Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong - By Nikki Logan Page 0,15
vitality and excitement about him even when he was relaxed—the sort of qualities she hadn’t experienced in years. Not since...
She frowned and tried to think about the last time she’d felt vital and realised she was going back a lot longer than four years. She hadn’t realised she missed it until tonight. Rob’s presence was a living reminder that comfortable and predictable was not all roses and perfume.
It meant she missed out on feelings like this. Like when she visualised Rob’s nipple-piercing and for one hot split second imagined closing her lips around it
God above. She shifted in her sleeping bag to disrupt the tingle of anticipation deep down inside. It had been a long time since she’d felt that too. Those feelings had dulled along with her enjoyment of life years ago. It was almost frightening to discover they’d been lying dormant all this time.
Waiting.
She flipped over angrily. She never let herself go there any more, back into those painful thoughts and memories. She was normally more cautious. It hurt too much.
It was easier to think about the man outside on the beach and his infuriating self-confidence and to speculate, secretly, what it might be like to press her mouth to his perfect smile and taste him. Just for a moment. To be held by those powerful arms, or lie beneath all that rock-hard strength. To feel all that life leaching into her.
Honor chased the sensual thoughts out, conscious that casting Rob in her private fantasy was no better than him watching her bathe. It was an intrusion, unwarranted and inappropriate. He was just a man whom circumstance had dumped on her island. He wasn’t here for her amusement.
It wasn’t his fault he was entirely distracting. And she was—apparently—still more alive than she’d believed. As she thought the word, she realised there had been several times today when he had distracted her for minutes on end. So much so, he’d driven all other thoughts from her mind. About her pain.
About them.
That made her feel disloyal, and the embers of pleasure finally cooled.
But they didn’t extinguish, no matter how hard she tried.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE following morning, Rob was nowhere to be seen. Even after she’d finally tumbled into exhausted sleep, Honor remained hyper-attuned to his return to camp and now she wondered where he had gone after she’d quarantined herself in the tent.
Damn him! He’d already upset her routine after less than one day on the island. She usually rose with the sun but, after her restless night, the island wildlife had been up for hours ahead of her.
She had work to do.
Grumbling, she pulled cut-off jeans and a tank top over her underwear, slapped on a liberal dose of sunscreen, slipped into comfortable tennis shoes and climbed out into the daylight. She ferreted out a muesli bar and bottle of water from her stores and picked up her logbook from the table, where she’d dropped it the previous night, then headed straight out towards the inland lagoon.
She crept around a crowded pisonia bush, which sagged under the weight of dozens of juvenile birds. They were entirely unconcerned with Honor’s quiet passing as they practised launching on the gusts of wind blowing over the lagoon. They dipped and flapped and showed off for each other, reminding Honor of a group of teenage skater boys hanging out at the mall.
She spotted one of her markers up ahead and cross-referenced with her logbook notes. Then she sat in the sand and turned her attention to the inland lagoon.
Her turtle watch would start tonight. The eggs in the earliest of the nests she was monitoring would be eight weeks old and could hatch any night. Then she’d swap her daytime bird monitoring to a nocturnal turtle watch, so these notes might well be her last intensive observations before she became a creature of the night for two months. She wondered whether that might not be a good thing, given her unexpected guest.
Avoidance was one way of dealing with the problem.
A hundred birds drifted lazily around on the current overhead. They were playing, not hunting, dipping in and out of the airflow, swooping on each other and free falling, only to pull up at the last moment. It was leisure time they wouldn’t have again until next breeding season. Once they got back to the serious business of survival, it would be a strict routine of hunt-eat-recover.
Honor knew how they felt. Her contract only required her to be on the island for six months of