Unlocking the Rebel's Heart

by Alison Roberts

  Any embryonic interest in a new male acquaintance evaporated instantly. ‘Maybe his wife got bored with fishing,’ she muttered.

  Betty headed for her sink with a snort. ‘If you’re going anywhere near Doc Donaldson’s office, tell him the soup won’t stay hot for much longer.’

  ‘No need.’ It was Don Donaldson who spoke, as he entered the kitchen. ‘I caught Nigel as he left and he told me I was late for lunch.’

  He wasn’t alone.

  ‘I’m just gatecrashing.’ Ben’s wide smile was aimed at Betty. ‘Your soup is as irresistible as you are, Betty.’

  JJ was scrambling to her feet. Sitting around chatting with Ben Marshall was not part of the new plan. It was high time she got back to work, anyway. She was a little too quick in grabbing her books, however, and one of them slid from her hands to land on the floor. Ben swooped to pick it up.

  ‘Bushcraft?’ His eyes widened as he flipped it open to where JJ’s bookmark was. ‘River crossing, huh?’

  JJ shrugged. ‘It was in the cottage. Maybe Zac left it behind. I just thought that you never know when information like that could come in handy.’

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because I can teach you more about crossing a river safely than you’ll ever learn by reading about it.’

  ‘She’s not doing anything,’ Don put in. ‘Not around here, anyway. I’m on duty.’

  ‘You’re doing a training session? On river crossings?’

  ‘Am now.’ Ben’s eyebrow lifted. ‘It was shaping up to be a boring afternoon given that I had nothing exciting planned and I can’t stand getting bored, so how ’bout it? As you said, you never know—it could save your life one day. I’ll pick you up. One p.m.?’ He didn’t wait for an answer because he was moving to where Betty was ladling more soup into bowls. ‘I’d marry you, Betty,’ he said, ‘if you weren’t already taken.’

  She was laughing. ‘Thirty years ago, lad,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

  It was the sound of that laughter that was making JJ smile as she slipped out of the kitchen. Such a happy sound, it was no wonder that her day had just acquired a new glow.

  * * *

  ‘So where’s everybody else?’

  Good question... But the only response Ben offered was to raise his eyebrows because he didn’t really have the answer. Maybe that’s what he’d decided he needed to find out himself when he’d discarded the list of other potential volunteers who might appreciate some bushcraft training.

  JJ’s deep frown was making a furrow on her brow ‘You said you were running a river crossing training course but there’s nobody here except us. Are we going to wait for them?’

  ‘I never said it was a team training session. Did I?’

  ‘Um...no...’

  Was that simply wariness in those dark eyes now? Or something more? Surprise? Pleasure, even...? The thought that JJ might like the idea they were going to spend some time alone together in the mountains created a flicker of anticipation in Ben’s gut and he knew that was the key to why he’d engineered this situation even as he’d tried to talk himself out of it last night. There was something about this woman that was messing with his head. His life, even, given that disastrous date with Heidi the other evening. He needed to identify what that something was and deal with it.

  JJ was eyeing the backpack as he eased his arms through the straps. ‘You planning to stay in the high country for a week?’

  He flicked a glance at the small hiker’s day pack she was holding. ‘You got a complete change of clothes in that? Pack liner? First aid kit? A torch, fire-lighting gear, toilet paper and a pocket knife?’

  Her eyes widened, as if she hadn’t realised how big a deal river crossings could be. As if she was more than a little nervous all of a sudden. But, instead of being annoying, Ben found he rather liked that idea. He could look after her. Keep her safe at the same time as teaching her something important.

  ‘It’s all good,’ he added. ‘That’s why I’ve got everything we might need.’

  ‘I’ve got food.’ JJ’s smile was hopeful. ‘I made some cheese and mustard sandwiches because Betty’s were so good yesterday. And I’ve got a Thermos of soup because I thought we might get a bit cold with wet feet. It’s only tomato soup out of a can, though. My gran would be appalled.’

  ‘My childhood favourite,’ Ben told her. ‘And something that my nan always kept in her pantry.’

  Her smile faltered and he could see it was because she’d picked up on his use of the past tense.

  ‘She died when I was fifteen.’

  ‘Oh... I’m sorry...’

  He shrugged as he turned away. ‘It’s a long time ago. It’s not uncommon, is it, to lose your grandparents?’

  ‘I’m lucky I’ve still got mine. Gran, that is. Grandad died a few years ago.’

  Ben acknowledged the information with a nod but he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t talk to anyone about his nan, for that matter. Or even think about her much. He’d actually forgotten that he and JJ had something quite unusual in common, having both been raised by grandparents. Because he’d preferred to push that particular moment when he’d felt that connection with her from his mind? In the same way he’d been trying so hard to dismiss the desire to kiss this woman?

  ‘Come on...’ He knew he sounded too abrupt but he was starting to think this whole idea might be a big mistake. ‘Let’s go.’

  It was easy enough to steer clear of anything he didn’t want to think about as they tramped upriver to find the section that Ben always used to train newbies. A typical, New Zealand braided river, Cutler’s ‘Creek’ offered several different channels that meandered and crossed each other as they headed towards the sea. They offered varying degrees of difficulty, from easy and shallow to a stretch of white water further upstream that could challenge even experienced participants.

  JJ seemed happy to listen as he explained how to choose the best place to cross a river, or even whether it was safe to cross at all.

  ‘Look at the river from as high a place on the bank as you can find. You want to try and judge the depth and speed of the flow, whether it’s over shingle or boulders and any dangers like rapids, submerged tree branches and side streams that will be adding to the water volume.’ He stopped several times as they walked upstream to encourage JJ to select what she thought would be a good spot.

  ‘There. No...that’s not good, is it? Steep banks mean deep water, don’t they? And they can make it impossible to get out on the other side. And what happens if you get swept off your feet further up from banks like that?’

  ‘I’m not intending to let you get swept off your feet,’ Ben told her. ‘This is River Crossing for Beginners and I’ll be hanging onto you.’ He could start teaching her the techniques to keep herself safe, floating with the current, when they got to a more difficult crossing.

  There were two variations of the mutual support method that Ben taught. They both involved putting an arm around each other’s backs and getting a good grip on either a pack strap or clothing. Even teaching JJ to take small, shuffling steps, not to lift her feet too high in the water and to watch the far bank as much as possible so as not to get disoriented by the flow of the river wasn’t enough to distract him from the awareness that his hands were touching her body.

  And maybe that was why he wasn’t holding quite tightly enough when JJ slipped on a small boulder when they were in the middle of their second crossing—this time in knee-level water with a faster current. He kept his promise to hang onto her but, try as he might, he couldn’t keep them both upright and the current was strong enough to sweep them downstream just far enough for them both to be soaked from head to foot by the time he found his footing again and managed to pull JJ onto the safety of a shingle island between two channels.

 
; Just far enough for JJ to have swallowed a bit of water that was making her cough, for her to have become cold enough to be shivering badly already and to have scared her so much she looked a great deal younger than she actually was.

  So vulnerable that Ben could feel something melting inside his chest. A liquid kind of feeling that matched the external river water that was streaming from his clothes and hair, except that the internal sensation was a lot more powerful and it was spreading throughout his entire body.

  Good grief, it even seemed to be reaching his eyes.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he heard himself saying aloud as he pulled JJ into his arms. ‘It’s okay...you’re safe now... I’ve got you...’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HOW TERRIFYING HAD that been?

  The fear hadn’t kicked in in that first moment when she’d felt her foot lose contact with the boulder beneath it because that had happened too fast. The shock of being plunged into water that felt like barely melted ice was so great that JJ didn’t have the brain space to feel frightened then, either. It was when she felt the power in that current tipping her so that she couldn’t get her face out of the water, the brush of a large rock beneath her that she’d probably just missed hitting her head on and she realised how easy it could be to drown that fear not only kicked in but instantly ramped up to terror.

  Not that the intensity of that terror had lasted for more than a heartbeat. Or maybe two. Because she’d known that Ben still had a grip on her. She was trusting him with her life but she had no choice and, at some level, she knew that trust wasn’t misplaced. And she’d been right. Here she was, out of the water. Safe. Shaking like a leaf, of course, but she was safe. Ben was holding her in his arms and, to be honest, JJ had never felt so safe in her life. How crazy was that?

  Crazy enough to make her laugh, anyway, as she pulled back to look up at Ben.

  ‘River C-Crossing for Beginners, huh?’ Her teeth were chattering hard enough to make her stutter. ‘I’d h-hate to do one of y-your advanced classes.’

  ‘You’re the first person I’ve dropped in a river,’ Ben told her. ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘I wasn’t h-holding on tightly enough,’ JJ confessed. ‘And I was l-looking d-down...’

  ‘And you’re freezing. Come on. Hopefully the extra clothing in my pack will have stayed dry enough.’

  The channels they needed to negotiate to get back to the riverbank where they’d started this training session got progressively easier and Ben was certainly keeping a tight grip on JJ but she was so cold ten minutes later that her fingers refused to co-operate by holding onto the strap of Ben’s backpack. Even her legs didn’t seem to want to hold her up.

  ‘How f-far?’ she asked. ‘To the car?’

  ‘We’re not going to the car,’ Ben responded. ‘Not yet. With this wind picking up, you’ll be hypothermic in no time. There’s a hut a lot closer. Just basic but we can get a fire going and some dry clothes on.’ He grinned at JJ. ‘Think of it as your survival training session.’

  The hut was small. Just a single room with a couple of old, wooden chairs, a tiny table and a pot-bellied stove but it was a huge relief to be out of the wind.

  ‘Get those clothes off,’ Ben ordered, as he opened his pack. ‘Yes...that dunk wasn’t enough to get right into the sealed bags in here. I’ve got a pair of trackpants and a sweatshirt that you can put on. There’s a foil sheet in here if they’re not enough.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘There’s an extra pair of trackpants but I’ll be fine for the moment while I get this fire going. I’ve got merino thermals on.’ He handed her the bag. ‘Take everything wet off,’ he instructed. ‘It won’t take long to get your undies dry and, by the time we’ve got warm and had something to eat, everything else will be at least wearable for the trek back to the car.’

  But JJ barely heard the last of his words. He wanted her to take her underwear off? She should be horrified at the thought. So why was there suddenly a heat in parts of her body that couldn’t possibly be explained by simply having shelter from the wind? This didn’t make sense. Any more than her reaction had, when she’d discovered that there weren’t going to be any other people joining them on this training session. She should have been annoyed by that. Feeling manipulated, perhaps. Instead, she’d been secretly pleased because it made her feel...special?

  Ben let his breath out in an amused huff at her expression. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t be looking.’ He peeled his anorak off, leaving it to hang and drip from a large hook on the wall. ‘I’ve got enough to do making a fire, here. If you hurry up, I can show you how to shave kindling off pieces of wood that are too big—like those logs in the corner, there.’

  He was crouched in front of the stove by the time he finished speaking, a pocket knife in one hand and a piece of wood in the other. He had his back to JJ so he couldn’t possibly see what she was doing and she turned her own back on him as she began to peel sodden clothing away from her body but this still felt incredibly...wrong, somehow. Naughty, even? Certainly something that rule-following people shouldn’t be doing.

  Something a boring person would never dream of doing, that’s for sure, but JJ was in the middle of an adventure, here, wasn’t she? She’d just been washed down a river, for heaven’s sake. Saved from drowning by the kind of hero any woman would dream of being rescued by—someone who was even giving up his own, spare clothing so that she could be warm and dry.

  No wonder she was feeling a very different appreciation of life right now. Or that rules she had lived by her entire life seemed suddenly irrelevant.

  She’d known from when she was old enough to start asking questions that it had been her mother’s fault that her grandparents had lost their beloved only son. She’d been driving the van that day. Touring around Europe had been her idea—something their sensible boy would never have considered doing if he hadn’t fallen in love with someone as wild as JJ’s mother. It didn’t mean that JJ had been any less loved, of course. It just meant that they’d made sure she understood what she needed to do to stay safe, for her own sake and for the people who loved her.

  She’d always known that she had to fight any inclination to be anything like her mother.

  JJ had done that literally by accident today. But, instead of being consumed by guilt, she was feeling more alive than she ever had and there was no way she was going to fight this kind of exhilaration. For perhaps the first time ever, she could understand why her mother had chosen to live her life like that. Maybe it was also no wonder that JJ had to bite back a smile as her cold fingers fumbled with the catch on her bra strap.

  * * *

  He couldn’t see what JJ was doing.

  But he knew what she was doing and he could imagine that wet clothing being peeled from her skin to leave it exposed. He could even imagine the goose bumps that would give it a texture that could only be smoothed by warmth—like the fire he was building, or the warmth from the touch of another person, perhaps?

  Oh...man... Even being thoroughly chilled himself and making sure he was distracted by a physical activity that he needed to focus on if he didn’t want to slice a good part of this thumb off wasn’t stopping the heat of his body’s reaction to what was going on behind him.

  This was what the problem was with JJ Hamilton, wasn’t it?

  Despite the fact that she was so unlike any other woman he’d ever been attracted to before—or perhaps because of that—this attraction was off the scale. It was far more than attraction. More than desire, even. This was lust, pure and simple but that was okay. He could control it. Hide it, in fact, given that he was a very long way from being some inexperienced teenager.

  Ben gave JJ plenty of time to get out of her clothes and into the dry ones. He had the fire crackling by then and had taken off his own outer shirt to leave just the short-sleeved, close-fitting merino thermal against his skin. He moved to shift
the wooden chairs close to the stove to use as a clothes rack to speed up the drying process and, even then, he avoided looking directly at JJ but he caught what was happening from the corner of his eye. He saw the most perfect, naked butt disappearing beneath the trackpants she was pulling up and he had to close his eyes as he let his breath out very, very slowly. He needed to clear his throat, too, before he could hope that his voice would sound normal.

  ‘We’ll hang all the wet stuff over these chairs by the fire.’

  ‘Okay.’ JJ wasn’t about to notice anything odd in his expression. She was looking down at the old, soft sweatshirt of his. ‘I really like this. Red is my favourite colour.’

  ‘Keep it,’ Ben told her. ‘It suits you.’

  JJ handed back the bag he’d used for the spare clothing. ‘Here...you can get this other pair of dry pants on now.’

  ‘I’ll help you wring as much water as we can from your clothes first.’

  JJ’s hair was still soaked and the end of her long braid was making a damp patch on the front of the red sweatshirt. Ben tried very hard not to look at it. Or think about what was underneath that damp patch. JJ didn’t seem bothered. She worked briskly, wringing out the smaller items of clothing and then draping them over the rungs on the back of her chairs.

  Good grief...who knew that someone that came across as being so uptight would wear underwear that was so lacy it had to be pretty much see-through?

  Ben finally stripped off his wet trousers, leaving his merino long johns on as he reached for the other pair of dry trackpants that JJ had left on the table. She didn’t even look in his direction. She was busy pulling something from her small pack.

  ‘Oh...no...’

  ‘What?’ She had something in her hand. Something that was dripping through her fingers and Ben found himself grinning broadly. ‘Yeah...sandwiches don’t usually like getting wet.’