shook his head.
She jumped up and down in exasperation. ‘Don’t keep knocking all my suggestions on the head—why not?’
The stranger took a very brief moment to examine her sodden, highly emotional presence. ‘I’m not—’ he began.
‘Yes, you are!’
‘You wouldn’t get through,’ he said precisely. ‘There’s a rock fall, and a washaway over the road a couple of kilometres back. It happened just after I passed.’
He stopped to open the back of the rather elderly Land Rover he was driving. ‘So I’ll go and see what I can do.’ He pulled out a hank of rope, a knife in a leather holder that he clipped to his belt, a small axe and a waterproof torch.
‘Oh, thank heavens—I’ll come.’
‘Nope. You stay here.’
‘Mister!’
He turned to her impatiently. ‘The last thing I need is a hysterical slip of a girl to worry about. I only have one waterproof, that I happen to be wearing—’
‘What does that matter?’ she interrupted. ‘I could hardly get wetter! And—’ Bridget drew herself up to her full height: five feet two ‘—I’m not a hysterical slip of a girl! Let’s go!’
Had it been doomed from the start, their rescue mission? She sometimes wondered. They certainly gave it their all. But climbing their way downstream beside the swollen creek, in pouring rain, with bushes and small trees whipping in the sudden gusts of wind, was not only heartbreakingly slow, it was exhausting.
It was also bruising and scraping, and before long, with still no sign of the car or any of its occupants, all her muscles ached.
That might have accounted for her slipping suddenly and getting herself caught up on an old piece of fence line at the edge of the creek. Somehow a piece of wire slipped into the belt loop of her pants, and she couldn’t free herself however much she wriggled.
‘Take them off!’ the man yelled, and flashed his torch behind her. She looked backwards over her shoulder, and nearly died to see a dirty wall of water coming down towards her.
She didn’t give it a second thought. She squirmed out of her pants, but the water caught her and she’d have been washed downstream if her companion hadn’t leapt in beside her, managed to tie the rope around her waist and somehow drag and half-carry her to relative safety.
‘Oh, thank you! You probably saved my life,’ she panted.
He didn’t reply to that. ‘We’ve got to get higher. Keep going,’ he ordered.
She kept going. They both kept going—until, when her lungs and her heart felt like bursting, he finally called a halt.
‘Here—in here,’ he said, and flashed the torch around. ‘Looks like a cave.’
It was a cave, with rocky walls, a dirt floor and an overhang overgrown with dripping bushes and grass. Bridget collapsed on the floor.
When her panting had subsided a bit, she said with irony, ‘Looks like the rescuers will have to be rescued.’
‘It’s often the way,’ he replied, and set the torch on a ledge of rock.
Bridget sat up and looked around tentatively. She wasn’t all that keen on small spaces, but the thought of what lay outside outweighed her tendency towards claustrophobia.
For the first time her partially unclothed state struck her. She looked down at her bare legs, then realised her blouse was torn and showing parts of her blameless pink lace and silk bra. It was also muddy and torn.
She looked up and discovered her rescuer on his knees, looking down at the dripping, twisted, half-clad length of her with a little glint of admiration in his amazing blue eyes—it was the first time she’d noticed them.
But just as she felt like squirming in embarrassment he looked away abruptly and started to undress himself.
She watched him in startled suspended animation as he ripped off his waterproof jacket, then his longsleeved plaid shirt, revealing a tanned, muscular chest sprinkled with dark hairs and a pair of powerful shoulders. For a moment her eyes rounded in admiration of her own, then she swallowed with a strange little squawk of sound—a squawk of unwitting apprehension.
He said, matter-of-factly, ‘I’m Adam, by the way. Why don’t you take your blouse off and put my shirt on? It’s relatively dry. I’ll look the other way.’ He tossed the shirt into her lap and did as he’d promised.
Bridget fingered the shirt. It was mostly dry, and it emitted a reassuringly masculine odour of sweat and cotton. It would be heaven—not only as a cover for the deficiencies of her attire, but also because she was starting to shiver with cold.
She pulled her blouse off, and her soaked bra, and slipped into his shirt as quickly as possible, buttoning it with shaky fingers. It was way too big for her, but although the sleeves hung over her hands, the length made her feel at least halfway decent. ‘Thank you. Thank you! But will you be all right? I’m decent, incidentally.’
He turned back and pulled his rain jacket on again. ‘I’ll be fine.’ He sat down. ‘Not going to return the compliment namewise?’
‘Oh, yes! I’m Bridget Smith.’ She often used only the second half of her famous double-barrelled surname. ‘Oh, no!’ She put her hand to her mouth and her eyes darkened with concern as, for the first time since the car with the children had been washed away, she thought suddenly of her own plight. ‘My car!’
‘Your car will be found,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure in what condition, but once the waters recede—and they will—it will be somewhere.’
‘Do you really think so? My windows were all closed but I didn’t have time to lock it—my whole life is in my car!’ she said, on a suddenly urgent little note.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
‘My phone, my credit cards, my driver’s licence, my keys, my Medicare card, not to mention the car itself.’ She stopped helplessly.
‘They can all be replaced or, in the case of credit cards, stopped.’
Bridget subsided, but her expression remained doomed.
‘I take it it’s Miss Smith?’ he queried.
She shrugged. ‘Not necessarily.’ Her thoughts returned to her car.
‘You’re not wearing a wedding ring,’ he pointed out.
Bridget hesitated, and stopped looking down the barrel of the chaos in her life if she didn’t retrieve her car to look rather intently at the man she was trapped in a cave with.
Then she fished beneath his plaid shirt and pulled out the gold chain she wore around her neck. There was a plain gold wedding ring threaded onto it.
‘I see—but why don’t you wear it on your finger?’ he queried.
Bridget
