Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong - By Nikki Logan Page 0,16

the year and it allowed her to base herself at the nearby Cocos Island township and boat out every day of that contract. Someone else probably would have. But someone else wasn’t trying to put themselves in the most northerly point in this stretch of water as they possibly could. Someone else wouldn’t crave the peace and quiet that only the cacophony of nature could bring.

Her eight months here every year was her own version of sanctuary. She only left the island for monsoon season—so some part of her must still value life—and she returned the moment it blew out for the year. If she could think of a way to stay here year round, she would.

She closed her eyes and breathed in a lungful of clean, salty air. She no longer smelled the guano from thousands of birds or the rotting vegetation and seagrass from the lagoon, but she knew they were there. Knew, without a doubt, it would be what a newcomer to the island smelled when they first arrived.

Like Rob.

She’d worried herself, last night, when she’d realised how her enjoyment of life had dulled. She had thought she was making a good recovery after all these years, finding ways to dribble joy into her greatly changed life, doing things that mattered to her. Staying focused on the end-game. It took a charismatic shipwreck hunter to shake things up and he’d only been here for twenty-four hours. Just one day to start unravelling all her carefully laid structures and boundaries. It galled her that she was questioning the life she’d been living perfectly happily for four years.

Perfectly? Nothing was perfect.

Honor dropped her eyes. His manner, his clothing and his attitudes had hinted at a lifestyle that she’d been quick to trivialise. He might be irritating and smug but she suspected Robert Dalton lived far more than she ever had.

In her four months in the civilisation of Cocos’ Home Island, she would keep very much to herself. People there knew her but not many people knew her. What friends she had left on the mainland had eventually given up trying to get her to come home and her family kept a carefully measured remote communication. The exception was her mother who—after months of fights and tense silences—had eventually taken herself and her pathological optimism far away to a town thousands of kilometres north of Honor’s home town. The irony was they were nearly neighbours now—Broome in Western Australia’s far north was the closest Australian town to Pulu Keeling.

If you called two thousand kilometres close.

She couldn’t remember anyone except her mother fighting particularly hard to keep her in Perth after the accident. Had they all made it too easy for her to become a recluse? Honor thought back to the woman she had been before the accident and looked at the woman she was now. Maybe. Then again, if she thought even further back, she remembered a young woman she could barely find inside her today.

Barefoot. Carefree. Wild.

She looked around her island and wondered how much of that she was unconsciously trying to recapture. You couldn’t get more wild than this, and more often than not she was barefoot. But carefree...?

Not even close.

She looked up from her aimless shuffling and realised she’d covered nearly the full one and a half kilometre circumference of the tiny island without coming across him.

Not that she’d been searching.

* * *

‘Would you like to see the hatchery?’

She found him in the next bay and extended an olive branch. The island might be small but he knew how to make himself scarce. It suddenly dawned on her that he’d been giving her space. That surprised her and threw her a little bit.

The welcoming warmth in his smile finished the job.

His changeability kept her on edge. One minute he was confident, sexy and every inch the playboy. Then the mask came off and he was considerate, funny and devastatingly serene. Or was serene Rob the mask?

I don’t think so.

‘The turtles? Sure.’

Honor refused to be pleased that he so instantly remembered her research focus. I went gaga over his century-old warship yesterday. It’s the least he can do. She led him around the inland lagoon and through a nondescript clutch of trees. She could see his disorientation and smiled. She knew Pulu Keeling like the back of her hand and didn’t need markers to tell her where she was. They emerged onto the beach about one hundred metres north of the Emden memorial from yesterday. Not that he