A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return: A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return

Lord, did she sound that morose when speaking of her long-dead family?

‘Well, aren’t we just a pair of poster children for “misery loves company”?’ she offered lightly. It seemed to work; his face defrosted a hint more. She pulled open her door. ‘In the car, McMurtrie.’

Grant desperately needed a few minutes in the darkness to gather his composure. He slid into his passenger seat and sank into the familiar, comfortable leather, breathing deeply.

Cancer. Lung cancer.

A whole bunch of things flashed through his mind and suddenly made sense: Alan’s awkwardness when Grant had mentioned the stink of tobacco in his father’s house. The freaky, hippy health-concoction in his beer fridge. The fact he’d more or less got his affairs in order before …

Grant took a deep breath.

He’d even waited until Kate was away before taking his life. He glanced at the face, so serious with concentration, watching the road ahead. Had Leo not wanted such a gentle woman to find him? To discover the horror? He was willing to bet big bucks that his father wouldn’t have expected his only son to find him, either, in a million years. Grant had a sinking suspicion he’d been counting on his old mate Alan Sefton to do the honours.

Cancer.

It had had nothing to do with Kate’s project or the land grab. Something very close to relief rushed through him, stumbling and falling over the latent grief still clogging his arteries. He should have been here. He should have made more than one call a year. He should never have let so many years go by. And neither should his father.

I see Leo staring back at me. Were they truly that similar? Would he end up grumpy and alone and sick enough to end it all? There wasn’t much else stopping him, just his work. Just the same rigid discipline about his job that his father had had. That Kate had.

He cleared his throat and turned to the woman whose hands gripped the steering wheel brutally. She knew, first hand, how he was feeling yet she hadn’t taken advantage of his weakness. She’d just been there for him. Is that the kind of quality his father had seen in his young friend’s character?

He cleared his throat. ‘Kate, thank you.’

Her eyes flicked to his, wide and anxious. ‘How are you?’

He nodded slowly. ‘I’ll survive.’ She wanted to ask something. He could see it in the way her teeth worried her lips. ‘Go ahead, Kate. Ask.’

The words practically exploded from her. ‘Did it not say on the certificate—the cause of death? Or did you not see it?’

His chest tightened up. Could he tell her? She and Leo had been friends. ‘I saw it,’ he answered carefully.

‘Yet tonight was still a surprise?’

Anxiety ravaged her sweet face. Knowing would only hurt her, and lying couldn’t hurt Leo. Or him; not any more. Yet he couldn’t let her go on feeling bad for letting the truth slip, either. He reached over and slid a hand onto her cool arm.

‘I’m glad you told me. Imagine if you hadn’t …’

Her brows dropped and she thought about that. ‘I just … I would have approached it so much more carefully if I’d known. Obviously,’ she finished flatly and shook her head.

‘It hasn’t been the best night for you—assaulted by the local fishing mafia, accosted by me and now digging your way out of the deepest of social faux pas.’

Kate’s laugh shriveled. ‘Oh no; that’s pretty typical of a Dickson night out. It’s why I prefer to stay in.’

‘Well, looks like you’ve got your wish.’

She hit the indicator and turned off the highway into Tulloquay’s long access-road.

‘It feels weird, coming here at night.’

But also strangely right. Grant had the sudden flash of them driving home from a night out at the community centre, grey and old, chatting about town affairs, about their grandchildren. Their hands old and weathered, tightly entwined. Just like his father must have always wished for with the wife he had lost so young.

And then to lose a son, too …

They didn’t speak until Kate pulled up in front of the house. She killed the ignition and then turned to peer at him from the half-shadows. ‘What did he die of, Grant?’

Damn her intuition and her curiosity. ‘Kate …’

‘I’ve been thinking about it all the way home. I assumed it was the cancer—but there should have been hospitals, a decline. His lungs weren’t really any worse when I saw him the week before.’ Beautiful brown eyes appealed to him. ‘Please, Grant. I know you must not want to talk about it but the question is going to eat at me.’

He studied her hard. No matter what he said, she was going to sit on her guilt for not being here. That Leo had died alone. The same guilt he was nursing. ‘It was the cancer, Kate.’

Tears filled doe eyes. ‘You’re lying—which means it was worse. Was it his heart? Did something happen to him? Was he hurt?’

Her anxiety was only going to increase if he didn’t put an end to this. He tightened his lips and swore inwardly. ‘Did Leo ever lose stock?’

Thrown off-balance momentarily, she blinked back at him. ‘Sure. Sometimes. He hated finding them out in the paddock, suffering. He hated shooting them, too, but he did what he had to do.’

‘He never could abide anything suffering. Anyone.’

Kate frowned and waited for him to continue, but in his steady, loaded silence her beautiful face blanched and the liquid wash of her eyes spilled over as she pieced together Leo’s puzzle.

‘He did what he felt he had to do, Kate.’

She fought so hard to keep from losing it in front of him, almost visibly willing those tears back under the privacy of her eyelids. But she couldn’t sustain it; they leaked, unauthorised, down her face. Grant cursed and reached out to gently curl his hand around the back of her neck. She let herself fall into the support of his shoulder. Immediately his nostrils filled with the scent of clean, unadorned woman. Even going into town, Kate hadn’t broken the no-perfume rule. Her hands slipped up to control her descent, one curling around his bicep and the other bracing on his chest. They burned through his wool-blend sweater and branded his skin, setting off a chain reaction of tingles.

But his hormones weren’t his priority right now.

He threaded his fingers through the thickness of her hair and pressed her against his shoulder, murmuring comforting sounds. She wasn’t a sobber, but her silent tears were almost worse. They matched her perfectly—stoic and dignified.

‘I should be comforting, you,’ she mumbled between tight shudders.

‘It is comforting, knowing he had a friend who would cry like this for him. Honour him.’

She sniffed. ‘I hate that he felt he had to do it, but I understand why.’ Grant stroked her hair. ‘Maybe it was the last thing he could control—how he left us?’

Us. That sounded way too good on Kate’s tear-puffed lips. His eyes lingered on them—fuller and redder than usual—even in the half-darkness.

The tears surged back. ‘He was so difficult,’ she squeezed out. ‘But so lovely.’

‘I know,’ he murmured against her hair.

Except he didn’t. ‘Lovely’ was not a word he ever would have associated with his father.

‘It’s like losing Dad all over again,’ she croaked.

Nothing she said could have cut him more deeply. Here was a woman who would give anything to have her father back, to have a farm to call her own, to have sheep and alpacas and … bloody seals. And he’d thrown it all away decades before, as though it had no value.

To him, it hadn’t.

‘I was born into the wrong family,’ he murmured, not really expecting her to hear. She curled her fingers tighter in his sweater and it was strangely reassuring. ‘I bet you would have traded with me in a heartbeat.’

She nodded silently against his chest. His next words crawled out of his deepest subconscious. ‘I might have stayed if you’d been here.’ Tear-streaked eyes raised to his, but she didn’t speak. She just studied him in that all-seeing way of hers. His explanation was more for his own benefit than hers. She wasn’t asking anything of him, not tonight. ‘Having someone who I could connect with—identify with—it would have helped.’

‘Helped how?’ It was more hiccup than anything else.

‘Made me feel less alien.’

Her sympathetic hand slid up to his shoulder. ‘You didn’t feel like you belonged here?’

Not until this month. ‘Never.’

Kate sighed, long and deep. ‘So sad. We’ve both lost so much of our lives.’

Somewhere deep in his brain he knew what she meant—that they’d both suffered loss. But the words echoed around the car, blew a trail through her loose hair, mingled with the wholesome scent of Kate, and all he could think about was not wasting one second more …

His left hand cupped the back of her head more comfortably and his right pressed against her cheek and tipped her face up towards his. He knew then that he’d been thinking about this for days—specifically not thinking about this for days. About how she would feel. How she would taste.

How she would react.

But she surprised him. Although her body stiffened against his initially, she didn’t pull back as he lowered his mouth gently onto hers. It was soft and salty from her tears, but full, honest and courageous like the woman it belonged to.

Kate’s head spun a lurching figure of eight at his closeness. His strong, distinctive cologne seemed to shimmy around her like scent released from the heat of a candle. She held herself suspended, lips gently parted against his first touch, assessing, and then leaned infinitesimally towards him, gently increasing the pressure of their kiss. Heat burst through her and crackled out to lick at the place their lips joined. Her mouth slid across his, tasting, breathing his air, melding perfectly.

He nipped and nibbled, sucking her bottom lip between his, then releasing it to slide across the neglected top lip. His big hands forked up through the waves of her hair, messing it around her face until it hung, wild and natural, like it sometimes did at the end of a long day on the rock-shelf.

She pulled back to gaze into eyes darkened with green heat. His thumbs learned the delicate line of her cheekbones and rubbed the last of the tears from her damp lashes.

She sucked in a breath to speak, but he slid one thumb down to silence her lips, closing the gap between them and taking her mouth with his again. It blazed against hers, his tongue hot, confident and branding its possession. Her skin burned wherever it rubbed against his which, squeezed as they were in the front of his car, was just about everywhere.

Her breath grew thin and desperate deep in her chest, but freeing herself for air was the last thing on her mind. Grant’s hands slid down over her shoulders and found their way to the sides of her ribs and under her arms. Then he pulled her more comfortably against him, sliding himself sideways to give her more room, freeing her to climb that masculine chest and latch on more firmly to his talented lips.

Heavy eyes simmered into hers and Kate suddenly grew shy, uncertain. His large, work-roughed hand stroked up her throat to rest under her chin and encourage her gaze back to his.

‘You will always look like this to me,’ he murmured thickly, kissing her brow, her jaw, her lips. Making her lashes fall to her cheeks. ‘Wild. Hot.’

Kate let her head fall back and Grant mouthed his way up her throat. Just as well she was lying half-across him, because there was no way she could have kept standing. Feelings she’d begun to think she’d forfeited for life came surging forth in sharp, exquisite lances deep in her body. Her fists clenched high on his open-necked sweater, giving her strength but letting her fingers spread to tangle in the scattered hair there, against the furnace that was his flesh. The forbidden feeling of the skin she’d tried not to ogle that first day made her smile and Grant’s lips moved instantly to the deep dimple that formed on her left cheek.

His tongue dipped in and out, his smooth teeth sliding against her cheek as he matched her smile. ‘I’ve wanted to touch those since I first saw you.’

Not that she wasn’t unexpectedly thrilled to hear such sentiments but, while she was busy making sense of words, she wasn’t drowning in the pleasure sensations of his body moving against hers. His mouth feasting on hers. She speared her fingers up into his short hair and forced his head back so she could glare into his eyes meaningfully. ‘That’s lovely, but you want to talk or you want to kiss?’

His answer was practically a growl.

And then it was on—both of them clamouring for the best position, the most access, surging, devouring and consuming each other. Grant reached down to the side of his seat and activated the recliner and both of them mechanically lowered until they stretched almost into the back seat. Kate lay across Grant’s chest, along his straining body; his hands had free access, at last, to the rest of her. They slid up and down her length, from shoulder to hip, rib to thigh, learning her contours. Blood rushed, thick and molten, through her arteries keeping her hyper-sensitive cells acute and full of oxygen, and keeping her grey matter thoroughly distracted about what the rest of her was doing.

And with whom.

Then suddenly, with no warning, the vehicle shot forward with a lurch.

Kate managed to suck in a breath and expel a scream at the same time. Grant yanked on the handbrake, crunching into Kate’s hip painfully, and then jammed the automatic gearstick into park position. Dimly, between the heaving breaths she drew in, she realised she’d pushed the automatic vehicle into gear with her hip as she crawled more fully onto Grant’s prone body.

Oh my God …

Heat surged into her cheeks as the full picture they presented finally dawned on her: sprawled out in his Jeep like a pair of sexed-up teenagers, her dress hiked up, shoes kicked off. She reached blindly for the steering wheel, anchored herself to it to haul herself back into the driver’s seat and then sat, puffing, as Grant moved his seat back up into the upright position.

Reality ran in rivulets down the car’s windows where they’d seriously fogged them up in the hot, sultry minutes that had just passed. Kate cracked her door open and sucked in the cold night air. There were two ways out of this and neither of them offered much in the way of a dignified exit. She could cry foul and leap from the car with indignation or she could be flippant about what had just happened and try to extract herself with as much dignity as possible, as though she did this kind of thing every day.

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