Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong (4 page)

‘Is that what I have to do to get a smile out of you?’ he said at last, laughing shakily. ‘Unman myself?’

Hardly.
Fortunately, her snort was only internal. Showing vulnerability only made her more aware of him as a man. He was being intentionally flippant, but she sensed his embarrassment was genuine. Funny how she could already read him after less than a day.

‘It’s a common enough reaction to blood.’ She hoped he’d sense her understanding, recognise there would be no ridicule here. She was absolutely the last one to laugh at someone
else’s neuroses. ‘Or maybe you’re experiencing delayed shock from hitting the reef?’

‘No, it’s the blood. Something I’ve done since I was a kid.’

After a moment more of deep breathing, he nodded and sat up straighter and Honor kneeled up towards his stomach, scooting forward between his legs to apply the first aid.

He straightened in the chair and pressed his lips together at the discomfort of stretching the wounds. Honor peeled open one of the iodine swabs and leaned in close. She mopped around the wound first, determined to clean off the blood so he didn’t have to look at it. Eventually, she had to wipe over the abrasions and knew it would sting. His left leg bounced fast but he didn’t make a sound. She dabbed as gently as she could, across each scrape and scratch, dousing the area in super germkiller.

His groan brought her eyes up to his and stilled her hands. ‘I’m sorry. It’s almost over. Coral’s full of micro-organisms that you really don’t want in your bloodstream.’

His attempt at a return smile was more of a pained grimace and she stifled a laugh. He was trying very hard to be stoical. Then his eyes strayed from hers, down over her scars to where her barely covered breasts hung level with his belly. She became suddenly and
vividly aware that she was kneeling—virtually in her underwear—between the splayed legs of a man she’d only just met.

Instinct yelled
move
but pride kept her still, despite the furious hammering of her heart. It startled her to feel a prickle of awareness, for her fingers to tingle at the silky-hard smoothness of his muscled belly. The sensations were as foreign as that scent he had. She’d forgotten how a natural man smelled. Her heightened awareness made her movements a little rougher, more rushed. She opened some alcohol wipes and swabbed off the dark rust-coloured iodine stain from around the wound. She needed the area clean and dry for the surgical tape to stick. He didn’t move as her hands skimmed proficiently over his abdomen with the sterile pad.

Her heart thumped steadily. The alcohol was taking longer to evaporate in the humid tropical air and she was desperate to get out from between his legs, convinced that she could feel the heat radiating off his thighs. She fanned the wound with the spare packets of wipes, with little effect. Gritting her teeth, she bent in to blow the damp area dry.

‘Okay!’ Rob lurched up out of the seat and stumbled backwards, knocking the chair on its side. Honor fell back onto her heels to avoid
his rushed departure. ‘I think I’m good. I can do the rest.’

‘But I need to—’

‘Really—I can put on the cream and the gauze. Thanks for cleaning it up for me.’

She returned to her feet, holding the first aid items out to him. Was he blushing? A bit more of her reserve slipped. If a man’s legs went to jelly at the sight of blood and he could still blush, how bad could he be? Then she remembered the way he’d been checking out her cleavage—her scars—and her back straightened. She handed him the first aid supplies.

He took them without quite meeting her eyes. But his voice was conciliatory. ‘Thanks. You’d make a good mother.’

Air sucked into Honor’s lungs sharply.
It was just words.
She knew it. Something to say in an awkward moment, but she wasn’t ready for the boot in the guts the words triggered.

She stumbled back as though physically wounded and forced a tight smile to her face. ‘I have work to do. I’ll leave you to finish up.’

Fix yourself up and go.

Without looking back, she beat a hasty retreat, snatched up her logbook and marched past him back into the trees.

‘Shh!’

Honor could have heard him approaching during a monsoon. She looked back over her shoulder at him, irritated. Again. Robert Dalton certainly didn’t bring out the best in her.

He slowed his approach, tiptoeing towards her hiding spot and crawled to lie next to her in the sparse scrub, taking care not to rub his patched up stomach on anything sharper than the island sand. Did he think he was well disguised now—all six foot three of him squashed behind a straggly young octopus bush?

Mainlanders. Gotta love them.

He lay by her side, glancing between her and the logbook, where she had recorded a series of numbers and unintelligible scribble that was meaningful only to her. Every time those blue eyes lifted, he looked more and more like
he was itching to speak. Finally, the silence got too much for him.

‘What are you doing?’

Even his whisper seemed loud. A frigate-bird broke from its cover a few metres away, lurching into the sky, its enormous wingspan carrying the ungainly giant away in seconds. She shot him an annoyed look. He flashed a sexy, superficial smile. Fully expecting that to make a difference.

‘I bet that gets results wherever you go.’ Her own voice was hushed. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand, just grinned in agreement, this time more genuine, and studied her the way she was studying the birds. His question still hung between them, unanswered.

‘I’m monitoring the flocks,’ she belatedly said.

He looked in the direction of her gaze and his eyes widened. Had he seriously not noticed it? The only other archaeologist she knew— used to know—spent most of her professional life in the bowels of the museum dusting things that other people dug up, spending most of her day staring at two square inches of artefact. Rob’s tan was too perfect and those muscles too manicured for him to spend all his time in a lab, but how else could she explain how he’d missed the massive inland lagoon that comprised half the island as he’d come towards
her. Salt-crusted, sheltered and writhing with birdlife, at first glance the surface of the water and the trees on the lagoon edge seemed white with foam when in fact they were covered with the glaring white of hundreds of feathered terns, boobies and noddies. She passed Rob her binoculars. He ranged his eyes over the lake and its myriad inhabitants. ‘Whoa.’

Thirty-something going on sixteen.

En masse it was quite a spectacle. Honor smiled and let him look. At peak season, these protected waters could support twenty thousand birds. Most used Pulu Keeling as a base, striking out to fish the rich waters of the Cocos Trench, then returning to nests and chicks and shelter. Even the giant frigatebirds, who generally ate and slept high above the planet on the currents of the trade winds, rested, recuperated and romanced here on the island. They were born here and instinct brought them back every two years to breed. It was, quite literally, their sanctuary.

‘And here I was thinking how quiet it is here …’

Honor looked at him strangely. ‘Quiet? No, listen.’

All around them echoed the sounds of contented birds. Occasionally, a particular voice rose in squabble or seduction but otherwise
the noise blended into a low drone which underpinned the perpetual sounds of the waves crashing on the outer reef and then washing on and off the shell-covered shoreline of the island with high-pitched tinkling. She pointed off to the right where she could hear the high, creaky
ack-ack
sound of a buff-banded rail roosting contentedly. She saw the moment Rob heard it too, his tiny smile of recognition. Then she tuned her ears the other way, tipping her head slightly and he followed suit. She could hear a rhythmic, throaty chuckle off in the distance and she tapped her finger in the sand in time, to help him focus in on the distinctive call of a fairy tern. His eyes drifted shut.

‘In front, the
pew-pew-pew
sound. In perfect time with the waves …’ she whispered.

His head tipped like a satellite dish, listening now for the ocean in the distance. It stretched his jaw to a perfect stubbly angle and Honor had a sudden urge to touch it. Relaxed like it was, his handsome face was less designer angles and more … appealing. More human. He was enjoying this.

She ripped her eyes away.

‘A thousand different sounds are out there for the listening. It’s anything but quiet.’

Their faces were quite close now and he opened his eyes to look sideways into hers,
naked speculation in his gaze. Honor caught her breath.
I bet that gets results every time, too.
Then, as though drawn by magnetism, his eyes strayed down to her scars and then shot back up again. She sighed.

It would be ever thus. She wasn’t angry or offended; a tiny bit disappointed, perhaps. She knew how the scars looked, what they meant and why she wore them—almost as a badge of honour. No man’s awkward stare was going to undo what they meant to her.

‘So, how far is the
Emden
memorial from here?’

She’d almost forgotten what had brought him to the island in the first place. ‘Uh … Over that way, I think a couple of hundred metres?’

He looked appalled. ‘Haven’t you seen it?’

She wasn’t much for manmade history, hadn’t paid the marker very much attention in four years. ‘Sure. It’s not far from the turtle nests.’

He craned upwards, towards the direction she’d indicated and his eyes glittered. ‘Show me?’

They were such simple words, but so eagerly uttered. His excitement was infectious. How long had it been since she got excited about anything? Four years? Longer? She
nodded and started to crawl backwards, away from the birds. He copied, reverse commando crawling into the cover of trees. He definitely looked better doing it than she did.

Five minutes had them emerging on the beach on the far side of the tiny island. Honor turned left and wandered along a shoreline more pristine than the northern one—impossibly so—but the lagoon on this side was shallower, electric-blue and mesmerising.

Rob stared out to sea where the
Emden
must have once listed on the outer reef. Weathered timbers grew out of the sand up ahead and Honor touched him on the arm and nodded in their direction. He followed her gaze then, almost reverently, moved towards the memorial. She approached, more respectfully, catching some of his awe.

This is special to him.

There it stood in all its simplicity, two uprights and a cross timber engraved with the words
SMS EMDEN.
At its base, the green-tinged remains of some metal part of the vessel. To Honor it looked like sea rubbish, but she could see it meant something very different to Rob. He squatted and ran a feather-light hand over the corroded green surface, his fingers dancing over every contour as though it were Braille. She tore her eyes away, overwhelmed by a sudden image of those long
graceful fingers learning the shapes of her own flesh.

Her pulse surged.

‘What happened here?’ She knew the basics but wanted to hear him tell it—desperately wanted to put things back on a surer footing— and nothing slowed her pulse quite as much as military history.

‘During the First World War, Australia’s
HMAS Sydney
responded to a distress call from Direction Island. The Cocos cluster was a strategic communications base because of its proximity between Indonesia and Australia. When the
Sydney
arrived, she encountered the German
SMS Emden
sitting offshore readying an attack.’

He moved around the memorial, checking out every angle. As though it were more than just a couple of whacked together timbers. A whole lot more. His blue eyes glowed vibrantly and Honor found herself focusing more on that than on the artefacts around them. His large hands got in on the act, waving in space, painting an imaginary scene, independent of the man telling the story. They became the punctuation for his hypnotic voice.

‘The
Emden
was a beast of a machine, even though she was a light cruiser. She’d scuttled hundreds of enemy vessels in her time. Then she just disappeared from known waters
until she turned up here, right on Australia’s doorstep.’

The first flash of interest in the wreck she’d ignored for four years sparked through her. She had no ear for maritime history but found herself completely captivated by his low, engaging voice. Did he know what a magical storyteller he was?

‘It was a short, brutal battle and
Emden’s
captain ran his own ship hard onto the reef to avoid it being captured by the enemy.’

Honor got the distinct feeling he’d forgotten she was even there, was telling the story for himself. He stared out to the reef, where the massive battleship must have run aground a century before. As he did, she imagined a shimmer on the horizon where the giant grey behemoth would have rocked dangerously on the edge of the precious atoll.

Oh, the coral,
a tiny voice despaired. ‘What happened to the crew?’

‘Most died in the fire-fight with the
Sydney.
Some in the grounding, some were captured by the Australians, but some.’ he turned and looked at the tropical paradise behind him ‘… some escaped capture and hid on the island, only to die of thirst because of the absence of fresh water. Their skeletons were found a year later, picked clean by the robber crabs.’

Well, that explained something. Honor
nodded up the beach. ‘The Malay word for that bend up there means “bosun’s grave”.’

Rob turned and stared at the point where the shore disappeared around a bend. Ghosts of memory fairly flew around them.

Finally Honor broke the silence. ‘And the
Emden?’

‘Just beyond the reef.’ He flicked his chin towards the flawless, rich blue ocean—so blue it seemed to become the sky somewhere off in the vast distance. ‘The Cocos people stripped her of anything they could use before she perished.’

‘She rusted away?’

‘She broke up and sank. She’s half reef herself now.’ He turned his eyes back to hers. ‘The coral got its revenge, ultimately.’