She smiled. ‘I can’t imagine having siblings.’
‘I can’t imagine not.’
‘You want kids? In the future?’ she added, in case her breathless question sounded too much like an offer.
He shrugged. ‘Isn’t that why we’re here? As a species, I mean? I like my genes, I’d like to see what else could be done with them.’
She was starting to like his genes, too. Very much. He had a whole swag of good-guy genes to go with the bad-boy one. And the dreamy eyes. Silence fell, and she realised into what personal territory they’d strayed. She was practically interviewing him for the job of future husband. ‘Sorry. Occupational hazard. I get way too interested in people’s lives.’
‘Why? What do you do?’
‘I’m a historian. Oral History. For the Department of Heritage.’
‘You talk to people for a living?’
‘I swing between talking endlessly to people and then spending weeks alone pulling their stories into shape.’
‘What for?’
‘So they’re not lost.’
‘I mean what happens with them?’
She shrugged. ‘They get archived. Locked away somewhere safe.’
‘No one ever hears them?’
‘Sure they do. Every story is catalogued by topic and theme and subject, so they can be accessed by researchers into just about anything anywhere in the world.’
‘Do you get to see the end results?’ he asked.
‘Not usually. Just my own research.’
‘So your work just goes on file somewhere? To gather dust, potentially, if no one ever looks for it?’ he mused.
‘Potentially.’ She shrugged. ‘You think something’s missing from that equation?’
‘Isn’t it a bit … thankless?’
She stared at him, wondering if he realised what he’d just revealed. Search-and-Rescue-Sam liked to be appreciated. This was exactly why she loved to do what she did. For the moments a person let a bit of his true self slip.
She smiled. ‘Not at all. Our jobs aren’t too dissimilar.’
He frowned at her.
‘We both save lives. You preserve their flesh for another few decades,’ she said. ‘I preserve their stories for ever. For their family. For perpetuity. There’s more to people’s time on earth than genetics.’
Which was why it was such a crime that her life was only just beginning at the ripe old age of twenty-five. She’d wasted so much time.
He considered her. ‘So what’s your story, Aimee Leigh? What are you doing up here in the highlands?’
‘Working. I’ve just finished a history, and the next few weeks I’ll be pulling it all together.’ She glanced around. ‘Or I would have been.’
‘You always do that in remote parts of the state?’
‘I wanted some time alone. I rented a house at Brady’s Lake.’
His eyebrows lifted. ‘How’s that time alone working out for you?’
Laughing felt too good. She went on longer than was probably necessary, and ended in a hacking cough. Sam reached out and slid his warm fingers to her pulse again, counting, then saying, ‘Nothing makes you reassess your life quite like nearly losing it.’
True enough. She’d planned on doing some serious soul-searching while up in the highlands and really getting to grips with how she’d let others run her life for so long. She refused to think it was because she wasn’t capable.
Well, she’d wanted space to think and she’d got it. Above, below and on both sides.
The pause fell again. But then she had a thought. ‘Can you see my handbag, Sam?’
He looked around. ‘Where is it?’
‘It was on the passenger seat.’ Not any more.
‘What do you need? Your wallet?’
‘That’s all replaceable. But I have someone’s life in there.’
‘The person whose history you were about to start working on?’
She nodded. ‘All my notes on a thumb drive.’
‘I’ll have a look,’ he said. ‘Not like I have somewhere else to be.’
He wedged himself between the seats again, but twisted away from her this time, bracing his spread knees on the seat backs and reaching out for the glow-stick. The yellow light moved with him as he stretched down towards the floor of the passenger seat.
But as he did so the car lurched.
‘Sam!’ Aimee screamed, just as his two-way radio burst into a flurry of activity. But the sudden splintering pain from her chest crippled her voice.
He froze in position and then slowly retreated, his strong muscles pulling him back up, bringing the light with him. He spoke confidently into the transmitter at his collar, but his words were three-parts buzz to Aimee. Her heart hammered so hard against her chest wall she was sure it might just split open.
She might have caused them to go crashing to the ground—who knew how far below? For a handbag! For a story! Tears filled her eyes.
‘Sorry, Aimee,’ he said, breathing heavily and righting himself more fully. ‘I’ll get it when the car’s hauled up.’
She shook her head, unable to speak, unable to forgive herself for putting them both at such risk.
He looked more closely at her. ‘Aimee? Were you hurt? Is the pain back?’
She shook her head—too frightened to speak—though her burst of activity had definitely got her pain receptors shrieking.
‘I wouldn’t have tried that if I’d thought it would actually dislodge us. That was just a settle. It will probably happen again whether we move or not. It doesn’t mean we’re going to fall.’
Tell her clenched bladder that. She nodded quickly. Still too scared to move more than a centimetre.
He found her eyes in the mirror. ‘Aimee, look at me.’
She avoided his eyes, knowing what she’d just done. Get my handbag, Sam … As though they were just sitting here waiting for a bus. Maybe her parents were right not to trust her with important decisions.
‘At me, Aimee.’
Finally she forced her focus to the mirror, to the blue, blue eyes waiting for her there. They were steady and serious, and just so reliable it was hard not to believe him when he spoke. ‘We’re thoroughly wedged between the tree and the rockface, and tethered to a three-tonne truck up top. We won’t be square-dancing any time soon, but you don’t need to fear moving. We are not going to fall.’
She looked at the rugged cut of his jaw and followed it down to the full slash of his lips, then up to his strong, straight nose and back to his eyes. Every part of him said reliable. Capable. Experienced. And a big part of her responded to the innate certainty in his manner. But an even bigger part of her was responding to something else. Something more fundamental. The something that would never have let him get this close, this quickly under her skin, if not for the fact that the fates had thrown them together like this. She would have followed him out onto the bonnet of her car with no safety harness if he’d asked her to with the kind of sincerity and promise that he was throwing at her right now in the mirror.
And