Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong (6 page)

Honor frowned at the word her subconscious threw up. She guessed Rob was a man who squeezed every bit of juice out of life. He loved his shipwrecks, clearly loved his women and had such a striking sense of vitality and excitement about him even when he was relaxed—the sort of qualities she hadn’t experienced in years. Not since …

She frowned and tried to think about the last time she’d felt vital and realised she was going back a lot longer than four years. She hadn’t realised she missed it until tonight. Rob’s presence was a living reminder that comfortable and predictable was not all roses and perfume.

It meant she missed out on feelings like this. Like when she visualised Rob’s nipple-piercing and for one hot split second imagined closing her lips around it

God above.
She shifted in her sleeping bag to disrupt the tingle of anticipation deep down inside. It had been a long time since she’d felt
that
too. Those feelings had dulled along with her enjoyment of life years ago. It was almost frightening to discover they’d been lying dormant all this time.

Waiting.

She flipped over angrily. She never let herself go there any more, back into those painful thoughts and memories. She was normally more cautious. It hurt too much.

It was easier to think about the man outside on the beach and his infuriating self-confidence and to speculate, secretly, what it might be like to press her mouth to his perfect smile and taste him. Just for a moment. To be held by those powerful arms, or lie beneath all that rock-hard strength. To feel all that
life
leaching into her.

Honor chased the sensual thoughts out, conscious that casting Rob in her private fantasy was no better than him watching her bathe. It was an intrusion, unwarranted and inappropriate. He was just a man whom circumstance
had dumped on her island. He wasn’t here for her amusement.

It wasn’t his fault he was entirely
distracting.
And she was—apparently—still more alive than she’d believed. As she thought the word, she realised there had been several times today when he had distracted her for minutes on end. So much so, he’d driven all other thoughts from her mind. About her pain.

About
them.

That made her feel disloyal, and the embers of pleasure finally cooled.

But they didn’t extinguish, no matter how hard she tried.

The following morning, Rob was nowhere to be seen. Even after she’d finally tumbled into exhausted sleep, Honor remained hyper-attuned to his return to camp and now she wondered where he
had
gone after she’d quarantined herself in the tent.

Damn him!
He’d already upset her routine after less than one day on the island. She usually rose with the sun but, after her restless night, the island wildlife had been up for hours ahead of her.

She had work to do.

Grumbling, she pulled cut-off jeans and a tank top over her underwear, slapped on a liberal dose of sunscreen, slipped into comfortable tennis shoes and climbed out into the daylight. She ferreted out a muesli bar and bottle of water from her stores and picked up her logbook from the table, where she’d dropped it the previous night, then headed straight out towards the inland lagoon.

She crept around a crowded pisonia bush, which sagged under the weight of dozens of juvenile birds. They were entirely unconcerned with Honor’s quiet passing as they practised launching on the gusts of wind blowing over the lagoon. They dipped and flapped and showed off for each other, reminding Honor of a group of teenage skater boys hanging out at the mall.

She spotted one of her markers up ahead and cross-referenced with her logbook notes. Then she sat in the sand and turned her attention to the inland lagoon.

Her turtle watch would start tonight. The eggs in the earliest of the nests she was monitoring would be eight weeks old and could hatch any night. Then she’d swap her daytime bird monitoring to a nocturnal turtle watch, so these notes might well be her last intensive observations before she became a creature of the night for two months. She wondered whether that might not be a good thing, given her unexpected guest.

Avoidance was one way of dealing with the problem.

A hundred birds drifted lazily around on the current overhead. They were playing, not hunting, dipping in and out of the airflow, swooping on each other and free falling, only to pull up at the last moment. It was leisure time they
wouldn’t have again until next breeding season. Once they got back to the serious business of survival, it would be a strict routine of hunt-eat-recover.

Honor knew how they felt. Her contract only required her to be on the island for six months of the year and it allowed her to base herself at the nearby Cocos Island township and boat out every day of that contract. Someone else probably would have. But someone else wasn’t trying to put themselves in the most northerly point in this stretch of water as they possibly could. Someone else wouldn’t crave the peace and quiet that only the cacophony of nature could bring.

Her eight months here every year was her own version of sanctuary. She only left the island for monsoon season—so some part of her must still value life—and she returned the moment it blew out for the year. If she could think of a way to stay here year round, she would.

She closed her eyes and breathed in a lungful of clean, salty air. She no longer smelled the guano from thousands of birds or the rotting vegetation and seagrass from the lagoon, but she knew they were there. Knew, without a doubt, it would be what a newcomer to the island smelled when they first arrived. Like Rob.

She’d worried herself, last night, when she’d realised how her enjoyment of life had dulled. She had thought she was making a good recovery after all these years, finding ways to dribble joy into her greatly changed life, doing things that mattered to her. Staying focused on the end-game. It took a charismatic shipwreck hunter to shake things up and he’d only been here for twenty-four hours. Just one day to start unravelling all her carefully laid structures and boundaries. It galled her that she was questioning the life she’d been living perfectly happily for four years.

Perfectly?
Nothing was perfect.

Honor dropped her eyes. His manner, his clothing and his attitudes had hinted at a lifestyle that she’d been quick to trivialise. He might be irritating and smug but she suspected Robert Dalton
lived
far more than she ever had.

In her four months in the civilisation of Cocos’ Home Island, she would keep very much to herself. People there knew her but not many people
knew
her. What friends she had left on the mainland had eventually given up trying to get her to come home and her family kept a carefully measured remote communication. The exception was her mother who— after months of fights and tense silences—had eventually taken herself and her pathological
optimism far away to a town thousands of kilometres north of Honor’s home town. The irony was they were nearly neighbours now— Broome in Western Australia’s far north was the closest Australian town to Pulu Keeling.

If you called two thousand kilometres close.

She couldn’t remember anyone except her mother fighting particularly hard to keep her in Perth after the accident. Had they all made it too easy for her to become a recluse? Honor thought back to the woman she had been before the accident and looked at the woman she was now. Maybe. Then again, if she thought even further back, she remembered a young woman she could barely find inside her today.

Barefoot. Carefree. Wild.

She looked around her island and wondered how much of that she was unconsciously trying to recapture. You couldn’t get more wild than this, and more often than not she was barefoot. But carefree …?

Not even close.

She looked up from her aimless shuffling and realised she’d covered nearly the full one and a half kilometre circumference of the tiny island without coming across him.

Not that she’d been searching.
‘Would you like to see the hatchery?’

She found him in the next bay and extended an olive branch. The island might be small but he knew how to make himself scarce. It suddenly dawned on her that he’d been giving her space. That surprised her and threw her a little bit.

The welcoming warmth in his smile finished the job.

His changeability kept her on edge. One minute he was confident, sexy and every inch the playboy. Then the mask came off and he was considerate, funny and devastatingly serene. Or was serene Rob the mask?

I don’t think so.

‘The turtles? Sure.’

Honor refused to be pleased that he so instantly remembered her research focus.
I went gaga over his century-old warship yesterday. It’s the least he can do.
She led him around the inland lagoon and through a nondescript clutch of trees. She could see his disorientation and smiled. She knew Pulu Keeling like the back of her hand and didn’t need markers to tell her where she was. They emerged onto the beach about one hundred metres north of the
Emden
memorial from yesterday. Not that he would know it. To the uninitiated, there would be nothing telling, but to Honor the signs were as good as a road map.

The shore was less shingly here, rather more sand than the usual eroded coral rocks. The lower beach had been cut away over time by rough waves, even inside the relative protection of the atoll, forming a ledge of sand over a metre high. It looked as if part of the shore had sunk away from the rest. Up above the high-tide mark there were marks in the sand, the telltale paired pattern of green turtle flipper prints, where both fins wedged into the sand and then hauled the weight of the rest of its body forward. Slow and hard all the way up the dunes to the edge of the trees.

Honor stopped, glanced at the chop-and-drag pattern and waited for his appreciation. Rob just stared. Then he looked at her blankly.

‘This is it,’ she said.

‘What?’

She looked back at the distinctive grooves in the dune edge.
How could he not see it?
‘There—those trails up and over the ridge of sand. A female climbed the dune right there last night to lay her eggs.’ She stepped closer, not risking going too close to the turtle-only zone. ‘They’re so graceful underwater, but it’s exhausting for them to get to the island in the first place and then to drag their weight up the beach. Then they have to dig a massive hole using just their flippers and lay more than a
hundred eggs into it. But there’s no rest yet; they have to fill it all in again—’

‘With just their flippers … ‘ His smile told her he was teasing.

‘Exactly … and do the whole trip in reverse, back out to sea. It’s really quite amazing.’

He didn’t look amazed, Honor thought peevishly, but he did look interested.

‘They leave their young? Don’t they stay to sit on the nest?’

‘The warmth of the deep sand acts like an incubator, so they leave the nest as soon as it’s filled in. In fact … depending on how warm it gets will determine whether the young are males or females.’

That earned an eyebrow raise. ‘What’s your role?’

‘I monitor the laying, how many hatch, how many dig out, how many make it to the ocean. After that, they’re on their own.’

‘How do you know how many are laid?’

‘I dig the nest out and count them.’

One dark eyebrow shot up at that. ‘You’re a raider?’ Her own words flung back in her face. She didn’t like it but had to give him points for wit. So, he wasn’t just a pretty face. The thought pleased her.

‘I’m a researcher. I count quickly, then re-bury the nest. Then I mark out and label the
nest site and I watch it for the next ten weeks until the eggs are due to hatch. ‘Do you help them?’ ‘No, never.’ ‘Never?’

‘Ever. First rule of scientific research. Observe, don’t intervene.’
No matter how hard it is.
Honor had watched birds and crabs pick off the vulnerable little hatchlings and done nothing; had watched one tiny reptile scrabble towards the inland lagoon—and four thousand predatory beaks—and left it to its fate. She simply recorded it all in her ever-present logbook. Detached. Intentionally numb. A lot like her life, really. They moved above the dunes and she pointed out dozens of nesting sites, marked out in green fluorescent tape.

‘How do you know where they’re going to nest?’ he asked.

‘I don’t. I wait for them to show me. I watch every night and then mark the nests.’ His eyebrows shot up. ‘Every night?’ She laughed. ‘You think there’s something more I should be doing with my evenings? Hitting Pulu Keeling’s top night spots?’

He did it again. Blushed slightly and then turned his head to avoid her seeing it. Why was that so appealing?

‘All these nests were filled by turtles laying
in October and November. There may have been others before and there will be many others after, but my study period is for eggs deposited in those two months of each year only. My job is to make sure I’m here when the October turtles touch land, then there’s eight weeks until the first hatchings are even possible.’ ‘And then?’

‘And then I pretty much live on this side of the island, counting hatchings.’

‘Until Mum comes back and digs them up?’

She looked at him curiously. Had the man not heard of the Discovery Channel? ‘The mothers never see them again. The young dig themselves out—the strong ones, anyway. It doesn’t pay to be the first turtle out of a nest…

Too much sand and too little energy.’

He was silent for a moment and then spoke. ‘It seems kind of unnatural, a mother abandoning her young. Isn’t her job to see they survive?’

A brutal whiplash tore through her gut and Honor had to struggle against the need to bolt into the trees. ‘Her life is valuable too. She half kills herself getting here and giving them life.’ He looked taken aback at her passionate response but she rushed on. ‘One mother turtle can lay five hundred eggs in a season and she
may not have another season for a decade. If she puts herself at risk by staying onshore longer than a few hours, then she may never give life to any of those little offspring at all.’