The Maverick Millionaire. Alison Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ at everything right now. At whoever had come up with the stupid idea of encouraging people to take their expensive luxury yachts out into dangerous seas and make the prize prestigious enough to make them risk their lives.

      At the universe for dropping a cyclone onto precisely this part of the planet at exactly this time.

      At fate for ripping him apart from his twin brother. The other half of himself.

      But maybe that anger was directed at Ben, too. Why had he said such a dreadful thing about their mother? Something so unbelievable—so huge—it threatened to rip the brothers apart, not just physically but at a much deeper level. If what he’d said was true and he’d never told him, it had the potential to shatter the bond that had been between the men since they’d arrived in this world only twenty minutes apart.

      Was life as he knew it about to end, whether or not he survived this dreadful day?

      And there was something else in his head. Or his heart. No...this was soul-deep.

      Something that echoed from childhood and had to be silenced.

      Dealing with it was automatic now. Honed to a talent that had made him an international star as an adult. The ability to imagine the way a different person would handle the situation so that it would all be okay in the end.

      To become that person for as long as he needed to.

      This was a scene from a movie, then. Reality could be distorted. He was a paratrooper. This wasn’t a dreadful accident. He was supposed to be here. It wasn’t him being rescued, it was a girl. A very beautiful girl.

      It was helpful that he knew that this stranger he had his arms wrapped around so firmly was female. Not that she felt exactly small and feminine, but he could work around that.

      He’d never had this much trouble throwing the mental switches to step sideways out of reality. A big part of his brain was determined to remind him that this horrible situation was too real to avoid. That even if it was a movie, there’d be a stuntman to do this part because his insurance wouldn’t cover taking this kind of a risk. But Jake fought back. If he could believe—and make countless others believe, the way he had done so far in his stellar career—didn’t that make it at least a kind of reality?

      He was out to save the world. The chopper would land them somewhere and he’d unclip his burden. He’d want to stay with the girl, of course, because he was desperately in love with her, but he’d have to go back into the storm. To risk his life to rescue...not his twin brother, that would be too corny. This was the black moment of the movie and he was the ultimate hero so maybe he was going back to rescue his enemy.

      And, suddenly, the escape route that had worked since he’d been old enough to remember threw up a barrier so solid Jake could actually feel himself crashing against it.

      Maybe Ben was the enemy now.

      Even if it hadn’t been a success, the effort of trying to catch something in the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions and turn it into something he could cope with had distracted him for however long this nightmare ride had been taking. Time was doing strange things, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.

      Close to his head, he could hear his rescuer trying to talk to the helicopter pilot. The wind was howling like a wild animal around them and she was having to shout, even though she had a microphone against her lips. As close as he was, Jake couldn’t catch every word.

      Something about a light. A moon.

      Was she kidding?

      In even more of a fantasyland than he’d been trying to get into?

      * * *

      ‘The lighthouse,’ Ellie told Dave, her words urgent. ‘At five o’clock. It’s Half Moon Island.’

      ‘Roger that.’ Dave’s voice in her ears sounded strained. ‘We’re heading southeast.’

      ‘No. The beach...’

      ‘What beach?’

      ‘Straight across from Half Moon Island. The end of the spit. Put us down there.’

      ‘What? It’s the middle of nowhere.’

      ‘I know it. There’s a house...’

      It was hard enough to communicate through the external noise and the internal static without trying to explain. This area was Ellie’s childhood stamping ground. Her grandfather had been the last lighthouse-keeper on Half Moon Island and the family’s beach house was on an isolated part of the coast that looked directly out at the crescent of land they’d all loved.

      The history didn’t matter. It was the closest part of the mainland they could put her down and she knew they could find shelter. It was close enough, even, for them to drop their first victim and try to go back for the other one.

      He still had her in a grip that made it an effort to breathe. An embrace that would have been unacceptably intimate from a stranger in any other situation. His face was close enough to her own to defy any concept of personal space but, curiously, Ellie didn’t have any clear idea of what he looked like.

      The hair plastered to his head looked like it would be very dark even if it was dry and it was too long for her taste for a man. The jaw was hidden beneath a growth of beard that had to be weeks old and his eyes were screwed shut so tightly they created wrinkles that probably made him look a lot older than he was.

      He was big, that much she could tell. Big enough to make Ellie feel small and that was weird. At five feet ten, she had always towered over other women and many men. She’d envied the fragility and femininity of tiny women—until she’d needed to be stronger than ever. That had been when she’d finally appreciated the warrior blood that ran in her veins from generations past.

      No man was ever going to make Eleanor Sutton feel small or insignificant again.

      She put her mouth close enough to the man’s ear to feel the icy touch of his skin.

      ‘We’re going to land on the beach. Keep your legs tucked up and let me control the impact.’

      Dave did his best to bring them down slowly and Ellie did her best to try and judge the distance between them and the solid ground, but it had never been so difficult. The crashing rolls of surf kept distorting her line of sight and the wind was sending swirls of sand in both horizontal and vertical directions.

      ‘Minus twenty...no...twenty-five...fifteen...’ This descent was crazy. They were both going to end up with badly broken legs or worse. ‘Ten... Slow it down, Dave.’

      He must have done his absolute best, but the landing was hard and a stab of pain told Ellie that her ankle had turned despite the protection of her heavy boots. There was no time to do more than register a potentially serious fracture, however. She fell backwards with her patient on top of her and for a split second she was again aware of just how big and solid this man was.

      And that she couldn’t breathe.

      But then they were flipped over and dragged a short distance in the sand. Ellie could feel it scraping the skin on her face like sandpaper. Filling her mouth as her microphone snapped off. The headphones inside her helmet were still working, but she didn’t need Dave’s СКАЧАТЬ