Dreaming Of... Australia

She took a deep breath. ‘Sorry, Sam. I think that was the ant juice talking. I apologise.’

He brushed it off with a shake of his head. ‘It’s not generally known for its truth serum properties.’

A blush stole up her cheeks, but this time he was staring straight at her. There was no hiding it. ‘A crazy side-effect?’

‘It’s probably written on the bottle somewhere. “May cause outbursts of inappropriate confession.”’

A gentleman, too. Handing her as dignified an exit as she was going to get. ‘Thank you. For keeping me sane.’ For keeping things light.

‘That’s how this works. You’re the victim. Whatever you need …’

Victim. The word put an early end to the golden glow of promise that had filled her from the inside out at his gentle teasing. Wasn’t that exactly what Danielle had accused her of being? By letting her father and Wayne run her life and others control her career? That hadn’t been a fun conversation. But it had been necessary. It had triggered the rapid departure of Wayne from her life and this journey of self-discovery. ‘Is that what I am?’

He stared at her—hard. ‘No. You’re brave and open and the least victim-like victim I’ve ever met.’

‘It’s because you’re with me. I’d be a basket case without you here.’

Two tiny lines appeared between his brows. ‘Sometimes we only find out what we’re capable of when we’re tested.’

‘Well, I think I’ve failed this test. Maybe I’ll do better next time.’

‘No.’ Immediate and fervent. ‘No next times. You don’t get this kind of luck twice.’

‘Luck?’ Was he crazy?

His face grew serious. He glanced at his watch. ‘You’ll see in a couple of hours. But I’ll be right here with you.’

A couple of hours felt like for ever. ‘Will the … what do you call it … getting me out …?’

‘Extraction.’

‘Will the extraction start as soon as the sun comes up?’

‘As soon as the sun crests the mountaintops, and assuming there’s no fog, yes.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘Hard to know. We have to stabilise your leg properly and make sure your shoulder is back in its socket before we shift you.’

She swallowed. Both those things sounded very unpleasant.

‘And then we’ll be pulling you out the back of the car.’

Her face must have paled, because he leaned forward and took her hand. ‘I’ll be with you every step of the way, Aimee. We’ll be tethered to each other at all times.’

‘The whole way?’

‘Until the top. Until the ambulance.’

She frowned at the finality of that statement. ‘Then what?’

He frowned. ‘Then that’s it. You go to hospital, then home where you belong.’

What if she didn’t belong anywhere? And why did she suddenly have the urge never to leave this shattered vehicle and the foil blanket and Sam’s gentle touch. ‘That’s it? I won’t see you again?’

He stared at her long and hard. ‘I’ll see how I go. Maybe I’ll drop your luggage back to you when the car’s towed up. You’ll have plenty to keep you busy before then.’

It was utterly insane how anxious she felt at the thought of that. A man she’d known less than a day. ‘I’d like to speak to you again. Under less extraordinary circumstances.’ When I’m showered and groomed and looking pretty. ‘To thank you.’

He nodded even more cautiously. ‘I’ll see how we go.’

That sounded very much like Wayne’s kind of I’ll see. Her father’s kind.

Translation: no.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘HOW many siblings do you have in total?’ Aimee asked after a while, when her inexplicable and irrational umbrage at his apparent brush off had subsided sufficiently. It wouldn’t hurt her to remember that this was business to Sam, no matter how chatty they got waiting for the sun to rise. Maybe rapport development was a whole semester unit over at Search and Rescue School. And maybe the two of them just had more rapport than most.

But it didn’t mean he’d want to take his work home with him—even metaphorically.

It just meant he was good at his job.

‘Seven,’ he murmured, leaning forward and blowing hot air into the cupped circle of her hand, still inside his. He pressed his lips against her fingertips for a tantalising, accidental moment. They were as soft and full as they looked. But warmer. And the sensation branded itself inside her sad, deluded mind.

Wayne had kissed her fingers many a time—and lots of other places besides—but while his lips had felt pleasant, even lovely at the beginning, they’d never snared her focus and dragged it by the throat the way the slightest touch from Sam did. She’d even started to wonder whether she was physically capable of a teeth-gnashing level of arousal, or whether ‘lovely’ was going to be her life-long personal best.

Please don’t let this be the drugs talking. Please. She wanted to think she was capable of a gut-curling attraction at least once in her life.

‘I’d definitely want more than one child,’ she said, then snapped herself to more attention when she heard her own dreamy tone. ‘Speaking as an only child, I mean. I’d want more.’

‘Your parents never did?’

‘Mum did, I think.’ But Lisbet Leigh hadn’t been the pants-wearer in their family. ‘Dad was content with just me.’

‘Why “just” you? I’m sure they are very proud of their only daughter.’

She let her head loll sideways on its neck brace. His way. ‘You really are an idealist, aren’t you?’

Was his total lack of offence at her ant-induced candour symbolic of his easygoing nature or of something more? Was Sam as engaged in her company as she was in his? Or was she just chasing rainbows? Maybe even painting them?

‘I’m sure my father will be eternally disappointed that his one-and-only progeny wasn’t really up to par,’ she continued.

‘Define par.’

She shrugged, and snuggled in tighter into her foil blanket. ‘You know … Grades. Sports. Achievements.’

‘You work for the country’s leading science and culture body. That’s quite an achievement.’

‘Right. And I had good grades. Not record-breaking, but steady.’

‘I can imagine.’ He smiled, and it reminded her a little bit of the way people smiled at precocious children. Or drunks. She didn’t like it.

‘You’re humouring me.’

‘I’m—’

Choosing your words very carefully …?

‘—just enjoying you.’ He almost fell over himself to correct himself. ‘Your company. Talking.’

Well … Awkward, much? ‘Any way, nothing short of medicine or law was ever going to satisfy my father. He’s had high expectations of me my whole life.’ And was constantly disappointed. Ironic, really, when she considered how his marriage had ended. Imploded. And how little he’d done to save it.

‘Do you like what you do?’

‘I love what I do.’

‘Then that’s what you’re meant to be doing. Don’t doubt yourself.’

His absolute certainty struck her. ‘What if I might love being a doctor, too?’

He shrugged. ‘Then that was where you’d have found yourself. Life has a way of working out.’

His assured belief was as foreign to her as it was exhausting. How would it feel to be that sure—about everything? She settled back against the seat and let her eyes flutter closed for a moment, just to take the sting of dryness out of them.

‘Aimee—’

Sam was right there, gently rousing her with a feather touch to her cheek.

‘I can’t even rest my eyes?’

‘You went to sleep.’

Oh. ‘I can’t sleep?’

He stroked her hair again. Almost like an apology. ‘When you get to the hospital you can sleep all you want. But I need you to stay awake now. With me. Can you do that?’

Stay with me. Her sigh was more of a flutter deep in her chest. ‘I can do that.’ But it was going to be a challenge. It had to be four a.m. and she’d left at six yesterday morning. Twenty-four hours was a long haul, even if she had had some unconscious moments before he’d found her. And apparently another just now.

‘Tell me about your research,’ he said, clearly determined to keep her awake. ‘What’s your favourite story?’

She told him. All about wrinkled, weathered, ninety-five-year-old Dorothy Kenworthy, who’d come to Australia to marry a man she barely knew eight decades before. To start a life in a town she’d never heard of. A town full of prospects and gold and potential. About how poor they’d been, and how Dorothy’s husband had pulled a small cart with his culture-shocked bride and her belongings the six-hundred kilometres inland from the coast to the mining town he’d called home. How long love had been in coming for them; about the day that it finally had. And about how severely Dorothy’s heart had fractured the day, seventy years later, she’d lost him.

Stories of that kind of hardship were almost impossible to imagine now—how people had endured them—overcome them—and were always her favourites.

‘Dorothy reminds me that there is always hope. No matter how dire things get.’

Sam’s brow folded and he drifted away from her again. Not because he was bored—his intense focus while she’d been telling the start of the story told her that—but because he’d taken her words deep inside himself and was processing them.

‘Why didn’t she give up?’ he eventually asked. ‘When she was frightened and heatstroked and feeling so … alien.’

‘Because she’d come so far. Literally and figuratively. And she knew how important she was to her husband. She didn’t want to let him down.’ His frown trebled as she watched. ‘Plus she’d made a commitment. And she was a woman of great personal honour.’

‘Is that something you believe in? Honouring commitments?’

‘What do we have if not our honour?’

Finally his eyes came back to her. ‘Is it her story on your thumb drive?’

‘No. It’s another one …’

She told him that one too. Then another, and another, sipping occasionally at the water he meted out sparingly and not minding when he shared from the same bottle. She didn’t care if Search and Rescue Sam gave her a few boy germs while he was giving her the greatest gift any man in her life had ever given her.

He listened.

He showed interest. He asked questions. He didn’t just listen waiting for an opportunity to talk about himself, or slowly veer the subject around to something of more interest to him. He heard her. He didn’t interrupt. And he wasn’t the slightest bit bored.

Just like that a light came on, bright and blazing and impossible to ignore, right at the back of Aimee’s mind.

That was the kind of man she wanted for herself. That was the kind of man she’d never really believed existed. Yet here one sat: living, breathing evidence—her already compromised chest tightened—and the universe had handed him to her.

How had she ever thought a man like Wayne was even close to worthy? Maybe if she’d been allowed out more as a young girl, had got to meet more people, sample more personalities … Maybe then she never would have accepted Wayne’s domination of her. Maybe if she hadn’t grown up watching it, until her father had finally forced her mother’s hand …

‘I can see you love these stories.’ His blue eyes were locked on her so firmly, but were conflicted, yet immobile. ‘You’re … glowing.’

Unaccustomed to the intensity he was beaming at her, and still unsettled by her thoughts of just a moment before, Aimee took shelter in flippancy. ‘Maybe it’s the glow-sticks.’ She smiled and settled against the seat-back, her body begging her to let it drift into exhausted slumber. ‘Or the sunrise.’

That seemed to snap him out of his blue-eyed trance. Around them the light had changed from the total absence of any light at all during the night to a deep, dark purple, then a navy. And the navy was lightening up in patches by the moment.

Sam glanced at his watch. A dozen worry lines formed on his face. ‘Okay Aimee, the darkness is lifting. We made it.’ He found her hand and held it. ‘I’m going to need you to be very brave now, and to trust me more than ever.’

We will not fall. She heard the words though she knew he didn’t say them.

It only took another few minutes before she realised why a new kind of tension radiated from his big body and from the hand he’d wrapped so securely around hers. The deep blue outside seemed to dilute as she watched it, and darkness began to take on the indistinct blurs of shape. Then they firmed up into more defined forms—the tree branch outside the window, the hint of a hill on the horizon—as the first touch of lightness streaked high across the sky.

Her heart-rate accelerated as it struggled to pump blood that seemed to thicken and grow sluggish.

Around them she saw nothing but emerging treetops—some higher than her poor battered Honda, some lower. The front of the car was in darkness longer than the areas around it because the nose was buried in a treetop. Literally balancing in the crown of a big eucalypt, which threw off its distinctive scent as the overnight frost evaporated. In her shattered side mirror she could see the angle of the hillside—steep and severe—that the back of her little hatchback had wedged against.

And they perched perilously between the two, staring down into the abyss.

A black dread surged from deep inside Aimee’s terrified body. She sucked in a breath to cry out but it froze, tortured, in her lungs and only a pained squeak issued, as high as the elated morning chorus of the birds around them but infinitely more horrified.

‘Hold on to me, Aimee….’

Sam’s voice was as much a tether as any of the cables strapping her into her car, and she clung to it emotionally even though she couldn’t rip her eyes from the scene she hung suspended over, emerging through the shattered windscreen, as the sun threw clarity across the morning and finally lifted the veil of darkness.

Her squeak evolved into a primitive whine and her entire body hardened into terrified rigour. The shadowy blur of Australian bush below them resolved itself into layer upon layer of towering treetops, falling away for hundreds of meters and narrowing to a sliver of water at the bottom of the massive gully she’d flown over the edge of.

Half a kilometre of deathly fall below the tenuous roost of her car, wedged between the treetop and the mountain.

Sam! Sam!

She couldn’t even make vowels, let alone call to him. The only movement her body would allow was the microscopic muscular changes that pushed air out of her body in a string of agonised whimpers. Like a dog with a mortal injury.

‘Look at me, Aimee …’

Impossible … It was so, so much worse than she’d feared even in her darkest moments. Luck, he’d called it, but it was more of a miracle that her car had hit the crown of this tree rather than plummeting straight past it and down to the tumbling rapids at the bottom of the gully. She’d have been dead before even getting down there, ricocheting off ancient trees like a pinball. Every single base instinct kept her eyes locked on the source of the sudden danger. The threat of the drop. Horrible, yet she couldn’t look away.

Her heart slammed so hard against her ribs she thought they might crack further.

Sam forced himself into her line of vision, stretching across her to break the traction of her gaze on the certain death below. The shaft of pain from the extra pressure on her leg was more effective than anything in impacting on her crippled senses.

‘Aimee …!’

Her eyes tried to drift past him, her face turning slightly, but he forced her focus back to him with insistent fingers on her chin.

‘At me, Aimee … Look only at me.’

Only at me. She heard the words but couldn’t process them. This was like last night all over again. It’s the shock, something deep down inside her tossed up. It was the shock preventing her from looking at him. Understanding him.

The whining went on, completely independent of her will.

Sam slid both warm hands up on either side of her face and forced it to him. This close, he all but obliterated the dreadful view down to the forest floor. In that moment her whole world became the blue of his eyes, the golden tan of his skin and the blush of his lips.

‘Aimee …’ Sam’s voice buzzed at her. ‘Think about Dorothy. Think how frightened and alone she felt out there in the desert—fifteen years old, with a man she’d only just met. Think about the courage she would have had to have to go with him. To get onto that boat in Liverpool and leave her entire family for a hot, hostile country. Think about how hard she would have fought against the fear.’

The most genteel, gentle woman she’d ever interviewed. And the toughest. Words finally scraped past her restricted larynx. ‘She had her husband …’

‘You have me.’ He ducked his head to recapture her eyes. ‘Aimee, you have me, and I’m going to get you out of here.’

This time her eyes didn’t slide away, back to the void below them. They gripped onto Sam’s.

He sighed his relief. ‘There you are. Good girl.’ He leaned in and pressed his hot lips to her clammy forehead.

The reassuring intimacy just about broke her again. ‘Sam …’

‘I know.’ He dropped back into his position, lying across her, between her and the awful view. ‘But you’re okay. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Not while I’m around.’

She blew three short puffs through frigid lips. ‘Okay.’

Sudden noises outside drew his focus briefly away, and when it returned it was intent. ‘Aimee … The extraction team are getting into position. Someone else is going to be taking over, but I’m not going to leave you, okay? I want you to remember that. We’re going to get buffeted and separated for moments, but I’ll always be there. I’m still tethered to you. Okay?’

She nodded, jerky and fast, curling her hand hard around his, not wanting to let go. Ever.

He stroked her hair back. ‘It’s about to get really, really busy, and no one’s going to ask your permission for anything. They’ll just take over. You’re going to hate that, but be patient. You’ll be up top in no time and then you’re back in charge.’

Her laugh was brittle and weak at the same time. ‘I thought you were in charge.’

His smile eclipsed the sunrise. ‘Nah. You just let me think that.’

She sobbed then, and pulled his hand to her lips and pressed them there. He rested his forehead on hers for a moment as the clanking outside drew closer.

‘I wet myself,’ she whispered, tiny and ashamed.

He wiped a tear away with his thumb. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I don’t think I can do this.’

‘You can do anything in this world that you set your mind to, Aimee Leigh.’

His confidence was so genuine, and so awfully misplaced, but it filled her with a blazing sort of optimism. Just enough to get her through this.

Just enough to do something really, really stupid.

She stretched as far forward as the flexi-straps would allow, pulled him by his rescue jacket towards her, and mashed her lips into his. Heat burst through her sensory system. His mouth was just as warm and soft as it had felt on her fingers, but sweet and strong and surprised at the same time, and salty from her own tears. She moved her lips against his, firming up the kiss, making it count, ignoring the fact that he wasn’t reciprocating. Just insanely grateful for the fact that he hadn’t pulled back.

Her heart beat out its triumph.

An unfamiliar face dropped in spider-like at their side window just as Sam tore his mouth away from hers. A dozen different expressions chased across his rugged features in a heartbeat: pity, embarrassment, confusion, and—there!—the tiny golden glow of reciprocal desire.

The man suspended in space outside the car did as good a job of schooling his surprise as Sam did—maybe they were all trained to mask their feelings—and immediately cracked the glass of her driver’s side window. One part of her screamed at the intrusion of sudden noise and calamity, but it was just as well.

What would she have said otherwise?

Sam gathered himself together faster. He looked out at the crew now swarming over the Honda and then back at her. And then he smiled. In that smile was understanding, forgiveness, and just a trace of regret.

He brushed her hair back from her face again, and Aimee thought she’d never be able to brush her own hair without imagining his callused fingers doing it for her.

‘Okay, Aimee,’ he said. ‘Here we go.’

And as a second man scrabbled into the back of the hatch and squeezed himself around the tree limb still buried there Sam smiled and winked at her.

‘Race you to the top.’

It took nearly three hours for the emergency crew to cut Aimee free, get her safely fixed onto a spine board, and carefully slide her backwards out of her car and up the gully-face to the waiting ambulance.

Sam hadn’t been kidding about his crew taking over. She was pushed, pulled, yanked and poked every which way, and only Sam was there to dose her up with ant juice and look out for her dignity, tied to her the whole time by his industrial umbilical cord. But she stayed silent and let them do what they had to do, and closed her eyes for the entire last third of it, because watching her own ascent up the hillside required more strength than she thought she had. She tuned her mind in to the sound of Sam’s voice—capable and professional as he gave instructions and followed others.

‘Last bit, Aimee,’ he said, close and private, as they finally pulled her up onto the road she’d gone flying off. ‘It’s going to get even more crazy now.’

She turned her head towards him as best she could in her moulded spinal brace and opened her mouth to thank him, but as she did so someone stuck a thermometer into it and she found herself suddenly cranked up onto wheels and rushing towards a waiting ambulance. He jogged alongside like her personal bodyguard, and in the split second before she was surrounded by paramedics she thought how little she would mind being protected by a man if it was a man like Sam doing the protecting.

Yet how ironic that she’d practically run away from the first two phases of her life because she’d been smothered.

She lifted the pained fingers of her dislocated arm in a limp kind of thank-you, but he saw it, jogging to a halt as they reached the ambulance. He unclipped his tether.

‘Goodbye. Good luck with your recovery.’ He was one hundred percent professional in the company of his peers, and her stomach dropped. Had she truly imagined the closeness between them?

But then she caught the expression in his eyes—wistful, pained—and he lifted a damp strand of hair from her face, those lips she’d pressed her own against whispering silently, ‘Live your life, Aimee.’

And then he was gone, and she was strapped unceremoniously into the back of a clean, safe ambulance, mercifully sitting on four wheels up on terra firma. She craned her neck as much as her tight restraints would allow and tried to track Sam in the suddenly chaotic crowd.

Emergency crew. Farmers with heavy loaders. Onlookers milling around. Presumably all the people who couldn’t get along the A10 because her rescue was in the way.

But then there he was—straightening out his kinked back and reaching for the sky with the fingers that had first stretched out to her in the darkness. Even with his heavy rescue gear on she knew that his body would be hard and fit and healthy below it.

An irritating orange blur blocked her view, and she tried to look around the emergency crew member who had climbed into the ambulance after her.

‘Sam said you needed this,’ the stranger said, placing her handbag on the gurney next to her.

Aimee’s eyes fell on it as though it was a foreign object.

‘It is yours?’ the man asked, suddenly uncertain.

Aimee made herself remember that this man had spent a freezing night on a mountain to save her life, and that it wasn’t his fault Sam had reneged on his promise to bring it to her in the hospital.