by Daphne Clair
Fast-flowing water threw itself over rocks and bounced the rafts and their passengers as they wove about, slanting against the waves, curving round outcrops, jumping over a submerged tree-trunk. Whoops of excitement and squeals of mock-fear mingled with the rush and roar of the river.
Then Reid’s raft went slewing aslant for some reason, and the water caught it and shoved it against a midstream rock. It tipped, and in that instant Xianthe lost her balance and flipped over the side. Annys saw Reid lunge to grab at her, but her weight combined with the angle of the raft was too much, and as the raft righted itself and careered on down the river they were both struggling in the water.
A rope in a bright plastic bag was thrown almost instantly from the raft ahead, the rope uncoiling as the red bag flew through the air, and the crewman in the bow of Annys’s raft threw theirs, too. Reid had lost his grasp on Xianthe and was being swept along in the wake of their raft. He grabbed a rope but Xianthe had disappeared, and with her heart in her mouth Annys saw Reid look about, then deliberately let go the rope and, while the raft hurtled on, he dived under the water.
Immediately afterwards she glimpsed Xianthe’s orange life-jacket in the swirling white turbulence. It wasn’t moving, and Annys realised she must be trapped by some underwater snag. Reid wouldn’t be able to fight the current to get to her.
Tony was swearing and trying to steer the raft closer. But they were going to go past before they could get near enough. Annys took a deep breath and, ignoring Tony’s forbidding shout, slipped over the side.
Cold water buffeted her, hurling her against a submerged boulder. She didn’t attempt to fight it, but breast-stroked diagonally with the current, heading for where she had seen the blur of orange. If she had gauged the direction right...
She saw a flailing arm and swam towards it. Xianthe clutched at her as the water foamed around them, sometimes right over Xianthe’s head, the raft racing past in a blur of yellow, the paddlers unable to hold it against the force of the rapids. Gripping Xianthe’s waistband, Annys tried to find the rope but that, too, was gone.
‘Caught!’ Xianthe gasped. ‘My foot!’
Annys made a shallow exploration, fighting the determined pull of the water and hampered by her life-jacket and helmet, and could see the rocks that had trapped Xianthe’s foot. She worked it free, and then surfaced, and with nothing to hold them now the water bore them along, not swimming but keeping their heads mostly above water.
‘Try to stay with me!’ Annys yelled against the roar of white foam splashing over rocks and hurtling between them. She still had a hold of Xianthe but was afraid that they could be wrenched apart at any moment. The power of the water was incredible—a lot of the time she couldn’t see for the spray that kept hitting her face, and she had no hope of controlling their headlong progress along the river. She had never felt so helpless, so totally at the mercy of natural forces. What if there were more waterfalls? Even steeper ones? It was possible the water would push them under and they might never be able to surface.
Don’t think about it, concentrate on avoiding the rocks, watching for calmer water, holding on to Xianthe.
She glimpsed Reid ahead of them, being swept along too but making a tremendous effort to reach them. Then he lunged across the current and was with them, shouting instructions that Xianthe gamely tried to follow.
It seemed an age before they hit a patch of slightly calmer water where the banks were rather less steep, and Reid and Annys backstroked across the current with Xianthe between them, to reach a group of relatively flat-topped boulders protruding into the river.
Xianthe yelped as they helped her out, and collapsed on to the rock, coughing up water.
‘Thanks,’ she gulped. ‘I’d have drowned without you two. I don’t know how to thank—’ She coughed again, shivering, and then began to sob.
Reid said, breathing hard, ‘It’s all right, Xianthe,’ and folded an arm about her shoulders. She put her head down and cried against him.
Half collapsed on the rock, Annys watched them, sawing in painful breaths of air herself. Over Xianthe’s head, Reid said roughly, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ Annys gasped, not looking at him now. Further down the river the rafters had managed to stop their craft, and Tony and another crew member were cautiously making their way back along the rocky bank. Panting, she shakily stood up, waving to show that the stranded members of the party were safe.
Xianthe straightened up, still shivering. ‘Sorry,’ she gulped.
‘It’s OK,’ Reid said.
‘You’re entitled,’ Annys told her, ‘after a fright like that.’
Xianthe looked up. ‘You jumped in after me, didn’t you?’
Reid shot Annys a glance that she found very strange in the circumstances. He looked blazingly angry. ‘Yes,’ he said, still looking at her. ‘She did. Like a bloody idiot.’
‘Reid!’ Xianthe protested feebly, and started to cough again.
‘You could have left it to me,’ Reid was saying angrily.
Tony hailed them and landed lightly on the sun-warmed rock, closely followed by the other man.
A bandage for her ankle and a change of clothing was organised for Xianthe, and Annys and Reid too put on dry things. Xianthe declared she wanted to continue down the river, and once he was sure none of the three was suffering from hypothermia, Tony helped her back into the raft, to the accompaniment of cheers from the rest of the group.
Still standing on the bank as they waited for Xianthe to be comfortably settled, Annys glanced at Reid’s set face. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked him quietly. He too had been swept into the water, they’d all been banged about a bit on the rocks, and he looked, she thought, a little pale as well as distinctly bad-tempered.
‘Of course I am,’ he said impatiently.
A fantastic thought crossed her mind. ‘You’re not mad at me because I rescued Xianthe before you did, are you? You couldn’t have got to her, swimming upstream,’ she pointed out. ‘All the boats had already been swept past her.’
He gave her an incredulous glare. ‘What on earth do you think I am? But since you brought it up, didn’t you hear what Tony told you about rescuing people who went overboard?’
‘You can’t talk,’ Annys retorted.
‘I was already in the water.’
‘You let go the rope.’ He could have saved himself and left Xianthe to take her chances.
‘It wasn’t long enough for me to reach her, and they couldn’t hold the boat.’
‘So, what’s different?’
‘It was a stupid thing to do, Annys,’ he said. ‘Putting your own life at risk. When you’d been warned, too.’
‘You’d never have reached her,’ Annys insisted. ‘What was I supposed to do? Leave her to drown?’
‘It didn’t have to be you. The crew is responsible—’
‘They had their hands full. I’m a strong swimmer. I knew I could do it.’
He stopped, drawing in his breath. ‘You think you can do anything, don’t you?’
‘Pretty well.’ Her head went up. ‘You told me once—’
‘When I first met you. Yes, I remember.’ He sounded thoroughly fed up, almost disgusted.
‘OK,’ Tony called. ‘You two can get back on board now. We’ve managed the roughest bit,’ he reassured them all. ‘The rest of the way it gets easier.’
It did, the fast-running river eventually broadening into a slow, swamp-bordered sweep of water making its meandering way to the sea. The mishap had made them about an hour behind schedule, but by dusk they were back on the ship, and round a bonfire and barbecue on the beach later the rafters regaled the stay-at-homes with highly coloured accounts of their adventurous river trip.
Annys had put on a bikini and tied a flowered sarong about her waist. But although some of the party had swum before eating, she found she didn’t fancy it, for once. Perhaps she’d had enough water for today. Xianthe evidently had no intention of swimming either. Wearing a slee
veless shirt, and jeans that hugged her slim, rounded figure, she was subdued, but told everyone that Reid and Annys had saved her life, bringing them a good deal of embarrassing attention before someone started to thrum on a guitar.
Across the firelight, Reid raised his brows at Annys, and made a small gesture with his head.
Annys gave an almost imperceptible nod, and quietly moved backwards, getting up to go to Reid’s side as he walked outside the light and along the sand. He might be thinking better of his bad temper earlier, and she was willing to meet him halfway. He’d had a rough time himself, after all, and if he was getting fond of Xianthe her brush with death would have been a nasty scare for him.
She had to fight down a stab of jealousy at the thought. Xianthe was a nice young woman; she ought to be happy for them. Xianthe might be right for him, she decided, trying to be objective. She was very brave, and Reid admired courage. Although he admired competence, too, at least so he’d said. And Annys had tried to live up to that, had kept any doubts and fears to herself, mindful of Reid’s stated aversion to clinging vines. She’d made her own way before and after marriage, never relying on him to help her out of trouble.
But he’d become irritated by it in the end, and when his ego had needed stroking, she reminded herself cynically, he’d turned to a different kind of woman.
Joining him, she said, ‘What do you want?’
He hadn’t stopped when she caught up, and they strolled along the sand, the sounds of laughter and talk fading behind them as they passed under the shadow of a tree growing on the bank above the sand. Somewhere in the distance Annys thought she heard the muted sound of a morepork’s lonely two-note call.
‘I figured you weren’t enjoying the general admiration any more than I was.’
‘True,’ Annys admitted. ‘So where are we going?’
‘Just walking,’ he suggested. ‘We shared a fairly traumatic experience today. I felt like sharing something a bit more restful with you. Do you mind?’
Nonplussed, a bit wary, Annys said, ‘No... I suppose not.’
Reid gave a quiet laugh. ‘We could all have died, you know.’
‘We didn’t.’
‘It gives one... a different perspective on things.’
‘Does it?’
His laughter was fuller and louder this time. ‘Always the pragmatist, aren’t you?’
She felt a spurt of anger. Did he mean she was unimaginative, lacking some kind of mental spark? ‘I don’t see any sense in making a drama out of it,’ she said.
‘OK.’ He shrugged. ‘Subject closed.’
They walked on silently for a few minutes, towards a rocky outcrop looming blackly ahead of them, jutting into the water. When they reached it, Reid turned to her and said, ‘Are you game?’
Scrambling over the rocks in the dark? It was probably crazy, but Annys shrugged and said, ‘If you are.’
There was some moonlight, and the going wasn’t as rough as might have been expected. On top the rocks had worn quite smooth but were dry and not slippery. Annys skirted a couple of black, shimmering pools and made her way carefully across to the other side of the outcrop, Reid didn’t offer to help her, but she was conscious of him at her elbow.
Descending the other side, they found themselves in a tiny cove where the sand was soft and still warm from the day’s sun. The tide was well down, and the water rippling over the sand left a gleaming patina on the deserted beach. A huge old pohutukawa growing at the base of a white cliff made a leafy cave.
Reid drew Annys into its shadow and said quietly, ‘Let’s sit.’
She sat with her knees drawn up, her toes digging into the sand. Reid spread his long legs out in front of him and leaned back on his elbows.
She hoped he didn’t want to talk. It was very peaceful here, and she realised that this was what she needed, a quiet space for a while away from the ship where there was nowhere to be really private, and away from the strenuous activities for which she had previously been grateful. Grateful because they meant she didn’t need to think too much, and they helped her to deal with Reid’s constant presence in the background.
He was right about what had happened today. They could easily have died, and all day she had been pushing that thought and its implications away.
As always, she’d picked herself up and gone on with what she was doing, because that was the only way to survive.
She’d never been quite so close to death before. She had always enjoyed the adrenalin rush of dicing with danger—on the ski slopes, in the water, climbing—but had the sense to be careful and minimise the risks. She’d got a kick out of the experiences offered by this adventure cruise. And she knew that she’d been more reckless than usual because of some complicated, not quite rational desire to show Reid she was afraid of nothing.
She didn’t know if that was part of what had made her dive in to go to Xianthe’s aid today. She hoped not. It wasn’t a very worthy reason. But there had been no time for thought. Split-second timing, which was what was needed before the boat went by and it was too late, didn’t allow for soul-searching about reasons.
That came later. Like now. Remembering the cold shock of the water, Xianthe’s frightened face, her own fear and helplessness later as the water had tossed them and hurtled towards an unknown fate, and then back to the sudden clutch of terror she had felt when she had first seen Reid fall from his raft and be swept under the white, roiling water, she shivered. Reid said quietly, ‘Are you cold?’
‘No.’ She wasn’t really, but she found to her surprise and chagrin that she couldn’t stop. She clenched her teeth, trying to control the increasing shudders that racked her. Reid said, ‘Annys! What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing! I...’ She sucked in a breath. ‘I don’t know!’ His arms came around her, hauling her close to his warmth. ‘Delayed shock,’ he diagnosed. ‘I got over mine with a stiff drink when we got back to the Toroa.’
Trying to stop her teeth chattering, she said, ‘Maybe I should have done that.’
‘Maybe.’ He held her firmly, his arms wrapped about her, until the shivering eased and stopped. ‘Better?’
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice muffled against his chest. ‘Thank you.’ He had put on a shirt over his shorts, but it wasn’t buttoned up, and she realised her cheek was resting against his skin. She ought to move, but, breathing in the clean, once familiar scent of him, she felt a sweet lethargy, a desire to stay where they were, pretend for a while that the dreams they had once shared were still intact.
He moved, settling more comfortably but not letting her go, and one hand came up to stroke her hair. A tiny warning signal tried to make itself heard, but she was too tired, too lulled by the drowsy pleasure of his nearness, of the rare tranquillity between them, to heed it.
He brushed the hair away from her temple, his fingers feather-light, and touched his lips to the smooth skin, and she sighed against his chest but didn’t move. When he shifted to lie on the sand, with her cheek still pressed against him, she didn’t protest.
The hand on her hair slid to her shoulder and down her bare arm, and up again. His other hand stroked her back, bare but for the strap of the bikini top. It felt very good, very soothing. Little waves of pleasure began to follow the lines his fingers were drawing up and down her spine. Her eyes closed. She moved her hand, touching him in turn, her fingers brushing against a flat male nipple.
She felt the sudden rise of his chest under her hand and her cheek, and then, as she made to withdraw, his hand clamped hers against him. They lay there in silence for a few minutes, and she tried to tell herself this had to stop now. Only the last thing she wanted was to stop.
When he tugged gently at her hair to lift her face, she didn’t resist, but as their eyes met she murmured, ‘Reid, maybe we shouldn’t—’
‘Shh,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t talk. Please.’ And then he turned a little so that he could reach her mouth with his, and bore her backwards on the sand.
He was
right, she thought, letting him open her lips to his. Talking led to arguments and anger, and this was what she wanted, needed, right now. The unique, unparalleled closeness and excitement, the affirmation of life that only making love could give.
She wound her arms about his neck and returned his kiss with a passion of her own, her open mouth an invitation, her body fitting itself to his in old, remembered ways. She let him unclip the bikini top and revelled in the touch of his fingers as they roved over her. She helped him untie the knot of the sarong at her waist and spread it on the sand so that they could lie on it. And she eased the shirt from his shoulders so that she could caress them and taste them and take gentle, nibbling bites at his salty skin.
When his hand stroked the inside of her thigh, she shuddered again, but with pleasure this time, and felt an answering tremor in him. She lifted her knee, and his lips replaced the stroking hand, and she murmured a sound of pleasure.
‘You always liked that,’ he whispered, coming back to her mouth, his leg sliding between hers.
‘So did you,’ she answered before her words were drowned in his kiss, while he pressed his thigh against her warmth, and closed his hands over her eager breasts.
She touched his hair, his shoulders, his arms, ran her hands down his back. She freed her mouth to gasp, ‘I want you—now!’ And parted her legs to accommodate him, then folded them about him, holding him tightly to her as he said fiercely,
‘I want you too, Annys, darling! Like this, with your lovely legs around me, your arms holding me, your wonderful, strong body against mine, its firmness and its softness. I’ve wanted to be inside you again.’
‘Oh, yes!’ she whispered back. ‘It feels so good. I missed you.’
He gave her a taut smile, holding back as she was, savouring the precarious, tingling plateau of pleasure. ‘Missed being together like this? Lain awake at night thinking about it? How good it was?’
‘Yes,’ she confessed. ‘Yes. So often.’
‘Me too.’ He kissed her mouth, and she strained towards him. He lifted his head to watch her as he moved slowly, deliriously, deeply. Her head went back, her lips still parted, and he dipped his head and put his lips to the curve of her throat.