moan struggled to break free. The fog in her mind resisted logical thought, but she made a valiant effort. “What we’re doing and—not doing it.”
He was planting kisses along her collarbone, pushing aside her top to worship her sun-kissed flesh. Shivers rippled. Needs clawed. Trying to blame the late hour, the alien surroundings or the stresses of the day seemed pointless. The only reason she was in Blake’s arms was because she’d fantasized about it all evening. He was right about the lack of choice. The only question had been when she would find herself in his arms. Never in her wildest dreams had she thought it would be so soon.
Too soon. She felt as if she were falling into a bottomless pit, but couldn’t seem to stop herself. “We barely know each other,” she tried.
He traced a finger down the cleft between her breasts, her answering shiver almost ending the argument there and then. “I thought we were about to remedy that.”
She twisted away, the effort almost too much. “You’re assuming I want to.”
His smile deepened and desire glinted in his eyes, echoing her own. “I know you want to. But until you’re ready to acknowledge the truth of it, I can wait.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
She shook her head. “No woman likes to be predictable.”
“That’s the wonder of you, Jo. You’re not in the least predictable.”
Except in this, she thought, astonished to be having the discussion with Blake at all. It had nothing to do with kissing or lovemaking. This was Shakespeare’s “marriage of true minds” and Blake was taking her to that place of unbelievable intimacy at a speed that terrified her. She didn’t want to feel this way about any man.
There was no logic to feeling threatened by closeness, but the fear had haunted her for as long as she could remember. She assumed she was afraid of losing someone she loved, although that didn’t explain the sense that being special to someone was somehow dangerous. She’d tried getting help to fight the fear, but so far, nothing had worked.
“It’s late,” she said before she said anything more revealing.
He looked up at the sky. “Actually, it’s early. Do you want to sleep, or watch the sun come up over the plains?”
If she had any sense, she would crawl into her sleeping bag and hope for oblivion. But she sensed that Blake would be in her mind no matter what she did. In her dreams, if she managed to fall asleep. Strangely, she felt wide-awake now. “As long as you don’t expect me to function too well later, I’d like to watch the sun come up,” she said. “I need to finish that shelter today.”
“There’s more to the outback than survival,” he pointed out. “There’s savagery no city person can imagine, and beauty almost beyond bearing.”
Her wide-eyed look met his. “I didn’t know you were a poet, too.”
“You can’t live in the outback without becoming poetic. Not if you have any soul at all.”
He had one, she didn’t doubt. She had been on the verge of misjudging him, she realized. Writing him off as a muscle man who was happiest chasing through the bush with a gun slung across his shoulders. She hadn’t allowed for all the times he would need to be still, to read the signs around him and make sense of what had happened or would happen. The patience to wait sometimes for days until a crocodile lost its fear of the unknown and approached a trap he’d set for it, so it could be moved without harm to safer territory.
All this and a mouth that threatened to command her soul, she thought. What had she gotten herself into?
The experience was all Blake had promised and more.
While she’d changed her shoes and grabbed a jacket, he had put on his own shirt and collected a torch from the car.
The torch was almost superfluous, the starlight illuminating the path to a grassy hilltop overlooking a spiderweb of rivers and creeks on one side and the immense plains on the other, ringed by mountains that would have looked at home on the moon. On her own, she would have been terrified of meeting a hunting dingo or wild buffalo, and the distant coughing sound that Blake told her was a crocodile would have frozen her blood. With him at her side, the sounds exhilarated more than they frightened.
Instinctively she dropped her voice, not wanting to intrude on the timeless landscape. “It would have been a sin to sleep through such beauty.”
His heated gaze told her they wouldn’t have been sleeping, and she shivered. The predawn chill seeping into her bones made her glad of the jacket. Nor did she object when Blake’s arm slid around her shoulders, and he brought her closer to him. She told herself the sudden fast beating of her heart was due to the spike in her body temperature. Nothing to do with being in his arms.
Dawn came as a spill of dusky coral across the cobalt sky. One by one, the stars winked out, replaced by a glow that slowly stained the darkness with orange and pink threaded with turquoise. Her breath caught as orange fire lit up the sky. The sunrise as she had never seen it before. No wonder early civilizations had convinced themselves that the sun was a god, prostrating themselves before it in awe.
She turned toward the first rays, letting them steal the chill from her face. “Do you make a habit of this?” Do you bring many women up here to watch the sunrise?
“When I’m out catching a croc, I work more by night than by day, so I’m often around to see the sun come up,” he said, answering only the question she’d asked. His arm tightened around her. “You’re a big improvement on a team of unshaven, unwashed men.”
Laughter bubbled up. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“It’s meant to be.”
At least they weren’t other women, she thought on a glow of satisfaction she didn’t want to feel but couldn’t seem to dispel. She settled her back more comfortably against him and found herself watching him as much as the sunrise. His head and shoulders were silhouetted against the sky as he leaned against the outcrop, totally at ease.
What was he thinking? she wondered. Of the sunrise or her? Annoyed with herself, she swung her gaze back to the vast plains, distracting herself by trying to identify the birds flying in to feed off the lush grasses and the insect life thronging the waterways. There were parrots and magpie geese and wild ducks, long-legged jabirus and clouds of budgerigars flocking to the water below their vantage point. A lone wedge-tailed eagle soared on thermal currents high above.
Thinking of the concrete canyons where she normally spent her days, she felt an instinctive tug of resistance. How could she be happy shut away indoors when so much beauty and freedom were here for the taking?
She felt rather than saw Blake tense. “What is it?”
He made a shushing sound and pulled her to the ground with him. From his pocket, he took out a pair of compact binoculars and trained them on a distant cluster of paperbark trees.
She dropped her voice to a whisper, although no one could possibly hear them. “What do you see?”
He handed her the glasses. “Movement at twelve o’clock.”
