Shipwrecked with Mr Wrong Page 17
She turned back to the ocean and said the only prayer she knew under her breath, and then held a silent conversation with Justin in her head. She spoke of her great love for him, her sorrow that he was gone and her great comfort that he was with his father. She spoke of a day, maybe a long time away, when they would see each other again.
Then, wiping the tears from her face, she turned her thoughts to Nate. Her best friend as well as her husband and probably more of a success at one than the other. She told him that she’d loved him dearly and felt loved in return. She told him that maybe he hadn’t been the great love of her life, just the first. She begged his understanding and, somehow, across the massive expanse of sky, knew that she had it.
She blew a kiss to them both and gently tossed the wreath into the sea. The boat and the wreath parted company quickly. It instantly reminded Honor of that other day at sea, when the waves had come between them, but this time it brought no pain, or only a little. Instead, it brought closure. The elemental wildness of the pitching waves was a fitting tomb for four years of pain. She watched the wreath drift away until it sank beneath the icy waves.
Everything came full circle in that moment. She cleared her throat and turned her back on the past four years. Turned to her future.
Rob sat, pensive, further up the boat, giving her the space she needed. His face was pale and he rubbed his hands up and down his board shorts. Honor immediately recognised his anxiety and went to stand before him.
He stood too and searched her face. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Good. Better.’ She blinked and the world seemed to get brighter, more colourful, all around her. She frowned. ‘Back.’
His shoulders slumped a little and he sucked in a breath. He walked her backwards until her calves bumped into the expensive leather of his seats. She sank down onto a cushion and he sat next to her. ‘Okay. There’s a few things you need to know …’
She swallowed. He did too. ‘I’ve pulled out of the family firm.’ Honor’s eyebrows shot up. Not what she was expecting. ‘When? Why?’
‘Pretty much as soon as I got back to Cocos. I thought a lot about what you said about me not living authentically in those last few days. I’ve been hiding what I love—who I am— from most of the people in my world. I’ve had one foot in each camp and that’s stopped me fitting in either one. I needed to decide which world I belonged to and give myself one hundred per cent. It was time to pee or get off the pot.’
A pang of memory bit. But it was warm. That phrase had been one of her mother’s favourites. ‘And you picked shipwrecks?’ He shook his dark head. ‘I picked you.’ Her eyes flared.
‘I’ve spent the last month on the phone to brokers seeing if I can track down an investment that will let me chase shipwrecks for a living. For a lifetime.’
Honor’s voice croaked past her dry throat.
‘And did you?’
‘Two in my price range. But neither of them were any good if you couldn’t see yourself standing on a boat next to me.’
A ball of shock slid up into her throat.
‘You and shipwrecks go hand in hand in my mind, Honor. It wasn’t hard for me to separate my passion for maritime archaeology from my lack of passion for property development. But I couldn’t for the life of me think about shipwrecks without seeing you. And I knew that the lifestyle I need to lead to pursue my passion wouldn’t fit with the woman I left on that island.’
She frowned. ‘Then you should choose shipwrecks.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
She leaned forward and grabbed his hand. ‘It is that simple, Rob. You can’t throw away your dream the moment you’ve finally achieved it. Not for me.’
‘I wouldn’t be throwing it away. I’d be choosing between dreams.’
But … The ocean seemed to spin around her.
‘I spent a whole lot of time on that island apologising for the way I feel. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that loving you was not my failing. It was my salvation. It helped me to realise a whole bunch of things about my life. It made me think that maybe love can endure. With the right person.’
Her head fell back with the shock of his words and her stomach clenched hard. Love …
‘I’m no masochist, Honor. I will love you whether or not you reciprocate but I won’t share. Not where it counts.’ He reached for her shoulders and his hot fingers burned into her skin. ‘I need to be special to you. I need you to smile when you remember me. I know how much you loved them but I need there to be room for me, too.’
Mortification streaked through her. Had she done such a thorough job of locking him out?
His hair blew in the wind as he shook his head sadly. ‘I know that’s a lousy thing to admit but it burns me from the inside that I can’t even get a foothold. It’s like my parents all over again.’
He was pure misery and the shamed admission came straight from his cautious, wary heart. Honor stepped closer to him and looked up at his handsome face, her heart thumping wildly. ‘You made a foothold, Rob Dalton, from that very first day when you crashed into my reef.’ She was too determined that he believe her to smile. ‘You forced your way in and settled there until there was no chance for me to boot you out, even though I tried. You’ve helped me and healed me.’
Blue intensity blazed down on her. ‘I don’t want to be the one to have fixed you, Honor. I want to be the one who gets to keep you.’
Her eyes stung with sudden tears. She put one hand on her heart and the other on his. ‘I will always love Nate and Justin and will always bleed at their loss. But you have a place in my future—a dominant place—and you are the reason I can think of them today and cry with fondness and not with sadness. You’ve shown me things I never hoped to see and not just on the sea floor. But in me.
‘Your joy is infectious. You suck the juice out of life and spit out the pips. Your shockingly cavalier attitude towards sex is liberating.’ She tipped her head back and laughed and his hands curled around hers. ‘And I cannot imagine going forward from here without you. So you’re going to have to tell all those other women of yours that someone else has claimed exploration rights on the HMAS Dalton.’
His fingers trembled against her skin. ‘Are you saying you’ll come with me to Broome?’
‘Broome?’
‘That’s where the best of the deals is.’ ‘My mother’s in Broome.’ ‘Maybe you could build more than one new future.’
Honor blinked. ‘They have a Parks office there. Maybe we can align our research. Work the same bits of ocean. Help each other with our work.’
‘You’ll keep the air flowing down to me?’
Her eyes blazed into his. ‘Always. Whatever it takes to bring you back to me.’
‘I’ll promise to stop rescuing wildlife. Breaking the researcher’s oath.’
She stretched onto her toes and pressed her mouth to the corner of his. ‘Don’t you dare. It’s the thing I love about you most.’
Rob froze. ‘You love me?’
Honor’s brow folded. ‘Did I not say it?’
‘Not until just then.’
She smiled. ‘I love you, Rob. I know now that I can live without you if I had to, but I don’t want to. It’s all too empty.’
He pulled her, then, hard into his arms and kissed her until they both gasped for air. He tugged her into his lap on The Player’s leather seats and ravished her face with his lips. ‘Let’s move this to the cabin.’
Honor laughed. ‘We’re forty kilometres from the nearest people. Who’s going to see us?’
Her head fell back and she closed her eyes as the Australian sun kissed her face. Rob pressed his warm mouth to her throat. ‘Humour me. I want to lie with you on a real bed for a change,’ he murmured hard against her pulse.
Sudden shyness overwhelmed her. She hesitated. He lifted his head and looked down at her. ‘You know what? I don’t care where or when. Just as long as you’ll be mine, Honor Brier. Forever.’
Forever? The word
that had inspired such fear in her a few short weeks ago now filled her with a trembling excitement. ‘Well, if we’re talking forever … I think I can lift the moratorium on getting past first base.’
He frowned. ‘It’s been a long time since I thought in terms of bases. I don’t think I even remember what second base is …’
She laughed. ‘I can see you’ve been badly corrupted. It will be my pleasure to reintroduce you to the way the rest of the world does it.’
He swung her up into his arms and kicked open the cabin door with an impatient foot and said against her ready lips, ‘It will be my pleasure to learn.’
As he carried her over the threshold of their future, Honor tipped her head back and looked up at the enormous expanse of blue. She’d found the sky.
Back on Pulu Keeling, the spirit penunggu sighed and called off the storm spirit and reclaimed the island for her own. Until the next sailor …
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II BV/S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
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First published in Great Britain 2011
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited,
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
© Nikki Logan 2011
ISBN: 978-1-408-90049-9
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Cover
Praise for Nikki Logan
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Copyright