A Kiss to Seal the Deal (11 page)

His face went from freshly closed to ancient granite in a blink. ‘What?'

‘The data logger confirmed it. Early this morning the TDR
captured a range of diving behaviours from Stella, but then it started recording unusual variations.'

His jaw hardened impossibly further. ‘Variations?'

‘A sharp climb above sea level, then a long flat period, then a sharp drop again. All five seconds apart, so that tells me the TDR was dry.' She leaned forward. ‘In fact, it hasn't been wet since very early this morning; the sensors never recorded moisture.' She paused for effect.
‘Any.'

They both knew the place he said he'd found it was the better part of a puddle.

He clenched his teeth hard enough to see high in his jaw. ‘What are you suggesting?

‘I'm not suggesting anything. I'm trying to make sense of the data. The data tells me that the TDR didn't wash up at Dave's Cove.'

‘There's probably an error.'

‘Twenty grand's worth of equipment doesn't make errors.'

Grant surged to his feet and moved to the kitchen to refill his glass. ‘Careful, Kate. I might start to think you're calling me a liar.'

Kate followed him, tucking her trembling fingers out of view and peering up at him, but held his gaze. ‘Whether you lied or not doesn't interest me. What interests me is
why
you felt the need to.'

His eyes hardened and his arms folded across his chest. ‘I assume you have a hypothesis, doctor.'

She smiled, delighted for once to see him so thoroughly on the back foot. ‘Why, yes I do, thanks for asking.' Then she got down to business. ‘Returning the TDR makes very little operational difference to our project beyond the financial impact of having to repay twenty big ones unexpectedly. Thank you again for that, by the way.'

He tipped his glass at her, though his mouth remained tight. His voice was pure sarcasm. ‘You're welcome.'

But she didn't let it faze her; the thrill of the hunt was too
great. ‘So I figure there must be something important about the way you found it that you didn't want me knowing. Something that would help us.' She tilted her head, thinking out loud. ‘Something that would damage your plans to sell.'

His jaw flexed. His silence screamed.

‘No.' Kate gasped as she realised. ‘Not the
way
you found it. The
place
.'

She locked on fast to Grant's gaze. He stared her down but she saw the faintest hint of colour stain his jaw. Her eyes narrowed. ‘You're blushing.'

He towered over her. ‘That's a sexual response, not an admission of guilt. I'm having a bit of a norepinepherine reaction of my own right now.' He leaned in closer. ‘You're very hot when you're thinking.'

She couldn't help the stumble—more of a blink, really—but regained her visual hold. ‘You're trying to distract me.'

His eyes positively smouldered. ‘When I begin to try you'll know it.'

Certain she'd be matching his flush, Kate held on for dear life, recognising that this moment mattered. What happened in this kitchen was going to change their flawed, awkward relationship for better or worse. She really hoped it was better.

Grant stepped up hard against her. His eyes simmered into pools of molten green. ‘Make me, Kate. Make me try. I haven't had this much fun in years.'

The heat spread downward from her cheeks, pouring over all her most sensitive points as he brought out the big guns of distraction. His hand lifted to tangle in her hair. Every part of her tingled, especially her intuition.

It had never, ever failed her.

Her eyes shot wide open. ‘Oh my God…'

Grant backed her into the fridge. ‘You should see your pupils, doctor. They're the size of dinner plates.' His breath tickled her hair.

‘You found the breeding site,' she whispered as he lowered
his face close. ‘Didn't you?' Her lungs started to heave, desperate for air. She knew she was right but needed to hear it. ‘Didn't you?'

His next words would make or break her career; every part of her throbbed from anticipation. From excitement. From raw, senseless attraction. Grant rested his forearm against the fridge door and leaned on it until his mouth paused dangerously close to her ear.

He stood frozen there for an eternity.

Then he pressed his blazing, soft mouth to her ear and she struggled to remain upright. She felt his lips open and the rush of breath as he whispered.

‘Yes.'

Her legs did give out then and he caught her with his free arm. Everything she'd worked for, everything she'd dreamed of accomplishing clicked into place as her arms snaked up around Grant's neck to hold herself upright. He consumed the flesh of her throat, her ear, biting and mouthing his way. She hung on for dear life, the sensual bliss of his mouth and the intellectual buzz of this amazing gift keeping her weak.

‘If I'd known you'd react like this I would have told you immediately.' He pressed into the ear that was rapidly becoming the centre of her sensory universe.

She held her own but barely. ‘No, you wouldn't. You wanted to drag it out longer.'

His chuckle was like the most wicked chocolate ice-cream, except hot against her cheek.

She peeled herself out from under him. ‘Seriously. You found it?'

He took a huge breath in and blew it out slowly, looking resigned to the inevitable. ‘I did.'

‘When can we see it?' Anticipation zinged hot and bubbly around her body.

‘I'll have to think about that.'

Disappointment thunked, dull and heavy, at her feet. ‘What's
to think about?' He couldn't mean… ‘You're not seriously going to keep it to yourself?'

‘If I hadn't returned the recorder you'd be none the wiser.'

Kate stared. It was true. He could have tossed it out to sea and said nothing. ‘Why did you return it?'

He shrugged. ‘Because you needed it.'

‘I need this more.'

His wide shoulders slumped. ‘I know.'

‘Grant…'

‘I'm going to need some time, Kate. You understand what you're asking me to do.'

To kill his hopes of selling Leo's farm.
‘You don't
need
to sell it, Grant. You only want to.'

‘You don't
need
the breeding site, you only want it. Your research will stand without it.'

‘It's not the same.'

‘It's exactly the same.'

Kate stared, long and lonely. The excitement that had blazed through her so gloriously congealed into a thick, disappointed glug. In him. In herself. That he could seriously wave her life's dream under her nose and then just whip it away. That he could possibly barter with her future. But he wasn't playing; this wasn't sport for him.

It was business. And when it came to business, she was woefully outclassed

‘We can't both have what we want, can we?'

His eyes hardened. ‘Doesn't look like it, no.'

Of course not. Why had she expected any different? Had she thought that the universe was going to cut her a break just because she'd met someone that filled her with life? Just because she'd let her heart start to thaw?

What a timely reminder of the reasons she never let herself care for someone like this.

Life had a way of ripping her away from anyone she dared to care about.

Maybe she should be grateful that it happened sooner rather than later with Grant. Before she gave any more of her heart and soul to someone who didn't deserve it.

She carefully placed her wine glass on the counter and turned back, as composed as she could be. ‘I think I've lost my appetite. Enjoy dinner.'

She turned for her bedroom and steeled herself to keep walking in case he called her back. But she needn't have bothered. When he spoke it wasn't to say
Kate, come back, I'm an idiot.

It was simpler, more brutal; whispered into the night.

‘Happy birthday, Kate.'

K
ATE
sagged back onto the ratty old swing chair she'd found out the back in a shed. For some reason she felt very at home in the lab, and in this chair—infinitely more than inside the house with Grant, as though she was in safe hands in here. As though she was surrounded by friends instead of the enemy. She shook her head. Both those thoughts were crazy.

The pressure was definitely getting to her.

Grant was just a man who wanted something a pole away from what she wanted.

She spun round and round in the chair, the hypnotic movement helping her think, helping her remain objective. It was Sunday, supposedly a day of rest, but when the clock was ticking rest could wait. Most of her team had families and so she released them on Sundays and worked alone in the lab to get ahead on processing the samples and analysis of the TDR data. Before now, it had been the lab at the university. But now she only had to walk down the hall from her bedroom and she was there. There should be no reason for this lethargy, this inability to focus. She had an esky full of samples and a rogue TDR awaiting attention.

And absolutely no inclination to do it.

Just one more thing to curse Grant for. She'd lain awake long after the moon had passed overhead, for the second night in a row, her thoughts vacillating between exhilaration that he'd identified the breeding site and memories of the feel of his hot
breath against her ear as he confessed to it. The way his hips had pushed hers back into the fridge. How she'd been excited, not threatened. How she'd wanted him to touch her for ever.

How it had come so close to distracting her from his discovery. Would he have told her if she hadn't pushed, if his body language hadn't given him away?

She lowered her feet to change the chair's direction.

Could he truly withhold the location of the breeding site? Would he turn out to be that kind of man?

Not for the first time, she wished the TDR recorded position as well as time and depth, then she wouldn't be reliant on a man with an agenda to find the breeding site. She could try and triangulate the location by the number of time readings that the TDR was above sea level, but how fast had he been driving? How slow? Did he go anywhere else first? The two differentials alone were no use to her beyond recording Stella's hunting and foraging activity before the TDR came off.

Once again, Grant held all the cards. Except this time he'd made sure she knew about it.

Maybe he was that kind of man.

He'd accused her of having a terrible poker face; his must be absolutely perfected, because he'd given nothing away yesterday out on the water. They'd probably stopped at the breeding site and he'd never so much as twitched.

More and more was slipping out of her influence. Just like when she'd been twelve and the world was happening to her, not with her.

She snagged the map off the bench top and stared at the long stretch of Tulloquay coast. Which one of the thirty or so pock-marks in the cliff face on the map was the one? There were six marked with an asterisk indicating likely seal territory, yet only one had any animals on it at all. Without Grant, it could take weeks to find it.

A few months ago that wouldn't have bothered her much. She'd learned to be extra patient where seal research was
concerned, but she no longer had the luxury of patience. The calendar had now turned onto the same page as the big, ugly red circle marking E-day: Eviction Day. That meant less than a month and her access to the Atlas colony would be shut off, for good.

She let the chair slow to a halt and then reversed direction absently.

Unless she could negotiate with the future buyers. It was possible, but why would new owners be any less concerned about conservation restrictions than Grant was? She'd got lucky with Leo. She'd come along at a time when he was reassessing many of his life's decisions, and, unwittingly, she'd brought him the one thing that he couldn't have said no to.

At the time Leo's deep knowledge about the fishing stocks in the region hadn't seemed unusual. But, in hindsight, she'd never met another landholder who was so informed about the stocks of a species beyond his fence lines. Maybe Leo saw her project as his last opportunity to make a difference to the industry that—if John Pickering was to be believed—he'd secretly wished to be part of.

Maybe it was true. Kate had wondered if his heart was truly in agriculture. No matter what his son thought, Leo McMurtrie had hardly been Super Farmer. He'd grazed his sheep too hard on the more arid parts of his property and he hadn't planted the right tree species to reduce salinity. And after his diagnosis he'd started to run his stock levels down and spend less and less time out in the paddocks.

Kate sucked in a breath and halted her relentless spinning.

And he'd spent more and more time sitting on the blustery bluffs of his coastal paddocks staring out to sea.

‘Oh, Leo!' How sad if he'd never felt free to pursue his true calling.

‘Kate?'

She spun towards the voice that had the same inflection
as his father's. The same fatalistic sadness in his gaze. Grant stared at her long and hard then held the door open for her.

‘Come on.' He was reluctant, resigned. ‘I've got something to show you.'

Her stomach lurched.
The breeding site.

Heart in mouth, Kate pushed out of Leo's chair, silently pressed past Grant in the doorway and led the way out into the sunlight. Part of her was excited by the possibility of seeing the breeding site, another part—almost a bigger part—was heart-in-mouth that maybe, just maybe, the man she'd just convinced herself was irredeemable was about to do the right thing.

 

The right thing
turned out not quite the way she'd expected. They drove the length of the coastal strip, right along what she estimated was the inland perimeter of the proposed conservation buffer-zone. He talked about his memories as a child, of what used to fill the now-empty paddocks, of growing up on the farm before he learned to hate it. The more he spoke, the harder it was to stay angry at him. Her body ate up his closeness. Her starved heart gorged on clues to the person he'd been.

‘It was a great life for a boy,' he murmured from behind the shelter of his dark sunglasses, still careful after the way last night had ended. ‘Wildlife. Space. Adventure.'

‘Danger?'

He smiled. ‘Definitely danger. And if I couldn't find any I'd make my own.'

‘It's a pity you never had siblings to play with.'

‘Mum got sick before they tried for another.'

‘How old were you when she died?'

‘Three.'

A sharp pang bit deep and low at the slight crack in that single word. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘Me, too. A lot might have been different if she'd lived.'

‘Different how?'

He shrugged. ‘If there'd been other kids. Or if I'd been older
when she died. Maybe Dad wouldn't have fixated so much on me. The farm.'

Grant inheriting the farm.

‘Maybe she could have been a cushion between us as I grew up,' he went on. ‘There was a lot I loved about my early life here.'

‘But not enough to stay?'

He shook his head, almost invisibly. ‘I wanted more than the farm. I wanted more than some land to define who I was.'

‘You think that's how Leo defined himself?'

‘I know he did. It was his whole world.'

Yet he'd harboured a secret love for the ocean. ‘What if it wasn't?'

Those dark glasses locked onto her. ‘What are you saying?'

‘I'm just asking the question. What if he really wanted to work at sea, doing what he loved?'

Grant pulled the Jeep to a halt and turned to her, sliding the glasses up. Revealing those fathomless eyes glinting with pain. ‘Fishing?'

Kate shrugged. ‘Maybe.'

‘What stopped him after I left?'

‘That's not a question I can answer. I wasn't there. What do you think?'

White tension showed at the corner of his mouth and the jade in his eyes seemed to darken. ‘I think it would suit you if I changed my mind about selling Tulloquay.'

The simple truth burned deep like a poker from the fire. But the fact he still thought she would trade on that, or that he would use that to distract her from this conversation…

Her breath shuddered. ‘It would make my job easier, yes. But so would a lot of things that I haven't done.'

‘Like?'

‘Like calling in favours at the Conservation Commission to get the application fast-tracked. Like letting them know I've
ID'd possible breeding sites.' She took a breath. ‘Like calling on Castleridge's council to halt the sale until our contract is concluded.'

A tic pulsed at the corner of his eye like a tiny heartbeat.

‘You didn't think I knew about that avenue?' she asked. He didn't answer. ‘I don't screw people over, Grant. I'm not one of your boardroom negotiations. I don't think that way.'

‘You don't want to protect your site?' The disbelief in his voice sliced even deeper.

‘I do. Desperately. But not enough to play dirty.'
Not enough to wound a lonely little boy grown into a shut-down man.

‘Exploiting available tools is not playing dirty. It's playing the game.'

‘In your world, perhaps. I'd rather sort this out the old-fashioned way.' One look told her what he imagined that to be. Heat roared into her cheeks. ‘Not that, either. A handshake. Like adults.'

‘How do you imagine we'll find a middle ground that we're both prepared to accept?'

‘I have no idea.'
Yet.
‘But I'm not prepared to do anything that forces your hand.'

His eyes briefly softened. ‘Trying to show me the error of my ways, Kate?'

‘No. I'd just rather you willingly do the right thing.'

‘What if the right thing for you is the wrong thing for me?'

Her breasts heaved with the chore of sucking in air. She'd asked herself this question over and over into the small hours of the morning. ‘Then you shouldn't do it.'

He squinted his disbelief. ‘Really? Even if you could force my hand with one phone call to Mayor Sefton?'

‘
Especially
because I could force your hand.' She tucked her hands together out of view. ‘That's not who I am. I lost my whole life when a road-train took away my choices. I'm not about to do that to someone else.'

Incredulous eyes blazed at her. ‘You liken this to losing your parents?'

Her breath was tight enough to ache. ‘Grant, this means a lot to you, or you wouldn't be fighting so hard. I don't have to understand it to recognise it.'

Silence fell thick and loaded.

Grant shook his head. ‘You're a strange creature, Kate Dickson.'

‘I know. But I'd like to think there are more people like me than…' Her words dried up.

‘Than like me? Is that what you were going to say?'

‘No. I was going to say than like the woman you think I am.'

He stared at her long and hard, to the point she wanted to squirm from the scrutiny. Then he simply turned to the steering wheel, slid the car into drive and moved off across the paddock on a sharp tangent towards the coast.

Kate sat quietly for the ten minutes it took to drive across the buffer to the coast, her trepidation growing. Without her map she had no hope of knowing exactly where they were. She'd been too sensitive to Grant's closeness on the way out to pay more attention to things like distances and landmarks. Out here, one bleached kilometre looked much like another.

He stopped the car and turned to her

Her heart raced. ‘What are you doing?'

‘I'm trusting you.'

She stared at him, her mind racing through the many ways this could be a trap.

‘I think I started trusting you a long time ago or else I wouldn't have told you about the site last night—no matter how good you smelled.'

Still she could say nothing.

He dropped his gaze to the dials on the dashboard then lifted it to meet her eyes once again. ‘I'm tired of being the bad guy, Kate. I spent the first part of my life being the kid
who disappointed his father, the next part being the man who abandoned his heritage and the most recent part being the guy who nails people to the cross contractually. I don't want to be the man who ruins your life, too.' Sincerity stained his pained glance. ‘So I'm abdicating the responsibility. Giving you the power.'

Kate's throat tightened up. ‘You're making
me
choose? What makes you think I won't just choose the seals?'

‘You're a scientist. I trust you to look at all the angles, weigh everything up and make the best decision.'

Her frown turned to a scowl. ‘You can't just opt out, Grant. I wanted…'

‘What?'

‘I wanted to give you the chance to make the right choice.'

‘To see if I failed or not? I've spent more than enough of my life being a disappointment to people, Kate.'

She had to choose. She had to make or break one of them. She wanted control of her life but…like this?

Careful what you wish for.

‘It might not even be the breeding site.' Ironic that she could even hope for that a little bit after all this time.

Grant cracked his door open and snapped off his seatbelt. He met her eyes. ‘Only one way to find out.'

Her eyes were as big as any child's on Christmas morning despite the new pressure Grant had given her. She knew she should probably strive for more professionalism, that clinging to Grant's arm was inappropriate at best. But she didn't care. Anticipation raced through her like a drug, drawing her focus to just one thing.

The seals.

She was about to find the missing piece of the puzzle. Cap off her research study. Get her future firmly back in her own hands.