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He froze in position and then slowly retreated, his strong muscles pulling him back up, bringing the light with him. He spoke confidently into the transmitter at his collar, but his words were three-parts buzz to Aimee. Her heart hammered so hard against her chest wall she was sure it might just split open.
She might have caused them to go crashing to the ground—who knew how far below? For a handbag! For a story! Tears filled her eyes.
‘Sorry, Aimee,’ he said, breathing heavily and righting himself more fully. ‘I’ll get it when the car’s hauled up.’
She shook her head, unable to speak, unable to forgive herself for putting them both at such risk.
He looked more closely at her. ‘Aimee? Were you hurt? Is the pain back?’
She shook her head—too frightened to speak—though her burst of activity had definitely got her pain receptors shrieking.
‘I wouldn’t have tried that if I’d thought it would actually dislodge us. That was just a settle. It will probably happen again whether we move or not. It doesn’t mean we’re going to fall.’
Tell her clenched bladder that. She nodded quickly. Still too scared to move more than a centimetre.
He found her eyes in the mirror. ‘Aimee, look at me.’
She avoided his eyes, knowing what she’d just done. Get my handbag, Sam … As though they were just sitting here waiting for a bus. Maybe her parents were right not to trust her with important decisions.
‘At me, Aimee.’
Finally she forced her focus to the mirror, to the blue, blue eyes waiting for her there. They were steady and serious, and just so reliable it was hard not to believe him when he spoke. ‘We’re thoroughly wedged between the tree and the rockface, and tethered to a three-tonne truck up top. We won’t be square-dancing any time soon, but you don’t need to fear moving. We are not going to fall.’
She looked at the rugged cut of his jaw and followed it down to the full slash of his lips, then up to his strong, straight nose and back to his eyes. Every part of him said reliable. Capable. Experienced. And a big part of her responded to the innate certainty in his manner. But an even bigger part of her was responding to something else. Something more fundamental. The something that would never have let him get this close, this quickly under her skin, if not for the fact that the fates had thrown them together like this. She would have followed him out onto the bonnet of her car with no safety harness if he’d asked her to with the kind of sincerity and promise that he was throwing at her right now in the mirror.
And extraordinary as it was, given how slow she was to trust strangers, she realised why.
She believed in him.
‘We are not going to fall,’ he’d said. She nodded, letting her breath out on a long, controlled hiss.
But deep down she feared that while that might be true literally, she could see herself falling very easily for a man like Sam. And just as hard.
Under these circumstances, that was a very, very bad idea.
CHAPTER THREE
‘SO who’s Wayne?’
Aimee’s head came up with a snap as Sam shifted again behind her. He was a big guy, and he had squeezed himself into the small space left vacant by the tree branches in the back of her little car and been settled there for over an hour.
‘Wayne?’
‘You mentioned his name earlier. Boyfriend? Brother?’
Was this conversation or curiosity? ‘Ex.’
‘Recent ex?’
‘Recent enough. Why?’
‘There was a … certain tone in your voice when you mentioned him.’
‘A certain sarcastic tone?’
She heard the smile in his voice. ‘Possibly.’
Aimee shifted back in her seat. Wayne was not someone she usually liked to talk about, liked even to think about, but all bets were off in this surreal setting. Their physical proximity demanded it. ‘Wayne and I turned out not to be a good fit.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I’m not. I’d rather have found out now than later.’ And it was true—no matter how challenging she’d found it to walk away. Even though he’d been giving her clear signals that she was somehow deficient in his eyes. Even though she knew he wasn’t good for her. She’d wriggled out from under the controlling thumbs of her parents only to fall prey to a man just like them at a time when she was most susceptible to him. ‘If I’d put any longer into the relationship I might have been more reluctant to end it.’
Another long pause. Funny how she’d only known Sam a handful of minutes but she already knew how to tell a thinking pause from an awkward one. This was thinking.
‘Not everyone finds that strength,’ he finally said.
‘You learn a thing or two recording life histories for a living. About achievements. About regrets. I don’t want any regrets in my life.’
She’d lost him again. His eyes stared out into the darkness.
What was his story?
‘Sam,’ she risked, after a comfortable silence had stretched out, ‘any chance you can lower the back of my seat a bit? Safely?’ She didn’t want a repeat of what happened before.
He studied the angle of the car and her position in it. His answer was reluctant. ‘The seatbelt is working well right now specifically because it’s nearly at ninety degrees.’
‘Even just a little bit? It’s doing my head in, looking straight down, wondering what’s down there, knowing that I’d crash straight through if the seatbelt gave.’
His hand slipped onto her shoulder through the gap between the seats. ‘The seatbelt is what’s keeping your body from putting too much weight on your bad leg.’
Oh.
Her disappointment must have reached him, though, because he said a moment later, ‘Let me just try something.’ He rummaged in his kit again, and then emerged with a set of flex-straps.
Aimee chuckled tightly. ‘You got a decaf latte in that Tardis, Doctor?’
He smiled as he wrapped one strap carefully around her waist and fixed it behind the seat, then the other under her good shoulder and hooked it on the headrest. ‘These aren’t generally for people, but I’ll be gentle with them.’
He pulled the two together and clipped one end of a climbing tether onto it, then fixed the other end to his own harness. If she fell she’d snag on his safety rope. Or pull him down with her.
That was a cheery thought!
‘Ready?’
So ready. So very ready not to be facing death literally head-on for every minute of this ordeal. She felt him fumbling along the edge of her seat for the recline lever and then suddenly the back of the seat gave slightly—just slightly—and he lowered it halfway to a fully reclined position. She hung on to her seatbelt lifeline and prepared for the pain of more of her body weight hitting her leg, but the flexi-straps did their job and held her fast to the seat-back. It really wasn’t too bad.
‘Oh, thank you.’ Her view was now the buckled roof of the car. A thousand times better than hanging out over who knew what. ‘Thank you, Sam.’
With her seat now reclined into the limited free space in the back of the car, there was nowhere for him to go but into the expanded gap between the front seats. He wedged himself there, with his spine to the passenger seat back, his shoulder pressing against the branch, facing her across the tiny gulf he’d opened up.
Unexpected bonus. She could talk to him front on.
‘You look funny,’ she said softly. Though still gorgeous. ‘Your face is back to front without the mirror.’
‘You look good.’ He smiled, then flushed as she dropped her eyes briefly. ‘I just meant that pretty much everything on you is intact. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to find that. Just to hear you honk that damned horn.’
Aimee sobered. He must hold some truly terrible images in his head.
‘It’s always the calmest most compliant people that have the worst injuries. They’re the ones I dream about later.’ He tucked her foil covering back in, keeping up his part of the conversation. She let his deep, rich voice wash over her. ‘It’s the guy with a twisted ankle and a golf tournament to get to that makes life hell. We’ve had hikers activate their EPIRB halfway up a mountain because they’re tired and want a lift back down.’ He shook his head.
‘Where do I fall on that scale?’ Was she being too high maintenance? Get my handbag, Sam. Lower my seat, Sam …
‘You have a scale all your own. All the reason in the world to be losing it, but holding up pretty well all things considered.’
She was—and that was really saying something, given her upbringing. Where the heck would she have learned resilience from in her bubblewrap childhood? But honour made her confess. ‘I was sobbing my heart out before I heard you calling.’
That seemed to genuinely pain him. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to you quicker. We had to assess the safety.’
She pinned him with her gaze. ‘I’m so glad you found me at all. Imagine if you hadn’t.’ It hit her then, for the first time, how long, slow and awful her death would have been. She swallowed back a gnarled lump and just stared, watching the play of emotion running over his features. Sadness. Regret. Confusion. But then his eyes lifted and it was just … light. And it changed him.
‘How old are you, Sam?’
‘Thirty-one.’
‘How is it that a man like you who wants children doesn’t yet have any?’ That was the closest she’d come to asking him outright: Why are you still single?
His eyes grew wary, but he finally answered. ‘It takes one to want it but two to make it a reality.’
‘You don’t have women knocking down your door to help you along with that reality? You’re gorgeous.’
His eyes grew cautious. But they didn’t dull. On the contrary, they filled with a rich sparkle. ‘Are you offering?’
She held her breath. Tilted her head. ‘Are you flirting?’
The bright sparkle in his eyes immediately dimmed. The smile straightened out into a half-frown.
Her breath caught. ‘You are.’
‘Sorry. Really inappropriate. Just playing to my strengths.’
His confusion touched her. ‘Don’t apologise. I’m battered and broken and feeling pretty average. It made me smile.’
‘I’m glad I could make you smile, then.’
‘Do they train you for that?’ she asked pertly.
‘For what?’
‘Keeping up people’s spirits with a sexy smile.’
The hint of colour high in his jaw brought her back to her senses. The man was just trying to keep her alive. He would say just about anything. Flirting included. It probably was in his training manual. Which meant it had to end. One of them had to put things back on a more real footing.
She took a deep breath. ‘Sorry, Sam. I think that was the ant juice talking. I apologise.’
He brushed it off with a shake of his head. ‘It’s not generally known for its truth serum properties.’
A blush stole up her cheeks, but this time he was staring straight at her. There was no hiding it. ‘A crazy side-effect?’
‘It’s probably written on the bottle somewhere. “May cause outbursts of inappropriate confession.”’
A gentleman, too. Handing her as dignified an exit as she was going to get. ‘Thank you. For keeping me sane.’ For keeping things light.
‘That’s how this works. You’re the victim. Whatever you need …’
Victim. The word put an early end to the golden glow of promise that had filled her from the inside out at his gentle teasing. Wasn’t that exactly what Danielle had accused her of being? By letting her father and Wayne run her life and others control her career? That hadn’t been a fun conversation. But it had been necessary. It had triggered the rapid departure of Wayne from her life and this journey of self-discovery. ‘Is that what I am?’
He stared at her—hard. ‘No. You’re brave and open and the least victim-like victim I’ve ever met.’
‘It’s because you’re with me. I’d be a basket case without you here.’
Two tiny lines appeared between his brows. ‘Sometimes we only find out what we’re capable of when we’re tested.’
‘Well, I think I’ve failed this test. Maybe I’ll do better next time.’
‘No.’ Immediate and fervent. ‘No next times. You don’t get this kind of luck twice.’
‘Luck?’ Was he crazy?
His face grew serious. He glanced at his watch. ‘You’ll see in a couple of hours. But I’ll be right here with you.’
A couple of hours felt like for ever. ‘Will the … what do you call it … getting me out …?’
‘Extraction.’
‘Will the extraction start as soon as the sun comes up?’
‘As soon as the sun crests the mountaintops, and assuming there’s no fog, yes.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘Hard to know. We have to stabilise your leg properly and make sure your shoulder is back in its socket before we shift you.’
She swallowed. Both those things sounded very unpleasant.
‘And then we’ll be pulling you out the back of the car.’
Her face must have paled, because he leaned forward and took her hand. ‘I’ll be with you every step of the way, Aimee. We’ll be tethered to each other at all times.’
‘The whole way?’
‘Until the top. Until the ambulance.’
She frowned at the finality of that statement. ‘Then what?’
He frowned. ‘Then that’s it. You go to hospital, then home where you belong.’
What if she didn’t belong anywhere? And why did she suddenly have the urge never to leave this shattered vehicle and the foil blanket and Sam’s gentle touch. ‘That’s it? I won’t see you again?’
He stared at her long and hard. ‘I’ll see how I go. Maybe I’ll drop your luggage back to you when the car’s towed up. You’ll have plenty to keep you busy before then.’
It was utterly insane how anxious she felt at the thought of that. A man she’d known less than a day. ‘I’d like to speak to you again. Under less extraordinary circumstances.’ When I’m showered and groomed and looking pretty. ‘To thank you.’
He nodded even more cautiously. ‘I’ll see how we go.’
That sounded very much like Wayne’s kind of I’ll see. Her father’s kind.
Translation: no.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘HOW many siblings do you have in total?’ Aimee asked after a while, when her inexplicable and irrational umbrage at his apparent brush off had subsided sufficiently. It wouldn’t hurt her to remember that this was business to Sam, no matter how chatty they got waiting for the sun to rise. Maybe rapport development was a whole semester unit over at Search and Rescue School. And maybe the two of them just had more rapport than most.
But it didn’t mean he’d want to take his work home with him—even metaphorically.
It just meant he was good at his job.
‘Seven,’ he murmured, leaning forward and blowing hot air into the cupped circle of her hand, still inside his. He pressed his lips against her fingertips for a tantalising, accidental moment. They were as soft and full as they looked. But warmer. And the sensation branded itself inside her sad, deluded mind.
Wayne had kissed her fingers many a time—and lots of other places besides—but while his lips had felt pleasant, even lovely at the beginning, they’d never snared her focus and dragged it by the throat the way the slightest touch from Sam did. She’d even started to wonder whether she was physically capable of a teeth-gnashing level of arousal, or whether ‘lovely’ was going to be her life-long personal best.
Please don’t let this be the drugs talking. Please. She wanted to think she was capable of a gut-curling attraction at least once in her life.
‘I’d definitely want more than one child,’ she said, then snapped herself to more attention when she heard her own dreamy tone. ‘Speaking as an only child, I mean. I’d want more.’
‘Your parents never did?’
‘Mum did, I think.’ But Lisbet Leigh hadn’t been the pants-wearer in their family. ‘Dad was content with just me.’
‘Why “just” you? I’m sure they are very proud of their only daughter.’
She let her head loll sideways on its neck brace. His way. ‘You really are an idealist, aren’t you?’
Was his total lack of offence at her ant-induced candour symbolic of his easygoing nature or of something more? Was Sam as engaged in her company as she was in his? Or was she just chasing rainbows? Maybe even painting them?
‘I’m sure my father will be eternally disappointed that his one-and-only progeny wasn’t really up to par,’ she continued.
‘Define par.’
She shrugged, and snuggled in tighter into her foil blanket. ‘You know … Grades. Sports. Achievements.’
‘You work for the country’s leading science and culture body. That’s quite an achievement.’
‘Right. And I had good grades. Not record-breaking, but steady.’
‘I can imagine.’ He smiled, and it reminded her a little bit of the way people smiled at precocious children. Or drunks. She didn’t like it.
‘You’re humouring me.’
‘I’m—’
Choosing your words very carefully …?
‘—just enjoying you.’ He almost fell over himself to correct himself. ‘Your company. Talking.’
Well … Awkward, much? ‘Any way, nothing short of medicine or law was ever going to satisfy my father. He’s had high expectations of me my whole life.’ And was constantly disappointed. Ironic, really, when she considered how his marriage had ended. Imploded. And how little he’d done to save it.
‘Do you like what you do?’
‘I love what I do.’
‘Then that’s what you’re meant to be doing. Don’t doubt yourself.’
His absolute certainty struck her. ‘What if I might love being a doctor, too?’
He shrugged. ‘Then that was where you’d have found yourself. Life has a way of working out.’
His assured belief was as foreign to her as it was exhausting. How would it feel to be that sure—about everything? She settled back against the seat and let her eyes flutter closed for a moment, just to take the sting of dryness out of them.
‘Aimee—’
Sam was right there, gently rousing her with a feather touch to her cheek.
‘I can’t even rest my eyes?’
‘You went to sleep.’
Oh. ‘I can’t sleep?’
He stroked her hair again. Almost like an apology. ‘When you get to the hospital you can sleep all you want. But I need you to stay awake now. With me. Can you do that?’
Stay with me. Her sigh was more of a flutter deep in her chest. ‘I can do that.’ But it was going to be a challenge. It had to be four a.m. and she’d left at six yesterday morning. Twenty-four hours was a long haul, even if she had had some unconscious moments before he’d found her. And apparently another just now.
‘Tell me about your research,’ he said, clearly determined to keep her awake. ‘What’s your favourite story?’
She told him. All about wrinkled, weathered, ninety-five-year-old Dorothy Kenworthy, who’d come to Australia to marry a man she barely knew eight decades before. To start a life in a town she’d never heard of. A town full of prospects and gold and potential. About how poor they’d been, and how Dorothy’s husband had pulled a small cart with his culture-shocked bride and her belongings the six-hundred kilometres inland from the coast to the mining town he’d called home. How long love had been in coming for them; about the day that it finally had. And about how severely Dorothy’s heart had fractured the day, seventy years later, she’d lost him.
Stories of that kind of hardship were almost impossible to imagine now—how people had endured them—overcome them—and were always her favourites.
‘Dorothy reminds me that there is always hope. No matter how dire things get.’
Sam’s brow folded and he drifted away from her again. Not because he was bored—his intense focus while she’d been telling the start of the story told her that—but because he’d taken her words deep inside himself and was processing them.
‘Why didn’t she give up?’ he eventually asked. ‘When she was frightened and heatstroked and feeling so … alien.’
‘Because she’d come so far. Literally and figuratively. And she knew how important she was to her husband. She didn’t want to let him down.’ His frown trebled as she watched. ‘Plus she’d made a commitment. And she was a woman of great personal honour.’
‘Is that something you believe in? Honouring commitments?’
‘What do we have if not our honour?’
Finally his eyes came back to her. ‘Is it her story on your thumb drive?’
‘No. It’s another one …’
She told him that one too. Then another, and another, sipping occasionally at the water he meted out sparingly and not minding when he shared from the same bottle. She didn’t care if Search and Rescue Sam gave her a few boy germs while he was giving her the greatest gift any man in her life had ever given her.
He listened.
He showed interest. He asked questions. He didn’t just listen waiting for an opportunity to talk about himself, or slowly veer the subject around to something of more interest to him. He heard her. He didn’t interrupt. And he wasn’t the slightest bit bored.
Just like that a light came on, bright and blazing and impossible to ignore, right at the back of Aimee’s mind.
That was the kind of man she wanted for herself. That was the kind of man she’d never really believed existed. Yet here one sat: living, breathing evidence—her already compromised chest tightened—and the universe had handed him to her.
How had she ever thought a man like Wayne was even close to worthy? Maybe if she’d been allowed out more as a young girl, had got to meet more people, sample more personalities … Maybe then she never would have accepted Wayne’s domination of her. Maybe if she hadn’t grown up watching it, until her father had finally forced her mother’s hand …
‘I can see you love these stories.’ His blue eyes were locked on her so firmly, but were conflicted, yet immobile. ‘You’re … glowing.’
Unaccustomed to the intensity he was beaming at her, and still unsettled by her thoughts of just a moment before, Aimee took shelter in flippancy. ‘Maybe it’s the glow-sticks.’ She smiled and settled against the seat-back, her body begging her to let it drift into exhausted slumber. ‘Or the sunrise.’
That seemed to snap him out of his blue-eyed trance. Around them the light had changed from the total absence of any light at all during the night to a deep, dark purple, then a navy. And the navy was lightening up in patches by the moment.
Sam glanced at his watch. A dozen worry lines formed on his face. ‘Okay Aimee, the darkness is lifting. We made it.’ He found her hand and held it. ‘I’m going to need you to be very brave now, and to trust me more than ever.’
We will not fall. She heard the words though she knew he didn’t say them.
It only took another few minutes before she realised why a new kind of tension radiated from his big body and from the hand he’d wrapped so securely around hers. The deep blue outside seemed to dilute as she watched it, and darkness began to take on the indistinct blurs of shape. Then they firmed up into more defined forms—the tree branch outside the window, the hint of a hill on the horizon—as the first touch of lightness streaked high across the sky.
Her heart-rate accelerated as it struggled to pump blood that seemed to thicken and grow sluggish.
Around them she saw nothing but emerging treetops—some higher than her poor battered Honda, some lower. The front of the car was in darkness longer than the areas around it because the nose was buried in a treetop. Literally balancing in the crown of a big eucalypt, which threw off its distinctive scent as the overnight frost evaporated. In her shattered side mirror she could see the angle of the hillside—steep and severe—that the back of her little hatchback had wedged against.
And they perched perilously between the two, staring down into the abyss.
A black dread surged from deep inside Aimee’s terrified body. She sucked in a breath to cry out but it froze, tortured, in her lungs and only a pained squeak issued, as high as the elated morning chorus of the birds around them but infinitely more horrified.
‘Hold on to me, Aimee….’
Sam’s voice was as much a tether as any of the cables strapping her into her car, and she clung to it emotionally even though she couldn’t rip her eyes from the scene she hung suspended over, emerging through the shattered windscreen, as the sun threw clarity across the morning and finally lifted the veil of darkness.
Her squeak evolved into a primitive whine and her entire body hardened into terrified rigour. The shadowy blur of Australian bush below them resolved itself into layer upon layer of towering treetops, falling away for hundreds of meters and narrowing to a sliver of water at the bottom of the massive gully she’d flown over the edge of.
Half a kilometre of deathly fall below the tenuous roost of her car, wedged between the treetop and the mountain.
Sam! Sam!
She couldn’t even make vowels, let alone call to him. The only movement her body would allow was the microscopic muscular changes that pushed air out of her body in a string of agonised whimpers. Like a dog with a mortal injury.
‘Look at me, Aimee …’
Impossible … It was so, so much worse than she’d feared even in her darkest moments. Luck, he’d called it, but it was more of a miracle that her car had hit the crown of this tree rather than plummeting straight past it and down to the tumbling rapids at the bottom of the gully. She’d have been dead before even getting down there, ricocheting off ancient trees like a pinball. Every single base instinct kept her eyes locked on the source of the sudden danger. The threat of the drop. Horrible, yet she couldn’t look away.
Her heart slammed so hard against her ribs she thought they might crack further.
Sam forced himself into her line of vision, stretching across her to break the traction of her gaze on the certain death below. The shaft of pain from the extra pressure on her leg was more effective than anything in impacting on her crippled senses.
‘Aimee …!’
Her eyes tried to drift past him, her face turning slightly, but he forced her focus back to him with insistent fingers on her chin.
‘At me, Aimee … Look only at me.’
Only at me. She heard the words but couldn’t process them. This was like last night all over again. It’s the shock, something deep down inside her tossed up. It was the shock preventing her from looking at him. Understanding him.
The whining went on, completely independent of her will.
Sam slid both warm hands up on either side of her face and forced it to him. This close, he all but obliterated the dreadful view down to the forest floor. In that moment her whole world became the blue of his eyes, the golden tan of his skin and the blush of his lips.
‘Aimee …’ Sam’s voice buzzed at her. ‘Think about Dorothy. Think how frightened and alone she felt out there in the desert—fifteen years old, with a man she’d only just met. Think about the courage she would have had to have to go with him. To get onto that boat in Liverpool and leave her entire family for a hot, hostile country. Think about how hard she would have fought against the fear.’
The most genteel, gentle woman she’d ever interviewed. And the toughest. Words finally scraped past her restricted larynx. ‘She had her husband …’
‘You have me.’ He ducked his head to recapture her eyes. ‘Aimee, you have me, and I’m going to get you out of here.’
This time her eyes didn’t slide away, back to the void below them. They gripped onto Sam’s.
He sighed his relief. ‘There you are. Good girl.’ He leaned in and pressed his hot lips to her clammy forehead.
The reassuring intimacy just about broke her again. ‘Sam …’
‘I know.’ He dropped back into his position, lying across her, between her and the awful view. ‘But you’re okay. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Not while I’m around.’
She blew three short puffs through frigid lips. ‘Okay.’
Sudden noises outside drew his focus briefly away, and when it returned it was intent. ‘Aimee … The extraction team are getting into position. Someone else is going to be taking over, but I’m not going to leave you, okay? I want you to remember that. We’re going to get buffeted and separated for moments, but I’ll always be there. I’m still tethered to you. Okay?’
She nodded, jerky and fast, curling her hand hard around his, not wanting to let go. Ever.
He stroked her hair back. ‘It’s about to get really, really busy, and no one’s going to ask your permission for anything. They’ll just take over. You’re going to hate that, but be patient. You’ll be up top in no time and then you’re back in charge.’
Her laugh was brittle and weak at the same time. ‘I thought you were in charge.’
His smile eclipsed the sunrise. ‘Nah. You just let me think that.’
She sobbed then, and pulled his hand to her lips and pressed them there. He rested his forehead on hers for a moment as the clanking outside drew closer.
‘I wet myself,’ she whispered, tiny and ashamed.
He wiped a tear away with his thumb. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I don’t think I can do this.’
‘You can do anything in this world that you set your mind to, Aimee Leigh.’
His confidence was so genuine, and so awfully misplaced, but it filled her with a blazing sort of optimism. Just enough to get her through this.
Just enough to do something really, really stupid.
She stretched as far forward as the flexi-straps would allow, pulled him by his rescue jacket towards her, and mashed her lips into his. Heat burst through her sensory system. His mouth was just as warm and soft as it had felt on her fingers, but sweet and strong and surprised at the same time, and salty from her own tears. She moved her lips against his, firming up the kiss, making it count, ignoring the fact that he wasn’t reciprocating. Just insanely grateful for the fact that he hadn’t pulled back.
Her heart beat out its triumph.
An unfamiliar face dropped in spider-like at their side window just as Sam tore his mouth away from hers. A dozen different expressions chased across his rugged features in a heartbeat: pity, embarrassment, confusion, and—there!—the tiny golden glow of reciprocal desire.
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