A Kiss to Seal the Deal (13 page)

He practically blanched. ‘I won't let that happen. I'll tie it up in the contract.'

‘Who's going to sign a contract with that kind of encumbrance? You might as well put the buffer zone in.'

He pushed away from the rock face, from her, and dropped down onto the rock shelf. Kate scrabbled after him.

‘My father died trying to make Tulloquay a success, Kate. I won't undo all that work.'

‘Leo was going to allow the buffer.'

He shook his head and marched onwards. ‘No. He must have had a plan. He just didn't get to see it through.'

‘He was dying, Grant. Maybe he wanted to make something of his life before it was too late?'

Grant practically spat back over his shoulder. ‘He
had
a life. He was a farmer.'

And a father. Although he wasn't much good at either, it seemed. Her heart squeezed at what he didn't say.

‘According to John Pickering he was a closet fisherman! What if he was only running the farm because he felt he had to?'

Grant spun and she smacked straight into his angry, broad chest. ‘Kate, stop it. I know what you're doing.'

She frowned up at him. ‘What am I doing?'

‘Sowing seeds of doubt. Pushing for your project.'

‘The only thing I'm pushing for is for you to let go of this stupid obsession with Tulloquay's
destiny
and try and look at this situation rationally.'

She saw the words strike his soul the moment they slipped from her careless lips. His eyes frosted over. ‘Stupid?'

‘Grant, no, that's not what I—'

‘It was a mistake bringing you here,' he ground out starting off again, his long legs making short work of the horror climb back up the cliff path. ‘I should have known what choice you'd make.'

Oh, what perfect timing for a comment like that. Here on the path where she couldn't catch up with him, couldn't drag him to a halt and make him listen. The climb stole her breath anyway, so she hurried up the narrow, deadly path in silence. This argument was not worth plunging over the side for. But once they emerged at the top, shoved their way through the thick, nasty shrubs, she was free to respond. She lifted her voice over the buffet of the wind, spoke between heavy breaths. ‘I meant what I said, Grant. I will not force your hand. I just wanted you to see you had options.'

He turned back to her when he got to the Jeep. ‘After
everything you've just said you expect me to believe you're not going to use this information? The find of your career?'

Kate's stomach clenched. ‘No, I'm not. And, yes.' She knew her eyes would betray her if she let him see into them. How would he miss the feelings she was sure simmered visibly there? ‘I do.'

‘Why would I believe that?'

Tight, aching heat boiled up like reflux. ‘Because name me
one
time since we met that I've done a single thing that would be at home at one of your negotiating tables.'

‘You got yourself time. You got yourself the mayor as an ally. You got my father on side.'

‘I didn't
get
those things, Grant. I worked hard for them. Perfectly honestly.'

‘Then give me your word, if you're so honest.'

She froze.

He continued. ‘That your decision is not to go to the Conservation Commission with the breeding site. Your word, if you want me to believe it.'

‘Are you testing me, the way you tested your father?' Kate barrelled on. ‘Tell me, if I say nothing, do I pass the Grant McMurtrie loyalty test?'

His nostrils flared. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You walked away from Leo when you were sixteen, Grant. How long did you secretly wait for him to beg you to come back? How disappointed were you that he never did?'

His colour surged. ‘Kate, don't go there.'

But she was way beyond caring. ‘Why not? Either I betray you or I betray my team. Myself. The seals.' The very thought sickened her. ‘What do I possibly have to lose at this point?'

‘How about the lab? Your accommodations?'

‘Take them. They mean nothing compared to—' She only just caught herself in time.

‘Compared to?'

Her lab smock rose and fell with her heavy, silent breaths. ‘Compared to your belief in me.' It was a half-truth at least.

Grant didn't speak for an age. ‘Why is that so important to you?'

No way. She wasn't giving him that only to have him rip it out from under her they way he'd done with the breeding site, knowing she wouldn't use it against him. ‘Because I'm a good person, Grant. I'm just trying to find a solution that means neither one of us has to lose everything. But you're treating me like I'm a mega-corporation trying to screw you out of your fortune.'

‘This isn't about whether you're a good person or not.'

‘You know what? I
get
that you have guilt issues about Leo. I
get
that the two of you had a fractured relationship. I
get
that you've chosen a career which exploits your natural suspicion about everyone on this planet. But I'm asking you to trust
me
. Believe in
me…
'

Her voice cracked horribly on the last word and Kate snapped her mouth shut. She busied herself opening the door so that he wouldn't see the sparkle gathering in her eyes.

‘Kate…' His voice was low, cautious.

‘Just drive me home, Grant.'

He didn't. He sat there in silence for thirty agonising seconds, thinking. Finally, her eyes dragged up to his, as dry as she could make them.

‘That was quite a speech,' he said. ‘But it was missing something.'

Exhaustion dragged at her like a diving belt. ‘What?'

‘Your word.'

A sink-hole opened up below her, leaving her feet hanging perilously over a giant, dark void. Just like Grant McMurtrie's heart. A dozen back-paddock curses spun through her mind, gathered for a bonfire in her wounded chest: that he'd missed the implication of what she was saying. That he'd harbour such suspicion about her integrity. Her own personal ethics.

That he could possibly, for one moment, believe that she'd screw over someone she loved.

And she did. That had begun to dawn on her down on the rock shelf as she had filled her lungs with his smell. As he'd shielded her with his body. The absolute irony that she'd fallen for the one man she could never have. That
he
was what her soul should decide to come out of hibernation for.

For what good it did.

Her eyes sank, deadened, into her skull. Getting words past the football pressing out from inside her chest was going to be a challenge. ‘You have my word, Grant. I will not tell the Conservation Commission about the breeding site. I will not stall your sale. You will have everything you want.'

But she would be damned if she was going to leave it out of her research when this was over. It might be the only chance she and the seals ever got. And she would be damned if she was going to stay in the house of a man who held such a low opinion of her too. She'd sleep in her car. They were close enough to the shut-out date that the samples could sit on ice in her city lab until she had nowhere else to be but there.

There simply was no good reason to stay in Grant's orbit a day longer. And so many reasons not to.

She turned her face away from him and stared out of the window, swiping angrily at the single tear that defied her iron will.

She was done crying for the McMurtrie men.

For ever.

T
HE
offices of Castleridge Shire Council reminded Grant enough of corporate receptions everywhere to start his foot tapping a staccato on the tiled floor. The receptionist glanced pointedly at it for the third time. He pressed his business shoe flat and still.

Again.

A moment later an inner door opened and a middle-aged woman with a pile of files left, looking intensely relieved and just a little bit pleased with herself. It was a momentary reminder that to the rest of the world meetings like this one were something to get nervous about. Like Kate had been, the first time he'd met her. She'd practically rattled with nerves, but had hidden it bravely.

He'd been doing business for other people for so long he'd forgotten what it felt like to have something to lose himself.

The receptionist unfolded from her station to her feet, looking entirely thankful to see the back of Grant and his tap-dancing foot. ‘Mayor Sefton will see you now.'

You bet he will.
And he'd better have some answers. Still, Grant spared her his best receptionist's smile as he passed which went a long way to undoing the purse of her ancient lips.

‘Grant, good to see you.' Alan stepped out from behind his desk and extended his right hand for a shake while his left rested more casually on Grant's shoulder. Business with
heart—something else he wasn't used to. Maybe that was what made Alan a good mayor.

‘I was going to give you a call or come out and visit,' the mayor said. ‘See what you've done with the place.'

Grant slid into the comfortable single-seater across from the mayoral throne. That was the only word for it, a gaudy overly ornate thing that looked like the gold-sprayed macaroni art he'd done in third grade. The art that had sat on his father's fridge long after he'd stopped eating macaroni. The image struck him as incongruous against the rest of his childhood memories.

‘Nothing dramatic,' he said.

‘You define setting up a research lab as nothing dramatic?'

‘Small town.'

‘I hear everything.' Alan's body language may have been relaxed and his smile wide but Grant had a sense that he meant it. A man didn't survive this long in regional politics if he didn't have a thriving network of informants. ‘I'm pleased you decided to work with Kate instead of against her.'

‘I'm not working with her. It was just more practical. She has a lot to do.'

‘Was coming to her rescue in the Castleridge Arms practical too?'

Grant shook his head. ‘How long did that one take to get to you?'

Alan laughed. ‘Pretty sure you were still having dinner. I heard things got a bit personal. I'm glad you were there to pull Kate out. She would hate to have any of them see that they got to her.'

It was Grant's turn to laugh. ‘Kate was doing just fine on her own.'

‘Don't bet on it. I've never met a woman with better camouflage skills.' He shifted in the throne and Grant recognised the commencement of their official meeting. Even the mayor's voice changed. ‘So, what have you decided to do about Tulloquay?'

‘I'm selling it.'

Alan stared at him. ‘To whom?'

‘To whoever is prepared to run it as a going concern.'

The mayor nodded. His eyes stayed blank. ‘Could be hard to do with the buffer declaration.'

‘There will be no buffer decree.'

His brows lifted. ‘You seem confident.'

Kate had given her word. ‘I am.'

‘Then why are you here?'

‘As dad's executor, I'd like you to give me forty-eight hours' notice of the probate settlement. Give me a chance to get all my ducks in a row. I figure it'll take them about that long to finalise the documents after you sign them.'

Alan thought about it. ‘I'm sure as the sole beneficiary that's not an inappropriate request. But it's not going to buy you much time.'

‘Enough. I only need ownership to sign the final documentation. There's nothing stopping me getting the ball rolling.'

Alan stared at him. ‘You're going to put it on the market early.' It wasn't a question.

‘Already have.' He'd visited the estate agent before coming here, just in case Kate wasn't as good as her word. Just in case she wasn't the woman he'd convinced himself she was.

Tulloquay was officially for sale.

His gut had been hollow since the moment he'd put pen to paper, imagining Kate's face when the sign went up out on the highway.

‘And the two days?'

‘Will let me finalise documentation ready for my signature the moment Tulloquay passes to me.'

Alan frowned and folded his hands in his lap. ‘I guess I shouldn't be surprised.'

‘By what?'

‘By your haste to get rid of the place you hate.'

The place where he'd been born. Where his mother had died. Where he'd grown up. ‘I don't hate Tulloquay. If I hated it I'd
be putting a pesticide factory on it.' Kate's own words about a future buyer doing that echoed ominously in his ears. ‘I want Tulloquay to remain a farm. A
stock
farm,' he added, for good measure.

Alan laughed. ‘As opposed to…?'

He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Kate has some crazy idea of using the buffer zone to establish a wind farm. She wants to see a forest of turbines up along the coast.'

Alan sat bolt upright in his seat. ‘Really?'

Grant was tired of indulging the fantasies of everyone but himself. ‘Don't get excited, Mayor. I've already said no. There will be no buffer. There will be no wind farm.'

Regardless of the breeding site.

Regardless of Kate.

The mayor frowned. ‘Why not? It's a terrific use of the degraded land. And green-power initiatives like that come bundled with rehabilitation funding. You could revegetate the entire coastal strip.'

Was he the only person on the planet that wanted Tulloquay to keep its soul?

‘My father didn't work his fingers to the bone building a sheep farm for all his life only to have windmills erected all over his grazing land.'

Alan considered him silently. ‘Grant, you were little more than a boy when you left and your contact with Leo was so reduced in the years since. How are you so confident you know what your father wanted? You barely knew him.'

Grant curled his hands around the armchair. Another old buddy about to tell him what his father was actually all about. ‘I know enough. I know he said goodbye to my mother there. I know he tried to raise me in his image and hated that I wasn't.' He swallowed hard against the painful memories. ‘I know what he said the day I packed and left.'

I would trade you for her in a heartbeat.

Alan frowned. ‘He was angry.'

‘For the son I never was, I know. He resented everything about me. Being left to raise me, me having no aptitude for livestock. No interest. Me eventually leaving.'

The mayor shifted forward, his eyes softening. ‘Yes. It took him a long time to accept what you'd done. What he never had the courage to do.'

Grant's eyes dropped briefly, then found Alan's again. ‘What?'

‘That you left, son. That you'd had the gumption and self-belief to walk away from what you didn't want.'

An icy chill rattled through him. ‘Are you saying he didn't?'

‘You don't know?' Alan's frown doubled and then cleared as he realised, speaking almost to himself. ‘Of course you don't.'

‘I know about his cancer.'

The mayoral eyes folded. ‘Ah.'

But now was not the time for that discussion. ‘So what other skeletons were in Dad's closet?'

Sefton considered his words. ‘It was no secret around here how he felt about the hand life had dealt him. He lost your mother, then you.'

‘If that bothered him he never did anything about it. He never tried to change the situation.'

How disappointed were you that he never begged you to come back?
His stomach churned at the truth in Kate's hastily thrown out words. How could she read him so clearly when he barely recognised it himself? He'd waited days, then weeks, then eventually months for his father to make the first move. To call him up and ask him to come home. But he never had. He'd never got his wife back, but he'd traded his lost-cause son in without so much as a backwards glance.

‘No, he wouldn't have,' Alan continued. ‘He wasn't about to drag you back into a life you didn't want any more than he
did. But he still resented the hell out of you for making the hard choice, when he hadn't had he courage.'

What?

The word wouldn't come. He couldn't do more than form the very beginning of it on silent lips. A life you didn't want any more than he did.

Goosebumps bubbled up under his fine suit. ‘Dad wanted to be a fisherman.'

Alan's smile was bittersweet. ‘Perhaps you knew him more than I thought.'

‘Then why didn't he?'

‘Because his father raised him to be a farmer. It was expected.'

A whooshing sound swirled around each of the mayor's words. Escalating. Amplifying. Expected.

‘And he never stood up against
his
father, against the heritage,' Alan said. ‘And that ate at him his whole life, that he hadn't had the courage. And then a scrawny bit of a kid did what he'd been wanting to do his whole life.'

Oxygen had to elbow its way past the tightness of Grant's lungs. His father hadn't wanted to be a farmer. He'd never had the courage to walk away.

But his son had.

‘He wasn't angry at me?'

Alan's kindly eyes wrinkled at the corners. ‘No, son. He was angry at himself for a long, long time. And by the time he finally worked all his issues through the damage was too deep-seated to undo. He'd lost you.'

Grant sat ramrod straight in his chair, his heart sucking back into itself, as the mayor continued. ‘But he always had such satisfaction knowing what a success you were making of your life. How you'd turned your life into something you wanted.'

‘But why didn't he just give it all up? Become a fisherman when there was no reason not to?'

‘Because his father had worked all his life to build Tulloquay
up. He felt he couldn't walk away from all that his forebears had done. Everything they'd tried to make the farm.' Kind eyes softened. ‘Sound familiar?'

Grant swallowed hard.

His father had died admiring him for having the courage to stand up for what he wanted. Not hating him for it.

Not hating him.

He lifted his head. ‘Then why didn't he leave me instructions in his will, if he wanted Kate's buffer to go through? It would have saved everyone a heck of a lot of pain.'

Alan lifted his hands. ‘I tried to persuade him. But he didn't want to impose his wants and needs on you. He let you walk away from your only family years before rather than tie you to a life the way he'd been tied. Leaving you specific instructions would only have forced your hand.'

He hadn't failed. His father was disappointed with his own failings, not his son's.

Sorrow for a lifetime lost swamped over him like a tidal surge. Emotions he hadn't allowed for years all bubbled up from the mud that swilled around him and burst, fresh and raw. Every part of him ached.

‘I need to—'

He stammered to a halt and frowned. Where did he start? There was too much to think about. So many things to filter, dissect. A lifetime of misunderstanding to sift through, like Kate with her lanternfish ear-bones. His head came up as all of those thoughts, feelings and regrets all lined up and made a three-dimensional letter in his imagination.

The letter K.

His eyes fell onto Alan's patient ones. ‘I think I need to see Kate.'

 

‘Going somewhere?'

Grant filled the entrance to her lab—her ex-lab—large and rock-solid, as if he was part of the building. Amazing how
quickly she'd grown used to seeing him amongst all the technical equipment they used on this project. Equipment that now lay dismantled around her. Of course, he'd never actually been in, not since the day he'd helped her move. The door was usually as far as he came.

She'd been stupid not to see that for what it was—proof that he didn't really support her. Or her research. She barely paused before turning her focus back to the data-logger computer. Lucky she'd kept all the cable ties handy. Maybe on some level she knew she wouldn't be here long.

‘Coming here was a mistake,' she said. ‘I'm just correcting it.'

Behind her, his voice grew pensive. ‘You're leaving?'

She levered a recalcitrant cable back and forth, trying to prize it free. ‘You can't expect me to stay.'

‘Don't make any rash decisions, Kate.'

Pain lanced through her. ‘You think I'm overreacting?' The cable finally yanked away from its housing on her indelicate grunt. ‘I don't like being coerced.'

‘By who?'

She spun to face him, heart racing. ‘I believed you when you said you were tired of being the bad guy. I felt sorry for the man who'd view himself that way. I let you put the responsibility for the decision squarely onto me because I thought it would make it easier on you.'

She struggled against the tears that wanted to express her hurt, swallowing them back. ‘You dressed it up as trust but that was one-hundred-percent pure strategy. You
knew
I wouldn't do the wrong thing by you. You
knew
I wouldn't prioritise myself over you. And you were right.'

She slammed something valuable into its box without a care for what it was. ‘I'm not ashamed of that. I got my values from my parents and they are the one thing of theirs that I got to
keep. But it doesn't mean I don't realise when I'm being manipulated. It doesn't mean I like being backed against the wall by a shark.'