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.
How about twenty minutes ago?
Even angry, Grant McMurtrie had made her body resonate in places she hadn’t thought about for years. It was still thrumming now; something about the insolent way he’d sized her up. It had boiled her blood in one heartbeat then sizzled it the next. She’d been insanely pleased to be wearing a skirt and blouse for once, even if she’d been covered in paint. Imagine if his first impression of her had been her usual working attire …
The sheep turned away, bored, as she tossed her ruined clothes and shoes into the back seat of her car for later and reached back over her shoulder to snag the zip-tether and pull her rubbery wetsuit up tighter against her skin. She picked her way barefoot over the edge of the bluff and down a near-invisible
