by Nikki Logan
‘He won’t be long,’ Rich murmured as a floodlight made its way steadily across the darkness that was the sea beyond the reef. The speed limits still applied even though no one else was using the channel. They weren’t there to protect the boats.
‘Did you enjoy dinner?’ Rich asked after a longish, silence-filled pause. He turned closer to her in the darkness.
She’d totally forgotten the eating part of the evening. All she’d been fixating on was the looking part, the touching part. The just-out-of-the-shower part.
‘Very much,’ she said, looking up to him. ‘Always happy not to go into a crowded building.’
‘Thank you for letting me tag along on the spawn; it really was very beautiful.’
It was impossible not to chuckle but—this close and in this much darkness—it came out sounding way throatier than she meant it. ‘I’m pretty sure I bullied you into coming.’
Just like she’d talked her way into Wardoo tomorrow.
‘Happy to have been bullied then. I never could have imagined...’
No. It really was unimaginable until you’d seen it. She liked knowing that they had that experience in common now. Every shared experience they had brought them that little bit closer. And now that she knew he was a Dawson...every experience would help to secure the borders against developers even more.
A stiff breeze kicked up off the water and reminded Mila that she was still in the light T-shirt and yoga pants she’d shrugged into in her steamy little bathroom inside her warm little house. Gooseflesh prickled, accompanied by imaginary wings fluttering as the bumps raced up her skin.
‘You should head home,’ Rich immediately said as she rubbed her arms. ‘It’s cold.’
‘No—’
She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to wait until eight a.m. to see him again. She wasn’t ready to leave this man who turned out to have had the back of everything she cared about for all these years. If he asked her back to his boat to spend the night she was ready to say yes.
‘I’m good.’
Large hands found her upper arms in the light from the silvered moon and added their warmth to her cold skin. Harps immediately joined the fluttering wings.
‘Here...’
Rich moved around close behind her and then rubbed his hands up and down her arms, bringing her back against his hard, warm, sweater-clad chest. He’d shifted from a client to an acquaintance somewhere around the visit to Yardi Creek, and from acquaintance to a friend when she’d agreed to have dinner. But exactly when did they become arm-rubbing kinds of friends? Was it when they’d stood so close by the shore this evening? When they’d shared the majesty of the spawn event? The not-quite kiss?
Did it even matter? The multiple sensations of his hands on hers, his body against hers was a kind of heaven she’d secretly believed she would never experience.
It was only when she saw the slash of the tender’s arriving floodlight on the back of her eyelids that she realised they’d fluttered shut.
Rich stepped away and the harps faded to nothing at the loss of his skin on hers.
‘I’ll see you here at eight,’ he said, far more composed than she felt. But then his big frame blocked the moonlight as he bent to kiss her cheek. His words were a hot caress against her ear and the gooseflesh worsened.
‘Sleep well.’
Pfff... As if.
Before she could reply, he had stepped away and she mourned not only the warmth of his hands but now the gentle brush of his lips too. Too, too brief. He stepped down onto the varnished pier out to the tender and left her. Standing here, watching him walk away from her, those narrow jeans-clad hips swinging even in the dim moonlight, was a little too much like self-harm and so she turned to face her truck and took the few steps she needed to cross back to it.
At the last moment she heard a crunch that wasn’t her own feet on the crushed gravel marina substrate.
‘Mila...’
She pivoted into Rich’s return and he didn’t even pause as he walked hard up against her and bent again, to her lips this time. His kiss was soft but it lingered. It explored. It blew her little mind. And it came with a sensation overload. He took her too much by surprise to invoke the citrus of anticipation but it kicked in now and mingled with the strong, candy surge of attraction as a tiny corner of her mind wondered breathlessly how long his kiss could last. Waves crashed and she knew it wasn’t on the nearby shore; it was what kissing gave her, though not always like this... Not always accompanied by skin harps and the crackle of fireplace that was the heat of Rich’s mouth on her own. And all that oak moss...
Her head spun with want as much as the breathless surprise of Rich’s stealthy return.
‘I should have done that hours ago,’ he murmured at last, breathing fast. ‘I wanted to right after the coral.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Belatedly, she realised she was probably supposed to protest his presumption, or say something witty, or be grown up and blasé about it. But really, all she wanted to know was why they hadn’t been kissing all evening.
‘I wanted you to know about me. Who I was. So you had the choice.’
Oh, kissing him was a choice? That was a laugh, and not because he’d sneaked up on her and made the first move. She’d been thinking about his mouth for days now.
There was no choice.
But she was grateful for the consideration.
‘I like who you are,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you for telling me.’
Besides, she was the last person who could judge anyone else for keeping themselves private.
He dipped his head again and sent the harps a-harping and the fire a-crackling for more precious moments. Then he straightened and stepped back.
‘Tomorrow then,’ he said and he and his conflicted gaze were gone, jogging down the pier towards the Portus’ waiting tender.
Mila sagged against her open car door and watched until he was out of sight. Even then, she stared at the inky ocean and imagined the small boat making its way until it reappeared as a shadow against the well-lit Portus. Impossible to see Rich climb aboard at this distance but she imagined that too; in her mind’s eye she saw him slumping down on that expansive sofa amid the polished chrome and glass. She tried to imagine him checking his phone or picking up a book or even stretching out on that king-sized bed and watching the night sky through the wraparound windows, but it was easier to imagine him settling in behind his laptop at the workstation and getting a few more hours of corporate in before his head hit any kind of pillow.
That was just who he was. And it was where he came from.
A whale shark couldn’t change its spots.
Except this one—just maybe—could.
CHAPTER NINE
MILA TOOK A careful knife to the reef and carved out a single oyster from a crowded corner, working carefully not to injure or loosen the rest. Then she did it again at another stack. And again. And again. On the way out to this remote bay, she’d told Rich that her department’s licence called for five test oysters every month and a couple of simple observational tests to monitor oyster condition and keep them free of the disease that was ravaging populations down the east coast of the country.
Rich held the little bag for her as she dropped them in one by one.
She smiled shy thanks, though not quite at him. ‘For a CEO you make an excellent apprentice ranger.’
* * *
So far this morning the two of them had been doing a terrific job of ignoring exactly what it was that had gone down between them last night. The kissing part, not the sharing of secrets part. One was planned, the other... Not so much. He hadn’t even known he was going to do it until he’d felt his feet twisting on the pier and striding back towards her.
‘Now I understand your fashion choice,’ he murmured, nodd
ing at her high-vis vest emblazoned with the department logo. It wasn’t the most flattering thing he’d seen her in since they’d met yet she still managed to make it seem...intriguing.
‘Don’t want anyone thinking they can just help themselves to oysters here,’ she said. ‘This is inside the sanctuary zone.’
Not that there was a soul around yet. The tide was way too low to be of interest to snorkelers and the fishermen had too much respect for their equipment to try tossing a line in at this razor-ridden place.
They waded ashore and Mila laid the five knotted shells out on the tailgate of her four-wheel drive. She placed a dog-eared laminated number above each, photographed it and then set about her testing. All that busyness was a fantastic way of not needing to make eye contact with him.
Was she embarrassed? Did she regret participating quite so enthusiastically in last night’s experimental kiss? Or was she just as focused on her work as he could be when he was in the zone? Given how distracted he’d been last night, going over and over the proposal, it was hard to imagine ever being in the zone again.
Mila picked one oyster up and gently knocked its semi-open shell. It closed immediately but with no great urgency.
‘That’s a four,’ she told him, and he dutifully wrote it down on the form she’d given him.
The others were all fours too, and one super-speedy five. That made her happy. She’d clearly opened an oyster or three in her time and she made quick work of separating each one from its top shell by a swift knife move to its hinge. She wafted the inner scent of each towards her nostrils before dipping her finger in and then placing it in her mouth to taste its juices. He wrote down her observations as she voiced them.
‘If these five exemplars are responsive, fresh and the flesh is opaque then it’s a good sign of the health of the whole oyster community,’ she said.
‘What do you do with them, then—toss them back?’
‘These five are ambassadors for their kind. I usually wedge the shells back in to become part of the stack, but I don’t waste the meat.’
‘And by that you mean...?’
‘I eat them,’ she said with a grin. ‘Want to help?’
Rich frowned. ‘Depends on whether you have any red wine vinegar on hand.’
She used the little knife to shuck the first of them and flip it to study its underside. Then she held up the oyster sample in front of her lips like a salute. ‘Au naturel.’
Down it went. She repeated the neat move and handed the finished shuck to him.
His eyebrows raised as soon as he bit down on the ultra-fresh mollusc. ‘Melon!’
‘Yeah, kind of. Salty melon.’
‘Even to you?’
She smiled. ‘Even to me. With a bonus hit of astute.’
Rich couldn’t really see how a hibernating lump of muscle could have any personality at all but he was prepared to go with ‘astute’. He’d never managed to taste the ‘ambition’ in vintage wine either, but he was prepared to believe that connoisseurs at the fancy restaurants he frequented could.
Maybe Mila was just a nature connoisseur.
Oyster number three and four went the same way and then there was only the one left. He offered it to Mila. ‘You know what they say about oysters...’
She blinked at him. ‘Excellent for your immune system and bone strength?’
He stared at her, trying to gauge whether she was serious. He loved not being able to read her. How long had it been since someone surprised him?
‘Yeah, that’s what they say.’
It was only when she smiled, slow and sexy, that he knew she knew. But obviously she wasn’t about to mention it in light of last night’s illicit kiss.
She gasped, scribbling in her log what she’d found on the oyster’s underside. ‘A pearl.’
Rich peered at the small cream mass. It wasn’t much of one but it undoubtedly was a pearl. ‘Is that a good sign?’
‘Not really.’ Mila poked at it carefully. ‘It could have formed in response to a parasite. Too much of that would be a bad sign for these stacks.’
‘Pearls are a defect?’ he asked.
‘“Out of a flaw comes beauty”,’ Mila quoted.
She might as well have been describing herself.
She lifted it out with her blade and rinsed it in the seawater, then swallowed the last of the oyster flesh.
‘Here,’ she said, handing it to him. ‘A souvenir.’
‘Because you have so many littering your house?’
Just how many had she found in her time?
‘It’s reasonably rare to find a wild one,’ she said, still smiling. ‘This is only my second in all the time I’ve been working here. But I don’t feel right about keeping them; I’m lucky enough just to do this for a living without profiting from it further. I gave the last one away to a woman with three noisy kids.’
Rich stared. She was like a whole different species to him. ‘Do you know what they’re worth?’
‘Not so much when they’re this small and malformed, I don’t think.’ She laid it out on her hand and let the little lump flip over on her wet palm. ‘But I prefer them like this. Rough and nature-formed. Though it’s weird, I don’t get any kind of personality off them. I wonder why.’
She studied it a moment longer, as if willing it to perform for her.
‘Here...’ She finally thrust her hand out. ‘Something to remember Coral Bay by. Sorry it’s not bigger.’
Something deep in his chest protested. Did she imagine he cared about that? When he looked at the small, imperfect pearl he would remember the small, imperfect woman who had given it to him.
And how perfect her imperfections made her.
He closed his hand around the lumpy gem. ‘Thank you.’
She took the empty shell parts and jogged back into the water to wedge them back into the stacks as foundation for future generations, then she returned and packed up. Rich took the opportunity to watch her move, and work, without making her self-conscious.
He found he quite liked to just watch her.
‘Okay,’ she finally puffed. ‘All done for the month. Shall we get going? Did you tell Wardoo you were coming?’
‘Panic duly instigated, yes.’
She smiled at him and he wondered when he’d started counting the minutes between them. She’d smiled more at him in the last hour than she had in the entire time he’d known her. It was uncomfortably hard not to connect it to her misapprehension that he was some kind of crusading, conservation good guy.
‘I think you’ll like it. This country really is very beautiful in its own unique way.’
As he followed her up the path to her car all he could think about was an old phrase...
Takes one to know one.
* * *
Their arrival at Wardoo was decidedly low-key. If not for the furtive glance of a man crossing between one corrugated outbuilding and the next she’d have thought no one was all that interested in Rich’s arrival. But that sideways look spoke volumes. It was more the kind of surreptitious play-down-the-moment peek reserved for politicians or rock stars.
Or royalty.
Some of the men who had worked Wardoo their whole adult lives might never have seen a Dawson in person. Grundy, she reminded herself.
A wide grin in a weathered, masculine face met them, introduced himself as the Station foreman and offered to show them, first, through the homestead.
‘Jared Kipling,’ he said, shaking Rich’s hand. ‘Kip.’
She wasn’t offended that Kip had forgotten to shake her hand in the fluster of meeting his long-absent boss. It saved her the anxiety of another first-time touch.
It was only when she watched Rich’s body language as he stepped up onto the veranda running the full perimeter of
the homestead that she realised he’d slipped back into business mode. She recognised it from that first day at Nancy’s Point. Exactly when he’d stopped being quite so...corporate she wasn’t as sure.
‘It’s vacant?’ Mila asked as she stepped into the dust-free hall of Wardoo homestead ahead of the men. Despite being furnished, there was something empty about it, and not just because the polished floorboards exuded isolation the way jarrah always did for her.
Wardoo was...hollow. And somehow lifeless.
How incredibly sad. Not what she had imagined at all.
‘Most of our crew live in transportables on site or in town. We keep the house for the Dawsons,’ Kip said. ‘Just in case.’
The Dawsons who had never visited? The hollowness only increased and she glanced at Rich. He kept his gaze firmly averted.
She left the men to their discussions and explored the homestead. Every room was just as clean and just as empty as the one before it. She ran her fingertips along the rich old surfaces and enjoyed the myriad sensations that came with them. When she made her way back to the living room, Rich and the foreman were deep in discussion on the unused sofas. She heard the word ‘lease’ before Rich shot to his feet and brought the conversation to a rapid halt.
‘If you’ve seen enough—’ Kip floundered at the sudden end to their conversation ‘—I can show you the operations yards and then the chopper’s standing by for an aerial tour.’
Rich looked decidedly awkward too. What a novelty—to be the least socially clumsy person in a room.
‘You have your own chopper?’ Mila asked him, to ease the tension.
It did the trick. He gifted her a small smile that only served to remind her how many minutes it had been since the last one.
Because apparently she counted, now.
He turned for the door as if she’d been the one keeping him waiting. ‘It seems I do.’
‘It’s a stock mustering chopper,’ Kip went on, tailing them. ‘There’s only room for two. But it’s the only way to get out to the perimeter of Wardoo and back in a day.’