Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong

chapter FOURTEEN



THE season changed virtually overnight.

It happened that way every year, in the space of a fortnight the weather turned from tolerable to dangerous. No monsoon season was fun to ride out in a sunflower tent but, back in 2001, Cyclone Walter scalped the treetops off two-thirds of the island and killed hundreds of birds. She’d be unlikely to live through something like that if it happened while she was on the island.

The blow that Rob had worried about when he’d left a month ago came to nothing, as so many of them did. The one after that caused a little more difficulty and the one due this week...that was going to be a problem. Not for the eternal island but for the solitary human inhabiting it.

Time to get back to Cocos.

Every year this moment brought Honor a great sadness. Her research wound up for the year, the breeding season over, birds streaming off the island until next year, hollowed out turtle nests filled with rubbery, degrading shell husks. Leaving the crabs to pick over the dead and the decomposing—the detritus of so many thousands of lives cohabiting such a small space.

But this year was the worst.

Because this year was the last.

The letter that Mark-the-Boatman had delivered last month had seen to that. She’d shoved it damp and crumpled, back into the buoyancy sack as Rob’s boat had finally disappeared around the southern fringes of the atoll. And then she’d forgotten it. Literally.

There was nothing the world had to say that she’d wanted or needed to hear at that moment. She only wanted to suck back into herself and wrap her arms around her aching breast and stumble from moment to moment on automatic. It was only a week later—one long, excruciatingly dull week—that she remembered it was there at all. She’d ripped into it in a fit of frustration that the island seemed more claustrophobic without Rob on it, ready for a tiny whiff of what the real world was doing.

A job offer. A letter from her superiors acknowledging the importance and quality of her work, but—in a piece of sensationally typical Government bureaucracy—offering to relocate her to a different project. As though that was some kind of reward for toughing it out on Pulu Keeling for so long. As though she’d been doing it all for them.

She’d snorted and thrown it away. Only her no-rubbish policy meant it was there, still crumpled at the bottom of the buoyancy sack to retrieve, flatten out and reread another week later.

A long, hollow week after it had finally sunk in that Nate and Justin had officially left the island. That there was no longer the slightest sense of them in the whisper of the breeze through the canopy or echoes of their laughter in the clucking of the terns. As though they’d hitched a ride with The Journeyman when it came for Rob.

They were just...gone.

Honor had always imagined that letting them go would be a gradual process, marked by poetic events and poignant sorrow. Not just this absence one morning when she crawled out of her enormous tent. As though someone had thoughtlessly removed a ladder through which they used to climb up and into the window of her consciousness. Had they milled around two storeys below that window, waiting for her to notice? Had they finally moved on when they realised she was too engaged with a sexy shipwreck hunter to remember to look for them? How long had they been gone before she’d noticed?

Their footprints were still in her heart. She could call up at will the memory of Justin’s smell, Nate’s woollen warmth. But they no longer waited for her in the dark recesses of the pisonia thatch, or called to her across the sea. She’d stood at the very edge of the most north-eastern corner of the island, stretching her gaze out towards the deepest reaches of the Javan trench, hoping to catch a memory on the stiff sea breeze.

Nothing.

Her island was totally empty of everything but birds and crabs and guano and the shadow of a gentle, caring, ridiculously arrogant man, which she refused to admit existed but which haunted every inch of this place. And with no Nate, no Justin—no Rob—Honor couldn’t ignore any more how very little she had left.

You’ve got nothing inside you, have you?

He’d said it to strike back. To hurt. But he’d been exactly right. All she had was her work and... Nope, that was it. She had her work. Her eyes drifted shut. She didn’t even have that now. Hours of observation that used to whizz by now dragged like the ancient turtles that hauled their weight up the shore. The raucous chatter of ten thousand lagoon birds used to hypnotise her into a zen-like state but now it just grated on her re-ignited senses. The once comforting solace of silence had taken to screaming its isolation.

Rob had shaken her out of a four-year trance. And awake Honor felt very differently about a whole bunch of things here on the island, including how she felt in her own skin. And her own company. One advantage to being numb was that you didn’t feel the loneliness. The tranquil isolation that had protected her for so many years now...didn’t. Its work was done.

And so was hers.

Rob may have reawakened her but Parks Australia had provided her exit. In the buoyancy sack that left the island twelve days ago with the supply vessel lay a hand-written letter from her agreeing to enter discussions about possible relocation to a regional park management role.

Honor sighed, deep and overdue, and stared out across her lagoon. This was more than the end of an era. It was the beginning of one.

On cue, the white rumbly shape of The Journeyman appeared to the south. It lurched side to side like a cumbersome oceanic elephant in the high swell. Not a moment too soon, probably. Everything felt more like monsoon this week.

She stepped into the lagoon and started wading out with the first of four sacks. As soon as The Journeyman landed, she explained that she was pulling out early and Mark’s deckhand dived in and swam towards shore to help out with the larger number of bags, until at last Honor found herself hauling the last one up onto the reef, which stood under two feet of water thanks to the high swell. As soon as she passed it to Mark to be stowed on the boat, she turned and stared back at the piece of paradise she’d almost certainly never stand on again. Only ten or so people a year got permits for Pulu Keeling and she wasn’t likely to be one of them in the future. No matter how much Parks Australia valued her contribution. She’d had her chance at paradise.

Deep sorrow ached through her.

She turned back to The Journeyman and steeled herself for the inevitable difficult journey back to Cocos.

Ugh. Boats.

‘Here comes someone who’ll be sorry to have come all this way now that you’re heading back in...’ Mark’s cheerful chuckle drew her eyes around to the south.

The electric-blue of The Player matched the horizon exactly and made the cruiser almost impossible to see for a brief moment. Like one of the mirages she’d been having over the past month when she imagined the shape of a man out on the reef. Silhouetted at the entry to her camp. Crouched at the Emden memorial.

But this was no mirage. This was Rob.

Her gut coiled tighter than a snake preparing to strike. Mark was still speaking but she had no idea what about. Between the thrash of the ocean on the reef and the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears, she couldn’t hear a thing. The Player drew closer.

Why was he here? After everything she’d said. They’d said.

‘Looks like I’ll only be taking your gear this run...’ Mark said, close behind her.

The blue cruiser pulled up close to the side of The Journeyman and Rob turned his see-no-evil sunglasses in her direction.

‘Hop in,’ he shouted over the throbbing of his engine.

Honor didn’t move, although her heart flipped a full three-sixty in its cavity. God, he looked good. Panic filled her whole body but she managed to sound vaguely normal, conscious of Mark and his deckhand standing so close by.

‘Where are we going?’ she shouted across the noise of two engines and an ocean. And a pounding heartbeat.

He removed his sunglasses and blue eyes pierced hers. ‘Does it matter?’

It was all there, in that one sentence. Decision time.

Stay on the large, rumbling Journeyman and she could go back to Cocos, then Perth, then her new job in Broome. A fresh start with new ground rules. Moving at her own pace and controlling her environment as she built a new life.

But step onto The Player and she’d be putting her heart in the hands of a man she desperately wanted to believe in. A man who made her feel valued and appreciated and needed, but wild and free and...alive at the same time. A man who could love her. A man who she could love. A man who could destroy her with a word.

She looked back over her shoulder at the island where she’d been so safe.

And then she sat down on The Journeyman’s worn vinyl seat.

Rob’s face froze.

In a heartbeat she peeled off her reef-soles from her feet, threw a polite smile at Mark and leapt nimbly off the edge of his boat. Her feet landed on The Player’s gunnel and a moment later she steadied herself on the back of Rob’s driver’s seat. His face was unreadable but his back was ramrod straight as he slid the glasses back on, then expertly manoeuvred the boat away from The Journeyman, shoved the throttle forward and roared off, leaving a dramatic wake behind them.

It took ten minutes to get far enough away from the other boat to feel alone. Really alone.

Honor itched to touch him, just because she’d been doing it in her dreams for a month and here was a chance to actually do it for real. She stepped up behind him and put one hand on his shoulder. His back immediately tensed. She hesitated but laid her cheek against it anyway and closed her eyes, breathing deeply of his scent. It was that achingly familiar mix of salt and man.

‘Honor—’

‘I missed you.’ Three words, whispered straight from the heart. Words she didn’t think about or worry about or plan—she just pressed them directly into his sun-warmed T-shirt with her lips and hoped they’d soak straight into his consciousness.

He didn’t step away or complain but he didn’t quite fully relax either. He cranked The Player up to full speed and ploughed expertly through the rolling ocean swell. Honor kept her eyes firmly shut and she pressed harder into his back. She knew how far from land they must be getting but she told herself that Rob was with her. That she was safe.

And she believed it.

After an age, he throttled back, killed the engine and turned to her.

‘No anchor?’ she asked.

‘Sometimes it’s just nice to drift.’

Six weeks ago that phrase would have frozen her into a ball of terror. But he had a point. Way out here, there was nothing to hit, short of a whale. He moved towards her, then quietly pulled her into his arms. He didn’t kiss her or stroke her. Just held her.

Really, really tight, as if sensing the direction of her thoughts.

‘I thought you weren’t going to come for a moment there,’ his hard chest rumbled. He looked down at her carefully. ‘Why did you?’

Moment of truth. ‘Because you asked.’ She’d jump off this boat right now if he promised her it was safe. Trust worked like that.

His gaze was intense and deep. He ran a thumb over her lower lip and nodded but said nothing more.

‘Why did you come back to the island?’ she asked.

‘I couldn’t stay away. The weather was turning—’

‘You came because of the weather?’ Her scepticism had to be showing on her face.

He paused, then met her eyes. ‘No. I came because we have unfinished business. The weather was just a great way to convince myself.’ He stroked her hair back from her face and then put her away from him as though he’d suddenly remembered he had no right to touch her.

‘I was planning on shipping out the moment the repairs to The Player were complete. But, the night before, I went for a drink or two at the Cocos Hotel and met with the bar manager there. An older Malay woman called Irit. We got talking about Pulu Keeling and she told me it was the only one of the twenty-seven Cocos Islands she’d never set foot on. That no Malay women could go there because of the penunggu...’

‘The island’s spirit guardian. I know. That’s an old myth. She’s supposed to send terrible storms if a woman sets foot on her island.’

Rob nodded. ‘But then she told me the story of the penunggu and why she guarded the island so jealously. That she’d lost everything as a mortal and found solace with her own company on Pulu Keeling, far from her homeland. And that every century she would lure a fisherman or a sailor—’ or a shipwreck hunter ‘—to the island to make her own, and he’d be powerless to refuse. Even if it meant his death.’

Honor’s mind immediately went to the German soldier buried at Bosun’s Grave one hundred years before. The spirit was just about due another.

‘The Cocos people sense your loss, Honor. They think you are penunggu incarnate. The only woman the spirit has ever tolerated on her island.’

‘And I lured you like some kind of siren?’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘You hit the reef because you were perving, Rob.’

He shrugged and smiled and Honor desperately wanted to kiss the corner of that smile. ‘I was powerless not to. You drew me.’

She stared at him. ‘You came back to the island to tell me I’m a spirit guardian?’

‘I came to bring you away from the island. Irit told me that the penunggu had been patient but she would never tolerate you having sent away her chosen man, and that she would punish you by bringing a storm or tidal surge to the island.’

The wind whipped up around them briefly to punctuate Rob’s words. Honor’s skin prickled. The whole thing would have been a whole lot more ridiculous if she hadn’t spent four years feeling like the island’s guardian. ‘You believed her?’

‘She was one of the elder Malay; she told a convincing yarn. And I guess I didn’t need that much of a shove.’ His face grew serious. ‘Why were you leaving? Isn’t it early?’

She shrugged. ‘The weather is turning...’ They both laughed, uncomfortable and tight. Honor took a deep breath. ‘And because I couldn’t stay. It’s lost its...’ She swallowed hard. ‘It’s not the same. I won’t be going back.’

God, even now her first instinct was to protect herself.

But, true to his nature, Rob didn’t shy away from the difficult stuff. ‘What changed?’

You left.

Nate and Justin left.

‘I did. I changed.’

His chest rose and fell a little more roughly. ‘Enough to go out on a boat with me.’

‘Apparently.’

‘You’re amazing.’

The sincerity and warmth in his voice triggered an instinctive flinch, but she swallowed it back and smiled. ‘I’m faking it.’

Rob laughed and the past month—all its angst and loneliness and introspection—simply ceased to be. It was as if no time had passed. The blue of his eyes settled to a darker shade. ‘Never fake it, Honor. It’s one of the things I valued most about our time—that we could just be open and honest with each other.’

A surge of heat raced up her throat.

‘For the most part.’ His smile faltered. ‘It’s why I came back. I have a few things I needed to say.’

Nausea swept through her. The old familiar friend. ‘You had to half kidnap me to say them?’ Being flippant helped.

‘I wanted to be sure you couldn’t run off into the trees.’ He released her and turned away towards the cabin. ‘But first...I have an ulterior motive. Something I’d like you to trust me on.’

Honor’s heart leapt into her throat as he re-emerged from below, carrying a large wreath garlanded with tropical flowers.

‘I brought this, for you. Because...’ He looked nervous. More than she’d ever seen him look. Tears immediately threatened. She couldn’t trust herself to speak past the choke. ‘I didn’t know you were leaving for good,’ he said, ‘but, now that you are, I thought you might like to mark today with something special. In lieu. Because you never got to go to their funeral.’

‘Oh.’

He peered at her face where she’d dropped it to stare at the deck. ‘Is that a good “oh” or a bad “oh”?’

She moved swiftly to him and wrapped her arms around his middle. He raised the wreath out of the way as she hugged him. ‘It’s a good ‘oh’. Thank you.’ Her voice was thick with emotion.

‘I figure that they will always be an important part of your life and an important part of you. And maybe you’d never been able to do this alone.’

‘I really wanted this.’ She couldn’t, in all her years, have imagined this, but now that she saw it she knew it was exactly the right thing.

She was about to bury her lost boys.

He lowered his arms and handed Honor the wreath. She took it in shaky fingers. Together, they moved to the back of The Player and paused. She didn’t know what to do any more than Rob seemed to.

She turned back to the ocean and said the only prayer she knew under her breath, and then held a silent conversation with Justin in her head. She spoke of her great love for him, her sorrow that he was gone and her great comfort that he was with his father. She spoke of a day, maybe a long time away, when they would see each other again.

Then, wiping the tears from her face, she turned her thoughts to Nate. Her best friend as well as her husband and probably more of a success at one than the other. She told him that she’d loved him dearly and felt loved in return. She told him that maybe he hadn’t been the great love of her life, just the first. She begged his understanding and, somehow, across the massive expanse of sky, knew that she had it.

She blew a kiss to them both and gently tossed the wreath into the sea. The boat and the wreath parted company quickly. It instantly reminded Honor of that other day at sea, when the waves had come between them, but this time it brought no pain, or only a little. Instead, it brought closure. The elemental wildness of the pitching waves was a fitting tomb for four years of pain. She watched the wreath drift away until it sank beneath the icy waves.

Everything came full circle in that moment.

She cleared her throat and turned her back on the past four years.

Turned to her future.

Rob sat, pensive, further up the boat, giving her the space she needed. His face was pale and he rubbed his hands up and down his board shorts. Honor immediately recognised his anxiety and went to stand before him.

He stood too and searched her face. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Good. Better.’ She blinked and the world seemed to get brighter, more colourful, all around her. She frowned. ‘Back.’

His shoulders slumped a little and he sucked in a breath. He walked her backwards until her calves bumped into the expensive leather of his seats. She sank down onto a cushion and he sat next to her. ‘Okay. There’s a few things you need to know...’

She swallowed. He did too.

‘I’ve pulled out of the family firm.’

Honor’s eyebrows shot up. Not what she was expecting. ‘When? Why?’

‘Pretty much as soon as I got back to Cocos. I thought a lot about what you said about me not living authentically in those last few days. I’ve been hiding what I love—who I am—from most of the people in my world. I’ve had one foot in each camp and that’s stopped me fitting in either one. I needed to decide which world I belonged to and give myself one hundred per cent. It was time to pee or get off the pot.’

A pang of memory bit. But it was warm. That phrase had been one of her mother’s favourites. ‘And you picked shipwrecks?’

He shook his dark head. ‘I picked you.’

Her eyes flared.

‘I’ve spent the last month on the phone to brokers seeing if I can track down an investment that will let me chase shipwrecks for a living. For a lifetime.’

Honor’s voice croaked past her dry throat. ‘And did you?’

‘Two in my price range. But neither of them were any good if you couldn’t see yourself standing on a boat next to me.’

A ball of shock slid up into her throat.

‘You and shipwrecks go hand in hand in my mind, Honor. It wasn’t hard for me to separate my passion for maritime archaeology from my lack of passion for property development. But I couldn’t for the life of me think about shipwrecks without seeing you. And I knew that the lifestyle I need to lead to pursue my passion wouldn’t fit with the woman I left on that island.’

She frowned. ‘Then you should choose shipwrecks.’

‘It’s not that simple.’

She leaned forward and grabbed his hand. ‘It is that simple, Rob. You can’t throw away your dream the moment you’ve finally achieved it. Not for me.’

‘I wouldn’t be throwing it away. I’d be choosing between dreams.’

But... The ocean seemed to spin around her.

‘I spent a whole lot of time on that island apologising for the way I feel. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that loving you was not my failing. It was my salvation. It helped me to realise a whole bunch of things about my life. It made me think that maybe love can endure. With the right person.’

Her head fell back with the shock of his words and her stomach clenched hard. Love...

‘I’m no masochist, Honor. I will love you whether or not you reciprocate but I won’t share. Not where it counts.’ He reached for her shoulders and his hot fingers burned into her skin. ‘I need to be special to you. I need you to smile when you remember me. I know how much you loved them but I need there to be room for me, too.’

Mortification streaked through her. Had she done such a thorough job of locking him out?

His hair blew in the wind as he shook his head sadly. ‘I know that’s a lousy thing to admit but it burns me from the inside that I can’t even get a foothold. It’s like my parents all over again.’

He was pure misery and the shamed admission came straight from his cautious, wary heart. Honor stepped closer to him and looked up at his handsome face, her heart thumping wildly. ‘You made a foothold, Rob Dalton, from that very first day when you crashed into my reef.’ She was too determined that he believe her to smile. ‘You forced your way in and settled there until there was no chance for me to boot you out, even though I tried. You’ve helped me and healed me.’

Blue intensity blazed down on her. ‘I don’t want to be the one to have fixed you, Honor. I want to be the one who gets to keep you.’

Her eyes stung with sudden tears. She put one hand on her heart and the other on his. ‘I will always love Nate and Justin and will always bleed at their loss. But you have a place in my future—a dominant place—and you are the reason I can think of them today and cry with fondness and not with sadness. You’ve shown me things I never hoped to see and not just on the sea floor. But in me.

‘Your joy is infectious. You suck the juice out of life and spit out the pips. Your shockingly cavalier attitude towards sex is liberating.’ She tipped her head back and laughed and his hands curled around hers. ‘And I cannot imagine going forward from here without you. So you’re going to have to tell all those other women of yours that someone else has claimed exploration rights on the HMAS Dalton.’

His fingers trembled against her skin. ‘Are you saying you’ll come with me to Broome?’

‘Broome?’

‘That’s where the best of the deals is.’

‘My mother’s in Broome.’

‘Maybe you could build more than one new future.’

Honor blinked. ‘They have a Parks office there. Maybe we can align our research. Work the same bits of ocean. Help each other with our work.’

‘You’ll keep the air flowing down to me?’

Her eyes blazed into his. ‘Always. Whatever it takes to bring you back to me.’

‘I’ll promise to stop rescuing wildlife. Breaking the researcher’s oath.’

She stretched onto her toes and pressed her mouth to the corner of his. ‘Don’t you dare. It’s the thing I love about you most.’

Rob froze. ‘You love me?’

Honor’s brow folded. ‘Did I not say it?’

‘Not until just then.’

She smiled. ‘I love you, Rob. I know now that I can live without you if I had to, but I don’t want to. It’s all too empty.’

He pulled her, then, hard into his arms and kissed her until they both gasped for air. He tugged her into his lap on The Player’s leather seats and ravished her face with his lips. ‘Let’s move this to the cabin.’

Honor laughed. ‘We’re forty kilometres from the nearest people. Who’s going to see us?’

Her head fell back and she closed her eyes as the Australian sun kissed her face. Rob pressed his warm mouth to her throat. ‘Humour me. I want to lie with you on a real bed for a change,’ he murmured hard against her pulse.

Sudden shyness overwhelmed her. She hesitated. He lifted his head and looked down at her. ‘You know what? I don’t care where or when. Just as long as you’ll be mine, Honor Brier. Forever.’

Forever? The word that had inspired such fear in her a few short weeks ago now filled her with a trembling excitement. ‘Well, if we’re talking forever...I think I can lift the moratorium on getting past first base.’

He frowned. ‘It’s been a long time since I thought in terms of bases. I don’t think I even remember what second base is...’

She laughed. ‘I can see you’ve been badly corrupted. It will be my pleasure to reintroduce you to the way the rest of the world does it.’

He swung her up into his arms and kicked open the cabin door with an impatient foot and said against her ready lips, ‘It will be my pleasure to learn.’

As he carried her over the threshold of their future, Honor tipped her head back and looked up at the enormous expanse of blue.

She’d found the sky.

* * *

Back on Pulu Keeling, the spirit penunggu sighed and called off the storm spirit and reclaimed the island for her own.

Until the next sailor...

* * * * *