A Kiss to Seal the Deal

by Nikki Logan

  The pathway. Unless twenty-five years of erosion had taken a toll, then this little trail would take him right down to the flat area near the water. Not a Sunday stroll, exactly, but doable. Lucky he’d kept himself in hiking condition instead of boardroom condition or this would have been a whole heap harder.

  He might not have bothered.

  It took around ten minutes for Grant to pick his way carefully down the ageing trail in the brutal cliff-winds. It levelled out at the base and he looked left and right, saw some familiar landmarks and remembered. Definitely right. For another ten minutes he worked his way carefully across an expanse of large, ancient rocks, with bigger waves occasionally soaking his boots. The same curled spit of land that obscured this spot from view from the sea stopped it getting hammered by the ocean’s force.

  No wonder the seals loved it here.

  No wonder he had, when he was a boy. If ever there was a spot destined for buried treasure and ruined pirate-ships, this was it.

  A moment later and he was there. Stepping into the comparative darkness of the cove, overhung by a limestone canopy older than mankind, he lifted his sunglasses and let his eyes adjust before climbing up higher on the rocks and sliding down behind the cover of a large boulder. It was only dim but, after the bright glare of the limestone cliff-face, his pupils were the size of pin-heads. And, after what had happened the last time he’d been here, he wasn’t taking any chances. He’d been young enough to be curious and stupid enough to be careless, but swift enough to get away safely when two-hundred kilos of angry, sexed-up bull seal had come lurching towards him, hell bent on seeing off the interloper. Or possibly killing him. Who knew how bull seals thought?

  Kate probably did.

  Kate…

  The woman he’d snuck out on in the early hours of this morning, delaying the inevitable moment when they would talk about what had happened the night before. He’d faked important work on the far side of the farm—as though she’d buy for one minute that anything that important could be fixed by the anti-farmer—and had taken off like a thief in the night just as the sun had wiggled its golden fingers over the eastern horizon. Because it had been easier than facing her after he’d kissed her last night. Because it had been easier than thinking about how much that kiss had rattled him. Excited him. Centred him.

  He couldn’t afford to be centred by Kate Dickson. He had a legal partnership that needed all his attention and a full life in the city to lead. Never mind that his partnership tended to take up most of his life or that, increasingly, a night in with a good book was about all he had energy for at the end of a long day.

  A Technicolor image intruded into his mind: Kate curled up at the opposite end of his enormous modular sofa, her lip between her teeth, lost in something on her laptop while he read the latest bestseller. If he stretched out an imaginary foot he could just about touch hers…

  He shook the image loose.

  Kate was farming stock. It didn’t matter where she lived or what she did; farming was either in your blood or it wasn’t. And in his case it wasn’t, even though technically it was. That was more than enough reason not to get involved. Plus, he wasn’t good relationship material, as so many women had found out over the years. He’d been wedded to his work for a decade.

  Not that she was exactly picking out engagement rings. She’d thrown herself into that kiss with as much gusto as he had, but she knew full well how different they were and how they stood at polar ends on the issue of Tulloquay and the seals. At least, she thought she did.

  She had no idea what these seals actually meant to him. What sanctuary they’d offered him as a child. That they were important to more than one person for more than one reason.

  But not necessarily as important as keeping his farm intact. It was yet another of those moments in life when you realise you can’t have everything. That you have to choose priorities.

  He was choosing the farm. She was choosing the seals. And she was fighting hard for them.

  The state Conservation Commission was already interested in her colony. If he knew her at all well, Kate would be banking on them ratifying conservation protection on the strength of her partially completed research alone. But, on her own admission, her request would carry more weight if she could sweeten the pot with a site of extra significance—a breeding site, for instance.

  A secret breeding site, for instance.

  A site pretty much like this one.

  Grant peered around the large boulder to see who was home. Two bull seals and a number of smaller females lounged around, barely noticing his presence. Both bulls sported bloody, superficial wounds but their relaxed posture told him neither animal had been serious about killing the other. Only one of them lay near the females—the victor. The one who had won mating privileges. The other, stretched out on its back, its small flippers waving in the gentle cliff-base breeze, looked like it was just all too hard.

  He sighed.

  No question about it—this was Kate’s breeding site. What she needed to put all the pieces of her puzzle neatly together and change the way the town, the government—the world—thought about fur seals. What she needed to guarantee a conservation zoning on his land.

  His eyes fell shut. What she needed, he couldn’t give her.

  In so many ways.

  The lab was one thing, something he could do to help her that wouldn’t really make much of a difference in the long term. Something he could give her to help take some of the weight off her shoulders.

  But handing her the ammunition to make sure no serious investor would ever want Tulloquay? Not an option. He may be the lousiest farmer ever to grace the south-west, but the last useful thing he could do for his father would be to find someone who would love the farm as much as Leo had. And to do that he had to have something worth selling.

  And, as the incident at the pub last night had made entirely evident, there weren’t too many folk in Castleridge who thought the words ‘seal’ and ‘worth’ had any relation to each other.

  Except maybe his father. He’d been so convinced that his dad had filled his lungs with carbon monoxide rather than face losing, to greenies, the farm he’d spent his life building up. But it turned out his lungs had been filled with something much more sinister all along—the same disease he’d lost his wife to when Grant had been little, although a different organ. No way strapping Leo McMurtrie was going to let himself grow as weak, frail and airless as his beloved wife had.

  Opting out must have seemed the most humane option.

  And, for a seventy-year-old man living alone three hours from his only family, maybe it had been.

  Grant let his lids flutter closed and finally allowed the blocked out memories to gurgle to the surface: those idyllic early years before Leo had grown disappointed with him, before Grant had discovered the father he worshipped had clay feet. Back when he still had a mother, the first happy years of his life. Just a man and wife blissfully in love and the young son they’d tried so hard for growing into the man he would one day be.

  At least the man they’d wished he’d be.

  Go on then, go! You’ve added no real value to this farm, so it might as well run without you.

  That awful last day when Grant had packed his bags and prepared to leave for good shoved its way into his memory: the mottled red of his father’s anger. The hurt in his eyes.

  If I’d known what sort of a kid you’d turn into, I wouldn’t have encouraged your mother to try so hard to have you. Maybe she’d still be with me today.

  Old anger sliced sharply below Grant’s ribs.

  Even as a sixteen-year-old he’d recognised the pain in his father’s words, but they’d burrowed down and festered in his subconscious nonetheless. Maybe there were drugs his mother could have taken if she hadn’t been pregnant, or therapies. Maybe being pregnant had drained her of the life-force she needed to fight off the disease that eventually took her life. He’d wondered about that often enough, growing up.

&nb
sp; But to hear it so baldly from his father’s angry lips…And then the final cut.

  I would trade you for her in a heartbeat.

  He forced his eyes open and stared down at the seals. Well, he had his wish now. Somewhere up in heaven Leo McMurtrie and the love of his life walked the land hand-in-hand once again. Hard to know whether a lifetime alone might have mellowed his father; if not, he had a whole after-life to find out whether he was capable of it.

  Grant turned away from the peaceful seals to face the steep climb back up the long, narrow track. The treacherous, torturous climb in gale-force winds suited his mood perfectly. Somehow he’d made such a mess of all of this, despite his best efforts. Kissing Kate was just one more in a series of questionable decisions.

  But as he turned to cross the shore towards the pathway back up the cliff, something small caught his eye. One of the females had a bloodied patch between her shoulder blades—not surprising, if childhood memories of graphic seal-mating served him well—but a few feet from her he could see something out of place, about the size of a pack of cards. Black. Durable. Expensive.

  Kate’s time-depth recorder. Her assistants carefully clipped the fur below the TDR to remove it; clearly, bull seals weren’t so courteous when they only had one thing on their minds. If the recorder had been sandwiched between a seal and two-hundred kilos of male, it might not even work. But he had to try and retrieve it. Those things were twenty grand each, she’d said, and Kate was responsible for them.

  If she couldn’t even afford a caravan to make their work easier, Grant was certain she couldn’t afford to replace a twenty-thousand dollar electrical device.

  Damn

  The bull seals grunted, grumbled and rolled over in the gentle breeze. They were settling in for a decent post-coital nap. He had two options: wait it out and hope the males went for a restorative swim later, or make the treacherous climb back to his Jeep and then return later today, when there’d be no guarantees the group would have shifted at all. Or that more bulls wouldn’t have appeared.

  Or that the TDR wouldn’t have been knocked off the rock shelf into the inky depths.

  He glanced at his watch, knowing he’d miss Kate, who would be up and gone within the hour, but conscious of the value of the little device lying out in the open on the rocks. To her.

  He backed out of the cover and climbed higher for protection and for a clear view of what the seals were doing. Then he crouched down to wait.

  Stinking coward.

  Never mind that she’d gone to bed without brushing her teeth rather than face him so soon; the fact she woken to an empty house and no decent morning-after conversation after she’d lain awake so long thinking up her part of it…

  Not that it was the morning after much. A kiss, that was all. OK—a killer kiss. A kiss that definitely would have led to more if her butt hadn’t intervened and sent the car lurching. Which would have made Grant’s no-show act this morning doubly despicable, because intimacy only prevented by accidental gearengagement still counted as intimacy by proxy. The intent had been there.

  And they both knew it.

  ‘Coward,’ she mumbled again as she hauled on a pair of tight leggings to go under her baggy field-shorts, warding off the cooling weather. Never mind that she hadn’t really perfected her blasé response before falling into a sweaty, turmoil-filled sleep—she deserved a chance to deliver it. Never mind that Grant being absent was about as effective a cool-off as she was ever going to get. Never mind that cooling off was what she wanted…

  There was a principle at stake.

  Decent men didn’t kiss someone living under their roof and then leave them hanging. Who did that? Complicated men. Complicated, conflicted men. And who was the poster child for complicated and conflicted? Grant McMurtrie.

  Today of all days.

  Not only was she still heart sore from discovering the truth about Leo’s suicide, and confused from the kiss she’d shared with his son, she was also thirty years old today.

  Her toast popped in the kitchen. OK, she’d dallied as long as she could, hoping he’d return from wherever. She was now officially pathetic—thirty and pathetic. She wolfed down her toast, cleaned the kitchen quickly and threw her gear into the back of her ute. She had a full day ahead of her, after losing all of yesterday to the lab set-up. Her seals needed her attention.

  The uncomplicated, unconflicted, comfortably predictable Atlas colony.

  Who were all in attendance for once, she realised, emerging down on the rocks at Dave’s Cove fifteen minutes later. Except for Stella, of course, but that was normal these days.

  It was bad enough worrying that something had happened to one of the longest-standing members of the colony without also worrying about her twenty-grand TDR fixed to her back and possibly lying on the bottom of the ocean. Or in some shark’s belly.

  She worked steadily, alone, until a carload of her team arrived.

  ‘Hey, Happy Birthday, old lady!’

  Her lips tightened into the serene smile she’d spent a long time working on. ‘Thank you, Artie. I can always rely on you to remind me when I’m getting older.’

  Her field assistant chuckled and threw her a small parcel wrapped in tin foil. Kate stared at it, then at him.

  ‘I believe it’s customary amongst your kind to exchange a gift.’

  ‘Amongst humans, you mean?’ Artie was the result of puberty gone wrong, super-long legs and arms that gave him a rather alien appearance. He traded on it. ‘I think you’re finally learning to understand us,’ she joked.

  She unwrapped the gift as he recited an ode out loud for the amusement of the rest of the team. ‘Things that are older than Kate…’

  It was a triple-chocolate cake, small, with melted chocolate inside and the richest of chocolate icings outside. She’d had this before when Artie’s mum had sent supplies to one of their most remote field locations.

  She clutched it as though it was a bundle of precious gems and interrupted his oration. ‘Artie, thank you!’

  The whole team laughed. Every cell of her being wanted to just gobble the chocolate delight, regardless of what was on her hands, but she held off long enough to strip off her gloves, rub alcohol cleanser all over them for good measure and pour herself a steaming hot coffee from the flask.

  Once that was done, the cake lasted about six seconds. It was as light, moist and to-die-for as the first one she’d ever had. She probably should have nibbled it. She probably should have savoured it. But after last night, she practically inhaled it.

  Fuelled by cake, and feeling infinitely better surrounded by the relentless banter of her team, Kate got back to her sampling. Even the putrid collection couldn’t spoil the happy feeling of a belly full of chocolate cake. She even forgot about Grant for a few minutes.

  As they worked amongst the lazing seals and nearly mature pups, a large wave washed up and onto the rocks, bringing a mercury-slick mass with it.

  ‘Stella!’ Kate’s heart lifted as she saw her long-missing female come lurching up the rock-shelf. She scrabbled the last of her sample into the bag and then tossed her stained gloves in favour of a crisp new pair. They snapped into place as she reached for the medical kit.

  ‘She’s wounded,’ Artie needlessly pointed out; the blood was streaming from a wound on Stella’s back.

  Together, the team worked to isolate her from the other seals for treatment. She wasn’t happy about it, but she lay still enough. Kate examined her thoroughly; the surge of blood had been caused by the movement of her powerful fore-muscles pushing her up onto the rocks and made worse by the water that streamed off her. On closer inspection, it wasn’t more than a surface wound and some lost fur. No stitches were necessary, just some antibiotic gel.

  But there was no escaping what had caused it. Kate’s heart sank as life delivered one of its stomach-curdling twists: Stella’s TDR was missing.

  ‘That’s an expensive haircut, girl,’ she whispered, gently applying the gel and wondering whether
they’d affixed the recorder badly, whether she’d snagged it while hunting along the reef edges or whether something bigger and nastier had torn it from her.

  Whatever, it was not good.

  Kate saw her research bonus shrivel before her eyes. Mind you, given that she wasn’t likely to finish her study before Grant evicted her, even that was looking dicey. No completion bonus meant she’d have to sell her apartment to raise the money to cover the cost of the missing TDR, as per her contract. Her gut plunged.

  ‘Hey.’

  Then it flipped in on itself.

  Oh, yay. Just when a birthday couldn’t get any better.

  Kate twisted her face up towards the deep voice. ‘I hope you’ve come to pitch in. You’ve used your one free spectator-pass.’

  Grant’s eyes narrowed and he chose his words carefully—smart man. ‘I can help, if you like.’

  She released Stella, who eyed both her and Grant balefully and lurched off, back into the water. Given how long she’d been absent, and given how she’d been man-handled the moment she’d arrived, Kate knew it was likely she wouldn’t see her again this season. And, under the circumstances, that meant ever. Her stomach squeezed.

  She stood stiffly and glared at the most convenient outlet for her frustrations. ‘You know what would help? Let me finish my research.’

  ‘Kate…’

  ‘Thought not.’ She marched away from him to repack the medical kit carefully. ‘Then I think my team has everything covered here. I’m sure you have a lot of things to do to get the farm ready to sell.’

  In two months. Just a matter of weeks. Panic began to nibble at her spine. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t done. Her research was sound but it wasn’t complete. She’d been crazy to take her eye off the ball, to let her growing friendship with Grant influence her work. She should have fought harder. Should have pushed the Conservation Commission; maybe it wasn’t too late.