Headlong (Quinn Brothers Book 2) Read online

  “You sound just like my parents,” she complained, before she had the chance to censor herself. It was true enough, but hardly polite. She could have bitten her tongue off as soon as she realized she had said it out loud.

  There was a shocked silence on the other end of the line for a few moments, and Jed’s face moved from astonishment, to anger, and then smoothed out again. When he spoke, his voice was soft and low. “I’m sorry I’m so hard on you, Abby,” he said, his voice a caress. “It’s just that you are worth so much to me. You mean such a lot to me, I want to see you achieve everything you can. I want to see you shine and soar. That’s why I expect so much of you. I know you can deliver everything I ask of you, if you truly want to.”

  And I want you to not be engaged to Julia, but we don’t always get what we want. “Thank you,” she said politely, refusing to fall for his blandishments. He was engaged to Julia. He had no business trying to sweet-talk her. “Oh, and congratulations by the way.”

  His brow wrinkled in confusion, but his eyes were cold and calculating. “Congratulations? What for?”

  “Your engagement. Oh, and becoming a father, too.”

  His caring expression collapsed in on itself and she caught a glimpse of pure frustration before he smoothed it out again. “How did you know?”

  “I saw it on Facebook the other day. Julia posted a lovely picture of the two of you, showing off her pregnant belly and the ring on her finger.”

  “Yeah right, thanks.” He sounded thoroughly unimpressed.

  She had a moment of feeling sorry for poor Julia, until she recalled that Julia had everything that Abby wanted. “I’m sure you will be very happy together. And I hope she won’t mind that you will have to spend this weekend reading through my article because you promised to send it to the editor with such a short turnaround time. I know you’ll be able to get through it all if you really want to.” And with that parting shot, she ended the call.

  Noah practically bounded into the breakfast hall then next day.

  “I hope you don’t have a busy day planned,” he said to Abby.

  She looked up at him, her half-finished toast on her plate, and raised an eyebrow. “Why’s that?” She took another bite of the toast. She had smothered it in butter. The extra calories could kiss her butt. She didn't have the willpower to resist today. Not when her parents were annoyed at her and her heart was still stinging from the last conversation with Jed. For all that she had been in love with him forever, he could be demanding and cold.

  Such a contrast to Noah, who was always so warm and sunny.

  “It’s my day off.” He helped himself to a pot of coffee on the table. His casual confidence still took her by surprise. Only he could get away with turning up for planned meals and help himself without checking with the cooks first, who were in charge of the rationing for the hostel. But they never seemed to mind, and she was pretty sure she had seen the elderly cook wink at him the last time he had turned up.

  “Do you have anything exciting planned?” She took another bite of her toast, relishing the buttery flavor.

  “I have permission to take you up in the helicopter for a flight.” This sentence was delivered with a ring of excitement in his voice that Abby just couldn’t match.

  “A flight in the helicopter?” Her throat felt dry and she hastily gulped a mouthful of coffee. The last time she had been in the helicopter she had felt too desperate to get to safety to be scared. But she wasn’t so keen on going for a ride just for fun. Not when it involved traveling so high while strapped into a flying death machine. What exactly were the statistics on the mortality rates for helicopter passengers? Was she ready to trust her life to him?

  Noah could see her face drop. Ever the optimist, it seemed to make him smile even more. “I told you that I’d be taking you on as many parent-unapproved activities as I could think of, and I’m delivering on that promise. You don’t need anything special for the flight. You can come with me as soon as you have done with breakfast.”

  He was right about flying being parent-unapproved. Her parents would hate the idea of a helicopter flight. If it didn’t help her to build her career, they couldn’t see the point of her doing anything. And if it could be considered dangerous? That would be completely unacceptable.

  She took another big bite of toast. The thought of her parents’ disapproval decided her. After all, she had dreaded going camping before she went, and ended up enjoying herself immensely. She was going to be fun and adventurous if it killed her. “Okay, I’m in.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Really? It was as easy as that to convince you?”

  She finished the last bite of her breakfast and licked the last of the butter from her fingers. “What can I say? I’m a pushover.” It would annoy Jed, too. And make his paper even later, which served him right.

  She buckled herself into the helicopter with a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach, thinking uncomfortably that Noah might soon be wearing her breakfast if her nerves continued the same way. The helicopter was bigger than she remembered from her rescue. There was plenty of room in the back for passengers that were more badly injured or ill than she herself had been when she was rescued.

  He handed her a pair of headphones with a mic attached. “It gets pretty noisy when I start the rotors,” he explained. “This will block out the noise but still let us talk to each other. Like you wore last time.”

  She nodded gamely, fighting the urge to unbuckle herself, jump out, and run away over the tarmac back to the confines of her lab. Her lab was her safe place, the place she retreated to whenever life got tough.

  A warm hand covered hers. “You okay?” he mouthed at her.

  She nodded. Funnily enough, with this evidence of his thoughtfulness, she did feel better. A fun and adventurous woman didn’t need a security blanket, she told herself firmly, as the rotors started to spin. I’ve done this before, I can do it again. And this time I will enjoy it!

  She was concentrating so hard on making herself relax that she didn’t notice they were already airborne.

  Noah’s voice came in her ear. “We’ll head over to the coast and out over the ocean. You get a great view of the water from the air. Keep a lookout for wildlife. You never know what you might see here.”

  After a few minutes’ flying, they were over the sea. From above, the water looked a clear, bright green, and the outline of the reefs below the surface were clearly visible.

  “Oooh, look,” she squealed, as a long shape came into view. “Is that a whale?

  “Sure is.”

  “I can really see a whale from all the way up here. That’s amazing.”

  He turned and winked at her. “Such enthusiasm for something that isn’t a rock.”

  She made a face at his cheeky comment. “And there’s another little whale next to it. It’s a baby whale. That is so cool.”

  The helicopter hovered in place for a moment, before Noah dropped it a little closer to the water. “They migrate up the coast this time of year.”

  “Wow.” She pulled her camera up from around her neck and aimed it down to take a photo of the whales. Noah dropped even closer to the water, so close Abby feared they would frighten the whales away.

  Suddenly a voice in her ears rang out. “Noah, you there mate?”

  Noah nosed the helicopter higher. “Yep, I’m just out on a scenic flight. What’s up, Dave?”

  “We have a bit of a situation here.”

  “Shoot.”

  “We’ve got a kid with a snake bite, sounds bad. From what they described could be a brown snake bite. The big chopper is out ferrying a really sick patient to the hospital in Perth, and all the others are out on calls. You’re the only one who’s close enough to pick her up.”

  Noah made an apologetic face at Abby and mouthed “I’m sorry” at her. “I’m on it. Where is she?”

  The dispatcher gave Noah the directions to a campsite not far from where they were and rang off.

  “Sorry abou
t that,” Noah said, as he wheeled the chopper around and headed for the land. “I won’t be able to give you much of a sightseeing trip after all. But that’s just part of life out here. If someone needs help and you’re the best person to give it, then you give it, no questions asked. Dave wouldn’t have called me if he hadn’t needed the chopper.”

  “Of course you have to go help,” Abby exclaimed. She would never dream of making Noah feel guilty for cutting short their trip to go and do his job. Even if she had been starting to forget that she was riding in a flying death machine and was actually enjoying herself. “We can go sightseeing any time, but that poor girl only has one chance to get to hospital.”

  “Thanks for being so understanding.”

  She smiled at him. “That’s the advantage of me being a workaholic. I’m far less likely than other people to complain if your job makes unexpected demands on you.”

  “That’s not always the case,” he replied with unaccustomed frankness. “In my experience, it’s often the people who take their own work the most seriously who are the most dismissive when it comes to what other people do.”

  His words gave her a momentary pause. Yeah, she’d been guilty of that herself, she had to admit. Just because she never saw him at work, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t working. He was out here flying helicopters to save people’s lives, while she was poking at rocks under a microscope in a search of a tenured position at a good university. When she thought about it like that, her work seemed desperately unimportant in comparison.

  Her earlier attitude towards him made her feel pretty bad about herself. “Are brown snake bites dangerous?” she asked, to change to subject.

  “They can be, especially for children. They are so much smaller than adults that the venom can really take a hold on them. The faster we can get them to hospital, and the sooner they can get filled with anti-venom, the better.”

  The chopper was flying low now, and the campsite came into view.

  Noah headed for a grassy patch close and brought the chopper in with barely a bump. He opened the door and jumped down to the ground. “As soon as we get the kid in and settled, we’ll take off again right away.”

  Abby hesitated for a second then jumped out too, not quite sure what she could do to help but not wanting to sit still in the helicopter. “I’ll help you load her in,” she said and scurried to catch up to him.

  The two of them jogged over to the small knot of people clustered around a small girl of about ten years old, dressed in a dusty pair of shorts and a tank top. There was the telltale silvery track of dried tears on her face, but she was alert and awake. They made way for Noah and Abby. Noah knelt by the girl, next to a small woman with a desperate look on her face—obviously the child’s mother. “So, you got bitten by a snake, huh?”

  The little girl nodded. “Just here, see?” And she pointed to a couple tiny marks on her leg, halfway up her calf, and a small trickle of blood that ran down to her ankle.

  “Did you see it?”

  She nodded. “It was brown. And this big.” She held her hands up a few feet apart. She sniffed. “I liked snakes before. They are pretty. But not when they bite me.”

  Noah nodded, but his face looked worried. Still his voice was calm when he said, “They are pretty, aren’t they? Still, just as well to get you off into hospital so the clever doctors can check out that he didn’t eat too much of you.”

  The girl giggled. “He didn’t eat hardly any of me.”

  “Have you ever ridden in a helicopter before?”

  She looked at her mother, who shook her head and looked as if she was about to burst into tears. “No she hasn’t.” Her voice was high pitched.

  “Then this will be a grand adventure. I’ll carry you to the chopper and get you settled so you can enjoy the ride.” And he picked her up as if she weighed no more than a teddy bear.

  The girl’s eyes filled with tears as she lay cradled in his arms and she looked straight at Abby. “I want my mum to come with me.”

  Abby gave the girl a reassuring smile. “Don’t you worry. Your mom will be right here with you all the way.” She took the frantic woman by the hand and led her behind Noah over to the waiting chopper.

  A few minutes later, the girl was safely buckled onto the stretcher with her mother on one side of her and Abby on the other, and Noah whispered urgently to Abby to try and keep them calm before he took off for the hospital, flying considerably faster than he had been on the sightseeing tour.

  The young girl, who Abby learned was called Evie, sat up and looked out the window with interest for a few minutes, before lying back and complaining of a sore head. Her leg had turned an alarming shade of purple.

  For the first time ever, Abby wished she had studied something else at college, something useful. Something that would mean she was able to help in such a situation. A doctor, a paramedic, anything. All she could do was to talk to Evie and her mother and keep them distracted on the trip to the hospital.

  Chapter Six

  Keeping Evie occupied was the best way of dealing with the situation, she decided. Evie’s mom would be much more likely to be able to keep herself together if her daughter looked okay.

  Noah flew a short way over the water. Abby pointed out the view from the window and engaged a pale Evie in looking for whales. Evie’s mom smiled wanly when Evie spotted one and squealed in excitement. She kept her lips firmly shut however, and as Evie turned her face to look out the window, Abby could see her chin quivering.

  When they were over the desert again, they tried to spot kangaroos. Evie wasn’t quite so excited about the kangaroos, but it still took her mind off her headache and stopped her from freaking out at her swollen leg.

  Abby could see outlines of buildings in the distance when Evie lay back and went quiet.

  Her mother grasped the edge of the stretcher so hard her knuckles went white. “Evie, wake up,” she cried. “Oh God, oh God.”

  “It’s okay,” Abby said, forcing her voice not to waver. “We are minutes away. I can see the hospital. Evie, can you hear me?”

  The little girl nodded her head and whispered a quiet “Yes.”

  “How old are you Evie?”

  “I’m seven and three-quarters.”

  “So you’re going to turn eight soon? Wow, that’s nearly double digits! Will you have a birthday party?”

  Evie nodded. “Yes, but Mum says I can only have three friends to sleep over and I want to invite Sammy and Alex too.” Her voice was quiet, but she was still talking. Abby kept going, not sure what else to do but to keep the girl awake and conscious.

  Her mum made a funny hiccupping sound. “Honey, you can invite them too, okay? And I’ll order that cake you wanted. The big one from the store with three layers.”

  Evie turned her head slowly and a small smile crept onto her face. “Really?” Her voice was still quiet but there was no mistaking the tinge of excitement in her voice. Abby’s heart was in her throat. She had to keep Evie awake. “That sounds like a great cake, Evie. What flavor is it?”

  “It’s chocolate. And it has pink icing.”

  “Yum. Is chocolate your favorite cake flavor?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was even quieter now.

  Abby could see the hospital roof now, looming closer. “Chocolate is my favorite, too,” she said. “What flavor is the pink icing?”

  “Raspberry,” Evie murmured back.

  The helicopter touched down. As soon as the engines were cut, a team of medics were opening the double doors and hauling out the stretcher with Evie on it. Evie’s mother paused just long enough to clasp Abby’s hand warmly and stutter out a few teary words of thanks before she rushed after her daughter.

  In a few moments, all was still and calm again. Abby looked around at the now-deserted rooftop and took a deep breath. She felt as if she had run an entire marathon.

  Noah had jumped down from the pilot’s seat and came to stand beside her.

  “She’ll be okay,” he sa
id. “We got her here quickly enough. It’s lucky we were close by, it could have been a lot worse.”

  Abby looked at him with new-found respect. “You do this every day?” Just the one rescue and her heart was still beating hard and she felt completely shattered. The nervous energy had really taken it out of her.

  “Yep. Sometimes I’m flying around from early in the morning to late at night. I can’t exactly choose when people need help. I just have to be prepared to respond when they do.”

  “I don’t know how you manage it. You were so good with that little girl and knew just what to say to her. And everything went so quickly and smoothly. You had her loaded into the chopper in no time at all.”

  He took her hand in his. “You were great with her in the back. I was a bit concerned that her mother was going to lose it. She might well have if you hadn’t been there with her to take her mind off things.”

  His touch was comforting. “There was not a lot else I could do. I felt a bit helpless actually.” She paused. “Studying rocks doesn’t really prepare you for real life emergencies like that.”

  “You were great.” They fell silent for a moment, both standing and staring at the doors that the emergency workers had carried Evie through. Noah cleared his throat.

  “I really appreciated that you were willing to help out. My last girlfriend would’ve been mad that I’d interrupted our date and sulked in the chopper while I sorted it out. But you just jumped in and did everything you could.”

  His last girlfriend? Did that mean that he thought of her as his current girlfriend? Had this been a date? The thought was surprisingly pleasant, but she didn’t want to think about it too hard. Maybe she was reading too much into his casual words. “Thank you for taking me out today. And for letting me help out where I could. It meant a lot to me.”

  Abby tackled her work with renewed enthusiasm the following weeks, getting up early and making sure all her work was done during the day, so she had her evenings free, as Noah’s campaign to encourage her to indulge herself in parental non-approved activities kicked up a notch.