Her Knight in the Outback

‘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.’

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