A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return: A Kiss to Seal the Deal / The Army Ranger's Return

Just one-hundred-percent clean, pure woman. With killer bone-structure.

She had to be the most natural, open woman he’d ever met. And as she’d stood there, playing the worst game of negotiation he’d ever witnessed, showing her entire hand in an easy second, he’d found himself wanting to help her. To teach her how the game was played. To save her from herself.

Kate Dickson and her greenies needed someone like him in their corner or they were going to get absolutely screwed by this world. But the idea of playing Sir Galahad to her helpless maiden appealed a little bit too much—given what she’d done. What she was still doing.

He shut off the water with a slam and yanked a towel from the rack.

Yet she’d walked out of here with the very thing she’d come for. He might disagree with her technique, but he couldn’t fault her results. Maybe he had more of his father in him than he realised if a few nervous smiles and a charming blush from an ingénue could have him eating out of her hand. Or maybe she had more of him in her than he gave her credit for. An innate talent for spotting someone’s weakness.

In his room, he yanked on a fresh set of jeans and a denim shirt before shoving his feet into well-worn paddock boots. His father’s, but a reasonable fit. Leo McMurtrie would flip in his grave to see his city son pulling on his battered work-boots and heading out into the paddocks.

He snatched his keys off the kitchen bench, slid an expensive pair of sunglasses on and sprinted to his car, eager to catch up with the virginal Ms Dickson and get the balance of power back on track between them. She and her team might sit on beaches all day getting a killer tan and counting bobbing seal-heads in the water—or something—but he was about to show them just how pointless it all really was. Probably better in the long run, given they’d be moving on soon, regardless of what the district mayor wanted. If Alan Sefton was so fired up about their success, then he could work with them to find a new location.

Tulloquay was off-limits.

He pulled his car up next to Kate’s battered ute right on the fifteen-minute mark and looked around. There was no sign of anyone up here, but a third vehicle was parked a few metres away. Six sheep sat curled happily in its shade, the only shade as far as the eye could see. He’d forgotten what a barren, blustery spot this was.

A healthy gust blew the fine sand from the cliff face back up at his skin and he found himself tempted to turn his rump to the wind like the sheep did. So much for the royal treatment. Looked like he’d have to show himself around.

He peered over the edge of the bluff and then gaped at what he saw below.

Kate lay full-bodied on a big, round seal, kitted up in elbow-and knee-pads, her dirty cargos and the filthiest shirt he’d ever seen. Her long, brown legs were hiked up hard and pressed into the sides of the seal, pinning its powerful flippers to its side and holding it immobile. Two rangy young men, as mucky and wet as Kate, worked hard at the front of the seal, fitting something to the vacant space between its shoulder blades. She contained the protesting seal just long enough for them to fit the small black box and test its fixings. Then the men backed off across the cove to join two other researchers there. Nearer to them a couple of other seals looking after a group of babies shifted nervously from side to side.

Grant held his breath.

These weren’t bull seals, but females could still give a nasty bite and they were known to carry toxic bacteria in their mouths. One bad contact and Kate would be under medical attention for the rest of her three months. Even he knew that, and it had been twenty years. She worked with these animals every day.

What the hell was she thinking?

Below him, Kate seemed to gather herself for a moment, and then in one lithe move she sprang sideways, rolling and crashing onto the rocky outcrop as the seal lurched away from her into the sea and disappeared under the waves. Grant felt the crack of bone against rock from his eagle-nest position, and was sure he heard her agonised groan as she flopped over onto her back and stared up at the sky.

Right at him.

From his high position, he could see the small track he used to take to get down to the water where it came out near the waterline of the rocky inlet known as Dave’s Cove. Two decades dissolved away as muscle memory took him to where he knew the top opening of that trail was. It was a lot harder getting down as a grown man than it had been as a fearless, fleet-footed boy but he stumbled out onto the rocky base just as Kate was pulling off an elbow pad. Bloody scrapes marred those perfect legs.

Adrenaline made itself known at last. ‘What the hell was that?’ he growled.

She stopped, stunned. Three of her team looked up. ‘What?’

‘Seal-riding is part of your research protocols, is it?’

Her mouth dropped open. ‘I wasn’t riding it, I was restraining it.’

‘Kitted out in rollerblading gear?’

She stopped and looked down at herself for a moment, astonished. Then she straightened and stared at him as though he were mad. Which at this moment he’d be prepared to believe.

‘I got back from your place and Stella was onshore. We’ve been waiting to get her alone for a week now. I didn’t have time to change into overalls.’

That was when he noticed the rest of her team was dressed alike in terrible blue overalls. At least, it could be blue, under all the filth. Hard to tell.

‘What were you doing to her?’ His seals. From years ago. Hisseals. Just when he would have sworn he didn’t care for any part of this farm.

‘We were fixing the TDR to her back. She’ll carry it for the next month’

Feeling like an idiot didn’t help his mood any, and it was starting to sink in that he’d made a mistake. A big one. He frowned, but softened his voice with effort. ‘The what?’

She eyed him cautiously. ‘Time-depth recorder. It collects data on their foraging habits.’

He looked out to sea where Stella had disappeared and then back at Kate. An odd feeling very close to grudging respect began to nibble in his belly. ‘That was dangerous, Kate.’

‘Don’t worry, you’re not liable; we have our own insurance. We know what we’re doing. And it doesn’t hurt her.’ At his sceptical look, she relented. ‘Well, maybe her pride. A little. She’ll forgive me; they always do. They’re very resilient. We’ve been doing this a couple of times a month for two years.’

‘So this is what you do down here? Track seals?’

Kate laughed and someone on the other side of the cove joined her. ‘Uh, no. That was the exciting part.’ She glanced at the huddling young who were starting to relax again now that the drama was over. They opened their dark mouths in a belated show of group bravery. ‘Sometimes we catch up the pups to weigh them and check their condition. But mostly we just take samples.’

‘Samples?’

Kate stripped the other elbow pad off but left the knee pads in position. ‘Come on over, we’ll show you. You might like to help.’

Let the sell-job begin. He had sudden visions of lifting traces of fur samples from the rocks, CSI style, and studying them for genetic variation under multi-million-dollar microscopes. Or extracting blood samples from the cute little fur-balls blinking at him. ‘Sure, why not?’

Kate threw him a pair of rubber gloves and a couple of plastic bags then handed him a large spatula as he grew close. ‘What do you want—vomit or scats?’

One of her team snorted. Grant just blinked at her.

‘Sorry.’ She was all innocence. ‘You did say you wanted to help?’

He had a sudden recollection of her joking about not wasting a valuable sample on smearing him with seal poop. ‘You cannot be serious?’

She sank onto one hip and braced long slim wrists on her waist. ‘Were you hoping for something sexier? Sorry; seal riding’s all done for the day.’

With a sarcastic smile, she bent down and artfully scooped a mountainous pile of silvery black gunge into her plastic bag, taking care to get every last bit. Grant’s stomach turned. She handed the bag to an assistant who labelled it for her and put it into one of three eskies over near the limestone cliff-face.

‘You’re not kidding.’

She straightened and looked at him. ‘Do I strike you as a comedian?’

No. Not at all. But he was damned if he was going to be shown up by a greenie. He glanced around the rocky beach. The way he figured it, what came back up had to be better than what had gone all the way through. ‘I’ll take vomit.’

Her smile, instant and genuine, was at least as dazzling as the sun burning down on them. It stole his breath almost as much as the odour from her sample, which reached him in the same moment. His stomach lurched again.

‘If you puke, do it away from our samples. We don’t want any contamination.’ With no further discussion, Kate turned back to her collection and left him in the dubious care of one of her team, who showed him the basics of vomit scooping.

He only gagged twice, which he was pretty proud of. And he collected three whole samples before he reluctantly gave in to his curiosity.

‘Why are we doing this?’

Kate worked hard to disguise the tiny, triumphant smile. But she wasn’t fast enough. Weirdly, it didn’t bother him. Instead, it birthed a warm kind of glow that something he’d done had finally pleased her. A rare enough sensation, when it came to her.

‘Our study relates to the foraging habits of these females so we can determine what level of threat the seals pose to commercial-fishing harvests.’

‘And collecting the foulest substance known to humankind will tell you that how, exactly?’

Kate straightened and zip-locked a particularly feral sample into containment. ‘Beaks and ear bones.’

Don’t ask. Curiosity, real and genuine, blazed. Do not ask! He stared at her, burning, determined not to speak.

‘OK, go ahead and tell me,’ he blurted and the power slipped further.

Kate’s face exploded with life, earnest passion glowing past the smears of dirt and goodness knew what else on her flawless skin. ‘We sift the faecal samples to isolate the otoliths—ear bones—of the food in their stomach. Then we pair the otoliths up, identify and count them, and it tells us how many fish each seal ate and of what species.’

There was no chance on this planet he was going to admit to the unconventional brilliance of the plan. How else could you figure out what the black goo once was? ‘You do realise it’s absolutely disgusting?’

‘Oh, completely. But sensationally effective.’ She shrugged. ‘Everything else digests.’

He scraped another sample into a fresh bag, mouth-breathing the whole time, still fighting back the stomach heaves. When he spoke, he sounded vaguely like he’d been sucking helium. ‘And the vomit?’

She moved to the next sample, closer to him, and squatted to attend to it. ‘Squid and octopus beaks get stuck in their sphincters. Make the seals regurgitate.’

Of course they do. When had his ordinary day taken such a surreal twist?

‘Wouldn’t want to miss any ear bones.’ His voice sounded tight, even to him, as he lifted a sample bag and braved a look.

She seemed genuinely pleased that he’d caught on so quickly. ‘Exactly. Let me show you something.’

If it wasn’t from a seal’s body, and if it got him away from this stench, he would follow her into the mouth of hell. He offloaded his sample to one of Kate’s assistants and followed her over to a far dry corner of the cove. She rummaged a moment and produced a laminated photograph of a small, glossy fish with googly eyes and fluorescent spots on its dark silver face. A particularly unattractive fish, but from the distant recesses of his memory he realised he knew that animal.

‘Lanternfish.’

Her brown eyes widened. ‘Right.’

‘You forget, I grew up around here.’

‘Still, not a common catch. It’s a deep-sea fish. How do you know it?’

Grant frowned. His father’s face swam in and out of his memory just as fast, but he couldn’t hold the elusive memory. ‘I have no idea. Why are they special?’

‘My research shows that ninety percent of the fish coming out of these seals is lanternfish.’

‘And?’

‘And humans don’t eat lanternfish. Too oily.’

It hit him then, why this mattered to her so much. ‘The seals are no threat to human fisheries.’

‘None. In fact they probably help it, because our fish and their fish prey on the same smaller species. So by keeping lanternfish numbers down the seals help ensure there’s more smaller-prey fish to support the fish we haul up by the netful.’

‘Thus protecting a multi-million-dollar industry.’

‘Exactly.’

Well, damn. The seals were probably essential to Castleridge’s thriving fishing industry. The same kind of feeling that he got when he found the weak link in a competitor’s contract hit him, a mini-elation. Except hot on the heels of the rush came a dismal realisation, and this one sank to the bottom of his gut. ‘Who knows about this?’ he asked carefully.

‘So far? My team. Leo knew. And now you know.’

‘Is that why my father gave you his support?’

‘It was your father that put me onto the lanternfish in the first place.’

His gut clenched and it had nothing to do with the stench. ‘Bull.’

She seemed surprised by his vehemence. ‘He never believed the seals were a problem. He’d watched their habits. He grew up with them too.’

True. How could he have forgotten that? Had Leo spent the same lazy days he had as a boy, hanging out with the forbidden seals? Had he sought sanctuary there when his father went off at him?

Her eyes gentled. ‘He was stoked when the results started coming in showing he was right.’

That was what she’d want him to believe, to improve her case. ‘You’re telling me he was happy his land was going to be accessioned?’

Her eyes dropped.

‘I thought not.’ Look at what he’d done as a result.

Brown almond eyes lifted to his. ‘He was conflicted, Grant. He wanted to do what was right. But he knew what it would do to the value of the farm.’

The almighty farm, the god to which Leo McMurtrie prayed. It had always been his beginning, middle and end. ‘And now you expect me to simply follow suit?’

Kate frowned and clutched the photograph. ‘I thought …’

‘You thought this would make a difference? Why?’

‘Because you’re a lawyer. You pursue justice. These animals are being unjustly persecuted and we hold the evidence in our hands.’

‘I’m a contracts lawyer, Kate. I don’t do the whole “scales of justice” thing. I lock down minor details, I screw down better deals, I hunt for loopholes and make sure no-one can get out of something they’ve committed to. Or, in this case, I’ll be doing my best to get out of the agreement my father had with you.’

Kate paled. ‘But how can you, now that you know? You can protect these seals. Help save them. Your whole property could become a sanctuary.’

Her naïve idealism was like a foreign language to him. ‘I can’t protect anyone, Kate. They won’t be mine to protect.’

She blinked. ‘What do you mean? I’ve been watching you improve the place. Getting it back in shape. Giving Tulloquay its life back.’

‘To sell, Kate. I’m doing it up to sell it as soon as it passes into my name.’

She seemed to stumble briefly but caught herself on a rocky outcrop. ‘You’re selling your farm?’

She said it as though he’d announced he was going to slaughter the seals for their coats. ‘My father’s farm. It was never mine, even when I lived here. I’m not a farmer. I’m a lawyer. I never wanted this.’

And Dad knew it. The final irony—leaving it to a son who wouldn’t want it, making all of this his problem.

‘But the seals …’

‘Three months, Kate. I did warn you. You’ll just have to wrap up early.’

The panicked glitter to her eyes wheedled its way straight into his subconscious. He didn’t like distressing her. ‘We can’t wrap up early. Breeding season starts in two months and we need to establish where that happens. It’s a key piece of the cycle to ensure we have a full year of foraging behaviour established for this year.’

‘Then you should have done it before now.’

Colour roared high along her cheekbone. ‘Do you think we didn’t try? We’ve been searching for two seasons to work out where they go. It’s unusual for any group to breed somewhere other than their rookery, but these ones do. The TDR’s don’t record positioning, only depth. We’ve lost the colony two seasons running during breeding season.’

‘Then who’s to say you wouldn’t have lost them again this year? I’m sure the bulk of your research will still stand. Whatever you have now has got to be more than science has ever had before. Two years is not a bad innings.’

She stared at him with eyes as big as the seal pups’. ‘How can you be so different to your father?’

His head came up like whiplash, his gut sucking up as tight as the vacuum-seal lid on the eskies. ‘Whatever you think you know, Kate, you’re wrong. My father gave his life to this farm. He wouldn’t have stood by and watched it get carved up.’

Her mouth gaped. ‘Yet you’re going to sell it off to some stranger?’

‘As a going concern. To someone who’ll work it the way it was meant to be.’

Her colour rose with her voice. ‘It wasn’t meant to be a farm. It’s meant to be a delicate coastal ecosystem for all creatures to enjoy, except we came along and colonised the south coast for ourselves and filled it with hard-hoofed livestock!’

‘People don’t buy delicate ecosystems.’

Hurt and disappointment washed over her face. ‘Shutting us down early makes it harder for me to get my results finalised, but it doesn’t invalidate the study completely. The research will still go through. You can’t stop it.’

In the moment when he should have been saying something, he saw the lightbulb come on over her head.

She gasped. ‘But it will stall ratification by the conservation commission. You’re going to rush this sale through before the conservation status changes.’

His choices were reflected back to him in the disgust in her pale expression. Infinitely worse than the hard, callused glares of some corporate types he routinely nailed down. At least there the playing field was relatively equal. Discomfort burned low in his throat.

‘I told you, Kate. Loopholes and weaknesses are what I do. You’ve shown your hand too early.’ He peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the bag at her feet, feeling about as worthy as the slimy muck that splattered off them.

‘You have three months.’

CHAPTER FOUR

FOR the next month, Kate’s days started at half-past four in the morning as she drove out daily to Tulloquay, arriving just after sunrise and staying until dark. The looming deadline of the settlement of Leo’s probate pressed down on her relentlessly—and now the addition of a possible new owner to negotiate with. How many times would she have to fight this battle? How many times would she see her world slide into disarray?

She hated it. When her parents had died, her life had been ripped comprehensively out of her hands. She’d been voiceless amongst strangers making decisions for her, people who’d thought a pre-teen wouldn’t have a problem with having a brand-new life mapped out for her. But she had.

A big problem.

It was why she’d picked science for a career—cause and effect. Logical progression. Predictable results. Her work rarely spun out of control the way her life had.

Until now.

Not that she wasn’t doing her best to drag it back into some kind of order. She’d split her team into half so that three of them could stick to the analysis of the samples in their lab in the city while she and two others continued collecting what samples they could on ever-lengthening shifts. She assigned herself the longest ones of all. It was exhausting and discouraging work and she was dreading the day they’d have to walk away, unfinished, from their study. From the seals. From everything they’d built. All on the very unlikely maybe of a future owner letting them resume their work.

But she backed up the new team rotation by working on a report late into the night that would hopefully show the Conservation Commission that the seal population was no threat to Castleridge’s fisheries, and, by extension, the rest of the region. Maybe that would be enough to get some protections put in place for the seals.

She tried hard not to think about the better use that her team could be putting all that driving time to—three hours in the morning and three in the evening. But, unless Grant McMurtrie planned to relent on his determination to sell Leo’s farm, there was no real option. They needed to increase the number of field days and they just couldn’t afford the kind of trailer-based accommodation infrastructure that went with remote postings.

It was bad enough fretting about the twenty-thousand-dollar TDR still fitted to the back of Stella, who was missing. It would eventually fall off the seal as her fur grew out, but for Kate’s project it would be a significant financial blow if it wasn’t recovered. Plus it carried a month’s worth of crucial data.

The most useful thing she could do to try and put the brakes on her madly spinning world was to stay down here overnight, mitigate all that time lost to travelling. She had a tent but last night she’d had no energy to erect it. She’d sat awake, long after her team mates had gone home, staring out at the glittering sky and watching the reflection of the stars shift on the ocean surface. Exhausted and discouraged, she’d curled up in the cramped back seat of her ute. She’d knocked off a whole report chapter—freehand, on her lap—before falling asleep, chilled and miserable, in her sleeping bag.

Now she stumbled back up over the edge of the cliff where she’d found a private spot to relieve her bladder after a long night in the car.

‘Tell me you didn’t sleep on the beach.’

She leaped clean off the ground at the unexpected voice, deep and close. She was more conscious than ever of her smelly seal-clothes, extra rumpled after a night squished up in her car. And the fact he’d just busted her peeing, albeit out of view.

‘Grant.’ Her hands went to her loose hair, blowing in the ever-present wind, before she could stop them. She scanned the desolate coastal paddocks until she spotted his truck in the far distance over near the sheep’s water supply. ‘What are you doing out here so early?’

‘I wanted to check the drinkers before it got too blustery. I saw your ute.’ He glared into the tiny extra-cab of the ute. ‘Did you sleep here, Kate?’

‘I was just too tired to drive last night.’

He narrowed his eyes and really studied her. ‘You look terrible.’

Again her hands twitched to attend to her shabbiness. He, of course, looked every bit the fresh-from-the-shower Aussie farmer, even though she knew he wasn’t. Clothes, it appeared, really did maketh the man. Every time she saw him those shoulders seemed to get wider. ‘We have so much to try and finish. Every minute counts.’

His lips thinned. ‘Where’s your team?’

‘I’m only bringing half of them; the other half are in the lab rushing the samples through.’ She could hear the tension in her own voice and smiled brightly. ‘But we’re getting there. It’s all good.’

He pulled his hat down harder over his eyes against the rising morning sun. ‘No, it’s not. Not if you’re wearing yourself out and sleeping in your car.’

Frustration hissed out of her. ‘Sadly, my budget doesn’t really run to portable labs and campers. I’m just working with the parameters I’ve got.’

‘Would that help? A lab down here?’

‘Talking in hypotheticals sure won’t.’

He stared at her steadily.