Читать книгу The Maverick Millionaire - Алисон Робертс - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTHE WAVE WAS the last straw.
As though the adrenaline rush of the last few hours was simply being washed away as Eleanor Sutton faced the immediate prospect of drowning.
How much adrenaline could one person produce, anyway? She’d been burning it as fuel for hours as the rescue helicopter crew she was a part of had played a pivotal role in dealing with the stricken yachts caught up in this approaching storm. They’d pulled two people from a life raft and found another victim who’d had nothing more than his life jacket as protection as he rode the enormous swells of this angry sea.
Then they’d plucked a badly injured seaman from the deck of a yacht that was limping out of trouble with the broken mast that had been responsible for the crewman’s head injuries. The chopper was full. Overfull, in fact, which was why Ellie had been left dangling on the winch line until they could either juggle space or get to a spot on land.
With her vantage point of being so much closer to the water as the chopper had bucketed through the menacing shark-gray sky, she’d been the one to spot the bright orange bubble of a life raft as it had crested one of the giant swells and then disappeared again. In the eerie light of a day that was far darker than it should be for the time, it had been all too easy to spot the two pale faces peering up at the potential rescue the helicopter advertised.
The helmet Ellie wore had built in headphones and a microphone that sat almost against her lips. Even in the howl of driving wind and rain and helicopter rotors, it was easy to communicate with both her pilot, Dave, and fellow paramedic, Mike.
‘Life raft at nine o’clock. At least two people on board.’
‘We can’t take any more.’ It was Dave who responded. ‘We’d be over limit in weight and this wind is picking up.’
There was a warning tone in those casual last words. Dave was a brilliant pilot, but he was already finding it a challenge to fly in these conditions. Some extra weight with the approaching cyclone getting ever closer might be enough to tip the balance and put everybody in even more danger.
But they couldn’t leave them behind. The full force of Cyclone Lila wouldn’t be felt for a good few hours yet, but they shouldn’t still be in the air as it was. All aircraft would be grounded by the time they reached land again. It was highly unlikely that this life raft would be spotted by any other boats and, even if it was, it would be impossible to effect a rescue.
If they didn’t do something, they were signing the death warrants of another two people. There had already been too much carnage in this disastrous leg of the Ultraswift-Round-the-World yacht race. At least one death had been confirmed, a lot of serious injuries and there were still people unaccounted for.
‘We can get one,’ Ellie said desperately. ‘He can ride with me on the end of the line. We’re so close to land. We can drop him and try going back for the other one.’
There was a moment’s silence from above. It was Mike who spoke this time.
‘You really want to try that, Ellie?’
Did she? Despite the skin-tight rescue suit she was wearing under her flight suit, Ellie knew she was close to becoming hypothermic. Would her fingers work well enough to manipulate the harness and carabiner clips to attach another person to the winch safely? She was beyond exhaustion now, too, and that old back injury was aching abominably. What if the victim was terrified by this form of transport and struggled? Made them swing dangerously on the end of the line and make a safe landing virtually impossible?
But they all knew there was no choice.
‘Let’s give it a try, at least,’ Ellie said. ‘We can do that, can’t we?’
And so they did, but Dave was having trouble keeping the chopper level in the buffeting winds, and the mountainous swells of the sea below were impossible to judge. Just as they got close enough to hover near the life raft, the foaming top of a wave reached over Ellie’s head and she was suddenly underwater, being dragged through the icy sea like a fish on a line.
And that did it.
She wasn’t under the water for very long at all, but it was one of those moments where time seemed to stand still. Where a million thoughts could coalesce into surprising clarity.
Eleanor Sutton was totally over this. She was thirty-two years old and she had a dodgy back. Three years ago this hadn’t been the plan of how her life would be. She would be happily married. At home with a gorgeous baby. Working part time, teaching one of the subjects she was so good at. Aeromedical transport or emergency management maybe.
The fact that she could actually remember this so clearly was a death knell. This kind of adrenaline rush had been what had got her through the last three years when that life plan had been blown out of the water so devastatingly. Losing personal priorities due to living for the ultimate challenge of risking her life for others had been the way to move forward.
And it wasn’t working any more.
If she could see all this so clearly as she was dragged through the wave and then swinging in clear air again over the life raft, Ellie knew it would never work again. She shouldn’t be capable of thinking about anything other than how she was going to harness another body to her own in the teeth of the approaching cyclone and then get them both safely onto land somewhere.
This was it.
The last time she would be doing this.
She might as well make it count.
Unbelievably, the men in the life raft weren’t ready to cooperate. Ellie had the harness in her hands. She shoved it towards one of them, holding it up to show where the arm loops were. The harness was taken by one of the men, but he immediately tried to pass it to the other.
‘Just do it, Ben. Put the harness on. You’re going first.’
But he pushed it back and there was a brief struggle as he tried to force the other man’s arm into one of the loops. Too caught up arguing over who got to go first, they were getting nowhere.
‘I’ll be okay,’ one of them was yelling. ‘I can wait.’
‘This isn’t make-believe,’ the other yelled back.
Static in her ears made Ellie wince.
‘You still on the air?’ Dave’s voice crackled. ‘That radio still working after getting wet?’
‘Seems to be.’ Ellie put her hand out to stop the life raft bumping her away. It was dipping into another swell. And the men were still arguing. Good grief—had one just accused the other of being just like his mother?
She thought the terrifying dunk into that wave had been the final straw, but this was just too much. Ellie was going a lot further than the extra mile here, making her potentially last job as a rescue helicopter paramedic really count. She shouldn’t be doing this and this lack of cooperation was putting them in a lot more danger. Suddenly Ellie was angry.
Angry with herself for endangering everybody involved in the helicopter hovering overhead.
Angry with these men who wanted to save each other instead of themselves.
Angry knowing that she had to face the future without the escape from reality that this job had provided so well for so long.
She was close enough to help shove the harness onto one of the men. To shout at them with all the energy her anger bestowed.
‘There’s no time for this.’
But they were ignoring her. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ one yelled.
There was another painful crackle of static in Ellie’s headphones. ‘What’s going on?’ Dave asked in her ear.
‘Stand by,’ Ellie snapped. She was still angry. Ready to knock some sense into these men, but whatever had been said while Dave had been making contact had changed something. The man she’d been helping to force the harness onto had gone completely still. Thankfully, Ellie’s hands were working well enough to snap the clips into place and check that he was safely anchored to the winch line.
‘The chopper’s full,’ she shouted at the other man. ‘We’ll come back for you as soon as we can.’ She clipped the last carabiners together and put her face close to her patient’s. ‘Put your arms around me and hang on,’ she instructed him grimly. ‘Just hang on.’ She knew they would have been listening to every word from above. Hopefully, they’d think the lack of reassurance she was providing was due to the tension of the situation, not the anger that was still bubbling in her veins like liquid lava.
‘Take us up, Dave. Let’s get out of here.’
* * *
‘Ben...’
The despairing howl was whipped from Jacob Logan’s lips by the force of the wind as he felt himself pulled both upwards and forwards in a violent swinging movement. It was also drowned by the stinging deluge of a combination of rain and sea spray, made all the more powerful by the increasing speed of the helicopter rotors above.
It was too painful to try and keep his eyes open. Jake squeezed them shut and kept them like that. He tightened his grip around the body attached to his by what he hoped was the super-strong webbing of the harnesses and solid metal clips. There was nothing he could do. However alien it felt, he had no choice but to put his faith in his rescuers and the fact that they knew what they were doing.
Shutting off any glimpse of the outside world confined his impressions more to what was happening internally, but it was impossible to identify a single emotion there.
Fear was certainly there in spades. Terror, more like, especially as they were spinning in sickening circles as the direction of movement changed from going up to going forward, interrupted by drops and jerks that were probably due to the turbulence the aircraft was having to deal with.
There was anger there as well. Not just because he’d lost the fight over who got rescued first. Jake was angry at everything right now. At whoever had come up with the stupid idea of encouraging people to take their expensive luxury yachts out into dangerous seas and make the prize prestigious enough to make them risk their lives.
At the universe for dropping a cyclone onto precisely this part of the planet at exactly this time.
At fate for ripping him apart from his twin brother. The other half of himself.
But maybe that anger was directed at Ben, too. Why had he said such a dreadful thing about their mother? Something so unbelievable—so huge—it threatened to rip the brothers apart, not just physically but at a much deeper level. If what he’d said was true and he’d never told him, it had the potential to shatter the bond that had been between the men since they’d arrived in this world only twenty minutes apart.
Was life as he knew it about to end, whether or not he survived this dreadful day?
And there was something else in his head. Or his heart. No...this was soul-deep.
Something that echoed from childhood and had to be silenced.
Dealing with it was automatic now. Honed to a talent that had made him an international star as an adult. The ability to imagine the way a different person would handle the situation so that it would all be okay in the end.
To become that person for as long as he needed to.
This was a scene from a movie, then. Reality could be distorted. He was a paratrooper. This wasn’t a dreadful accident. He was supposed to be here. It wasn’t him being rescued, it was a girl. A very beautiful girl.
It was helpful that he knew that this stranger he had his arms wrapped around so firmly was female. Not that she felt exactly small and feminine, but he could work around that.
He’d never had this much trouble throwing the mental switches to step sideways out of reality. A big part of his brain was determined to remind him that this horrible situation was too real to avoid. That even if it was a movie, there’d be a stuntman to do this part because his insurance wouldn’t cover taking this kind of a risk. But Jake fought back. If he could believe—and make countless others believe, the way he had done so far in his stellar career—didn’t that make it at least a kind of reality?
He was out to save the world. The chopper would land them somewhere and he’d unclip his burden. He’d want to stay with the girl, of course, because he was desperately in love with her, but he’d have to go back into the storm. To risk his life to rescue...not his twin brother, that would be too corny. This was the black moment of the movie and he was the ultimate hero so maybe he was going back to rescue his enemy.
And, suddenly, the escape route that had worked since he’d been old enough to remember threw up a barrier so solid Jake could actually feel himself crashing against it.
Maybe Ben was the enemy now.
Even if it hadn’t been a success, the effort of trying to catch something in the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions and turn it into something he could cope with had distracted him for however long this nightmare ride had been taking. Time was doing strange things, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.
Close to his head, he could hear his rescuer trying to talk to the helicopter pilot. The wind was howling like a wild animal around them and she was having to shout, even though she had a microphone against her lips. As close as he was, Jake couldn’t catch every word.
Something about a light. A moon.
Was she kidding?
In even more of a fantasyland than he’d been trying to get into?
* * *
‘The lighthouse,’ Ellie told Dave, her words urgent. ‘At five o’clock. It’s Half Moon Island.’
‘Roger that.’ Dave’s voice in her ears sounded strained. ‘We’re heading southeast.’
‘No. The beach...’
‘What beach?’
‘Straight across from Half Moon Island. The end of the spit. Put us down there.’
‘What? It’s the middle of nowhere.’
‘I know it. There’s a house...’
It was hard enough to communicate through the external noise and the internal static without trying to explain. This area was Ellie’s childhood stamping ground. Her grandfather had been the last lighthouse-keeper on Half Moon Island and the family’s beach house was on an isolated part of the coast that looked directly out at the crescent of land they’d all loved.
The history didn’t matter. It was the closest part of the mainland they could put her down and she knew they could find shelter. It was close enough, even, for them to drop their first victim and try to go back for the other one.
He still had her in a grip that made it an effort to breathe. An embrace that would have been unacceptably intimate from a stranger in any other situation. His face was close enough to her own to defy any concept of personal space but, curiously, Ellie didn’t have any clear idea of what he looked like.
The hair plastered to his head looked like it would be very dark even if it was dry and it was too long for her taste for a man. The jaw was hidden beneath a growth of beard that had to be weeks old and his eyes were screwed shut so tightly they created wrinkles that probably made him look a lot older than he was.
He was big, that much she could tell. Big enough to make Ellie feel small and that was weird. At five feet ten, she had always towered over other women and many men. She’d envied the fragility and femininity of tiny women—until she’d needed to be stronger than ever. That had been when she’d finally appreciated the warrior blood that ran in her veins from generations past.
No man was ever going to make Eleanor Sutton feel small or insignificant again.
She put her mouth close enough to the man’s ear to feel the icy touch of his skin.
‘We’re going to land on the beach. Keep your legs tucked up and let me control the impact.’
Dave did his best to bring them down slowly and Ellie did her best to try and judge the distance between them and the solid ground, but it had never been so difficult. The crashing rolls of surf kept distorting her line of sight and the wind was sending swirls of sand in both horizontal and vertical directions.
‘Minus twenty...no...twenty-five...fifteen...’ This descent was crazy. They were both going to end up with badly broken legs or worse. ‘Ten... Slow it down, Dave.’
He must have done his absolute best, but the landing was hard and a stab of pain told Ellie that her ankle had turned despite the protection of her heavy boots. There was no time to do more than register a potentially serious fracture, however. She fell backwards with her patient on top of her and for a split second she was again aware of just how big and solid this man was.
And that she couldn’t breathe.
But then they were flipped over and dragged a short distance in the sand. Ellie could feel it scraping the skin on her face like sandpaper. Filling her mouth as her microphone snapped off. The headphones inside her helmet were still working, but she didn’t need Dave’s urgent orders to know how vital it was that she unhook them both from the winch line before they were dragged any further towards the trees that edged the beach.
Before they both got killed or—worse—the line got tangled and brought the helicopter down.
Somehow she managed it. She threw the hook clear so that it didn’t hit her patient as it was retracted and the helicopter gained height. Once she’d unclipped herself from this man, she could get into a clear position and they could lower the line to her again.
But it was taking too much time to unclip him. Her hands were so cold and she was shaking violently from a combination of the cold, pain and the sheer determination to get back and save the other man as quickly as possible.
He was trying to help.
‘No,’ Ellie shouted, spitting sand. ‘Let me do it. You’re making it harder.’
His hands fisted beside his face. ‘You’re going back, aren’t you? To get Ben?’
‘Yes. Just let me...’ Finally, she unclipped the last carabiner and they were separated. Ellie almost fell the instant she tried to put weight on her injured ankle but somehow managed to lurch far enough away from her patient to wave both arms above her head to signal Dave. There was no point in shouting with the microphone long gone, but she did it anyway.
‘Bring the line down. I’m ready.’ She wouldn’t need to worry about her ankle once she was airborne again. It shouldn’t make it impossible to get the other man from the life raft.
‘Sorry, El. Can’t do it.’ Dave’s voice was clear in her ears. ‘Wind’s picking up and we’ve got a status one patient on board under ventilation.’
The helicopter was getting smaller rapidly. Gaining some height and heading down the coast.
‘No...’ Ellie yelled, waving her arms frantically. ‘No-o-o...’
The man was beside her. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. ‘Where’s he going?’ He grabbed Ellie’s shoulders and it felt like he was making an effort not to shake her until her teeth rattled. ‘You’ve got to go back. For Ben.’
His face was twisted in desperation and Ellie knew her own expression was probably close to a mirror image of it.
‘They won’t let us. It’s too dangerous.’
The man had let her go in order to wave his arms now. ‘Come back,’ he yelled. ‘I trusted you, dammit...’
But the bright red helicopter was vanishing into the darkening skies. Ellie could still hear Dave.
‘We’ve got your GPS coordinates. Someone will come as soon as this weather lifts. Get to some shelter. Your other radio should still work. We’ll be in touch.’ She could hear in his voice that he was hating leaving her like this. It broke all the unspoken rules that cemented a crew like this together. ‘Stay safe, Ellie.’
The helicopter disappeared from view.
For what seemed a long, long time, Ellie and the rescued man simply stood on this isolated, totally deserted stretch of coastline and stared at the menacing cloud cover, dark enough to make the ocean beside them appear black. The foam of the crashing breakers was eerily white.
The man took several steps towards the wild surf. And then he stopped and let out a howl of despair that made Ellie’s spine tingle. He knew he’d lost his friend. The lump in her throat was big enough to be painful.
‘I would have gone back,’ she yelled above the roar of the wind and surf. ‘If they’d let me.’
He came closer in two swift strides. ‘I would have stayed,’ he shouted back at her.
He was angry at her? For saving his life?
His words were a little muffled. Maybe she’d heard wrong. Dave was too far away for radio contact now and the communication had been one-sided anyway, thanks to the broken microphone. Ellie undid the chin strap of her helmet and pulled it off. The man was still shouting at her.
‘Who gave you the right to decide who got rescued first?’
Ellie spat out some more sand. ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ she informed him furiously. ‘And if we don’t find any shelter soon we’ll probably both die of hypothermia and then all this would have been for nothing.’ He wasn’t the only one who could be unreasonably angry. ‘Who gave you the right to put my life in danger?’
She didn’t wait to see what effect her words might have had. Ellie turned and tried to pick out a landmark. She had to turn back and try to catch a glimpse of Half Moon Island to get any idea of which direction they needed to go. The lighthouse was well to her left so they had to go north. The beach house was in a direct line with the point of the island where the lighthouse was.
Confident now, Ellie set off up the beach. She didn’t look to see whether he was following her. He could have his autonomy back as far as she was concerned. If he wanted to stay out here and die because she hadn’t been able to rescue his friend then maybe that was his choice. She was going to survive if she could, thank you very much.
Except that she didn’t get more than two steps away. Her ankle collapsed beneath her and she went down with a shout of anguish.
‘What’s the matter?’ The man was crouched over her in an instant. ‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s my ankle. I... It might be broken.’
If he was swearing, the words were quiet enough for the wind to censor them. Ellie felt herself being picked up as if she weighed no more than one of those tiny women she’d once mistakenly envied. Now she was cradled in the arms of this big man as if she was a helpless child.
‘Which way?’ The words were as grim as the face of the man who uttered them.
‘North.’ Ellie pointed. ‘About a mile.’
A gust of wind, vicious enough to make this solid man stagger, reminded her that this was only the beginning of this cyclone. Things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got any better.
The stabs of pain coming up her leg from her ankle were bad enough to make her feel sick. On top of her exhaustion and the knowledge that they were in real trouble here, it was enough to make her head spin. She couldn’t faint. If she did, how would he know how to find the beach house, which was probably their only hope of surviving?
‘There’s a river,’ she added. ‘We turn inland there.’
She could feel his arms tighten around her. It had to be incredibly hard, carrying somebody as tall as she was in the face of this wind and on soft sand, and they had a long way to go.
Could he do it?
Ellie had no choice but to put her faith in him, however hard that was to do. With a groan that came more from defeat than pain, she screwed her eyes shut and buried her face against his chest as he staggered along the beach.
It had been a very long time since she had felt a man’s arms around her like this.
At least she wouldn’t die alone.
