Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

once been alive. Doobie had explained to Samantha how the pale “sand,” so called, was actually ground-up coral and that coral was a living animal—great colonies of tiny living animals.
    Samantha paused and stooped down where the ocean meets the sand to study a chunk of coral cast ashore by that storm. It stank, for one thing, and its pallid gray was absolutely disappointing, not at all the bright red one calls “coral.” Its upper face, no doubt the living part of which Doobie spoke, was not just rough and hard but sharp. The notion of a nearly flat surface being so sharp intrigued her.
    As green as anything in Ireland, the forest beside her shimmered in the sun with a vibrating warmth unknown in Erin. In Ireland the constant green seemed a sort of backdrop to life, a landscape canvas against which the major characters of the drama of Samantha Connolly played their roles. This rain forest, though, was a living thing unto itself, a dense and brooding entity. It crowded relentlessly against the narrow white line of shore; in places, mangroves breached the line and brought the forest wading down into the very sea. Death lurked here, they said, and tangled resistance to even the most innocent of attempts to penetrate its ominous darkness. Samantha couldn’t quite believe that; it was much too beautiful.
    Sun. In her few short months on this Queensland coast, Samantha had basked in more sun than she had seen her whole lifelong in Ireland. And she wasn’t even trying to bask—nor should she; her nose exhibited a pronounced tendency to peel.
    Today she strode, inundated in brilliance, along that shifting, halting line twixt land and sea. The slurry of sand gave beneath her bare heels and squeezed up between her bare toes. Crystal ripples flung themselves up the beach where she walked and fell back to nothing, over and over and over. She tried to remember the storm and this surf crashing against the front porch a quarter mile beyond its normal confines. She couldn’t anymore, not clearly, and that had been only a few short days ago.
    Hoofbeats? Samantha wheeled. Here came Mr. Sloan along the beach. He was riding Gypsy today for the first time since the tragedy at the stable, and she appeared in rare form. She carried her nose high and her ears up. Her nostrils flared and snorted. Samantha almost wished Mr. Sloan would simply let her go and let her fly—let her run free and wild with her mate the sea—but he held her firmly to a brisk collected canter.
    Gypsy was following the surf line, too, so Samantha stepped out into the water a few feet to give way.
    But Mr. Sloan didn’t pass by. He drew Gypsy to a reluctant halt in front of Samantha. “Out touring, Sam?”
    “I suppose, sir, in a way. I just now helped Kathleen take dinner down to the men at the mill. She’s driving the wagon back, but I thought it too nice an afternoon to bump along the road. ’Tis no farther, and slightly quicker, to return home along the beach here. And ’tis lovely, the day, aye?”
    He swung down out of the saddle. Gypsy skitted aside and waltzed in a tight circle around him. He commenced a gentle stroll just above waterline, so Samantha fell in beside him. She shifted her shoes from her right hand to her left, lest they accidentally brush against him and make a dirt mark on his clean white jodhpurs.
    His dark eyes held hers only a moment, then gazed off to far distance. “You seem t’ve become something of a mother hen to the house staff. You know your sisters quite well, I presume.”
    “Too well, at times.”
    He chuckled. “I understand; I grew up with two brothers. And how well do you know Amena O’Casey?”
    Samantha considered a moment. “Not well, not really. We became acquainted, of course, on the voyage here. She indentured herself the very same day we did. But then and now she tends to explore her own pursuits and meself has other interests. And ’tis Linnet with whom she shares a room. I be nae her supervisor and she