Half a kilometre of deathly fall below the tenuous roost of her car, wedged between the treetop and the mountain.
Sam! Sam!
She couldn’t even make vowels, let alone call to him. The only movement her body would allow was the microscopic muscular changes that pushed air out of her body in a string of agonised whimpers. Like a dog with a mortal injury.
‘Look at me, Aimee …’
Impossible … It was so, so much worse than she’d feared even in her darkest moments. Luck, he’d called it, but it was more of a miracle that her car had hit the crown of this tree rather than plummeting straight past it and down to the tumbling rapids at the bottom of the gully. She’d have been dead before even getting down there, ricocheting off ancient trees like a pinball. Every single base instinct kept her eyes locked on the source of the sudden danger. The threat of the drop. Horrible, yet she couldn’t look away.
Her heart slammed so hard against her ribs she thought they might crack further.
Sam forced himself into her line of vision, stretching across her to break the traction of her gaze on the certain death below. The shaft of pain from the extra pressure on her leg was more effective than anything in impacting on her crippled senses.
‘Aimee …!’
Her eyes tried to drift past him, her face turning slightly, but he forced her focus back to him with insistent fingers on her chin.
‘At me, Aimee … Look only at me.’
Only at me. She heard the words but couldn’t process them. This was like last night all over again. It’s the shock, something deep down inside her tossed up. It was the shock preventing her from looking at him. Understanding him.
The whining went on, completely independent of her will.
Sam slid both warm hands up on either side of her face and forced it to him. This close, he all but obliterated the dreadful view down to the forest floor. In that moment her whole world became the blue of his eyes, the golden tan of his skin and the blush of his lips.
‘Aimee …’ Sam’s voice buzzed at her. ‘Think about Dorothy. Think how frightened and alone she felt out there in the desert—fifteen years old, with a man she’d only just met. Think about the courage she would have had to have to go with him. To get onto that boat in Liverpool and leave her entire family for a hot, hostile country. Think about how hard she would have fought against the fear.’
The most genteel, gentle woman she’d ever interviewed. And the toughest. Words finally scraped past her restricted larynx. ‘She had her husband …’
‘You have me.’ He ducked his head to recapture her eyes. ‘Aimee, you have me, and I’m going to get you out of here.’
This time her eyes didn’t slide away, back to the void below them. They gripped onto Sam’s.
He sighed his relief. ‘There you are. Good girl.’ He leaned in and pressed his hot lips to her clammy forehead.
The reassuring intimacy just about broke her again. ‘Sam …’
‘I know.’ He dropped back into his position, lying across her, between her and the awful view. ‘But you’re okay. Nothing’s 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.