A Kiss to Seal the Deal (4 page)

He only gagged twice, which he was pretty proud of. And he collected three whole samples before he reluctantly gave in to his curiosity.

‘Why are we doing this?'

Kate worked hard to disguise the tiny, triumphant smile. But she wasn't fast enough. Weirdly, it didn't bother him. Instead,
it birthed a warm kind of glow that something he'd done had finally pleased her. A rare enough sensation, when it came to her.

‘Our study relates to the foraging habits of these females so we can determine what level of threat the seals pose to commercial-fishing harvests.'

‘And collecting the foulest substance known to humankind will tell you that how, exactly?'

Kate straightened and zip-locked a particularly feral sample into containment. ‘Beaks and ear bones.'

Don't ask.
Curiosity, real and genuine, blazed.
Do not ask!
He stared at her, burning, determined not to speak.

‘OK, go ahead and tell me,' he blurted and the power slipped further.

Kate's face exploded with life, earnest passion glowing past the smears of dirt and goodness knew what else on her flawless skin. ‘We sift the faecal samples to isolate the otoliths—ear bones—of the food in their stomach. Then we pair the otoliths up, identify and count them, and it tells us how many fish each seal ate and of what species.'

There was no chance on this planet he was going to admit to the unconventional brilliance of the plan. How else could you figure out what the black goo once was? ‘You do realise it's absolutely disgusting?'

‘Oh, completely. But sensationally effective.' She shrugged. ‘Everything else digests.'

He scraped another sample into a fresh bag, mouth-breathing the whole time, still fighting back the stomach heaves. When he spoke, he sounded vaguely like he'd been sucking helium. ‘And the vomit?'

She moved to the next sample, closer to him, and squatted to attend to it. ‘Squid and octopus beaks get stuck in their sphincters. Make the seals regurgitate.'

Of course they do.
When had his ordinary day taken such a surreal twist?

‘Wouldn't want to miss any ear bones.' His voice sounded tight, even to him, as he lifted a sample bag and braved a look.

She seemed genuinely pleased that he'd caught on so quickly. ‘Exactly. Let me show you something.'

If it wasn't from a seal's body, and if it got him away from this stench, he would follow her into the mouth of hell. He offloaded his sample to one of Kate's assistants and followed her over to a far dry corner of the cove. She rummaged a moment and produced a laminated photograph of a small, glossy fish with googly eyes and fluorescent spots on its dark silver face. A particularly unattractive fish, but from the distant recesses of his memory he realised he knew that animal. ‘Lanternfish.'

Her brown eyes widened. ‘Right.'

‘You forget, I grew up around here.'

‘Still, not a common catch. It's a deep-sea fish. How do you know it?'

Grant frowned. His father's face swam in and out of his memory just as fast, but he couldn't hold the elusive memory. ‘I have no idea. Why are they special?'

‘My research shows that ninety percent of the fish coming out of these seals is lanternfish.'

‘And?'

‘And humans don't eat lanternfish. Too oily.'

It hit him then, why this mattered to her so much. ‘The seals are no threat to human fisheries.'

‘None. In fact they probably help it, because
our
fish and
their
fish prey on the same smaller species. So by keeping lanternfish numbers down the seals help ensure there's more smaller-prey fish to support the fish we haul up by the netful.'

‘Thus protecting a multi-million-dollar industry.'

‘Exactly.'

Well, damn.
The seals were probably essential to Castleridge's thriving fishing industry. The same kind of feeling that he got
when he found the weak link in a competitor's contract hit him, a mini-elation. Except hot on the heels of the rush came a dismal realisation, and this one sank to the bottom of his gut. ‘Who knows about this?' he asked carefully.

‘So far? My team. Leo knew. And now you know.'

‘Is that why my father gave you his support?'

‘It was your father that put me onto the lanternfish in the first place.'

His gut clenched and it had nothing to do with the stench. ‘Bull.'

She seemed surprised by his vehemence. ‘He never believed the seals were a problem. He'd watched their habits. He grew up with them too.'

True. How could he have forgotten that? Had Leo spent the same lazy days he had as a boy, hanging out with the forbidden seals? Had he sought sanctuary there when
his
father went off at him?

Her eyes gentled. ‘He was stoked when the results started coming in showing he was right.'

That was what she'd want him to believe, to improve her case. ‘You're telling me he was happy his land was going to be accessioned?'

Her eyes dropped.

‘I thought not.'
Look at what he'd done as a result.

Brown almond eyes lifted to his. ‘He was conflicted, Grant. He wanted to do what was right. But he knew what it would do to the value of the farm.'

The almighty farm, the god to which Leo McMurtrie prayed. It had always been his beginning, middle and end. ‘And now you expect me to simply follow suit?'

Kate frowned and clutched the photograph. ‘I thought…'

‘You thought this would make a difference? Why?'

‘Because you're a lawyer. You pursue justice. These animals are being unjustly persecuted and we hold the evidence in our hands.'

‘I'm a contracts lawyer, Kate. I don't do the whole “scales of justice” thing. I lock down minor details, I screw down better deals, I hunt for loopholes and make sure no-one can get out of something they've committed to. Or, in this case, I'll be doing my best to get
out
of the agreement my father had with you.'

Kate paled. ‘But how can you, now that you know? You can protect these seals. Help save them. Your whole property could become a sanctuary.'

Her naïve idealism was like a foreign language to him. ‘I can't protect anyone, Kate. They won't be mine to protect.'

She blinked. ‘What do you mean? I've been watching you improve the place. Getting it back in shape. Giving Tulloquay its life back.'

‘To sell, Kate. I'm doing it up to sell it as soon as it passes into my name.'

She seemed to stumble briefly but caught herself on a rocky outcrop. ‘You're selling your farm?'

She said it as though he'd announced he was going to slaughter the seals for their coats. ‘My father's farm. It was never mine, even when I lived here. I'm not a farmer. I'm a lawyer. I never wanted this.'

And Dad knew it.
The final irony—leaving it to a son who wouldn't want it, making all of this his problem.

‘But the seals…'

‘Three months, Kate. I did warn you. You'll just have to wrap up early.'

The panicked glitter to her eyes wheedled its way straight into his subconscious. He didn't like distressing her. ‘We can't wrap up early. Breeding season starts in two months and we need to establish where that happens. It's a key piece of the cycle to ensure we have a full year of foraging behaviour established for this year.'

‘Then you should have done it before now.'

Colour roared high along her cheekbone. ‘Do you think we didn't try? We've been searching for two seasons to work out
where they go. It's unusual for any group to breed somewhere other than their rookery, but these ones do. The TDR's don't record positioning, only depth. We've lost the colony two seasons running during breeding season.'

‘Then who's to say you wouldn't have lost them again this year? I'm sure the bulk of your research will still stand. Whatever you have now has got to be more than science has ever had before. Two years is not a bad innings.'

She stared at him with eyes as big as the seal pups'. ‘How can you be so different to your father?'

His head came up like whiplash, his gut sucking up as tight as the vacuum-seal lid on the eskies. ‘Whatever you think you know, Kate, you're wrong. My father gave his life to this farm. He wouldn't have stood by and watched it get carved up.'

Her mouth gaped. ‘Yet you're going to sell it off to some stranger?'

‘As a going concern. To someone who'll work it the way it was meant to be.'

Her colour rose with her voice. ‘It wasn't
meant
to be a farm. It's meant to be a delicate coastal ecosystem for all creatures to enjoy, except we came along and colonised the south coast for ourselves and filled it with hard-hoofed livestock!'

‘People don't buy delicate ecosystems.'

Hurt and disappointment washed over her face. ‘Shutting us down early makes it harder for me to get my results finalised, but it doesn't invalidate the study completely. The research will still go through. You can't stop it.'

In the moment when he should have been saying something, he saw the lightbulb come on over her head.

She gasped. ‘But it will stall ratification by the conservation commission. You're going to rush this sale through before the conservation status changes.'

His choices were reflected back to him in the disgust in her pale expression. Infinitely worse than the hard, callused glares of some corporate types he routinely nailed down. At least there
the playing field was relatively equal. Discomfort burned low in his throat.

‘I told you, Kate. Loopholes and weaknesses are what I do. You've shown your hand too early.' He peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the bag at her feet, feeling about as worthy as the slimy muck that splattered off them.

‘You have three months.'

F
OR
the next month, Kate's days started at half-past four in the morning as she drove out daily to Tulloquay, arriving just after sunrise and staying until dark. The looming deadline of the settlement of Leo's probate pressed down on her relentlessly—and now the addition of a possible new owner to negotiate with. How many times would she have to fight this battle? How many times would she see her world slide into disarray?

She hated it. When her parents had died, her life had been ripped comprehensively out of her hands. She'd been voiceless amongst strangers making decisions for her, people who'd thought a pre-teen wouldn't have a problem with having a brand-new life mapped out for her. But she had.

A big problem.

It was why she'd picked science for a career—cause and effect. Logical progression. Predictable results. Her work rarely spun out of control the way her life had. Until now.

Not that she wasn't doing her best to drag it back into some kind of order. She'd split her team into half so that three of them could stick to the analysis of the samples in their lab in the city while she and two others continued collecting what samples they could on ever-lengthening shifts. She assigned herself the longest ones of all. It was exhausting and discouraging work and she was dreading the day they'd have to walk away, unfinished, from their study. From the seals. From everything
they'd built. All on the very unlikely
maybe
of a future owner letting them resume their work.

But she backed up the new team rotation by working on a report late into the night that would hopefully show the Conservation Commission that the seal population was no threat to Castleridge's fisheries, and, by extension, the rest of the region. Maybe that would be enough to get some protections put in place for the seals.

She tried hard not to think about the better use that her team could be putting all that driving time to—three hours in the morning and three in the evening. But, unless Grant McMurtrie planned to relent on his determination to sell Leo's farm, there was no real option. They needed to increase the number of field days and they just couldn't afford the kind of trailer-based accommodation infrastructure that went with remote postings.

It was bad enough fretting about the twenty-thousand-dollar TDR still fitted to the back of Stella, who was missing. It would eventually fall off the seal as her fur grew out, but for Kate's project it would be a significant financial blow if it wasn't recovered. Plus it carried a month's worth of crucial data.

The most useful thing she could do to try and put the brakes on her madly spinning world was to stay down here overnight, mitigate all that time lost to travelling. She had a tent but last night she'd had no energy to erect it. She'd sat awake, long after her team mates had gone home, staring out at the glittering sky and watching the reflection of the stars shift on the ocean surface. Exhausted and discouraged, she'd curled up in the cramped back seat of her ute. She'd knocked off a whole report chapter—freehand, on her lap—before falling asleep, chilled and miserable, in her sleeping bag.

Now she stumbled back up over the edge of the cliff where she'd found a private spot to relieve her bladder after a long night in the car.

‘Tell me you didn't sleep on the beach.'

She leaped clean off the ground at the unexpected voice,
deep and close. She was more conscious than ever of her smelly seal-clothes, extra rumpled after a night squished up in her car. And the fact he'd just busted her peeing, albeit out of view.

‘Grant.' Her hands went to her loose hair, blowing in the ever-present wind, before she could stop them. She scanned the desolate coastal paddocks until she spotted his truck in the far distance over near the sheep's water supply. ‘What are you doing out here so early?'

‘I wanted to check the drinkers before it got too blustery. I saw your ute.' He glared into the tiny extra-cab of the ute. ‘Did you sleep here, Kate?'

‘I was just too tired to drive last night.'

He narrowed his eyes and really studied her. ‘You look terrible.'

Again her hands twitched to attend to her shabbiness. He, of course, looked every bit the fresh-from-the-shower Aussie farmer, even though she knew he wasn't. Clothes, it appeared, really did maketh the man. Every time she saw him those shoulders seemed to get wider. ‘We have so much to try and finish. Every minute counts.'

His lips thinned. ‘Where's your team?'

‘I'm only bringing half of them; the other half are in the lab rushing the samples through.' She could hear the tension in her own voice and smiled brightly. ‘But we're getting there. It's all good.'

He pulled his hat down harder over his eyes against the rising morning sun. ‘No, it's not. Not if you're wearing yourself out and sleeping in your car.'

Frustration hissed out of her. ‘Sadly, my budget doesn't really run to portable labs and campers. I'm just working with the parameters I've got.'

‘Would that help? A lab down here?'

‘Talking in hypotheticals sure won't.'

He stared at her steadily.

‘Fine. Yes, it would help. We would run the samples during
the hottest part of the day and move our contact hours to morning and late afternoon. I could get my whole team back down.'

Grant looked out to sea for moments and then brought his clear green eyes back to hers. ‘What sort of a building do you need? Does it have to be hospital-grade?'

Her heart-rate picked up. Was he serious? Was Grant McMurtrie offering to
help
her? He was built near enough to a gift-horse. ‘No. Just dry, lockable and pest-free. As long as the equipment can be sterile we can work anywhere with power.'

‘How about my garage? It needs a good clean-out but I'm not using it.'

Grant drove a top-of-the-range Jeep Wrangler and it sat out weathering most days. ‘You need that for your car.'

His eyes darkened. ‘No. It's not…suitable.'

She stared at him. ‘It's a garage.'
Of course it's suitable.

‘Do you want it or not?'

Kate's breath whooshed out of her. ‘Why would you do that? You want us gone.'

His gaze was steady. ‘Despite what you believe, I'm not completely heartless. I grew up with these seals and don't want to see them persecuted any more than you do. The way I figure it, you can't get a complete year's worth of data no matter what happens, so me making your daily tasks more comfortable isn't going to hurt me, particularly.'

He was right. Volume made all the difference in the world to her, to the validity of her research. But depressingly little difference to him or to the Commission, who were holding out for something more persuasive.

‘What if you're wrong?'

‘I wouldn't be offering if I thought there was a chance of that.'

The smug confidence should have infuriated her. But all it did was remind her how much she was drawn to a capable man, with a good mind.

His eyes softened. ‘And I don't like seeing you hurt yourself. Have you even had a day off since I last saw you?'

And a kind heart, as it turned out.

Kate shuffled. She didn't want to think well of the man whose self-interest was sending her life into chaos. ‘The clock's ticking. I'll have nothing but time off when it's all over.'

He frowned, knowing full well he was the cause of the rush. ‘You're welcome to my garage, Kate. Make the best of it that you can.'

Relief hung, suspended and pendulous, waiting for her mind to make a decision. She briefly tossed around the idea of declining, maintaining a high moral ground. But practicality won out; she was nothing if not practical.

The relief released its iron grip as soon as she had the thought and whooshed in a free-fall through her body. ‘Thank you, Grant. That will really help.' She chewed her lip.

He saw it. ‘What?'

In for a penny…
‘Would it be okay if I set up a camp in one of your sheltered paddocks? With the lab here it would make more sense for me to stay, too. My team can bring things in and out as I need them. Most of them have families to get home to.'

‘You don't?'

Kate kicked herself mentally for opening the door to that line of enquiry. Gentle warmth flamed up her throat and the contrast between it and the arctic breeze sent a blizzard of tiny lumps prickling down her flesh. ‘Only my Aunt Nancy,' she hedged. ‘And I don't really see her all that often these days.'

Mad old Aunt Nancy. She'd got Kate to adulthood after her parents' accident, but only barely, and mostly by luck. It had been more a case of reverse parenting in the end. Still, Nancy had provided food and shelter and access to a decent school after Kate had lost everything. She'd done the rest herself, miles from the town and countryside she'd loved so much. It had been the beginning of a lifetime trend. She didn't like to leave
anything to chance. Chance had a way of turning around and biting you.

‘Your parents?' His words were casual enough, but his gaze was intense.

How had they got here? She shook her head knowing there was no way to not answer such a direct question. But her chest still tightened like a fist. ‘Died when I was a kid. Road accident.'

Grant said nothing for a moment. ‘Where were you?'

‘School. I didn't know until the principal came to collect me at the end of the day.'

‘Lucky you weren't with them.'

Kate felt the familiar stab deep inside. Her voice thickened. ‘That's the consensus.'

But some days her personal jury was still out on that one.

She'd stayed with the country-school principal for three days until Aunt Nancy had arrived from the city to collect her—her mother's whispered-about sister. A woman she'd never met. Someone had packed all Kate's belongings for her and shipped her up to the big smoke in a matter of days. Her family farm and everything in it was sold by solicitors and the money left over after the debts were settled had been put into trust for when she was eighteen. She'd never even been allowed to set foot on her property again. As an adult, she realised everyone had done what they thought was the best thing at the time. But losing your parents, your home and your community in one hit had been brutal on a young girl.

Although, it had taught her how to plan, how to make sure there were never any variables outside of her control. And how good it felt to be standing on land again.

‘It's tough, being on your own so young.'

She looked at him. Really looked. ‘You sound like you're speaking from experience.'

‘I left the farm when I was sixteen. Dad and I… It was time for me to make my own way.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Anything I could for the first couple of months. I worked part-time in a timber yard to keep a roof over my head and I put myself through the final year of high-school at a community college. An advisor there got me into a scholarship program for business and law and the rest is history.'

Self-schooled, self-housed, scholarship grades and partner by twenty-eight. This man knew something about being driven. And about being busy.

‘Look at that—something in common! Who'd have thunk it?' Awkward silence fell and Kate blew the cobwebs away. ‘Anyway, are you happy for me to camp?'

‘No.' Grant seemed almost surprised by the word he'd uttered. He shoved his hands into deep pockets. ‘I have room in the house. You'll be more comfortable.'

Kate stared. ‘I can't stay in your house. I barely know you.'

He shrugged. ‘So? It's a working arrangement.'

‘But what will people say?'

‘Do you care?'

The glint in his eye said he already knew the answer.

‘No.' Not when her deadline ticked maddeningly in her head.

‘Look, Kate, I put the toilet seat down and I'm kind to puppies. Despite being on different sides on this, I'm not actually trying to sabotage your work.'

So her jibe from a month ago had stung. Good. She chewed her lip. ‘It would make things go much faster here.'

His eyes narrowed again. ‘How much faster?'

Her lips twisted in a sad smile. ‘Don't panic. Even if we worked twenty-four-seven we can't get the buffer ratified. Not without identifying the breeding ground.'

‘That would make that much difference?'

Why did she keep trusting this man with information? He stood between her and her project. Her mouth opened without
her consent. ‘I believe so, yes. The Conservation Commission would accept partial research results if we could also hand them a site of significance.'

He looked undecided. Was he about to change his mind about helping her?

‘Don't worry; I'm no closer to knowing where it is than I have been for two years. Your plans for world domination are safe.'

He matched her smile and the sorrow reached all the way to his eyes. ‘This isn't personal, Kate. It's business.'

She looked at him long and hard. ‘I'm prepared to believe it's not personal between us, but this is very personal between you and your father. Why are you selling the farm? He left it to you.'

His face shut down hard before her eyes. ‘Because I'm no farmer. That's become abundantly apparent to me this month.'

‘You've kept the place running for weeks now.'

‘Barely. I know nothing about stock. Short of feeding them and keeping them watered.'

‘I'm sure there are people who can help you. Teach you.'

‘Like who?' he said.

‘Like any of the farmers in the district. Leo was a very popular man.'

‘I'm hoping one of those farmers will be champing at the bit to get an outfit this size when it comes on the market. I don't want to seem desperate.'

Kate realised. ‘You're trying to build the farm up, make them think you have it all under control, so you get a good price.' She had to give him points for controlling his environment.