at once—she’d done it enough in the last four years to call herself a master. She crouched in front of him and rested back on her heels, her eyes steady on his, waiting for his anxiety to pass.
She disliked him a little bit less.
Finally, he blew out a steady breath and half smiled. She matched him, trying to be supportive.
‘Is that what I have to do to get a smile out of you?’ he said at last, laughing shakily. ‘Unman myself?’
Hardly. Fortunately, her snort was only internal. Showing vulnerability only made her more aware of him as a man. He was being intentionally flippant, but she sensed his embarrassment was genuine. Funny how she could already read him after less than a day.
‘It’s a common enough reaction to blood.’ She hoped he’d sense her understanding, recognise there would be no ridicule here. She was absolutely the last one to laugh at someone else’s neuroses. ‘Or maybe you’re experiencing delayed shock from hitting the reef?’
‘No, it’s the blood. Something I’ve done since I was a kid.’
After a moment more of deep breathing, he nodded and sat up straighter and Honor kneeled up towards his stomach, scooting forward between his legs to apply the first aid.
He straightened in the chair and pressed his lips together at the discomfort of stretching the wounds. Honor peeled open one of the iodine swabs and leaned in close. She mopped around the wound first, determined to clean off the blood so he didn’t have to look at it. Eventually, she had to wipe over the abrasions and knew it would sting. His left leg bounced fast but he didn’t make a sound. She dabbed as gently as she could, across each scrape and scratch, dousing the area in super germkiller.
His groan brought her eyes up to his and stilled her hands. ‘I’m sorry. It’s almost over. Coral’s full of micro-organisms that you really don’t want in your bloodstream.’
His attempt at a return smile was more of a pained grimace and she stifled a laugh. He was trying very hard to be stoical. Then his eyes strayed from hers, down over her scars to where her barely covered breasts hung level with his belly. She became suddenly and vividly aware that she was kneeling—virtually in her underwear—between the splayed legs of a man she’d only just met.
Instinct yelled move but pride kept her still, despite the furious hammering of her heart. It startled her to feel a prickle of awareness, for her fingers to tingle at the silky-hard smoothness of his muscled belly. The sensations were as foreign as that scent he had. She’d forgotten how a natural man smelled. Her heightened awareness made her movements a little rougher, more rushed. She opened some alcohol wipes and swabbed off the dark rust-coloured iodine stain from around the wound. She needed the area clean and dry for the surgical tape to stick. He didn’t move as her hands skimmed proficiently over his abdomen with the sterile pad.
Her heart thumped steadily. The alcohol was taking longer to evaporate in the humid tropical air and she was desperate to get out from between his legs, convinced that she could feel the heat radiating off his thighs. She fanned the wound with the spare packets of wipes, with little effect. Gritting her teeth, she bent in to blow the damp area dry.
‘Okay!’ Rob lurched up out of the seat and stumbled backwards, knocking the chair on its side. Honor fell back onto her heels to avoid his rushed departure. ‘I think I’m good. I can do the rest.’
‘But I need to—’
‘Really—I can put on the cream and the gauze. Thanks for cleaning it up for me.’
She returned to her feet, holding the first aid items out to him. Was he blushing? A bit more of her reserve slipped. If a man’s legs went to jelly at the sight of blood and he could still blush, how bad could he be? Then she remembered the way he’d been checking out her cleavage—her scars—and her back straightened. She handed him the first aid supplies.
He took them without quite meeting her eyes. But his voice was conciliatory. ‘Thanks. You’d make a good mother.’
Air sucked into Honor’s lungs sharply. It was just words. She knew it. Something to say in an awkward moment, but she wasn’t ready for the boot in the guts the words triggered.
She stumbled back as though physically wounded and forced a tight smile to her face. ‘I have work to do. I’ll leave you to finish up.’
Fix yourself up and go.
Without looking back, she beat a hasty retreat, snatched up her logbook and marched past him back into the trees.
CHAPTER THREE
‘Shh!’
Honor could have heard him approaching during a monsoon. She looked back over her shoulder at him, irritated. Again. Robert Dalton certainly didn’t bring out the best in her.
He slowed his approach, tiptoeing towards her hiding spot and crawled to lie next to her in the sparse scrub, taking care not to rub his patched up stomach on anything sharper than the island sand. Did he think he was well disguised now—all six foot three of him squashed behind a straggly young octopus bush?
Mainlanders. Gotta love them.
He lay by her side, glancing between her and the logbook, where she had recorded a series of numbers and unintelligible scribble that was meaningful only to her. Every time those blue eyes lifted, he looked more and more like he was itching to speak. Finally, the silence got too much for him.
‘What are you doing?’
Even his whisper seemed loud. A frigate-bird broke from its cover a few metres away, lurching into the sky, its enormous wingspan carrying the ungainly giant away in seconds. She shot him an annoyed look. He flashed a sexy, superficial smile. Fully expecting that to make a difference.
‘I bet that gets results wherever you go.’ Her own voice was hushed. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand, just grinned in agreement, this time more genuine, and studied her the way she was studying the birds. His question still hung between them, unanswered.
‘I’m monitoring the flocks,’ she belatedly said.
He looked in the direction of her gaze and his eyes widened. Had he seriously not noticed it? The only other archaeologist she knew— used to know—spent most of her professional life in the bowels of the museum dusting things that other people dug up, spending most of her day staring at two square inches of artefact. Rob’s tan was too perfect and those muscles too manicured for him to spend all his time in a lab, but how else could she explain how he’d missed the massive inland lagoon that comprised half the island as he’d come towards her. Salt-crusted, sheltered and writhing with birdlife, at first glance the surface of the water and the trees on the lagoon edge seemed white with foam when in fact they were covered with the glaring white of hundreds of feathered terns, boobies and noddies. She passed Rob her binoculars. He ranged his eyes over the lake and its myriad inhabitants. ‘Whoa.’
Thirty-something going on sixteen.
En masse it was quite a spectacle. Honor smiled and let him look. At peak season, these protected waters could support twenty thousand birds. Most used Pulu Keeling as a base, striking out to fish the rich waters of the Cocos Trench, then returning to nests and chicks and shelter. Even the giant frigatebirds, who generally
