Page 25 of Angel In Armani

“Wankers!” Sara pushed the phone across the desk, tempted to hurl it across the room. Damn insurance company. She’d just wasted another two hours on various levels of hold and being shunted around from person to person passing the buck and she still had nothing more than “Yes, we are pursuing the claim with the other party’s insurance company, and yes, we are hopeful of a timely resolution.”

Which meant, as far as she could tell, You’ll get a check, maybe, but only when we’re good and ready.

No check equaled no repairs to the A-Star.

No helo.

No helo equaled no customers.

No money coming in. Still quite a bit going out. Rapidly sinking bank balance.

And she was pretty much fresh out of ideas as to how to fix that other than her looking for work elsewhere.

Telling her dad she thought she should do that—that closing down Charles Air wasn’t going to be as short-term as she hoped—might just give him a coronary.

She kicked the trash can by her foot, which raised a whuff of protest from Dougal who was lying next to her chair.

She looked down and he pushed himself up, shoving his broad black head forward under her hand with a happy wriggle.

She rubbed his ears. But not even Dougal could make this better. Besides, he was happiest when he had Sara to himself. And Charles Air being closed meant no mechanics and other random men around. Which meant Sara could bring Dougal to the airfield with her instead of having to leave him with her parents.

Douglas was ninety pounds of big black softy, except when it came to men. Put him in the path of a guy and he turned into ninety pounds of overprotective barking, growling idiot dog. So far Sara’s dad was the only exception to the rule, and even that had taken years of Dougal staying with her parents before Dougal had stopped slinking around and barking at him as though Sean was a dog-eating monster.

God only knew what his issue was. She’d gotten Dougal when he’d been only three months old, right after Jamie had died. He was purebred and raised by a good breeder but at some point a man had obviously done something to scare him. That experience had lodged deep inside his doggy brain and wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how much training and conditioning they tried.

She sighed and rubbed his ears again. Right now, she had bigger problems than her anti-male dog.

She’d tried everything she could think of to move the insurance company along, but no dice. She couldn’t get them to commit to any sort of time frame.

So, decisions needed to be made.

If she shut everything down, then they could probably cover the hangar fees for a few more months and keep the A-Star from getting any worse than it already was. But shutting down for any extended period of time could be a death knell. Without new cash flow, once the money was gone, it was gone.

Her mom was already back working part-time but couldn’t do more than that with her dad out of action. He needed help with his therapy and other things, so he couldn’t be alone five days a week. Getting his leg functioning was as important as getting the A-Star repaired. He couldn’t work until his leg was better. Couldn’t fly a chopper if you couldn’t use the pedals.

And getting his leg better was racking up an ever-growing pile of physical therapy and doctors’ bills.

That was without thinking about the hospital bills or the rehab facility. He’d had health insurance, but it didn’t cover everything. And the company was arguing about some of the costs it was supposed to cover, which meant they might have even higher bills to pay.

She was beginning to hate even the word insurance.

But that still didn’t solve her problems. Nor would trying to stick her head in the sand and ignore the fact they couldn’t keep going the way they were. Nope. Time to woman up and talk to her dad about the whole freaking mess.

She copied the latest file from their accounting software to a flash drive and tucked it into her bag.

Then she locked up and headed for her parents’ house.

Her mom’s car wasn’t in the drive. Maybe that was better. It would be easier to tell her dad alone. Give him some time to come to terms before they had to tell her mom as well.

She sat in the drive, hands gripped around the steering wheel, hot lead weighing her stomach down.

Failed him.

She’d failed him.

She’d left the army to come home to keep Charles Air alive and she couldn’t do it.

Couldn’t even manage that much.

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