Lovestruck

by Bronwyn Sell

  Geoff waded in fully clothed, and Amy followed, casting an apologetic look at Josh. He gave a one-shoulder shrug. His dad, his consequences. And, actually, he wasn’t a teenager, and even when he had been, his parents had pretty much left him to get on with it.

  ‘What did I tell you about going there, buddy?’ Sanjay said behind Josh, his voice unnaturally calm.

  Josh turned side-on. ‘We haven’t gone there, Pa. That was not what it looked like.’ While being precisely what it looked like. ‘I was just teaching her to windsurf.’

  ‘You were teaching Amy to windsurf?’

  ‘Why is that so hard to believe?’

  ‘I’ve seen her windsurf. She’s a demon at every water sport ever invented.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Why would she lie about that? And what was with all that messing around in the shallows? ‘Do you happen to know if she snorkels?’

  ‘She’s a Divemaster. The whole family is, from Nan on down. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason.’ So now Josh looked like the liar, when he’d thought himself the big hero. He stared into the hills, remembering with a gut-punch how he’d held her in the water as he’d instructed her how to clear her mask. Behind him, a crow cawed. He couldn’t think of any scenario that would explain a lie like that—two lies. Had she wanted attention? That didn’t seem like her deal, but how would he know? Had she wanted to hang out with him, get closer, be alone together?

  ‘Josh, she’s not as happy-go-lucky as she seems. She feels deeply.’

  ‘Pa, I—’

  ‘I know you think you can breeze through life as a lone wolf and never take anything seriously, but this is a great family, and it could be your family, but not if you mess it up. It’ll be good for you, if you give it a chance.’

  ‘I know.’ Josh wanted a seat at that long, noisy table, too. And the last thing he wanted was to mess up his dad’s happy-ever-after. Just because Josh didn’t believe in that bollocks … ‘Don’t sweat it. She’s safe. She’s not even close to my type. There’s no way in hell I’d go there.’

  Sanjay shushed him. Shit. His voice had risen. He sneaked a look at the water, but Amy had her back to him.

  ‘She’s been hurt by guys like you,’ Sanjay said.

  Guys like you. Last night, when Josh had told Amy he was the guy mothers warned their daughters about, she’d said something like, If only. Josh summoned the balls to look straight at his father’s face. Sanjay’s expression wasn’t as dark as his voice sounded. He was genuinely concerned. For Amy, Geoff, himself, or Josh? Or all of the above?

  ‘I’m not going there,’ Josh said. ‘I swear.’

  There. Done. Taken care of. Now he just had to keep his word, which he could totally do.

  Sanjay pulled off his T-shirt. ‘You coming in?’

  Josh looked at the cove and gave a short, sharp laugh. Amy and Geoff were starfishing, Geoff’s belly jutting up like half a beach ball. Josh didn’t dare look too closely at Amy, but he had a solid picture from earlier that would see him through. ‘Nah. Mind if I take one of the bikes and go exploring? I’m thinking Geoff could use a lift back to base anyway.’

  ‘Good plan. That’ll give him an out without losing face. There’s a mountain-bike track that’ll take you down the eastern side of the island almost to the lighthouse at the southern tip, though it gets pretty rough in places. From there, you can follow the road back along the western side. There are other trails that cut across before that, so you can choose your distance. You can’t really get lost.’

  ‘Perfect.’ He would choose a good long distance. ‘Got any water you don’t need?’

  Sanjay swung his backpack off his shoulder and handed Josh a full bottle. ‘See you at the bachelors party later?’

  ‘How many of those things are you planning to have?’ They’d already had two in Melbourne, one for Sanjay and one for Geoff, not that Josh had been able to go because he’d still been packing up his stuff in Perth and telling his mother for the fiftieth time that he was just as happy to stay, if she wanted him to.

  Sanjay slapped him on the back. ‘You only get married twice. Pace yourself, son—gonna be a doozy of a week.’

  It already had been, and they were less than twenty-four hours in.

  Josh forced himself not to look back at the beach while he repacked his backpack. There were plenty of great women out there in Casual Dating Land, just as attractive, witty, smart and fun as Amy, who were happy to share his bed with promises of nothing more than fun and games. She was way too special for that. You couldn’t find a sister on a dating site. And he was adult enough to resist destructive urges—self-destructive or otherwise. He just needed to convince his brain and his body that she was his stepsister and therefore gender neutral. Maybe he should pretend she was a guy—his new little bro.

  Yeah, nah, that wasn’t gonna work.

  He lifted Geoff’s bike off the grass and raised the seat. That connection he felt with Amy—it was different from other women only because he’d been looking for family all his life. That was why she lit him up, because she could potentially be his in a way no one else could, aside from Carmen. His brain and his body were getting confused because he wasn’t used to platonic relationships with women he got along with this well.

  So why didn’t he feel for Carmen what he felt for Amy? Because he hadn’t spent enough time with her? Maybe he should volunteer for wedding duties. If he felt the same attraction to her, he’d know his reaction to Amy was just some messed-up symptom of his craving for a family.

  In the meantime, he could avoid being alone with Amy, at least until this feeling passed—and it would pass, as it did with any woman. It was just a matter of time, distance and distraction. He could find a willing lover any day of the week. Sisters came once in a lifetime, if you were lucky, and for once in his life, he was getting lucky—but not getting lucky.

  Self-control. That’s all this would take.

  Trip Review: Curlew Bay

  Rating:

  Review: Not enough seafood on the menu. I mean come on, this is a marine reserve! Bloody fish everywhere. Literally jumping out of the water in front of the resort. Why don’t they just walk out onto the jetty with a net?

  13

  Sophia

  She really should do another diving course. Sure, it was gorgeous lying on a faded cushion on a narrow bench seat of Harry’s little boat, the view changing on the whim of the breeze as the boat gently revolved—from the southern tip of Curiosity Island, to white sails littering the deep-blue channel, to the shadowy outline of the mainland, to the little green bump that was Stingray Island, to its tail of white sand fringed by coral, and back to Curiosity Island, or reversing course via the mainland again. The canopy’s shade moved with it, the sun rolling up and down her legs. Bliss, yes, but she had the sense of being close but not quite there. There being where Harry was, somewhere under the boat. She’d only ever dived around Sydney, which was like training for a marathon and never running it.

  Or planning a wedding that never happened.

  Touché.

  Something knocked against the hull. Harry? She rolled off the bench and peered over the side, her feet hard up against Harry’s kayak, which took up a fair chunk of the deck. There could be a dark blur in the water, but the surface was blindingly shimmery, even through her sunglasses. She remembered the Polaroids Harry had offered her—X-ray vision into the ocean—and stepped across to the little console. Another bump. She swapped sunglasses, humming a tune that had landed in her brain from nowhere. What was that song?

  The new lenses took the glare off the surface but she could make out nothing but sifting layers of blue. She hummed along until she reached the chorus. ‘Love Is in the Air’. Now where had that come from? There was plenty of warmth in the air, and oxygen, and freedom. But love? Not that kind of honeymoon.

  Yet another bump and the shape glided into view. Not Harry—a big shark. She froze. It disappeared under the boat, doing that sinister side-to-side sway, like it w
as scanning for prey. From the stern she heard a splash. Harry had surfaced and was pulling his regulator out.

  ‘A shark!’ she said breathlessly, pointing, not that she knew where it was. ‘A big one. Under the boat.’

  He pushed up his mask. ‘Just a reef shark. About as dangerous as your average Labrador. These guys, on the other hand, you don’t wanna get too close to.’ He hauled up a net bag and slid it onto the deck. Inside were half a dozen slimy, prickly grey blobs. ‘Were you worried about me, in a Jaws way? That’s so sweet.’

  She bristled. ‘Of course not. But can you get out of the water? Please?’

  ‘You know you have more chance of being killed by a flying champagne cork than a shark? You just don’t read so much about the champagne corks in the media. Which is strange. I would have thought that’d be pretty interesting.’

  ‘Just because it’s irrational doesn’t make it feel any less real. And now I’m going to be scared of champagne too, so thanks.’

  ‘Something tells me you’ll get over it.’ He climbed onto the deck and pulled off his fins one by one, tossing them into a plastic box. ‘High and dry. Happy?’

  ‘Happy Feet’. Why was that song dancing around in the corners of her brain? Chirpy big bands had no place in her hastily revised no-longer-a-honeymoon playlist.

  Harry stripped away his dive gear and stored it, and unzipped his wetsuit to his waist, the arms hanging at his sides. Yowser. That move should have come with a warning. Earlier, she’d coyly looked away while he’d changed into the wetsuit, but between the shark and the song in her head, he’d caught her by surprise this time.

  ‘Are they your marauding starfish?’ She turned her attention to the bag.

  ‘Marauding no more.’ He crouched over them, his glorious chest forcing its way back into her view. With a hooked metal rod, he coaxed one out of the bag, do-do-do-ing the Jaws theme in a ridiculously high voice, à la Alvin and the Chipmunks. It looked like a jelly pincushion with a lot of legs.

  ‘That’s a starfish? It’s the size of a dinner plate.’

  ‘Yep, big, hungry and horny. A bit like my brother. We’re fighting an outbreak all over the Great Barrier Reef—of these things, not Codys, fortunately. They’re not as big a problem as the coral bleaching, but at least the solution is more straightforward.’

  He studied the creature, giving Sophia an opportunity to study him. Heart and soul and intelligence. He really was the whole package. He was broad and strong but not ripped in a gym way. His skin seemed to fit him comfortably—not stretched taut, not flabby, but with a little room to move. His torso was smooth and tempting, with a sexy sprinkling of hair disappearing under the front of the wetsuit. She felt a tightening deep within—that kind of tightening. Wow. When had she last felt that? And when had she stopped getting it with Jeremy? Was it something you only got with a new man?

  Not that Harry was a new man, or ever would be.

  A sudden force spun the boat sideways. She wobbled, tipping forward and back like she was on a tightrope, and then pitched right into Harry, squashing his nose into the crotch of her capris. He fell to his knees and caught her around her thighs just as she dived for the bench seat, and somehow the two movements ended with her straddling his face.

  ‘Good grief. I am so sorry,’ she said, as she clambered over him with the grace of a hippo.

  He ducked out, chuckling.

  ‘What just happened?’ she said, pulling herself upright.

  ‘A bullet.’

  She ducked, looking around. ‘What?’

  ‘A bullet wind,’ he clarified, laughing so much he started to cough. ‘They come charging down off the islands. It’s a Queensland thing, and this little boat loves going for a spin in them.’

  ‘Is, um, your nose all right?’

  ‘My nose is fine. You’re lucky you didn’t faceplant into one of those things.’

  She followed his gaze to the starfish. ‘It looks like it’s deflating—or peeing itself to death.’

  ‘They’re mostly water so they don’t survive long out of the ocean. I got about a hundred of his mates on one trip a few weeks back.’

  ‘A hundred? On this boat?’

  ‘I didn’t remove those ones from the reef, just injected them with bile salts and let the scavengers take care of the clean-up. These big bastards must have been hiding out, so I thought I’d finish the job. You get some people saying it’s a natural phenomenon and we should let it play out, but it looks like it’s climate change and runoff and other human behaviour that’s creating the conditions for these things to go nuts. And it’s this or standing back and watching the coral die.’

  ‘Damned if you do …’

  ‘Precisely.’

  He nudged it back into the bag, its suckers resisting, and dropped the whole prickly cargo into a big white bucket. ‘I’ll bury them when we’re back on shore.’ He pulled off his diving gloves and chucked them in the box. Abruptly, he stood and caught Sophia’s wrist, and every one of her internal organs seemed to spasm.

  ‘Incoming,’ he said, nodding at the water.

  A large ruffled shadow skidded across the water toward them, like some enormous ancient predator skimming the surface. As it hit the boat, she stuck out her free hand and clutched the first solid thing she found—his biceps. He flinched but her brain could not convince her fingers to let go. He released her wrist and planted his hands on her hips, his stance keeping them both upright as the boat spun, clinking. The bucket slid across the deck and he stuck out a foot and stopped it.

  As the boat stilled, she snatched her hand away, muttering another apology.

  ‘Catches out the best of us,’ he said, waiting a few seconds until she’d steadied before releasing her. She abruptly took a seat before she could commit another assault on the poor guy.

  Once back in board shorts and shirt, he settled onto the seat at the controls. ‘I’ll show you around Stingray Island while we’re out here. It has a beaut little lagoon. It’s basically just a big spa pool.’

  He went to start the motor, but it only ticked. He tried again and swore.

  ‘Engine trouble?’ she said, needlessly.

  ‘Would you believe I drafted a funding application for a new boat this morning?’

  ‘The paperwork you were talking about?’

  ‘Yep. And to make it even more ironic, it needs to be submitted this afternoon but if we’re stuck out here because of a broken boat …’

  ‘Cruel.’

  After a fruitless ten minutes, he pulled a phone from the console and dialled.

  ‘Hazza,’ said a tinny, distant voice.

  ‘Hey, Lena,’ he said, ‘we’re stranded over Stingray Reef. Tin Lizzy is dead as a dead thing.’

  ‘Ooh, a rescue mission. We may have to call in the navy.’ Sophia had to listen hard to pick out Lena’s words.

  ‘The regular breakdown service will do fine.’

  ‘And when you say, “We’re stranded”, you mean you and the jilted bride?’

  Ouch.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was deep with warning.

  ‘So you won’t mind if it takes a while?’

  Sophia chewed on her bottom lip. Oh really?

  ‘Yes. Yes, I would mind.’

  Hmph.

  ‘You have shelter?’ Lena said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Water? Food? Kayak?’

  ‘All of the above but—’

  ‘I’m on my way to a meeting with the captain at the new base. Weather should hold, so you’ll be good until I can get to you.’

  ‘Leenz,’ he said in that cautionary tone.

  ‘Or I could call Marine Rescue?’

  ‘Like the guys would ever let me live that down. No thanks. We’ll kayak in to Stingray Island and you can meet us there, but I’ll radio in that the boat’s sitting here. And Leenz, don’t take too—’

  ‘Gotta go. Just pulling up at Mischief Bay. See you in a few hours. Have fun!’

  ‘Lena, the funding appli—’
He took the phone away from his ear and looked at it, shaking his head.

  ‘Breakdown services, am I right?’ Sophia said.

  ‘You heard that?’ There was tension in his tone. She could lie and let him off the hook, but it was always more interesting to not let people off the hook.

  ‘Every word.’

  ‘Ripper,’ he said to himself sarcastically. He tossed her a life-jacket. ‘We’ll be more comfortable on the island.’

  As he loaded up a drybag and fitted it into a hatch in the kayak, she studied his hands. They were scarred and calloused, veiny and muscular—if hands could be muscular—with deep stains in the ridges of his finger pads that saltwater evidently had no hope of removing. They’d feel a little rough against her bare skin. Hypothetically.

  When he slid the kayak into the water, its towline hooked to the boat’s stern, she clicked that it was one of those sit-on kayaks, with only one seat.

  ‘Um, it’s a single kayak,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ he said, expertly straddling it. ‘It’s sturdy. Probably more seaworthy than the boat. And it’s not far. You can tuck in behind me, like on a motorbike.’ He released a lever behind the seat and manoeuvred it backward, then he shuffled forward to leave just enough space for her butt.

  ‘Are you sure?’ She wasn’t exactly child-sized.

  ‘Trust me.’

  Trust him? You’d think, given her recent experience, she’d have trust issues when it came to men, but right this second, she was fairly confident that she’d hand over her life, her heart and her finances if Harry asked. Trusting him with her safety was a no-brainer.

  After some awkward manoeuvring, she landed behind him with a thud. The kayak seesawed and he slipped it from its mooring and paddled forward, settling it. There was no option but to slide her legs down either side of his, spooning them—or was that forking? She snickered. Forking him. If only.

  ‘Something funny?’

  ‘Just enjoying my holiday,’ she said. As he stroked, she watched the muscles in his arms, regretting that his lifejacket hid much of his shape. His hair was curling as it dried. If she leaned forward a few inches, she could lick the back of his neck. It wasn’t a thing she’d do, of course, but the thought of the taste and feel of him was enough to sustain her. Operation Distraction achieved. ‘Living in the moment.’