He cleared his throat. ‘If anyone asks, you passed out just then.’
Her eyebrows shot up. ‘Did you just lie?’
‘Would you feel better if I said I save them up for very important moments?’
I’d feel better if you didn’t do it at all. Her father was a liar, and she didn’t like even the slightest connection between the two men in her mind.
She raised both brows for answer. Wow, when had she got so confident? One month ago she never would have challenged someone like this. Driving off a mountain really brought out the best in a girl.
Plus, with Sam, she felt safe expressing herself. On five minutes’ acquaintance.
He sighed and relented at her pointed look. ‘It seems I’m the only one who thinks I’m better off down here with you,’ he said.
‘Were you ordered to go back up? Why?’
He considered her in the mirror. Now that her arm was free she could twist her body further around. She did it now, turning to face him for the first time, though it hurt to do it. Her already tight breath caught further.
She hadn’t imagined it … Piece by piece in the mirror she’d thought he was intriguing. Fully assembled he was gorgeous. There was something almost … leonine … about the way his features all came together. Dark, high eyebrows over blue almond-shaped eyes. Defined cheekbones, trigger jaw. All with a coat of rugged splashed over the top. As if she wasn’t breathy enough …
‘Why, Sam?’
His mind worked furiously and visibly. ‘Okay …’ He resettled himself into the gap between the seats and lowered his voice. As if he was about to share a great secret. As if there was anyone but them here to hear it.
‘We’re not just resting against a tree, Aimee. Or on a hillside.’
She appreciated his use of the collective. ‘We’ sounded so much better than ‘you’ when someone was breaking bad news. And he was. His whole body confessed it.
‘Where are we?’ she whispered, glancing out at the inky blackness around them and remembering how she’d imagined earlier that it was death’s waiting room. But as she said the words she realised … He’d abseiled down to her. And when she’d first tried to move her leg and screamed a bird had exploded from its roost right next to her window, not high above it. And she’d heard her wheels spinning freely in space when she’d first slammed to a stop.
Her heart lurched.
‘Or should I be asking how high are we?’
CHAPTER TWO
SHE saw the truth in the flinch of his dark brows. A tight pain stabbed high in her chest. She was so, so bad with heights. ‘Oh, my God …’
‘Aimee, stay calm. We’re secure. But we don’t know what damage the impact has done to the tree—if any. That’s the unknown.’
She stared at him. ‘You hate unknowns?’
His eyes grew serious. ‘Yeah. I do.’
‘But you’re in here.’
‘I’ve made it safe.’
But still he was refusing to leave her. ‘You have to go.’
‘No.’
‘Sam—’
‘It’s going to get light in a couple of hours,’ he pushed on, serious. ‘I want to be here when that happens.’
For the rescue? Or for when she could see what was below them—or wasn’t—and went completely to pieces? She shifted her focus again and stared out through her shattered, flimsy windscreen, partially held together only by struggling tint film. The only thing stopping her from falling into—and through—that windscreen was her seatbelt.
She turned back to stare at him again. In truth she really, horribly, desperately didn’t want to be alone. But she didn’t want him hurt, either. Not the man who’d taken such gentle care of her.
‘Don’t even worry about it, Aimee,’ he said, before she’d even finished thinking it through. ‘It’s not your choice to make. It’s mine.’
‘I don’t get a say?’
‘None. I’m in charge in this vehicle. It’s my call.’
I’m in charge. How many years had she secretly rebelled against ‘in charge’ men. Men who thought they knew what was best for her and insisted on spelling it out. Her father. Wayne. Men who liked her better passive, like her mother. Yet here she was crumbling the moment an honest-to-goodness ‘take charge’ man told her what to do.
But, truthfully, she didn’t want to be alone. Not for one more moment of this ordeal.
‘So, what do we do until it gets light?’ she asked.
‘I’ll keep monitoring your condition, make sure the car’s still sound. I can radio up for anything you need.’
Silence fell. ‘So we just … talk?’
‘Talking is good. I don’t want you dropping off to sleep.’
But making small talk seemed wrong under the circumstances. And it was just too much of a reminder that she didn’t know him at all, despite the strange kind of intimacy that was forming between them. A bubble she didn’t particularly want to burst.
‘What do we talk about?’
‘Anything you want. I’m told I’m good company.’
She glanced up into the mirror in time to see him flick his eyes quickly away. Maybe this was awkward for him, too.
She scratched around for something to say that wasn’t about the weather. Something a bit more meaningful. Something that would normalise this crazy situation. ‘You said Search and Rescue is only part of your job. What’s the other part?’ With every minute that passed, her breath was coming more easily.
He seemed unused to making conversation with his rescuees, but he answered after just a moment. ‘I’m a ranger for Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service.’
The man who abseiled down rockfaces to save damsels in distress also looked after forests and the creatures in them. Of course he did. ‘So this is just moonlighting for you?’
He chuckled, and shone the small torch on the fixings of her seatbelt. ‘Don’t worry. They sent me because I’m the best vertical rescue guy in the district. We don’t get enough demand for a full time Search and Rescue team up here.’
‘Small mercies.’
He sat back. ‘True.’
‘Which do you enjoy more?’
His eyes lifted back to hers in the mirror, held them in his surprise. Had no one ever asked him that? ‘Hard to say. Search and Rescue is more … tangible. Immediate. But the forests need a champion, too.’
‘This part has got to be more exciting, though?’ Her dry tongue had made a mess of that sentence.
Sam rummaged in his equipment for a moment, before reappearing between the seats with a sponge soaked in bottled water. He pressed it to her lips and Aimee sucked at it gratefully.
‘It’s not the excitement I’m conscious of.’ He frowned as she sucked. ‘Though that’s how it is for some of my colleagues. For me it’s the importance.’ He withdrew the sucked-dry sponge and resaturated it. ‘I think I’d feel the same way if it was national secrets I was protecting. Or a vial of some rare cells instead of a person.’
The ants’ innards were making her feel very