Christmas Holiday Husband (23 page)

A sickening stab of anguish shot through her. He was looking for her, but he wouldn’t be able to find her because her clothing camouflaged her so well. The sandy cotton trousers were the colour of the crumbling rock. The olive green T-shirt merged with the vegetation. Desperate and despairing, she cast about for any possible way of making herself visible.

Red...

He’d be able to see red...

With infinite caution she lay back and scrabbled at her T-shirt, easing it up to expose her cherry-red silk camisole.
Oh please, please, Tony...

She half hung, helpless, bombarded by noise, as the welcome downdraught of the rotors finally beat against her. She squeezed her eyes closed against the dust, and prayed with every ounce of hope the buffeting air wouldn’t rip the rest of the old tree out and send her sliding over the edge.

xxx

He landed as fast as he dared, and as close to her as he calculated wise. After setting friction on the controls and slowing the rotors to ground idle, he vaulted out, yanking the ever-useful rope with him. He knotted one end around his waist and the other around a skid-strut.

“Ellie!” he bellowed. “Stay still.”

As he jogged closer he found his panicked instruction was hardly needed. She had no hope in hell of moving, and was so close to being dragged to extinction that his heart lodged in his throat and beat a frantic tattoo there. “Fuck! My poor darling...” he croaked, dropping to the ground. Flat as a hunting cat, he inched across the rough pasture, mindful his extra weight could collapse the cliff’s edge at any second.

Ellie burst into tears, wailing with pain and relief, and the sound cut him to shreds.

“Hold on, my little love—hold on, I’m here. I’m right here. I’ll soon have you safe.” He pushed closer, grabbed her flailing hand, and pressed a quick kiss onto it. Somehow he passed the rope around her so they were secured together, taking up as much slack as he could to prevent them pitching over if the worst happened.

With every joint popping, with every muscle straining, he hauled the tree root higher until she pulled her trapped ankle away, screaming with the surge of pain as he released her.

She clawed at the crumbling brink of the Devil Hole, blue eyes wide in her sunburned face. He crushed her against him, dragging her like a lion with a newly killed antelope, and crawled away from the edge, muttering furious endearments and curses. At last they collapsed side by side in a filthy heap and just lay, her sobbing, him panting.

Minutes later his lips roamed over her face, seeking her mouth. His tender kiss was flavoured with relief and longing. “Ellie, my love, that was a hell of a way to get my attention,” he whispered. “I’ll never let you out of my sight again. You have
no idea
what that did to my heart. I thought I’d lost you for all money.”

“I thought you had, too,” she hiccupped between sobs. “I thought I was dead any second.”

“Unforgivable,” he said, with another soft kiss, “to find the woman I loved after all these years, and then nearly lose her again.”

xxx

Ellie’s ears heard the words, but it took time for them to register in her stressed and overloaded brain.

The woman he
loved?

Fireworks sparked all through her, burning away the pain and fatigue, leaving just his simple confirmation. “The woman you
love?
”

Her myriad scrapes and bruises throbbed a little less. Even the ankle became bearable.

“The woman I loved from the moment I saw her,” he agreed hoarsely. “God, Ellie, you bowled me over all those years ago in Sydney. You have no idea how I tried to resist you. I really didn’t want to mess up our travelling by having you on my mind the whole time.” He heaved a huge sigh.

She nudged him in the ribs. “I’ve had you on mine ever since.”

He smiled, and stroked her hair back from her dusty face. “I felt the electricity between us the moment I set eyes on you. And you were giving me a good going over in return.”

“I was hidden behind my sunglasses,” she protested.

“Looking straight at me, all the same. I could tell by the angle of your head.”

“You were beautiful,” she said. “The most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I didn’t mean to stare, but I couldn’t stop.”

He dropped a kiss on her brow. “And I didn’t mean to ask you out. But some little devil made me do it anyway. And look where that got us...”

“I wanted you so much. I’d never felt that way about any other man.”

“As I discovered.” He grimaced, looking straight into her eyes. “When I found I was your first lover, I wanted to start the whole evening over. Seduce you gently. Make it wonderful for you.”

He ran his hand through her hair again, and she closed her eyes for a few seconds, absorbing his caress.

“I didn’t seem to need much seducing. And you did make it wonderful, Tony.”

“That was an incredible week. It ripped me apart when you went home.”

“But you had to keep travelling. I knew that.”

She raised her head and nipped his neck. “That’s for going away for so long.”

She kissed the same spot. “That’s for rescuing me just now.”

Then she bit him hard enough to make him jump and swear. “And that,” she said with satisfaction, “is for never mentioning you loved me.” She pushed herself away from his startled face and glared down at him. “Don’t you know that would have made all the difference, Tony? If I’d known you wanted
me
as much as Cal, I might...
might
have said yes.”

“You might have? You
would
have!” His eyes reflected the sudden joy her words brought.

She sniffed. “Only might. Don’t get too hopeful.”

He laughed as she tried to maintain her outraged expression. “Is your heart going as fast as mine?” he asked, slipping a hand under her T-shirt to cradle a lace-caged breast.

Ellie knew her pulse would be thundering under his fingers. “That’s just terror,” she said, smiling.

“Is the other one as scared?” His hand roamed further sideways, gentle and loving. “You’re shaking all over,” he whispered, pulling her against him again to comfort her and reinforce his fervent pledge of love.

She sighed and laid her face against his chest. “You’re still a bit shivery yourself.”

“Reaction to extreme physical effort,” he countered. “I’m not in the least affected by the fact you’ve agreed to marry me.”

“But—”

“Sorry—
might
have agreed to marry me.”

“Yes, I might. Possibly,” she said, snuggling closer.

“Give me a definite yes or I’ll throw you back over the edge.”

She grinned, and raised her gaze to his. “Dangerous idea, Tony. We’re still tied together.” Her eyes followed the rope back to the shining black dragonfly which sat a little distance away, rotors slowly turning.

“Where you go, I go...?” he suggested.

“Yes please,” she whispered, as the shock of her rescue hit home and tears started to wash pale furrows down her dusty face again. He pulled her even closer as she wept.

“Would it have held us both?” she asked, minutes later, looking sideways at the gleaming machine.

“It weighs well over half a tonne,” he said, relaxing his fierce grip on her. “It can lift a steer. I helped rescue some in the winter floods over on Miller’s Flat. God knows what they thought, poor beasts, slung up and flying through the air.” He smoothed a finger along her eyebrow. “I don’t think the two of us would weigh more than a steer, do you?”

She managed a weak chuckle at the thought of it.

“Frankly I didn’t care, Ellie. It was both of us or neither of us. If we’d dragged the chopper over the edge, at least we’d have gone together.”

He ran a tender hand along her cheek, wiping at the occasional huge tears that still welled from her eyes. “Can you move yet? Can you move
at all?
We need to get you to hospital.”

“I don’t think I need hospital, Tony. If you wash me off a bit and clean up these scrapes with antiseptic I’ll be fine.” She cast a doubtful glance downward. “I’m sure I can move if I lean on you. I’d better get your local doctor to look at my ankle, I suppose.”

He drew a deep breath. “We’ll see about that. I’m just about steady enough to fly you home now, but I think we should get the air ambulance out for you.”

“Home,” she murmured. “Wharemoana?”

“Of course Wharemoana. Home for all of us. Speaking of which, we need to tell our son...” He let the words hang in the air.

Ellie bit her lip. “How on earth do we do that? He’ll hate me so much. Producing such a wonderful dad for him after all this time. Depriving him of you for so long.”

Tony shook his head. “Don’t look back, Ellie. Let’s go forward. Children are remarkably forgiving. I could tell you stories about the twins,” he added, trailing off and sighing. “Julia and I put them through hell—tried not to of course, but still...”

She reached up and kissed his chin. “Sshhhh. All in the past now.”

A brief flicker of amusement transformed his face. “I’ve got some photos we could show him. You and me together. Looking indecently fond of each other. Found them again the other day when...”

“When you were searching for a Cal lookalike photo to drive me crazy with?”

He nodded. The corners of his mouth twitched again. “Shots that Darren took in Sydney. You and me. That white bikini.” He rolled his eyes at her and she giggled.

“He had some photos printed at a kiosk when we reached London, and there you were again. Magic to have you. To see you really were that lovely.”

“Your tarty redhead,” she teased.

“This,” he said, pulling the tie from her collapsing pony tail, “is a much truer indication of your temperament. Dark and witchy. Full of evil intentions.”

“I am not,” she protested.

“Not any longer,” he agreed, running his hands through her hair, massaging her scalp and aching neck. “Let’s go home, my darling.
Our
home. I’ve no intention of passing Wharemoana on to Cal for a very long time yet.” He sent her a surprisingly shy grin. “We’ll get Doc Langton to look at your ankle right away. Then tomorrow I’ll collect my son and my mother-in-law-to-be and we’ll all have Christmas here together—unless you’ve anything better arranged, of course?”

“What could possibly be better?” she murmured, attempting to get to her feet. When that proved impossible, she let him gather her up and carry her.

Once he’d settled into her seat and attended to her harness, she watched him unhitching the rope. “Good thing you had that with you.”

“I rescue frisky young heifers from gullies all the time.”

Ellie had no idea whether to believe him. She sat, still trembling, as he coiled it up. “There’s something I haven’t told you. He’s Callum Anthony.”

xxx

Tony swallowed and bowed his head. “I know. He said. It blew me away, Ellie, that you’d do it for me.” His gaze held hers.

“I did it for him as well, Tony. So he’d have something of his dad’s. I didn’t reckon on him ever getting anything else. I tried to find you soon after he was born. From the Electoral Rolls I mentioned. That was really why I wrote the letter. So I could tell you about your amazing new son. About his eyes that were yours, and that he was so beautiful, so healthy. To ask if you wanted to meet him.”

Tony nodded, unable to speak for the moment. Then he managed a lopsided grin and stowed the rope away before seating himself at the controls. “I’m sorry it never reached me, Ellie. Thanks for trying, anyway. It makes things easier, knowing...”

“A pretty feeble effort. But I didn’t have the money for a private investigator. And you weren’t an official missing person, so I didn’t expect the Police would spring into action.”

“You should have done a Google search.”

One of her shoulders rose in an eloquent shrug. “It was a long time ago, Tony. Were you well known enough then? I was scared and poor, and I’d wrecked my mother’s life as well as mine. I was exhausted with the baby and probably not thinking too straight.”

“But you’re thinking straight now? You
will
marry me? You and Cal?”

She laughed, and reached over to touch his nearest hand. Their fingers curled together. “Yes, I’m thinking straight now for sure. Yes, we’ll marry you, me and Cal.”

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Tomorrow was April the fifth. Ellie’s birthday.

And her wedding day.

Her mother Rebecca now lived in the new house in town—planting up the garden, keeping the bedrooms ready for her daughter and grandson’s visits. And sometimes providing dinner, and possibly more, for a rather nice Mr Plummer who had time on his hands for building trellis arches and garden edgings.