Никки Логан – A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return: A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return (страница 3)

‘To whom?’

‘To science. To understanding the role of predators on fish stocks. To the future ecology of the oceans.’

‘To you.’

Her chest rose and fell twice. ‘Yes, to me. This is my life’s work.’

And all she had.

His half-smile, half-snort managed to be engaging and offensive at the same time. ‘Play that tune in a few years when life’s work means something more than five or six years.’

‘You’re not exactly Methusela. What are you … forty?’ She knew he wasn’t.

His nostrils flared. ‘Thirty-five.’

Young, to be the success the internet hinted he was. He must have been very driven. She appealed to that part of him. ‘When you were younger, didn’t you care about something enough to give up everything for it?’

Grant glared and buried his paint-encrusted hands in his pockets. When he’d been young all he could think about was getting away from this farm and the certain future that had felt like a death sentence. Finding his own path. It had taken him the first ten years to realise he hadn’t found it. And the next nine waiting for some kind of sign as to which way to go next.

That sign had come in the form of a concerned, late-night call from Castleridge’s mayor that his father had missed the town’s civic meeting and wasn’t answering his phone or his door. He’d driven a three-hour drive in two and they’d broken his father’s door down together.

Grant stopped short of the door in question—newly replaced, newly painted—and let Ms Kate Dickson walk ahead. Without her destroyed jacket, her opaque crème blouse hid little as the Western Australian light blazed in the doorway. Her little power-suit had given him a clue to the fit, lean body beneath. Now here was exhibit A in all its silhouetted glory.

His gut tightened.

Not that she’d played it that way. Her attire was entirely appropriate for a business discussion. Professional. His shirt had revealed more than hers, even though she had cleavage most women in her position would have been flashing for leverage. It had felt positively gratuitous as her eyes had fallen on his exposed chest. He certainly wasn’t dressed for company.

Then again, she wasn’t invited, so she’d have to take what she got. ‘Don’t ask me to empathise with you, Miss Dickson.’

‘Ms!’

‘Your life’s work destroyed my father.’

The sun was too low behind her for him to see whether she lost colour at that, but her body stiffened up like the old eucalypts in the dry paddock. She took an age to answer, low and tight. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

She seemed genuinely thrown for a moment. Her blouse rose and fell dramatically and his conscience bit that he’d struck that low a blow. He’d only just stopped short of saying ‘took my father’s life’.

But that was a secret for only three people.

She ran nervous hands down her skirt and it reminded him instantly of the soft feel of her legs under his hands just moments before. He shoved the sensation away.

Her voice, when it came, was tight and pained. ‘Mr McMurtrie, your father was a difficult man to get to know, but I respected him. We had many dealings together and I’d like to think we finally hit an accord.’

Accord. More than he’d had with his father at the end. All they’d had was estrangement.

‘The suggestion that my work—the work of my team—may have contributed to his death is …’ She swallowed hard. ‘For all his faults, your father was a man who loved this land and everything on it. He came to care for the Atlas colony in the same way he cared for his livestock. Not individually, perhaps, but with a sense of guardianship over them. Responsibility. I believe the seals brought him joy, not sadness.’

‘Wishful thinking, Kate?’

She turned enough that he could see the deep frown marring her perfect face.

He struck, as he was trained to. ‘My father was served a notice just a month ago that said sixty square-kilometres of coastland was to be suspended while its conservation status was reconsidered—a two-kilometre-deep buffer for the entire coastal stretch. That’s a third of his land, Kate.’

Her body sagged. She chose her words carefully. ‘Yes. I was aware of the discussions. Aware our findings were being cited as—’

‘Then it should be no surprise to you that it might have pushed him—’

Grant clamped his mouth shut, suddenly aware of what it might do to a person to be told they were responsible for someone’s suicide. Someone like Kate. Especially when he didn’t know that for a fact. Yet. ‘That it might have stressed him unduly.’

Her nod was slow, her face drawn. ‘If it wasn’t what he wanted, yes, I could imagine. But he was working with us.’

For what reason, only his father would know. But Alan Sefton had a thorough and detailed will sitting in his office, completed just weeks before Leo’s death, that gave Grant responsibility for Tulloquay. And that will didn’t say one single word about seal protection or participating in research. And, where Grant came from, legal documents like that spoke infinitely louder than words.

‘There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that my father would have willingly signed over one third of his land to a bunch of greenies. He loved this farm.’

Her eyes dropped. ‘He was not a man to do anything by halves.’

It dawned on him finally that his father and this woman had had some kind of relationship. Not conventional, he was sure—his father just wasn’t that easy to get on with—but her shock on the telephone and her sadness now finally registered. And his own grief and long-repressed anger lifted just enough for him to see how the passing of Leo McMurtrie might impact a young woman who’d spent several days a week for two years on his farm.

But he couldn’t let compassion get the better of him. That was probably what his father had done in the end—compassion and a healthy dose of male paternalism. He looked again at the small, naturally beautiful woman before him. Possibly male something else.

And look what it had led to.

He stiffened his back. ‘The moment probate goes through, your team needs to find somewhere else to do your study. Ask some of the farmers up the coast for access.’

‘You don’t think I would have done that rather than negotiate with your father for so long? This site is the only one suitable. We need somewhere accessible that allows us to get quickly between the seals and the water. The cliff faces to the north are even less passable.’

‘Then you’ll have to get creative. The moment it’s in my power, I’ll be closing my gates to your seal researchers. Fair warning.’

Even without being able to clearly see her face against the glare, he knew she was staring him down. ‘Warning, yes. But fair? For all his faults, your father was at least a man of integrity.’

She turned and gracefully crossed the veranda, down the steps to her beat-up old utility truck. Hardly the sort of vehicle he would expect a beauty to travel in. She slid in carefully and swung her long legs modestly in before quietly closing the door.

In that moment he got his first hint as to why his father might have relented after a year of pressure. Not because she’d used her body and face to get her way … but because she hadn’t.

Kate Dickson was an intriguing mix of brains, beauty and dignity and she clearly loved the land she stood on.

No wonder his father had caved. It was exactly what he had loved about Grant’s mother.

CHAPTER TWO

STRIPPING bare in an open paddock was the least of Kate’s concerns. The looming threat of every visit being her last made her suddenly want very much to visit her seals. Just socially, despite the timing being wrong.

Wrong shoes, wrong clothes, wrong time of day. But she was doing it anyway.

These animals were the most stable thing she’d had in her life in the past few years and the idea of losing them filled her mouth with a bitter taste.

An arctic gust blew in off the Southern Ocean as she peeled off her ruined skirt and blouse and hauled her wetsuit on in their place—the closest she’d ever get to being a seal, albeit twenty kilos too light. No wonder sharks sometimes mistook surfers for their favourite blubbery food-source when they were in full wetsuit. She’d relied on the same confusion to get closer to the Atlas colony the first time.

On a usual working day she ditched the wetsuit for serviceable, smelly overalls, about the most comfortable thing ever invented—warm, dry and snug. But also the least attractive.

Unless you were a male wool-sack.

Her beat-up old utility gave her the tiniest bit of privacy against the baleful stares of thirty sheep that scattered like freckles across the dry, crunchy paddock. It was not really suitable pasture for sheep grazing, but they had a ready food source in feed stations dotted around the farm. They were more interested in the engagement and social aspects of grazing as a flock than in what little nutrition the salt-stiffened grass afforded.

The sheep had seen her half-naked plenty of times and were about as uninterested as the rest of her team to whom boundaries, and gender, meant nothing. Sifting through seal vomit for six hours a day had a way of bringing a team closer together. But sift they did, and then they studied it. Such a glamorous life; no wonder gender and modesty came to mean nothing to any of them. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually felt like a woman.