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The man who’d climbed in here to rescue her? ‘You can do … whatever you want.’
In her peripheral vision, in the dim glow of the cabin, she watched him strip off his gloves and twist a foam neck brace out of his bag.
‘Just a precaution,’ he said, before she could start worrying.
She let her head sag into the brace as he fitted it. Quite a comfortable precaution—if anything in this agonising situation could be called comfortable.
Next, he wedged a slimline torch between his teeth, and then he twisted through the gap between the driver and passenger seats, reaching for her legs. He held himself in place with one hand and dragged her torn skirt high up her thighs with the other. He pointed his torch down into the darkness at her feet, studying closely.
‘I felt it break,’ she said matter-of-factly—and softly, given how close his face was to hers—amazed that she could be calm at all. Still, what else could she do? Freaking out hadn’t helped her earlier.
‘It hasn’t broken the skin, though,’ he mumbled around the torch, sliding her dress modestly back into position. ‘That’s a good thing.’
He wasn’t going to lie, or play down what was happening to her. She appreciated that.
‘At least I can manage to break my leg the right way.’ She winced. ‘Wayne would be pleased.’ One of very few things her dominating ex would have appreciated—or possibly noticed—about her.
Sam was eight-tenths silhouette, since the glow-stick was behind him on the dash but suddenly the front of the car was full of the smell of oil and leather, rescue gear and sweat, and good, honest man.
‘Are you going to give me painkillers?’ she said, to dislodge the inappropriate thought, and because everything was really starting to hurt now that the car was more stable and the pressure points had shifted.
‘Not without knowing for sure you’re not allergic. And not with the pain in your chest; you have enough respiratory issues without me compounding it with medication.’
‘I hate pain,’ she said.
His chuckle was totally out of place in this situation, but it warmed her and gave her strength. ‘With the endorphins you’ll have racing through your system you’ll barely feel it,’ he said, before twisting away to rifle in his bag again. When he returned he had a small bottle with him. ‘But this will help take the edge off.’
She glanced sideways at the bottle. It didn’t look very medical. She lifted her curious eyes to him in mute question rather than waste more breath on a pointless question.
‘Green Ant Juice,’ he said. ‘It’s a natural painkiller. Aboriginal communities have used it for centuries.’
‘What makes it juicy?’
His pause was telling. ‘Better not to ask.’
Oh. ‘Will it taste like ants?’
The rummaging continued. He resurfaced with an empty syringe. ‘Have you tasted them?’
‘I’ve smelled them.’ The nasty, acrid scent of squashed ants.
Again the flash of white teeth in the mirror. ‘Your choice. You prefer the pain?’
For answer, she opened her mouth like a young bird, and he syringed a shot of the sticky syrup into it. ‘Good girl.’
His warm thumb gently wiped away a dribble of the not-quite-lemony juice that had caught on the corner of her lips. Her pulse picked up in response. Or it could have been the analgesic surging into her system.
Either way, it felt good.
The gentle touch was so caring and sweet, while being businesslike, that it brought tears back to her eyes. When was the last time someone had taken genuine care of her? Had just been there for her when it all went wrong? Her parents believed that prevention was infinitely better than the cure, and Wayne would have just rolled his eyes and scolded her for over-reacting.
As Sam withdrew his ungloved left hand her eyes were tear-free enough to notice that his ring finger was bare and uniformly tanned. Yeah, because that’s always important to know in life or death situations. She shook her head at her own subconscious. Her shoulder bit and she winced visibly.
‘I’m going to have a look at your arm, Aimee. Just keep very still.’
She did—not that she could feel a thing; her arm had been wedged back there for so long it wasn’t even bothering her, although obviously it was really bothering Sam. She heard and felt him changing positions, getting closer to her driver’s door.
‘Do you remember how the accident happened?’ he asked, making conversation while he fiddled around behind her.
She shook her head. ‘I was driving the A10. One minute everything was fine.’ She filled her strained lungs again. ‘The next I was sliding and then …’ She shuddered. ‘I remember the impact.’ Breath. ‘Then I passed out for a bit.’ Breath. ‘Then I woke up here in this tree. Stuck.’
Her strained respiration seemed unnaturally loud in the silence that followed. When he finally did speak he said, ‘Looks like an oil patch on the asphalt. A local passing through slid on it, too, but managed to stop before the edge. He saw your tail-lights down here and called it in.’
Thank goodness he did. I might have been out here for days. Aimee lifted her chin to see better in the mirror what he was doing behind her. ‘Sam, don’t worry about whether it’s going to hurt. Just do whatever you have to do. I’m a rip-the-Bandaid-off kind of girl, despite what I said earlier about pain.’
She felt his pause more than heard it. ‘You can’t feel this?’
The worry in his voice spiked her heart into a rapid flutter. ‘I can’t feel anything.’
When he spoke again, his voice was more carefully moderated. ‘Your arm is wedged back here. I think it’s dislocated. I’ve freed it up a little bit, and I’m going to try to push it forward, but this will go one of two ways. Either you won’t feel a thing even once it’s free—’
Meaning she might have damaged something permanently.
‘—or the sensation is going to come back as soon as it’s free. And if that happens it’s going to hurt like hell.’
She felt a tug, but no pain. It was like having a numb tooth yanked. So far so good. ‘Won’t the ant juice help?’
‘It won’t have taken full effect—’
That was as far as he got. With a nasty crack her arm came free, and he pushed it forward back into the front seat where it belonged. The pain burst like white light behind her eyes, and came from her throat in an agonised retch as full sensation returned—arm burning, shoulder screaming.
His hands were at her hair instantly, stroking it back, soothing. ‘That’s the worst of it, Aimee. It’s all done now,’ he murmured, over and over. ‘All done …’
She rocked where she sat, holding her breath, damming back the tears, sucking the pain in, wanting so badly to be as brave as Sam was in coming down here for her. Then, as the ant juice and her own adrenaline kicked in, the rocking slowed and her body eased back in the seat, not fighting the restraint of the seatbelt as much.
‘Better?’ That voice again, warm and low just behind her. She lifted her eyes to the crooked rearview mirror, reached for it slowly with her good arm, missed and tried again through a slight fogginess. She adjusted it and found his eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, knowing it would never be enough, but just so grateful that she was no longer alone with her thoughts and fears of death.
He knew what she was saying. ‘You’re welcome. I’m sorry that hurt so much.’
‘Not your fault. And it’s easing off now.’ If easing off could describe the deep, dull, throb coming from her right arm and leg. ‘And it’s made it easier to breathe. Talk.’
Though not perfectly.
‘Don’t get comfortable. We have a long way to go.’
‘Is it time to get out?’ God, she hoped so. Every time the car creaked and settled the breath was sucked out of her lungs.
The compassion turned to caution. ‘Not just yet. We have to wait for it to get a little bit lighter. It’s not safe to try and haul you out in the dark.’
Given how unsafe she felt staying in, that was saying something. Although that wasn’t strictly true; everything had got a whole heap less scary the moment Sam had first called out to her. But every minute she was here he was here, risking his life, too. ‘You should go, then. Come back when it’s morning.’
His eyes narrowed in the mirror. ‘But you’d be alone.’
As uncomfortable as that thought made her, it was a heck of a lot more comfortable than something happening to him because of her. ‘I’ve been alone most of the night. A few more hours won’t kill me.’ Except that it very well might, if things went wrong, her lurching stomach reminded her. But at least it would only be her. ‘I don’t want you to get hurt because of me.’
The crinkles at the corners of his eyes multiplied. ‘I appreciate the thought, but I know what I’m doing.’
‘But the hatch isn’t open.’ So if the car slipped further it wouldn’t just slide away from around him, and the harness she guessed tethered him to something above them. It would take him, too. And who knew how steep this embankment was.
‘We’re secure enough.’
‘Do you do this for a living?’ Suddenly she wanted to know. What kind of person risked his life for total strangers? Plus talking took her mind off … everything else.
‘Amongst other things, yes.’
She tipped her head and spoke more freely than she might have without fifty mils of squished ants zooming through her blood. ‘Are you an adrenaline junkie?’
He laughed and checked her pulse, his fingers warm and sure at the base of her jaw under the foam neck brace. Her heart kicked up its pace.
‘A little fast …’ he murmured to himself, then turned his focus back to her. ‘No, I’m not interested in risk-taking for the sake of it. But to save someone’s life …’
‘I don’t want you risking your life for mine.’
Blue eyes held hers in the mirror. ‘Why not?’
‘Because …’ it wasn’t worth it ‘… this was my mistake. You shouldn’t have to pay for it.’
He looked like he wanted to argue. ‘Well, if I do my job right then neither of us will be paying. Excuse me a sec.’
He reached to his collar and pressed a button she’d only just noticed. He had a speedy conversation with whoever was on the other end of the radio at his hip. It was mostly coded medical talk, but she read his thin lips and his deep frown well enough.
‘Assess this as Code Three. Will offer hourly sit-reps.’ More distant crackles, then his eyes lifted to hers in the mirror and held them as he spoke, a fatal resignation written clearly in them. ‘Negative, Topside. Requiring static again. We’ve just gone Code Two.’
After not much more communication he signed off, and the silence that followed was the longest that had fallen since he’d scrambled into her beleaguered Honda. When he finally did speak, it was hushed.
He cleared his throat. ‘If anyone asks, you passed out just then.’
Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Did you just lie?’
‘Would you feel better if I said I save them up for very important moments?’
I’d feel better if you didn’t do it at all. Her father was a liar, and she didn’t like even the slightest connection between the two men in her mind.
She raised both brows for answer. Wow, when had she got so confident? One month ago she never would have challenged someone like this. Driving off a mountain really brought out the best in a girl.
Plus, with Sam, she felt safe expressing herself. On five minutes’ acquaintance.
He sighed and relented at her pointed look. ‘It seems I’m the only one who thinks I’m better off down here with you,’ he said.
‘Were you ordered to go back up? Why?’
He considered her in the mirror. Now that her arm was free she could twist her body further around. She did it now, turning to face him for the first time, though it hurt to do it. Her already tight breath caught further.
She hadn’t imagined it … Piece by piece in the mirror she’d thought he was intriguing. Fully assembled he was gorgeous. There was something almost … leonine … about the way his features all came together. Dark, high eyebrows over blue almond-shaped eyes. Defined cheekbones, trigger jaw. All with a coat of rugged splashed over the top. As if she wasn’t breathy enough …
‘Why, Sam?’
His mind worked furiously and visibly. ‘Okay …’ He resettled himself into the gap between the seats and lowered his voice. As if he was about to share a great secret. As if there was anyone but them here to hear it.
‘We’re not just resting against a tree, Aimee. Or on a hillside.’
She appreciated his use of the collective. ‘We’ sounded so much better than ‘you’ when someone was breaking bad news. And he was. His whole body confessed it.
‘Where are we?’ she whispered, glancing out at the inky blackness around them and remembering how she’d imagined earlier that it was death’s waiting room. But as she said the words she realised … He’d abseiled down to her. And when she’d first tried to move her leg and screamed a bird had exploded from its roost right next to her window, not high above it. And she’d heard her wheels spinning freely in space when she’d first slammed to a stop.
Her heart lurched.
‘Or should I be asking how high are we?’
CHAPTER TWO
SHE saw the truth in the flinch of his dark brows. A tight pain stabbed high in her chest. She was so, so bad with heights. ‘Oh, my God …’
‘Aimee, stay calm. We’re secure. But we don’t know what damage the impact has done to the tree—if any. That’s the unknown.’
She stared at him. ‘You hate unknowns?’
His eyes grew serious. ‘Yeah. I do.’
‘But you’re in here.’
‘I’ve made it safe.’
But still he was refusing to leave her. ‘You have to go.’
‘No.’
‘Sam—’
‘It’s going to get light in a couple of hours,’ he pushed on, serious. ‘I want to be here when that happens.’
For the rescue? Or for when she could see what was below them—or wasn’t—and went completely to pieces? She shifted her focus again and stared out through her shattered, flimsy windscreen, partially held together only by struggling tint film. The only thing stopping her from falling into—and through—that windscreen was her seatbelt.
She turned back to stare at him again. In truth she really, horribly, desperately didn’t want to be alone. But she didn’t want him hurt, either. Not the man who’d taken such gentle care of her.
‘Don’t even worry about it, Aimee,’ he said, before she’d even finished thinking it through. ‘It’s not your choice to make. It’s mine.’
‘I don’t get a say?’
‘None. I’m in charge in this vehicle. It’s my call.’
I’m in charge. How many years had she secretly rebelled against ‘in charge’ men. Men who thought they knew what was best for her and insisted on spelling it out. Her father. Wayne. Men who liked her better passive, like her mother. Yet here she was crumbling the moment an honest-to-goodness ‘take charge’ man told her what to do.
But, truthfully, she didn’t want to be alone. Not for one more moment of this ordeal.
‘So, what do we do until it gets light?’ she asked.
‘I’ll keep monitoring your condition, make sure the car’s still sound. I can radio up for anything you need.’
Silence fell. ‘So we just … talk?’
‘Talking is good. I don’t want you dropping off to sleep.’
But making small talk seemed wrong under the circumstances. And it was just too much of a reminder that she didn’t know him at all, despite the strange kind of intimacy that was forming between them. A bubble she didn’t particularly want to burst.
‘What do we talk about?’
‘Anything you want. I’m told I’m good company.’
She glanced up into the mirror in time to see him flick his eyes quickly away. Maybe this was awkward for him, too.
She scratched around for something to say that wasn’t about the weather. Something a bit more meaningful. Something that would normalise this crazy situation. ‘You said Search and Rescue is only part of your job. What’s the other part?’ With every minute that passed, her breath was coming more easily.
He seemed unused to making conversation with his rescuees, but he answered after just a moment. ‘I’m a ranger for Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service.’
The man who abseiled down rockfaces to save damsels in distress also looked after forests and the creatures in them. Of course he did. ‘So this is just moonlighting for you?’
He chuckled, and shone the small torch on the fixings of her seatbelt. ‘Don’t worry. They sent me because I’m the best vertical rescue guy in the district. We don’t get enough demand for a full time Search and Rescue team up here.’
‘Small mercies.’
He sat back. ‘True.’
‘Which do you enjoy more?’
His eyes lifted back to hers in the mirror, held them in his surprise. Had no one ever asked him that? ‘Hard to say. Search and Rescue is more … tangible. Immediate. But the forests need a champion, too.’
‘This part has got to be more exciting, though?’ Her dry tongue had made a mess of that sentence.
Sam rummaged in his equipment for a moment, before reappearing between the seats with a sponge soaked in bottled water. He pressed it to her lips and Aimee sucked at it gratefully.
‘It’s not the excitement I’m conscious of.’ He frowned as she sucked. ‘Though that’s how it is for some of my colleagues. For me it’s the importance.’ He withdrew the sucked-dry sponge and resaturated it. ‘I think I’d feel the same way if it was national secrets I was protecting. Or a vial of some rare cells instead of a person.’
The ants’ innards were making her feel very rubbery and relaxed, and the water had buoyed her spirits. She chuckled, low and mellow. ‘Just in case I was beginning to feel special.’
He smiled at her. ‘Right now you’re very special. There’s sixteen trained professionals up there—all here for you.’
The scale of the rescue operation came crashing into focus for her. That was sixteen people who should be home in bed, wrapped around their loved ones. ‘I’m so sorry—’
‘Aimee, don’t be. It’s what we do.’
Did Sam have someone like that at home? Someone worrying about him when he was out? She could hardly ask that question, so she asked instead, ‘How many lives have you saved?’
He didn’t even need to count. ‘Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight after today.’
Aimee’s eyebrows shot up, and she turned in her seat as best she could. Her shoulder bit cruelly. His hand pressed her back into stillness gently.
‘Twenty-seven! That’s amazing.’ Then she looked more closely at him. At the shadows in his gaze. ‘How many have you lost?’
‘I don’t count the losses.’
Rubbish. Everyone counted the losses. It was human nature. ‘Meaning, “I’m not about to tell a woman trapped in her car whether or not I saved the last woman trapped in her car”?’
His smile was gentle. ‘Meaning I don’t like to think about it.’
No. She could understand that. Given how much of a partnership this rescue was, she could only imagine how he’d feel when he couldn’t save someone. Maybe someone he’d bonded with. Like they were bonding now. She smiled tightly. ‘Well, on behalf of all women everywhere trapped in their cars I’d like to say thank you for trying. We can’t ask for more.’
Ridiculously, just acknowledging that she wasn’t the first person who’d been in a life-or-death situation made her feel just a little bit more in control of this one. Other people had survived to tell their tales.
In control. A further novelty. She frowned. How bad had she let things get?
‘Sure you can. You can ask me for whatever you need right up until they’re loading you into the back of the ambulance. Then I know I’ve done everything I can.’
‘Putting yourself at so much risk. It must be hard on …’ Your family. Your girlfriend. Was she seriously going to start obsessing on his availability? It seemed so transparent. Not to mention hideously inappropriate. In that moment she determined not to even hint for more information about his personal life. ‘Hard on you … emotionally.’
He thought about that. ‘The benefits outweigh the negatives or I wouldn’t do it.’
He reached forward to check her pulse again and she studied the line of his face. There was more to it than that, she was sure. But it would be rude to dig. His fingers brushed under her jaw for the third time and her already tight breath caught further.
‘Would my wrist be easier?’ she asked, lifting her good arm because it felt like the appropriate thing to do.
He shook his head and pressed tantalisingly into the skin just down from her ear, monitoring his watch. ‘You have a nice strong pulse there.’
And it gets stronger every time you brush those fingers along my throat.
‘Aimee …?’ She looked at him sideways, her lashes as low as his voice. His smile was half twist, half chuckle. ‘Don’t hold your breath—it affects your pulse.’
Heat surged up her throat around his fingers. Wow. Did ant juice turn everyone into a hormone harlot?
Fortunately he misread her flush. ‘Don’t feel awkward. I’m trained for this, but I’m guessing this is your first major incident.’
She nodded. ‘I’ve never even been to hospital.’
‘Never?’
She grasped at the normal topic of conversation. ‘Not counting my birth.’
‘Are you super-healthy or just super lucky?’
‘A little of both. And it helps when your parents won’t let you lift so much as a box without assistance.’ The same as every man she’d dated. ‘It’s hard to hurt yourself falling out of a tree when they are all off-limits. And streams. And streets.’
‘Protective, huh?’
‘You could say that.’ Or you could say her parents were competitive and bitter after their divorce and neither of them wanted to give the other the slightest ammunition. ‘They both went a bit overboard in protecting me.’ She’d grown up thinking that was normal. ‘It wasn’t until I left home that I realised other kids were allowed to make mistakes.’
‘How old were you when you left home?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘So you get points for taking the initiative and getting out of there?’
It hadn’t been easy to break away from both of them so, yeah, she did get points.
But then she lost them again for leaping out of the frypan into the fire with a nightmare like Way ne.
‘Anyway, it’s just as well my parents aren’t here to see this,’ she joked. ‘They’d have me locked up for ever and never let me leave the house.’ Or they’d have each other in court trying to score points off me.
‘Give them credit for getting you this far in one piece,’ he murmured.
She laughed, and then winced at the pain. ‘If you don’t count the broken leg and dislocated shoulder. And the bruised sternum.’
‘Don’t forget the gash on your forehead.’
Really? Her hand slid up and followed the trail of stickiness down to her lashes. That explained the stinging in her eyes earlier. Lord, what must she look like? Black and blue and with the fine white powder from three airbags all over her? She wanted to check in the mirror, but that just smacked of way too much vanity. And it was too close to publicly declaring her interest in whether or not Sam was looking at her as her … or just as a person to be rescued.
‘Here …’ he said, curling between the seats again and bringing his face closer to hers. He efficiently swabbed at the superficial cut with a damp medicated wipe, and then fixed the two sides of the wound together with butterfly tape. Then he gently swabbed up some of the dried blood that ran down over her brow. Aimee stole a chance to breathe in some of his air.
‘You’ll be back to beautiful in no time,’ he said.
The temptation to stare at his eyes close-up was overwhelming, but it seemed too intimate suddenly so she shifted her focus lower, to his lips, before forcing them away for something less gratuitous. Which was how she ended up staring at a freckle just left of his nose while he ministered to her wound.