Rescue Nights

by Nina Hamilton

  His throbbing cock was actually causing him pain so he pulled her hips to the edge of the bench and with hands embarrassingly shaking, he covered himself in protection. Knowing that she was well and truly ready for him by the dazed sheen to her gaze, he drove himself in to the hilt and marvelled in the slick warmth of her body, sheathing his.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Even the cold of the bench below her wasn’t enough to distract Kate from the intense pleasure that had her holding back her own climax. Andrew was above her, head thrown back, almost roaring his approval.

  For once, he wasn’t checking her reaction, checking to make sure that she was fine, that she didn’t feel the slightest bit of discomfort. There was a freedom in that. There was a freedom in the pinch of the bench where his thrusts were so vigorous, she was sure that any lesser furniture would fall apart under the sheer force. There was a freedom in the way his body raced to its own climax and hers was left to find its own way, something that didn’t seem to be causing her any problems. In fact, she bit her arm in an attempt to delay the inevitable, wanting to watch the man with her in his moment of lost control.

  He towered above her, muscles corded in stark relief, as every atom in him sang as if desperate for that moment of satisfaction. Then the moment fractured and Kate’s own vision clouded as she came.

  For long minutes, Kate lay winded trying to bring her body back into one dimension. Andrew dropped a kiss to her stomach as he brought his weight off where he had collapsed over her body.

  ‘Please tell me you are still intact?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends on what you want to call intact.’ Kate pushed herself up on her elbows and touched her head with a smile. ‘Concussion may be involved, but boy was it fun.’

  She joked, but this had, more than anything, made her feel herself again. Though she had to admit such brilliant, shiny sex had been far from her pre-Andrew norm. Nevertheless, feeling strong and at home in her own body was something both deeply missed and now truly celebrated.

  She put on Andrew’s t-shirt that he had thrown in her direction. He had kept the pants and was now fishing in her villa’s fridge for a beer. Somehow, this was the place that they always ended up. Probably because she was more likely to have been shopping for groceries, even if for the last seven weeks he had been the one who had insisted on carrying each and every grocery bag.

  That memory of Andrew’s attentiveness brought Kate back into the world. She realized that she had at least a few phone calls to return, a few anxious family members to soothe. Everyone had been waiting for the outcome of her appointment today. Everyone had been so kind, not mentioning what would happen if her injury meant another delay, not mentioning what would happen if she couldn’t completely recover. They all deserved the courtesy of her news now.

  ‘I’ll be ready for the fitness test tomorrow,’ she stated with absolute certainty once she got her mother on the line.

  ‘You need your sleep,’ said Andrew, interrupting her contemplation of the stars as she stood staring out, leaning against the French door frame in her bedroom.

  When she turned, he was lying facing her, wordlessly holding up the blanket in invitation, waiting for her to come and settle against his warm skin.

  As she fitted her body against his, it was hard not to think in terms of the love word. They hadn’t spoken of a future, but surely with such consideration and passion there was the possibility for one.

  ‘Three more like that.’

  To be approved again for active duty as a rescue paramedic you didn’t just need a doctor’s certificate from one of the city’s premier consultants. You also had to prove that you could perform any number of manual tasks, in front of a necessarily critical audience. The stakes were too high for you to fail on the job, you needed to be an unbreakable link in the team.

  That was why she was climbing a rope in order to hit a bell for the seventh out of ten times.

  ‘Come on Kate, you can do it twice as fast as that,’ came a call from Joe.

  Even with her arms burning as if acid had been poured into each joint, Kate almost managed a smile. That was before she remembered the progressive pain of the beep test up next.

  ‘Strength test, beep test, skills test completed and passed. Final test is a drag and hold, but first you can have a twenty minute break for a drink.’

  Kate listened to the tester and tried to hide the sheer exhaustion that came from pushing for hours at a time. Because she had been injured in a workplace accident, Queensland Rescue had brought in an outsider to certify her, not wanting emotion over her reported bravery to sway the decision. Cairns Command had accepted the protocol and tried not to look insulted at any questions of impartiality.

  ‘I’ll hit the locker room then,’ Kate walked out with a ramrod straight spine.

  In the change rooms, as if pre-arranged, Andrew sat on the long wooden bench.

  ‘Afternoon tea of champions,’ he said, tossing her a coke and a packet of lollies. ‘I’ve heard only good things from the gym.’

  Kate shrugged and tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed his absence. It wasn’t that he had been involved in any call-outs because she had spotted Joe and Ben observing all day.

  ‘I bloody hate this enough normally,’ she confessed. ‘This time I’ve only been running again for the last three weeks. I thought my lungs were going to burst.’

  Embarrassed at admitting to such weakness, Kate did a double check as to the emptiness of the toilet and shower stalls before sitting down beside Andrew. His hand inched over to rest a bare centimetre from her own. So close, she could feel the warmth of it radiating.

  ‘It is fine. You’ll be fine,’ he said.

  That was it? Kate wondered why a usually verbal man was suddenly so reserved on the reassurance.

  The pause went so long she found herself filling it. ‘The skills lab. Well, that quite frankly is a little humiliating. I know I had minor concussion but did they think it was brain damage? Because my CPR skills and assessment techniques hadn’t suddenly fallen out of my brain during the last two months.’

  Kate had six more minutes of her break left but she could feel herself moving into babbling territory. Andrew stood as she did. As she went to leave, he leaned over and put his mouth to hers. It was pure instinct that had Kate responding to his kiss before good sense and a strict understanding of workplace propriety took over.

  ‘Not here,’ she said, pushing at his chest. ‘You know that door is unlocked. Even if everyone here knew about our relationship, making out here would still be definitely off the table.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Andrew, in clipped tones, running his hand through his shortly cropped blond hair.

  Kate just shook her head at the man who was no longer meeting her gaze. ‘Now I have to go and drag someone twenty metres and hope no ribs pop out.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ he said.

  As pissed off as she was, Kate couldn’t help but be glad that he was finally showing some support today.

  Kate received another set of instructions for what felt like the fiftieth time today.

  ‘We can’t have any staff directly paid through Queensland Rescue to participate directly in our assessment. However, as Dr Wentworth here is employed through Queensland Health we are lucky that he has volunteered to play the body.’

  Kate had to stop herself from visibly wincing. Andrew was six-foot-two and made of pure rangy muscle. Dragging him the full twenty metres mandated was going to be painful and near impossible. At last year’s standardized testing for the whole team, the body had been one of the admin girls, so what the hell was Andrew playing at, agreeing to put her in this position?

  For a female paramedic, this was one of the single hardest physical tests to pass, and the one that guaranteed the most failures. The reality was that it was something that was unlikely to be replicated in the field so they did it, got it over and done with, and tried to make it as easy as possible.

  As Andrew lay down at the end of
the helicopter tarmac, with the temporary markers laid out Kate was still bewildered by the motivation that would have induced him to volunteer. Surely, he would have acknowledged to himself that he was making her journey back to work harder.

  ‘Ready, set…’

  At the tester’s ‘go’, Kate made her run along the hard surface. With the outside location, the whole base was watching and she hoped like hell that they won’t going to be watching a failure.

  Under her arm was the rigid ski onto which she had to manipulate Andrew’s body.

  Reaching him, where he was lying face down in the prone position, she went to grab his shoulder. When she went to pull on it, in order to get him shifted over to where she could start getting him strapped down to the unrolled ski, she was shocked to find his body rigid.

  There was an unspoken understanding within the industry when undergoing these sorts of tests. A loose flexible body was infinitely easier for those being assessed to deal with, and as such, no-one volunteering for these tests would be anything but loose.

  Most of the time, Kate had to stop whoever was playing the body from actually helping her by moving and getting her disqualified. As she went to pull on Andrew’s arm for the third unsuccessful time, it looked like that wasn’t going to be today’s problem. Really the man was so rigid, that he would be lucky to survive the next few minutes without an ‘accidental’ kick to the ribs.

  ‘Is this about the kiss?’ she asked, in a voice so low that it wouldn’t reach even the most sensitive of ears beyond Andrew. ‘Because, if so, fuck you.’

  Andrew’s jaw clenched down harder but finally he went lax enough for her to struggle his body into position. Even without taking his full weight, this portion of the challenge was taxing.

  By this point, Kate’s breath was coming out in hard pants that reminded her that her lung capacity was still stretching back to normal. However, she had made the decision that she was ready for this kind of uber-challenging work and she was going to live up to that promise.

  With that motivation and banishing Andrew’s oddity from her mind, Kate buckled the final strap and didn’t worry when she saw that it pinched his skin a little now. Standing up and locking her arms into position, Kate began the backward shuffle that would move her, and drag her patient, the full length of the course and allow her her recertification badge.

  ‘Well done and well within time.’ The blood was pounding hard enough through Kate’s veins that that she barely heard the words of congratulations from the tester. However, she made the effort to lift her sore arms up and smile as she returned his handshake.

  ‘I’m looking forward to being back at work,’ she said.

  Joe, Ben, and Margo had gone for less formal embraces. For the moment, it suited her that no-one had thought to undo Andrew’s straps so he was still strapped to the ski, where she had dropped him across the line about three minutes ago.

  ‘Well, I think that our favourite new old member of our team might be deserving of some beers tonight,’ said Joe, as he slapped Kate on her back for a second time.

  ‘I might deserve them,’ Kate replied. ‘But at this point I think that the most likely outcome would be that they would make me fall over. Can I raincheck?’

  ‘Only until tomorrow,’ said Margo.

  Kate smiled at her friend’s congratulations. The relief and warmth they felt about her return was genuine, which only made Andrew’s actions more inexplicable.

  ‘I suppose I should let Dr Wentworth out of his bonds then.’

  The others turned around guiltily but Kate felt no such emotion. Even undoing the clasp that had gone on roughly didn’t bring the slightest flinch. There was a small graze on the back of his hand where it had made contact with the gravel and it was only after Margo had exclaimed over it Kate offered her services with the first aid kit.

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll treat it before I get changed to go home.’

  If the others noticed her lack of gracious enthusiasm, it went uncommented upon. Maybe they laid it down at the feet of the inevitable exhaustion that came with the rigors of fitness testing.

  Andrew and Kate made their way to the privacy of the locker room without exchanging a single word. Once there Kate’s only contribution to the conversation was ‘sit’ as she hunted up the necessary supplies to dress and cover the graze.

  She thought she could do the whole procedure in professional silence but when she reached out and touched the hand he had without speaking held out, she just as quickly dropped it, and pushed against his immovable shoulder.

  ‘You volunteered for that,’ she said, her voice breaking a little. ‘Really?’

  Andrew’s shoulders shrugged, moving under her touch, ‘I volunteered, as in they asked if I could do it, and I couldn’t think of a reason to say no.’

  ‘Apart from the fact that you are probably one of the bulkiest people on site today, so you could have understood that saying yes was going to make my accreditation just that much harder and make any chance of relapsing today just that little bit more likely.’

  Kate kept her voice low. She would have hated anyone to overhear their conversation. As far as anyone knew, today had been a triumph.

  ‘Are you calling me fat?’ he asked, with a half-smile on his face.

  ‘A man who just tried to sabotage me during one of the most important moments of my professional career doesn’t get to make jokes and be cute.’

  ‘Did you ever think I might be for just one moment absolutely terrified that you were going to be back in that helicopter facing God knows what risks?’

  Andrew didn’t give her a minute to answer as his obvious frustrations poured out. ‘I have supported you all the way through your recovery and just for a moment today, I had a moment, one moment of panic. So I’m sorry if I slowed you down for a second but bad luck; I might love how fearless you are but sometimes that part of you scares me.’

  The tremor in Andrew’s voice shook Kate to her core but it didn’t stop her reply.

  ‘Well, I was terrified today that I wasn’t going to be deemed good enough to go back to the work that I loved, so we are equal on the fear front.’

  However, because first aid was a reflex, beyond all emotion, Kate took his hand in hers again and began in the relatively slow process of cleaning and dressing the small graze on his wrist. It was only after she had finished this process and was packing up the kit that she heard another person entering the locker room.

  Kate took a deep breath before she turned and faced the new arrival. Pete, the Base Commander, was looking chuffed.

  ‘I see we’ve got you back to business,’ he said, gesturing to the first aid kit in her hand. ‘I hope it is only minor and it means that we have the A team in the air again.’

  ‘Very minor sir,’ Kate answered.

  Congratulations,’ he said, as he held his hand out towards her.

  After the slightly awkward ceremonial gesture, he turned to Andrew. ‘I’ve filled in the paperwork your London office needed. I can’t pretend we won’t be sad to see you go, when your next month here is up.’

  Later, Kate would wonder how that polite smile of hers remained so firmly, so resolutely in place as she realised the extent of Andrew’s betrayal. Somehow, she accepted more congratulations, turned down more offers of drinks and didn’t look Andrew in the eyes as she made her way to the car.

  ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.’

  How had she ended up being the girl who didn’t ask the obvious questions. Like, dammit, when are you going back to your real life?

  Kate realized that if she sat in the work carpark any longer, someone was going to come to her window and ask if she was OK. Or, Andrew was going to get away from the work conversation and follow behind her in his car and they were going to have to walk through the resort doing the arguing couple thing. No, she definitely didn’t want that, especially seeing she didn’t figure as any sort of a partner in his life, professionally or personally
it seemed.

  Half an hour later, the knock she had been dreading, and expecting, sounded. At least, here, at home, she could ignore him in private.

  ‘Kate, just open the door. I will stand here all night if I have to,’ Andrew called, after the fourth increasingly loud bang had gone unanswered.

  ‘Say your piece, but you are not coming in,’ she said, as she cracked the cedar door open halfway and crowded the entrance with her body.

  He looked frustrated, but seemed to accept her dictate and stood his ground only slightly too close for comfort. ‘I wanted to say sorry for leaving you out of the loop. My plans for London were something I wanted to talk to you about myself.’

  My mistake,’ she said, voice clipped. ‘I knew you were going back but I guess I didn’t realize that the dates were so set.’

  Kate could feel her breath getting shallow and knew, this time, that it wasn’t broken ribs stopping oxygen from fully reaching her lungs. ‘If that is all, I have had a tiring day and I think I will enjoy a night of reality television alone.’

  She stepped back, but Andrew’s large hand hitting the door stopped her from fully closing it on him.

  ‘How could you think that everything we have been through begins and ends with that?’ he asked, one shoulder now over the threshold.

  Rather than letting him get too close, Kate gave up her tactical position. She walked away and, from the fridge, overfilled one large wineglass. If they were going to have this conversation now, she deserved fortification. Andrew deserved nothing, so she offered nothing.

  Not wanting to bring back memories of the way he had had her on the marble bench top last night, Kate decided to sit on the lounge room couch and wait for him to bring the opening sally.

  Andrew sat, resting his forearms along his thighs. The last time she had seen him look so agitated was the night of her accident.

  ‘You have to understand,’ he started. ‘The London thing is my dream job.’

  Kate just took another gulp of wine. She wasn’t going to make this an easier conversation for him.