Emergency Baby. Alison Roberts

there’s no GPS on board. It’s about thirty kilometres off shore.’

      An oddly heavy sensation settled in the pit of Sam’s stomach. Perhaps it was the thought of the heavily rolling sea that the ebbing southerly would have left in its wake. A winch job onto a vessel was tricky enough even in relatively calm seas. Not that Sam suffered from any kind of motion sickness. She was just experiencing an empathetic moment for whoever was unwell out there.

      ‘What’s happened?’ she queried.

      ‘Partial amputation.’Alex held the door to the hangar open just long enough for Sam to catch up. ‘Compound fracture tib and fib. Sounds like the guy got in the way of a wire that snapped when the boat hit a particularly deep swell.’

      ‘Mmm. Deep swells, huh?’ Sam tried to summon the reaction she would normally have to the prospect of such a challenging job. To see it as a personal step towards conquering anything that could hold her back. There was no need for either of them to discuss the dangers of trying to get from a helicopter to a pitching ship’s deck safely. ‘Sounds fun.’

      Alex’s head turned sharply to catch her gaze and Sam had the horrible thought that he might have detected something she wouldn’t admit even to herself. That that heavy sensation in the pit of her stomach wasn’t empathetic seasickness at all. It was fear.

      She grinned at him. ‘Toss a coin, then?’

      It was their usual method of deciding who got to do the most challenging part of a job they were both equally qualified to do. Both Sam and Alex were trained to be either the winch operator or the person who got dangled. They needed to decide in advance, however, so that the winching harness could be put on and the correct seats taken before the confined space of the aircraft made it difficult.

      ‘It’s my turn,’ Alex said firmly. ‘You got to do it last time.’ He reached for the winching harness and stepped into it.

      Had she? Sam tried to remember the last sea rescue they’d been on. It had been months ago and hadn’tAlex gone down and brought a conscious patient up in a nappy harness?

      ‘But—’

      ‘Too slow.’ Alex clipped the front of the harness together and turned to step onto the skid and into the cabin. ‘Get with it, Sam. We’re off.’

      Terry had already done all the checks the helicopter needed. The rotor speed was increasing and Sam knew they would be off the ground as soon as her safety belt was fastened. There was no point trying to argue with Alex and it wasn’t until well after take-off, when they started scanning a menacing-looking sea beneath them, that Sam realised why it was still bothering her.

      It wasn’t that she needed to face whatever was causing that irritating level of nervousness. It was more that she sensed Alex had picked up on it and had claimed the more dangerous part of the job because he was trying to protect Sam.

      The cheerful grin she received on shooting a suspicious glance in Alex’s direction had an element of self-satisfaction that she would normally have put down to Alex scoring in the game of chasing the biggest adrenaline rush. The flash of something quite different that she caught in the depths of those dark eyes confirmed her suspicion, however.

      The impression was gone in an instant. If she hadn’t been searching for it, Sam would never have recognised it. On how many other occasions might she have missed it? She’d never looked for anything like it because Sam had never had any doubts about what she wanted to do so had never been concerned that anyone would pick up on something potentially shameful.

      They all had things that scared them to some degree. They would be idiots if they didn’t, but Sam, like the boys, had never allowed any level of fear to put up a barrier she couldn’t find a way to cross. She’d always fought for her chance to take on anything that came their way. Sometimes she won and sometimes she didn’t, but now that Sam was thinking along new lines, she realised that Alex had often found ways to circumvent the coin-tossing on jobs that had the potential to be particularly fraught.

      He hadn’t denied the accusation she’d fired at him once—that he just wanted to claim the glory of doing the hardest part of the job—but it was quite possible that the gung-ho attitude was a cover. That Alex tried to protect her far more often than she’d ever been aware of.

      The very notion should have been like a red rag to a bull as far as Sam was concerned. If she’d picked up on anything like this a month ago she would have been furious. Would have demanded a showdown once they got back to Base and sorted her colleague’s attitude out. But Sam was too puzzled to be angry.