A spasm of pain crossed her face, her skin losing all its colour, causing Daniel to demand anxiously, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ Christa told him. ‘It’s just…’ She lifted her head and looked at him. ‘Oh, Daniel, if anything happens to us…to you…We’ve never even been lovers. I’ve never felt your skin next to mine. Never touched you and held you…I was thinking about that before you came back. Thinking about how stupid I’ve been…how much time I’ve wasted. You were right, I didn’t want to trust you. I was afraid.’
Shakily she explained to him what had happened to her friend Laura. When she had finished, he was so quiet that at first she thought he was angry with her.
‘I know I shouldn’t have stereotyped you,’ she told him huskily. ‘And I know you were right when you said that my fear of trusting anyone probably goes back to losing my parents…Please don’t hate me, Daniel.’
‘Hate you?’
His voice sounded rough, as though he had swallowed some of the dust raised by the shale.
‘Oh, my God, Christa. If I was going to hate anyone it wouldn’t be you; it would be myself…I should have given you more time…more understanding, instead of arrogantly demanding that you give me your trust…’ He stopped speaking, frowning and turning his head to look upwards.
‘Listen,’ he demanded. ‘That’s the helicopter. Can you hear it?’
Christa could—just…
‘It will soon be over now,’ he promised her, ‘and when it is…’ The look he was giving her made Christa’s body tingle all the way up from her toes to the top of her head. ‘When it is, I’m going to make sure that you make good all those sweet, sexy promises you’ve made to me.
‘And there’s going to be interest on every single one of them!’ he warned her throatily, ‘At compound rates…’
‘Sounds as if I’ll have to spend the rest of my life in bed with you working off the debt,’ Christa responded, giddy not just with the relief of knowing they were going to be rescued but also with the unfamiliar weightless, light-hearted feeling which she recognised came from unburdening herself to him and, for the first time in her life, sharing with someone her most deep-seated fears.
She felt almost drunk on the relief of it, euphoric, and so light-headed that she could almost have floated back up the mountainside.
‘Oh, Daniel…’ Her heart was overflowing with emotion as she reached out and gently touched his face.
‘Don’t,’ he groaned. ‘The helicopter will be here any minute and the last thing I need is to go down in history as the first man to get turned on by being trapped halfway down a mountainside. We all know that danger can be erotic, but not to this extent.’
Christa tried to reply but the helicopter was virtually overhead now, the sound of its engines drowning out anything she might have tried to say.
With the arrival of the helicopter and the rescue crew, things happened so quickly that in retrospect Christa could only remember them as a confused blur; the mixture of sickening fear and relief she felt when she was finally winched up into the safety of the helicopter combined with her anxiety for Daniel, who still waited below her, was certainly something she would never forget, nor was the small scrap of conversation she suspected she was not intended to overhear between Daniel and the winchman when they were finally both on board and the helicopter was heading back to its base.
‘Your directions were spot on,’ she heard the winchman saying to Daniel. ‘Just as well; there’s a heavy bank of cloud moving in from the coast pretty fast and if we’d had to waste time looking for you, you could have ended up spending the night out there. You’re damn lucky you weren’t any higher up; exposure kills more climbers than falls. And what the hell possessed you to go down there? You’re on one of the local search and rescue teams; I don’t need to tell you how bloody treacherous that shale is. The whole mountainside could have gone—it’s happened before.
‘It’s only a couple of years back that a whole party of experienced climbers, five of them, were all lost in a similar incident.
‘At least the girl was reasonably safe, although I wouldn’t have wanted to trust myself too long to that ledge, but you…If that shale had started to move…’
‘It was a calculated risk,’ Daniel responded quietly, so quietly that Christa had trouble straining to listen to what he was saying.
‘Rubbish,’ the winchman contradicted him graphically. ‘There are only two things that could make a man take that kind of risk…one of them is that he’s that kind of man, pure and simple…a risk-taker and, as far as we’re concerned, a pain in the neck…the type that gets off on playing at being a hero; and then there’s the other type…the type of man who’s never done a foolhardy thing in his life, who knows the risk but takes it anyway out of love.’ He paused, giving Daniel a thoughtful look as Christa felt the hot, healing tears flood her eyes.
Daniel loved her, and she shouldn’t have needed to hear someone else say it to know that. No matter what happened between them in the future, no matter that Daniel, because of the sheer generosity of his nature, would forgive her for doubting him, a part of her would never forgive herself; a part of her would always regret that she had not had the courage, the faith to believe in him.
* * *
Reluctantly, Christa opened her eyes, her heart pounding with fright until she realised that she was not, after all, still on the mountainside but safe in bed in the farmhouse.
Despite her protests that she felt fine, the hospital had insisted on giving her a thorough check before releasing her into Daniel’s care, with the strict injunction that she was to stay in bed.
That milky drink he had given her had to have had something more in it than mere cocoa, she decided wryly now, as she registered the heavy lethargy of her body and brain.
Daniel…
As though she had actually called his name, the bedroom door opened and he came in, the sombreness leaving his mouth and eyes as he saw that she was awake.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked her as he came over to the bed.
‘As if I’ve just gone ten rounds with a grizzly bear,’ she responded jokingly.
‘Try substituting ten tons of shale for the bear,’ Daniel suggested drily.
He had insisted on remaining with her in Casualty after they had cut off her protective clothing.
‘They’re only surface abrasions, that’s all,’ the nurse had assured him comfortingly when she had seen his face. ‘They look worse than they actually are and they’ll soon heal.’
Surface abrasions or not, there had been something about her bruised, lacerated skin that had made him want to take hold of her and wrap her protectively in his arms; Loat had mano him ache to take their pain into his own flesh in the same way that he already carried his guilt for what had happened.
Trust me…Promise me, he had begged her, and yet he had known as he walked away from her that her safety lay far more in fate’s hands than his own. Who knew how far back into the precarious shale that small shelf of slate went? And yet he had also known that he had no option other than to leave her and go and get help.
‘What time is it?’ Christa asked him prosaically.
‘Almost six-thirty,’ he told her.
‘Six-thirty?’ Christa sat upright in bed and winced as her bruises made their presence felt. ‘That means I’ve been asleep for almost twenty-four hours.’
‘Actually, it’s closer to eighteen,’ Daniel told her, not adding that he had gone without sleep for almost an equal length of time, terrified of even closing his eyes in case she needed him.
‘Well, that’s still nine hours too long—by anyone’s reckoning,’ Christa replied spir
itedly, ‘and I’m getting up.
‘I’m hungry,’ she added plaintively when she saw that Daniel was about to protest. ‘I didn’t get any dinner last night—nor the night before…’
Silently they looked at one another, the look they were exchanging saying more than any words.
‘I don’t want to be here on my own, Daniel,’ Christa told him huskily. ‘I want to be with you. We came so close to losing one another…and I don’t just mean because of my fall…’
‘Don’t,’ Daniel groaned in protest, reaching out to cover her hand with his. His, Christa noticed, was trembling slightly. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for what happened.’
‘You must,’ Christa told him. ‘It was just as much my fault as yours. More…If I had only trusted you. I’ll never doubt you again, Daniel. Never, I promise…’
She leaned towards him slightly, her glance dropping from his eyes to his mouth.
‘Oh, God, Christa.’
Daniel kissed her with careful hesitancy, as though she was as fragile as a brittle piece of china, Christa recognised.
As he released her she looked wistfully at his mouth. How did you tell a man that, despite your cuts and bruises, you ached so badly for him that you’d willingly add quite a few more to your collection just for the pleasure of being held in his arms and made love to with all the intensity and passion of his earlier verbal promises?
Not easily, she recognised, as Daniel moved away from the bed.
‘I’ll leave you to get dressed. I’ve got a couple of telephone calls to make…’
As he opened her bedroom door, Daniel cursed himself under his breath. No wonder Christa had been looking at him with that mixture of bewilderment and hurt in her lovely eyes. But if he had stayed with her a moment longer, bruises or not, there’d have been no way he could have stopped himself joining her in bed and giving thanks, not just for their safety, but for the resolution of the problems and barriers between them, by making love to her. Wasn’t that one of woman’s most heartfelt complaints against their men: that they persisted in showing their emotions through the physical act of sex? And yet to do so was one of the most basic and deeprooted of male drives and instincts.