32

“EMILY!” Connor shouted again. But she still didn’t wake up. Either she was too far out to hear him or she couldn’t wake up. With the six-hour time difference between the Seychelles and Sydney and the drowsy side effects of her medication, her body clock was probably out of sync.

He looked to the Orchid at the opposite end of the bay. The tender was tethered to its stern, and he couldn’t see anyone on deck. And there were, of course, no lifeguards on this deserted beach. In the few seconds Connor had taken to search for help, Emily had drifted even farther out. If he didn’t take immediate action, she’d soon be lost in open water.

“I’m going to bring her back,” Connor told Ling, ripping off his T-shirt and running into the sea. “Contact Brad.”

As soon as he was deep enough, he dived beneath the waves and swam hard. Surfacing, he powered through the water, glad now for all of Charley’s training.

But swimming in the sea was totally different from being in an indoor pool. Although the bay was relatively calm, the gentle swell still blocked his line of sight. Emily and her silver inflatable mattress continually bobbed in and out of view, and he had to keep stopping to ensure he was still heading in the right direction.

Emily was now more than 250 feet out, almost beyond the tip of the headland. Connor dug deep with every ounce of strength he possessed. His legs kicking, his arms pumping, he swam not for his life, but for hers.

Then all of a sudden he was alongside her.

“Emily!” he gasped, clutching the mattress’s handle.

But she was still dead to the world, a blissful smile on her face.

Deciding that waking her suddenly at this point could risk her drowning, Connor turned the mattress around and kicked for the shore. After a minute or so, he looked up. The beach seemed no closer.

He put his head down and kicked furiously, driving the inflatable mattress ahead of him.

Connor looked up again. They were still beyond the headland. He realized he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was fighting against the current.

Despair crept into his mind. There was no way he could beat the pull of the ocean. His heart was already pounding like a drum, and he could feel his muscles burning from the effort made just to reach Emily.

Where is Brad and the tender?

He would never rescue Emily at this rate. Then he remembered Charley reminiscing about one of her surfing trips where she’d been caught in a riptide. These currents, she’d explained, were rarely more than a hundred feet wide, and surfers often used them as an expressway into the ocean to catch waves. The way to escape a riptide was to simply swim parallel to the shore and, once clear, diagonally back to the beach.

Redirecting their path, Connor swam toward the headland. Then, as soon as he judged he was clear of the rip, he took a diagonal course to where Ling stood waving to him.

With a glance over at the headland, Connor saw he was at last making progress. But the going was still tough. His lungs burned for air, and to make matters worse, in his growing exhaustion he started to lose his rhythm. His limbs grew heavy as lead, and he imagined himself sinking to the seabed like a stone.

In the distance he could hear the roar of the motorboat’s engines.

Then, all of a sudden, his foot struck sand, and he glanced up in surprise.

“Are you okay?” asked Ling, pulling the inflatable mattress and Emily onto the foreshore. Farther up the beach, Chloe was still stretched out on her towel, headphones on, oblivious to the near tragedy. Brad was just arriving in the tender.

Connor dragged himself out of the shallows and collapsed on the warm sand. “Barely,” he wheezed as a wave of white water rushed up the beach, engulfing the mattress and waking Emily with a start.

“Oh . . . I must have dozed off,” she said, sitting up and brushing her wet hair from her face. Seeing Connor sprawled in the sand like a beached fish, gasping for breath, she remarked, “Did you go for a swim?”

Connor opened his mouth to reply but was too exhausted for words and just let his head flop back down.

“You need to relax more,” Emily said, laughing. “This is a vacation, you know.”