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Sensible woman, he decided. No fuss, no drama, she’ll be good to work with.
He settled the asthmatic girl in the front seat and strapped in those he could, letting the rest sit cross-legged on the floor.
He ran his eyes over them, again mentally tallying their combined weight, adding it to the aircraft weight so he was sure it was below take-off weight. The next trip would be tighter.
They were off, the children sitting as still as they’d been told to, although the urge to get up and run around looking out of windows must have been strong. The teacher he’d brought along would have sorted out those who were strapped in seats, he realised when the excited cries of one child suggested he had at least one hyperactive passenger.
‘Can you manage?’ he asked the teacher, who was in the paramedic’s seat behind the little girl, and had put another dose of salbutamol into the spacer and passed it to his front seat passenger.
‘Just fine,’ the sensible woman assured him. ‘You fly the thing and I’ll look after Gracie. Deep breath now, pet, and try to hold it.’
The school mini-bus was waiting behind the hospital as he landed, and the aide helped the children into it while the teacher took Gracie into Emergency.
‘Most of the parents are at the school,’ the bus driver told him. ‘I’ll take this lot there, then come back.’
Marty nodded, hoping he hadn’t misjudged the tide and that he would be bringing back the other children, the teacher and the unknown Emma Crawford.
As yet unknown? he wondered, then shook his head. Hospital staff were off limits as far as he was concerned.
Besides which, she was short and dark-haired, not tall and blonde like most of his women.
Most of his women! That sounded—what? Izzy would say conceited—as if he thought himself a great Lothario who could have whatever woman he liked, but it really wasn’t like that. He just enjoyed the company of women, enjoyed how they thought, and, to be honest, how they felt in his arms, although many of his relationships had never developed to sexual intimacy.
What colour were her eyes?
Not Izzy’s eyes, obviously, but the short, dark-haired woman’s eyes—the short, dark-haired woman who wasn’t at all his type.
The switch in his thoughts from sexual intimacy to the colour of Emma Crawford’s eyes startled him as he flew back towards the beach.
Meanwhile, the woman who wasn’t at all his type was attempting to calm the children left on the beach. Three were in tears, one was refusing to go in the helicopter, and the others were upset about not being in the first lift. The teacher was doing her best, but they were upsetting each other, vying to see who could be the most hysterical.
‘Come on,’ Emma said, gathering one of the most distressed, a large boy with Down’s syndrome, by the hand, ‘let’s go and jump the little waves as they come up the beach.’
Without waiting for a response, she steered the still-sobbing child towards the water’s edge, and began to jump the waves herself. A few others followed and once they were jumping, the one who still clung to Emma’s hand joined in, eventually freeing her hand and going further into the water to jump bigger waves.
‘Now they’ll probably all compete to go the deepest and we’ll be saving them from drowning,’ Emma said wryly to the teacher, who had joined her at the edge of the water.
‘At least they’ve stopped the hysteria nonsense,’ the teacher said. ‘They work each other up and really…’ She hesitated before admitting, ‘I was shaken by it all myself, so couldn’t calm them down all that well.’
‘No worries,’ Emma told her. ‘They’re all happy now.’
Which was precisely when one of them started to scream and soon the whole lot were screaming.
And pointing.
Emma turned to see a man race down the beach and dive into the water, her fleeting impression one of blackness.
‘He was on fire,’ one of the children said, as they left the water and clustered around their teacher, too diverted by the man to be bothered with screams any more.
Emma waded in to where the man was squatting in the water, letting waves wash over his head, her head buzzing with questions. How cold was the water? How severe his burns? Think shock, she told herself. And covering them…
‘Can you talk to me?’ she asked, and he looked blankly at her.
Shock already?
‘I’m a doctor, I’d like to look at your burns. I’ve got pain relief in my bag on the beach.’
She touched his arm and beckoned towards the beach but he shook his head and ducked under the water again.
Time to take stock.
He was young, possibly in his twenties, and very fair. His hair was cut short, singed on one side and blackened on the other. The skin on his face on the singed side was also reddened, but not worse, Emma decided, than a bad sunburn.
