Flinging them both against their seatbelts.
He snapped open his buckle before inertia could grab him. Propelled himself from his seat.
“Tash,” he said, slapping her cheek. Actually slapping her cheek. He needed her body to react. Before she slipped away.
“Hey,” she rasped. At least, that’s what he hoped she said. Her eyes were closed, her lids a sickening reddish-blue. Her muscles had gone limp and a stillness had fallen over her body.
Matt moved. Fast.
He scrambled from beside her and scanned the floor of the cockpit. He needed corticosteroid. She needed corticosteroid.
His head roared. Fear and adrenaline choked his veins. Fuck, he hadn’t been this terrified even when the Al-Shabaab militants had attacked his Doctors Without Borders camp last year. When he’d thought he was going to die on the other side of the world, away from his home and loved ones.
A glint of glass amongst the debris on the plane’s floor caught his frantic eye. Relief rushed through him, hot and icy at once.
One hypo shot. That’s all he had.
One shot.
One chance.
Snatching up the pre-prepared dose of corticosteroid, he spun back to Tash, now deathly silent and still in the pilot’s seat.
He grabbed her limp arm by the wrist. Shoved up the sleeve of her T-shirt. Flicked her inner arm, once, twice and then, refusing to listen to the panic and fear crowding his mind, pierced her skin with the hypodermic needle and pressed the plunger.
For a heartbeat, she didn’t respond.
Nothing.
And then she arched in her seat and sucked in a long, fierce breath.
Pulled into her lungs all the air in the world.
Gorged herself and her oxygen-starved body on it.
And then slumped back into her seat, her chest rising and falling, rising and falling, her eyes still closed.
“Guess…” she whispered, as if the word was splintered glass in her throat, “I…owe…you…one.”
Closing his eyes, Matt cupped the back of her head and let out a ragged laugh. “Let’s call it even. You did, after all, land the plane even as you were doing your best to die on me.”
Her answering chuckle bubbled past her lips in a weak puff. “I’m…talented.”
He pressed his forehead to hers, growing aware of the fact the plane’s engine had at some point, died. “You’re incredible,” he whispered.
“No, I’m not,” she answered, her voice stronger, her breath less strained.
He pulled away a little, looking down at her.
She gazed up at him, dark smudges under her eyes, her lids heavy.
“What are you then, Captain Tight Pants?” he asked.
She closed her eyes and slumped deeper in her seat. “Tired.”
Matt watched her. Counted her breaths, monitored their duration, their depth.
The side effects of a severe attack like this, coupled with the double dose of systemic corticosteroid and the adrenaline spike of a near-plane crash were a worrying mix. There wasn’t a hope in hell he was going to take his eyes off her. Not until they were rescued.
“Tash,” he whispered, brushing his knuckles over her cheek. “I know you’re tired and I’m going to let you rest soon, but I just want to check that the rest of the world—”
Her lips curled in a slow smile and, without opening her eyes, she held out her hand. “Headphones, please?” she whispered.
He plucked the headphones she wore during flight from the floor and then placed them on her palm.
Eyes still closed, she pressed one padded earpiece to the side of her head, aligned the small mic close to her lips and then reached forward and flicked a switch on the control panel.
“This is RFDS VH one-forty-two,” she said, her voice only a little stronger. “Repeat, this is RFDS VH one-forty-two, broadcasting on all channels. Just letting the world know we have landed safely. Repeat, we have landed safely. No rescue needed.”
Dropping the headphones into her lap, she let out a slow breath. “There you go, Doc. Now the world knows we’re okay,” she murmured with a small smile, eyes still closed. “Give me a few moments to get my breath back completely and I’ll get us up again. You won’t be stuck with me and my defective lungs for that long. Promise.”
“Hey.” He cupped her face. “Hey, look at me.”
She did, her gaze unfocussed for a moment before fixing on his face.
“I want to be stuck with you forever.”
The declaration left him before he was aware it had formed in his head, but the moment it was out there, he realized it was the truth.
Six weeks working with her, six weeks being in her constant company, of growing attached to her aloof distance even as he ached for the simmering fire he sensed beneath her cool surface had brought him to this very reality. Fearing he was going to lose her to a severe asthma attack only cemented that reality.
He wasn’t just falling in love with her. He was ready to make her his life.
“Whoa.”
Tash’s husky exclamation drew a grin to his lips. He traced her bottom lip with his thumb, watching the slow path before lifting his gaze to her eyes. “Wasn’t expecting that?”
She shook her head.
“Me either. But it’s true.” He chuckled. “Think you could handle being Wallaby Ridge’s sexy doctor’s sexier girlfriend? We could be the town’s real-life romance novel, the kind that Jen is always reading when we’re flying to a call-out—the doctor and the pilot. Saving lives and riding the clouds to—”
Tash threw herself from her seat, damn near shoving him to his butt as she scrambled from the cockpit.
“Tash?”
“I gotta get some air,” she threw over her shoulder, hurrying for the plane’s exit.
A cold fist clenched around Matt’s heart. Fuck.
He pushed himself to his feet, ready to go after her.
And staggered sideways as white-hot pain detonated in the base of his skull, shooting down his neck, his spine. His hip struck the edge of his seat, the collision sending shards of agony over his ribs.
He winced, steadying himself with one hand on the back of his seat as he reached up and touched the back of his head with his other hand.
His fingers encountered warm moisture. Hot pain radiated over his head.
Letting out a ragged breath, he explored the unseen wound with tentative jabs and strokes, assessing what his fingertips found. Laceration, approximately three centimetres long, deep, definitely needing stitches.
It’d have to wait though.
First, he needed to go after Tash.
After finally realizing he wanted to be with her for the rest of his life, he wasn’t going to let a bloody head wound stop that life starting now.
* * *
Tash paced along the length of the King Air B200’s right wing, palms cupping her elbows, the toes of her boots kicking up red dust.
She should stop. The dust, the cool dusk air…the insane nervous tension strapping her chest, churning her belly…if she wasn’t careful she’d have another goddamn attack.
“I want to be stuck with you forever.”
Matt’s words scraped at her, a feverish jumble of notions and desires.
“Think you could handle being Wallaby Ridge’s sexy doctor’s sexier girlfriend?”
Pivoting on her heel, she hurried back towards the plane’s tail, hugging herself tighter.
She sucked in a breath, grateful for it even in her agitated state.
“We could be the town’s real-life romance novel…”
“The doctor and the pilot…”
Pilot.
Her throat constricted. Her belly knotted. A soft moan slipped from her lips.
Pilot.
There was the kicker. The problem right there.
How could she stay in Wallaby Ridge as pilot for the Royal Flying Doctors Service if she wasn’t going to fly anymore?
How could it be “the doctor and the pilot” if she w
as going to stop flying planes?
After today, there was no question that’s exactly what she had to do—quit. Hand in her pilot’s license and stick to the ground. There was no other way around it. For starters, it was highly unlikely the RFDS would ever let her pilot one of their planes again. And there was no way she was going to put anyone else’s life at risk like she had today, least of all Matt’s.
“Tash?”
She flinched at his voice. The worried question in her name twisted the knot in her belly tighter.
Flicking a look to her right, she watched him round the nose of the plane, his stare fixed on her face.
He frowned. “What’s going on?”
Without answering him, she turned away, the sight of him walking toward her, his hand on the nose of the King Air B200 too much to deal with.
Matt and her plane. The two things she didn’t want to live without.
The two things she realized now she had to walk away from.
Thanks to her damn defective, fucked-up, stupid lungs.
“Tash?”
A warm palm slid up her arm, over her back.
She stilled. Pulled a slow breath and then turned back to him. “Hi.”
“Hi?” He raised his eyebrows at her. “Really? That’s what we’re going with?”
Despite herself, she laughed. Then she bit back the reaction with an exasperated grimace. “Yeah, sorry. That was a bit lame, wasn’t it?”
“Want to tell me the reason for the dramatic bolt from the plane?” He narrowed his eyes, studying her. Not just as a guy who a second ago professed his desire to spend the rest of his life with her, but as a doctor. “Anyone would think you were trying to get away from me.”
Tash swallowed. Met his stare. “I was.”
“Is that so? Why?”
The relaxed calm of his response unsettled her. She shook her head, aching to press herself to his body, to feel the warm solidity of his existence for one last moment before she ended what they hadn’t truly had a chance to begin. “My parents,” she said, “are high-powered venture capitalists. The kind who make those labeled as high achievers seem like lazy layabouts.”
Confusion filled Matt’s face. She let out a dry laugh, her belly churning, her heart aching. Would he understand what she was so poorly trying to say?
“Three days away from graduating from the air force as a fighter pilot,” she went on, “the adult on-set asthma none of us knew I had killed my dreams. Mum and Dad’s dreams as well, so it seems. They turned their back on me from that point, shunned me for failing to make the grade. Neither cared that I’d been rejected during my final medical. Neither were concerned I’d been the best in every class I took, both practical and theory. For them, the fact my lungs weren’t as exemplary as my brain and flying skills just meant I wasn’t the daughter they’d wanted.” She pulled a face. “If you’re not the best, you aren’t theirs.”
“Jesus.”
A wry smile tugged at her lips at Matt’s shocked exclamation.
“They are perfectionists, and they raised me to be the same. So when I wasn’t perfect, when I failed…” She shrugged, the action tearing at her soul. “I didn’t even let them know I left Sydney. Didn’t ask them for support as I jumped through all the hoops the Royal Flying Doctors Service asked me to before offering me the job as your pilot. Mum and Dad have no idea I’m now flying a doctor over the vast distances of the Outback. Of course, they wouldn’t be surprised to know, thanks to my failings, I’d almost killed said doctor as well.”
Another cold ribbon laced through her, this one bitter with self-contempt, and she let out a wry laugh. “I’ve got a lot of baggage, Doc. Screwed-up baggage. None of it you want anything to do—”
He silenced her with his lips and swept his tongue into her mouth, the kiss as hungry and as fierce as it was unexpected. He balled his hands in her shirt at the base of her spine and yanked her to him, a primitive taking of that which he wanted.
Her.
She groaned, pressed her palms to his chest and, for a staggering moment, tried to fight the concentrated pleasure rushing through her.
And a heartbeat later, she surrendered to it, incapable of doing anything else but.
She raked her hands up his chest, lashing his tongue with hers. He deepened their kiss, his hunger evident not just in his ravenous lips but in the ungentle way he grabbed her arse and ground his erection to the curve of her sex.
She groaned, the rigid pole pushing her own desire to a feverish point.
Just this once. She’d give herself just this one time. This one time to lose herself in what could have been…
Scoring her nails over his shoulders, down his pecs, she teased his nipples—puckered into hard points—through his shirt. He hissed in a breath against her lips, his cock pulsing at her touch. She pinched his nipples again, a quick tug before dragging her nails down his ribcage, his sides, to the waistband of his jeans.
She wanted him naked. Wanted him naked and inside her.
Now.
Her heart raced with the need.
Her whole body burned with it. Every nerve ending, every molecule.
Hooking her fingers into his shirt, she pulled its hemline free of his jeans. Slipped her hands beneath the fine cotton and captured his nipples—skin on skin.
“Fuck, Tash,” Matt groaned, bucking as she pinched the pebbled points again. “That feels—”
She yanked her hands free of his shirt, grabbed the front and tore it open, uncaring of his buttons.
Before he could respond, she smoothed her hands up the subtle six-pack of his stomach, skimmed her fingers over the knotted white path of the scar marring his ribcage, and closed her lips around his right nipple.
“Holy fuck,” he ground out, tangling his fingers in her hair. “Holy fuck.”
She sucked his nipple into her mouth, closed her teeth around it and sucked again.
He bucked again. Bucked and cursed and grabbed at her belt buckle.
She straightened, tasting every inch of the muscular column of his throat, the stubble-roughened line of his jaw as she helped him remove her belt.
He tore at her clothes with desperate hands, yanking her T-shirt up over her head with rough impatience. She did the same, shucking his shirt from his shoulders even as she tried to toe off her boots.
With a horny laugh, he dropped to his knees, grabbed one foot and tugged her boot from her foot.
She curled her fingers into his armpits and pulled him back up, crushing his mouth with hers. She didn’t want to stop kissing him. She didn’t want to not have his lips, his tongue against hers. Even if it did mean she was still wearing one boot.
As if aware of her insatiable hunger, he worshipped her mouth with his, unzipping her jeans as he did so. His hands replaced the snug denim wrapping her hips, his fingers sliding over the curve of her arse cheeks.
She arched into his possessive touch, rolling her sex against the firm pole of his erection still restrained by his trousers. Its unyielding length sent liquid heat to her pussy and she dropped her hands to his fly.
Before she could yank his zipper open, however, he pushed her Levis down over her hips, exposing her butt and sex to the evening air.
“Oh God,” she whimpered, the exclamation becoming a raw moan as Matt dropped to his knees once again and yanked her leg free of her jeans.
She stood before him, one foot booted, one leg still half-covered in snug denim, her pussy lips moist, her clit swollen with impatient want.
He didn’t waste time teasing her.
Without a word, he grabbed her unshod foot, hooked her knee over his shoulder and plunged his tongue into her wet slit.
The sudden shift in position threw her off balance and she grabbed at his shoulders, resting her back against the wing of her plane. Leaning against the King Air B200 as Matt fucked her pussy with his tongue.
“Oh God, Matt,” she cried out, her voice the only sound in the endless Outback night. “Oh God, yes. Yes.”
He laved his tongue over her clit, sucked on the tiny button and nipped it with his teeth. She cried out again, driving her hips upward, grinding her sex harder to his savage mouth.
He held her leg to his shoulder with a punishing grip before turning his mouth to the sensitive flesh high on her inner thigh. Pain and pleasure shot through her as he sucked, marking her his with a bruising love bite. The sheer dominating possession of the action sent liquid electricity to her pussy, and she cried out, her entire core thrumming with an exquisite pressure.
He returned his mouth to her sex, flicking at her clit with the tip of his tongue, a tormenting caress that drove her closer to the edge of pleasurable oblivion. And then, without preamble, he penetrated her pussy with two fingers.
Sank deep into her wet heat.
Stroked her G-spot with wicked pressure as he laved her clit with his tongue again.
“O-oh oh shit, Matt…” she gasped, her body lost to the intensity of his touch. “I’m going to come.”
He didn’t stop. In fact, his mouth and fingers in her sex grew wilder. She clung to him, driving her back to the rounded edge of her plane’s wing, pumping her hips upward into his tongue’s brutal fucking of her pussy. Moaning as he scissored the fingers inside her against the sweet sensitivity of her G-spot.
Moaning and writhing and coming. Oh God, she was coming. She was—
Her climax claimed her, an exquisite clamping and contraction of her core. She dragged her nails over Matt’s shoulders, scraped them over his neck. “Oh fuck,” she gasped, her body tight and tense and deliciously on fire. “Fuck, that’s…that’s so…good…so…”
Before she could finish, he slid his mouth from her pussy, replacing his tongue on her throbbing clit with his thumb as he rained a wicked path of kisses up her belly.
Up over her ribs.
To her bra-restrained breasts.
And then he was sucking her right nipple through the satin. Drawing it deep into his mouth as his fingers and thumb continued to wrought pleasure on her pulsing pussy.
Another orgasm crashed through her, this one far more intense.
Every molecule in her body thrummed, charged with an elemental energy, fed by Matt’s mastery of her arousal and response. She cried his name, and when her voice failed her, when the words were lost to the pleasure of his touch, she whimpered her surrender.
Breathless For You: Outback Skies, Book Two Page 5