‘I’m warm.’
‘Thanks to Barbara’s quilt,’ she said. ‘Her great-grandmother made that quilt. It’s been used as a wall hanging for a hundred years. If we’ve wrecked it we’re dead meat.’
He thought about it. He’d more than likely bled on it. No matter. He held it a little tighter.
‘I’ll give her a million for it.’
‘A million!’
‘Two.’
‘Right,’ she said dryly. ‘So you’re a famous actor, too?’
‘A financier.’
‘Someone who makes serious money?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You mean Heinz and I could hold you for ransom?’
‘You could hold me any way you want.’
Um...no. Wrong thing to say. This might be a dream-like situation but reality got a toehold fast.
‘I’m sure I told you my rollerball name,’ she said, quite lightly. ‘Smash ’em Mary. Some things aren’t worth thinking about.’
She was five foot five or five foot six. He was six four. Ex-commando.
He smiled.
‘Laugh all you want, big boy,’ she said. ‘But I hold the painkillers. Speaking of which, do you want some?’
‘Painkillers,’ he said, and he couldn’t get the edge out of his voice fast enough.
‘Bad, huh?’ She’d loaded wood onto the fire, and now she turned back to him, lifted Heinz away—much to the little dog’s disgust—and checked his face. She put her hand on his neck and felt his pulse, and then tucked the quilt tighter.
‘What hurts most?
There was a question. He must have hit rocks, he thought, but, then, he’d been hurled about the lifeboat a few times, too.
‘Leg mostly,’ he managed. ‘Head a bit.’
‘Could I ask you not to do any internal bleeding?’ She flicked on her torch and examined his head, running her fingers carefully through his hair. The hair must be stiff with salt and blood, and her fingers had a job getting through.
Hell, his body was responding again...
‘Bumps and scrapes but nothing seemingly major apart from the scratch on your face,’ she said. ‘But I would like an X-ray.’
‘There’s no ferry due to take us to the mainland?’
‘You reckon a ferry would run in this?’ She gestured to the almost surreal vision of storm against the mouth of the cave. ‘I do have a boat,’ she said. ‘Sadly it’s moored in a natural harbour on the east of the island. East. That would be where you came from. Where the storm comes from. Any minute I’m expecting my boat to fly past the cave on its way to Australia. But, Ben, I do have codeine tablets. Are you allergic to anything?’
‘You really are a nurse?’
‘I was. Luckily for you, no one’s taken my bag off me yet. Allergies?’
‘No.’
‘Codeine it is, then, plus an antinauseant. I don’t fancy scrubbing this cave. You want to use the bathroom?’
‘No!’
‘It’s possible,’ she said, and once again he fancied he could feel her grinning behind the torch beam. ‘The ledge outside the cave is sheltered and there’s bushland in the lee of the cliff. I could help.’
‘I’ll thank you, no.’
‘You want an en suite? A nice fancy flush or nothing?’
‘Lady, I’ve been in Afghanistan,’ he said, goaded, before he could stop himself.
‘As a soldier?’
‘Yes.’ No point lying.
‘That explains your face,’ she said prosaically. ‘And the toughness. Thank God for Afghanistan. I’m thinking it may well have saved your life. But even if we don’t have an en suite, you can forget tough here, Ben. Not when I’m looking after you. Just take my nice little pills and settle down again. Let the pain go away.’
* * *
Her clothes were dry on one side and not the other. She rearranged them, wrapped a towel around herself and headed out to the ledge to look out over the island.
If there wasn’t an overhang on the cliff she wouldn’t be out here. The flying debris was terrifying.
It was almost dark, but in truth it had been almost dark for the last few hours. She checked her watch—it had been four hours since she’d hauled her soldier/sailor/financier up here.
The storm was getting worse.
She had so much to think about but for some reason she found herself thinking of the unknown Jake. Twin to Ben.
She only had a hazy recollection of the shows he’d been on, but she did know who he was. One of her stepsisters had raved about how sexy Jake Logan was. Mary remembered because it had been yet another appalling night of family infighting. Her stepsister had been trying to make her boyfriend jealous and he’d been rising to the bait. Her stepmother had been taking her sister’s side. Her father had, as usual, been saying nothing.
She’d only arrived because she’d tried one last-ditch time to say how sorry she was. To make things right.
It had been useless. Her family wouldn’t interrupt their fighting to listen. It was her fault.
Her fault, her fault, her fault.
Terrific. She was surrounded by a cyclone, she had a badly injured guy stuck in her cave—and she was dwelling on past nightmares.
Think of current nightmares.
Think of Jake.
She’d given some fast reassurance to Ben, but, in truth, the last radio report she’d heard before communications had been cut had been appalling. The cyclone had decimated the yachting fleet, and the reporter she’d heard had been talking of multiple deaths.
There’d been an interview with the head of the chopper service and he’d been choked with emotion.
‘The last guy...we came so close... We thought we had him but, hell, the wind... It just slammed everything. The whole crew’s gutted.’
The last guy...
Was that Ben’s Jake?
She had no way of knowing, and there was no way she was passing on such a gut-wrenching supposition to Ben.
She felt...useless.
‘But I did save him,’ she told herself, and Heinz nosed out to see what was going on; whether it might be safe enough for a dog to find a tree.
Not. A gust blasted across the cliff in front of them; he whimpered and backed inside.
‘You and Ben,’ Mary muttered. ‘Wussy males.’
She glanced back into the cave. All was dark. All was well.
She hoped. She still had no way of telling whether Ben’s leg was fractured or, worse, if that crack on his head had been severe enough to cause subdural haemorrhaging. What if she walked back in and he was dead?
She walked back in and he was asleep, breathing deeply and evenly, with Heinz nuzzling back down against him.
What to do?
What was there to do? Sit by the fire and imagine subdural bleeding or twins falling from ropes into a cyclone-ravaged sea? Think of home,