Friends to Forever by Nikki Logan

Author:Nikki Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

BETH had long given up trying to control the violent shaking of her frozen body, but the advancing ice-age finally showed in the loud chattering of her teeth. Not surprising, given she’d lost Marc’s fleecy sweatshirt to the dark depths of the ocean during the refloating. It meant she only had her flimsy blouse to keep her top half warm. And nothing on the bottom.

Marc had eventually accepted she wasn’t going to go back to the car and leave him alone with the dying whale, but he didn’t like it. Exhaustion had even wiped the frown off his face. But her loudly clattering teeth seemed to break the last of his tolerance.

‘Beth, you’re freezing.’

Both their bodies were well into survival mode now, her own barely conscious of what was going on around it. Neither of them could do more than lean on the whale for support and drag arm-after-painful-arm from the water to slosh onto the animal to keep it wet.

‘You have to get out of the water,’ he said. ‘You need to warm up.’

Her chill caused her voice to vibrate. It hurt even to speak, so tight was her chest. ‘It’s warmer in the water than out of it. And I’m not leaving you, Marc. You’d have to work twice as hard and you have nearly nothing left now.’

‘I’ll feel better knowing you’re safe and dry.’

‘I’m not leaving.’

She couldn’t see his glare in the darkness but she could feel it.

‘Fine,’ he finally growled. ‘Give me a second.’

He spread his dripping towel out on the whale’s hide and splashed slowly ashore. Beth lost him in the darkness after he passed her. It seemed like a lifetime, alone in the dark with the whale, but he finally returned.

‘Take this,’ he said bluntly, thrusting the last muesli bar at her.

Too exhausted to eat, she tucked it into the hip of her knickers. Too exhausted to protest, he just watched her do it.

‘Now this,’ he said, and thrust something else at her.

Beth reeled back and almost lost her footing, catching herself at the last second against the whale’s cold body. Her mind lurched out a preventative no! a split second before her body hummed an eager yessss!

‘It’s whisky. Dry, but it will warm you up a bit.’ He raised the silver flask right in her face and it glinted in the moonlight.

Her stomach roiled. Her blood raced. Her body screamed with excitement.

‘Get it away from me.’ She didn’t mean to shove him so roughly, didn’t even know where she found the energy, but the flask fell from his hands into the salt water. He scrabbled to pick it up, frowning in the moonlight.

‘Take it, Beth. You need to have something.’

‘I’ve been drinking water.’

‘That’ll keep you alive but it won’t stop you getting hypothermia. If you won’t get out of the water, then it has to be this.’

‘I don’t drink.’

Her ridiculously weak protest actually made him laugh. ‘Well, you’re going to have to make an exception, Princess. Survival comes first.’

He shook the water off the flask and held it out to her again.

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