Her Emergency Knight

by Alison Roberts

His hands felt deliciously warm against her chilled skin now. Warm…and very gentle.

  ‘Wiggle your toes,’ he commanded. ‘Now your ankles. Does anything hurt?’

  ‘They feel better now they’ve had a rest.’

  ‘The swelling’s gone down quite a lot.’ Guy took the bag of first-aid supplies and smeared antiseptic cream over the raw patches before covering them with gauze dressings. Then he sliced a crêpe bandage in half length-ways to make a narrow strip, which he used to bind the dressings in place. ‘This should work like extra socks,’ he commented. ‘Might make the shoes fit a bit better as well. Now.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘Let’s see that arm.’

  The cardboard splint had become soggy way back when the snow had gone up her sleeve that morning. It was doing little to support the fracture but Jennifer’s arm still felt exposed and vulnerable when the splint was removed along with the bandage.

  ‘Any paresthesia?’ Guy queried.

  ‘A bit,’ Jennifer admitted. ‘Just in the tips of my ring and little fingers.’ The tingling had started after that fall.

  ‘Can you squeeze my hand?’

  His fingers felt wonderfully warm and solid. Jennifer closed her hand around them and held on. It was worth the pain.

  ‘Pretty weak,’ Guy grunted. ‘You’ll have to watch you don’t trust any real weight on that arm tomorrow.’ He uncurled her fingers and removed his hand. ‘I’ll find a stick or two we can splint it with. That cardboard’s useless.’

  ‘What about your ankle?’ Jennifer asked when he returned. ‘And that nasty cut on your leg?’

  ‘They’ll keep.’ Guy bound her arm firmly. ‘I’m going to collect some leaves for the base of our shelter and then…’ He smiled at Jennifer ‘…I’m going to make the best soup you’ve ever tasted in your life.’

  It was more like faintly chicken-flavoured hot water, with only two packets of dehydrated soup dissolved in a whole billy full of boiling water, but Guy was right. It was more delicious than anything Jennifer could remember. The thin layer of noodles at the bottom was a bonus. They took turns drinking from the billy after it had cooled enough to handle, and used their fingers to scoop up the noodles. They sat on the foil sheet spread over a layer of dead leaves beneath the tarpaulin Guy had tethered between two large boulders and they basked in the warmth radiating from the roaring fire in front of them.

  ‘Try and get some sleep,’ Guy advised. ‘We’ve got another hard day ahead of us tomorrow. I’ll keep the fire going as long as I can.’

  The padding of two anoraks was enough to make leaning against the smooth rock almost comfortable but, as tired as she was, Jennifer didn’t feel inclined to sleep.

  ‘Do you still think you know where we are? What direction we need to go in?’

  Guy’s grunt was noncommittal. ‘Roughly. Whether we can keep to it is another matter. Depends on how many bluffs we need to get past and how dense the forest is. If the weather closes in, we’ll be in real trouble.’

  Jennifer sat quietly for several minutes. She would have considered herself in real trouble already if it wasn’t for Guy. After today she was quite prepared to trust in his leadership, wherever that took them. OK, so he hadn’t rushed back to help her when she had fallen on the snow slope, but she had coped, hadn’t she?

  He hadn’t slackened his pace for the rest of the day either, but she had kept up. Trying to prove to Guy that she was capable of more than he thought had pushed her physical boundaries further than she would have imagined possible, and a part of her was feeling pretty damned proud of herself right now.

  Guy’s movement as he added more wood to the fire drew her attention, and Jennifer knew he wouldn’t realise he was being observed from the darkness of the small shelter. She watched as he hunkered down beside the flames and stretched his hands towards the warmth. His physical size alone was enough to give the impression of great strength, but there was something far more solid about this man than mere physical attributes.

  The flickering firelight illuminated his features enough for Jennifer to see a repose that was startling. The sadness was only to be expected. How many times that day would Guy’s thoughts have returned to Digger? A lot more than hers had, and that had been frequent enough. How much pain had he had to cope with in the past to have reached the level of acceptance he was unknowingly projecting at the moment? And where did anybody gain the strength of character to actually seem at peace in a situation like this?

  He belongs here, Jennifer realised suddenly. He was a part of this landscape…the way she had felt for those fleeting moments when watching the sunset on the lake surface. But she didn’t feel like that now. She felt left out. And lonely.

  ‘You don’t like talking much, do you?’

  Guy flicked a brief glance in her direction and then shrugged. ‘Is that necessarily a fault? Maybe I’m a good listener.’

  She could imagine that to be true. Guy was probably as dependable as a GP as he was proving as a leader in a survival situation. How many people trusted him with their secrets and their health? Even their lives? Jennifer had the strong impression that once you earned loyalty from Dr Knight, you would never lose it. She liked that. It was the kind of dependability her father had always demonstrated. The kind of man Digger must have been.

  Guy obviously misinterpreted her sigh. ‘Did you have something you wanted to talk about?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’ Jennifer chuckled softly. ‘I must have bad karma, I guess. I’ve never been so cut off from the rest of the world and I’m stuck with someone who hates me.’

  ‘I don’t hate you. I don’t even know you.’

  ‘You think you do. You think I’m useless. Posh. One of a “type” you clearly have no time for.’

  ‘You’re rich and famous. Highly successful and very popular. You must be used to living in luxury. It doesn’t give us a lot in common, does it?’

  ‘I’m not rich and I’m hardly famous. Outside the world of emergency medicine, I’m a nobody. What’s more, I’ve worked incredibly hard to get where I am and I’m not ashamed of it.’

  ‘I never suggested you should be.’

  ‘Your tone suggested it.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that we’re very different people. We may as well live on different planets as far as our daily lives and backgrounds go.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ Jennifer let her breath out in an exasperated huff. ‘For your information, I grew up in the country. On a dairy farm on the outskirts of a one-horse town in Taranaki. My dad was a share-milker and my mum died when I was eight. We had nothing. My dad worked to help me get a better life and I got up at 4:00 a.m. every day so I wouldn’t let him down. I helped milk the cows. I worked hard enough at school to get labelled a nerd and had no real friends. I left my dad living alone so I could go to university and med school. He was proud of me.’

  ‘I’m sure he was.’ Guy added some more sticks to the fire. ‘Did you ever want to go back?’

  ‘Of course. I went home to visit Dad as often as I could.’ Which hadn’t been nearly often enough in recent years. And now it was too late.

  ‘I meant to live.’

  ‘That would have defeated the whole purpose of escaping.’

  ‘And that’s what makes us so different.’ Guy nodded. ‘I wanted to escape as well when my mother died. I was eighteen. It was Digger that persuaded me to go to med school and helped me fund it. He knew I’d have to go back one day, even if it did take me ten years to realise how much I hated the city.’

  ‘If you hated it so much, why did it take so long?’

  ‘Med school kept me pretty focussed. And then I had another reason I couldn’t leave.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘I got married.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jennifer blinked in surprise. Of course. Why wouldn’t he be married? He probably had his wife and several kids tucked away in a country cottage behind a white picket fence covered in roses. Then she remembered his tone. ‘You make it sound like a problem
.’

  ‘Turned out that way.’ Guy snorted. ‘I made the mistake of picking one of your lot.’

  ‘My lot?’

  ‘A townie.’

  ‘I just told you I wasn’t a townie.’ Jennifer could well remember the insult levelled at city dwellers who decided they wanted to join a rural community. A single word, but it spoke volumes about their ignorance and unacceptability.

  ‘You are by inclination. You couldn’t wait to escape. You’ve never gone back.’

  Jennifer was silent. There was no argument there. The isolation of rural life held no appeal whatsoever. She didn’t want their conversation to end just yet, however. The feeling of companionship was too valuable.

  ‘You went back,’ she observed quietly. ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘She tried it for a while. Said it would kill her if she tried any longer.’ Guy’s tone was bitter. ‘It had already killed her love for me.’

  ‘But not yours for her?’ It was an incredibly personal question and Jennifer wouldn’t have been surprised if Guy told her to mind her own business. She was quite ready for a rebuke when he finally spoke but, again, he surprised her.

  ‘You can’t keep loving someone if it has to be on their planet and the atmosphere’s incompatible with your own.’ Guy cleared his throat, which came across as a kind of verbal shrug. ‘She’s happy now. Married to a plastic surgeon and living in Sydney. I believe they’ve got a holiday house on some Fijian island for when they want a break from the rat race.’ Guy started banking up the fire as he spoke. ‘It’s all ancient history.’ He moved back to lean on a boulder and closed his eyes. ‘Get some sleep, Jenna. I intend to.’

  That was the end of the conversation. Sleep wanted to claim Jennifer’s exhausted body now, but her brain held on for a few more minutes. No wonder Guy didn’t think much of her. It fitted. The impression she’d had earlier that it would take a lot to break this man’s loyalty returned. How much stronger would that loyalty be to a woman he loved? One that he had made a commitment to spend the rest of his life with? The pain of having that union destroyed was quite likely great enough to have prevented him ever risking his heart again. Or even trusting a woman, let alone a townie, on a personal basis. She was also aware of a sneaking sympathy for the woman involved in that shared history.

  At this point in time she herself might be sharing this man’s planet, but he was quite right. The atmosphere was incompatible for long-term survival and she’d be stepping off at the first opportunity. Once she reached safety and civilisation, she doubted that anything would make her want to return.

  Ever.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘YOU actually do this for fun?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Jennifer’s face twisted into lines of disbelief as she turned to clamber backwards down a narrow channel between two huge boulders. Spray from the small waterfall to her left sent an icy rainfall to splatter her head and she could feel the drops collecting into runnels down the length of her spine.

  They had been following the course of this mountain stream for what felt like an eternity. Now deep in the rainforest, the thick canopy prevented any warmth from sunshine and the sound of rushing water had become oppressive white noise that covered any sound with the potential to make this journey a little more tolerable. Like the buzz of a small plane or the chop of an approaching helicopter. Or the gentle cacophony of bird life. Or even conversation.

  Guy was at least ten metres in front of Jennifer and he managed to stay at precisely that distance no matter how hard she tried to close the gap. That meant shouting if she wanted to talk to him and Jennifer was far too weary to shout. She needed every ounce of energy she could summon to simply keep moving.

  It would be so much easier to be covering the type of terrain that had led to the lake yesterday. Even to be picking their way across snow. But, no, they were making their way slowly down a much harder slope, negotiating boulders, fallen tree trunks and sometimes thick vegetation, which all required a huge physical effort.

  Shirley’s suede shoes were hopeless. More than once Jennifer had slipped and had had to catch herself to prevent a fall. The firm splinting Guy had provided for her arm couldn’t prevent the agony when she had to use that limb to save herself. Her guide didn’t seem too bothered by his own injuries. He limped occasionally and she had seen his face set into grimly determined lines at times, but he hadn’t slackened his pace or given them a rest yet.

  He moved as though he knew exactly where they were going. As though he was actually enjoying the challenge.

  ‘It’s beyond me.’

  ‘What is?’ Guy was slowing down. Finally.

  ‘How anyone could enjoy doing this.’ Jennifer stepped up on a rock and then found a flat patch of shingle to hop down towards. Her legs protested the effort and she sighed. ‘At least I’m getting all the exercise I need for the rest of my life here. I think I’ll even start driving to work and that only takes me ten minutes to walk.’ Jennifer was about to pass Guy as she spoke, but she didn’t stop. It wasn’t exactly a difficult route, was it? All they had been doing for hours now had been following this damn stream.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look up, Jenna.’

  Jennifer raised her gaze from finding the next foothold. ‘I don’t see anything.’

  ‘Precisely. Where do you think the stream has gone?’

  Jennifer took a cautious step forward. The sound of the water had changed as well. The gurgle of a fast, rocky flow had become more distant—a solid roar. She saw why when she stepped high enough to see past the ferns crowding tree trunks on either side of the stream.

  She stepped back hurriedly. ‘It’s a waterfall!’ she cried in dismay. ‘Down a cliff!’

  ‘We’ll have to head along the ridge and find another way down.’

  ‘Oh…great!’

  Jennifer’s mutter was inaudible. Once again, Guy was leading the way and this time they were heading into the forest. Uphill. He couldn’t know what direction he was going in. They could be doing some vast circle that would lead them back to the lake.

  They were completely lost and no rescue team would spot them hidden beneath the canopy of dense rainforest. She couldn’t see why Guy was bothering to even mark their route as he bent yet another fern frond, turning the silver side uppermost to shine amongst the dark green foliage.

  The trust she had bestowed on this man last night was wearing very thin, his stamina and calm demeanour no longer any comfort. He was an alien species all right. He’d just keep going until he dropped, and he’d probably do that with little or no communication. No wonder his wife had fled back to civilisation. She herself should have stayed with the plane. At least she wouldn’t have been left feeling so unwanted by the lack of conversation her companions could have offered.

  The bitter train of thought led back to Digger, and Jennifer knew she shouldn’t judge Guy Knight’s personality on his current state. She had to remember he was trying to save them both right now, and as long as they survived she couldn’t care less what sort of person he was anyway.

  ‘Take a break, Jenna.’ Guy had chosen a fallen moss-covered tree trunk as a resting place.

  Jennifer said nothing as she sat down.

  ‘How are the feet holding up?’

  ‘I’m keeping up, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re doing well.’ Guy nodded.

  Jennifer refused to let the praise warm her. ‘Have you got any idea where we are right now?’

  ‘Only vaguely. I’m still watching the sun.’

  ‘You can’t even see the sun.’

  ‘I can see its direction.’ Guy pointed and for the first time Jennifer took a real look at the wider area of the forest.

  Huge, ancient trees were dotted surprisingly sparsely across a forest floor thick with ferns and smaller, native shrubs. Sunlight filtered through the canopy to give a hazy spotlight effect in which she could see a swarm of tiny insects
. A fantail hovered, catching a meal, and between its friendly squeaks Jennifer heard the sound of another bird call.

  ‘That was a bellbird, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Sure was.’

  ‘And these are beech trees, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Jennifer took a deep breath, taking in the unfamiliar scent of a landscape untouched by man—a rich aroma of moisture, earth and the warmth of the sun. It wasn’t quiet at all now that she was actually listening. The bird life was everywhere. She could hear the movement of dry twigs and leaves and even the heavy beat of a wood pigeon’s large wings. For an instant that sense of belonging came back. The feeling of being part of something extraordinary.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ she whispered.

  ‘But you wouldn’t do it for fun?’ Guy was watching her with a curious expression.

  ‘No way.’ Jennifer wanted to dismiss both her unsettling response to the setting and the heat that Guy’s gaze seemed to generate. ‘I’d buy a painting, though.’

  He snorted. ‘That’d be right. Hang it somewhere to complement the ivory carpets and leather couches. Sit and look at it while you’re sipping a glass of Chardonnay.’

  ‘You still think I’m a townie, don’t you? Driven by ambition and money and all the shallow values you country hicks associate with city dwellers?’ Jennifer was angered by more than the putdown, but she wasn’t at all sure why. ‘Sure, the scenery’s pretty in the wild but you can find just as much ugliness in isolated communities as you can in any city. I’ve been there. I know just how shallow and petty-minded people can be in small towns.’ Jennifer stood up. The break wasn’t proving exactly restful anymore. ‘And what does it say about you, wanting to isolate yourself? Maybe your wife was escaping more than a dead end as far as her social life and any career were going.’

  She turned her back on Guy and waited. A long, silent minute passed.

  ‘Are we going, then?’ she queried tightly.

  Guy got slowly to his feet. ‘I thought you were taking the lead here, Dr Allen.’

  Jennifer’s jaw tightened. A fat lot of good that would do either of them. ‘It’s actually Professor Allen, if you want to get really formal. Or should that be shallow?’