Читать книгу Summer Beach Reads - Natalie Anderson - Страница 41

A YEAR ago she could never have conceived of standing here, swathed in thermal clothing and yak furs, gasping for breath, minutes from the base camp of Everest.

Yet here she was.

She’d outed herself publicly a month after getting back from the dinosaur trip and published her mother’s list, along with the letter to her. The outpouring of support—from readers and media and sponsors alike—had blown her away and, not long afterwards, a ticket had arrived courtesy of a local travel agent who wanted to help her finish the list.

I can’t help with both of the final things on your list, the agent had written, referring to her mother’s desire to hold her grandchild, but I can get you to Nepal.

Ten days of flights, buses, yaks and hiking later and here she was … Staring at the bright wind-tattered prayer flags so typical of Nepal and the scattered synthetic tents of the climbers. Being practically carried by her patient, serious-faced guide.

Five thousand metres above sea level, all uphill. And they called this ‘base’ camp?

She lifted her eyes to the peak of the mountain. ‘Holy Mother’ to the Tibetans. Despite being more than halfway up it already, Everest only got bigger. Less imaginable. Getting to base camp had nearly killed her, even with the compulsory acclimatisation days midway. No roads, no tracks, just vague, invisible trails lined with rocks. She couldn’t begin to understand what scaling to Everest’s summit would be like.

The tents in front of them looked like acne—bulbous and out of place on the spectacular natural landscape. She laughed out loud at the image and her guide threw her the latest in many concerned looks.

‘Rest,’ he ordered and then thrust a flask of hideousness at her. An iron-based drink. Good for blood cells, good for altitude sickness. Bad for taste buds.

She could have gone to North base camp. That was accessible by road. But no, she’d had to do it the old-fashioned way. Ready or not.

And, in her case, definitely not.

She looked around as her guide saw to their trusty yak. She’d become quite fond of the matted, stinky thing that tootled along under the very small burden of her backpack, tent and food supplies. It finally dawned on her, halfway up the trail to base camp, that the yak was actually for her, if she passed out, so that her Sherpa could get her back down again without having to carry her himself.

She might have been wobbly but she was still, at least, on her feet.

And she was here. The entrance to Everest base camp.

Tick.

Something about being halfway up this mountain made her feel very close to her mother. And to God, though she was not a religious person, generally. Here, it seemed, she was.

Her breath came as shallow and tightly as ever, thanks to the altitude, and she did her best to only half-fill her lungs the way her Sherpa had shown her. But she’d grown accustomed, now, to dizzy spells and dark patches at the edges of her vision and to slowing her pace to accommodate the lack of oxygen in her blood.

‘Shirley?’

She spun at the sound of her name. Pure instinct. Visions were something else she’d grown used to as her oxygen-starved brain played tricks on her but that was her first aural mirage.

Except that it wasn’t.

Hayden stood in front of her, bright orange trekking gear, tan even darker than normal.

Her breathing escalated. The dark patches swarmed.

She reached for her guide on instinct.

And then she passed out.

Gentle fingers stroked her back to consciousness.

She opened her eyes a crack and stared at Hayden.

The real one. Not the Hayden of her walking daydreams. Or her fevered night dreams. Her brain wasn’t so oxygen-starved that it had forgotten how to deduce.

She sagged. ‘You sent the ticket.’

Played again.

‘I saw your blog,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do something to reward your courage. It was the only thing I could do.’

‘Most people would send flowers.’

He smiled and quoted her. ‘I’m not most people. I had to find something far more dramatic and convoluted.’

Her wind-cracked lips turned up at the corners just a little. ‘Figures.’ She looked around. ‘Where am I?’

‘Medical tent.’

‘Did you carry me?’ Lord, please no. As if passing out in the first place wasn’t unseemly enough.

‘You had a yak.’ He laughed at the horrified expression she couldn’t mask. ‘The altitude hit me hard too; I wouldn’t have been able to carry you here.’

She struggled to sit up. ‘So you slung me over the yak, butt waving in the air?’

‘Pretty much,’ he conceded. ‘You’re going to be fine, by the way. You just hyperventilated.’

‘I don’t care why I got here. I care how I got here.’

‘Shirley …’ He smiled, reaching out and tracing a loose strand of hair. The soft expression on his face spoke volumes.

Her outrage dried up. Her smile died. How was he even here? She asked him.

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘You knew I was coming?’

‘I knew you’d use the ticket. I hoped you hadn’t decided on a lengthy tour of Nepal first. I nearly died when I discovered there are two base camps. Who knew?’

Anyone who’d done the slightest bit of planning? ‘What if I’d gone to the other one?’

‘I had spies along both trails. I knew word would very quickly spread of a lone woman trekking towards base camp. Besides,’ he added, ‘I figured you wouldn’t do the easy one.’

So he did know her, just a little bit. She narrowed her eyes. ‘How did you get here ahead of me? Chopper?’ She knew him a little bit, too.

A dark flush crept above the pinched neck of his trek gear. ‘Yeah. From halfway up. Greatly jeered at as I landed by the climbers.’

‘So that’s “how” taken care of.’ She swallowed. ‘Now why are you here?’

‘I needed to see you.’

‘You have my address.’

‘I needed to see you far from home, somewhere magical.’

Her breath started to thin out. Was it the air again, or just her usual reaction to Hayden’s presence? She took what passed for a deep breath in the highlands of Nepal.

‘Why?’

He stared, glanced around to see if they were alone. ‘Because …’

She waited. The first month of being away from him had been pure misery. Knowing he didn’t love her. Knowing he didn’t even want her enough to just tell her what she wanted to hear. The second month, marginally better and by the third month she’d made some decent progress on getting her life back on track.

Hence the Everest trip.

‘Were you overdue to throw my life back into turmoil?’

His eyes softened. ‘Is it turmoil—seeing me?’

She swung her legs off the side of the stretcher and sat up. Her head spun. She breathed back the nausea. ‘Nothing I won’t survive again.’

His gaze changed. ‘I don’t know whether to be proud of your courage or ashamed of myself that you need to call on it.’

She held her tongue. ‘Why are you here, Hayden?’

‘I missed you.’

Was he serious? ‘Couldn’t find a blonde?’

‘Not sex, Shirley. I missed you. The moment you left the dinosaur campsite, the moment you climbed out of bed that day.’

‘You turned your back on me that morning in the tent, Hayden. The message was pretty clear.’

‘I didn’t want you to see my face. And I couldn’t look at yours again. At the pain.’

The first part stopped her cold. But the last part rankled. ‘Don’t pity me.’

He took her hands where they’d bunched into fists. ‘I don’t pity you, Shirley. I pity me.’

What?

‘I’d convinced myself that the pain I felt that day was yours. That I was simply responding to hurting someone I cared about.’ He resettled himself on his haunches. ‘But it went on. And on. And it finally dawned on me that it was my pain. I’d never been in pain before.’

‘Everyone feels pain.’

‘Not if you’ve numbed yourself to survive. I’d never let myself care enough, be engaged enough, be emotionally invested enough to care if something was taken away from me. Not since I was a boy. I’d shoved it right down deep inside out of sheer survival. I’d forgotten what loss felt like.’

Every humane cell in her body responded to that, totally overruling her anger.

‘I don’t want to be like him, Shirley. Controlling others to make up for something in myself.’

‘You’re not like him.’

‘Two years ago it finally dawned on me what I was becoming. The socially acceptable version of him. So I dropped out and tried to get myself sorted. I thought I had it beat. And then you looked at me that day in the tent the way my mother used to look at him. That awful mix of pain and love and resignation. And I knew I was kidding myself thinking I could manage it alone.’

Alone. Was he looking to her to be some kind of salvation?

‘I’m getting professional assistance now.’

Nothing he could have said—nothing—could have surprised her more. Not if he stood on the top of Everest and declared undying passion for her yak. ‘You’re in therapy?’

‘He’s an idiot—’ he brushed it off, shifting the angle of his crouch by her stretcher ‘—but he seems to know some things. We’re making progress.’

Given his budget, he probably had the best the country had to offer.

‘But I didn’t need Sigmund Freud to tell me why I was hurting. I missed you, Shirley. In my life. In my arms. In my business.’

He smiled, but she couldn’t match it. This was all too monumental.

Seriously, if she woke up on the side of some pebbly track with her Sherpa and the yak staring down at her she was going to just … walk off the edge of the nearest crevasse. And have a very unfriendly discussion with the God she was starting to get a sense of up here.

She got to her feet and he pushed himself up to stand in front of her. She stared up at him. Made herself say it. The bitterest pill.

‘You told me you could never love me.’

He dropped his eyes. ‘I told you I’d never be able to love you. Not the way you deserve. Not the way it is supposed to be.’

It was impossible to know whether it was just her air that got tighter or the altitude. ‘You let me believe it was me.’

‘I thought that was what you wanted to hear. Needed to hear.’

He was right. She had. She’d needed to hate him. She lifted her eyes and took a breath. ‘It’s too late, Hayden. I’ve moved on.’

His dark brows dropped. ‘On? To what?’

That was the problem with lying; ideally, you needed to have put thought into it. ‘On to … getting over you.’ Ugh. Lame. ‘I’m going to hold out for someone who can love me the way I need, the way I deserve.’

His colour dropped slightly. But then his eyes narrowed. ‘No. You fainted when you saw me.’

Confident words, but they weren’t matched by his tone.

‘It was the—’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ Stronger. Surer. He shuffled closer. ‘It was me. You still care.’

She clamped her lips together.

‘Shirley, you’re not that inconstant. And you’re too moral. You might have been trying to get over me, but you’re not.’

Pfff … ‘You’re so arrogant.’

He smiled. ‘Yet you still love me.’

She dropped her head and when she lifted it she left behind all her masks, all her pretensions. ‘Is this fun for you, Hayden, tormenting me? Is the ego stroke worth flying across the world for?’

His smile evaporated, his eyes darkened. ‘No, Shirley. This is not about my ego. This is about my … feelings. My heart.’

The discomfort was what gave him away. It showed in every crease and fold in his handsome face. Talking about this was excruciating for him.

He was serious …

‘Just say it, Hayden.’ Whatever he’d come here to say.

He looked around them again. ‘Not here. This is not how I imagined it.’

‘No. Here, or not at all. You don’t get to orchestrate every moment to your personal satisfaction.’ Not when it hurt this much.

Indecision flitted across his features. ‘Please, Shirley. Just step outside. Only a few feet.’

The plea was so honest and so earnest, it was hard to ignore. Fine. ‘Just outside. No further.’

He led her out into the bright daylight. After the darkness of the tent, the electric-blue sky half blinded her. She raised her hands to let her eyes adjust more slowly. It didn’t help when he turned her so that she was looking at him against the backdrop glare of the main peak of ‘Holy Mother’.

‘I need sunglasses—’ she started.

‘God, woman, you’re making this very hard.’

His tone clamped her mouth shut. He’d never, ever snapped at her like that, hissing with frustration. Even when they were fighting. But, for once, she didn’t immediately assume responsibility. Not everything was her fault. And that was a massive mental shift for her.

‘Just let me do this,’ he gritted. He paused, composed himself and then lifted his eyes back to hers. ‘Shirley … You were never going to be just casual for me. I was a fool not to see it coming. I was way too fascinated and intrigued by you.’

Everest disappeared. Her entire vision right now—her entire world—was Hayden Tennant.

‘I pushed you away and threw the gift of your love back in your face rather than face my own demons.’ He blew out a long breath. ‘I was terrified that I would hurt you even more if I stayed in your life. I even justified it that way to myself and felt quite the hero for doing the hard thing. I couldn’t have been more patronising if I’d tried. The truth is …’

He frowned and struggled with what came next but she couldn’t move for all the oxygen bound up in the snow-caps.

‘The truth is, I was scared to let myself feel. To care. Love and I don’t have a particularly good track record; my father’s obsession with my mother destroyed her, my love for her imprisoned me with him. I have no idea what loving someone safely entails. I was frightened that I would stuff it up if I tried. That I’d fail and you’d end up hating me. But you ended up hating me anyway—’

‘No, I didn’t,’ she murmured.

‘You must have.’

‘I wanted to, believe me. I couldn’t forgive you but I couldn’t forget you, either.’ She sighed. ‘And I couldn’t hate you.’

His Adam’s apple bungeed a few times. ‘Then I saw your blog and what you said about not having the heart for a love that was like a military campaign—’

‘Actually, that was—’

‘Will you stop interrupting?’ he barked. ‘I’m trying to tell you I love you.’

Oxygen-less air whooshed into her lungs.

Hayden snapped his mouth shut, and then his lips tightened. ‘Though I was hoping to do it more romantically than that,’ he muttered.

She didn’t dare breathe out in case there was nothing left to take back in. The dark patches appeared in her peripheral vision again. ‘More romantic than at the foot of Everest? Having flown halfway around the world and paid off half of Nepal and Tibet to find me?’

His lips twisted. ‘Yeah. More than that.’

She finally inhaled. A ridiculous lightness—totally different to what she’d felt coming up the mountain—suffused her.

His eyes darkened. ‘This is what I came to. Love liberates, it doesn’t entrap. It’s not something you can plan for or manage. It’s like stepping off a bridge into nothing.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But it’s so much less terrifying when there’s someone there, stepping off with you.’

She swallowed back tears. She’d done enough blubbing in front of Hayden for a lifetime. He took her hands.

‘If this isn’t love,’ he said, threading his fingers through hers and boring into her with the intensity of his gaze, ‘then it should be.’

So much for not blubbing. Tears spilled, heedless of her will, over her lashes and ran down her wind-whipped, make-up-less face. Lord, what a picture she must present. But she didn’t care. She’d bare her whole soul if he asked her to.

And then—despite every fear and doubt and heartbreak and agony of the past months—they were kissing again. The sensation she’d believed she’d never have access to again, the rush of adrenalin that came from just touching him, coursed through her blood where the oxygen couldn’t go.

She clung to his strong frame, weakened, and he gathered her more tightly in to him, worshipping her mouth with his. There was barely enough oxygen to go around for one, let alone keep two hearts pumping. They fell apart, panting.

‘I am good enough for you,’ she gasped. It felt important to make that clear.

He blinked, confused. ‘I agree.’

‘I mean that I’m through with doubting myself. Believing myself unworthy. I want a strong, equal relationship.’

‘Princess, you’re preaching to the choir …’

‘And I want you to admit that this wasn’t strategic. Neither one of us made the other love us.’

His eyes softened. ‘Everything about you made me love you, Shirley.’

She glared at him.

‘You want the lightning bolt?’

‘I want you to admit that something special happened here. Something bigger than both of us.’

‘How about I tell you when it happened, instead?’

She stared.

‘I first bought in to loving you when you stood on my porch and called me an ass that day. No one had challenged me like that, ever.’ He stepped closer. ‘Then when your ridiculous stockings at the beach forced such lightness into the darkness inside me.’ His hand twisted up into her hair. ‘Then when you gave up your seats at the symphony for some strangers way up the back and you revealed your soul.’

Her eyes brimmed over again.

‘But I still wavered. Then you were so natural and good with the boys at Tim’s party and all I could think about was what a spectacular mother you would make.’

A tear wobbled free.

‘But if you want the thunderbolt. The moment I knew I was screwed?’

Only from Hayden would she take screwed as a compliment. She nodded and shook another tear loose.

‘The giraffe. That moment surrounded by sea containers and diesel fumes when you held your hand out to me, your eyes filled with such magic and mystery and drew me into your fantasy. No-one had ever given me the gift of joy before. Unconditional generosity.’

And there was the magic word.

Unconditional.

‘I don’t ever want to have to earn your love,’ she whispered.

He stepped back and regarded her gravely. Then he sank to one knee, on the rocks and shale underfoot, just as he had inside the tent. It wasn’t a proposal. It was older and more classic than that. It was a Spartan honour pledge.

‘I give it to you. As a gift. Whether you want to keep it or not, it doesn’t change how I feel. My love is yours, unconditionally.’

She sank down onto her knees to join him. The stones cut into her skin. She ignored it. ‘I accept. And I love you. Every part of you.’

They fell forward into each other’s lips, kissed as if it were their first time. Then they pulled back and stared at each other, lost. Panting.

‘I caught up to you on the list,’ he got out between breaths.

She leaned against him. ‘In just a few weeks? How?’

‘I cheated.’ He laughed. ‘We’re neck and neck now that we’re both here.’

She smiled. ‘You know what? That list doesn’t seem so important now.’

He curled his arms around her. ‘Typical. Just as defeat is on the horizon.’

She chuckled. ‘We have something much more impressive on the horizon.’

They stared up at the Himalayan peaks together. Awed.

‘This really hurts,’ Shirley finally admitted.

‘You’re not kidding.’ He pushed to his feet and then pulled her carefully up with him off the sharp rocks.

‘You know you’re hiking down off the mountain with me, right? I won’t be seen in your chopper.’

‘And miss all those nights in a tent with you?’ He kissed her again. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way. You still owe me from the dinosaur dig.’

‘We can’t do anything.’ She giggled. ‘We’ll have a guide sleeping just feet away.’

He pushed back and stared at her. ‘Did you Just … giggle?’

Truly unmasked now. Exactly how she wanted to stay. ‘That’s just one of a range of ordinary-person sounds I make when I’m not on guard,’ she joked. ‘And you’re going to get to discover them all.’

He swooped down to kiss the side of her throat. ‘That’s not going any way to preserving the modesty of your guide. Now all I can think about is getting you in a tent and eliciting all those sounds.’

‘Truly,’ she said, curling her head and seeking out his lips for more oxygen deprivation. ‘They can’t be any worse than the sound of the yak on the way up.’