by Nikki Logan
‘I know. I grew up here.’
Oh, that’s right. A spark of excitement flared through her. ‘Do you remember the colony when you were a boy?’
His lids dropped. ‘I should. I spent part of every day with them.’
Kate froze. ‘No. Did you?’
He stared at her overly long. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, Miss Dickson. It doesn’t mean I have any information for you and it doesn’t mean I’m going to say yes. My answer is still no.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t need a reason. It’s the beauty of Australia’s freehold system—my land, my rules.’
Kate brought out her big gun. Her only gun. ‘Actually, it’s not.’ His face grew thunderous but she pushed on. ‘Technically speaking, it’s not your land. Not yet.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Is that a fact?’
‘I’ve been told it will take six to eight weeks for probate and to settle the estate according to the terms of Leo’s will. Until then, this farm still belongs to your father. And the contract stands.’
God, she hoped so. She’d had to have dinner with a loathsome octopus in order to get some certainty on that. His price for helping her.
The fury on Grant McMurtrie’s face had her crossing her arms across her chest, just in case he reached right through her ribcage and snatched at her heart with that big fist. He glared at her and it fluttered even faster.
‘You doubt I have enough connections to get it pushed through? I’m a lawyer, Miss Dickson.’
‘Ms!’ she hissed.
‘Actually, I imagine it’s Dr Dickson, if we’re being formal. Why not use that?’
‘Because Dr Dickson was my father. And because I prefer Ms. If you can’t manage that, then just call me Kate.’ She took a breath. ‘But that’s besides the point. I’ve been told that even with fiddling probate won’t take less than six weeks.’
The hostility switched to offence. ‘I do not fiddle, Miss Dickson. I merely apply the law.’
Uh-huh. The octopus had been a lawyer, too.
His expression changed. ‘What do you imagine will change in six weeks?’
‘Maybe nothing. But maybe you’ll come to see that the work we are doing is important.’
‘To whom?’
‘To science. To understanding the role of predators on fish stocks. To the future ecology of the oceans.’
‘To you.’
Her chest rose and fell twice. ‘Yes, to me. This is my life’s work.’
And all she had.
His half-smile, half-snort managed to be engaging and offensive at the same time. ‘Play that tune in a few years when life’s work means something more than five or six years.’
‘You’re not exactly Methusela. What are you…forty?’ She knew he wasn’t.
His nostrils flared. ‘Thirty-five.’
Young, to be the success the internet hinted he was. He must have been very driven. She appealed to that part of him. ‘When you were younger, didn’t you care about something enough to give up everything for it?’
Grant glared and buried his paint-encrusted hands in his pockets. When he’d been young all he could think about was getting away from this farm and the certain future that had felt like a death sentence. Finding his own path. It had taken him the first ten years to realise he hadn’t found it. And the next nine waiting for some kind of sign as to which way to go next.
That sign had come in the form of a concerned, late-night call from Castleridge’s mayor that his father had missed the town’s civic meeting and wasn’t answering his phone or his door. He’d driven a three-hour drive in two and they’d broken his father’s door down together.
Grant stopped short of the door in question—newly replaced, newly painted—and let Ms Kate Dickson walk ahead. Without her destroyed jacket, her opaque crème blouse hid little as the Western Australian light blazed in the doorway. Her little power-suit had given him a clue to the fit, lean body beneath. Now here was exhibit A in all its silhouetted glory.
His gut tightened.
Not that she’d played it that way. Her attire was entirely appropriate for a business discussion. Professional. His shirt had revealed more than hers, even though she had cleavage most women in her position would have been flashing for leverage. It had felt positively gratuitous as her eyes had fallen on his exposed chest. He certainly wasn’t dressed for company.
Then again, she wasn’t invited, so she’d have to take what she got. ‘Don’t ask me to empathise with you, Miss Dickson.’
‘Ms!’
‘Your life’s work destroyed my father.’
The sun was too low behind her for him to see whether she lost colour at that, but her body stiffened up like the old eucalypts in the dry paddock. She took an age to answer, low and tight. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
She seemed genuinely thrown for a moment. Her blouse rose and fell dramatically and his conscience bit that he’d struck that low a blow. He’d only just stopped short of saying ‘took my father’s life’.
But that was a secret for only three people.
She ran nervous hands down her skirt and it reminded him instantly of the soft feel of her legs under his hands just moments before. He shoved the sensation away.
Her voice, when it came, was tight and pained. ‘Mr McMurtrie, your father was a difficult man to get to know, but I respected him. We had many dealings together and I’d like to think we finally hit an accord.’
Accord. More than he’d had with his father at the end. All they’d had was estrangement.
‘The suggestion that my work—the work of my team—may have contributed to his death is…’ She swallowed hard. ‘For all his faults, your father was a man who loved this land and everything on it. He came to care for the Atlas colony in the same way he cared for his livestock. Not individually, perhaps, but with a sense of guardianship over them. Responsibility. I believe the seals brought him joy, not sadness.’
‘Wishful thinking, Kate?’
She turned enough that he could see the deep frown marring her perfect face.
He struck, as he was trained to. ‘My father was served a notice just a month ago that said sixty square-kilometres of coastland was to be suspended while its conservation status was reconsidered—a two-kilometre-deep buffer for the entire coastal stretch. That’s a third of his land, Kate.’
Her body sagged. She chose her words carefully. ‘Yes. I was aware of the discussions. Aware our findings were being cited as—’
‘Then it should be no surprise to you that it might have pushed him—’
Grant clamped his mouth shut, suddenly aware of what it might do to a person to be told they were responsible for someone’s suicide. Someone like Kate. Especially when he didn’t know that for a fact. Yet. ‘That it might have stressed him unduly.’
Her nod was slow, her face drawn. ‘If it wasn’t what he wanted, yes, I could imagine. But he was working with us.’
For what reason, only his father would know. But Alan Sefton had a thorough and detailed will sitting in his office, completed just weeks before Leo’s death, that gave Grant responsibility for Tulloquay. And that will didn’t say one single word about seal protection or participating in research. And, where Grant came from, legal documents like that spoke infinitely louder than words.
‘There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that my father would have willingly signed over one third of his land to a bunch of greenies. He loved this farm.’
Her eyes dropped. ‘He was not a man to do anything by halves.’
It dawned on him finally that his father and this woman had had some kind of relationship. Not conventional, he was sure—his father just wasn’t that easy to get on with—but her shock on the telephone and her sadness now finally registered. And his own grief and long-repressed anger lifted just enough for him to see how the passing of Leo McMurtrie might impact a young woman who’d spent several days a week for two years on his farm.
/> But he couldn’t let compassion get the better of him. That was probably what his father had done in the end—compassion and a healthy dose of male paternalism. He looked again at the small, naturally beautiful woman before him. Possibly male something else.
And look what it had led to.
He stiffened his back. ‘The moment probate goes through, your team needs to find somewhere else to do your study. Ask some of the farmers up the coast for access.’
‘You don’t think I would have done that rather than negotiate with your father for so long? This site is the only one suitable. We need somewhere accessible that allows us to get quickly between the seals and the water. The cliff faces to the north are even less passable.’
‘Then you’ll have to get creative. The moment it’s in my power, I’ll be closing my gates to your seal researchers. Fair warning.’
Even without being able to clearly see her face against the glare, he knew she was staring him down. ‘Warning, yes. But fair? For all his faults, your father was at least a man of integrity.’
She turned and gracefully crossed the veranda, down the steps to her beat-up old utility truck. Hardly the sort of vehicle he would expect a beauty to travel in. She slid in carefully and swung her long legs modestly in before quietly closing the door.
In that moment he got his first hint as to why his father might have relented after a year of pressure. Not because she’d used her body and face to get her way…but because she hadn’t.
Kate Dickson was an intriguing mix of brains, beauty and dignity and she clearly loved the land she stood on.
No wonder his father had caved. It was exactly what he had loved about Grant’s mother.
CHAPTER TWO
STRIPPING bare in an open paddock was the least of Kate’s concerns. The looming threat of every visit being her last made her suddenly want very much to visit her seals. Just socially, despite the timing being wrong.
Wrong shoes, wrong clothes, wrong time of day. But she was doing it anyway.
These animals were the most stable thing she’d had in her life in the past few years and the idea of losing them filled her mouth with a bitter taste.
An arctic gust blew in off the Southern Ocean as she peeled off her ruined skirt and blouse and hauled her wetsuit on in their place—the closest she’d ever get to being a seal, albeit twenty kilos too light. No wonder sharks sometimes mistook surfers for their favourite blubbery food-source when they were in full wetsuit. She’d relied on the same confusion to get closer to the Atlas colony the first time.
On a usual working day she ditched the wetsuit for serviceable, smelly overalls, about the most comfortable thing ever invented—warm, dry and snug. But also the least attractive.
Unless you were a male wool-sack.
Her beat-up old utility gave her the tiniest bit of privacy against the baleful stares of thirty sheep that scattered like freckles across the dry, crunchy paddock. It was not really suitable pasture for sheep grazing, but they had a ready food source in feed stations dotted around the farm. They were more interested in the engagement and social aspects of grazing as a flock than in what little nutrition the salt-stiffened grass afforded.
The sheep had seen her half-naked plenty of times and were about as uninterested as the rest of her team to whom boundaries, and gender, meant nothing. Sifting through seal vomit for six hours a day had a way of bringing a team closer together. But sift they did, and then they studied it. Such a glamorous life; no wonder gender and modesty came to mean nothing to any of them. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually felt like a woman.
How about twenty minutes ago?
Even angry, Grant McMurtrie had made her body resonate in places she hadn’t thought about for years. It was still thrumming now; something about the insolent way he’d sized her up. It had boiled her blood in one heartbeat then sizzled it the next. She’d been insanely pleased to be wearing a skirt and blouse for once, even if she’d been covered in paint. Imagine if his first impression of her had been her usual working attire…
The sheep turned away, bored, as she tossed her ruined clothes and shoes into the back seat of her car for later and reached back over her shoulder to snag the zip-tether and pull her rubbery wetsuit up tighter against her skin. She picked her way barefoot over the edge of the bluff and down a near-invisible crease of sand in the painfully sharp rocks, their ofttrodden pathway down the cliff face to the rocky cove below. The trail had been worn when they’d found it, hinting at use over generations. A mercy for her poor feet, but trickily narrow, just wide enough for a slight woman.
Or a small boy.
Her mind immediately went to one in particular. Grant McMurtrie must have come here a hundred times in his young life, hard as it was to imagine the imposing man as a child. What adventurous little soul wouldn’t find his way to the dangers of open cliff-face, gale-force wind gusts and wildlife galore? Envy as green as his eyes bubbled through her.
He might have had the seals before her, but she had them now. They’d been hers for the past two years and, if she played her cards right, they’d go on being hers for the next year. Longer, if the Conservation Council ruled in her favour. They were already extremely interested in her research.
Two-dozen dark heads lifted as she negotiated her way down the crease. These seals were used to the arrival of humans on their beach now. They were not trusting—definitely not—but accustomed. Only a couple of heads remained raised at the unusual sight of just a solitary human; the rest flopped back onto the rocks to continue their lazy sunning. Kate smiled at the typical scene. A gang of rotund pups mucked around by the water’s edge, vocalising and chasing each other and play-fighting, as though they needed to use up all their energy now before they grew up and became biologically sluggish like their mothers, scattered lazing around the rocks.
Or their older brothers, hanging out in bachelor groups further up the coast. Or their fathers, who did their own thing most of the year but came together with the females for breeding season.
Families. They came in all shapes and sizes, and if those pups got lucky they’d have theirs for a lot longer than she’d had hers. Kate frowned. She’d had a long time to grow accustomed to being on her own but it had never really grown any easier.
One of the pups squealed and drew her maudlin focus back to them.
It was amazing they tolerated human presence at all, given Kate and her team caught them up once a month and piled them into wool sacks for weighing. But the young seals seemed to view it as a regular part of their lives, a game to be had. More than one pup dashed straight back into the wool sack after release, keen to be back with its mates. Looking into the sack was one of the rare true pleasures of her job, as four pairs of enormous, melted-chocolate eyes in brown furry faces peered back out at her.
It got all her maternal instincts bubbling, yearning, until she shushed them. When your colleagues barely noticed you were female, and when colleagues were the only men you met, kids weren’t an immediate issue on the horizon, no matter what her biology was hinting.
Plus they were just one more thing to love and lose. And what was the point?
‘Hey, Dorset,’ Kate murmured to one of the seals she could recognise by sight as she settled herself on a suitably flat rock. The large female was one of five wearing the monitoring equipment this month. The time-depth recorder captured her position above sea-level every five seconds when she was dry and every two seconds when she was wet, twenty-four-seven. They rotated the expensive recorders monthly across the whole adult colony, to get a good spread of data from as many animals as possible, in order to determine information for their study: where the seals fed, for how long and how deep they went.
What they were eating was a different matter. There was no convenient machine for that, hence the vomit and poop-sifting.
Dorset gave an ungracious snort and turned her attention back out to sea, sparing the briefest of glances for Danny Boy, her pup. Seal mothers were shocking
ly fast to abandon their pups when threatened; that made it much easier to catch up the young for weighing, but it bothered Kate on a fundamental level that these babies were often left undefended.
She knew from experience how that felt.
She’d made a pledge to herself back when she was young that she’d never let herself get in that position again—exposed, vulnerable to the capricious decisions of others. Without control. Without any say.
It must have occurred to the seal species in the ancient past that the loss of the baby meant the loss of only one, but the loss of a fertile mother meant the loss of an entire genetic line. Pups were expendable. And entirely, tragically vulnerable.
Danny Boy looked straight at her and then dashed off, barking in grumpy high-pitched tones. Sad affection bubbled through her. As far as the fishing communities along the west coast were concerned, seals and man were hunting the same fishstocks. And, when that industry was worth millions of dollars a year, anything or anyone threatening supply would not be tolerated. Her research was showing that, whether by good design or dumb luck, seals were hunting totally different fish from humans. If only she could prove that to the people of Castleridge. To the government. To the world.
‘Don’t suppose you guys would consider going vegetarian?’ she quietly asked the wary mass of seals.
Close by, one mother trumpeted her displeasure at that idea, and Kate scrabbled away from the ensuing stench; beyond disgusting.
Her chuckle was half-gag. ‘Go on. Get it out of your system now. I need you guys to be charming the next time I come down.’
With McMurtrie junior in tow. It was the obvious next step. If he was going to throw legalese at her, then she’d fight back with the only thing she had—history. If Grant McMurtrie had cared for these seals as a kid, maybe she could use that and try to change his mind about her access. She wasn’t above begging, or conniving.
Whatever it took to snatch back a bit of control.
Not only did she have three funding grants riding on this, but her professional reputation as well. She didn’t want years of work to be wasted because somebody had a chip on their shoulder about conservation programs. She had her university, the Fisheries Department and the Castleridge Town Shire to remind her of that. They were expecting results in return for their contribution and it was her job to get them, come hell or high water.