
happened to it—I only had a few things to my name at the moment,
and that dress was one of them. I might not have gone through with
the wedding, but I couldn’t imagine just giving up on the dress
itself.

The other concern I
had was that someone had discovered it as they were finishing the
loading process and decided it must belong to someone on the plane.
If they’d actually looked into the bag and seen what was in it,
they could have decided that something like a wedding dress should
really be hand-carried. Or maybe they had suspected that it was
something that a stowaway like me had brought on board, and
reported it to whoever was on the flight with me. My heart pounded
faster and faster. It was obvious that the dress was not anywhere
to be found in the luggage compartment where I was hiding; I would
have to take my chances and hope that I could slip into the
passenger compartment, maybe find it, and slip back into the
luggage area until the plane landed.