Her Knight in the Outback

‘Yeah, me, too, but you have to live as well. What about weekends?’

The criticism rankled. ‘Not all of us are on the cushy public servant schedule. An hour—a day—could mean the difference between running across someone who knew Travis and not.’

Or even running into Trav himself.

‘What if they came through an hour after you left, and pausing to look at something pretty could have meant your paths crossed?’

Did he think she hadn’t tortured herself with those thoughts late at night? The endless what-ifs?

‘An hour afterwards and they’ll see a poster. An hour before and they’d have no idea their shift buddy is a missing person.’ At least that was what she told herself. Sternly.

Marshall blinked at her.

‘You don’t understand.’ How could he?

‘Wouldn’t it be faster to just email the posters around the country? Ask the post offices to put them up for you.’

‘It’s not just about the posters. It’s about talking to people. Hunting down leads. Making an impression.’

Hoping to God the impression would stick.

‘The kind you nearly made this afternoon?’

‘Whatever it takes.’

Their meals arrived and the next minute was filled with making space on the table and receiving their drinks.

‘Anyway, weren’t we supposed to be talking about something else?’ Eve said brightly, crunching into a chip. ‘Where are you headed next?’

‘Up to Kalgoorlie, then Southern Cross.’

North. Complete opposite to her.

‘You?’ His gaze was neutral enough.

‘Esperance. Ravensthorpe. With a side trip out to Israelite Bay.’ Jeez—why didn’t she just draw him her route on a serviette? ‘I’m getting low on posters after the Nullabor run. Need an MP’s office.’

His newly groomed head tipped.

‘MP’s offices are obliged by law to print missing-person posters on request,’ she explained. ‘And there’s one in Esperance.’

‘Convenient.’

She glared at her chicken. ‘It’s the least they could do.’

And pretty much all they did. Though they were usually carefully sympathetic.

‘It must be hard,’ he murmured between mouthfuls. ‘Hitting brick walls everywhere you go.’

‘I’d rather hit them out here than stuck back in Melbourne. At least I can be productive here.’

Sitting at home and relying on others to do something to find her brother had nearly killed her.

‘Did you leave a big family behind?’

Instantly her mind flashed to her father’s grief-stricken face as the only person he had left in the world drove off towards the horizon. ‘Just my dad.’

‘No mum?’

She sat up straighter in her seat. If Christine-of-the-dagger was off the table for discussion, her drunk mother certainly was. Clearly, the lines in her face were as good as a barometric map. Because Marshall let the subject well and truly drop.

‘Well, guess this is our first and last dinner, then,’ he said cheerfully, toasting her with a forkful of mashed potato and peas. There was nothing more in that than pure observation. Nothing enough that she felt confident in answering without worrying it would sound like an invitation.

‘You never know, we might bump into each other again.’

But, really, how likely was that once they headed off towards opposite points on the compass? The only reason they’d met up this once was because there was only one road in and out of the south half of this vast state and he’d crashed into an emu right in the middle of it.

Thoughtful eyes studied her face, then turned back to his meal.

* * *

‘So you’re not from Sydney, originally?’

Marshall pushed his empty plate away and groaned inwardly. Who knew talking about nothing could be so tiring? This had to be the greatest number of words he’d spoken to anyone in weeks. But it was his fault as much as hers. No dagger tattoo and no missing brother. That was what he’d stipulated. She’d held up her end of the bargain, even though she was clearly itching to know more.

Precisely why he didn’t do dinners with women.

Conversation.

He’d much rather get straight to the sex part. Although that was clearly off the table with Eve. So it really made a man wonder why the heck he’d said yes to Eve’s ‘not a date’ invitation. Maybe even he got lonely.

And maybe they were now wearing long coats in Hades.

‘Brisbane.’

‘How old were you when you moved?’ she chatted on, oblivious to the rapid congealing of his thoughts. Oblivious to the dangerous territory she’d accidentally stumbled into. Thoughts of his brother, their mother and how tough he’d found Sydney as an adolescent.

‘Twelve.’

The word squeezed past his suddenly tight throat. The logical part of him knew it was just polite conversation, but the part of him that was suddenly as taut as a crossbow loaded a whole lot more onto her innocent chatter. Twelve was a crap age to be yanked away from your friends and the school where you were finding your feet and thrust into one of the poorest suburbs of one of the biggest cities in the country. But—for the woman who’d only pumped out a second son for the public benefits—moving states to chase a more generous single-parent allowance was a no-brainer. No matter who it disrupted.

Not that any of that money had ever found its way to him and Rick. They were just a means to an end.

‘What was that like?’

Being your mother’s meal ticket or watching your older brother forge himself a career as the local drug-mover?

‘It was okay.’

Uh-oh...here it came. Verbal shutdown. Probably just as well, given the direction his mind was going.

She watched him steadily, those dark eyes knowing something was up even if she didn’t know exactly what. ‘Uh-huh...’

Which was code for Your turn next, Oscar Wilde. But he couldn’t think of a single thing to say, witty or otherwise. So he folded his serviette and gave his chair the slightest of backward pushes.

‘Well...’

‘What just happened?’ Eve asked, watching him with curiosity but not judgment. And not moving an inch.

‘It’s getting late.’

‘It’s eight-thirty.’

Seriously? Only an hour? It felt like eternity.

‘I’m heading out at sunrise. So I can get to Lake Lefroy before it gets too hot.’

And back to blissful isolation, where he didn’t need to explain himself to anyone.

She tipped her head and it caused her dark hair to swing to the right a little. A soft fragrance wafted forwards and teased his receptors. His words stumbled as surely as he did, getting up. ‘Thanks for the company.’

She followed suit. ‘You’re welcome.’

They split the bill in uncomfortable silence, then stepped out into the dark street. Deserted by eight-thirty.

Eve looked to her right, then back at him.

‘Listen, I know you’re just across the road but could you...would you mind walking me back to the bus?’

Maybe they were both remembering those three jerks from earlier.

‘Where do you park at night?’ He suddenly realised he had no idea where she’d pulled up. And that his ability to form sentences seemed to have returned with the fresh air.

‘I usually find a good spot...’

Oh, jeez. She wasn’t even sorted for the night.

They walked on in silence and then words just came tumbling out of him.

‘My motel booking comes with parking. You could use that if you want. I’ll tuck the bike forward.’

‘Really?’ Gratitude flooded her pretty face. ‘That would be great, thank you.’

‘Come on.’

He followed her to the right, and walked back through Norseman’s quiet main streets. Neither of them spoke. When they reached her bus, she unlocked the side window and reached in to activate the folding front door. He waited while she crossed back around and then stepped up behind her into the cab.

Forbidden territory previously.

But she didn’t so much as twitch this time. Which was irrationally pleasing. Clearly he’d passed some kind of test. Maybe it was when the beard came off.

The Bedford rumbled to life and Eve circled the block before heading back to his motel. He directed her into his bay and then jumped out to nudge the KTM forward a little. The back of her bus stuck out of the bay but he was pretty sure there was only one other person in the entire motel and they were already parked up for the night.

‘Thanks again for this,’ she said, pausing at the back of the bus with one of the two big rear doors open.

Courtesy of the garish motel lights that streamed in her half-closed curtains, he could see the comfortable space he’d fallen asleep in bathed in a yellow glow. And beyond it, behind the door that now stood open at the other end of the bus, Eve’s bedroom. The opening was dominated by the foot of a large mattress draped in a burgundy quilt and weighed down with two big cushions.

Nothing like the sterile motel room and single country bed he’d be returning to.

‘Caravan parks can be a little isolated this time of year,’ she said, a bit tighter, as she caught the direction of his gaze. ‘I feel better being close to...people.’

He eased his shoulder against the closed half of the door and studied her. Had she changed her mind? Was that open door some kind of unconscious overture? And was he really considering taking her up on it if it was? Pretty, uptight girls on crusades didn’t really meet his definition of uncomplicated. Yet something deep inside hinted strongly that she might be worth a bit of complication.

He peered down on her in the shadows. ‘No problem.’

She shuffled from left foot to right. ‘Well...’night, then. See you in the morning. Thanks again.’

A reluctant smile crossed his face at the firm finality of that door slamming shut. And at the zipping across of curtains as he sauntered to the rear of the motel.

Now they were one-for-one in the inappropriate social reaction stakes. He’d gone all strong and silent on her and she’d gone all blushing virgin on him.

Equally awkward.

Equally regrettable.

He dug into his pocket for the worn old key and let himself into his ground floor room. Exactly as soulless and bland as her little bus wasn’t.

But exactly as soulless and bland as he preferred.

CHAPTER THREE

‘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—’