Buch lesen: «Dreaming Of... Australia: Mr Right at the Wrong Time / Imprisoned by a Vow / The Millionaire and the Maid»

CHAPTER ONE

‘HELLO?’

The darkness was the same whether her eyes were open or closed so she didn’t bother trying.

The disembodied voice that floated down to her made Aimee wonder if maybe she was dead, and she and her car and the tree she’d hit when she flew off the A 10 had all been transported together in a tangled, inseparable mess into a void.

Some kind of spiritual waiting room.

Her heart battered against the seatbelt that still pinned her to the seat like an astronaut strapped into a shuttle.

Starved of light, her imagination lurched into overdrive. She replayed the slide and crash in her mind, each time making it worse and more violent. One minute she’d been travelling happily along through the towering eucalypts that defied gravity, growing forty-five degrees up out of the Tasmanian mountain all the way to the horizon …

… the next she’d been sliding and briefly airborne, before slamming into the trunk of this tree.

‘Hello?’

Her head twitched slightly. Maybe her heavenly number was being called? She prised open her crusted, swollen lids and stared into the darkness that still reigned.

It didn’t seem necessary to reply. Surely in the spirit world it would be enough just to think your response?

Yes. I’m here …

She reluctantly released her death-grip on her seatbelt and risked extending trembling fingers out into the dense nothing around her. They grazed against something solid almost immediately, and she traced them across the crusty, papery surface of bark, rolling tiny unbreakable cubes beneath her fingertips like reading Braille.

A tree branch. Riddled with pieces of her shattered windscreen.

She fumbled her touch to the roof of the car, found the interior light and—with only a momentary thought for what might be revealed—depressed the plastic panel and squinted at the sudden dim light.

Her dash had slipped forward about a foot, and buckled where parts of the engine had pushed into it. The roof above her had crushed downwards. But, most terrifying of all, an enormous tree limb had pierced the armour of her little car, through the windscreen and the passenger seat beyond it, and was taking much of the vehicle’s weight. Aimee stared at the carnage and tasted the slide of salt down the back of her throat.

If that branch had come through just two feet closer …

The panic she’d been holding at bay so well these past hours surged forth. She plunged the car back into darkness, thicker and more cloying than before, and let the tears come. Crying felt good—it helped—and she let herself indulge because no one was around to see it. She’d never in her life cried in front of someone else, no matter the incentive, but what she did in the privacy of her own car wreck was her business.

‘Can you hear me?’

The words just wouldn’t quite soak into her overwhelmed, muddled mind, but the voice sounded angelic enough—deep and rich and … concerned. Shouldn’t it be serene? Wasn’t its job to reassure her? To set her mind and fears at rest and guide her to … wherever she was going? Glowing and transcendent and full of love.

‘Make any kind of noise if you can hear me.’

A solitary beam of light criss-crossed back and forth from high above her, mother-ship-style, across the places her vehicle wasn’t. It moved too fast for her fractured mind to make sense of what it revealed around her.

‘Search and Rescue,’ the voice said, sounding strained and uncomfortable and somehow closer. ‘If you can hear me, make any kind of noise.’

For an angel, he was awfully demanding.

Aimee tried to speak, but her words came out as a creepy kind of gurgle. He didn’t respond to her partial frog croak. She fumbled the hand that wasn’t pinned behind her and found her car’s horn, hoping to heaven she’d preserved enough battery.

She pressed.

And held.

The noise exploding through what had been so many hours of silence made her jump even though she knew it was coming, and her leg responded with sharp blades of protest. The long peal echoed through the darkness, sounding high and empty.

‘I hear you,’ the voice called back, sounding relieved and professional. ‘I’ll be with you soon. I’m just securing your car.’

A small lurch and a large clang were separated only by the barest of heartbeats, but then she felt and heard some of the weight of the car shift as whatever he’d used to secure it tightened into position. The move changed the dynamic of all the twisted fixtures in her front seat, and shifted some of the pressure of whatever had been pressing against her injured leg. It protested with violent sensation and she slammed her hand down on the horn again. Hard.

‘Ho!’ The voice yelled, then again urgently. Somewhere high above she thought she heard the word echo, but not in the same voice.

The tensioning stopped and the vehicle creaked and settled, more glass splintering from her windscreen and tinkling away into the night.

‘Are you okay?’ the voice yelled.

She swallowed back the pain and also wet her throat. ‘Yes,’ she cried feebly, and then stronger, ‘Yes. But my leg is trapped under the dash.’ She hoped he’d do the maths and make the connection that their securing of the car was making her pain worse. She didn’t have the energy or breath to explain.

‘Got it.’ She heard a thud on her roof but then nothing, no movement. Then some rustling outside the rear passenger side window. ‘Any other injuries?’ he called, closer. She heard the sounds of a mallet knocking something into place.

‘Uh … I can’t tell,’ she whimpered.

‘What’s your name?’ This time from somewhere over the top of her windscreen.

So they could advise her next of kin? Give her parents one more thing to fight over? she thought dismally. God, wouldn’t they both make a meal of this? ‘Aimee Leigh.’

He repeated that detail in short, efficient radio-speak to whoever he’d just called up to moments before. ‘Are you allergic to morphine, Aimee?’ he asked, definitely sounding close this time.

‘I don’t know.’ And she didn’t much care. The screaming of her leg had started to make every other part of her ache in sympathy.

‘Okay …’

She heard more rustling from beyond the tree limb her Honda was skewered on and she craned her head towards the empty front passenger seat. Suddenly the darkness glowed into an ethereal white-blue light and a glow-stick seemed to levitate through the window, around the enormous branch, and then come to rest on the crippled dash of her car. She blinked her eyes in protest at the assault of blazing light. But as they adjusted the full horror of her situation came back to her. She looked at where her leg disappeared into the crumpled mess that had been her steering console, down at her right arm, which was wedged behind her between the seat and her driver-side door, then back again at the half-a-tree which stretched its grabbing fist past her into the back of her little hatchback.

But just as she tasted the rising tang of panic the man spoke again, from beyond the tree. ‘How are you doing, Aimee? Talk to me.’

‘I’m—’ A mess. Terrified. Not ready to die. ‘—Okay. Where are you?’

‘Right here.’

And suddenly a gloved hand reached through the leaves of the tree branch that had made a kebab out of her car and stretched towards her. It was heavy-duty, fluoro-orange, caked in old dirt and had seen some serious action. But it was beautiful and welcome, and as the fingers stretched towards her from the darkness Aimee reached out and wrapped all of hers around two of his. He curled them back into his palm and held on.

‘Hi, Aimee,’ the disembodied voice puffed lightly. ‘I’m Sam, and I’ll be your rescuer today.’

Right then—for the first time in hours—Aimee believed that she was actually going to make it.

Search-and-Rescue-Sam couldn’t get close enough to do a visual inspection from outside the car, so he had her run through a verbal description of all her major body parts so he could try and assess her condition remotely. He seemed less concerned with her agonising leg than with the tightness in her chest, where her seatbelt bit, and with her forgotten arm—completely numb, immobile, and impossible for her to twist around to see.

‘I don’t like unknowns, Aimee Leigh,’ he murmured as he ducked away to check the tension on the ropes holding the car in place. He kept up with the assessing questions and she kept her answers short and sharp—pretty much all her straining lungs would allow. The whole time he circled the vehicle, equipment clanking, and bit by bit she felt the car firming up in its position.

‘I want to get a look at that arm if I can,’ he said when he reappeared at the window beyond the tree limb.

‘If I can’t see it from here how are you going to see it from there?’ she gasped.

‘I’m not. I’m going to try and get in there with you.’

How? The two of them were separated by three feet of solid tree. And her door wasn’t budging.

‘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 resurfaced with an empty syringe. ‘Have you tasted them?’

‘I’ve smelled them.’ The nasty, acrid scent of squashed ants.

Again the flash of white teeth in the mirror. ‘Your choice. You prefer the pain?’

For answer, she opened her mouth like a young bird, and he syringed a shot of the sticky syrup into it. ‘Good girl.’

His warm thumb gently wiped away a dribble of the not-quite-lemony juice that had caught on the corner of her lips. Her pulse picked up in response. Or it could have been the analgesic surging into her system.

Either way, it felt good.

The gentle touch was so caring and sweet, while being businesslike, that it brought tears back to her eyes. When was the last time someone had taken genuine care of her? Had just been there for her when it all went wrong? Her parents believed that prevention was infinitely better than the cure, and Wayne would have just rolled his eyes and scolded her for over-reacting.

As Sam withdrew his ungloved left hand her eyes were tear-free enough to notice that his ring finger was bare and uniformly tanned. Yeah, because that’s always important to know in life or death situations. She shook her head at her own subconscious. Her shoulder bit and she winced visibly.

‘I’m going to have a look at your arm, Aimee. Just keep very still.’

She did—not that she could feel a thing; her arm had been wedged back there for so long it wasn’t even bothering her, although obviously it was really bothering Sam. She heard and felt him changing positions, getting closer to her driver’s door.

‘Do you remember how the accident happened?’ he asked, making conversation while he fiddled around behind her.

She shook her head. ‘I was driving the A10. One minute everything was fine.’ She filled her strained lungs again. ‘The next I was sliding and then …’ She shuddered. ‘I remember the impact.’ Breath. ‘Then I passed out for a bit.’ Breath. ‘Then I woke up here in this tree. Stuck.’

Her strained respiration seemed unnaturally loud in the silence that followed. When he finally did speak he said, ‘Looks like an oil patch on the asphalt. A local passing through slid on it, too, but managed to stop before the edge. He saw your tail-lights down here and called it in.’

Thank goodness he did. I might have been out here for days. Aimee lifted her chin to see better in the mirror what he was doing behind her. ‘Sam, don’t worry about whether it’s going to hurt. Just do whatever you have to do. I’m a rip-the-Bandaid-off kind of girl, despite what I said earlier about pain.’

She felt his pause more than heard it. ‘You can’t feel this?’

The worry in his voice spiked her heart into a rapid flutter. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

When he spoke again, his voice was more carefully moderated. ‘Your arm is wedged back here. I think it’s dislocated. I’ve freed it up a little bit, and I’m going to try to push it forward, but this will go one of two ways. Either you won’t feel a thing even once it’s free—’

Meaning she might have damaged something permanently.

‘—or the sensation is going to come back as soon as it’s free. And if that happens it’s going to hurt like hell.’

She felt a tug, but no pain. It was like having a numb tooth yanked. So far so good. ‘Won’t the ant juice help?’

‘It won’t have taken full effect—’

That was as far as he got. With a nasty crack her arm came free, and he pushed it forward back into the front seat where it belonged. The pain burst like white light behind her eyes, and came from her throat in an agonised retch as full sensation returned—arm burning, shoulder screaming.

His hands were at her hair instantly, stroking it back, soothing. ‘That’s the worst of it, Aimee. It’s all done now,’ he murmured, over and over. ‘All done …’

She rocked where she sat, holding her breath, damming back the tears, sucking the pain in, wanting so badly to be as brave as Sam was in coming down here for her. Then, as the ant juice and her own adrenaline kicked in, the rocking slowed and her body eased back in the seat, not fighting the restraint of the seatbelt as much.

‘Better?’ That voice again, warm and low just behind her. She lifted her eyes to the crooked rearview mirror, reached for it slowly with her good arm, missed and tried again through a slight fogginess. She adjusted it and found his eyes.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, knowing it would never be enough, but just so grateful that she was no longer alone with her thoughts and fears of death.

He knew what she was saying. ‘You’re welcome. I’m sorry that hurt so much.’

‘Not your fault. And it’s easing off now.’ If easing off could describe the deep, dull, throb coming from her right arm and leg. ‘And it’s made it easier to breathe. Talk.’