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.
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
