Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong - By Nikki Logan Page 0,62

and held fast in case he looked back at her. She didn’t want him to see her cry. Or sag onto the sand still clutching her letter.

She needn’t have bothered. He vaulted the reef, climbed into The Player, fired the boat up and motored out to deeper waters in The Journeyman’s wake.

He never once looked back.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE season changed virtually overnight.

It happened that way every year, in the space of a fortnight the weather turned from tolerable to dangerous. No monsoon season was fun to ride out in a sunflower tent but, back in 2001, Cyclone Walter scalped the treetops off two-thirds of the island and killed hundreds of birds. She’d be unlikely to live through something like that if it happened while she was on the island.

The blow that Rob had worried about when he’d left a month ago came to nothing, as so many of them did. The one after that caused a little more difficulty and the one due this week...that was going to be a problem. Not for the eternal island but for the solitary human inhabiting it.

Time to get back to Cocos.

Every year this moment brought Honor a great sadness. Her research wound up for the year, the breeding season over, birds streaming off the island until next year, hollowed out turtle nests filled with rubbery, degrading shell husks. Leaving the crabs to pick over the dead and the decomposing—the detritus of so many thousands of lives cohabiting such a small space.

But this year was the worst.

Because this year was the last.

The letter that Mark-the-Boatman had delivered last month had seen to that. She’d shoved it damp and crumpled, back into the buoyancy sack as Rob’s boat had finally disappeared around the southern fringes of the atoll. And then she’d forgotten it. Literally.

There was nothing the world had to say that she’d wanted or needed to hear at that moment. She only wanted to suck back into herself and wrap her arms around her aching breast and stumble from moment to moment on automatic. It was only a week later—one long, excruciatingly dull week—that she remembered it was there at all. She’d ripped into it in a fit of frustration that the island seemed more claustrophobic without Rob on it, ready for a tiny whiff of what the real world was doing.

A job offer. A letter from her superiors acknowledging the importance and quality of her work, but—in a piece of sensationally typical Government bureaucracy—offering to relocate her to a different project. As though that was some kind of reward for toughing it out on Pulu Keeling for so long. As though she’d been doing it all for them.

She’d snorted and thrown it away. Only her no-rubbish policy meant it was there, still crumpled at the bottom of the buoyancy sack to retrieve, flatten out and reread another week later.

A long, hollow week after it had finally sunk in that Nate and Justin had officially left the island. That there was no longer the slightest sense of them in the whisper of the breeze through the canopy or echoes of their laughter in the clucking of the terns. As though they’d hitched a ride with The Journeyman when it came for Rob.

They were just...gone.

Honor had always imagined that letting them go would be a gradual process, marked by poetic events and poignant sorrow. Not just this absence one morning when she crawled out of her enormous tent. As though someone had thoughtlessly removed a ladder through which they used to climb up and into the window of her consciousness. Had they milled around two storeys below that window, waiting for her to notice? Had they finally moved on when they realised she was too engaged with a sexy shipwreck hunter to remember to look for them? How long had they been gone before she’d noticed?

Their footprints were still in her heart. She could call up at will the memory of Justin’s smell, Nate’s woollen warmth. But they no longer waited for her in the dark recesses of the pisonia thatch, or called to her across the sea. She’d stood at the very edge of the most north-eastern corner of the island, stretching her gaze out towards the deepest reaches of the Javan trench, hoping to catch a memory on the stiff sea breeze.

Nothing.

Her island was totally empty of everything but birds and crabs and guano and the shadow of a gentle, caring, ridiculously arrogant man, which she refused to admit existed but which haunted every