“I can try.” She eased forward with infinite caution, her tired muscles aching in protest, and swallowed hard against vertigo as the wind sent the overburdened tree-top swaying in an exaggerated arc. Then, after wrapping her legs tight around the fearfully slim trunk, she ran questing fingers up the boy’s small back, straining upwards as far as she could. As soon as she had a firm grip on his T-shirt, she said gently, “Right, Barry. I’m going to pull you loose. I want you to hold on as tight as you can. Don’t panic if you feel a tug, because I’ve got you. Understand?”
“Y-yes.”
She gritted her teeth and tugged, and the T-shirt tore off the jagged edge it had been caught on. The boy screamed as he heard the material rip and he twisted like an eel to clutch, not at the trunk as she’d told him to, but at her hand.
She could feel it coming the split second before it happened. With the violent shift of his body, the boy lost his perch. She had no time to do more than to snake her hand around his wrist in a death clench before he went tumbling past her.
Then Sian screamed as well, as her torso was yanked backwards and both the boy and her back and shoulders slammed with stunning force against the trunk.
She hit her head and nearly blacked out. For one horrible moment she was afraid that the strength in her locked legs would give out, that they would both fall, tumbling head over heels to their deaths. Dizzy and sickened, with pain shooting up from her arm and shoulder, she hung upside-down and maintained her clutch on the boy’s wrist with all her might.
“Dear God in heaven!” Matt’s exclamation was shaken.
Tears streamed from her eyes and blinded her, for the boy’s weight was too much. Her intake of breath was a tortured rasp. “Help me!”
“Oh, darling—just hold on. I can almost reach him. Sian, for the love of God, don’t slip now. Nearly there—”
A long, low moan broke from her lips as her entire body shook with the stress. Her torso was stretched in an intolerable bow, the tendons of her arm standing out like the strings of a violin keening. Then the weight eased, and Matt breathed, “Got him. Let go!”
Her fingers slipped away strengthlessly. Tilting her head back, she watched with blurred, upside-down vision as he slung the boy on to his broad back, where Barry clung like a monkey. Matt looked up at her. The fear and tension had tautened the bones of his face into sharp angles before he started to dissolve into a white haze. All right now. Let go. Her lips parted in a sigh, and her dusky eyelashes fluttered.
“Sian!” Her name was a violent roar, and startled her alert. “Don’t faint! I’m going to hand him down to his mother and be right back. Don’t move an inch—do you hear? Answer me!”
“I hear you,” she whispered, through the pounding in her head. She hurt all over, though, and shock was making her so dizzy. It would be terribly easy to just sleep…she started to drift away on a spinning cloud…
Until the warm, hard reality of Matt’s hand eased underneath her abraded shoulders. He lifted her head and laid it gently in the hollow of his corded neck and shoulder, then slid his arm up and around her torso. “There now, I’ve got you,” he soothed. “You’re safe. Try to put your arm around my neck and let go with your legs.”
She turned her face into the salted heat of his neck. She tried to put her injured arm around him but, though he felt so strong and rock-steady, she lacked capacity to hold on to him. “I can’t do it,” she said in despair. “I’ll fall.”
“Ssh,” he whispered, and turned his face into hers. The corner of his open mouth moved against her cheekbone. “I’d lose my arm before I let you fall. You’ll just swing around, that’s all. I promise.”
Her weak tears slipped along his neck. “But I’ve hurt my shoulder. I don’t think I can manage the climb down.”
“I’ll be right behind you the whole way, with one arm around your waist,” Matt said steadily. The rigidity of his arm was severely restricting her breathing. “Please, Sian. Trust me.”
Her eyes closed, and she did as he asked, the tension in first one leg, then the other, loosening in submission to either death or safety. Her body swung around and the world righted, and she groaned, a shaken animal sound, at the terror and the pain of it. The muscles in Matt’s arm bunched hard as granite at her back; she connected with the length of his body.
He had one leg hooked around a branch, the other outstretched to a stronger one below, and he held her perfectly steady with just the one arm—at what cost of strength, she couldn’t guess—until her feet had found the same branch and she could stand for herself.
Then, for long moments, he just crushed her to him, burying his face into her hair. “I’ll give you this much, young lady,” he said tautly from the back of his throat, “you do know how to frighten the wits out of a man.”
She huddled, shaking, between the barrier of his chest and the tree trunk. “Is he safe?”
“Safe and sound and howling his eyes out, the little beast,” said Matt grimly. “Sian, my love, delightful as it is to hold you in my arms, I think I could do a much better job of it on the ground. Is this your way of sweeping me off my feet?”
She leaned her forehead on one hand. “It was entirely unplanned, I assure you.”
“Your poor, lovely back—you’re scraped all over. Have you the strength to hold on with one hand?” he asked. “Good, then I want you to move as I move, and you can let go when I have my arm around your waist like this. All right?”
“All right.”
Pressed against her back, he bent to plant a swift kiss behind her ear. “Good girl.”
The trip down to safety was a nightmare, made bearable only by Matt’s steady chest pressed against her back. Afterwards Sian could never recall much of what happened; she just blindly put her hand and feet where he told her to, and trusted him to do the rest.
Then came the blessed moment when he helped her ease into a sitting position on the lowest, thickest branch before leaping gracefully to the ground. Sian leaned against the tree-trunk, scarcely able to believe that they had made it down alive.
There seemed to be quite a crowd around them, but such was her reduced state that the only person she had eyes for was Matt. Her huge, glazed eyes rested on him, numbly patient, until he straightened and turned back to her, the predator’s gaze alien with relief and some vast undefineable emotion.
He held open his arms and said gently, “Last stop, sweetheart.”
She went down into them as if she were coming home.
Sian woke with a start in darkness, and for a disorientated moment couldn’t remember where she was or how she had come to be there. Then, recognising the shape and feel of her own bed and the familiar outlines of her dresser in the moonlight that spilled in from half-shut curtains, she relaxed and hugged a pillow to her chest.
The pillow was soft and had a faint, clean, spicy smell to it that was strange and yet comfortingly familiar as well. She turned her face into it, inhaling deeply. She ached, all over, from the back of her knees along the length of her raw back and stiff, sore shoulder, and the throbbing lump at the back of her head.
Now she recalled the little boy stuck in the tree, though the image was shot through with the recollection of fear and pain, and through it all, stronger than anything, threaded the memory of Matt’s strong body.
After he had helped her down from the tree, he had immediately swung her overstressed body into his arms and carried her away through a babbling confusion of thanks and well-wishing from the mother of the boy she had helped to rescue. Sian had rested her aching head against his shoulder, face turned into the privacy of his neck.
Joshua and Steven were dispatched to clear away the picnic things, while Jane came along to direct Matt back to South Bend and the quickest route to Memorial Hospital. Though the long day and the ride back had made her sleepy, he wouldn’t let her fall into a doze for fear she had suffered concussi
on when she’d banged her head.
At his and Jane’s insistence during the speed-limit-breaking drive, she had irritably recited times-tables, poems, songs, anything that kept her awake and showed she suffered no impairment of her faculties. Then came the wait in the emergency ward, for X-rays and first aid. The doctor who had seen her had been brisk and overworked; the heat, he had said, seemed to bring out all the crackpots, and he had looked at Sian as if she were one of them, while she tried to ignore Matt’s sardonic smile and Jane’s muffled chuckles.
Having found nothing wrong with her other than scrapes, bruises and strained ligaments, the doctor had prescribed some muscle relaxants for her stiffening arm and shoulder. Matt drove them back to the apartment and went to get the prescription filled, while Jane helped Sian bathe and dress in an over-long T-shirt.
When Matt had come back with the prescription, she’d swallowed a dose and had promptly gone out like a light, but she must have slept for hours, for the medicine had worn off and pain was what had awakened her.
The apartment was very quiet. Sian tried to twist around and find the luminous display of her bedside clock, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It had just gone midnight, which meant that there was probably no one else around, for the group had been planning to see a midnight movie at the local cinema.
Because she was feeling under par and sorry for herself, Sian sniffed a bit and rubbed her nose into the fragrant pillow, and belated recognition blossomed as she recognised Matt’s scent, which lingered on the linen case.
Of course, he had slept in her room only the night before. The smell of him triggered a whole wealth of images and it was no use trying to make sense of the convoluted and certainly stormy aspects of their relationship, for Sian’s sensual memories were only of the good things—comfort, and strength, and the urgent relief with which he had held her after the traumatic ordeal.
Easy tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away angrily. All he had to do was be useful in a crisis, and she started to associate his scent with attributes like reliability and steadfastness! She hadn’t even known him for more than a couple of days, and now, just because she was feeling a little down and he had been there when she had needed him, she had to go and miss him, didn’t she?
How sillily she was behaving, how weak and stupid! This was just the sort of thing she had wanted to avoid: this empty, idiotic yearning. Thank God she was too sensible to fall in love with the man, for that would be the final straw.
Oh, how she ached. Sian tossed and turned fretfully but couldn’t get into a position that gave relief to her abused body. Finally having to admit defeat, she threw back her covers and rose shakily on sore feet to search for the muscle relaxants. If she remembered correctly, Jane had left the bottle on the kitchen counter.
Sian left her bedroom and stepped into the hall. She noticed the light was on in the living-room and curiously went to investigate, for the light she and Jane normally left on when they went out for the evening was the one over the back porch.
As she limped around the corner and into golden, indirect illumination and the sound of soft music playing on the stereo, a tawny head lifted from the arm of the sofa where a long, tough body reclined, and Matt said quietly, “Sian?”
She faltered to a halt. One self-conscious hand crept up to her gleaming, tousled hair as she asked in a sleep-blurred voice, “What are you doing here?”
“We felt that somebody should stay to keep an eye on you in case you needed anything, and, as I’m not a Monty Python fan, I volunteered,” he replied, rising smoothly to his feet. He had forsaken his denim shorts for a pair of equally faded jeans and grey sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off. His casual good looks and masculine presence were such an exactly perfect product of wish-fulfilment that the weak tears flooded back again and glittered brilliantly in her green eyes. “What’s the matter—feeling achy?”
The gentleness in the question was just what she had not needed. She turned away from him in embarrassed confusion as the tears spilled over, nodding mutely.
He walked around the edge of the sofa and put a careful arm around her. “Come on. Let’s get you some medication.”
She allowed herself to be led back through the hall, flinching and wiping her damp cheeks when he flicked on the light, but he never so much as glanced at her as he went to run cold water into a tall glass and shook out a couple of pills into his palm.
He offered them to her and she took them with a grimace, drinking thirstily until the water was gone. Then she exclaimed with disgust, “I hate taking those things, they make me so dopey!”
His grin was keen and white as he took away the glass and set it in the sink. “I know what you mean. Once I had whiplash from a car accident and took some, but I only ended up doing more injury to myself by walking into walls. Still, they’ll help you sleep for the first couple of nights. Your bruises are coming up lovely, aren’t they?”
She glanced down in even deeper embarrassment at the rainbow of colours mottling her bare arms. Some odd impulse made her say slowly, “They look worse than they really are. I bruise very easily, and never remember afterwards how I managed to do it.”
The silence in the kitchen was very deep. Sian kept her face half averted, downbent. When Matt spoke, his voice was wry. “Forgiveness, Sian?”
A violent tremor rippled through her. She waited until it passed. “I don’t know.”
“Your delicate skin—” He ran a light finger up her arm, then said abruptly, “Why don’t you come into the living-room with me until those muscle relaxants start to work, or are you already sleepy?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep yet.”
“All right,” he said easily, and opened up the refrigerator door. “Want another cold drink? I’m having a beer, but I’m afraid that’s out for you. What about orange juice?”
“Yes, please.” She watched him pour it, then asked somewhat awkwardly, “How are you—any lasting effects from this afternoon?”
His mouth whitened as it drew tight and deepened the lines beside it. He let her precede him back towards the living-room. “Not unless you count the aftermath of shock. I thought only near-death experiences were supposed to make one’s life flash before one’s eyes, but when I saw that kid start to tumble, and you lunged forward to grab him and it looked as if you were going to fall as well, all kinds of ‘should have beens’ and ‘might have beens’ flashed in front of me.”
“I didn’t have anything like that,” said Sian with a frown as she curled stiffly on to the couch and he settled beside her. “All I remember seeing after I fell back and hit my head was stars.”
“Yes, well,” he said, looking at her with an odd, grim expression that eased as he gave her the juice and opened his beer. “You did a very courageous thing today, and at least we all survived to talk about it.”
Sian tilted back her head and drank, then afterwards regarded Matt’s profile contemplatively. He was certainly unstinting in praising her for her courage, but in all honesty she had not really considered herself to be in any personal danger; when she had grabbed on to Barry’s wrist, she had done so instinctively, without thought to the consequences such an action might possibly have for herself.
Real courage, or so it seemed to her, was what people like Matt possessed, for she knew that he had climbed far higher than was safe for a man of his size and weight, in full knowledge of what he risked. Yet he had made everything seem so easy, and not once spoken of what must have gone through his mind as he met her eyes in the tree and made his decision to act as he had. All his comments were of the fear he had felt for her sake, and the boy’s, never his own.
“I owe you my life,” she said, not fully comprehending until that moment the truth in her words.
His head turned, a quick, startled movement. She was obscurely glad that he did not pass off her statement with a shrug and a flippant reply, fo
r she was genuinely moved and the depth of her feelings could not be dismissed lightly.
“That little kid owes you his,” Matt said, with a slow, crooked smile. “And the reckless, self-destructive boy I used to be owes the salvation of his to the memory of a wise girl who taught him the meaning of sanity, and quality of life. That’s just how life is, Sian. That’s the real message in your interlocking circles. You can’t talk of owing anybody as if it were a debt to be paid. Our humanity binds us together with ties of decency, dedication and sometimes self-sacrifice. There isn’t such a thing as a free spirit.”
She looked away, confused and troubled by what he’d said. It showed in the frown that drew the slim wings of her dark brows together.
“I’m not sure I agree with you,” she replied, and, though her gaze rested on the stereo across the room, what she saw in her mind’s eye was the ghost of an abandoned, lonely little girl. “My father’s a free spirit who always does exactly as he pleases.”
“Does he?” Matt asked, settling back to put one long arm with extreme care along her shoulders. He stretched out his muscular legs. “I don’t know much about him, except that he cuts a rather exotic figure in Joshua’s eye. He’s quite a gambler, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said drily, “he’s one of the best in the world. When I haven’t been at boarding schools or university, I’ve been visiting him at whatever five-star hotel happens to be his home at the moment.”
The hand from the muscular arm circling her very gently tucked a black strand of hair behind her hair, making the movement into a caress. “You must have been a beautiful little girl,” he said. “I can just see you in a pretty dress, with your hair curling down your back and those huge, melting green eyes. If I had a daughter like that, it would break my heart to send her away.”
“Would it?” she asked, her throat aching. If Matt gave to his children the same profound gentleness that he had just now showed to her, he would be an excellent father. She almost found herself envying the woman who would become his wife.
A Solitary Heart Page 6
