by Holly Ford
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but I don’t much like the look of the tree.’ She tucked the soaking wet rug around their shoulders. ‘I’d never make it anyway.’
‘You have to try.’
‘I’m going to. I’m going to try right down here. We both are.’ Tess held him a little tighter. ‘If I’m going down Broken Creek, I want to go with a McAdam.’ As another piece of debris hit the hull, she glanced over her shoulder at the current. ‘Maybe if it sees who I’m with it’ll show me some respect.’
Somewhere under the boat, something crunched. Was their angle changing? Tess tried to ready herself for the river again. If they went in sideways like this, she thought the current would probably flip them – the first trick would be not to get trapped under the hull when it did. She stamped down a spike of terror. Best not to think about what was waiting for them under there. The slim chance they had of not getting snagged in the tree themselves. How long it took to drown. Nate’s eyes were closed. She wasn’t sure if he was conscious or not. She thought about trying to wake him up, but it seemed unkind. God, she was tired. So tired her ears were starting to ring. Tess shook her head. The low hum continued.
‘Nate.’ Tess shook him too. ‘Nate, wake up.’
He put his hand over hers. ‘Is it time to go?’
‘Listen. Can you hear that?’
‘I hear it.’ Abruptly, Nate’s eyes flared into full consciousness. ‘It’s Mitch. He’s coming.’
Seventeen
He was flying low up the river. So low they were already being whipped by the rotor wash before the body of the Robbie rose above the tree. There was no need to wave. The only things stopping Tess looking Mitch straight in the eye were the sunglasses he was wearing. As he swung around, hovering above them, she raised her hand anyway. She wasn’t surprised not to get a wave in return. Mitch looked like he had his hands full.
‘Come on.’ Tess heaved Nate to his feet. Mitch was coming down to meet them, watching his tail rotor, watching his skids, the passenger seat of the Robbie tantalisingly close. All she had to do was get Nate up into it without killing anybody. ‘You have to stand up,’ she yelled into his ear. Don’t pass out, don’t pass out.
Mitch had one skid in the boat, wind and water beating everywhere. Calf-deep in it, barely able to tell river from hull, Tess tried to guide Nate onto the skid.
‘You go first,’ he yelled at her. ‘He can only take one at a time.’
Oh, Jesus. ‘You can’t get in by yourself,’ she yelled back. ‘Mitch can come back for me!’
‘No!’
Across the cockpit, Mitch was yelling too. Tess couldn’t make out the words, but she pretty much got the gist. One of them needed to get in the fucking chopper before it ended up in the river as well.
Dropping her head under Nate’s arm, she heaved him across her shoulders. ‘Hold still,’ she ordered, ‘or you’ll end up killing us all.’ She stepped onto the skid. ‘Now get in.’ Holding onto the grab rail beside the door, Tess let him down as carefully as she could on the tiny seat, hoping to God he wasn’t going to crash into Mitch and the controls. Quickly, she buckled the seatbelt around Nate’s waist, the surge and churn of the river below eating at the edges of her vision. He was saying something to her, arguing still, but she couldn’t hear him.
Giving a thumbs up to Mitch, she got ready to step back down. Mitch was shaking his head, saying something as well. In the instant Nate seized her wrist with a strength she wouldn’t have thought he had left and both men shouted in unison, she got the words at last. Hang on.
As the Robbie sheered sideways and climbed, Tess looked down. The boat had vanished. No – not quite. She could see its white nose poking out of the current behind the tree as they both swept downstream. Then the trunk tossed and rolled, and it was gone.
Oh, Jesus. Tess clung hard to the grab handle. This was not a good moment for her knees to give out. Staying low, slow and straight, Mitch headed for the bank.
When he’d set her down in the flood-swept grass, Tess sank to her heels and stayed there for a while. The ground was a wonderful thing. She’d never given it the credit it deserved. She spread her fingers across the damp, silty tussock, blessing it for its stillness.
A few metres away, Mitch was down too, and waving at her from the bubble. Forcing herself to her feet, she hurried over. In the passenger seat, Nate was unconscious, his duct tape oozing blood again. Tess didn’t remember him letting go.
Mitch was pointing at the headset behind him. She put it on. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Mitch demanded. ‘Just the arm?’
‘He’s lost a lot of blood.’ She thought hard. ‘Hypothermia, probably. Maybe a concussion. He got chucked out of the boat. I think he hit the windscreen, that’s what cut him, but it could have been something else under there, a rock or a snag, I don’t know. I found him unconscious in the water.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah.’ Yeah, she was. After all that, she actually was. ‘Go on, get him out of here. I’m good.’
Mitch leaned over, checking Nate’s seatbelt. ‘I’ll be back for you,’ his voice said in her ears, ‘as soon as I can. Okay?’
Nodding, Tess slipped the headset over Nate’s ears. His eyes opened. With a goofy grin he reached out, touched her hair, and passed out again. Across the cockpit, Mitch was peeling his jacket off. Leaning over, he passed it to her with a ‘keep warm’ gesture.
Backing out of the way of the rotors, she pulled the jacket on and watched the Robbie lift off and clatter away.
•
Mitch doesn’t fly people. As the minutes collected into hours and continued to pass with no sound but the roar of the river behind her, Tess tried not to doubt his word. Mitch had said he’d come back for her, and he would. Wouldn’t he?
At the very least, he’d send Harry to pick her up on a bike, or in the ute, if there was a track to ... wherever exactly this was. The country ahead of the gorge was unfamiliar territory to her, and she’d been too busy watching the surface of the river on the way up to pay much attention to what was beyond the banks.
Eventually, she heard a distant buzz bounce around the hills, the sound slowly resolving into the Robbie’s tinny racket as the chopper came back into view. Oh, thank god for that … As the helicopter touched down, Tess felt a wave of exhaustion sweep through her. Making her way through the rotor wash, she climbed into the cabin at last. Having buckled herself in, she reached for the headset behind her.
‘Sorry I took so long,’ Mitch said, his deep, calm voice profoundly comforting in her ears. ‘I couldn’t find Harry, so I had to stay with Nate till Mountain Rescue came.’
‘He’s okay?’
‘They’ll get some blood into him and he’ll be fine.’
‘I thought you must have flown him to hospital.’ Tess leaned her head back against the seat.
‘I don’t have the range. Or the parking permit.’ Mitch paused. ‘How long do you think I’ve been gone?’
‘A couple of hours,’ she yawned. ‘Three. It doesn’t matter, I’m not complaining.’
‘Forty-seven minutes.’ He indicated the timer above the instrument panel in front of them. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
She peered down at her wrist. ‘I guess my watch isn’t working right.’ Tess yawned again. ‘What time is it now?’
‘Just after eleven.’
Well, that couldn’t be right. The sky was still light. ‘In the morning?’
‘In the morning,’ Mitch said, ‘yes. Tess, can you tell me what day it is?’
She thought about it. ‘The same day Nate and I went up to the gorge.’
‘Which was?’
‘Friday.’
‘Okay.’ He sounded relieved. ‘You just relax over there. We’ll be home in a minute.’
‘So it’s only been three hours since we left?’
‘Something like that, yeah.’
Tess frowned. ‘What made you come looking for us?’
‘I took the dogs for a r
un,’ Mitch said matter-of-factly. ‘Thought I might as well drive down and check out the river while I was at it. I was standing there on the bank and something that looked a lot like Nate’s pack came sailing by. It didn’t seem like a good sign.’
Tess gave a little smile. Maybe the river had been looking after the last McAdam after all.
‘What happened to Nate’s father?’ she asked.
‘Nate’s dad? He was killed in a car crash. Why?’
‘Off the bridge?’
‘No, he got taken out by a carload of teenagers on the wrong side of the road. What makes you think he drove off a bridge?’
‘Just something Nate said when we were …’ Tess drew away from the word sinking. ‘When we were stuck out there.’
‘People say all kinds of crazy stuff when they’re hurt,’ Mitch said. ‘I wouldn’t take too much notice.’
As the rotors slowed, Tess realised they were on the ground.
‘Come on, let’s get you home and warmed up.’
‘Can you drop me off at the river? I need to pick up the HiLux,’ she remembered, as Mitch helped her out.
He gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t think that’s a great idea right now. I’ll go get it with Harry when he comes back.’
‘The tractor and the boat trailer are down there too.’
‘Yeah, we’ll bring those back as well. Not,’ he added, guiding her over to his ute, ‘that we’ve got a lot of use for the trailer anymore.’
‘Mitch?’
‘What?’
‘Thank you for flying me today.’ In the front seat, she turned to him. ‘I know you don’t like to carry people.’
‘Well.’ He gave her his little smile. ‘If you’re not in the bubble, you’re pretty much freight.’
‘Seriously,’ Tess said. ‘It was an amazing thing you did. Thank you. It couldn’t have been easy.’
‘It’s been a long time since I flew that close to the edge.’ Mitch shook his head. ‘I don’t think I’ve risked a helicopter like that outside of a simulator.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She paused. ‘I hope it hasn’t … that it didn’t …’
‘Stir up old memories?’ The wry smile again. ‘Yeah, it did. It made me remember how good it feels to lift people out of trouble.’
The drive back to the homestead got pretty fuzzy. She was vaguely aware of Stan talking to her, of Mitch helping her out of the lifejacket she’d forgotten she was wearing, but the next thing that registered fully on Tess’s consciousness was the moment she woke up on the living room sofa, warm and dry, a fire in the fireplace and darkness edging the room.
Across the fire, Mitch looked up from the book he was reading. ‘I thought you might want to know,’ he said, ‘I spoke to Nate. He said to tell you he’d talk to you tomorrow.’
As she smiled to herself, his eyebrows rose enquiringly. Tess shook her head. ‘I think you had to be there.’
•
‘Hey.’ Two days later, propped up against a couple of pillows in the cottage, Nate gave her the softest version of his smile she’d ever seen. ‘Come in.’ His eyes were warm but serious, his dimple apparently washed away.
Leaning over the bed, Tess hugged him quickly, careful of his injured arm. Careful of a lot of things. But still, at some point – his hand on the back of her shoulder, his bare skin so close to her face – she became aware that holding a warm, conscious and seemingly naked Nate in her arms was a very different experience to the one they’d shared in the middle of Broken Creek.
It was late when Mitch had brought him home last night, and in the absence of an invitation to do otherwise, Tess had left the two of them alone. This morning, early as it still was – too early, maybe, she realised now, for a man who’d just been released from hospital – she hadn’t been able to stay away. Now here he was, very much alive. Very real.
In response to the inclination of his head, and the lack of anything else in the bedroom to sit on, she settled herself on the sheet beside him. Nate laid his hand on her forearm, matching the spread of his fingers to the bruises his grip had left there as she’d stood on the skid of the Robbie. ‘You’re okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ Tess smiled. Briefly, she put her hand over his. ‘Are you?’ She raised her eyes to the neat white dressing running the length of his bicep, the ugly red welts banding his arm where the duct tape had been, the heavy bruising staining his shoulder. She resisted the urge to touch him again with the same effort she was putting into not looking at the rest of his body, the hard curves of muscle denting the pillows, rippling away under the sheet, his knee raised, his skin glowing gold above the white cotton in the slanting morning sun.
‘Yeah,’ he said slowly, removing his hand from her arm. ‘I’m all good. I promised them I’d take it easy on the stitches today, but I’ll be back at work tomorrow.’
She shook her head. ‘There’s no hurry about that.’ Unable, suddenly, to formulate words, Tess stared down at a mark on the knee of her jeans. At the edge of her vision, Nate’s left hand rested beside her leg.
‘You know there’s still a conversation you and I need to have,’ he said. The sheet shifted a little as he sighed. ‘We might as well do it now.’
She didn’t dare look up. ‘Okay.’
‘Have you got the letter with you?’
Had she got the what? Oh, Jesus Christ – he was talking about the redundancy consultation? That was the conversation he’d been wanting to have?
‘No,’ she said briskly, plastering what she hoped was a bland expression over her face as she looked up at him at last. ‘I wasn’t expecting to do that today. I just came to see how you were.’
He nodded. ‘Thanks.’ Tess felt him sigh again. ‘I guess I was hoping we could just get it over with. You know. Move on.’
‘Yeah.’ She took a deep breath herself. ‘Look, about that. Before we have the official conversation, I just need … I need to ask you …’
‘What?’
‘The things you said out there, on the river – did you mean them?’
Nate’s eyes flared. ‘What did I say?’
‘That you wouldn’t be the first McAdam to go down in Broken Creek.’
‘Poetic licence,’ he shrugged. ‘My great-grandfather drowned in it a couple of centuries back. Mum’s side. Not a McAdam, technically.’
‘Oh.’ Tess left a respectful pause. ‘What was he trying to do?’
‘Something stupid, probably.’
She gave him a quick smile. ‘You also said …’ Getting to the hard bit, she stumbled, dropping his gaze. ‘You said you were okay with it. That it – that it made sense, you … well, you know … ending that way.’
Nate’s eyebrows rose. ‘I said that?’
Tess nodded.
‘Was there some context, or did I just share?’
‘You were trying to get me to leave.’
‘I was?’ His grin sparkled up in all its glory. ‘That doesn’t sound like me.’
‘There was also,’ she said, trying not to laugh, ‘a sinking boat involved.’
‘Ah. Yeah, I do remember something about that part.’ Nate gave her a more serious look. ‘You didn’t. Leave, I mean.’
‘Would you have left,’ Tess shrugged, ‘if it had been Mitch in the boat? Or Harry?’
‘Harry?’ Nate made a fifty-fifty gesture with his good arm.
‘Come on.’
She watched him think about it. ‘Maybe not,’ he admitted. ‘But then, nobody ever said I was smart.’
‘So,’ she said, after a while, ‘what you said …’
Nate was silent a while longer. ‘You asked me once,’ he said quietly, ‘why I was still here.’
Tess winced.
‘The real answer is that I don’t know where else to go.’ He was looking away from her, his eyes on the window, the hills outside. He didn’t move as she placed her hand on his. ‘You know, growing up, for a while there it felt like I was saying a lot of goodbyes. Every night when I went to sleep, this place was t
he one thing I knew for sure would still be there when I opened my eyes.’
Swallowing the lump in her throat, she stroked his hand. ‘But,’ she said very softly, ‘you know that there will be …’
‘Other farms?’ he said. ‘Other jobs? Yeah. I know.’ Nate looked back at her with the same gentle smile he’d had on his face when she walked in. ‘I’ll be fine.’ He turned his hand, lifting hers. ‘Nobody died, right?’
Tess smiled back. ‘Nobody died.’
As the urge to put her arms around him grew close to overwhelming, she bowed her head.
‘Hey.’ The abs she was trying not to look at braced as he sat up. ‘That was it.’
‘That was what?’ She raised her chin to find him staring at her like a heading dog sizing up a stroppy sheep.
‘Your face.’
‘What are you talking about? Of course it’s my face.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Your I’m-into-you face. That was it.’
Oh god. Tess tried to marshal her defences only to find they’d all fled. ‘What if it was?’ she asked him. As his surprise faded, she could see Nate was close to laughing, and she was getting that way herself. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. ‘I’m not going to do anything.’ He held her eyes, a serious, measuring look. ‘Are you?’
Leaning forward, she kissed him. A slow kiss, travelling her body like a shiver, a ripple obliterating everything but itself. He was barely touching her, his hand on the back of her neck without pressure, but all she was conscious of was his body, the pulse below her lips as she pressed them to his neck, the taste of his skin, the curves of his chest under her hands, and the feeling, as his fingers brushed softly inside her collar, catching the cotton between them as they traced the line of her shirt to her breast, that she was rising clear, floating free, a rope kicked, a weight lifted, the two of them drifting now on a gentler river. Tess pulled the shirt over her head.
As he ran his hand between her breasts she kissed him again, his lips opening to hers, his fingertips travelling with almost unbearable lightness over her stomach, sending another shudder through her as they stroked the skin below the waistband of her jeans.