style="font-size:15px;"> He backed off while Aubrey kept talking, encouraging the terrified girl as she assisted her into the basket. “You’re doing great, Danny. You’re going to be all right.” She signaled to raise the basket. Danny’s terror-filled eyes remained locked on hers as she rose up out of the water. “Almost home.” A sense of satisfaction settled upon her as the basket headed toward the helo.
“What are you doing here?” she called after she signaled for the hoist hook to be lowered for their retrieval.
“Helping you out?” he returned hopefully.
She narrowed her eyes menacingly. He wasn’t helping, he was saving. Or that’s what he’d thought he was going to do. The first time she’d seen him in twelve years and he was trying to save her? How annoying.
She didn’t need help or anything else from him. She certainly didn’t need saving.
As the cable came down she reached for the hoist hook and deftly secured it to his V-ring. She lifted an arm, holding a thumbs-up, signaling he was ready to be hoisted.
“ARE YOU SURE you want to be here?” Aubrey’s sister Nina asked her again. Both she and their younger sister, Camile, kept looking at her like she might tip over at any second.
“Yes, absolutely. I’m off duty, so I’ll take a nap later and be as good as new.” Aubrey studied one of the several lists she had attached to her clipboard. “We’ve got sixteen people signed up for this work party. I need to be here.”
The three sisters were standing in the basement of the First Methodist Church surrounded by boxes, bags and baskets full of snacks, toys and children’s books. The items were ready to be stuffed into Christmas stockings for handing out at A Visit With Santa. It would be the second event in the DeBolt Realty Crazy About a Coast Christmas competition.
Aubrey, along with the mayor, was co-chair of Pacific Cove’s Christmas Committee, which put them in charge of the town’s participation in the contest.
Eligible beach towns up and down the Pacific Northwest coast had signed up for the competition. Back in July, each interested town had applied for entrance by submitting a proposal for four tourist-and/or community-friendly holiday events to be held the first three weeks of December. The categories included food, entertainment and fun for the family.
“You’ve been awake for who knows how many hours, part of that time on a rescue in freezing cold water where you saved four people,” Camile said, crinkling her face skeptically. She tucked a blond, chin-length curl behind one ear and plopped a hand on one petite hip.
Aubrey often marveled at how her little sister had ended up so...well, little. In comparison to her and Nina, anyway, who were both just a few inches shy of six feet. And while Nina was thin and willowy like their mother, Aubrey was curvier but athletic like their dad. Camile was barely over five feet, with “bones like a bird,” their grandma liked to say.
“I helped save four people, along with my flight crew. Two flight crews actually,” Aubrey corrected. Being a rescue swimmer might be one of the toughest jobs in the Coast Guard, but there was no way she could do it without her crew. Yesterday’s rescue had gone smoothly. Aside from Eli being deployed to assist her, she was feeling good about it.
Upon returning to base, she’d tried not to glare at Eli as she’d discussed the rescue with her team. She’d learned that after being rolled by the wave and hit by debris, coupled with the amount of time both she and the survivor had been in the water, the crew’s concern had escalated. The decision had been made to send down another swimmer, in this case Eli. She understood, yet it troubled her just the same.
Because it was Eli. She couldn’t help but wonder how hard he had pushed for it.
Even though as kids they’d both been wild and adventurous, and often competitive with one another, he’d always had an overly cautious streak where she was concerned. Trying to protect her, help her, save her. She couldn’t stop wondering exactly what had happened on that helo.
She’d been tempted to ask Jay, but didn’t want to give away the fact that she and Eli had any kind of romantic past. It wasn’t relevant and she didn’t need to be ribbed about it. Or have anyone thinking she was receiving special treatment. Anxiety bubbled within her at the thought. She needed to put it out of her mind for now and focus on the task at hand.
“You’re going to take a nap? Right,” Nina drawled wryly. Nina had been living with her for almost a year now and knew that she didn’t do naps. Aubrey powered through fatigue, shaking it off like a beesting or a twisted ankle.
She couldn’t help but be touched by her sisters’ concern, but enough already. She lifted her arms and held them aloft. “You guys, please stop worrying. I promise it was no big deal. Just another day at the office. Did you count these books?”
Nina answered, “Yes, I’ve counted them several times. You love using that office line, don’t you?”
Aubrey shrugged a shoulder and grinned. “I do.” She couldn’t help it. She loved that her “office” was the ocean. She loved her job, too. She was proud of what she and her fellow Coasties accomplished on a daily basis.
“Okay, but I could have handled this work party, you know?”
“Of course I know that,” Aubrey said. And she could have. But Aubrey needed everything to be perfect. “What kind of an example would that be setting for the rest of the team if I bailed in this crucial time?”
Camile snorted. “The team? The Christmas committee is a team? Do you even know how much you sound like Dad right now?” Camile had only returned home from college a few days ago for winter break, so this was the first Christmas committee meeting she’d been able to attend.
She deepened her voice and added an uncanny impersonation of their father. “‘To expect commitment and one-hundred-percent effort from your team members, a good leader needs to be an example.’”
In tandem, she and Nina burst into laughter.
Aubrey couldn’t help but grin herself. “Thank you,” she said, even though they all knew it wasn’t really a compliment. The sisters disagreed on the effectiveness of their now-retired Coast Guard father’s parenting techniques as they’d been growing up. Aubrey had hung on his every word while doing her level best to emulate him. Nina had not. Camile had fallen somewhere in the middle.
Aubrey looked down at her clipboard. “How are we doing with the goodies?”
Nina flipped a page in her own notebook. “Two hundred and twenty-six Baggies—three pieces of saltwater taffy per bag for a total of six hundred and seventy-eight pieces. Two hundred and thirteen pouches of roasted almonds and three hundred string cheese sticks.”
“Perfect.”
“Ah, yes, almonds and cheese, those most traditional of holiday treats,” Camile drawled sarcastically. “Couldn’t we have scored some fudge or a frosted sugar cookie or something? You know that June, the owner of Bakery-by-the-Sea, is a friend of mine, right? She makes the prettiest cookies.”
“I know, and that’s a sweet offer. But we have plenty of candy with the taffy. Why not take the opportunity to show kids that healthy foods
