Читать книгу Her Knight in the Outback - Nikki Logan - Страница 10
Оглавление‘THIS BUS NEVER stops being versatile, does it?’
Eve’s breath caught deep in her throat at the slight twang and comfortable gravel in the voice that came from her left. The few days that had passed since she’d heard his bike rumble out of the motel car park at dawn as she’d rolled the covers more tightly around her and fell back to sleep gave him exactly the right amount of stubble as he let the beard grow back in.
‘Marshall?’ Her hand clamped down on the pile of fliers that lifted off the table in the brisk Esperance waterfront breeze. ‘I thought you’d headed north?’
‘I did. But a road train had jack-knifed across the highway just out of Kal and the spill clean-up was going to take twenty-four hours so I adjusted my route. I’ll do the south-west anti-clockwise. Like you.’
Was there just the slightest pause before ‘like you’? And did that mean anything? Apparently, she took too long wondering because he started up again.
‘I assumed I’d have missed you, actually.’
Or hoped? Impossible to know with his eyes hidden behind seriously dark sunglasses. Still, if he’d truly wanted to avoid her he could have just kept walking just now. She was so busy promoting The Missing to locals she never would have noticed him.
Eve pushed her shoulders back to improve her posture, which had slumped as the morning wore on. Convenient coincidence that it also made the best of her limited assets.
‘I had to do Salmon Gums and Gibson on the way,’ she said. ‘I only arrived last night.’
He took in the two-dozen posters affixed to the tilted up doors of the bus’s luggage compartment. It made a great roadside noticeboard to set her fold-out table up in front of.
He strolled up and back, studying every face closely.
‘Who are all these people?’
‘They’re all long-termers.’ The ten per cent.
‘Do you know them all?’
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘But I know most of their families. Online, at least.’
‘All missing.’ He frowned. ‘Doesn’t it pull focus from your brother? To do this?’
Yeah. It definitely did.
‘I wouldn’t be much of a human being if I travelled the entire country only looking after myself. Besides, we kind of have a reciprocal arrangement going. If someone’s doing something special—like media or some kind of promotion—they try to include as many others as they can. This is something I can do in the big centres while taking a break from the road.’
Though Esperance was hardly a metropolis and talking to strangers all day wasn’t much of a break.
He stopped just in front of her, picked up one of Travis’s posters. ‘Who’s “we”?’
‘The network.’
The sunglasses tipped more towards her.
‘The missing-persons network,’ she explained. ‘The families. There are a lot of us.’
‘You have a formal network?’
‘We have an informal one. We share information. Tips. Successes.’
Failures. Quite a lot of failures.
‘Good to have the support, I guess.’
He had no idea. Some days her commitment to a bunch of people she’d never met face to face was the only thing that got her out of bed.
‘When I first started up, I kept my focus on Trav. But these people—’ she tipped her head back towards all the faces on her poster display ‘—are like extended family to me because they’re the family of people I’m now close to. How could I not include them amongst The Missing?’
A woman stopped to pick up one of her fliers and Eve quickly delivered her spiel, smiling and making a lot of eye contact. Pumping it with energy. Whatever it took...
Marshall waited until the woman had finished perusing the whole display. ‘The Missing?’
She looked behind her. ‘Them.’
And her brother had the biggest and most central poster on it.
He nodded to a gap on the top right of the display. ‘Looks like one’s fallen off.’
‘I just took someone down.’
His eyebrows lifted. ‘They were found? That’s great.’
No, not great. But at least found. That was how it was for the families of long-timers. The Simmons family had the rest of their lives to deal with the mental torture that came with feeling relief when their son’s remains were found in a gully at the bottom of a popular hiking mountain. Closure. That became the goal somewhere around the ten-month mark.
Emotional euthanasia.
Maybe one day that would be her—loathing herself for being grateful that the question mark that stalked her twenty-four-seven was now gone because her brother was. But there was no way she could explain any of that to someone outside the network. Regular people just didn’t get it. It was just so much easier to smile and nod.
‘Yes. Great.’
Silence clunked somewhat awkwardly on the table between them.
‘Did you get out to Israelite Bay yet?’ he finally asked.
‘I’ll probably do that tomorrow or Wednesday.’
His clear eyes narrowed. ‘Listen. I have an idea. You need to travel out to the bay and I need to head out to Cape Arid and Middle Island to survey them for a possible new weather station. Why don’t we team up, head out together? Two birds, one stone.’
More together time in which to struggle with conversation and obsess about his tattoos. Was that wise?
‘I’ll only slow you down. I need to do poster drops at all roadhouses, caravan parks and campsites between here and there.’
‘That’s okay. As far as the office is concerned, I have a couple of days while the truck mess is cleared up. We can take our time.’
Why did he seem so very reluctant? Almost as if he was speaking against his will. She scrunched her nose as a prelude to an I don’t think so.
But he beat her to it. ‘Middle Island is off-limits to the public. You can’t go there without a permit.’
‘And you have a permit?’
‘I do.’
‘Have you forgotten that this isn’t a tourist trip for me?’
‘You’ll get your work done on the way, and then you’ll just keep me company for mine.’
‘I can get my work done by myself and be back in Esperance by nightfall.’
‘Or you can give yourself a few hours off and see a bit of this country that you’re totally missing.’
‘And why should I be excited by Middle Island?’
‘A restricted island could be a great place for someone to hide out if they don’t want to be discovered.’
The moment the words left his mouth, colour peaked high on his jaw.
‘Sorry—’ he winced as she sucked in a breath ‘—that was... God, I’m sorry. I just thought you might enjoy a bit of downtime. That it might be good for you.’
But his words had had their effect. If you needed a permit and Marshall had one, then she’d be crazy not to tag along. What if she let her natural reticence stop her and Trav was there, camping and lying low?
‘I’ll let you ride on my bike,’ he said, as though that made it better. As if it was some kind of prize.
Instantly her gut curled into a fist. ‘Motorbikes kill people.’
‘People kill people,’ he dismissed. ‘Have you ever ridden on one?’
If riding tandem with a woman in the midst of a mid-life crisis counted. ‘My mother had a 250cc.’
‘Really? Cool.’
Yeah, that was what she and Travis had thought, right up until the day it killed their mother and nearly him.
‘But you haven’t really ridden until you’ve been on a 1200.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Come on... Wouldn’t you like to know what it’s like to have all that power between your legs?’
‘If this is a line, it’s spectacularly cheesy.’
He ignored that. ‘Or the freedom of tearing along at one hundred clicks with nothing between you and the road?’
‘You call that freedom, I call that terror.’
‘How will you know until you try it?’
‘I’m not interested in trying it.’
He totally failed at masking his disappointment. ‘Then you can tail me in the bus. We’ll convoy. It’ll still be fun.’
Famous last words. Something told her the fun would run out, for him, round about the time she pulled into her third rest stop for the day, to pin up posters.
‘There’s also a good caravan park out there, according to the travel guides. You can watch a west coast sunset.’
‘I’ve seen plenty of sunsets.’
‘Not with me,’ he said on a sexy grin.
Something about his intensity really wiggled down under her skin. Tantalising and zingy. ‘Why are you so eager for me to do this?’
Grey eyes grew earnest. ‘Because you’re missing everything. The entire country. The moments of joy that give life its colour.’
‘You should really moonlight in greeting-card messages.’
‘Come on, Eve. You have to go there, anyway, it’s just a few hours of detour.’
‘And what if Trav comes through in those few hours?’ It sounded ridiculous but it was the fear she lived with every moment of every day.
‘Then he’ll see one of dozens of posters and know you’re looking for him.’
The simple truth of that ached. Every decision she made ached. Each one could bring her closer to her brother or push her further away. It made decision-making pure agony. But this one came with a whole bundle of extra considerations. Marshall-shaped considerations. And the thought of sitting and watching a sunset with him even managed to alleviate some of that ache.
A surprising amount.
She sighed. ‘What time?’
‘How long are you set up here for?’
‘I have permission to be on the waterfront until noon.’
‘Five past noon, then?’
So eager. Did he truly think she was that parched for some life experience? It galled her to give him all the points. ‘Ten past.’
His smile transformed his face, the way it always did.
‘Done.’
‘And we’re sleeping separately. You know...just for the record.’
‘Hey, I’m just buying you a sunset, lady.’ His shrug was adorable. And totally disarming.
‘Now go, Weatherman—you’re scaring off my leads with all that leather.’
Her lips said ‘go’ but her heart said stay. Whispered it, really. But she’d become proficient in drowning out the fancies of her heart. And its fears. Neither were particularly productive in keeping her on track in finding Travis. A nice neutral...nothing...was the best way to proceed.
Emotionally blank, psychologically focused.
Which wasn’t to say that Marshall Sullivan couldn’t be a useful distraction from all the voices in her head and heart.
And a pleasant one.
And a short one.
* * *
They drove the two hundred kilometres east in a weird kind of convoy. Eve chugging along in her ancient bus and him, unable to stand the slow pace, roaring off ahead and pulling over at the turn-off to every conceivable human touch point until she caught up, whacked up a poster and headed out again. Rest stops, roadhouses, campgrounds, lookouts. Whizzing by at one hundred kilometres an hour and only stopping longer for places that had people and rubbish bins and queued-up vehicles.
It was a horrible way to see such a beautiful country.
Eventually, they made it to the campground nestled in the shoulder crook of a pristine bay on the far side of Cape Arid National Park, its land arms reaching left and right in a big, hug-like semicircle. A haven for travellers, fishermen and a whole lot of wildlife.
But not today. Today they had the whole place to themselves.
‘So many blues...’ Eve commented, stepping down out of the bus and staring at the expansive bay.
And she wasn’t wrong. Closer to shore, the water was the pale, almost ice-blue of gentle surf. Then the kind of blue you saw on postcards, until, out near the horizon it graduated to a deep, gorgeous blue before slamming into the endless rich blue of the Australian sky. And, down to their left, a cluster of weathered boulders were freckled by a bunch of sea lions sunning themselves.
God...so good for the soul.
‘This is nothing,’ he said. Compared to what she’d missed all along the south coast of Australia. Compared to what she’d driven straight past. ‘If you’d just chuck your indicator on from time to time...’
She glanced at him but didn’t say anything, busying stringing out her solar blanket to catch the afternoon light. When she opened the back doors of the bus to fill it with fresh sea air, she paused, looking further out to sea. Out to an island.
‘Is that where we’re going?’
Marshall hauled himself up next to her to follow her gaze. ‘Nope. That’s one of the closer, smaller islands in the archipelago. Middle Island is further out. One of those big shadows looming on the horizon.’
He leaned half across her to point further out and she followed the line of his arm and finger. It brought them as close together as they’d been since he’d dragged her kicking and cursing away from the thugs back in Norseman. And then he knew how much he’d missed her scent.
It eddied around his nostrils now, in defiance of the strong breeze.
Taunting him.
‘How many are there?’
What were they talking about? Right...islands. ‘More than a hundred.’
Eve stood, staring, her gaze flicking over every feature in view. Marshall kept his hand hooked around the bus’s ceiling, keeping her company up there. Keeping close.
‘Trav could be on any of them.’
Not if he also wanted to eat. Or drink. Only two had fresh water.
‘Listen, Eve...’
She turned her eyes back up to his and it put their faces much closer than either of them might have intended.
‘I really am truly sorry I said that about your brother. It was a cheap shot.’ And one that he still didn’t fully understand making. He wasn’t Eve’s keeper. ‘The chances of him being out there are—’
‘Tiny. I know. But it’s in my head now and I’m not going to be able to sleep if I don’t chase every possibility.’
‘Still, I don’t want to cause you pain.’
‘That’s not hurting, Marshall. That’s helping. It’s what I’m out here for.’
She said the words extra firmly, as if she was reminding both of them. Didn’t make the slightest difference to the tingling in his toes. The tingling said she was here for him.
What did toes ever know?
He held her gaze much longer than was probably polite, their dark depths giving the ocean around them a run for its money.
‘Doesn’t seem a particularly convenient place to put a weather station,’ she said finally, turning back out to the islands.
Subtle subject change. Not. But he played along. ‘We want remote. To give us better data on southern coastal weather conditions.’
She glanced around them at the whole lot of nothing as far as the eye could see. ‘You got it.’
Silent sound cushioned them in layers. The occasional bird cry, far away. The whump of the distant waves hitting the granite face of the south coast. The thrum of the coastal breeze around them. The awkward clearing of her throat as it finally dawned on her that she was shacked up miles from anywhere—and anyone—with a man she barely knew.
‘What time are we meeting the boat? And where?’
‘First thing in the morning. They’ll pull into the bay, then ferry us around. Any closer to Middle Island and we couldn’t get in without an off-road vehicle.’
‘Right.’
Gravity helped his boots find the dirt and he looked back up at Eve, giving her the space she seemed to need. ‘I’m going to go hit the water before the sun gets too low.’
Her eyes said that a swim was exactly what she wanted. But the tightness in her lips said that she wasn’t about to go wandering through the sand dunes somewhere this remote with a virtual stranger. Fair enough, they’d only known each other hours. Despite having a couple of life-threatening moments between them. Maybe if she saw him walking away from her, unoffended and unconcerned, she’d feel more comfortable around him. Maybe if he offered no pressure for the two of them to spend time together, she’d relax a bit.
And maybe if he grew a pair he wouldn’t care.
‘See you later on, then.’
Marshall jogged down to the beach without looking back. When he hit the shore he laid his boots, jeans and T-shirt out on the nearest rock to get nice and toasty for his return and waded into the ice-cold water in his shorts. Normally he’d have gone without, public or not, but that wasn’t going to win him any points in the Is it safe to be here with you? stakes. The sand beneath his feet had been beaten so fine by the relentless Southern Ocean it was more like squidging into saturated talcum powder than abrasive granules of sand. Soft and welcoming, the kind of thing you could imagine just swallowing you up.
And you wouldn’t mind a bit.
His skin instantly thrilled at the kiss of the ice-cold water after the better part of a day smothered in leather and road dust, and he waded the stretch of shallows, then dived through the handful of waves that built up momentum as the rapid rise of land forced them into graceful, white-topped arcs.
This was his first swim since Cactus Beach, a whole state away. The Great Australian Bight was rugged and amazing to look at right the way across the guts of the country but when the rocks down to the sea were fifty metres high and the ocean down there bottomless and deadly, swimming had to take a short sabbatical. But swimming was also one of the things that kept him sane and being barred from it got him all twitchy.
Which made it pretty notable that the first thing he didn’t do when he pulled up to the beautiful, tranquil and swimmable shores of Esperance earlier today was hit the water.
He went hunting for a dark-haired little obsessive instead.
Oh, he told himself a dozen lies to justify it—that he’d rather swim the private beaches of the capes; that he’d rather swim at sunset; that he’d rather get the Middle Island review out of the way first so he could take a few days to relax—but that was all starting to feel like complete rubbish. Apparently, he was parched for something more than just salt water.
Company.
Pfff. Right. That was one word for it.
It had been months since he’d been interested enough in a woman to do something about it, and by ‘interested’ he meant hungry. Hungry enough to head out and find a woman willing to sleep with a man who had nothing to offer but a hard, one-off lay before blowing town the next day. There seemed to be no shortage of women across the country who were out to salve a broken heart, or pay back a cheating spouse, or numb something broken deep inside them. They were the ones he looked for when he got needy enough because they didn’t ask questions and they didn’t have expectations.
It took one to know one.
Those encounters scratched the itch when it grew too demanding...and they reminded him how empty and soulless relationships were. All relationships, not just the random strangers in truck stops and bars across the country. Women. Mothers.
Brothers.
At least the women in the bars knew where they stood. No one was getting used. And there was no one to disappoint except himself.
He powered his body harder, arm over arm, and concentrated on how his muscles felt, cutting his limbs through the surf. Burning from within, icy from without. The familiar, heavy ache of lactic acid building up. And when he’d done all the examination it was possible to do on his muscles, he focused on the water: how the last land it had touched was Antarctica, how it was life support for whales and elephant seals and dugongs and colossal squid and mysterious deep-trench blobs eight kilometres below the surface and thousands of odd-shaped sea creatures in between. How humans were a bunch of nimble-fingered, big-brained primates that really only used the millimetre around the edge of the mapped oceans and had absolutely no idea how much of their planet they knew nothing about.
Instant Gulliver.
It reminded him how insignificant he was in the scheme of things. Him and all his human, social problems.
The sun was low on the horizon when he next paid attention, and the south coast of Australia was littered with sharks who liked to feed at dusk and dawn. And while there had certainly been a day he would have happily taken the risk and forgotten the consequences, he’d managed to find a happy place in the Groundhog Day blur that was the past six months on the road, and could honestly say—hand on heart—that he’d rather not be shark food now.
He did a final lazy lap parallel with the wide beach back towards his discarded clothes, then stood as soon as the sea floor rose to meet him. His hands squeezed up over his lowered lids and back through his hair, wringing the salt water out of it, then he stood, eyes closed, with his face tipped towards the warmth of the afternoon sun.
Eventually, he opened them and started, just a little, at Eve standing there, her arms full of towel, her mouth hanging open as if he’d interrupted her mid-sentence.
* * *
Eve knew she was gaping horribly but she was no more able to close her trap than rip her eyes from Marshall’s chest and belly.
His tattooed chest and belly.
Air sucked into her lungs in choppy little gasps.
He had some kind of massive bird of prey, wings spread and aloft, across his chest. The lower curve of its majestic wings sat neatly along the ridge of his pectorals and its wing tips followed the line of muscle there up onto his tanned, rounded shoulders. Big enough to accentuate the musculature of his chest, low enough to be invisible when he was wearing a T-shirt. It should have been trashy but it wasn’t; it looked like he’d been born with it.
His arms were still up, squeezing the sea water from his hair, and that gave her a glimpse of a bunch of inked characters—Japanese, maybe Chinese?—on the underside of one full biceps.
Add that to the dagger on the other arm and he had a lot of ink for a weatherman.
‘Hey.’
His voice startled her gaze back to his and her tongue into action.
‘Wow,’ she croaked, then realised that wasn’t the most dignified of beginnings. ‘You were gone so long...’
Great. Not even capable of a complete sentence.
‘I’ve been missing the ocean. Sorry if I worried you.’
She grasped around in the memories she’d just spent a couple of hours accumulating, studying the map to make sure they hadn’t missed a caravan park or town. And she improvised some slightly more intelligent conversation.
‘Whoever first explored this area really didn’t have the best time doing it.’
Marshall dripped. And frowned. As he lowered his arms to take the towel from her nerveless fingers, the bird of prey’s feathers shifted with him, just enough to catch her eye. She struggled to look somewhere other than at him, but it wasn’t easy when he filled her field of view so thoroughly. She wanted to step back but then didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she was affected.
‘Cape Arid, Mount Ragged, Poison Creek...’ she listed with an encouraging lack of wobble in her voice, her clarity restored the moment he pressed the towel to his face and disguised most of that unexpectedly firm and decorated torso.
He stepped over to the rock and hooked up his T-shirt, then swept it on in a smooth, manly shrug. Even with its overstretched neckline, the bird of prey was entirely hidden. The idea of him hanging out in his meteorological workplace in a government-appropriate suit with all of that ink hidden away under it was as secretly pleasing as when she used to wear her best lingerie to section meetings.
Back when stupid things like that had mattered.
‘I guess it’s not so bad when you have supplies and transport,’ he said, totally oblivious to her illicit train of thought, ‘but it must have been a pretty treacherous environment for early explorers. Especially if they were thirsty.’
