‘Can you pop the hatch?’
She knew what he was asking—could she reach the door release?—but the request struck her as ludicrous, as if he wanted to load some groceries into the back of her brutalised car. She started to laugh, but it degenerated into a pained wheeze.
‘Aimee? Hanging in there?’
Focus. He was working so hard to help her. ‘I’m just …’ She stretched her left arm across her body, to see if she could reach the release handle below her seat. She couldn’t and, worse, she puffed like a ninety-year-old woman just from that. ‘I’ll have to take my seatbelt off …’
‘No!’
The sudden urgency in his otherwise moderated voice shocked her into stillness, and she realised for the first time how hard he was working to keep her calm. He might be faking it one hundred percent, but it was working. Why the sudden urgency over her seatbelt? It had already done its job. It wasn’t as if she could crash twice.
‘I’ll come through the back window. Shield yourself from the falling glass if you can.’
It took him a moment to work his way around to the back of the car. She followed his progress with her senses and pressed her good foot to the brake pedal until she could see his legs in her rearview mirror, splayed wide and braced on the failing tail-lights of her hatch, as though gravity meant nothing to him.
Somewhere at the back of her muddled mind she knew there was something significant about the fact that he’d abseiled down to her. But then she was thoroughly distracted by the realisation that he was going to come in there with her—put himself at risk—to help her. Anxiety burbled up in her constricted chest.
‘Ready, Aimee? Cover your head.’
She curled her lone arm around her head and twisted towards the door. Behind her she heard a sharp crack, and then the high-pitched shattering of the back window. Tiny squares of safety glass showered down on her and pooled in the wrecked dash. She straightened and watched in the rearview mirror as Sam folded down her back seats and lowered himself to where she was trapped.
A moment later he appeared between the two front seats of the car, bending uncomfortably around the sub-branches of the tree limb.
‘Hey,’ he said, warm and rich near her ear.
An insane and embarrassing sob bubbled up inside her at having rescue so close at hand—at having him so close at hand—and she struggled to swallow it back. ‘I’m sorry …’ she choked.
‘Don’t be. You’re in an extraordinary situation. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t scared.’
He didn’t get it. How could he? She didn’t feel scared. She felt stupidly safe. Just because he was here. And that undid her more than all the fear of the hours before he’d come. How long had it been since she felt so instantly safe with a man?
‘Do you understand what’s happened to you, Aimee?’
‘I had an accident,’ she squeezed out. ‘I ran off the road.’
‘Yeah, you did. Your car’s gone down an embankment.
The back is pressed into the hillside and the front has come to rest against a tree.’
‘You make that sound so peaceful,’ she whispered. The complete opposite of the violence that had befallen her and her car. She twisted around to see his face, but the angle was too tricky and it hurt too much to twist any further.
‘Try not to move until I’ve stabilised your neck,’ he murmured gently. He reached past her and adjusted the rearview mirror so that he could see her in it. And vice-versa. ‘I want you to look at my eyes, Aimee. Focus.’
She lifted hers to the mirror and met his concerned, compassionate gaze, eyes crinkled at the edges from working outdoors, and the bluest blue she’d ever seen. At least she thought they were blue. They could have been any colour, given the emergency lighting was casting a sickly pallor over everything. He slid his finger up between them.
‘Now, focus on my finger.’ He moved it left and right, forward and back. She tracked the gloved finger actively in the mirror, but slipped once and went back to his eyes—just for a moment, for a better look. The most amazing eyes. Just staring at them made her calmer. And more drowsy.
‘Okay.’ He seemed satisfied.
‘Did I pass?’
She lifted her head just slightly, so that the mirror caught the twist of his lips as he smiled. ‘Flying colours. You’re in pretty good shape for a girl wedged in a tree.’
She felt him brace his knees on the back of the front seats and heard him rifling through the kit he’d hauled in with him. ‘I need to check you out physically, Aimee. Is that going to be okay?’
The man who’d climbed in here to rescue her? ‘You can do … whatever you want.’
In her peripheral vision, in the dim glow of the cabin, she watched him strip off his gloves and twist a foam neck brace out of his bag.
‘Just a precaution,’ he said, before she could start worrying.
She let her head sag into the brace as he fitted it. Quite a comfortable precaution—if anything in this agonising situation could be called comfortable.
Next, he wedged a slimline torch between his teeth, and then he twisted through the gap between the driver and passenger seats, reaching for her legs. He held himself in place with one hand and dragged her torn skirt high up her thighs with the other. He pointed his torch down into the darkness at her feet, studying closely.
‘I felt it break,’ she said matter-of-factly—and softly, given how close his face was to hers—amazed that she could be calm at all. Still, what else could she do? Freaking out hadn’t helped her earlier.
‘It hasn’t broken the skin, though,’ he mumbled around the torch, sliding her dress modestly back into position. ‘That’s a good thing.’
He wasn’t going to lie, or play down what was happening to her. She appreciated that.
‘At least I can manage to break my leg the right way.’ She winced. ‘Wayne would be pleased.’ One of very few things her dominating ex would have appreciated—or possibly noticed—about her.
Sam was eight-tenths silhouette, since the glow-stick was behind him on the dash but suddenly the front of the car was full of the smell of oil and leather, rescue gear and sweat, and good, honest man.
‘Are you going to give me painkillers?’ she said, to dislodge the inappropriate thought, and because everything was really starting to hurt now that the car was more stable and the pressure points had shifted.
‘Not without knowing for sure you’re not allergic. And not with the pain in your chest; you have enough respiratory issues without me compounding it with medication.’
‘I hate pain,’ she said.
His chuckle was totally out of place in this situation, but it warmed her and gave her strength. ‘With the endorphins you’ll have racing through your system you’ll barely feel it,’ he said, before twisting away to rifle in his bag again. When he returned he had a small bottle with him. ‘But this will help take the edge off.’
She glanced sideways at the bottle. It didn’t look very medical. She lifted her curious eyes to him in mute question rather than waste more breath on a pointless question.
‘Green Ant Juice,’ he said. ‘It’s a natural painkiller. Aboriginal communities have used it for centuries.’
‘What makes it juicy?’
His pause was telling. ‘Better not to ask.’
Oh. ‘Will it taste like ants?’
The rummaging continued. He