CHAPTER SEVEN
“LOWER THE BASKET!” yelled paramedic Francis Abigail Bryce into her headset over the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter hovering a hundred feet overhead. Wind and rain lashed at the ledge on which she was crouched, shielding the fallen climber.
If she slipped it was a long way down and probably wouldn’t end well. It wasn’t exactly how she’d envisioned spending her Friday evening but when word had come through from the rangers’ station earlier that a climber had fallen, Frankie had been dispatched to the scene.
Further up the coast from the large seaside town of Port St. John’s on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, heavy rains had caused a huge landslide and rescue teams were busy digging out survivors. With the storm wreaking havoc on the Juan de Fuca Strait, rescue personnel were stretched to the limit.
Frankie had returned with a few of the injured and then been the lucky candidate in the wrong place at the wrong darn time. Now, instead of providing emergency medical care at the site of the slide, she was clinging to a slick ledge only a few feet wide and a couple hundred feet from certain death because a group had thought it smart to go climbing in torrential rain.
She looked down into the guy’s youthful face and shook her head. Probably a student on spring break, she thought. EMTs were always busy this time of the year, rescuing kids from their own ambitions.
“Hang in there, handsome,” she yelled, aware that in the fifteen minutes she’d been there, he’d been slipping in and out of consciousness. She suspected a ruptured spleen and she’d already wrapped his leg in an inflatable compression cast.
Concerned about what was taking so long, Frankie looked up as a deep voice in her ear warned, “Heads up,” and the next instant a large figure dropped onto the ledge. Dressed in a red and black jumpsuit and wearing a half-face helmet with comms mouthpiece, he looked like a huge bug from an alien world.
Frankie didn’t need to see his eyes to know who it was. The hard, masculine jaw and the unsmiling line of his sensual mouth would have been a dead giveaway even if the hair on the back of her neck hadn’t stood up like a freaked-out cat.
Nathan Oliver. The man who’d been back for months without at least letting her know he was home.
What the hell was he doing here? Wasn’t he some super-secret commander of the Maritime Security Response Team or something? Unless her patient was a terrorist, or a foreign national in the country illegally—which Frankie doubted—she was pretty sure a member of the nation’s deployable operations group stationed at Port St. John’s wouldn’t normally be part of search and rescue.
Then again, maybe the landslide and current conditions in the strait had put all coasties on call, including the MSRT. And, yeah, wasn’t it just peachy that he had to be the one dropping from the sky?
Unhooking his line from the chopper, he gave a couple of hand signals to the pilot above before his safety line disappeared into the lashing rain.
With her heart in her throat, Frankie ruthlessly squelched the urge to reach out and grab him before rotor wash blew him off the ledge. Or maybe before she gave him a little shove over the edge herself.
Okay, fine, so maybe she was tempted for about a nanosecond, but even though Nathan Oliver was the last person she wanted to see, she didn’t want him to die either.
They’d meant too much to each other—once.
Besides, balanced on the rocky ledge and sure-footed and powerful as a mountain lion, Nate was more than capable of rescuing them both. He’d been a Navy SEAL before transferring to the Pacific North West unit of the US Coast Guard as Lieutenant Commander of the MSRT. Granted, the present conditions probably weren’t the worst he’d experienced, but even he couldn’t walk up sheer cliffs in this weather.
He dropped to his haunches beside her and she felt the sweep of his penetrating gaze. The resultant shiver, she told herself, was from being soaked through and freezing. It couldn’t be that he still affected her.
That ship had sailed a lifetime ago and Frankie didn’t make a habit of repeating her mistakes. Especially the very public ones that had devastated not only her pride but also her heart.
She saw his mouth form words that looked like, “You okay?”
But instead of replying, she yelled, “Where’s the basket? He’s going into shock.”
He pointed skyward and she looked up to see the rescue litter swinging wildly in the gusting wind as it descended toward them. Nate barked out an order to the chopper and the pilot edged closer to the cliff face. But instead of controlling the swing, it caused the litter to spin.
He rose to his feet in one smooth move and stretched out a long arm to snag it. Almost in slow motion, Frankie watched as it abruptly shifted in the wind. She opened her mouth to yell a warning as the medevac litter flew through the air toward him.
He saw it coming too late to get out the way and it clipped him on the side of his helmet, sending him staggering backward toward the edge.
Time slowed and stretched, narrowing into an endless tunnel of pure horror as Nate fought to regain his balance. Then his foot slipped and in that split second before he went over, his gaze caught and held hers.
In that timeless instant, all the wild conflicting emotions she’d managed to suppress for twelve long years exploded through her, blinding her to everything but him.
Everything but the need to keep him from disappearing from her life forever. And before she realized she was moving, Frankie rose and leapt for him in one desperate move.
She reacted. As she always did.
Fear gave her strength and speed and before she could even process her actions, her icy fingers closed around his harness. Her momentum sent her thudding into him and Frankie wrapped her legs around him like a vice as they shot off the ledge.
Through
