Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong (8 page)

BOOK: Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong
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She looked at him flatly. No, not entirely flat, he saw as he really looked. Carefully flat. Engineered flat. His eyes narrowed.

‘Can’t you go later?’ she hedged.

‘No. The wind’s perfect right now. I don’t know how long it will last.’
Come on, lady. I’m not going to beg.

She stared at him. Eyes empty.

‘Please.’ That shamed him, but seemed to be effective.

She looked out to sea between the trees and then back to him. Quiet and dignified but incomprehensible. ‘I don’t do boats.’

Rob’s pulse hammered out his confusion. ‘You’re living on an island!’

‘I take one trip in and one out again and that’s it.’

‘But you love to swim …?’

Her chin was determined. ‘Only the shallows.’

‘Honor, please. I may not get another chance to see her up close. You don’t need to dive, just monitor from up top. We’re talking an hour of your life.’ It galled him to have to grovel like this.

‘I’m sorry, Rob. No.’ She turned back to her breakfast, though it was lunchtime. Disappointment made his heart pound. Or was it anger? Then he turned and stalked away. So much for all the rapport he’d hoped they’d built last night.

She wasn’t going to help him and without a dive buddy he wouldn’t be seeing the
Emden
this trip. Maybe ever.

‘How can it be safe to take
The Player
out to dive if it’s not safe to run the twenty-five kilometres back to Home Island?’

He was angrily stripping and repacking his gear on the boat when Honor appeared on the coral behind him and called her question out to him on deck.

He turned. ‘You changed your mind?’

She stared at him, desperately eager to swim back to shore but determined to face this demon. ‘I figured I owe you one.’

For last night.
She didn’t need to spell it
out—he’d sat with her half the night. And then held her as she’d blubbed her heart out. Her being his second today was a fair trade—as far as he knew.

Because he knew nothing.

He nodded and thanked her but the waves breaking on the atoll drowned it out. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she called.

‘We’ll only be three hundred metres offshore. Even if she starts taking on water we can be back here long before things get critical.’ Honor knew that was not the case further out to sea. From experience.

‘What will I have to do?’ She shifted uncomfortably on the reef, a large rock in her stomach.

‘Just monitor the tug-rope and the air gauges, and second-check the dive-time.’ He looked at her as though he expected her to turn and swim off in panic. She would not panic.

‘Okay.’

There was no way he could have heard her tiny assent, but he must have got the message loud and clear from her body language. A delighted smile broke across his face and he exploded into action.

‘Stay there,’ he called, moving to the wheel. ‘I’ll get closer.’

He started the motor, hauled in both anchors
and motored closer to the coral edge, countering the swell as it came and went.

Honor knew the routine. It had been a long time, but she and boats used to have a good relationship. Some things you just didn’t forget. As Rob swung
The Player’s
stern towards her, she leaped lightly onto its drop ladder and then nimbly stepped into the boat.

If he was surprised at her boat sense, he didn’t show it. He shoved
The Player
into gear and roared out to sea before she could change her mind.

She sank onto a padded seat and gripped the rail behind her where he couldn’t see. She fixed a smile to her face like rigor mortis but she was determined he wouldn’t see anything but her teeth each time he looked at her. She’d faked it for four seasons of drop-offs and pickups with the supply vessel; she could fake it now.

He did look at her a couple of times, but just briefly, and Honor saw how changed he was at the helm of his boat. He looked so much more comfortable in his skin there, focused on the waters ahead, accurately reading the surface indicators. This was his element. Where he belonged. Yet another reason he was bad news for her.

Rob steered
The Player
around to the south of the island and lined up with the memorial
on shore. Honor had no idea how the outer reefs were shaped, so she hoped his boating skill was a match for the treacherous waters. Still, she could see shore in the distance and knew she could swim the three hundred metres in if she had to. Scant comfort.

She reached one hand over the side into the ocean as he slowed the boat. Let him think it was the saltwater that made her hands damp and cold. He moved to the bow and tossed both anchors out. Honor cringed once again on behalf of the coral far below as metres of coiled chain unravelled. Reef was tough, but not indestructible, and every human contact had the potential to damage it. The anchors snagged and
The Player
stretched with the tide against them, its stern swinging towards shore.

That was probably good. That way, she could keep her eye on land.

It took Rob no time to gather his dive gear and pull it on. He’d done this a million times, judging by his quick efficiency getting into the sleeveless dive skin and shrugging on the air-tank, regulator, weight belt and fins. He pushed his dive mask up onto his head. She wasn’t so terrified that she didn’t notice how the rubber suit moulded to every bulge and
ripple in his body. But she was too frightened to appreciate it.

He showed Honor a couple of dials on a small digital screen.

‘This is a wireless monitoring feed,’ he explained. ‘It gives you a GPS readout of my location and air levels. It also shows my depth. I’ll ping you every so often so that you know I’m okay.’

‘What do I do if you’re not?’ She had never dived; knew she’d be useless to him up here in an emergency.

He took her icy fingers and placed them on a blue button. ‘This will ping me back. Ping three times if you think there’s a problem. I’ll surface.’

If you can.
‘What kind of problem?’

‘Air. Shark. Monsoon.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘These waters are relatively shallow so even if there is a problem I can offload my gear and swim up on lung-air alone.’

That was good news and settled a few of Honor’s nerves. Having a job to do also helped her focus and ignore where she was. Bobbing out on open ocean.

Rob stood and moved to the edge of the boat. She looked over at the dark shadows deep below. His voice brought her eyes back to his. They were warm and intense.

‘Thank you, Honor. This means …’ He
seemed lost for words. ‘Thank you. See you soon.’

He pulled the mask down over his face, fitted the regulator into his mouth, sucked in a few test breaths and tumbled backwards over
The Player
‘s starboard side. Honor looked over the edge and watched him descend. There was a flurry of splashing and bubbles and then …

Silence.

The last thing Rob saw as he hit the water was Honor’s pale face watching him drop. He didn’t understand how a woman who studied marine creatures for a living could have an aversion to boats, but her nerves were obvious on their short trip around to the south-east corner of the island.

Maybe that was why she had a thing for
terrestrial
marine creatures, he thought as he descended slowly into the colder water below the surface.

He checked all his gauges and straps and then looked around him. He could see the looming darkness of the drop-off towards shore, the outer edge of the same coral band he’d first met Honor on. But it was wider on the south side of the island and the drop-off was sheer. That was how the
Emden
‘s besieged captain had been able to scuttle his own ship. He’d quite literally sailed from deep
water right onto the reef two feet below the surface. As the
Emden
had broken apart in rough weather, the densest parts had slid off the drop-off and sank away out to sea before coming to rest on the sea floor.

He approached that floor now and the water turned from indigo to a richer, less earthly colour. The
Emden
didn’t lie so deep that natural light couldn’t filter down to it, but it was far enough that the light quality changed as it descended, becoming a strange, ethereal blue. He knew without looking his skin would be a sickly, translucent colour for the same reason.

The local fish had specialised for this unique light. Their colours were vibrant and complementary as they darted around the unexpected human arrival. Dark shapes on the ocean floor came into focus. Rob was excited, but forced himself to slow his breathing and his pace and remembered, guiltily, to ping the remote monitor. He swam on. If Honor called him back now he knew he’d have a hard time making good on his promise to return.

The wreck spread over some distance. Massive parts of it had completely broken apart, caking the sea floor with corroded residue. Nothing rusted down here; in the absence of air, it all just … dissolved. The densest parts survived the longest and Rob had no trouble making out the pointed bow of the
SMS
Emden.
It was battleship grey no longer, caked now with golden corals, brain-shaped clusters and microscopic marine life. Sponge fingers waved in the gentle floor current and blue-lipped clams bonded to the old steel, filtering goodness from the water all around him.

It was just like the photographs and nothing like them.

He remembered to ping again.

He rounded the
Emden’s
bow and saw two enormous Mickey Mouse ears sticking out of the sand in the distance. His heart kicked out and the number of bubbles leaving his mask doubled. He swam towards the visible part of the
Emden’s
giant propeller, crusted over with barnacles and limpets. The other half had become sea floor.

Ping.

Fish continued to dart this way and that, braver now he’d shown them no harm. One or two became his undersea chaperones, following him with interest as he drifted around. He slowed to a stop and held his breath. Not the smartest thing to do while diving but he risked it for a chance to take in the otherworldly silence of the ocean floor.

Not silence, though. Any more than Honor’s island was silent. The water carried magnified noises to his exposed ears. The last of the bubbles floated off with his expelled breath
and with them their distinctive and relentless
bub-a-lub.
The dense silence surrounding him was broken by the strange creaks, pops and squeaks of undersea creatures.

He saw a looming shape in the distance. Too small to be a shark, too big to be a fish. A ray, maybe? As it neared, its shape resolved into one of Honor’s green turtles. It glided effortlessly through the water, its bulk and weight meaningless in the low gravity environment. On shore, it would be a different story. He immediately thought of Honor and how excited she would be to see one in its natural underwater environment.

Honor …

Ping.

The hour passed all too quickly. Rob swam over the entire wreck, memorising the detail, examining everything and touching nothing. His mind buzzed with unanswerable questions about what he’d seen. Did he have the patience to wait until he was back on the Australian mainland? His body was energised and hyper-sensitive; his heart hadn’t felt this light in months. Since his last new dive. At last, he noticed his air was below half, which meant his time was up. He turned his face to the surface and ascended, taking care to equalise every ten metres to get back to Honor safely.

He broke surface, blinked in the glare of
the above-sea world and spat out his regulator. She wasn’t peering over the edge waiting for him. He was crazy to have harboured the expectation, even subconsciously, but he knew a tiny moment of disappointment.

Pulling his full weight into the boat was near impossible after the relaxation of complete buoyancy. He shed his weight belt and tank, hauling them ahead of him into the boat, but still he felt as if he weighed hundreds of kilograms. Like one of Honor’s turtles out of water. He peeled off his fins and chucked them ahead of him onto
The Player’s
deck, then pushed his whole body upwards with powerful arms and legs.

He saw Honor sitting near the helm of the boat, the monitor still tight in her hands. She didn’t look up at him.

He pulled off the mask and dropped it with his fins. Then he turned to speak to her.

And froze.

She sat, trembling and ashen-faced, huddled in the doorway to
The Player
‘s forward hatch.

Was the nightmare over?

Soothing warmth seeped into Honor’s numb skin, not from the gentle hands rubbing her back but from the bare chest pressed tightly against hers. Intense heat radiated, soaking
in, warming her frigid muscles. It should have taken just a split second for her to imagine how it would feel if his heart beat naked against hers, but the thought had to battle through the choked mire of her clouded mind. Shock still ruled and it lingered aggressively.

Breathing deeply, she lifted her stinging eyelids and Rob slowly came into focus. He’d peeled his wetsuit half down at some point on their return to
The Player
‘s mooring and he enveloped her in his powerful arms and sea-salt smell. Safety had never felt—or smelt—so good.

His lips were working; Honor was mesmerised by the movement, but the words were an incoherent thrum in her ears. His hands moved in reassuring circles over her back, under her cotton shirt, against her bikini, all warm and toasty against her frosted skin. The whooshing started to recede, to sound more like words, and then finally those words impacted on her brain. He was reciting Paterson.

‘… and upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way, where mountain ash and Kurrajong grew wild …’

‘Wide.’ Was that pathetic croak her voice?

He stopped and looked into her face. Deep blue relief flooded into his eyes. ‘Hey.
Welcome back.’ He gently brushed her hair away from her damp face. ‘What’s wide?’

‘The Kurrajong grew wide,
not wild. Common error … ‘

His smile was entirely placating then. He wasn’t about to argue with the crazy lady. ‘How do you feel?’

BOOK: Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong
4.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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