A Kiss to Seal the Deal

by Nikki Logan

  ‘But why didn’t he just give it all up? Become a fisherman when there was no reason not to?’

  ‘Because his father had worked all his life to build Tulloquay up. He felt he couldn’t walk away from all that his forebears had done. Everything they’d tried to make the farm.’ Kind eyes softened. ‘Sound familiar?’

  Grant swallowed hard.

  His father had died admiring him for having the courage to stand up for what he wanted. Not hating him for it.

  Not hating him.

  He lifted his head. ‘Then why didn’t he leave me instructions in his will, if he wanted Kate’s buffer to go through? It would have saved everyone a heck of a lot of pain.’

  Alan lifted his hands. ‘I tried to persuade him. But he didn’t want to impose his wants and needs on you. He let you walk away from your only family years before rather than tie you to a life the way he’d been tied. Leaving you specific instructions would only have forced your hand.’

  He hadn’t failed. His father was disappointed with his own failings, not his son’s.

  Sorrow for a lifetime lost swamped over him like a tidal surge. Emotions he hadn’t allowed for years all bubbled up from the mud that swilled around him and burst, fresh and raw. Every part of him ached.

  ‘I need to—’

  He stammered to a halt and frowned. Where did he start? There was too much to think about. So many things to filter, dissect. A lifetime of misunderstanding to sift through, like Kate with her lanternfish ear-bones. His head came up as all of those thoughts, feelings and regrets all lined up and made a three-dimensional letter in his imagination.

  The letter K.

  His eyes fell onto Alan’s patient ones. ‘I think I need to see Kate.’

  ‘Going somewhere?’

  Grant filled the entrance to her lab—her ex-lab—large and rock-solid, as if he was part of the building. Amazing how quickly she’d grown used to seeing him amongst all the technical equipment they used on this project. Equipment that now lay dismantled around her. Of course, he’d never actually been in, not since the day he’d helped her move. The door was usually as far as he came.

  She’d been stupid not to see that for what it was—proof that he didn’t really support her. Or her research. She barely paused before turning her focus back to the data-logger computer. Lucky she’d kept all the cable ties handy. Maybe on some level she knew she wouldn’t be here long.

  ‘Coming here was a mistake,’ she said. ‘I’m just correcting it.’

  Behind her, his voice grew pensive. ‘You’re leaving?’

  She levered a recalcitrant cable back and forth, trying to prize it free. ‘You can’t expect me to stay.’

  ‘Don’t make any rash decisions, Kate.’

  Pain lanced through her. ‘You think I’m overreacting?’ The cable finally yanked away from its housing on her indelicate grunt. ‘I don’t like being coerced.’

  ‘By who?’

  She spun to face him, heart racing. ‘I believed you when you said you were tired of being the bad guy. I felt sorry for the man who’d view himself that way. I let you put the responsibility for the decision squarely onto me because I thought it would make it easier on you.’

  She struggled against the tears that wanted to express her hurt, swallowing them back. ‘You dressed it up as trust but that was one-hundred-percent pure strategy. You knew I wouldn’t do the wrong thing by you. You knew I wouldn’t prioritise myself over you. And you were right.’

  She slammed something valuable into its box without a care for what it was. ‘I’m not ashamed of that. I got my values from my parents and they are the one thing of theirs that I got to keep. But it doesn’t mean I don’t realise when I’m being manipulated. It doesn’t mean I like being backed against the wall by a shark.’

  Just one more word she could add to the litany of names she’d called him since this morning.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  She shouldn’t tell him. He was the enemy. Her mind knew it even if her body was in denial—her heart. ‘I’m cutting my losses, Grant. I’ll finish up at Dave’s Cove and head back to the city.’

  ‘You still have three weeks.’

  ‘No.’ Her lips tightened. ‘I’m not doing this on your schedule.’ Like some starved dog grateful for whatever scraps you might throw me. Pulling out on her own terms was the last thing she could do to control her own environment.

  ‘But your research?’

  Her voice thickened. ‘Is finished. It had to end one day.’

  His frown cut down between those eyes she knew she’d be dreaming about for years. She turned away, back to her equipment, unable to bear looking at him.

  It hurt too much.

  ‘My father hated the farm, Kate.’

  His quiet words stopped her cold. ‘What?’

  ‘At least, he hated farming. I’m sure he loved the coastal position. You were right. He wanted to be a fisherman. You were right about all of it.’

  She turned her eyes back towards the hollow, defeated tone of his voice. Sorrow swelled up inside her. Being right had never felt less satisfying. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Mayor Sefton. They were friends.’

  Kate nodded, itching to cross to him but conscious that he hadn’t stepped forward. If he needed her, wanted her, he would have come to her, not stop just short, hovering in the doorway as usual. Her chest tightened. Actions meant so much more than words. Nothing had really changed.

  But he did come to you, a little voice nagged. He’s here now.

  ‘You’ve been protecting a mirage.’ She didn’t say it to be unkind, but she saw the impact of her words in his expression: Pained. Raw. But still he didn’t move.

  While she burned to.

  ‘A mirage,’ he repeated, nodding. ‘All the heritage I thought I was preserving. None of it was real. None of this has been real.’

  She swallowed. ‘I’m real.’

  His hands braced, white-knuckled, on the frame of the doorway to the lab. She ached to move, to take even a few steps towards him. But she anchored herself against the lab table and stayed put. He had to come to her.

  ‘But I’m not,’ he gritted out. ‘I’ve spent my life persevering in a field I don’t much like because I chose it. Because I threw away my family to be the furthest thing from a farmer that I could. Because pulling out would render that sacrifice meaningless.’

  ‘Is that why your father kept on at Tulloquay after you’d gone? To justify all the loss?’

  Was it a case of like father like son?

  Grant shrugged. ‘We’ll never know. Something kept him on this land.’

  Kate eyed him hard. Took a risk. ‘What will keep you here?’

  He missed her pointed look, shook his head. ‘I fought to be in the boardrooms of the city. That’s where I belong. For better or for worse.’

  ‘Why? Because you don’t believe in starting again? What if your future is here?’

  He looked around. ‘I feel like a ghost here.’

  Sudden anger blazed through her. Would he still not accept that there was a heritage in coming home—even if that home wasn’t everything you expected? ‘You are a ghost, Grant. You just stand there in the doorway and keep yourself removed from the reality of all of this. Refusing to become tangible. Refusing to take a single action that will make this real.’

  Refusing even to step forward.

  I’m right here, Grant. I’m real.

  His eyes flicked over the corners of the lab before finally resting on hers. The fluorescent lights bounced off what she suddenly realised was a sheen of sweat on his skin. ‘I can’t come in.’

  Frustration made her hiss. ‘Why not?’

  ‘This is where I found my father.’

  The frustration and anger twisted over and over in an urgent ball and then plummeted to the depths of her belly. Horror should have torn at her skin. Fury. But all Kate could think about was how comfortable she always was in this room. And how it was the only place o
ther than Dave’s Cove that she didn’t feel alone. How Grant had only managed to step foot in here once. So briefly. It made an unearthly kind of sense.

  Leo had died here. Grant had found him right here.

  She looked around.

  Hello, Kate, the walls almost whispered.

  His pain was contagious and it swelled and pressed against her chest. She put down the computer she was dismantling and quietly crossed to the doorway, conscious she was breaking her own sanction—going to him. Again. But doing anything less was in breach of the person she was. That was as pointless as Grant denying his heritage.

  She stood on the step below his, slipped her hand into his icy-cold one…and pulled. His eyes flickered down into hers, his fingers tightening but not entirely with resistance. She ran her thumb over the back of his palm—encouraging, fortifying—and stepped back down into the sunken garage. ‘Come on. You did this before.’ Albeit brief and painfully rushed.

  It was step out or topple down onto her. Grant’s foot eased forward onto the lower step.

  ‘It’s just a room, Grant.’

  And then he was there. Standing in the space his father had taken his last breath in. His grip was like a vice on her hand… But he was there.

  Pride surged through her. ‘How do you feel?’

  He looked around, thinking. Confused lines splayed out from the corners of his eyes. ‘I feel nothing.’

  Not exactly what she’d been hoping to inspire.

  His fingers tightened. ‘No, not nothing. Blank.’ His eyes found hers and focussed, as though he was really seeing her at last. Her heart flip-flopped. ‘Canvas blank. Like it’s waiting. Like everything starts now.’

  Kate’s breath tripped in her throat. Her fingers threaded more firmly between his.

  He shook his head. ‘Saving this farm was the last useful thing I could do for my father.’ Self-loathing stained a short, bitter laugh. ‘And there was no need. The farm wasn’t his life. The sea was.’

  His free hand slid up to cup her cheek. She pressed into it, to warm it. Uncaring about the tears gathering in her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Grant.’

  ‘Don’t be. You did nothing but be a friend to my father in his final days.’ He glanced around. ‘Maybe your project brought him the first real satisfaction of his life.’

  Kate’s watery laugh was half a sob. She glanced at Leo’s old chair. ‘I hope so. I wish so.’

  Grant’s thumb broke free of her jaw to wipe gently under her eye, catching the tiny tear that wobbled there. Kate blinked up at him, lost in his intense, green depths. He shifted his thumb lower, dragging it back and forth softly across her lips. Her heart rate gathered momentum. He looked as surprised as she was by the movement, almost as if his hand acted on its own accord.

  ‘I’m not selling the farm.’

  She gasped.

  ‘I’ll take it off the market tomorrow.’

  When had he put it on? She ignored the question and asked one of her own. ‘You’ll stay on the farm?’

  His eyes darkened. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll think of something. But you can finish your research. Take whatever time you need.’

  Her whole body shuddered.

  He glanced around again. ‘It was wrong of me to make you choose. Things have just been…complicated, clouded, since I arrived.’

  Every protective urge in her body reached out to him to take his pain. ‘You gave me the breeding site. It was my decision not to use the information. I had a choice.’

  ‘Not much of a choice. You did that for me.’

  Her heart had to be glowing in her eyes. Surely? She could only nod.

  ‘That changes things between us.’

  Her eyes longed to flutter shut but she held them long enough to peer up at him, her heart kicking into high gear. ‘Us?’

  ‘Now that it’s all over. Now that there’s no your side or my side. Now that there’s not a giant, messy gulf separating us.’ He traced the sensitive line of her top lip with his thumb. She pressed her mouth to the masculine pad of flesh. ‘Can I finally kiss you again?’

  The heavenly drug of desire thickened her words. ‘That depends.’

  He smiled. ‘On what?’

  Kate opened her lips and let his thumb slide between them, between her teeth. Then she released him and slipped her arms around his warm, very unghostly body. ‘On whether this is a beginning or an end.’

  Grant’s eyes flickered like a pilot flame before bursting into bright life as they drew closer. Kate drowned in their green, green depths. His lips, when they finally touched hers, were as soft and coaxing as the first time they’d kissed. Blood rushed thick and fast into her head, pooling behind the sensitive flesh where her mouth met his, thrumming with joy.

  He lifted his head, barely, and murmured close against her skin. ‘This feels like a beginning.’

  His arms tightened around her, kept her close as his mouth worked over hers. His serpentine hold seemed to restrict her air intake and all she could suck in were fast, flimsy gasps between glorious, blazing kisses. It only added to her light-headedness but for once she didn’t care. If she stumbled, he’d catch her. If she passed out, he’d keep her safe until she recovered.

  If she loved him…

  Maybe—maybe—he could love her back.

  She’d felt it on intuition when she’d been tucked into him behind the boulder on the rock shelf at the breeding site—that Grant would be gentle and protective should he ever make love to her.

  She was about to find out.

  She tore her throbbing mouth from his and confessed through hoarse words. ‘I packed up my bedroom.’

  A gaze the colour of a rainforest mist settled down on her. She held her breath.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he murmured, lowering his mouth again. ‘We can use mine.’

  ‘Protective’ didn’t really cut it.

  Grant practically worshipped her during the twelve hours they were sequestered away in his bedroom. His touch was gentle, his whispers a dazzling, mind-altering caress. He’d borne his weight over her as gently as she could have wished, but he was as self-assured and powerful as she could have dreamed for.

  And he filled corners of her soul she’d thought she’d surrendered for ever to cobwebs.

  They’d emerged just once to re-fuel on chicken sandwiches, then fallen back into bed. His mobile had rung—they’d ignored it. His laptop had dinged—Grant had snapped it shut and then dived back under the covers. His mobile had gone off again—he’d tossed it across the room.

  They’d laughed and loved and lazed until the sun poked experimental tentacles over the horizon. Kate watched the glorious golden glow spread across Tulloquay’s paddocks from the safety of Grant’s bedroom window. From the warmth of his embrace.

  Her naked skin pressed back hotly against his and the feathered quilt wrapped them into a sacred cocoon. Grant nuzzled his way through the wild tangle of her unbound hair and pressed his lips into her nape—in case it was the solitary square inch of her body that he hadn’t kissed overnight.

  Even on less than two hours’ sleep, Kate felt revitalised. Nothing was too complicated with Grant at her back. She’d finish her research, save the seals, make a difference. She’d find a way to help him with the farm. Life just felt brighter. Like anything was possible.

  All totally under control. And she did not care if it wasn’t.

  Because she had him.

  She shifted uncomfortably as the ring that hung on a leather thong around his neck bit into her spine. He retrieved it carefully and draped it over her shoulder. She stared at it.

  ‘Who…?’ She didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want to know if he had an ex-wife squirrelled away somewhere. Or, worse, a dead one that he’d never got over. A man didn’t wear his old wedding ring near his heart for nothing.

  He picked the ring up and fingered it. ‘This was my mother’s.’

  ‘You’ve always worn it?’

  ‘I took it the day I left. I think my father knew, but
he never said a word.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t need the ring to remember her by. Or recognised that you needed it more?’

  Tension radiated out from his hard body. It was different to the exciting tension he’d carried all night. It was subtle, but there. ‘This is all so new to me,’ he eventually murmured into her hair.

  Kate leaned back into his strength, still revelling in the beauty of his body against hers. She tipped her head up and around to look at him. His jaw was strong and defined and irresistibly close to her lips. She pressed them into his stubbled skin and murmured ‘Which part?’

  ‘Not the sex.’ He smiled down at her and her heart skipped a beat or three.

  Her chuckle turned throaty. ‘I figured. No-one’s that good on instinct.’

  ‘I don’t…’ He pressed another worship against her temple, then whispered against her hot skin. ‘I’ve kept myself separate for a long time. Haven’t let myself feel…anything.’

  Her heart picked up pace, and not just because of the blazing hands absently stroking up and down her ribs beneath the quilt. ‘You’ve had a lot of loss.’

  ‘So have you. But you’ve managed to come out a decent human being.’

  She twisted back to look more closely at him. ‘You don’t think you’re a good person?’

  ‘I…’ Two tiny lines appeared between his brows. ‘I feel like everything I have is undeserved. Like I just lucked into it.’

  ‘You’ve worked so hard. Why would you think you don’t deserve it?’

  He fingered the ring. ‘The last person that valued me wore this ring.’

  His mother. She turned in his hold and the move pressed her more fully against him. They fitted together so perfectly. That had to mean something, right? ‘Your father valued you. He left you this farm.’

  ‘Only by default. Who else was he going to leave it to? He didn’t exactly move heaven and earth to get me back when I left.’

  ‘Leo was nothing if not proud. And strong. It must have burned him not to come after you. Releasing you to find your own dreams. Doesn’t that tell you something about how worthy you were to him?’

  He stared at her. ‘I exploit weakness for a living. Do you imagine he would have been proud of that?’