Shipwrecked with Mr. Wrong Read Online Free PDF

studied her the way she was studying the birds. His question still hung between them, unanswered.
    ‘I’m monitoring the flocks,’ she belatedly said.
    He looked in the direction of her gaze and his eyes widened. Had he seriously not noticed it? The only other archaeologist she knew— used to know—spent most of her professional life in the bowels of the museum dusting things that other people dug up, spending most of her day staring at two square inches of artefact. Rob’s tan was too perfect and those muscles too manicured for him to spend all his time in a lab, but how else could she explain how he’d missed the massive inland lagoon that comprised half the island as he’d come towardsher. Salt-crusted, sheltered and writhing with birdlife, at first glance the surface of the water and the trees on the lagoon edge seemed white with foam when in fact they were covered with the glaring white of hundreds of feathered terns, boobies and noddies. She passed Rob her binoculars. He ranged his eyes over the lake and its myriad inhabitants. ‘Whoa.’
    Thirty-something going on sixteen.
    En masse it was quite a spectacle. Honor smiled and let him look. At peak season, these protected waters could support twenty thousand birds. Most used Pulu Keeling as a base, striking out to fish the rich waters of the Cocos Trench, then returning to nests and chicks and shelter. Even the giant frigatebirds, who generally ate and slept high above the planet on the currents of the trade winds, rested, recuperated and romanced here on the island. They were born here and instinct brought them back every two years to breed. It was, quite literally, their sanctuary.
    ‘And here I was thinking how quiet it is here …’
    Honor looked at him strangely. ‘Quiet? No, listen.’
    All around them echoed the sounds of contented birds. Occasionally, a particular voice rose in squabble or seduction but otherwisethe noise blended into a low drone which underpinned the perpetual sounds of the waves crashing on the outer reef and then washing on and off the shell-covered shoreline of the island with high-pitched tinkling. She pointed off to the right where she could hear the high, creaky
ack-ack
sound of a buff-banded rail roosting contentedly. She saw the moment Rob heard it too, his tiny smile of recognition. Then she tuned her ears the other way, tipping her head slightly and he followed suit. She could hear a rhythmic, throaty chuckle off in the distance and she tapped her finger in the sand in time, to help him focus in on the distinctive call of a fairy tern. His eyes drifted shut.
    ‘In front, the
pew-pew-pew
sound. In perfect time with the waves …’ she whispered.
    His head tipped like a satellite dish, listening now for the ocean in the distance. It stretched his jaw to a perfect stubbly angle and Honor had a sudden urge to touch it. Relaxed like it was, his handsome face was less designer angles and more … appealing. More human. He was enjoying this.
    She ripped her eyes away.
    ‘A thousand different sounds are out there for the listening. It’s anything but quiet.’
    Their faces were quite close now and he opened his eyes to look sideways into hers,naked speculation in his gaze. Honor caught her breath.
I bet that gets results every time, too.
Then, as though drawn by magnetism, his eyes strayed down to her scars and then shot back up again. She sighed.
    It would be ever thus. She wasn’t angry or offended; a tiny bit disappointed, perhaps. She knew how the scars looked, what they meant and why she wore them—almost as a badge of honour. No man’s awkward stare was going to undo what they meant to her.
    ‘So, how far is the
Emden
memorial from here?’
    She’d almost forgotten what had brought him to the island in the first place. ‘Uh … Over that way, I think a couple of hundred metres?’
    He looked appalled. ‘Haven’t you seen it?’
    She wasn’t much for manmade history, hadn’t paid the marker very much attention in