Dreaming Of... Australia: Mr Right at the Wrong Time / Imprisoned by a Vow / The Millionaire and the Maid

She told him. All about wrinkled, weathered, ninety-five-year-old Dorothy Kenworthy, who’d come to Australia to marry a man she barely knew eight decades before. To start a life in a town she’d never heard of. A town full of prospects and gold and potential. About how poor they’d been, and how Dorothy’s husband had pulled a small cart with his culture-shocked bride and her belongings the six-hundred kilometres inland from the coast to the mining town he’d called home. How long love had been in coming for them; about the day that it finally had. And about how severely Dorothy’s heart had fractured the day, seventy years later, she’d lost him.

Stories of that kind of hardship were almost impossible to imagine now—how people had endured them—overcome them—and were always her favourites.

‘Dorothy reminds me that there is always hope. No matter how dire things get.’

Sam’s brow folded and he drifted away from her again. Not because he was bored—his intense focus while she’d been telling the start of the story told her that—but because he’d taken her words deep inside himself and was processing them.

‘Why didn’t she give up?’ he eventually asked. ‘When she was frightened and heatstroked and feeling so … alien.’

‘Because she’d come so far. Literally and figuratively. And she knew how important she was to her husband. She didn’t want to let him down.’ His frown trebled as she watched. ‘Plus she’d made a commitment. And she was a woman of great personal honour.’

‘Is that something you believe in? Honouring commitments?’

‘What do we have if not our honour?’

Finally his eyes came back to her. ‘Is it her story on your thumb drive?’

‘No. It’s another one …’

She told him that one too. Then another, and another, sipping occasionally at the water he meted out sparingly and not minding when he shared from the same bottle. She didn’t care if Search and Rescue Sam gave her a few boy germs while he was giving her the greatest gift any man in her life had ever given her.

He listened.

He showed interest. He asked questions. He didn’t just listen waiting for an opportunity to talk about himself, or slowly veer the subject around to something of more interest to him. He heard her. He didn’t interrupt. And he wasn’t the slightest bit bored.

Just like that a light came on, bright and blazing and impossible to ignore, right at the back of Aimee’s mind.

That was the kind of man she wanted for herself. That was the kind of man she’d never really believed existed. Yet here one sat: living, breathing evidence—her already compromised chest tightened—and the universe had handed him to her.

How had she ever thought a man like Wayne was even close to worthy? Maybe if she’d been allowed out more as a young girl, had got to meet more people, sample more personalities … Maybe then she never would have accepted Wayne’s domination of her. Maybe if she hadn’t grown up watching it, until her father had finally forced her mother’s hand …

‘I can see you love these stories.’ His blue eyes were locked on her so firmly, but were conflicted, yet immobile. ‘You’re … glowing.’

Unaccustomed to the intensity he was beaming at her, and still unsettled by her thoughts of just a moment before, Aimee took shelter in flippancy. ‘Maybe it’s the glow-sticks.’ She smiled and settled against the seat-back, her body begging her to let it drift into exhausted slumber. ‘Or the sunrise.’

That seemed to snap him out of his blue-eyed trance. Around them the light had changed from the total absence of any light at all during the night to a deep, dark purple, then a navy. And the navy was lightening up in patches by the moment.

Sam glanced at his watch. A dozen worry lines formed on his face. ‘Okay Aimee, the darkness is lifting. We made it.’ He found her hand and held it. ‘I’m going to need you to be very brave now, and to trust me more than ever.’

We will not fall. She heard the words though she knew he didn’t say them.

It only took another few minutes before she realised why a new kind of tension radiated from his big body and from the hand he’d wrapped so securely around hers. The deep blue outside seemed to dilute as she watched it, and darkness began to take on the indistinct blurs of shape. Then they firmed up into more defined forms—the tree branch outside the window, the hint of a hill on the horizon—as the first touch of lightness streaked high across the sky.

Her heart-rate accelerated as it struggled to pump blood that seemed to thicken and grow sluggish.

Around them she saw nothing but emerging treetops—some higher than her poor battered Honda, some lower. The front of the car was in darkness longer than the areas around it because the nose was buried in a treetop. Literally balancing in the crown of a big eucalypt, which threw off its distinctive scent as the overnight frost evaporated. In her shattered side mirror she could see the angle of the hillside—steep and severe—that the back of her little hatchback had wedged against.

And they perched perilously between the two, staring down into the abyss.

A black dread surged from deep inside Aimee’s terrified body. She sucked in a breath to cry out but it froze, tortured, in her lungs and only a pained squeak issued, as high as the elated morning chorus of the birds around them but infinitely more horrified.

‘Hold on to me, Aimee….’

Sam’s voice was as much a tether as any of the cables strapping her into her car, and she clung to it emotionally even though she couldn’t rip her eyes from the scene she hung suspended over, emerging through the shattered windscreen, as the sun threw clarity across the morning and finally lifted the veil of darkness.

Her squeak evolved into a primitive whine and her entire body hardened into terrified rigour. The shadowy blur of Australian bush below them resolved itself into layer upon layer of towering treetops, falling away for hundreds of meters and narrowing to a sliver of water at the bottom of the massive gully she’d flown over the edge of.

Half a kilometre of deathly fall below the tenuous roost of her car, wedged between the treetop and the mountain.

Sam! Sam!

She couldn’t even make vowels, let alone call to him. The only movement her body would allow was the microscopic muscular changes that pushed air out of her body in a string of agonised whimpers. Like a dog with a mortal injury.

‘Look at me, Aimee …’

Impossible … It was so, so much worse than she’d feared even in her darkest moments. Luck, he’d called it, but it was more of a miracle that her car had hit the crown of this tree rather than plummeting straight past it and down to the tumbling rapids at the bottom of the gully. She’d have been dead before even getting down there, ricocheting off ancient trees like a pinball. Every single base instinct kept her eyes locked on the source of the sudden danger. The threat of the drop. Horrible, yet she couldn’t look away.

Her heart slammed so hard against her ribs she thought they might crack further.

Sam forced himself into her line of vision, stretching across her to break the traction of her gaze on the certain death below. The shaft of pain from the extra pressure on her leg was more effective than anything in impacting on her crippled senses.

‘Aimee …!’

Her eyes tried to drift past him, her face turning slightly, but he forced her focus back to him with insistent fingers on her chin.

‘At me, Aimee … Look only at me.’

Only at me. She heard the words but couldn’t process them. This was like last night all over again. It’s the shock, something deep down inside her tossed up. It was the shock preventing her from looking at him. Understanding him.

The whining went on, completely independent of her will.

Sam slid both warm hands up on either side of her face and forced it to him. This close, he all but obliterated the dreadful view down to the forest floor. In that moment her whole world became the blue of his eyes, the golden tan of his skin and the blush of his lips.

‘Aimee …’ Sam’s voice buzzed at her. ‘Think about Dorothy. Think how frightened and alone she felt out there in the desert—fifteen years old, with a man she’d only just met. Think about the courage she would have had to have to go with him. To get onto that boat in Liverpool and leave her entire family for a hot, hostile country. Think about how hard she would have fought against the fear.’

The most genteel, gentle woman she’d ever interviewed. And the toughest. Words finally scraped past her restricted larynx. ‘She had her husband …’

‘You have me.’ He ducked his head to recapture her eyes. ‘Aimee, you have me, and I’m going to get you out of here.’

This time her eyes didn’t slide away, back to the void below them. They gripped onto Sam’s.

He sighed his relief. ‘There you are. Good girl.’ He leaned in and pressed his hot lips to her clammy forehead.

The reassuring intimacy just about broke her again. ‘Sam …’

‘I know.’ He dropped back into his position, lying across her, between her and the awful view. ‘But you’re okay. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Not while I’m around.’

She blew three short puffs through frigid lips. ‘Okay.’