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“If I see you doing something that could get you injured or killed, I’ll step in and take over with no arguments from you. Agreed?”
The condition was reassuring and she nodded her acquiescence. “In that event, I’d be a fool to argue. Do we shake hands on the deal, or what?”
“Or what,” he said.
Releasing his hold on the tent, he stepped closer and his hands closed around her shoulders, pulling her against him. She should have expected this. He’d warned her he was attracted to her. And heaven knew, she was attracted to him. Still, she was unprepared for the onslaught of sensations as his lips found hers. Her mind reeled.
The mouth that she’d dismissed as hard and uncompromising was anything but, she discovered when his lips teased hers apart. His were firm and sensuous, tormenting her with featherlight forays to the corners, then claiming her whole mouth as if to share air. Not an unpleasant act, she discovered, breathing in the masculine scent and taste of him as her reason threatened to slip.
She was out of her element, exhausted. How else could she explain her sudden bout of weakness, as if her limbs had turned molten? Desire bubbled up, making nonsense of her claim to be in charge. The night didn’t help, dizzying her with a thousand pinpoints of starlight so that she had to cling to Blake as her world spun.
His breathing sounded fast and shallow. His fingers massaging her shoulders made her shift restlessly, as if to steer his hands to more intimate places. Eyes closing, she dropped her head back and allowed him access to her exposed throat. His lips lingered on the pulse she could feel fluttering like a trapped bird.
Somehow, she managed to find her voice. “Blake, this isn’t a good idea.”
His cheek nuzzled hers, the beginnings of a beard rasping against her softness. The contrast felt wonderful. “You make it sound as if we have a choice,” he murmured.
Strange how hard it was to argue. “There’s always a choice.”
He kissed the hollow at the base of her throat. “Between?”
A moan struggled to break free. The fog in her mind resisted logical thought, but she made a valiant effort. “What we’re doing and—not doing it.”
He was planting kisses along her collarbone, pushing aside her top to worship her sun-kissed flesh. Shivers rippled. Needs clawed. Trying to blame the late hour, the alien surroundings or the stresses of the day seemed pointless. The only reason she was in Blake’s arms was because she’d fantasized about it all evening. He was right about the lack of choice. The only question had been when she would find herself in his arms. Never in her wildest dreams had she thought it would be so soon.
Too soon. She felt as if she were falling into a bottomless pit, but couldn’t seem to stop herself. “We barely know each other,” she tried.
He traced a finger down the cleft between her breasts, her answering shiver almost ending the argument there and then. “I thought we were about to remedy that.”
She twisted away, the effort almost too much. “You’re assuming I want to.”
His smile deepened and desire glinted in his eyes, echoing her own. “I know you want to. But until you’re ready to acknowledge the truth of it, I can wait.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
She shook her head. “No woman likes to be predictable.”
“That’s the wonder of you, Jo. You’re not in the least predictable.”
Except in this, she thought, astonished to be having the discussion with Blake at all. It had nothing to do with kissing or lovemaking. This was Shakespeare’s “marriage of true minds” and Blake was taking her to that place of unbelievable intimacy at a speed that terrified her. She didn’t want to feel this way about any man.
There was no logic to feeling threatened by closeness, but the fear had haunted her for as long as she could remember. She assumed she was afraid of losing someone she loved, although that didn’t explain the sense that being special to someone was somehow dangerous. She’d tried getting help to fight the fear, but so far, nothing had worked.
“It’s late,” she said before she said anything more revealing.
He looked up at the sky. “Actually, it’s early. Do you want to sleep, or watch the sun come up over the plains?”
If she had any sense, she would crawl into her sleeping bag and hope for oblivion. But she sensed that Blake would be in her mind no matter what she did. In her dreams, if she managed to fall asleep. Strangely, she felt wide-awake now. “As long as you don’t expect me to function too well later, I’d like to watch the sun come up,” she said. “I need to finish that shelter today.”
“There’s more to the outback than survival,” he pointed out. “There’s savagery no city person can imagine, and beauty almost beyond bearing.”
Her wide-eyed look met his. “I didn’t know you were a poet, too.”
“You can’t live in the outback without becoming poetic. Not if you have any soul at all.”
He had one, she didn’t doubt. She had been on the verge of misjudging him, she realized. Writing him off as a muscle man who was happiest chasing through the bush with a gun slung across his shoulders. She hadn’t allowed for all the times he would need to be still, to read the signs around him and make sense of what had happened or would happen. The patience to wait sometimes for days until a crocodile lost its fear of the unknown and approached a trap he’d set for it, so it could be moved without harm to safer territory.
All this and a mouth that threatened to command her soul, she thought. What had she gotten herself into?
The experience was all Blake had promised and more.
While she’d changed her shoes and grabbed a jacket, he had put on his own shirt and collected a torch from the car.
The torch was almost superfluous, the starlight illuminating the path to a grassy hilltop overlooking a spiderweb of rivers and creeks on one side and the immense plains on the other, ringed by mountains that would have looked at home on the moon. On her own, she would have been terrified of meeting a hunting dingo or wild buffalo, and the distant coughing sound that Blake told her was a crocodile would have frozen her blood. With him at her side, the sounds exhilarated more than they frightened.
Instinctively she dropped her voice, not wanting to intrude on the timeless landscape. “It would have been a sin to sleep through such beauty.”
His heated gaze told her they wouldn’t have been sleeping, and she shivered. The predawn chill seeping into her bones made her glad of the jacket. Nor did she object when Blake’s arm slid around her shoulders, and he brought her closer to him. She told herself the sudden fast beating of her heart was due to the spike in her body temperature. Nothing to do with being in his arms.
Dawn came as a spill of dusky coral across the cobalt sky. One by one, the stars winked out, replaced by a glow that slowly stained the darkness with orange and pink threaded with turquoise. Her breath caught as orange fire lit up the sky. The sunrise as she had never seen it before. No wonder early civilizations had convinced themselves that the sun was a god, prostrating themselves before it in awe.
She turned toward the first rays, letting them steal the chill from her face. “Do you make a habit of this?” Do you bring many women up here to watch the sunrise?
“When I’m out catching a croc, I work more by night than by day, so I’m often around to see the sun come up,” he said, answering only the question she’d asked. His arm tightened around her. “You’re a big improvement on a team of unshaven, unwashed men.”
Laughter bubbled up. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“It’s meant to be.”
At least they weren’t other women, she thought on a glow of satisfaction she didn’t want to feel but couldn’t seem to dispel. She settled her back more comfortably against him and found herself watching him as much as the sunrise. His head and shoulders were silhouetted against the sky as he leaned against the outcrop, totally at ease.
What was he thinking? she wondered. Of the sunrise or her? Annoyed with herself, she swung her gaze back to the vast plains, distracting herself by trying to identify the birds flying in to feed off the lush grasses and the insect life thronging the waterways. There were parrots and magpie geese and wild ducks, long-legged jabirus and clouds of budgerigars flocking to the water below their vantage point. A lone wedge-tailed eagle soared on thermal currents high above.
Thinking of the concrete canyons where she normally spent her days, she felt an instinctive tug of resistance. How could she be happy shut away indoors when so much beauty and freedom were here for the taking?
She felt rather than saw Blake tense. “What is it?”
He made a shushing sound and pulled her to the ground with him. From his pocket, he took out a pair of compact binoculars and trained them on a distant cluster of paperbark trees.
She dropped her voice to a whisper, although no one could possibly hear them. “What do you see?”
He handed her the glasses. “Movement at twelve o’clock.”
Positioning herself to face the direction he indicated, she adjusted the powerful glasses to her vision. A lone man in khaki clothing jumped into focus. He had a sack slung over his shoulder and was retreating into the trees. “It’s the man I saw watching our camp,” she murmured. If he’d been visiting the creek again, his intentions—whatever they were—had been thwarted because she was up and about instead of sleeping.
Blake nodded confirmation. “Eddy Gilgai. Take a good look so you’ll know him if you see him hanging around again.”
She did so, then lowered the glasses. “You sound as if you expect to see more of him.”
“If Max put him up to this, we will. Max isn’t the type to give up easily.”
“Shouldn’t we try to catch Eddy now?”
“That stand of trees is farther away than it looks. By the time I get there, he’ll have melted into the bush. One of his clan could track him but I doubt that I could. And besides even if we did catch him, we couldn’t prove he was up to no good.”
“Even though Des asked him to leave?”
“Visiting his relatives isn’t a crime, and that’s what he’d claim to be doing.”
“If feeding a wild crocodile isn’t illegal and you can’t arrest him for trespassing, how will you pin anything on him?”
His mouth tightened. “Tom’s the lawman. I have my own methods.”
Not entirely orthodox, she deduced. “I don’t think I want to know.”
“No reason you should. None of this need concern you, provided you stay well clear of the creek.”
A vision of a prehistoric killer rearing out of the water made her shiver. “Don’t worry, I intend to.” She wasn’t sure about taking the rest of his advice.
His dark gaze told her he suspected what she was thinking. “I’ll be around to make sure you do.”
“I don’t need a minder.”
“No? Then show me the direction that takes us back to camp.”
She stood up and looked around. “Should be easy enough. We climbed up here from that side.” A network of creeks bordered their location. And all the clumps of trees looked alike. Surely there should be a glimpse of the tent from here? A faint track gave her more confidence. “That way,” she said, pointing.
He looked amused. “The trail does lead to a camp, but it’s about three times as far away as yours and only used at cattle mustering time.”
“Smart-ass,” she muttered under her breath. Then remembered her resolution and folded her arms. “Okay, Crocodile Man, how do I work it out?”
In a fluid movement, he uncoiled from the ground and picked up a stick. Pushing it vertically into the ground, he placed a stone at the end of the shadow cast by the stick. “Now we wait twenty minutes.”
She was intrigued. “For what?”
“Patience,” he counseled.
Easy for him to say. She wasn’t known for patience. She wondered if he knew it and was testing her. She decided not to give him the satisfaction of being right and schooled herself to remain still, although her awareness of him grew to agonizing proportions.
He stood statue-still, his gaze on the far horizon. How could he be so at ease when her muscles twitched with the need for movement? The twenty minutes seemed like an eternity.
When her watch indicated the time had passed, although he hadn’t even glanced at his watch, he placed another stone at the slightly changed angle of shadow cast by the stick, then drew a line from the first stone to well beyond the second.
“This line runs west-east.” He turned her until the shadow stick was behind her and she was standing with her left foot halfway between the stones and her right foot on the line the same distance again past the second stone.
Warmth flooded through her from his touch, and her concentration wavered. His breath was hot on her cheek, his smell invitingly masculine. She dragged in a steadying breath. “Now what?”
“Now you’re looking north, in the direction of the camp.” Hunkering down he drew a line at her feet bisecting the first line, indicating north-south, she assumed.
When she said so, he nodded. “This is how you make an earth compass.”
Trying not to focus on the luxuriant spill of his hair, or give in to the temptation to run her fingers through it—an entirely new temptation for her—her brows knit. “How would this help us at night?” They had climbed the hill before dawn.
He stood up, standing a fraction too close to her for comfort. “The earth compass works in moonlight, too. Once you decide in which direction to travel, you stand on the compass and face the way you intend moving. Look for a bright star, or better still, a group of stars in that direction and move toward them.”
Follow your star, she thought. Was there a message here? “Won’t the trees get in your line of sight?” she asked, annoyed at the husky way her voice came out.
He nodded. “Good thinking. You don’t choose stars that are right on the horizon, or you’ll lose sight of them behind the trees. You also need to remember that stars move east to west at about fifteen degrees an hour, the same as the sun. I’ll show you how to measure degrees using your hand span.”
He took her hand and the world lurched again. Much more of his touch and she would be in his arms again, not answerable for the consequences. She tugged free, feeling heat flood into her face. “Show me later. I think we should get back to camp and make sure Eddy hasn’t disturbed anything.”
Blake saw the telltale color stain her cheeks and felt an inner swell of satisfaction. She would be his before this adventure was over. She might not be sure if she wanted him, but he had no doubts. What happened after that was up to fate, although he had ideas about that, too.
“You’re the boss,” he said. For now, at least.
He saw her eyes widen as if she’d picked up his thought. “You don’t have a problem with that?”
His shoulders lifted. “Why should I? I’m a sensitive new-age kind of guy.”
“Yeah, right.”
Feigning hurt feelings, he stuck out his lower lip. “You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you’ll let me lead as long as it suits you.”
Keeping the grin off his face, he said, “I might surprise you.”
The skeptical look she gave him only made him want her more. He’d take the greatest delight in breeching that tough journalistic facade to connect with the woman beneath. She’d be all softness, all warmth, all passion. An all-or-nothing kind of lady. His kind.
But first he’d have to win her trust and make her want him as much as he wanted her. Then he’d see who led and who followed.
He couldn’t stop himself. He brushed his thumb along her jawline and saw her shudder. Dark, potent desire leaped into her gaze and he watched her master it with an effort. Or thought she had. She would never know how tempted he was to show her how thin her veneer of control really was. He knew because his own wasn’t much better. The awareness was in his gruff tone as he said, “Let’s get back to camp.”
Chapter 5
Blake’s survey of their campsite showed no signs of disturbance, although he frowned when he spotted fresh footprints near the perimeter. “Unfortunately, they don’t tell us anything except that someone was here.”
“And we already know that,” she said, setting the ingredients for the bush bread called damper out on a folding table.
In the middle of starting the fire, Blake paused. “Don’t take this too lightly. What Eddy’s doing has more than nuisance value. If I had my way, feeding wild crocodiles would be illegal in Australia.”
She mixed flour and water, plunged elbow-deep into the sticky mix and began to knead. “It’s already illegal in countries like the United States, but it’s popular with tourists.”
“Who have no idea of the risks involved,” he said. “Teaching crocodiles to jump creates an association between people and food. When they do what they’ve been trained to do and eat someone, the same people training them will be baying for their blood.”
She kept kneading, sprinkling extra flour over the ball of dough as she worked. “I’m starting to feel sorry for the crocodiles.”
