Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong (7 page)

It was a poor defence. The reality was that out of one hundred eggs only a handful would survive the dig-out, the race to the ocean and then the many,
many
marine predators waiting for an inexperienced little turtle to happen past. It was the law of the wild. The lower you were on the food chain, the more offspring you had—to increase the chances of a few surviving to take your genes forward.

It was also what made the non-intervention policy so incredibly hard to stomach. The wholesale loss of young lives.

She sighed, turned away. She was coming across as a complete fanatic; certainly it was what Rob must think. She’d given him nothing else to think, after all. He didn’t need to know where her real anger came from.

That was for her alone.

Rob trod gently above the high tide line behind Honor, conscious there could be hundreds of tiny little lives cooking away in the sand beneath his feet, but Honor stomped into the trees faster than he could follow if he didn’t match her pace.

What had all that been about?
He was
hoping for a rather different reaction, was counting on her appreciating the brilliance of his informed questions. To make up for all the insensitive and idiotic things he’d done since arriving. He was trying to have a
conversation,
for crying out loud.

And that was something new for him.

Rob Dalton didn’t start conversations. He didn’t have to—conversations found him. Centred around him quite often. He’d always thought it made him a great conversationalist.

It had certainly worked for his father in land development. There was a man who could talk to anyone, about anything, any time. It was an art form. Rob Junior had seen, first hand, the way it transformed people. How his dad could turn a crowd around until they were eating out of his hand. Just by chatting with them. Rob knew exactly how his father felt about half the people he worked with and watched him turn on the smile and ask after their children and talk about their trips to Hong Kong as though he gave a damn. To very good effect.

Yep, little Rob had learned at the heels of the best.

Now, he wasn’t so sure. What if he
cultivated
interest for something someone was saying? Probed a bit and found out what made them so interested. That was what his question to Honor had been about. He wanted her to
keep talking about turtles and eggs and fluorescent marker tape just to hear her talking. To watch her talking. To watch her come alive.

The woman lived and breathed her work. As though it were all she had. But he’d made a strategic error somewhere, said the wrong thing and she’d sucked all the passion back into herself like a sea anemone and then bolted off into the trees, leaving him in hot pursuit.

They approached a small clearing in the shore trees, leading to yet another little beach alcove. Honor stopped in front of him and he caught up. She put her hand out behind her to stop him from passing. It brushed his hip but she rested it there, oblivious. He smiled and let it sit, enjoying the unexpected sensation of her slender fingers on him. For as long as it lasted.

Ahead on the dune edge was a small white ball of fluff sitting miserably in the sand. Its little black face turned from the afternoon sun and its black eyes blinked, peering around defiantly.

‘It’s a red-footed booby chick.’

‘I’m guessing you’ve seen a heap of those in four years?’ Why was this one so special?

She looked up into the trees around them. ‘It’s fallen from that nest. Its parents won’t come for it.’

The solution seemed obvious. ‘Let’s just put it back.’

Her hair swung sadly. ‘We can’t. The nonintervention policy.’

‘Can it survive?’ It was so tiny, he guessed it would be very fragile under the explosion of wispy white feathers.

‘No. It will die.’

He took her elbow. ‘Well, let’s go, then. You don’t need to see that.’ He wasn’t overly keen himself.

She shook her head and squatted. The chick had noticed them and shuffled out further onto the beach, increasing its exposure to the afternoon sun. Rob dropped down too and they both backed up a little.

‘You won’t help it?’

She shook her head.

‘But you won’t leave it?’

The setting sun caught a momentary glint from her lashes as she shook her head again. She was going to sit here until it died. He looked at her hard. ‘Honor, why?’

When she finally answered, her voice was soft. ‘So it’s not alone.’

Ordinarily, he would have rolled his eyes and scoffed at such sentimental rubbish, but there was something about her voice, the stillness of her body, which gave him pause. This wasn’t a vapid, doe-eyed princess being soppy
about a fluffy puppy. This was Honor. Cranky, sarcastic, passionate and tough. If she wanted to stay, there had to be a good reason.

‘Do you want your logbook?’ She’d dropped it in the sand next to her. She shook her head again.

Not work, then?

The woman was a mystery.

Eventually, Rob decided to stop making a fool of himself by trying to guess her thoughts and to wait it out. What else was there to do, after all? Whatever her morbid fascination, it was bound to pass soon enough. He felt less welcome than ever as she started a private vigil. He settled in the sand behind her, hooked his arms around his hunched knees and waited.

He hadn’t expected to wait half the night. The moon was high and full and drenched the tropical beach in beautiful moonlight. He was on his feet again—he’d been up and down several times as the hours ticked by—and Honor’s water flask had run out. He was thirsty. But she wasn’t leaving and so neither was he.

The chick had, eventually, grown accustomed to their presence and lurched back towards the protective shelter of the tree line. It showed some common sense, at least. Rob thought its death would have been faster if it
had stayed out in the sun, perhaps mercifully. Even so, the chick hadn’t moved for quite some time now. Neither had the woman watching.

‘Honor?’ His voice was croaky after hours of silence. She turned her head slightly. Awake, then. ‘Shall I go and check it out?’

Around them, birds slept peacefully in ramshackle nests barely off the ground, in paltry divots scraped from the earth or out on the bare jungle floor. There was either no significant predators on this island or they were all nuts. Judging by the numbers, it had to be the first. Most perched on eggs, or supervised those perched on eggs. At least one pair of boobies would have no offspring to care for this night.

Honor paused a moment and then nodded, straightening with obvious stiffness.

Rob stepped past her and moved towards the still chick. He caught himself when he would have nudged it with his toe, conscious of Honor’s watery gaze. He squatted and lifted it gently from the sand. Dead and cool, it weighed nothing.

Her shoulders sagged when she saw it and he worried a moment about what to do with the little corpse. Then he tucked its body beneath a small scrappy dune plant, assuming it would feed the prolific crabs that swarmed all over the island. She didn’t protest.

Finally a right move from me.

He looked at Honor. The moonlight lit her perfectly and she looked wretched. This was not about a bird. He burned to ask but knew he had no right. He didn’t know what to say but was desperate to say something to alleviate her obvious misery.

‘It wasn’t alone, Honor.’

Her eyes spilled over and she sagged to the rich blanket of decomposing leaves and branches on the forest floor.

Crap!
No, this wasn’t about a dead bird but, whatever it was, she was about to relive it right here. Concern made him careless. He reached down and pulled her to her feet, into his arms, hoping to comfort her. Immediately, she fought him and he had to tighten his arms around her. Hours in the gym had given him much more than dozens of phone numbers and he held her easily despite her pathetic physical protest.

She cried into his shoulder for a heartbreaking minute, then, as soon as she quietened, he let her pull away. The bright moonlight did nothing to hide the embarrassment that flushed her already blotchy face. He wanted to make a light remark, to ease the discomfort they were both feeling, but he breathed in her distress and remembered how careful she had
been not to make light of his blood sensitivity. He owed her that much at least.

‘Ready to go now? ‘ There was nothing but gentleness in his words.

‘I have to monitor the turtle nests,’ she said, stepping away. ‘Camp’s back through there. Just follow the tree line to the right when you get through and it will take you back.’

‘Don’t you need anything? A torch? Supplies? How will I know you’re all right?’
Come back with me.

Rob cringed the moment the words left his mouth. Of course she would be all right. She was more a creature of nature than of man’s world. This island was her domain. He waited for the sarcastic lash to fall.

But her voice was soft. ‘We’re only a few minutes from camp. If I need anything I can come back.’ She stepped further into the trees, pointing towards camp so he could follow.

He turned and looked at the blanket of trees where she’d pointed and when he looked back at her she was gone.

R
OB
woke early the next morning from a heated, sleep-deprived dream in which a golden-haired mermaid nibbled her way up his legs, over his thigh and onto— ‘Son of a—!’

He flung himself upright from his loosely dug out groove in the beach sand to find a dozen small crabs with seashells for hats crawling across his body with nippers at the ready. They were the advance guard for a battalion of red hermit crabs that marched swiftly, diagonally down the shore like some kind of shared consciousness towards the dawn sea. And he was lying right in their path. He scrambled to his feet and they swarmed around him, uncaring and fixated on their watery goal.

Their intensity and determination made him laugh out loud as they spread over the shore like a blood tide and until the last, late marcher scurried desperately into the ocean
and was gone. It was his second night spent on the beach and he was surprised at how natural it felt to wake there.

A man could get used to this.

Tired or not, he was desperate to see the
Emden
up close. He had been since their second visit late yesterday. His plan this trip had just been to find the marker and do some bearing work but now he’d seen the memorial and, knowing how close he was and how much time he had up his sleeve, he struggled to keep the sunken enigma out of his mind. She was like an elusive beauty frozen in time that he was desperate to meet.

He imagined what she must look like now, a hundred years on, covered in sea life. Eternal. How many things in this life were for ever? But wrecks … they just lay there, hidden, waiting for their shot at immortality. And
he
wanted to give that to them. Find them and make them eternal. He’d seen pictures, of course, but photos and video was never close to the real deal. The wreck had called him for a good portion of yesterday and she started up again as soon as he woke. He knew he had hours before Honor would wake from her night shift. What better way to spend it than with the
other
woman in his life?

He smiled. He hadn’t thought of Honor in … minutes. It was a sad day when a rusty old
cruiser could push a gorgeous woman from the forefront of his thoughts—albeit a complicated, brittle woman.

Things hadn’t gone to plan that first night. He’d made an idiot of himself by stripping off in front of her, trying to put her at ease. She hadn’t been eased, she hadn’t laughed and she certainly hadn’t grown any less outraged. But she had called him Rob and that tiny slip gave him a sliver of hope. That she didn’t entirely hate his guts.

None of his trademark moves were having the slightest impact on her. If anything, they were making her more tense. And he was getting entirely rattled. What did he have if not his repertoire of moves? Certainly no scintillating personality to fall back on. He’d grown up entirely clear on where his worth lay. His business acumen and his face. Not necessarily in that order.

The rest were optional extras in the Dalton household. Not valued and not required.

His only consolation was that, after last night, he and Honor were equal on the humiliation front. He knew she would be mortified to have broken down in front of him.

He wandered the island for three hours, exploring, examining, discovering. Honor was tucked up in her little tent sleeping off her night shift, so he didn’t have to worry about
accidentally running into her. He took his seventh pass by the
Emden
memorial and looked out to the reef for evidence that the wind had shifted offshore. The seas would be too rough to dive in until they did.

He raised his binoculars and looked out beyond the visible reef. The whitecaps that had been steadily coming straight towards him had shifted east-west.

Perfect.

He’d waited half the morning for this. He turned and hurried back to camp, eager to get out in the water, back where he felt confident and in control. He’d already towed his diving gear back out to
The Player
in anticipation. But there was a catch.

Only an idiot would dive an unfamiliar wreck alone in a boat with a hairline fracture in its hull. He needed Honor’s help.

And asking would kill him.

He found her, just woken, at the campsite and he grabbed the bull by the horns. ‘I need a favour.’ Her single raised eyebrow told him he’d grabbed too hard. He swallowed some pride. ‘I need to ask your help.’

It wasn’t much better but at least she deigned to tilt her head in enquiry.

‘Would you come out with me on
The
Player
and be my second while I dive the
Emden?’

He prepared himself for what hurdle she would undoubtedly put in his way. Then she surprised him.

‘No.’

No excuse. No explanation. Just no.

‘Why?’

‘I’m working.’

Rob really couldn’t think of birdwatching as work but knew it would be suicide to say so. ‘Can’t you take a break?’ He needed this dive. ‘I’d be … grateful.’