The Maverick Millionaire

He was big, that much she could tell. Big enough to make Ellie feel small and that was weird. At five feet ten, she had always towered over other women and many men. She’d envied the fragility and femininity of tiny women—until she’d needed to be stronger than ever. That had been when she’d finally appreciated the warrior blood that ran in her veins from generations past.

No man was ever going to make Eleanor Sutton feel small or insignificant again.

She put her mouth close enough to the man’s ear to feel the icy touch of his skin.

‘We’re going to land on the beach. Keep your legs tucked up and let me control the impact.’

Dave did his best to bring them down slowly and Ellie did her best to try and judge the distance between them and the solid ground, but it had never been so difficult. The crashing rolls of surf kept distorting her line of sight and the wind was sending swirls of sand in both horizontal and vertical directions.

‘Minus twenty...no...twenty-five...fifteen...’ This descent was crazy. They were both going to end up with badly broken legs or worse. ‘Ten... Slow it down, Dave.’

He must have done his absolute best, but the landing was hard and a stab of pain told Ellie that her ankle had turned despite the protection of her heavy boots. There was no time to do more than register a potentially serious fracture, however. She fell backwards with her patient on top of her and for a split second she was again aware of just how big and solid this man was.

And that she couldn’t breathe.

But then they were flipped over and dragged a short distance in the sand. Ellie could feel it scraping the skin on her face like sandpaper. Filling her mouth as her microphone snapped off. The headphones inside her helmet were still working, but she didn’t need Dave’s urgent orders to know how vital it was that she unhook them both from the winch line before they were dragged any further towards the trees that edged the beach.

Before they both got killed or—worse—the line got tangled and brought the helicopter down.

Somehow she managed it. She threw the hook clear so that it didn’t hit her patient as it was retracted and the helicopter gained height. Once she’d unclipped herself from this man, she could get into a clear position and they could lower the line to her again.

But it was taking too much time to unclip him. Her hands were so cold and she was shaking violently from a combination of the cold, pain and the sheer determination to get back and save the other man as quickly as possible.

He was trying to help.

‘No,’ Ellie shouted, spitting sand. ‘Let me do it. You’re making it harder.’

His hands fisted beside his face. ‘You’re going back, aren’t you? To get Ben?’

‘Yes. Just let me...’ Finally, she unclipped the last carabiner and they were separated. Ellie almost fell the instant she tried to put weight on her injured ankle but somehow managed to lurch far enough away from her patient to wave both arms above her head to signal Dave. There was no point in shouting with the microphone long gone, but she did it anyway.

‘Bring the line down. I’m ready.’ She wouldn’t need to worry about her ankle once she was airborne again. It shouldn’t make it impossible to get the other man from the life raft.

‘Sorry, El. Can’t do it.’ Dave’s voice was clear in her ears. ‘Wind’s picking up and we’ve got a status one patient on board under ventilation.’

The helicopter was getting smaller rapidly. Gaining some height and heading down the coast.

‘No...’ Ellie yelled, waving her arms frantically. ‘No-o-o...’

The man was beside her. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. ‘Where’s he going?’ He grabbed Ellie’s shoulders and it felt like he was making an effort not to shake her until her teeth rattled. ‘You’ve got to go back. For Ben.’

His face was twisted in desperation and Ellie knew her own expression was probably close to a mirror image of it.

‘They won’t let us. It’s too dangerous.’

The man had let her go in order to wave his arms now. ‘Come back,’ he yelled. ‘I trusted you, dammit...’

But the bright red helicopter was vanishing into the darkening skies. Ellie could still hear Dave.

‘We’ve got your GPS coordinates. Someone will come as soon as this weather lifts. Get to some shelter. Your other radio should still work. We’ll be in touch.’ She could hear in his voice that he was hating leaving her like this. It broke all the unspoken rules that cemented a crew like this together. ‘Stay safe, Ellie.’

The helicopter disappeared from view.

For what seemed a long, long time, Ellie and the rescued man simply stood on this isolated, totally deserted stretch of coastline and stared at the menacing cloud cover, dark enough to make the ocean beside them appear black. The foam of the crashing breakers was eerily white.

The man took several steps towards the wild surf. And then he stopped and let out a howl of despair that made Ellie’s spine tingle. He knew he’d lost his friend. The lump in her throat was big enough to be painful.

‘I would have gone back,’ she yelled above the roar of the wind and surf. ‘If they’d let me.’

He came closer in two swift strides. ‘I would have stayed,’ he shouted back at her.

He was angry at her? For saving his life?

His words were a little muffled. Maybe she’d heard wrong. Dave was too far away for radio contact now and the communication had been one-sided anyway, thanks to the broken microphone. Ellie undid the chin strap of her helmet and pulled it off. The man was still shouting at her.

‘Who gave you the right to decide who got rescued first?’

Ellie spat out some more sand. ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ she informed him furiously. ‘And if we don’t find any shelter soon we’ll probably both die of hypothermia and then all this would have been for nothing.’ He wasn’t the only one who could be unreasonably angry. ‘Who gave you the right to put my life in danger?’

She didn’t wait to see what effect her words might have had. Ellie turned and tried to pick out a landmark. She had to turn back and try to catch a glimpse of Half Moon Island to get any idea of which direction they needed to go. The lighthouse was well to her left so they had to go north. The beach house was in a direct line with the point of the island where the lighthouse was.

Confident now, Ellie set off up the beach. She didn’t look to see whether he was following her. He could have his autonomy back as far as she was concerned. If he wanted to stay out here and die because she hadn’t been able to rescue his friend then maybe that was his choice. She was going to survive if she could, thank you very much.

Except that she didn’t get more than two steps away. Her ankle collapsed beneath her and she went down with a shout of anguish.

‘What’s the matter?’ The man was crouched over her in an instant. ‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s my ankle. I... It might be broken.’

If he was swearing, the words were quiet enough for the wind to censor them. Ellie felt herself being picked up as if she weighed no more than one of those tiny women she’d once mistakenly envied. Now she was cradled in the arms of this big man as if she was a helpless child.

‘Which way?’ The words were as grim as the face of the man who uttered them.

‘North.’ Ellie pointed. ‘About a mile.’

A gust of wind, vicious enough to make this solid man stagger, reminded her that this was only the beginning of this cyclone. Things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got any better.

The stabs of pain coming up her leg from her ankle were bad enough to make her feel sick. On top of her exhaustion and the knowledge that they were in real trouble here, it was enough to make her head spin. She couldn’t faint. If she did, how would he know how to find the beach house, which was probably their only hope of surviving?

‘There’s a river,’ she added. ‘We turn inland there.’

She could feel his arms tighten around her. It had to be incredibly hard, carrying somebody as tall as she was in the face of this wind and on soft sand, and they had a long way to go.

Could he do it?

Ellie had no choice but to put her faith in him, however hard that was to do. With a groan that came more from defeat than pain, she screwed her eyes shut and buried her face against his chest as he staggered along the beach.

It had been a very long time since she had felt a man’s arms around her like this.

At least she wouldn’t die alone.

CHAPTER THREE

SHE WAS NO lightweight, this woman in his arms.

Jake had to lean forward into the fierce wind and his feet were dragging in the soft sand that was no match for these conditions. It swirled around enough to obscure his feet completely and it would have reached his nose and eyes if the rain hadn’t been heavy enough to drive it down again.

Another blast of wind made Jake stagger and almost fall. He gritted his teeth and battled on. They had to find shelter. She’d been right. He might wish it was Ben instead of him, but he was lucky to still be alive and he owed it to her to try and make sure the heroic actions of his rescuers weren’t wasted to the extent that one of them lost her life.

A river, she’d said. Good grief. He didn’t even know the name of the woman he was carrying. A person who had risked her life for his and he’d been ungrateful enough to practically tell her he wished she hadn’t. That he would have stayed with Ben if he’d been given a choice.

His left leg was dragging more than the right and a familiar ache was tightening like a vice in his thigh.

Another vice was tightening around his heart as his thoughts were dragged back to Ben, who would still be being tossed around in the ocean in that pathetically small life raft.

The combination of his sore leg and thoughts of his brother inevitably dragged his mind back to Afghanistan. They’d only been nineteen when they’d joined the army. Sixteen years ago now but the memories were as fresh as ever. Had it been his idea first that it was the ideal way to escape their father?

Charles Logan’s voice had the ability to echo in his head with all the force of the gunfire from a war zone.

You moronic imbeciles, you’re your mother’s children, you’ve inherited nothing from me. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

No. They’d both wanted to run. Both had needed the brutal reality of the army to find out what life was like outside an overprivileged upbringing. To find out who they really were.

But he had been more excited about it, hadn’t he? In the movies, the soldiers were heroes and it always came out all right for them in the end.

They weren’t supposed to get shipped home with a shattered leg as the aftermath of being collateral damage from a bus full of school kids that had been targeted by a roadside bomb.

His brother’s last words still echoed in his head.

Why do you think she killed herself?

It had been Ben who’d found her, all those years ago, when the boys had been only fourteen.

Did he know something he’d never told him? Had he found evidence that it hadn’t been an accidental overdose of prescription meds washed down with alcohol?

A note, even?

No. It couldn’t be true. She wouldn’t have deserted her children with such finality. She’d loved them, even if she hadn’t been around often enough to show them how much.

A cry was ripped from Jake’s lips. An anguished denial of accepting such a premeditated abandonment.

Denial, too, of what was happening right now? That his brother was out there somewhere in that merciless ocean? Too cold to hang on any longer?

Drowned already, even?

No. Surely he’d know. He’d feel it if his other half was being ripped away for eternity.

* * *

The cry of pain was enough to pull Ellie from the mental haze she’d been clinging to as she kept her face buried from the outside world, thinking of nothing more than the comfort of being held in strong arms and, hopefully, being carried to safety.

What had she been thinking? Eleanor Sutton wasn’t some swooning heroine from medieval times. She didn’t depend on anyone else. She could look after herself.

‘Put me down,’ Ellie ordered.

But he kept lurching forward into the biting wind and rain.

‘No. We’re not at the river.’

‘I need to see where we are, then.’ She twisted in his arms to look towards the sea.

Taking her helmet off had probably been a bad idea. The wind was pulling long strands from the braid that hung down over Jake’s arm. They were plastered against her face the moment they came free and she had to drag them away repeatedly to try and see properly.

‘I can’t see it. The waves are too high.’

‘See what?’

‘The light from the lighthouse. The bach is in a direct line with the light, just before the river mouth.’

‘The what?’

‘The bach. A holiday house.’ Ellie had finally picked up the drawl in the man’s voice. ‘Are you American?’

‘Yep.’

‘A cabin, then. Like you’d have by a lake or in the woods. Only this one’s near the beach and it’s the only one for a hundred miles.’

‘How do you know it’s even there?’

‘Because I own it.’ Maybe it wasn’t dark enough for the automatic light to be triggered, but she’d seen it earlier, hadn’t she? When she’d told Dave where to drop them?

Maybe she’d only seen the lighthouse itself and it had been childhood memories that had supplied the flash of light. The flash she’d watched for in the night since that first time she’d stayed on the island with her grandfather. A comforting presence that had assured a small girl she was safe even if she was on a tiny island in the middle of a very big sea.

‘We’ll have to keep going till we get to the river. I can find the way from there.’

How long did he keep struggling against the wind before they finally reached the river mouth? Long enough for Ellie to know she’d never felt this cold in her life. At least they had the wind behind them as they turned inland, but there was a new danger when they reached the forest of native bush that came to meet the coastline in this deserted area. The massive pohutukawa trees were hundreds of years old and there were any number of dead branches coming loose in the vicious wind to crash down around them. Live bits were breaking off, too, leafy enough to make it impossible to see the old track that led to the bach.

Ellie had to rely on instinct. Her fear was growing. Had she made a terrible mistake, telling Dave they could find shelter here? The little house that Grandpa and her father had built had seemed so solid, wedged into the bush that had provided the wood to make it. A part of the forest that would always be here even if she had never come back. A touchstone for her life that was a part of her soul.

But how many storms had there been in the years that had passed? Had the tiny dwelling disintegrated—like all the hugely important things in her life seemed to have a habit of doing?

No.

They almost missed it. They were off to one side of the patch of land she owned. She might have let herself get carried right past if she hadn’t spotted the tiny hut that sat discreetly tucked against the twisted trunk of one of the huge pohutukawas.

‘We’re here,’ she shouted.

The man looked at the hut. If he went inside the bleached wood of its walls, he would have to bend his head and he wouldn’t be able to stretch out his arms. ‘Are you kidding me? That’s your cabin?’

Ellie actually laughed aloud.

‘No. That’s the dunny.’

‘The what?’

‘The long drop. Toilet.’ Oh, yeah...he was American. ‘It’s the bathroom.’

She didn’t wait to see a look of disgust about how primitive the facilities were. The track from the outhouse to the real house was overgrown, but Ellie knew exactly where she was now. And if the outhouse had survived, maybe everything else was exactly as it should be. Within a few steps they could both see the back porch of the beach house, with its neatly stacked pile of firewood. The relief of seeing it look just like it always had brought a huge lump to Ellie’s throat.

She felt herself being tipped as he leaned down to grasp the battered iron knob of the door. He turned and pushed. The door rattled but didn’t open.

‘It’s locked.’

She couldn’t blame him for sounding shocked. It wasn’t as if another living soul was likely to come here when the only access was by boat so why would anybody bother locking it?

Another childhood memory surfaced. The door that had been purchased in a city junkyard had been roped to the deck of the yacht, along with an old couch and a potbelly stove.

‘The door’s even got a lock and a key.’ Her father had laughed. ‘That’ll keep the possums out.’

A family joke that had become a tradition. Unlocking the bach meant they were in residence in their tiny patch of paradise. Locking it meant a return to reality.

‘I know where the key is. Put me down.’

This time he complied and it was Ellie’s turn to be shocked as she felt the loss of those secure arms around her, along with the chill of losing his body warmth that she hadn’t been aware of until now. She staggered a little, but her ankle wasn’t as bad as it had been. Hellishly painful but it didn’t collapse completely when she tested it with a bit of weight. Maybe it was a bad sprain rather than a fracture.

‘Can you walk?’

‘I only need to get to the meat safe. The key’s in there.’

The wire netting walls of the meat safe were mangled, probably by possums, and the box frame was hanging by only one corner, but the big, wrought-iron key was still on its rusty nail. Getting it inside the lock was a mission for her frozen hands, though, and turning it seemed impossible.

‘It must be rusty.’ Ellie groaned with the effort of trying to turn the key.

‘Let me try.’ His hands covered hers and pushed her fingers away so that he could find the end of the key. She was still wearing her rescue gloves and his hands had to be a lot colder than hers were, but the pressure of the contact felt like it was skin to skin. Warm.

Maybe it was the reassurance that she wasn’t alone that was so comforting?

He was shivering badly, Ellie noticed, but when he jiggled the key and then turned it, she could hear the clunk of the old lock opening.

And then they were inside and the sound of the storm was suddenly muffled.

* * *

Safety.

They might be frozen to the bone and in the middle of nowhere, but they had shelter.

Jake was safe, thanks to this woman. Thanks to her astonishing courage. She’d not only risked her life to get him out of that life raft, she’d battled the elements, despite being injured, to lead him here. To a place where they had four walls and a roof and they could survive until the storm was over.

She seemed as stunned as he was. They both stood there, staring at each other, saying nothing. It couldn’t be nighttime yet, but it was dark enough in here to make it difficult to see very clearly. She was tall, Jake noted, but still a good few inches shorter than his six feet two. Eyes dark enough to look black in this light and her lips were deathly pale but still couldn’t hide the lines of a generous mouth. A rope of wet hair hung over one shoulder almost as far as her waist.

‘What’s your name?’ He’d been so used to shouting to be heard outside that his voice came out loudly enough to make her jump.

‘Eleanor Sutton. Ellie.’

‘I’m Jacob Logan. Jake.’

‘Hi, Jake.’ She was trying to smile but loosening her facial muscles only made her shiver uncontrollably. ‘P-pleased to m-meet you.’

‘Likewise, Ellie.’ Jake nodded instead of smiling.

His name clearly didn’t mean anything to her and it was a weird feeling not to be instantly recognised. He didn’t look much like himself, of course. Even his own mother probably wouldn’t have recognised him in this dim light with the heavy growth of beard and the long hair he’d had to adopt for his latest movie role. But instant demotion from a megastar to a...a nobody was very strange.

Jake wasn’t sure he liked it.

And yet it was oddly comforting. It took him back to a time when he had only been known for being ‘one of those wild Logan boys.’ Closer to Ben, somehow.

Should he tell her? Was it being dishonest not to? Would Ben consider this a form of play-acting as well?

Keeping silent didn’t feel like acting a part. Just being the person he used to be. And there would be no reason for this Ellie to present herself as anything other than who she really was and, in Jake’s experience, that wasn’t something he could ever trust. This might be the only time in his life that he got to see how a stranger reacted to him as a person without the trappings of extreme wealth or fame. He was curious enough to find this almost a distraction from his desperate worry about Ben.

‘We need to get warm.’ She wasn’t even looking at him now. ‘There should be enough dry wood to get the fire and the stove going. Hopefully the possums won’t have been inside. There’ll be plenty of blankets on the beds. And there’s kerosene lamps if the fuel hasn’t evaporated or something. It’s been a fair few years since I was here.’

Beds? For the first time, Jake took a good look around himself.

The dwelling was made of rustic, rough-hewn boards that had aged to a silvery-gray that made it look like driftwood. An antique glass-and-metal lamp hung from a butcher’s hook in the ceiling and there was a collection of big shells lined with iridescent shades of blue and purple attached to the wall in a curly pattern. Beside that was a poster of a lighthouse, its beam lighting up a stormy sky while massive waves thundered onto rocks below. There was a kitchen of sorts in one corner of the square space, with a bench and a sink beside the potbelly stove close to a small wooden table and spindle-back chairs.

The other half of the space was taken up with an ancient-looking couch and an armchair, positioned in front of an open fireplace. Two doorless openings in the walls on either side of the fireplace led to dark spaces beyond. The bedrooms?

‘Don’t just stand there.’ The authority in her voice made Jake feel like he was back at school. Or under the charge of one of the many nannies the Logan boys had terrorised. Incredibly, he had to hide a wry smile. No woman had ever spoken to him like this in his adult life. And then he remembered being shouted at on the beach. Being told that no one would be going back to rescue his brother.

What did it matter whether Ellie knew who he was? Or what she thought of him?

Nothing would ever matter if he’d lost Ben.

Ellie was opening a cupboard in the kitchen. She pulled out a big tin. ‘Do something useful. You’ll get even colder if you don’t move. You can get some wood in from the porch.’ She prised open the lid of the tin. ‘Yes...we have matches.’

A fire. Warmth. This basic survival need drove any other thoughts from Jake’s head as he obeyed the order. He took an armful of small sticks in first to act as kindling and then went back for the more solid lumps of wood. His brain felt as frozen as his fingers. Worry about Ben was still there along with the anger of no attempt being made to rescue him, but he couldn’t even harness the energy of that anger to help him move faster. And then something scuttled away as he lifted a piece of wood. Did New Zealand have poisonous spiders, like Australia did? Or snakes?

Man, he was going to have some story to tell Ben when he saw him again.

If he saw him again.

There was a puddle of water on the floor where Ellie was crouching to light the fire and he could see how badly her hands were shaking, but she’d managed to arrange small sticks on a nest of paper and while the first two matches spluttered and died, the third grew into a small flame.

She looked up as he walked towards her with the wood. He saw the way her eyes widened with shock.

‘You’re limping.’ Her tone was accusing. ‘You’re hurt. And I let you carry me all that way. Why didn’t you tell me?’