Unlocking the Rebel's Heart Page 14

  This was the first time Ben had seen her since the night he’d taken the fish and chip dinner to her cottage. The place he’d ended up being oddly desperate to escape from. It had been a lot more difficult to escape from that background need to keep moving and stay well clear of that disturbing kind of stillness that had prompted him to leave her bed that night but the perfect opportunity to prevent him possibly ever being that still again had presented itself only last night.

  The chance to live his dream.

  JJ’s head turned, as if she could feel Ben watching her as Don Donaldson was finishing his speech, and the instant her gaze met his, Ben knew she could see something in his expression—or perhaps even read his mind—and she was suddenly confused. Bewildered, even? Had she been seeking encouragement to commit to the job here and being a part of Cutler’s Creek permanently but she had picked up the vibe that he wasn’t going to be here himself?

  Everybody was waiting for JJ to respond in some way and Ben could sense her hesitation. He could understand it, too. She was standing at a rather significant crossroad in her life at this moment and it was a huge decision. One that he didn’t think she should be forced to make in public, like this, which gave him an urge to protect her. To deflect the attention and give her some time to collect herself.

  He did realise that it might not be the kindest way to tell her his news but it was certainly the easiest. Possibly the only way, because if he was alone with JJ and close enough to touch her, he might have changed his mind and taken a chance on a very different direction in his own life.

  ‘I have a bit of an announcement myself,’ he said aloud.

  Every head turned in his direction. Except for JJ, who dropped her gaze, as if she knew she might need a moment of relative privacy.

  ‘I had a call last night,’ Ben told them. ‘One of the guys on the helicopter crew in Dunedin had an accident on his motorbike and he’ll be out of action for some time. I’ve been offered a spot to train and work with the crew.’

  He’d certainly made himself the centre of attention instead of JJ. Mike was beaming.

  ‘Wow...you’ve had your heart set on that for a long time, mate. Congratulations.’

  But Zac was looking dismayed. ‘You’re going to be missed around here. What will we do without you?’

  ‘There’s a locum paramedic from Invercargill who’ll fill in until a permanent station manager can be found but, hey, you guys—and the volunteers on the team—can manage anything yourselves, you know. I can just drop in and do the transport.’

  Betty was scowling. ‘When?’ she demanded. ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘Um...it’s short notice. I’m sorry. I’m hoping to head out of town by the day after tomorrow.’

  The silence that followed his admission was broken only by whimpers from baby Hugo. People were exchanging glances and Ben was taken aback by the wave of emotion he could feel in this room.

  Had he become a more integral part of this community than he’d realised? In his need to keep moving and his instant acceptance of the job offer, he hadn’t really factored in that he was going to hurt people that he cared about. A lot. He was going to miss them as much, if not more than they would miss him.

  He was giving up the place that had been his home for several years.

  He was giving up friends. The kind of friends that would have always had his back, no matter what, just as he would have had theirs.

  He was giving up JJ.

  The silence grew. So did the lump in Ben’s throat. But then someone spoke. Clearly enough that perhaps it was only Ben who could pick the note of courage beneath the words.

  ‘Seeing as it’s the morning for announcements,’ JJ said, ‘I’d like you all to know that I’m going to accept the permanent position that I’ve been offered here at Cutler’s Creek. You can be as much of a full-time grandpa as you want, Don, and enjoy more time with Jill. And, Zac? Let’s talk about that cottage later. I think Shaun and I will be very happy to make it our home for the foreseeable future.’

  The atmosphere in the kitchen did a rollercoaster swoop and any upset about Ben’s departure seemed to have been forgotten in the very real delight that JJ had decided to stay. He was as delighted as anybody. He was also proud of her. She’d come a very long way since he’d knocked her off her feet on the side of the road. She’d not only made herself a part of this community, she seemed to have found her feet and a confidence in what she wanted in her life.

  JJ Hamilton was going to be fine, even if he wasn’t going to be around to look after her, and knowing that was probably going to make it a little easier to leave. Ben was still relieved that he wasn’t going to have too much time to think about it, though. No time at all, really, given the amount of packing and organisation he had to have done by tomorrow.

  He needed to get on with that, in fact, so he shouldn’t be standing around here drinking coffee and eating Betty’s cheese toasties. The noise level in the kitchen was increasing rapidly with people gathering around JJ, eager to tell her and each other how happy they were that she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Nobody noticed when Ben slipped quietly from the room.

  * * *

  He’d told her that she was one of the bravest people he’d ever met.

  She was certainly a very different person from the one who’d arrived in Cutler’s Creek, looking for time out from a life that she hadn’t been sure she’d been happy with, and JJ knew she had Ben to thank for the new version of herself that she’d grown into.

  However hard it was going to be to get used to not having Ben Marshall in her life, she would always be thankful that she’d met this amazing person and perhaps the best way she could show him how much he meant to her was to give all the encouragement she could so that he could find exactly what he wanted from life.

  Maybe that was why she found more courage than ever at that moment and had made a choice that was a public confirmation of the new person she had become. Someone who recognised what the most important things in her life were and that was...belonging. Caring about something to the point of passion, and that didn’t necessarily have to be a particular person, did it? It could be a profession with new facets to her work—like a qualification in mountain rescue. A community that had more than its share of warm-hearted, generous people. A small, rural hospital, even, that offered such a variety of work and skill levels required that it would never get boring.

  It took even more courage, however, to keep smiling when she’d seen Ben walking out of those kitchen doors—out of the perfect life that she’d been dreaming about only in the last day or two—and JJ knew that it might take a long time for her to be able to remember that moment without a pain that was sharp enough to make her catch her breath every single time.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  In some ways, it actually got worse. For the first few days, that included saying goodbye to Ben, wishing him all the best and exchanging promises to keep in touch. Pushing that pain to one side was necessary to simply keep functioning. That the first couple of weeks without him were so busy also helped keep it at bay. Having negotiated the purchase price of Zac’s cottage, a few visits to Queenstown had to be slotted into her timetable to talk to her bank manager and arrange for a solicitor to draw up the sales agreement and there were plenty of other things to think about, too.

  ‘That big paddock through the gate in the hedge is yours,’ Zac warned JJ. ‘It needs a bit of managing. I’ve been getting Greg to mow it for hay every summer and he runs a mob of sheep on it occasionally to keep it down but you might want to use it for something else. There used to be a Clydesdale horse there, called Chloe, who kind of came with the property. Greg’s looking after her on his farm at the moment but I’m sure she’d love to come back to her old paddock. She’d be great company for that pet sheep of yours.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ JJ promised. ‘I need the c
ontact details for the septic tank company, too. And that hedge cutting firm. Oh...and I’ll need to get some firewood in so that it’s dry for next winter, too, won’t I?’

  Cutler’s Creek’s temporary ambulance station manager, Trevor, was doing his part to keep JJ busier than usual. A perfectly pleasant man in his late fifties, Trevor was an EMT rather than a paramedic but he was keen to provide the best service he could at his lower skill level. JJ was determined to do her best as well and not to make negative comparisons to Ben but it wasn’t easy, especially after she noticed on his first visit to the hospital that Trevor carried a notebook version of ambulance protocols in a pocket of his uniform and referred to them frequently.

  It made JJ realise how she must have seemed to Ben when he’d come into the hospital that day and found she’d labelled practically every single item and cupboard in their treatment room/emergency department. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she’d needed to follow rules so rigidly to feel safe but, at the same time, it was so patently obvious that they were such different people. How had she been so sure she’d found the person who was her soul mate? And why was she now living with an emptiness that made her so sure she was never going to meet anyone else she felt like that about?

  With Zac’s family responsibilities including a very precious, tiny baby, it had been easy to persuade him to let JJ be first on call—day or night—for any ambulance callouts for potential medical or trauma emergencies that might need a doctor attending. With Trevor’s skill level combined with his determination to follow every guideline and to err on the side of caution those calls for backup were coming in often enough to add noticeably to her workload.

  There was a dislocated finger on the rugby field on a Saturday morning and an urgent call to a suspected heart attack later the same day, but it turned out that Bert had, once again, forgotten to use his GTN spray before doing something a bit more energetic. The call to a woman in labour a couple of days after that had both JJ and Debbie responding to meet the ambulance at a farm well out of town, but that also turned out to be a false alarm. The woman, who was visiting her aunt, was most likely experiencing her first Braxton-Hicks contractions and they had both panicked.

  ‘I miss Ben,’ Debbie said as they drove back to the hospital, now well behind in everything else that needed to be done that afternoon. ‘Even if she’d been well into second stage labour, he would have probably just delivered the baby and turned up at the hospital with them both.’

  JJ simply nodded her agreement. She and Debbie had become good friends but she couldn’t admit just how deeply she was missing Ben. Because talking about it not only wouldn’t help, it could, quite easily, make it a whole lot worse.

  ‘Do you think he made the right decision? To leave?’

  ‘I think we all have to do what’s best for us. You only get one life, don’t you, and you have to follow your dreams.’

  ‘And you think you’ve made the right decision? To stay here?’

  ‘I love it here.’ JJ nodded again, more enthusiastically this time. ‘I’m still getting surprised by how much. D’you know, I told Zac the other day that I needed to know where to order firewood from so I can get a supply in before next winter and I got home from work yesterday to find that someone had dumped a trailer load of cut wood in front of the barn. I have no idea who. That’s not something that would have ever happened anywhere else I’ve lived.’

  Debbie had turned to watch the countryside rolling past from the side window. ‘I’m glad you’re happy here. I hope Ben’s happy in his new job, too. No... I take that back.’ Her sideways smile was mischievous. ‘I hope he hates his new job and comes back here before anyone permanent gets appointed to our station.’

  ‘I suspect he’s very happy,’ JJ said quietly. ‘One of these days, he’ll drop in wearing his flight suit and helmet with the biggest smile on his face we’ve ever seen.’

  When she had reason to summon the rescue helicopter only a week or so later, she watched it land on the road close to where she was stabilising a young man who’d come off his motorcycle at high speed and her heart was pounding. Was that Ben at one end of the stretcher, stooping to move beneath rotors that would keep spinning so they could take off within minutes to get this critically injured patient to a major trauma centre?

  Any disappointment that Ben wasn’t part of the crew was easily dismissed until the handover of her patient was complete and the air rescue crew was ready to load the stretcher back into the helicopter. It was only then that JJ couldn’t stop herself asking.

  ‘How’s Ben? I... I thought I might see him today...’

  ‘He’s up in Christchurch for a couple of days. Doing a HUET course.’

  ‘HUET?’

  ‘Helicopter Underwater Escape Training.’

  JJ’s eyes widened. She could only imagine how much of an adrenaline rush learning to deal with a time-critical emergency like that would be. ‘Wow...he must be loving that.’

  The crew was already moving now but the paramedic turned to grin at JJ. ‘If anybody was born to do this job, it’s Ben. You’ll see him soon.’

  In a way, knowing that she was very likely to see him soon made JJ miss him even more. How hard was it going to be, that first time, to see that he had made totally the right decision and that he was loving his new life away from Cutler’s Creek?

  Away from her...

  She wasn’t the only person missing Ben, of course. Mike was looking downcast when JJ met him in the supermarket early on Sunday afternoon.

  ‘We’re all losing our fitness,’ he told JJ. ‘And getting rusty on important stuff like our abseiling skills. We’ve decided to do something about that. I might hike up Twin Rocks track later today and make sure it’s not blocked by any trees or a slip or something.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘So you’re in, then? For a full session on Twin Rocks with the whole group next Saturday?’

  ‘Oh, help...’ JJ hadn’t even been jogging with Shaun in the last few weeks and she could remember only too well the pain of struggling up that track that first time. She had a whole week to get her body moving again before Saturday, though, and she couldn’t encourage others without showing she was willing herself. The skills the guys in this community had when it came to difficult rescues were part of the legacy Ben had left a community he’d been passionate about. And it was a legacy more than well worth preserving. ‘Okay... I’m in. Next Saturday.’

  She would take Shaun out as soon as she got home, she decided. And, in the spirit of honouring Ben’s legacy, she was also going to wear that old red, sweatshirt of his that he’d given her that day of the river crossing incident.

  The day they’d first made love...

  As a means of distracting herself, JJ couldn’t wait to get started but it seemed that her pet sheep wasn’t so enthusiastic and he was big enough now for it to be impossible for JJ to drag him into co-operating when he had no desire to go running.

  ‘Oh, fine... I’ll go by myself.’ But, on the point of heading out to the roadside to start running, JJ changed her mind. If she was by herself, there was nothing stopping her from jumping into her car, driving to the start of the Twin Rocks track and giving that a go—just to find out whether she had, indeed, lost every bit of that fitness Ben had helped her achieve. The keys were still in her car, because Cutler’s Creek was the kind of place where you didn’t need to lock your car or house, so she didn’t even need to take the time to go back into the cottage.

  And it didn’t matter that a quick glance at the sky revealed the slightly ominously dark bases to the huge, fluffy clouds. She wouldn’t have to go all the way to the top to test her fitness level so she’d probably be home in an hour and back before Mike got started, which might be a good thing if she was out of breath and stopping too often. And, even if it did start raining before she got back home, it was no big deal. She wasn’t going to melt, was
she?

  Halfway up the Twin Rocks track, JJ realised just how much harder this was after a few weeks of not pushing herself. She could even feel discomfort in that sprained ankle that had healed months ago. Instead of turning back, however, she pushed herself harder. Because she could imagine that Ben was watching her and, even if he couldn’t possibly know about it, she still wanted to feel that he would be proud of her. The extra motivation worked well until she got to that point in the track where she had to scramble over those huge boulders. The ones that Ben had helped her negotiate that first time. How could she not remember what had happened only a little later that day. That moment when he’d been helping her into that harness. When the world had stopped turning for a heartbeat because they’d both been thinking about kissing each other.

  And how much they’d wanted to...

  The curl of desire was more like the stab of a knife in her belly and JJ knew she had tears streaming down her face. But she didn’t stop. Or even slow down. She couldn’t, because if she did, she might sit there sobbing, and how pathetic would that be? Ben had given her the gift of believing in herself and she was damned well going to make the most of it.

  Maybe it was a burst of too much enthusiasm that did it. Perhaps it was because she was half-blinded by tears. It could have been that the first drops of rain had made the boulders more slippery than she remembered or, more likely, that she still had a residual weakness in the tendons of that ankle she’d sprained. Whatever the cause, the result was just as catastrophic. As she put every ounce of effort into boosting herself over the last obstacle, JJ lost her footing. She not only fell hard towards the downhill side of the track, she found herself rolling down the edge of the steep gully, through ferns and bracken and over hard lumps of rock.