had some kind of massive bird of prey, wings spread and aloft, across his chest. The lower curve of its majestic wings sat neatly along the ridge of his pectorals and its wing tips followed the line of muscle there up onto his tanned, rounded shoulders. Big enough to accentuate the musculature of his chest, low enough to be invisible when he was wearing a T-shirt. It should have been trashy but it wasn’t; it looked like he’d been born with it.
His arms were still up, squeezing the sea water from his hair, and that gave her a glimpse of a bunch of inked characters—Japanese, maybe Chinese?—on the underside of one full biceps.
Add that to the dagger on the other arm and he had a lot of ink for a weatherman.
‘Hey.’
His voice startled her gaze back to his and her tongue into action.
‘Wow,’ she croaked, then realised that wasn’t the most dignified of beginnings. ‘You were gone so long...’
Great. Not even capable of a complete sentence.
‘I’ve been missing the ocean. Sorry if I worried you.’
She grasped around in the memories she’d just spent a couple of hours accumulating, studying the map to make sure they hadn’t missed a caravan park or town. And she improvised some slightly more intelligent conversation.
‘Whoever first explored this area really didn’t have the best time doing it.’
Marshall dripped. And frowned. As he lowered his arms to take the towel from her nerveless fingers, the bird of prey’s feathers shifted with him, just enough to catch her eye. She struggled to look somewhere other than at him, but it wasn’t easy when he filled her field of view so thoroughly. She wanted to step back but then didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she was affected.
‘Cape Arid, Mount Ragged, Poison Creek...’ she listed with an encouraging lack of wobble in her voice, her clarity restored the moment he pressed the towel to his face and disguised most of that unexpectedly firm and decorated torso.
He stepped over to the rock and hooked up his T-shirt, then swept it on in a smooth, manly shrug. Even with its overstretched neckline, the bird of prey was entirely hidden. The idea of him hanging out in his meteorological workplace in a government-appropriate suit with all of that ink hidden away under it was as secretly pleasing as when she used to wear her best lingerie to section meetings.
Back when stupid things like that had mattered.
‘I guess it’s not so bad when you have supplies and transport,’ he said, totally oblivious to her illicit train of thought, ‘but it must have been a pretty treacherous environment for early explorers. Especially if they were thirsty.’
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