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.
‘Y-yes. Thank you.’
Sam knew how much she was worried about the oral history on the thumb drive inside. He didn’t want her separated from it for longer than necessary.
