“I did find some, but they were ruined when a chopper landed on them.”
His face crunched into a scowl. “Why on earth did you leave them in the way of a helicopter? Couldn’t you have moved them first?”
“I didn’t know it was going to land there. It was rescuing me from when I got lost and my truck broke down—”
He cut her off again. “Whatever, it can’t be helped now. You’re okay and that’s all that matters. When can you go back out to get more?”
“I’m going out tomorrow with John and the chopper pilot. He’s going to tow—”
“Sounds perfect. Let me know when you have the samples, right?”
“Sure, I will do.” She took a deep breath and her heart started to beat double time. It was now or never. “Is everything okay with you today? You just sound a bit hassled.”
“I’m snowed under with work,” he said, his voice unusually curt. He looked back over his shoulder as if someone was in the office with him. “I’ve gotta go now. Talk to you later.” And he disconnected the call abruptly.
Abby sat for a moment, her heart still thumping in her chest. It was too late. He was gone. She wouldn’t be able to tell him tonight how much she loved him, how much she had always loved him, how she looked forward to their almost daily video calls with a painful intensity.
On autopilot, she took out her ear studs and washed the makeup off her face, cleaning it carefully so as not to hurt her sunburned skin any further. Then she slipped out of her linen shirt and shorts and into a pair of shortie cotton pajamas. It was so hot that she didn’t need to wear anything to bed, but the habit was too ingrained for her to change.
Finally she slipped into bed and pulled the simple white sheet over her.
She was disappointed in tonight’s call—she could admit that much to herself. Talking to Jed over video calls could be difficult at times. He was such a genius that he didn’t always have the patience of other, lesser men.
She had been looking forward to hearing his concern about her getting lost in the outback and laughing with him over her fear of spiders and scorpions. She had wanted his sympathy over her lost samples, and his assurance that her work wasn’t unduly set back.
Instead, he had brushed her off as if she were unimportant, a nuisance, something he had to tick off before he got on with the rest of his day. She had to remember that he didn’t mean to be abrupt—it was just his way of communicating. Sometimes he treated her like a princess who could do no wrong, and sometimes, like tonight, he just didn’t.
If she didn’t love him so much, she would have been annoyed at him. As it was, she simply turned her pillow over, lay her hot cheek down on the cool side, and thought about how happy he would be when she turned in a series of ground-breaking journal articles and got his name, along with hers, in neon lights.
Noah picked her up just after dawn the following morning to drive out to the site of the wrecked truck and work out how to retrieve it.
She gave a low whistle as he drove up. Despite being covered in a thin layer of red dust, as everything in the town was, his four-wheel drive looked almost brand new, and the interior gleamed with polish. Most cars she had seen here were at least twenty years old, thick with grime on the outside. with shot suspensions from the potholes on the road. Why bother cleaning your car when it will just get immediately covered with red dust again? seemed to be a general consensus of everybody in the town. This truck stood out like a sore thumb. In a good way.
It wasn’t exactly comparable to the high-end Mercedes that her parents drove around in, but it must have cost just as much, if not more, and it was infinitely better suited to the harsh conditions out here.
He leaned his head out of the open window and gestured at her to jump in the front.
“You have a nice truck,” she said, as she buckled up her seatbelt. She half wondered how he could afford it.
He shrugged. “Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s good for carrying surfboards and it copes pretty well with sand. I haven’t gotten it stuck yet.”
John was already laying down on the back seat, rubbing his eyes and looking half asleep.
“Kids were up half the night,” he muttered to Abby, and then promptly closed his eyes and started to snore lightly.
Abby settled in for the drive out to the sample site. It was kind of fun being a passenger instead of the driver, she decided, as Noah navigated the bumpy track with the minimum of swerving and bouncing. The suspension on his vehicle was way better than on the old truck she had wrecked, and the drive was reasonably smooth.
Smooth enough for her to focus on the scenery for the first time.
She’d thought that it was such a dull place when she first got here. Dull except for the rocks, that is. The rocks were the most exciting thing about the whole area.
The ground was flat but dotted with red mounds. Some of them were only as high as her knees, but others were twice as high as she was. She’d seen them before but had never bothered to ask what they were. They weren’t rocks, so in her eyes they didn’t really matter much.
She pointed them out to Noah. “What are they?”
He lifted his eyebrows so high they almost met his hairline. “How long have you been here?”
“Two weeks,” she replied, a bit nettled by his attitude.
“And you haven’t seen a termite mound before?”
“Of course I’ve seen them. I haven’t been going around with my eyes closed. I just didn’t know what they were.”
“You didn’t think to ask?”
“I just did.”
He scratched his head. “Fair point. They’re termite mounds. Filled with hundreds of thousands of termites. They are everywhere out here.”
“Why are there so many of them? And why are they so big and red?”
“Lots of termites. Lots and lots of termites. Nothing much else lives out here except for kangaroos, emus and the odd dingo. They’re red because they are made of the local red soil, held together with termite spit and poop.”
She made a face. “Uuugghh. Gross.”
“I suppose it is when you think of it. The mixture hardens like concrete. You’d sure know it if you ran into one of them in your car.”
She thought of the truck they were going out to rescue and gave a bark of laughter. “Worse than a kangaroo and a pothole combined?”
“Not as bouncy as a kangaroo and harder than a pothole.”
She shut her window and flicked on the air-conditioning. Barely past dawn, and it was already getting hotter than was comfortable. “Everything in Australia is out to kill you,” she said disconsolately. “Venomous snakes, poisonous spiders, rabid dingoes, kicking kangaroos, vicious sharks, hungry crocodiles, and now concrete termite mounds. I even have to be careful when I am collecting rock specimens to make sure I don't get bitten by a lizard or stung by a scorpion and die a horrible death far from civilization.”
He laughed outright at her depressing description. “But the rocks are worth it?”
“The rocks are the best thing about Australia,” she declared firmly.
“There must be something that you like about the place. Other than the rocks, that is.”
She thought for a moment. “I haven’t really done a lot else. I’ve spent all my time either out collecting samples or analyzing them in the lab. I haven't had any time to do anything else.”
“You mean you haven’t made time to do anything else.”
“My work is important to me. It always comes first.”
“All work and no play?” He shook his head sadly. “You’ve gotten your priorities all around the wrong way. I prefer to play as much as possible and just work when I have to.”
What would her parents say about such a…a useless life? They had drummed into her the importance of having a solid and successful, if not stellar, career ever since she was old enough to remember. “But what is there to do here? There’s nothing but rocks and...and termite mounds. Which is okay, because I like rocks. But wha
t do you do for fun?”
“I surf most mornings. Go windsurfing sometimes. Kiteboarding. Kayaking. Scuba diving, free diving, snorkeling. If I don’t feel like getting wet, I go hiking and look at wildlife, take the tent out and go camping to look at the stars. Or mountain biking. Or if it’s a quiet day, I might take the chopper out just for fun and go sightseeing.”
She stared at him in amazement. “You really do all that?” How did someone even have time in their life to learn how to do all those things? “I’ve never done any of those things.”
He looked at her in surprise. “You haven’t tried any of those?”
They sounded a bit scary, if she was honest with herself. “There wasn’t much opportunity for water sports where I grew up in Colorado, and my parents weren’t exactly the outdoor type. We never even went skiing when I was growing up, and Colorado is famous for its ski fields. Dad purely hated the snow and Mom wasn’t fussed on it, either. I have gone hiking once though. I do go walking sometimes, but it’s mostly when I’m researching just to find more rock samples. And I’ve been in your helicopter, I guess, but I wasn't really focusing on sightseeing at the time.”
“You should make the most of it while you are over here.”
She shrugged. “I guess.” It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to do new things, it was that she didn’t know how to. How could she learn to surf when she’d only ever had swimming lessons at a local pool, and hadn’t been in the water at all for more than a decade?
Just then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught something move. “Oh, look, an emu.” She watched it for a while as it meandered its way through the low scrub. “They are the silliest-looking birds I have ever seen. All neck and legs and feet.”
“Fast, though. And they have powerful legs on them. They can give you a vicious kick if you get in their way. Their claws could disembowel you.”
“Great. Something else in Australia that is out to kill me.”
“Just don’t try to pull out its tail feathers and it will leave you alone.”
She digested that for a moment. Did anyone really need to be warned not to try to pull out an emu’s tail feathers? Surely nobody was stupid enough to try. “And you know that how?”
“First-hand experience,” he said with a grin.
She shook her head. Okay, so there was at least one person in the world who was stupid enough to try and pull an emu’s tail feathers out, and she was stuck in a vehicle with him. “Will we see any kangaroos?”
“Probably. They stay in the shade during the day, but you can usually find them first thing in the morning, or at dusk, when they come out to feed.”
“And to attack unsuspecting cars,” she muttered.
It wasn’t long before they reached the site of the wrecked truck. Noah brought his vehicle to a stop and got out to inspect the ruin. Abby ducked out, pulled her hat on, and consulted her notebook for the list of samples that she wanted to collect.
John in the back seat woke up with a snort, and groggily clambered out, yawning behind a hand.
Noah stuck his thumbs in the waistband of his shorts. “Think you can get it going again?”
John looked gloomily at it and gave one of the tires a kick. “It doesn’t look great.”
As the men fussed around the truck, first towing it out of the large pothole and then jacking it up to inspect the damage, Abby started methodically to collect her samples. It was much easier the second time around. Now that she knew exactly what she was doing, what she wanted and where to find it, the work went surprisingly quickly. She was still annoyed about losing her entire first set, but these would do nicely. Some of them looked promising, and she was anxious to get back to the lab and get them under the microscope.
It was nearly noon by the time she had finished. She wandered over to sit in the shade of Noah’s truck for a respite from the heat. The sun was high in the cloudless sky, and it was already hot enough to give her the start of a headache. She took a long drink of tepid water and then tipped a trickle over her head and down the back of her neck to cool herself off.
Noah came over, wiping his greasy hands on a rag, and flopped next to her on the ground. “You did a real number on John’s truck. We won’t be able to fix it here. We’ll have to tow it back to town. Can I have a drink?”
She passed him her bottle of water and he took a long drink, tossing the now empty bottle back inside the truck.
In the parched desert air, the water she had tipped on herself had already evaporated.
Crap. Double crap. She hadn’t realized until now how much she had been counting on Noah and John being able to fix it.
She certainly wasn’t going to stiff John with the bill for fixing it. After all, it had been kind of him to lend it to her, and it was her fault that it was now inoperable. Annoyingly, she simply didn’t have the money to get it fixed herself. Every penny of her savings had been spent on her ticket out here, except for the modest sum she had put aside to keep her fed until she returned home again.
She would have to call her parents and beg them for a loan. They would insist on knowing the reason why she needed the money, and she would have to listen to at least an hour of lectures about being more careful, driving to the conditions, did she really need to be in Australia at all, wouldn’t it be better for her to give up field work and concentrate on lab work, which is where all the money and prestige was instead of grubbing around in the dirt like a second-class citizen. It exhausted her just to think about it.
She really needed to get her research completed successfully so she stood a chance of getting a job somewhere half decent. If she did really well, maybe Jed would put in a good word for her for a junior professorship in his department.
Working with him every day? She sighed to herself. That would be a dream come true.
“Tired?” Noah asked, interrupting her daydream.
She shook her head. He must have heard her sigh and misinterpreted it. “No, just daydreaming.”
“I’m shocked,” he said lazily, as he leaned back on his elbows on the dusty ground. “I thought you were a career-driven woman, and here you are, daydreaming on the job. I’ve fired people for less than that.”
“When have you had staff working for you? I thought you didn’t work.”
“Back when I was living at home, I had staff working for me.”
“Where is home?” she asked curiously. She had noticed that his accent differed slightly to the drawling voices of the Australians.
“I grew up on a sheep farm in New Zealand. Down in the South Island. Mum and Dad still live there with a couple of my brothers.”
“Wow. I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand.”
“You have? I thought most Americans didn’t even know New Zealand existed.”
“It’s got fascinating geology. The whole country is located on a fault line, and it has incredible volcanic activity and geothermal areas. It would be very interesting to study.”
He looked at her and laughed. “You are one of a kind, aren’t you?”
She frowned at him and stood up. He rankled her, and she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was his self-assured smile and the way everything he said seemed to be mocking her. Maybe it was the tattoos that ran the length of his arm. Her parents were strictly against tattoos—they were for troublemakers and people who didn’t fit into polite society. Maybe it was the fact that he found it amusing how she worked hard, when he should be looking at her dedication to her work with respect.
“Should we get going then?” She put her hands on her hips and looked down at him.
“Yeah, we should do.” He stood up slowly and walked lazily over to John, who still had his head rather hopefully stuck into the engine and was enthusiastically hitting various dented engine bits with his hammer.
“Shall we hook her up and head back?”
“Yeah, ‘bout all we can do,” John said, finally throwing his hammer into the truck in defeat and pushing his sweaty hair out of his eyes with the
back of a dirty hand.
The men tied a rope between the two vehicles and John sat in the wrecked truck to brake as they slowly took it back to the town. Abby climbed into the front seat next to Noah, who immediately struck up a conversation again.
“So tell me about life back home. What do you do with your friends for fun?”
There was a few seconds’ silence that Abby didn’t want to break.
“You can’t tell me that you study so much that you don’t have friends?” He caught her frown out of the corner of his eye and trailed off. “Well what about a boyfriend? You must have had a boyfriend before.”
Abby looked out the window. She hadn’t had a boyfriend before. It had never mattered much to her, finding love. Her love was her work. Until Jed of course. But she wasn’t going to share that secret with the endlessly positive and frustratingly flirty Noah. His prying made her feel embarrassed about her lack of life experiences, as though she was missing out on something. But she wasn’t—it was people like him who didn’t work hard and who thought you could sail through life without sacrificing anything who were the ones who were going to miss out on things in the end.
Noah grinned at her silence.
“Abby, I think we have been brought together for a reason. And that reason is to show you how to relax a little and have a good time. Doing something other than digging up rocks.”
“I know how to relax and have fun already.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Abby sighed. He wasn’t going to let it go. “Fine. What do you want to show me?”
His grin was practically ear to ear now. “Lots of things,” he said in a low voice that made her stomach twist a little bit. “But I’ll start with the beach. Have you even been to the beach here yet?”
An image of him shirtless popped into her head and she pushed the thought away.
“No, not yet. I was going to go see it one of these days. Some of the other researchers go.”
“Great, you should go with them. But I’m going to take you to a secret beach. You’ll love it.”
She sighed and agreed, thinking there must be a ton of other women who would be jumping at the chance to spend their day with a muscled and tattooed, long-haired adventure seeker. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible. She just wished it was Jed who had asked her instead.
Headlong (Quinn Brothers Book 2) Page 3