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