Awakened by His Touch

by Nikki Logan

  ‘You never went anywhere as a kid?’

  ‘We went on a grand total of one family holiday in my whole life. I drove further getting here to you.’

  Getting to you. She forced the little thrill of those words down. He meant Morgan’s. Of course he did. But still...

  ‘So you headed off to see the world. How did you pay for it?’

  ‘I’d been working after school in a fast food place since I was fourteen, I saved up enough for the first leg of my journey as soon as I left school.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Cheapest flight out of Perth was to Bali. You’d be amazed at how many people go to the trouble of travelling to another country and then don’t want to engage with the locals. I ran errands for xenophobic Westerners for a few months before hopping over to Vietnam, then Thailand and India. Picking up whatever work I could get, always living local. Living cheap. Exploiting whatever opportunities I could find as I went along. Country-hopping.’

  ‘How did you manage the languages? The politics in some of those areas? As a kid?’

  ‘I didn’t always, but I got by. By the time I hit India I had a system and I was of age. Bars, hotels and restaurants were perfect for short-term work, because you could sneak at least one decent meal a day while getting paid. I kept a low profile and always kept moving.’

  ‘You didn’t want to stop?’

  ‘No.’ Passion leaked out of him as a groan. ‘I’d been stopped my whole life. I just wanted to move.’

  She shuffled around towards him. ‘Then why did you come home?’

  When she said ‘home’ it was with a respectful breath. But she got the sense that to Elliott it was more of a dirty word.

  He accepted a drink from the waiter who had delivered it to their cluster of seats and then dropped his voice down for her hearing only.

  ‘I grew up. Got tired of my own pace. And I realised that I could get the same spirit of...conquering...from finding small businesses and growing them. Selling for a profit. Eventually, that led to a buy-sell pattern that was as nomadic as my travelling but more profitable, and Ashmore Coolidge took me on as an intern. And the rest is history.’

  What he saw as nomadism she saw as reluctance to commit. Not that it had made him any less money that way. ‘No more travel?’

  ‘For business, yes. And the odd holiday back to Bali, where it all started.’

  ‘We’re very different people,’ she murmured.

  The only part of his wanderlust that she could relate to was the frustration towards a parent. She’d felt it her whole life, but attached to her over-eager father, whereas Elliott’s had been with his apparently under-achieving mother.

  ‘Not so different. You wouldn’t have grown Morgan’s the way you have if you didn’t have a pioneering spirit.’

  ‘I grew it to secure our financial base. I wasn’t looking to revolutionise the industry.’

  ‘Yet you have in some ways.’

  ‘What ways?’

  ‘The apitoxin side of your business. Treating rheumatism and Parkinson’s. That’s pretty unusual. The surf wax.’

  Hmm. Someone had been reading up.

  ‘Apitoxin is not revolutionary. I started with bee venom in response to the Davidsons’ allergic son—to help desensitise him so that they can stay on the land they love.’

  And once she’d discovered that harvesting the venom didn’t have to kill the bees, she’d realised it was a perfect by-product of what they did every day, anyway.

  ‘And we produce near one of Australia’s best surf regions. Of course we were going to make a speciality board wax. But I still didn’t invent the idea.’

  ‘There’s nothing that Morgan’s is doing that’s totally unique? What about your facial recognition work?’

  Really? Was he going to keep badgering until she confessed to being the Steve Jobs of bees? ‘It’s the bees that are amazing. And the software engineers. Not me.’

  ‘It was your proposal.’ But something in her expression must have finally dawned on him. ‘Why don’t you want to be amazing, Laney?’

  Frustration hissed out of her. ‘Because I’m not. I’m just me. Anything I do is out of curiosity or the desire to strengthen our brand. I’m not curing cancer or splitting atoms.’

  ‘Not yet...’

  Ugh..! ‘Why does everyone try to make me more than I am? I just work with bees. They are my business and I try to be smart about business. But that’s it.’

  ‘Laney—’

  ‘We have a whole weekend ahead of us, and I’m not going to show you anything of interest if you don’t let this go. Your visit is about Morgan’s—not about me.’

  ‘Okay, take it easy. I’ll drop the subject. But at some point you’re going to have to accept what everyone else knows—that you are Morgan’s.’

  * * *

  You are Morgan’s.

  She wasn’t. She didn’t want to be. She was a Morgan and that was it. Morgan’s was a family, a plural, a heritage and a way of life. It was the genetic memory and the learning of everyone who’d ever had anything to do with their bees, going right back as far as their founder, her great-grandfather, and that first Queen he’d hived up as a hobby.

  She and Morgan’s were as symbiotic as queens and their colonies: one couldn’t exist without the other. But, as reverent as they were while the Queen lived, ultimately when she was lost the colony just made a new one. They kept the hive strong.

  It wasn’t personal with bees.

  So why was Elliott trying to personalise this? Why was he trying to hang Morgan’s success around her neck, all millstone-ish? And why was he working his way up to making Morgan’s continued success contingent somehow on her...what had he called it...?

  Her pioneering spirit.

  As if that was a prerequisite for something to come.

  ‘Good morning.’

  Wilbur slowed her to a halt halfway to the chalet. ‘Morning, Elliott. Sleep well?’

  ‘I slept brilliantly. May I?’

  How did she know what he was asking? Yet she did. ‘Sure.’

  She unclipped her harness and gave Elliott the moment he’d asked for with Captain Furry-Pants. Released, Wilbur knew he was allowed to enjoy it. Just be a dog. The two of them enjoyed a mutual rough-house until they naturally parted, all done.

  She buckled up the harness again and Wilbur sat at attention by her leg. ‘No possums this time?’

  ‘Nothing I didn’t sleep through.’

  Bully for him. She’d slept as badly as those possums. ‘Have you had breakfast?’

  ‘I’ve had coffee. Close enough.’

  ‘That might work for you in the city, but here a coffee doesn’t fuel you until morning tea. You’d better have a reasonable lunch.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She tipped her head. ‘I don’t want to have to carry you if you faint.’

  His chuckle carried them across the paddock. ‘So what’s the plan for this morning?’

  ‘I thought I’d show you where we make the queens and the Royal Jelly. Two more of our sidelines.’

  ‘You make the queens?’

  ‘Well, the bees do it. We just give them a nudge.’

  Elliott followed Laney and Wilbur between fences and along the crunch of a gravel path towards the plant sector. Inside, a pair of workers chatted to each other over the whirr-whirr of the centrifuge harvester as they worked. It was exactly per the videos Elliott had watched for research. But over in the corner progress was more silent and studied. And that was where Laney was leading him.

  If she’d walked him off a cliff he’d have considered following.

  Which went to show how desperate he’d become in his hunt for the meaning of life.

  ‘Hi, Laney.’ Two voices piped u
p at the same time.

  Laney introduced them and then launched into presentation mode.

  ‘So, when the Queen is ready to step down, she creates special cells and her attendants know to pack them with super-nutritious jelly instead of honey.’ She ran her long fingers along the work her staff were doing until she found the enlarged cells. ‘It’s the exclusive diet of Royal Jelly which produces a fertile virgin queen instead of an infertile worker bee. Hence the name.’

  The way she said it—with such a ta-da! in her voice... It made him wish he hadn’t already done so much reading up. That way her passion could infect him for real. ‘So you place artificial cells in the hive and the attendants just fill it? No questions asked?’

  She passed him a row of artificial queen cups to examine. ‘Bees aren’t good with the big picture. And this is the most important moment in their bee career. Thousands of bees will be born and die without ever facing such responsibility.’

  Jeez—if he’d waited for opportunities to come to him he’d have withered and died right there in his tiny alley-facing office.

  ‘So a new queen hatches and the hive is happy ever after?’

  Her laugh was overly loud even in the busy plant. ‘No, multiple virgin queens emerge and fight to the death until only the strongest is left standing.’

  Okay, that hadn’t been in any of his pre-reading. ‘That’s very...Machiavellian.’

  ‘Once the victor emerges she has a couple of days to gather her strength and then she mates with as many drones from unrelated hives as she can in a day in a special yard we set up.’

  ‘Bloodied and hepped up on battle frenzy? I’m amazed she gets any takers at all.’

  ‘The drones are highly motivated. Every egg a queen will ever produce in her lifetime comes from that single blazing day of sexual excess.’

  ‘When I come back I want to be a drone,’ he said. ‘Sounds like they have it best.’

  ‘Sure. If you don’t mind getting your genitals torn out for your troubles.’

  His, ‘Sorry...?’ was more of a choke.

  ‘When the drone yard is littered with disembowelled corpses she flies back to her starter hive and then lays for the rest of her months-long life.’

  Lucky she couldn’t see his gape.

  ‘I thought you were this gentle, sweet farm girl. I take it all back. You are as ruthless as they come, Helena Morgan.’

  She didn’t look the slightest bit put out—if anything she looked pleased. ‘Surely that’s a compliment, coming from you? Besides, if you don’t like that then maybe we shouldn’t show you how Royal Jelly is produced.’

  ‘What could possibly top pimping, disembowelment, sanctioned orgies and virgins fighting to the death?’

  One of Laney’s staff busied himself melting the wax seal on the rest of the queen cells with a heat lamp and then scooped out the Royal Jelly onto the edge of a collection container, plucked a tiny grub out and squashed it on the table.

  Laney’s face was comically grave. ‘Bee-o-cide.’

  For some reason that shocked him more than anything else she’d done or said. In his mind Laney was as peace-and-love as any hippy, so bee-slaughter didn’t sit comfortably. ‘But you go to so much trouble to save the other bees?’

  ‘Has it only just dawned on you that we’re farmers, Elliott? These ones would have fought to the death anyway. We just pre-pick the survivor.’

  ‘So you play God?’

  ‘They’re essentially clones. The ethics get a little murky. Besides, the grubs are tiny when they’re swamped in Royal Jelly. Virtually insentient.’

  ‘Wow.’ He shook his surprise free. ‘Here I was, feeling sorry for the worker bees who slave away keeping the voracious Queen and her royal young in riches, but I think they might actually have the best of the lot. They spend their days seeing the world, scooping up nectar in the warm sunshine, stretching their wings.’

  Her pretty face tightened. ‘I thought you would have identified more with the Queen.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Entombed in your office cell. Growing large on gathered riches. Fighting for supremacy against your colleagues until you run the show and then working yourself to death until you either create your own replacement or someone knocks you off.’

  That dismal view of Ashmore Coolidge really wasn’t all that far off reality. On its worst days. ‘You make my job sound a lot more exciting than it is. I just sit in an office and try to be smart.’

  ‘Bees have a system. It’s worked for them for a very long time. We don’t mess with it—we just work with it. And we birth a heck of a lot more bees than we kill.’

  And this was a farm, after all. Primary production. They did the dirty work so the rest of the country could eat. Had he really expected it to include no death at all just because it was bees and not beef?

  He watched the process a few times over and got a sense of how fast the two employees could work, how many queens could be created in a day, and how much Royal Jelly was harvested. Then he multiplied that by the number of hives their production report said were in play at any one time and the number of times a year that this process happened to the same hive.

  ‘That’s a lot of jelly in a year.’ At a small fortune per kilo. Sticky gold. ‘What do you do with all the Queens?’

  His unease about Laney’s straight-faced acceptance of bee-o-cide couldn’t outlast his curiosity. His mind buzzed with thoughts of global expansion potential and operational ramifications. An increasing number of northern hemisphere countries were losing entire apiaries as their winters worsened. Southern hemisphere breeders could ship them new hives, ready to go in spring and keep their agriculture alive.

  The possibilities, the income—and Ashmore Coolidge’s commission—were endless.

  ‘Come on—show me the honey extraction.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  LANEY HAD BEEN right about breakfast. He should have eaten before starting. It wasn’t even noon yet and he was flagging already.

  ‘I blame it on the country air,’ he grumbled when she queried his increasing quietness.

  ‘You’re standing in a shed full of energy.’

  ‘I can’t eat the honey your staff have gone to so much trouble to extract.’

  ‘No. But you can eat honey that you’ve gone to trouble to extract. Come on. I’ll show you our smallest sideline.’

  Two sun-bleached girls—one brunette, one Nordic-looking—sat with a plastic crate of fresh honeycomb between them, squeezing the honey out by hand.

  ‘Here,’ Laney said, nudging an empty stool with her foot. She pulled another over from the corner and sat it next to his.

  The Nordic girl handed him a chunk of whole messy honeycomb, complete with the odd bee carcass.

  ‘Have you ever milked a cow?’ Laney asked.

  Of course he hadn’t. That would have required a normal childhood visit to a farm. But she couldn’t see his pointed look so he was forced to reconsider his sarcasm.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, then. Um...have you ever caught a fish?’

  ‘Yes.’ That he had done. He and Danny on Misfit. Though, to be fair, their boat trips were more about talking and drinking than any concerted effort at catching a fish.

  ‘Okay, so harvesting honey manually is the same kind of slow, steady action as when you’re running a fishing line. Squeeze, release. Squeeze, release.’ She demonstrated on thin air.

  He glanced at the girl next to him, got a sense of the action and then tried it. A chunk of his honeycomb immediately came away and fell into the collection container—wax and all—with a dull thud.

  ‘Too hard.’ Laney laughed and bent to retrieve it before squeezing its honey free herself. ‘Squeeze...release...’ she repeated, and then leaned half over him to place her hands around his. ‘Here, li
ke this...’

  Her strong fingers closed gently around his which, in turn, closed much less gently around the honeycomb. Instantly he got a sense of how light his touch had to be.

  ‘Squeeze...’ She did so and it was steady and gentle, yet oddly firm at the same time. ‘And release...’

  Releasing came with a slight twist of her wrists that somehow compelled the honey out of the comb while keeping the waxy parts more or less in hand. She repeated both motions again, brushing more fully against him on the ‘squeeze’ and then retreating slightly on the ‘release’.

  The action definitely reminded him of something, but it sure as heck wasn’t fishing. And he sure as heck shouldn’t be thinking about it now. But with Laney this close, all clean and warm and stretched across him as she was, it was hard to think of anything else.

  ‘You do this manually?’ He forced words from his lips just as she was doing with the honey from the honeycomb. Just to return some normality to this highly charged moment. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s good training for new staff, but there’s also a small market for naturally harvested honey. Wax, dead bees and all. We sell it as Morgan’s Naturále.’

  Au naturále was not something he should be thinking about right now any more than the sensual squeeze and release action of Laney’s hands coiled so intimately around his. He concentrated on the action, on the accumulating pool of raw honey in the container between his legs, and very much not on the earthy woman by his side.

  She released his hands and sat back, leaving hers dripping over the collection container while he continued.

  Eventually Laney spoke. ‘Stasia?’

  The girl to his right peered into his bucket and then said in accented English, ‘Not bad.’

  Stasia tapped another tub with her foot and Elliott tossed the remaining ball of waxy mush in with hers. His hands were honey-coated, like sticky, sweet gloves. Stasia took his container and upended his honey into her own as Laney stood. Elliott automatically turned for the sinks that they’d used before the little demonstration.

  ‘No.’ Laney caught him with a gentle body-block, given her hands were as honey-coated as his. Her block meant she brushed into him much harder than she already had. ‘That’s the whole point.’