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. Her eyes drifted back to him again as the stranger shifted slightly in the ambulance and her heart swelled.
Such a good man.
But, as she watched, a fragile, porcelain-featured woman hurried through the throng of onlookers and hurled herself at Sam—her Search-and-Rescue-Sam—and threw slim arms around his neck. Those masculine arms that had kept her so safe on the hillside slid automatically around the woman’s waist and he picked her up, swinging her gently around as she buried her face into his neck.
The orange blur blocked her view again as the stranger turned to climb out of the ambulance.
‘Wait! Please!’ Aimee called out to him, and he turned back. ‘That woman … with Sam. Who is she?’
It never occurred to her not to ask, and it clearly never occurred to him not to answer, because he turned around, located them in the crowd, and then brought his gaze back to Aimee.
‘Oh, that’s Melissa,’ he said, as if that explained it all. ‘Sam’s wife.’
Eleven months later
WOW. Where had the year gone?
Sam caught the sideways glance of the woman next to him and pressed a damp palm onto his right thigh to still its irritating bounce. He straightened, then shifted, then loosened and re-fixed his tie one more time. What he wouldn’t give to be hanging off the side of a mountain somewhere, rather than sitting here today … waiting. To either side of him was a mix of old and young, male and female, trained professionals and passers-by. All nervous—like him. All lined up—like him—to get their handshake from the Governor General and a commendation for bravery.
A commendation for doing what he was paid to do.
He shook his head.
He’d participated in six other rescues in the eleven months since he’d hauled Aimee Leigh’s battered car up that cliff-face. Since the ambulance doors had slammed shut on that rescue and raced off down the winding A10. No sirens. The best news in an otherwise crappy day. No sirens meant no critical emergency. No sirens meant his assessment of her injuries and his handling of them as they’d carefully winched Aimee up the rock-face had been correct. Busted leg, dislocated shoulder, chest bruising.
No sirens meant the tree had come off worse than she did.
Thank God.
Her little car had been a write-off. She’d been fond of it, judging by the gloss in its paint work and the careful condition of its interior before nature tore it to pieces, and he’d become pretty fond of it, too, by the time they’d finished examining the towed up wreck. How something that small had managed to preserve the precious life in it against an impact like that …
Pretty miraculous.
‘Gregory?’ a voice called down from the top of a small set of temporary steps. ‘Sam Gregory?’
Damn. His turn.
For lack of any other kind of moral support here today he turned to the stranger next to him and lifted his eyebrows in question. The older woman gave him a quick visual once over and a reassuring nod, then wished him luck as he pushed to his feet, tugging at the suit that felt so foreign on him.
But Mel had nagged him into wearing it.
Not that she’d know if he’d switched out of it halfway to the ceremony today, as he’d used to when he ditched school. Maybe he could have skipped the whole thing—gone sightseeing in Canberra instead. She’d have no idea.
She wasn’t here.
She’d said she would come, but she’d been gnawing her lip at the time, and he knew she had a lot going on at work. Knew she’d be here under sufferance. And that was worse than having no one here.
Or so he’d thought at the time.
‘This way Mr Gregory,’ the assistant stage manager murmured, walking with him to the edge of the enormous drapes which framed the simple setting on stage. The recipient before him was standing awkwardly in the centre of the stage as the master of ceremonies segued into amateur mobile phone video of a man—the awkward man—dangling by braced legs off the edge of a bridge in the north of their country, snatching survivors from torrential flood waters as they tumbled under it. He’d caught and saved three people that day. No one was talking about those that his numb fingers hadn’t been able to hold on to.
That’s heroic. A man who’d been servicing a farm truck one minute and was risking his life for strangers the next. No training. No equipment. No crew backing him up. No time to change his mind. The only man left standing as an inland tsunami careened through his town.
Sam flexed his shoulders. Why anyone thought he was worthy of even standing on the same stage as a guy like that …
He’d wanted to knock it back when his supervisor had first told him of the nomination. But his boss had guilted him into coming, warning him that not accepting it with grace was an insult to the men and women he worked with who’d missed out