Mr Right At The Wrong Time

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.

Freckle-staring seemed suitably modest.

Awkwardness tangled in amongst the awareness suddenly zinging between them, and she struggled for something harmless to say. ‘I can honestly say that’s the first time anyone has ever said that to me. Especially by the dying light of a glow stick.’

A deep frown cut his handsome face immediately as he seemed to realise that the iridescent emergency light had dimmed to something closer to a sickly, flickering candlelight. He stared at it as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d failed to notice, then disappeared into the back to rummage in his bottomless kit.

‘It’s got nothing to do with the colour in your cheeks,’ he said, snapping a second glow-stick to activate the chemicals inside, and reaching forward to place it next to the first. Las Vegas light filled the car, and for a heartbeat the tree outside the windscreen, but the graduated darkness beyond it that didn’t show a hint of ground.

Aimee swallowed hard.

‘Look at how you’re handling yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re very calm, under the circumstances.’

She captured his eyes in the mirror. ‘It just means I’m good at denial. It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid.’

He stilled, and the intensity in his gaze reached right through the glass of the mirror and twisted around her lungs, preventing them from expanding. ‘I’m not leaving you, Aimee.’

‘I know,’ she squeezed out.

‘We’ll be out in a couple of hours.’

‘Uh-huh.’ But it sounded false even to her own ears.

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘I want to. I really do.’

‘Do you trust me?’

Did she? She’d believed every single thing he’d said. She’d done every single thing he’d asked, without question, and not just because he’d pulled rank on her. Sam was trained, capable and compassionate, and he’d not done anything to earn her distrust. Even though she’d known him less than an hour she felt a more natural connection with him than some of the people she’d known her whole life.

Wow. That was a bit sad.

‘I do trust you,’ she whispered. But he’d have no way of knowing how rare that was.

‘Then trust I’ll get you out of here.’

She looked at him long and hard. ‘I know you want to.’

‘And I always get what I want.’

As a kid, she’d practised for weeks to teach herself the one-eyebrow lift and she did it now, desperate to retreat from the chemistry swirling smoke-like around them. The butterfly tape over her left brow tugged slightly. ‘Such confidence.’

‘I don’t start something without finishing it. It’s a point of principle.’

So how had he coped with those people he’d not been able to save? Maybe sitting in vehicles like this one with them, knowing he’d failed? Her heart ached for the memories he must have. But she wasn’t about to ask. For his sake … and hers.

She shivered convulsively. ‘Did the temperature just drop?’

‘Hang on …’ He disappeared for a moment and then squeezed back through the gap with a tightly rolled silver tube. It unfolded into an Aimee-sized foil blanket. Together they tucked it around her as best they could. Down over her good leg. Carefully around her injured arm.

Sam stroked back her hair from the neck brace with two fingers and tucked a corner of the blanket in behind her shoulder. Heat surged where he touched and became trapped beneath the insulation. A perverse little voice wondered if it would be inappropriate to ask him to touch her every ten minutes, to keep the heat levels optimum. She might as well get some use out of the unexpected chemistry between her and her knight-in-shining-fluoro. His heat soaked into her chilled skin.

‘God, that’s good …’ Her good hand was outside the blanket, and she used it to tuck the foil tightly under her thighs to seal more warmth in.

‘Don’t cover your injured leg,’ he said, withdrawing back between the seats. ‘The cold is actually good for it.’ Then, without asking, he reached forward and took her exposed hand between his and started to rub it. Vigorously. Impersonally. Creating a friction heat that soaked into her icy fingers and wrist. He did the same up and down her bare arm.

‘How’s that?’ he murmured.

Heavenly. And it had nothing to do with the blanket. ‘Better.’