A Child to Open Their Hearts
Autore
Marion Lennox
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Chapter One
THIS COULD BE a disaster instead of a homecoming. He could be marooned at sea until after his daughter’s wedding.
Max wasn’t worrying yet, though. Things would be chaotic on Wildfire Island after the cyclone, but the weather had eased and Sunset Beach was a favourite place for the locals to walk. If the rip wasn’t so fierce he could swim ashore. He couldn’t, but eventually someone would stroll to the beach, see his battered boat and send out a dinghy.
Max Lockhart, specialist surgeon, not-so-specialist sailor, headed below deck and fetched himself a beer. There were worse places to be stuck, he conceded. The Lillyanna was a sturdy thirty-foot yacht, and she wasn’t badly enough damaged to be uncomfortable. She was now moored in the tropical waters off Wildfire Island. Schools of tiny fish glinted silver as they broke the surface of the sparkling water. The sun was warm. He had provisions for another week, and in the lee of the island the sea was relatively calm.
But he was stuck. The waters around the island were still a maelstrom. The cliffs that formed the headland above where he sheltered were being battered. To try and round them to get to Wildfire Island’s harbour would be suicidal, and at some time during the worst of the cyclone his radio had been damaged and his phone lost overboard.
So now he was forced to rest, but rest, he conceded, had been the whole idea of sailing here. He needed to take some time to get his head in order and ready himself to face the islanders.
He also needed space to come to terms with anger and with grief. How to face his daughter’s wedding with joy when he was so loaded with guilt and sadness he couldn’t get past it?
But rest wouldn’t cut it, he decided as he finished his beer. What he needed was distraction.
And suddenly he had it. Suddenly he could see two people on the island.
A woman had emerged from the undergrowth and was walking a dog on the beach. And up on the headland...another woman was walking towards the cliff edge.
Towards the cliff edge? What the...?
As a kid, Max and his mates had dived off this headland but they’d only dived when the water had been calm. They’d dared each other to dive the thirty-foot drop. Then they’d let the rip tug them out to this reef, where they’d catch their breath for the hard swim back. It had kept them happy for hours. It had given their parents nightmares.
For the woman on the headland, though, the nightmare seemed real. She was walking steadily towards the edge.
Suicide? The word slammed into his head and stayed.
He grabbed his field glasses, one of the few things not smashed in the storm, and fought to get them focussed. The woman was young. A crimson shawl was wrapped around a bundle at her breast. A child?
She was walking purposefully forward, closer to the edge. After the cyclone, the water below was a mass of churning foam. Even as a kid he’d known he had to get a run up to clear the rocks below.
‘No!’ His yell would be drowned in the wind up there, but he yelled anyway. ‘Don’t...’
His yell was useless. She reached the cliff edge and walked straight over.
* * *
Hettie de Lacey, charge nurse of Wildfire Island’s small hospital, rather enjoyed a good storm. It broke the humidity. It cleared the water in the island’s lagoons and it made the world seem fresh and new.
This, however, had been more than a good storm. The cyclone had smashed across the island three days ago, causing multiple casualties. Even though most wounds had been minor, the hospital was full to bursting, and Hettie had been run off her feet.
This was the first time she’d managed a walk and some blessed time to herself. Sunset Beach was relatively sheltered, but she was close to the northern tip, where waves flung hard against the headland. The seas out there were huge.
In another life she might have grabbed a surfboard and headed out, she thought, allowing herself a whiff of memory, of an eighteen-year-old Hettie in love with everything to do with the sea.
Including Darryn...
Yeah, well, that was one memory to put aside. How one man could take such a naïve kid and smash her ideals... Smash her life...
‘Get over it,’ she told herself, and she even smiled at the idea that she should still angst over memories from all those years ago. She’d made herself a great life. She was...mostly happy.
And then her attention was caught.
There was a yacht just beyond the reef. It was a gracious old lady of a yacht, a wooden classic, anchored to the south of The Bird’s Nest. The Nest was a narrow rim of rock and coral, a tiny atoll at the end of an underwater reef running out from shore.
The yacht was using the atoll for shelter.
It’d be Max Lockhart, she thought, and the nub of fear she’d been feeling for Caroline dissipated in an instant. Oh, thank heaven. She knew the owner of Wildfire Island was trying to sail here for his daughter’s wedding. Max had left Cairns before the cyclone had blown up, and for the last few days Caroline Lockhart, one of Hettie’s best nurses, had been frantic. Her father was somewhere out to sea. He’d lost contact three days ago and they had no way of knowing if he’d survived.
She could see him fairly clearly from where she was, but she’d never met him—his few visits to the island during her employment had always seemed to coincide with times when she’d taken leave. But this must be him. The entrance to the harbour was wild so this was probably the safest place he could be.
She went to wave, and then she hesitated. The guy on the yacht—it must be Max—was already waving. And yelling. But not at her. At someone up on the headland?
Intrigued, she headed to the water’s edge and looked up. Another islander out for a walk? Max must be stuck, she thought. He’d be wanting to attract attention so someone could send a dinghy out to bring him in. He’d seen someone up on the cliffs?
And then her breath caught in horror. Where the shallows gave way to deep water and the cliffs rose steeply to the headland, the wind still swept in from the cyclone-ravaged sea.
And up on the headland... Sefina Dason.
The woman was thirty feet above her but Hettie would know her anywhere. For the last few days Sefina had been in hospital, battered, not by the cyclone but by her oaf of a husband. She’d had to bring her toddler in with her because no one would care for him, something almost unheard of in this close-knit community.
There’d been whispers...
But this wasn’t the time for whispers. Sefina was high on the headland and she was walking with purpose.
She was headed for the edge of the cliff!
And then she turned, just a little, and Hettie saw a bundle, cradled to her breast in a crimson shawl. Her horror doubled, trebled, went off the scale.
Joni!
No! She was screaming, running, stumbling over the rocks as beach gave way to the edges of the reef. No!
She could hear the echoes of the guy on the yacht, yelling, too.
But yelling was useless.
Sefina took two steps forward and she was gone.
* * *
Max knew the water under the headland like the back of his hand. In good weather this was a calm, still pool, deep and mysterious, bottoming out to coral. It was a fabulous place for kids to hurl themselves off the cliff in a show of bravado. The rip swept in from the north, hit the pool and tugged the divers out to the rocky outcrop he was anchored behind. As kids they’d learned to ride the rip to their advantage, letting it pull them across the shallow reef to the atoll. They’d lie on the rocks and catch their breath, readying themselves for the swim across the rip back to the beach.
But that rip would be fierce today, too strong to swim against. And the water in the pool...would be a whirlpool, he thought, sucking everything down.
All this he thought almost instantly, and as he thought it he was already tearing up the anchor, operating the winch with one hand, gunning the engine with the other.
His mind seemed to be frozen, but instinct was kicking in to take over.
Where would she be hurled out?
He hit the tiller and pushed the throttle to full speed, heading out of the shelter of the atoll, steering the boat as close as he dared to the beach. He couldn’t get too close. Sheltered or not, there were still breakers pounding the sand.
There was a woman running along the beach, screaming. The woman with the dog? She’d seen?
But he didn’t have time to look at her. He was staring across the maelstrom of white water, waiting for something to emerge. Anything.
He was as close as he could get without wrecking the yacht. As far as he could tell, this was where the rip emerged.
He dropped anchor, knowing he’d be anchoring in sand, knowing there was a chance the boat would be dragged away, but he didn’t have time to care.
There... A wisp of crimson cloth... Nothing more, but it had to be enough.
If he was right, she was being tugged to twenty feet forward of the boat.
He’d miss her...
He was ripping his clothes off, tearing. Clothes would drag him down. If he used a lifejacket he could never swim fast enough.
He had so little chance the thing was almost futile.
He saw the wisp of crimson again, and he dived.
* * *
Sefina.
Joni.
Hettie was screaming but she was screaming inside. She had no room for anything else. Where...?
She’d swum here. There was a rip, running south. Hettie could swim well. Surfing had once been her life, but to swim against the rip in these conditions...
The guy on the boat had seen. If she could grab Sefina and tow her with the rip, maybe he could help.
A mother and a toddler?
She couldn’t think like that.
As a teenager she’d trained as a lifeguard, hoping for a holiday job back when she’d lived at Bondi. Her instructor’s voice slammed back now. ‘Look to your own safety before you look to help someone in the surf.’
This was crazy. Past dangerous.
Oh, but Joni... He was fifteen months old and she’d cradled him to sleep for the past few nights. And Sefina... Battered Sefina, with no one to turn to.
Forget the instructors. Her clothes were tossed onto the sand. ‘Stay,’ she yelled at Bugsy, and she was running into the waves regardless.
* * *
The rip was so strong Max was swept south the moment he hit the water. Anything in that pool would be tugged straight out, past the reef and out to sea.
He surfaced, already being pulled.
But Max had swum like a fish as a kid, and for the past few years gym work and swimming had sometimes seemed the only thing that had kept him sane.
He couldn’t swim against the rip but if he headed diagonally across he might collide with...with what he hoped to find. That slip of crimson.
He cast one long look at the pool, trying to judge where he’d last seen that flash of crimson.
He put his head down and swam.
* * *
Was she nuts? Trying to swim in this surf? But if she got past the breakers she only had the rip to contend with. She could deal with the rip, she thought. She knew enough not to panic. The guy on the boat would have seen her. If she could reach Sefina and hold on to her, she could tread water until help came.
Even if the guy hadn’t seen her, she was due to go on duty at midday. The staff knew she’d gone for a walk on the beach. If she didn’t return they’d come down and find Bugsy, find her clothes... Once the rip dragged her out, she could tread water and hope...
Yeah, very safe, she thought grimly as she dived through another wave. Not.
What would she do if she reached them? The lifeguard part of her was already playing out scenarios.
The quickest way to kill yourself is to put yourself within reach of someone who’s drowning. They’ll pull you down as they try to save themselves.
There was her instructor again.
Sefina wouldn’t try to save herself, though. Sefina wanted to die.
Sefina...
She’d known how unhappy the girl was, but in the post-cyclone chaos all Hettie had been able to give the young woman had been swift hugs between periods of imperative medical need. She’d promised her she was safe in the hospital. She’d promised they’d sort things out when things had settled.
She hadn’t realised time had been so achingly short.
Hettie surfaced from the last breaker and looked around wildly. The rip was stronger than she’d thought. Maybe she’d missed them.
And then she saw someone else in the water, swimming strongly across the rip. The guy from the boat?
There went her source of help if she got into trouble, she thought grimly. All of them in the water? This was breaking every lifesaving rule, but it was too late to back out now. She was watching the rim of the foam where the deep pool ended and the relative calm began.
There! A sliver of crimson.
She must have shouted because the swimming guy raised his head. She waved and pointed.
He raised a hand in silent acknowledgement and they both put their heads down and swam.
* * *
He could see her now, or he could see the swirl of crimson shawl she’d wrapped around her body. If he could just get closer...
The pull of the rip was hauling him backwards. By rights it should’ve propelled the woman’s body towards him.
Was she stuck on the edge of the reef? Had the shawl snagged?
The rocks were too close to the surface for safety. He should stay well clear...
He didn’t.
* * *
This was crazy. Suicidal. She couldn’t swim into the foam. She daren’t. As it was, the rip was pulling so hard she was starting to doubt her ability to get herself to safety.
A breaker crashed on the rocks and threw a spray of water, blocking her vision. She could see nothing.
With a sob of fear and frustration she stopped trying and let herself be carried outward.
Free from the foam she could tread water. She could look again.
She could see nothing but white. Nothing...
* * *
There! Max’s hands had been groping blindly in front of him, but the touch of fabric had him grabbing.
He had her, but she was wedged in rocks. He was being washed by breaker after breaker. He couldn’t see. He pulled upwards to take a tighter hold—and a child fell free into his arms.
The child must have been clinging, or tied within the shawl. The rip caught them again and they were tugged outwards.
He had a child in his arms. He had no choice but to let himself go. To ride the rip...
He was pushing the child up, rolling onto his back, trying to get the little one into the air. The water was sweeping...
‘Here!’
It was a yell and suddenly someone was beside him. A woman, dark-haired, fierce.
‘Give him to me. Help Sefina. Please!’
‘You can’t hold him.’ He didn’t even know if the child was alive.
Her face was suddenly inches from his, soaking curls plastered across her eyes, green eyes flashing determination. ‘I can. I know what to do. Trust me.’
And what was there in that that made him believe her?
What was there in that that made him thrust the limp little body into her arms and turn once again towards the rocks?
He had to trust her. He had to hope.
* * *
Joni was breathing. He’d been limp when he’d been thrust at her, but as she rolled and prepared to breathe for him—yes, she could do it in the water; lifesaver training had been useful—the little one gasped and choked and gasped again.
His eyes were shut, as if he’d simply closed down, ready for death. How many children drowned like this? Thirteen years as a nurse had taught Hettie that when children slipped untended into water they didn’t struggle. They drowned silently.
Somehow, though, despite not fighting, Joni must have breathed enough air to survive. As she touched his mouth with her lips he gasped and opened his eyes.
‘Joni.’ She managed to get his name out, even though she was fighting for breath herself. ‘It’s okay. Let’s get you to the beach.’
His huge brown eyes stared upwards wildly. Joni was fifteen months old, a chubby toddler with beautiful coffee-coloured skin and a tangle of dark curls. He was part islander, part...
Well, that was the problem, Hettie thought, her heart clenching in fear for his mother.
She couldn’t do anything for Sefina, though. The sailor—Max?—had handed her Joni and she had to care for him.
Where was he now? she wondered as she trod water. Her first impressions had been of strength, determination, resolution. His face had been almost impassive.
He’d need strength and more if he was swimming back against the reef. The risks...
She couldn’t think of him now. Her attention had to be on keeping Joni safe.
Keeping them both safe?
She cupped her hand around Joni’s chin and started side-stroking, as hard and fast as she could, willing him to stay limp. The rip was still a problem. Getting back to the beach was impossible. The boat was too close to the breakers, but the atoll at the end of the reef might just be possible. If she could just reach the rocks...
Blessedly Joni stayed limp. It must be shock, she thought as she fought the current, but she was thankful for it. He lay still while she towed.
But the rip was strong. She was fighting for breath herself, kicking, using every last scrap of strength she had, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t reach the atoll. It was so near and yet so far.
If she could just keep floating, someone would help, she thought. If she rode the rip out, if she could hold on to Joni...
But if he struggled...
She had no choice. The rip was too strong to fight.
She held him as far out of the water as she could and let herself be carried out to sea.
* * *
He had her. For what it was worth, he had her, but she was dead. He could see the head injury. He could see the way her head floated limply.
She must have crashed onto the rocks, he thought. She’d stepped straight down instead of diving outwards. Death would have been instantaneous. It had been a miracle that the child had stayed with her.
He had her free of the reef, but what to do now? He couldn’t get her to the beach. There was no way he could fight the rip. It was carrying them out fast, towards the atoll. Did he have enough strength to get them both there?
By himself there’d be no problem, but holding this woman...
He couldn’t.
She was dead. Let her go.
He couldn’t do that, either. A part of him was still standing at his son’s gravesite.
A part of him was remembering burying his wife, all those years ago.
Somewhere, someone loved this woman. To not have a chance to say goodbye... It would have killed him.
Holding on to her might kill him. He couldn’t keep fighting for both of them.
Despite the strength of the rip, the water he was in was relatively calm. He was fighting to get across the current but he paused for a moment in his fight to get a bearing. To see...
And what he saw made him rethink everything. The woman he’d given the child to still held him, but they were drifting fast, so fast they’d miss the atoll. They were being pulled to the open sea.
The woman didn’t seem to be panicking. She had the child in the classic lifesaver hold. She seemed to know her stuff, but she wasn’t strong enough. In minutes she’d be past the atoll and she’d be gone.
A woman and a child, struggling for life.
A woman in his arms, for whom life was over.
Triage. Blessedly it slammed back. For just a moment he was a junior doctor again in an emergency room, faced with the decision of which patient to treat first.
No choice.
He gave himself a fraction of a second, a moment where he tugged the woman’s body around and faced her. He memorised everything about her so he could describe her, and then, in an aching, tearing gesture that seemed to rip something deep inside, he touched her face. It was a gesture of blessing, a gesture of farewell.
It was all he could do.
He let her go.
* * *
She’d never reach it. Her legs simply weren’t strong enough to kick against the current.
She was so near and yet so far. She was being pulled within thirty yards of the atoll and yet she didn’t have the strength to fight.
If she was swept out... If Max didn’t make it... How long before they could expect help?
The child in her arms twisted unexpectedly and she almost lost him. She fought for a stronger hold but suddenly he was fighting her.
‘Joni, hush. Joni, stay still...’
But he wasn’t listening, wasn’t hearing. Who knew what he was thinking?
She was being swept...
And then, blessedly, she was being grabbed herself by the shoulders from behind. She was being held with the swift, sure strength of someone who’d been trained, who knew how to gain control.
Max?
‘Let me take him.’ It was an order, a curt command that brooked no opposition. ‘Get yourself to the atoll.’
‘You can’t.’
‘You’re done,’ he said, and she knew she was.
‘S-Sefina?’
‘She’s dead. We can’t do anything for her. Go. I’m right behind you.’
And Joni was taken from her arms.
Relieving her of her load should have made her lighter. Free. Instead, stupidly, she wanted to sink. She hadn’t known how exhausted she was until the load had been lifted.
‘Swim,’ Max yelled. ‘We haven’t done this for nothing. Swim, damn you, now.’
She swam.
* * *
He could do this. He would do this.
Too many deaths...
It was three short weeks since he’d buried his son. The waste was all around him, and the anger.
Maybe it was Christopher who gave him strength. Who knew?
‘Keep still,’ he growled, as the little boy struggled. There was no time for reassurance. No time for comfort. But it seemed to work.
The little boy subsided. His body seemed to go limp but he reached up and tucked a fist against Max’s throat. As if checking his pulse?
‘Yeah, I’m alive,’ Max muttered grimly, as he started kicking again against the rip. ‘And so are you. Let’s keep it that way.’
* * *
Rocks. The atoll was tiny but she’d made it. The last few yards across the rip had taken every ounce of her strength, but she’d done it.
She’d had to do it. If Max and Joni were swept out, someone had to raise the alarm.
She wasn’t in any position to raise any alarm right now. It was as much as she could do to climb onto the rocks.
She knew this place. She’d swum out here in good weather. She knew the footholds but her legs didn’t want to work. They’d turned to jelly, but somehow she made them push her up the few short steps to the relatively flat rock that formed the atoll’s tiny plateau.
Then she sank to her knees.
She wanted—quite badly—to be sick, but she fought it down with a fierceness born of desperation. How many times in an emergency room had she felt this same appalling gut-wrench, at waste, at loss of life, at life-changing injuries? But her training had taught her not to faint, not to throw up, until after a crisis was past. Until she wasn’t needed.
There was a crisis now, but what could she do? She wasn’t in an emergency room. She wasn’t being a professional.
She was sitting on a tiny rocky outcrop, while out there a sailor fought for a toddler’s life.
Was he Max Lockhart?
More importantly, desperately more importantly, where was he? She hadn’t been able to look back while she’d fought to get here, but now...
Max... Joni...
She was a strong swimmer but she hadn’t been able to fight the rip.
Please... She was saying it over and over, pleading with whomever was prepared to listen. For Joni. For the unknown guy who was risking his life...
Was he Max? Father of Caroline? Owner of this entire island?
Max Lockhart, come home to claim his rightful heritage?
Max Lockhart, risking his life to save one of the islanders who scorned him?
So much pain...
If he died now, how could she explain it to Caroline? For the last three days, when the cyclone had veered savagely and unexpectedly across the path of any boat making its way here from Cairns, Hettie’s fellow nurse had lost contact with her father. She’d been going crazy.
How could she tell her he’d been so near, and was now lost? With the child?
Or not. She’d been staring east, thinking that, if anything, he’d be riding the rip, but suddenly she saw him. He was south of the atoll. He must have been swept past but somehow managed to get himself out of the rip’s pull. Now he was stroking the last few yards to the rocks.
He still had Joni.
She’d been out of the water now for five minutes. She had her breath back. Blessedly, she could help. She clambered down over the rocks, heading out into the shallows, reaching for Joni.
She had him. They had him.
Safe?
