Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong - By Nikki Logan Page 0,67

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