She’d leapt on Denise’s idea of traditional healing for his soul at least – anything to keep him calm before more help could arrive – because she’d almost admitted defeat. Denise had studied Zac, seeing to the spirit within, and murmured about a build-up of negative energy which had placed a stone of bad magic inside him. She’d said that the stone was preventing his return to consciousness and she’d danced and smoked the accumulation out with a solemnity that had brought tears to Ava’s eyes.

So was it coincidence that from the moment after the cleansing smoke and chanting from the traditional healer had finished, Zac’s restless movements had settled and his galloping, thready pulse had begun to even out? She didn’t know. But she had hugged her friend in gratitude.

Since then she’d been able to sit and watch, and she was trying to keep him calm with her voice. She was so immensely, wearily thankful that she could.

She watched her man’s large, capable hands and those long, strong, brown legs lying too still. And that broad expanse of tanned chest and ripped upper abdomen, which had been slick with agitated sweat, but now lay cool and dry.

Tiredness swamped her, and she opened and shut her gritty eyes. She swept back the curtains to the early-morning darkness and allowed her gaze to drift over the roadway outside. There were few cars at this hour, and the ones that did crawl past left an unfamiliar muffled noise of dusty bitumen and tyres. Not your usual Yulara sound. The silence of the night calmed her and sent a shallow burst of new energy through her.

When would he wake up? Had he been damaged? Would he wake up? The questions bombarded her as memories of Zac on the gurney from their one ambulance skittered through her mind like that staccato gecko making his way down the wall of the room. Stop. Start. Freeze.

His unfocused eyes.

The blast of concern at his continuing unconscious state.

The panic she’d stamped down because of her helplessness at not being able to get him to a higher level of care and knowing he could only become worse – at least that had passed for the moment.

Now all she could do was wait.

Chapter Fourteen

Zac

When Ava’s car had hit the guardrail on Zac’s side, it had been so fast he didn’t have time to shift away. Something in the deafening maelstrom of their crazy spin ripped his shoulder open and smacked the back of his head, and his vision blurred until they stopped spinning and landed with a thwump back on the vehicle’s wheels, but he’d stayed awake.