The Tortured Rebel Read online

‘Ages ago. When I left nursing I went into the ambulance service. They needed an extra crew member on a chopper one night and I got picked. I’d only been up in the air for ten minutes when I realised I didn’t want to be sitting in the back. I wanted the driver’s seat.’

  Oh … help. This was exactly what she hadn’t wanted to be doing. Raking over the past. Divulging far more about herself than she’d intended to. Opening doors that had to remain shut or they would both be sucked into the worst space of all.

  Jet’s chuckle was so unexpected, her head swung to face him. The sound was more than one of amusement. It signalled sympathy. It said he understood. That he would have felt exactly the same way.

  And that was when Becca remembered how he’d got his nickname. Not because his hair was jet black but because he’d had a passion for fast things. Motorbikes and cars. Aircraft. Even his women had to be sleek and ready to speed into his bed.

  Hadn’t part of his attraction been that he’d had the aura of the kind of things associated with flying? Things like turbulence and danger. The thrill of feeling weightless and able to move with a freedom that could be pure bliss. Maybe the rush she got from flying was the best substitute she had ever been able to discover for how she’d once felt being close to Jet. Being the focus of his attention. Being close enough to accidentally touch.

  Not that such a ridiculous notion had ever occurred to her during the process of falling in love with flying and chasing the dream of becoming a pilot. Why would it? She’d never seen Jet again. She’d never been reminded of what it felt like to be this close.

  Her sigh was an admission of defeat. She couldn’t fight this. She might have lasted amazingly so far, given the distance they had already covered, but she couldn’t continue to keep this time together totally impersonal and safe. She had no choice but to face up to whatever emotional fallout eventuated. She had to deal with it and survive. She could do that. She’d done it before, hadn’t she?

  ‘So, when did you get your pilot’s licence, Jet?’

  It was the first time she’d used his name. It curled off her tongue and hung between them like a white flag of surrender.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘I thought you said you could handle a BK.’

  ‘I can. Through osmosis, to start with. Then I got to be mates with some army pilots. They were happy to bend the rules sometimes. And I learn fast.’

  That was true enough. Of all the ‘bad boys.’ Jet had undoubtedly been the smartest. That was why he’d won the scholarship to attend an elite, private school in the first place.

  ‘The formal endorsement of the ability was a bit out of my price range,’ Jet added dryly.

  Yeah … not only the smartest. Despite all those boys being sent to boarding school for reasons they’d had every right to resent, Jet had had the biggest chip on his shoulder about his background. The others, including Matt, had been there because they had parents who could afford to offload the responsibility of children they weren’t particularly interested in. It had been years before Becca had learned of Jet’s multiple foster-family background. That he’d thought of himself as a charity case. She’d never heard more than hints, however. It wasn’t a topic ever up for discussion, any more than the blatant disparity in financial advantages.

  Was that why he’d thrown it at her now? As some kind of barrier?

  It was ancient history, surely. He’d proved how well he could do relying entirely on his own resources. Becca had a lack of patience for people who blamed life’s disappointments on their backgrounds. If you let either the pain of the past or fear of the future dictate your life, you were just shooting yourself in the foot as far as ever being happy. When it came down to it, everybody had to be able to draw on personal strength, no matter what their childhood had been like. Maybe Jet needed to get over himself.

  ‘Med school’s not cheap,’ she fired back. ‘You managed that, no problem.’

  ‘Unless you count the past ten years I’ve spent paying the loan off.’ Jet was scowling but then he shrugged. His next words were barely more than a mutter, as though he was talking to himself rather than Becca. ‘Maybe I will get my licence now. It’s not as if I want to save up for a house or anything.’

  ‘Gypsy lifestyle, huh?’

  Becca regretted her choice of words as soon as she’d uttered them. It was supposed to be a light-hearted comment, to finish the discussion without adding more substance to that ghostly barrier coming into view. To make his life choices seem desirable, even. But the idea of a gypsy was a little too apt. A man going his own way in life, according to his own rules. A bit dark and dangerous. Yes, she could picture Jet Munroe as a gypsy all right. Or a pirate. Or. This had to stop.

  ‘I know what you mean about the osmosis,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I reckon I could get an IV line in, if push came to shove.’

  ‘I should hope so. Didn’t you say you’d been with the ambulance service?’

  ‘I didn’t get quite that far with my training.’ Becca knew she sounded defensive but did he have to make her sound inadequate? Was he determined to make her feel younger and far less experienced than she was? ‘I work with a lot of intensive care paramedics who are brilliant at what they do,’ she added crisply. ‘My job is just to get them there.’

  That seemed to score a point. Conversation ceased and they flew on with the engine noise filling the space. Like it had done a while back but this time it was different. It was like they were both unwillingly forced to be taking part in some kind of dance, Becca decided. They’d drawn closer. Touched on some level. And now they were wheeling apart. Circling. Knowing that they would be drawn in again and next time it would be even closer. Acceptance of the inevitability didn’t lessen the dread so Becca said nothing. She was hanging on. Trying to delay the inevitable.

  Jet seemed to be in tacit agreement with the tactic. It became a challenge. Who was going to break first? The time stretched and the challenge grew. A distraction all on its own. In the end, it wasn’t either of them who broke it. The radio crackled and buzzed inside their helmets. Someone was trying to contact them but reception was bad. Becca switched frequencies and tested them.

  ‘Flight zero three three. Are you receiving me, over?’

  On her third attempt, Richard’s voice was cracked but audible. They were clearly far enough away from base to be pushing the boundaries for communication and static was wiping out chunks of the speech they could hear.

  ‘.return to base.’

  ‘Please repeat,’ Becca said. ‘Message broken.’

  ‘.in seismic activity …’

  Good grief, had the volcano erupted? No. Becca looked up from the radio controls to stare into the darkness ahead. They were easily close enough by now to see the glow from such an event in the night sky. A sky that was lightening perceptibly with a faint line defining the horizon. Dawn was not that far off and that was good. It would make landing on the island a lot safer.

  ‘.wind shear in the event of eruption,’ came the end of Richard’s latest broadcast.

  So it hadn’t erupted, then. Even better.

  ‘.ash.’ The single word was another warning.

  ‘Message broken,’ Becca said again.

  ‘.pager.’ The word was a command now. ‘.mobile.’

  ‘Roger. Over and out.’

  They flew in silence again for a minute. And then another. Becca was reluctant to follow the instruction. Even as broken as the communication had been, it was clear the mission was in danger of being aborted. And they were almost there, dammit. With no obvious cause for alarm.

  ‘You going to check your pager, then?’ Jet queried. ‘And your phone?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Another minute passed. The sky was definitely getting lighter. Becca peered ahead. Was it too soon to expect to make visual contact with Tokolamu?

  ‘Any time soon?’ Jet murmured.

  With a sigh, Becca unclipped the pager from her belt and handed it to her passenger. He activated the device
and started scrolling through messages.

  ‘These seem to be old messages. When did you go to Cathedral Cove?’

  ‘Yesterday. About eleven hundred hours. Idiot teenagers diving off the cliff into some big waves. One of them mistimed it and got banged up on the rocks. Winch job.’

  ‘And south of the Bombay Hills?’

  ‘That was the job before Cathedral Cove. Motorway pile-up.’

  ‘Nothing new on here, then.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Range for the radio should be better than the pager.’

  ‘Give me your phone.’

  The reluctance to let Jet read any text message she might have was surprisingly strong but Becca shrugged it off. It wasn’t as if there would be anything too personal in there. Like a message from a boyfriend. She almost wished there was. She could be sure that Jet’s love life wasn’t a desert and her single status would probably be enough to count as another putdown. Or was some of this feeling of inadequacy coming from something she’d considered long since buried? She wasn’t old enough. Or special enough. She was just Matt’s kid sister and Jet was.

  ‘Here it is. It says “Cancel, cancel. Seismic activity increasing. Eruption considered imminent. Risk unacceptable. Return to base.”’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?‘ But there was something more than astonishment in Jet’s tone. It sounded like admiration. Respect, even.

  ‘Look.’ Becca pointed, and Jet peered into the grey sky of early dawn. ‘Two o’clock,’ she added.

  Lumpy shapes that weren’t waves. Getting larger by the second. The chain of islands of which Tokolamu was the largest. Becca could see it clearly now. Could see the tip of the volcano and it was as dark as the rest of the rocky land mass.

  ‘We haven’t got the fuel to get back,’ she said calmly. ‘Personally, I’d rather take my chances after a safe landing on an island than ditching in the ocean somewhere.’

  There was a moment’s silence as Jet absorbed the implications. Becca finally turned to look at him and, to her amazement, he grinned at her.

  ‘Your bird,’ he said. ‘Your rules.’

  His face was really alive now. Dark eyes gleamed beneath the visor of the helmet. They were breaking the rules and hurling themselves towards danger and he was loving it. And … oh, Lord … that smile could probably persuade her to do anything, however dangerous it obviously was.

  Maybe she should turn back. There was a life raft on board. They would know their coordinates and another chopper could possibly already be on the way to meet them.

  But the islands were so close now. She could think about spotting the buildings and then locating the nearby landing site. People desperately needed the assistance she was bringing. If she got stuck on the island because an ash cloud prevented take-off then so be it. It wasn’t as though—

  The oath Jet breathed cut off any thought of potential safety.

  Had she really thought the sky was so light now? Against the glow of an erupting volcano, it had gone pitch black again.

  Ash would kill the engines. How long before it enveloped them? Becca began dropping altitude. Heading for the closest island. Except that was Tokolamu, wasn’t it? And maybe it wasn’t ash she had to worry about first. The force of the eruption was about to hit them. Wind shear would drop them like a rock.

  It was dropping them. Becca was fighting with the controls of her machine and she knew it was pointless. So pointless she didn’t say a thing when she found Jet leaning in to try and take over. She couldn’t hear a thing he was shouting because the noise outside was overwhelming everything. The sky was on fire and the island and its surrounding sea was rushing towards them so fast she could barely process the information.

  She was about to die and Jet Munroe was trying to save her.

  The irony of the situation barely registered before the cacophony of sound and light around her vanished and everything became black.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE WAS fighting for his life.

  For Becca’s life, too. Man, that look on her face was pure determination without a hint of fear. She was so small and fierce and seemed to believe that she could wrestle the force of Mother Nature and an out-of-control aircraft into submission.

  The impression would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so incredibly fleeting. Shoved aside with a million other, irrelevant thoughts as Jet let an automatic part of his brain loose. The part that stored emergency procedures backed up by remarkably honed survival skills.

  Even so, in that mental maelstrom he recognised another motive to win this challenge. Maybe he had to do this for Matt. It was too late to save his best mate but he could save the person who’d been so important to him. The small, lonely girl that he’d tried so hard to be a substitute parent to. As well as a big brother and best friend all at the same time. Matt would have given his life in a heartbeat to save his sister.

  Jet could do no less.

  Except … they weren’t going to die, dammit. Not if he could do anything about it. He added his weight to Becca’s to fight the controls and, for a split second the sickening downward spiral lessened and he could see straight ahead. Towards the foam of waves breaking on unforgiving black rocks. And past the rocks to a tiny area of shingle beach. Would solid land be a better option than an icy ocean and the pull of its current?

  Not that he really had much choice in the matter but the instantaneous, clinical evaluation of potential options filled those last few seconds before speed, gravity and the total failure of this machine to respond well enough combined and they hit. something. Hard.

  Hard enough to knock him out?

  He couldn’t be sure. His head was spinning, filled with a roaring sound and bright flashes of light. He could be regaining consciousness after God knew how long or … this could be moments after the crash and the window in which he could escape.

  And survive.

  Something overrode that pure survival instinct, however. The knowledge that he hadn’t been alone.

  ‘Becca … Becca …’

  He couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t open his eyes. Something was digging painfully into his face and it took a moment to realise that the pain was caused by broken pieces of his flight helmet visor. He wrenched them clear and pulled his helmet off, ignoring the warm, sticky sensation of bleeding.

  Now he could see surprisingly well. Red light, like a fiery dawn, surrounded them. The Perspex of the helicopter was cracked and a horribly bent rotor blade was directly in front, framed by a large hole. A spray of water suddenly came through the hole and soaked him, cold enough to wake him up completely. Were they in the sea? No. He could feel something solid beneath them and the crumpled chassis of the chopper was rocking. Grinding on something hard.

  The rocks. They must be caught on rocks, probably close to dry land. A wave could lift the wreckage and put it at the mercy of the ocean at any moment and that wouldn’t be a good thing. The spray had barely stopped but Jet had released his harness and his attention was focussed on the crumpled body of his pilot.

  ‘Becca. Can you hear me?’

  The groan that came in response was the best sound Jet had ever heard.

  She was alive.

  Stripping off the gloves he’d been wearing, Jet moved to wedge himself between what was left of the Perspex bubble and a flight control panel that was bent and broken. A couple of faint, flickering lights caught his attention as he moved. Hopefully, one of them might be the emergency locator beacon activating. The other one was on the radio and, on the off chance it was still operational, Jet pulled on the curly microphone cord to wrench it clear of the central controls it had fallen into.

  ‘Mayday, mayday,’ he sent. ‘Flight zero zero three down.’

  Even if they got the message, they wouldn’t be sending another rescue chopper. Flying into volcanic ash was impossible. The only hope of assistance would come from the ship already diverted towards Tokolamu and, what had they said about its ETA?

  Thirty-six hou
rs. A day and a half.

  They were on their own.

  Apart from another group of survivors on this island who still needed help, of course. Jet depressed the button on the side of the microphone again.

  ‘Abandoning aircraft,’ he said decisively. If this transmission was getting through, at least nobody would waste time trying to search the crash site later. ‘We’ll head for the settlement.’

  A faint crackle emanated from the radio then another spray of salt water came through the windscreen and the electronic equipment fizzed and died. He had wasted no more than about thirty seconds on what was probably a useless attempt to communicate with the outside world but it still felt like way too long.

  Becca needed him.

  Dropping the microphone, Jet used his hands and eyes to try and examine her. These weren’t the worst conditions under which he’d done a primary survey on an injured person but they were nudging the top spot. He could feel the wash of the waves around the helicopter chassis and getting sucked out to sea and then smashed onto rocks again would be pretty much as dangerous as being under enemy fire.

  Airway. Breathing. Circulation.

  Becca groaned more loudly and mumbled some incomprehensible words but the attempt to speak was a good indication that her airway was clear. Breathing? Jet put his hands around her ribs, oblivious of the fact that he was cupping her breasts as he concentrated on what was happening below her ribs. Were her lungs filling well? The same amount on each side? Was her breathing too fast or too slow? God, she was so small.

  Fragile.

  Her breathing seemed OK. Jet ran his hands over the rest of her body. Feeling her abdomen to see if it elicited a pained response. Checking her legs for the deformity of a broken bone or the wetness of major bleeding. Amazingly, he found nothing. Until he checked her arms, anyway. When he felt her left arm below the elbow, Becca cried out and opened her eyes.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he told her. ‘You’ve hurt your arm.’

  Broken it, quite likely, because of how hard she’d been gripping the controls at the point of impact. Her flight suit was ripped and she was bleeding badly. Jet ripped the sleeve farther and tied the strips tightly over the wound. There was no time to do more right now. This first check might have only taken sixty seconds but it was past time to get out of there.