in a million years. So how about you? Are you looking for pow yourself?’
‘No!’ The fear was back, just like that, and it brought him up fast.
He could have bitten out his tongue. What a stupid thing to ask.
‘Uh oh,’ he said ruefully. ‘I can’t believe I asked that. With what I know of you… that was extraordinarily insensitive. I’m so sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘Like your private life is none of my business,’ she conceded and managed an apologetic smile. ‘I had no right to ask what you believe in—or why you’re travelling alone. Or even why you’re not wearing lipstick.’
He grinned and the tension dissipated a little. ‘I guess it’s okay to be curious,’ he told her, and by mutual accord they started climbing again. ‘We’re not part of this ship’s demographic.’
‘Yeah, the passenger list comprises three honeymoon couples and everyone else is over fifty. Which leaves us hanging loose.’ The strain had disappeared and friendship again seemed possible. ‘I need to warn you,’ she said honestly, ‘Maud is a born matchmaker and, frankly, she’s scary. Now she thinks of you as a hero, I’m thinking she’ll try very hard to get us together. Maybe you should start a mad, passionate affair with one of the Miss Taggerts, just to deflect her.’
As the Miss Taggerts were both in their seventies, he was able to chuckle. And, thankfully, so did she.
The awkward moment was past. Excellent.
He needed to tread warily, he thought. He did want this woman to be a friend.
But nothing else. Despite Maud’s intentions, he surely wasn’t in the market for a relationship, especially not in the hothouse atmosphere of a cruise ship. He did not believe in pow.
But he did want her to be a friend, he conceded—even if she was a passenger and little—and exceedingly cute.
They rounded the next rocky outcrop and saw Jason and Maud, high on the cliff face, with Maud waving wildly down at them.
‘They’re here,’ she boomed, her elderly voice echoing out over the wilderness. ‘The paintings are here and they’re wonderful. This whole place is magic. Come up and join the spell.’
‘That’s my Maud,’ Rachel said, grinning. ‘There’s magic wherever she goes.’
And ditto for Maud’s Rachel, Finn thought, watching her wave back, but he didn’t say so.
He climbed up the scree behind her, careful of her even though she wouldn’t accept help. He watched her wince as she put strain on her obviously injured hip. He watched her greet Maud with laughter and then he saw her quiet awe as she looked at the paintings she’d waited a lifetime to see.
The art was extraordinary. Here was the depiction of life almost twenty thousand years before, stylized men and women who bore no resemblance to any identifiable race, animals that were long extinct, sketches that showed this vast rocky cliff had once looked out over grassy plains rather than a sea that must be junior in the scheme of time.
Finn had seen paintings like these the last time he’d done this cruise. Even so, his awe only deepened, and Rachel seemed almost unable to breathe.
She moved from painting to painting. She looked and looked, making no attempt to touch. Finn’s tour guides were trained to protect these wonders and Finn knew if Rachel tried to touch, Jason would stop her, but there was no need to intercede.
Maud was treating the paintings with the same respect, but Finn could see that half the old lady’s pleasure was seeing Rachel’s reaction.
Maybe that went for all of them. Rachel’s wonder was a wonder all by itself.
She examined everything. She saw the obvious paintings and then went looking for more. She slid underneath a crevice and found paintings on the underside of the rocks. She slid in further so she was in a shallow cave.
‘These look like pictures of some sort of wombat,’ she called. ‘On the roof. Oh, my… Come and see.’
‘I’m not caving for wombats,’ Maud retorted and Jason elected to keep his uniform clean so it was Finn who slid in after her.
She was looking in the half dark. Finn had a flashlight app on his camera phone. He shone it on the wombat-type animals and he watched her amazement.
‘They can’t have painted these here,’ she breathed, soaking in the freshness of ochre-red animals that looked as if they’d been painted yesterday. ‘This will have been the rock face. The gradual deformation of the magma will have pushed it sideways and under. Imagine how much art’s hidden, but how much has the cliff movement preserved? These rocks are the sentinels of this art. Silent keepers. It does my head in.’
He thought about it, or he tried to think about it. Artwork in geological terms. He looked again at the wombats—and then he looked at Rachel.
She was lying in the red dust, flat on her back, with the rock face art two feet above her head. She’d wriggled under the rocks, pushing dirt as she’d wriggled. Her blonde curls were now full of red dust, and there was a streak of red running from her forehead to her chin.
With the flashlight focused on the wombats, she was barely more than a silhouette, and a grubby one at that, and she wasn’t looking at him. She was totally engrossed in what she was seeing.
Friends?
That was fast, he thought ruefully. He’d decided he could think of this woman as a friend rather than… well, as a woman.
He’d thought it for a whole twenty minutes, but now he was lying in the dust beside her, her bare arm was just touching his, and he felt…
Like he had no business feeling. Like his life was about to get complicated.
Really complicated.
He did not want complications.
But she turned to him, her face flushed with excitement, and heaven only knew the effort it cost him not to take her face in his hands and kiss her.
How would she react?
The same way he’d react, he thought, or the same way he should react. He’d seen her fear. She didn’t want any sort of relationship and neither did he.
‘I can die happy now,’ she breathed, and that was enough to break the moment. To stop him thinking how much he really wanted to kiss her.
‘We’re not wedged that far under the rock,’ he managed. ‘I think if we try really hard we should be able to wriggle out. Maybe dying’s not an option.’
‘But you know what I mean.’
‘No,’ he said, and figured maybe he needed to take this further. There was something in Rachel’s voice that told him this place had been an end point, an ambition held close when things were terrible. If I can just hang on long enough to see the Kimberley art…
So now she’d seen the art, and maybe she’d need to do more than hang on, he thought. Given what he’d heard in her voice—maybe
