* * *
‘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 a
nd 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.
CHAPTER THREE
SHE WAS NO lightweight, this woman in his arms.
Jake had to lean forward into the fierce wind and his feet were dragging in the soft sand that was no match for these conditions. It swirled around enough to obscure his feet completely and it would have reached his nose and eyes if the rain hadn’t been heavy enough to drive it down again.
Another blast of wind made Jake stagger and almost fall. He gritted his teeth and battled on. They had to find shelter. She’d been right. He might wish it was Ben instead of him, but he was lucky to still be alive and he owed it to her to try and make sure the heroic actions of his rescuers weren’t wasted to the extent that one of them lost her life.
A river, she’d said. Good grief. He didn’t even know the name of the woman he was carrying. A person who had risked her life for his and he’d been ungrateful enough to practically tell her he wished she hadn’t. That he would have stayed with Ben if he’d been given a choice.
His left leg was dragging more than the right and a familiar ache was tight
ening like a vice in his thigh.
Another vice was tightening around his heart as his thoughts were dragged back to Ben, who would still be being tossed around in the ocean in that pathetically small life raft.
The combination of his sore leg and thoughts of his brother inevitably dragged his mind back to Afghanistan. They’d only been nineteen when they’d joined the army. Sixteen years ago now but the memories were as fresh as ever. Had it been his idea first that it was the ideal way to escape their father?
Charles Logan’s voice had the ability to echo in his head with all the force of the gunfire from a war zone.
You moronic imbeciles, you’re your mother’s children, you’ve inherited nothing from me. Stupid, stupid, stupid...
No. They’d both wanted to run. Both had needed the brutal reality of the army to find out what life was like outside an overprivileged upbringing. To find out who they really were.
But he had been more excited about it, hadn’t he? In the movies, the soldiers were heroes and it always came out all right for them in the end.
They weren’t supposed to get shipped home with a shattered leg as the aftermath of being collateral damage from a bus full of school kids that had been targeted by a roadside bomb.
His brother’s last words still echoed in his head.
Why do you think she killed herself?
It had been Ben who’d found her, all those years ago, when the boys had been only fourteen.
Did he know something he’d never told him? Had he found evidence that it hadn’t been an accidental overdose of prescription meds washed down with alcohol?
A note, even?
No. It couldn’t be true. She wouldn’t have deserted her children with such finality. She’d loved them, even if she hadn’t been around often enough to show them how much.
A cry was ripped from Jake’s lips. An anguished denial of accepting such a premeditated abandonment.
Denial, too, of what was happening right now? That his brother was out there somewhere in that merciless ocean? Too cold to hang on any longer?
Drowned already, even?
No. Surely he’d know. He’d feel it if his other half was being ripped away for eternity.
The Maverick Millionaire Page 2
