Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong (20 page)

She slipped gently into the lagoon, turned and dragged the buoyancy sack into the water behind her, towing it slowly back to shore. Intentionally taking her time. The coward part of her hoped that she’d get to land and see the two boats heading out to sea, to avoid the inevitable awkward farewell with Rob. After everything they’d said yesterday, what more was there to cover? It had been hard enough
watching him swim out to
The Player
to spend their last night together apart.

Her breathing came heavily and not from fighting the choppy lagoon waters. Her pulse had been racing ever since she’d seen
The Journeyman
plough towards them around the far edge of the island earlier that hour. An anxiety she was too frightened to name crouched in her stomach, pushing on her diaphragm and robbing her of air.

Loss.
She easily picked out her old adversary from amongst the confusion and despair. That, at least, she knew she could deal with, but she also knew with nauseating certainty how she was going to feel tomorrow, and the next day.

And the next.

She’d been on this train a long, long time.

As she pulled herself upright and out onto the shore, she realised that she was tired of feeling that way. Sorrow was exhausting. She hadn’t noticed until just then how light she’d felt these past few days. It wasn’t until the old familiar weight settled back in that she realised she’d been living without it for days. Since Rob crashed into her life.

Honor lugged the sack up the shore to the high-tide line and quickly opened it to check the contents. Two things caught her eye from amongst the goodies within. A box of hot
cocoa sachets—she closed her eyes and prayed thanks to the chocolate gods for that one—and a folded envelope. Her letter.

She shook the sea water off her hands and flapped them in the air to dry before pulling the envelope out to examine it. Mark was right; it was from her work. A frown creased her forehead. There wasn’t a problem with her research …?

‘Honor?’

She spun around, crumpling the unopened letter in her hands as Rob emerged from the surf. Beyond him, she could see Mark’s deckie loading the welding gear back onto
The Journeyman.

Here it comes …
She forced a tight smile to her face. ‘All done?’

He looked out to the horizon. ‘I don’t like how this weather’s looking. I don’t want to leave—’

‘I’ve weathered storms here before, Rob. You’d be surprised how much shelter the pisonia trees provide. Besides, this isn’t a big one.’ Nature made a liar of her as a strong gust blew dried seaweed along the beach and yanked strands from the ponytail high on her head.

Tropical or not, the zephyr blew in straight off the ocean and had cooled as it travelled. It hit Honor’s wet skin and birthed goose
bumps wherever it touched. She shivered in response.

‘I’ll get these in as quick as I can, though, just to be sure.’

He nodded and looked up the beach towards camp. He looked every bit as uncomfortable as she felt. She took the plunge just as he swung his head back around. They both spoke at once.

He smiled and it was like the sun breaking through the grey clouds. It tore another shred off her heart. ‘You first.’

She shuffled her weight to the other foot. ‘I was just going to say … goodbye.’ Her voice was much steadier than she felt. Years of faking it were paying off.

‘You’ll be okay?’

He wasn’t just talking about the storm. ‘Yes. Thank you, for everything.’
For ten days of lightness. For letting me have you.
She willed him to understand. He didn’t let her down.

His eyes bled down into hers. ‘You’re so welcome.’

Another gust tugged at her body. She crossed her arms across chilled flesh.

‘Goodbye, Honor.’ He stepped in towards her and wrapped his arms around her before she could protest. Before she could beg him not to. Her folded arms trapped her like a
straitjacket against the steel of his chest. He dipped his mouth to meet hers.

She twisted her face away, not willing to risk a final kiss. He didn’t move, didn’t so much as blink. He just stood still and waited, as enduring and patient as the shipwreck he was leaving behind.

Her will faltered, as he must have known it would, and she relaxed in his grasp, the letter almost fluttering from her trembling fingers. His lips met hers halfway in a gentle kiss that caused a painful ache behind her sternum. It was like their first kiss. Soft and tender, full of promise. Only this one was full of sadness.

An ending.

Grief robbed all the strength from her and she sagged in his arms. He took her weight as his kiss deepened. She felt his body stir against hers, couldn’t help responding, but at the last second she dragged her wits back around her and pushed away.

Not cruelly, but finally.

She struggled for composure, to keep the tears at bay. It took a monumental effort to wipe the grief from her face and leave it blank. She knew that he’d blame himself for whatever he saw there and she wanted him to see … nothing.

By contrast, his eyes burned into her. Anger, hurt, rejection and loss all mingled to make for
a painful mix. But there was no hate, for which Honor was deeply grateful. She wouldn’t have coped with seeing that in his beautiful blue depths.

He stood straighter in the brewing storm and looked at her impassive face. When he spoke, she shouldn’t have been able to hear his whisper, but she did. The words eddied around her before whipping off down the long shingle beach.

Find the sky, Honor.

Although there was no malice in his words, no intent to be cruel, they gutted her like a fish because of the sheer impossibility of ever crawling out of the place she was in. She sucked in her breath and held it as Rob turned and waded back out towards
The Player.
He was halfway across the lagoon before she let the grief out on an animalistic groan. She tipped her chin up and held fast in case he looked back at her. She didn’t want him to see her cry. Or sag onto the sand still clutching her letter.

She needn’t have bothered. He vaulted the reef, climbed into
The Player,
fired the boat up and motored out to deeper waters in
The Journeyman
‘s wake.

He never once looked back.

T
HE
season changed virtually overnight.

It happened that way every year, in the space of a fortnight the weather turned from tolerable to dangerous. No monsoon season was fun to ride out in a sunflower tent but, back in 2001, Cyclone Walter scalped the treetops off two-thirds of the island and killed hundreds of birds. She’d be unlikely to live through something like that if it happened while she was on the island.

The blow that Rob had worried about when he’d left a month ago came to nothing, as so many of them did. The one after that caused a little more difficulty and the one due this week … that was going to be a problem. Not for the eternal island but for the solitary human inhabiting it.

Time to get back to Cocos.

Every year this moment brought Honor a great sadness. Her research wound up for the
year, the breeding season over, birds streaming off the island until next year, hollowed out turtle nests filled with rubbery, degrading shell husks. Leaving the crabs to pick over the dead and the decomposing—the detritus of so many thousands of lives cohabiting such a small space.

But this year was the worst.

Because this year was the last.

The letter that Mark-the-Boatman had delivered last month had seen to that. She’d shoved it damp and crumpled, back into the buoyancy sack as Rob’s boat had finally disappeared around the southern fringes of the atoll. And then she’d forgotten it. Literally.

There was nothing the world had to say that she’d wanted or needed to hear at that moment. She only wanted to suck back into herself and wrap her arms around her aching breast and stumble from moment to moment on automatic. It was only a week later—one long, excruciatingly dull week—that she remembered it was there at all. She’d ripped into it in a fit of frustration that the island seemed more claustrophobic without Rob on it, ready for a tiny whiff of what the real world was doing.

A job offer. A letter from her superiors acknowledging the importance and quality of her work, but—in a piece of sensationally
typical Government bureaucracy—offering to relocate her to a different project. As though that was some kind of reward for toughing it out on Pulu Keeling for so long. As though she’d been doing it all for them.

She’d snorted and thrown it away. Only her no-rubbish policy meant it was there, still crumpled at the bottom of the buoyancy sack to retrieve, flatten out and reread another week later.

A long, hollow week after it had finally sunk in that Nate and Justin had officially left the island. That there was no longer the slightest sense of them in the whisper of the breeze through the canopy or echoes of their laughter in the clucking of the terns. As though they’d hitched a ride with
The Journeyman
when it came for Rob.

They were just … gone.

Honor had always imagined that letting them go would be a gradual process, marked by poetic events and poignant sorrow. Not just this
absence
one morning when she crawled out of her enormous tent. As though someone had thoughtlessly removed a ladder through which they used to climb up and into the window of her consciousness. Had they milled around two storeys below that window, waiting for her to notice? Had they finally moved on when they realised she was too engaged
with a sexy shipwreck hunter to remember to look for them? How long had they been gone before she’d noticed?

Their footprints were still in her heart. She could call up at will the memory of Justin’s smell, Nate’s woollen warmth. But they no longer waited for her in the dark recesses of the pisonia thatch, or called to her across the sea. She’d stood at the very edge of the most north-eastern corner of the island, stretching her gaze out towards the deepest reaches of the Javan trench, hoping to catch a memory on the stiff sea breeze.

Nothing.

Her island was totally empty of everything but birds and crabs and guano and the shadow of a gentle, caring, ridiculously arrogant man, which she refused to admit existed but which haunted every inch of this place. And with no Nate, no Justin—no Rob—Honor couldn’t ignore any more how very little she had left.

You’ve got nothing inside you, have you?

He’d said it to strike back. To hurt. But he’d been exactly right. All she had was her work and … Nope, that was it. She had her work. Her eyes drifted shut. She didn’t even have that now. Hours of observation that used to whizz by now dragged like the ancient turtles that hauled their weight up the shore. The raucous chatter of ten thousand lagoon birds
used to hypnotise her into a zen-like state but now it just grated on her re-ignited senses. The once comforting solace of silence had taken to screaming its isolation.

Rob had shaken her out of a four-year trance. And awake Honor felt very differently about a whole bunch of things here on the island, including how she felt in her own skin. And her own company. One advantage to being numb was that you didn’t feel the loneliness. The tranquil isolation that had protected her for so many years now … didn’t. Its work was done.

And so was hers.

Rob may have reawakened her but Parks Australia had provided her exit. In the buoyancy sack that left the island twelve days ago with the supply vessel lay a hand-written letter from her agreeing to enter discussions about possible relocation to a regional park management role.

Honor sighed, deep and overdue, and stared out across her lagoon. This was more than the end of an era. It was the beginning of one.

On cue, the white rumbly shape of
The Journeyman
appeared to the south. It lurched side to side like a cumbersome oceanic elephant in the high swell. Not a moment too soon, probably. Everything felt more like monsoon this week.

She stepped into the lagoon and started wading out with the first of four sacks. As soon as
The Journeyman
landed, she explained that she was pulling out early and Mark’s deckhand dived in and swam towards shore to help out with the larger number of bags, until at last Honor found herself hauling the last one up onto the reef, which stood under two feet of water thanks to the high swell. As soon as she passed it to Mark to be stowed on the boat, she turned and stared back at the piece of paradise she’d almost certainly never stand on again. Only ten or so people a year got permits for Pulu Keeling and she wasn’t likely to be one of them in the future. No matter how much Parks Australia valued her contribution. She’d had her chance at paradise.

Deep sorrow ached through her.

She turned back to
The Journeyman
and steeled herself for the inevitable difficult journey back to Cocos.

Ugh. Boats.

‘Here comes someone who’ll be sorry to have come all this way now that you’re heading back in.’ Mark’s cheerful chuckle drew her eyes around to the south.

The electric-blue of
The Player
matched the horizon exactly and made the cruiser almost impossible to see for a brief moment. Like one of the mirages she’d been having over the past
month when she imagined the shape of a man out on the reef. Silhouetted at the entry to her camp. Crouched at the
Emden
memorial.

But this was no mirage. This
was
Rob.

Her gut coiled tighter than a snake preparing to strike. Mark was still speaking but she had no idea what about. Between the thrash of the ocean on the reef and the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears, she couldn’t hear a thing.
The Player
drew closer.

Why was he here? After everything she’d said. They’d said.

‘Looks like I’ll only be taking your gear this run.’ Mark said, close behind her.

The blue cruiser pulled up close to the side of
The Journeyman
and Rob turned his see-no-evil sunglasses in her direction.

‘Hop in,’ he shouted over the throbbing of his engine.

Honor didn’t move, although her heart flipped a full three-sixty in its cavity. God, he looked good. Panic filled her whole body but she managed to sound vaguely normal, conscious of Mark and his deckhand standing so close by.