“It’s late,” she said before she said anything more revealing.
He looked up at the sky. “Actually, it’s early. Do you want to sleep, or watch the sun come up over the plains?”
If she had any sense, she would crawl into her sleeping bag and hope for oblivion. But she sensed that Blake would be in her mind no matter what she did. In her dreams, if she managed to fall asleep. Strangely, she felt wide-awake now. “As long as you don’t expect me to function too well later, I’d like to watch the sun come up,” she said. “I need to finish that shelter today.”
“There’s more to the outback than survival,” he pointed out. “There’s savagery no city person can imagine, and beauty almost beyond bearing.”
Her wide-eyed look met his. “I didn’t know you were a poet, too.”
“You can’t live in the outback without becoming poetic. Not if you have any soul at all.”
He had one, she didn’t doubt. She had been on the verge of misjudging him, she realized. Writing him off as a muscle man who was happiest chasing through the bush with a gun slung across his shoulders. She hadn’t allowed for all the times he would need to be still, to read the signs around him and make sense of what had happened or would happen. The patience to wait sometimes for days until a crocodile lost its fear of the unknown and approached a trap he’d set for it, so it could be moved without harm to safer territory.
All this and a mouth that threatened to command her soul, she thought. What had she gotten herself into?
The experience was all Blake had promised and more.
While she’d changed her shoes and grabbed a jacket, he had put on his own shirt and collected a torch from the car.
The torch was almost superfluous, the starlight illuminating the path to a grassy hilltop overlooking a spiderweb of rivers and creeks on one side and the immense plains on the other, ringed by mountains that would have looked at home on the moon. On her own, she would have been terrified of meeting a hunting dingo or wild buffalo, and the distant coughing sound that Blake told her was a crocodile would have frozen her blood. With him at her side, the sounds exhilarated more than they frightened.
Instinctively she dropped her voice, not wanting to intrude on the timeless landscape. “It would have been a sin to sleep through such beauty.”
His heated gaze told her they wouldn’t have been sleeping, and she shivered. The predawn chill seeping into her bones made her glad of the jacket. Nor did she object when Blake’s arm slid around her shoulders, and he brought her closer to him. She told herself the sudden fast beating of her heart was due to the spike in her body temperature. Nothing to do with being in his arms.
Dawn came as a spill of dusky coral across the cobalt sky. One by one, the stars winked out, replaced by a glow that slowly stained the darkness with orange and pink threaded with turquoise. Her breath caught as orange fire lit up the sky. The sunrise as she had never seen it before. No wonder early civilizations had convinced themselves that the sun was a god, prostrating themselves before it in awe.
She turned toward the first rays, letting them steal the chill from her face. “Do you make a habit of this?” Do you bring many women up here to watch the sunrise?
“When I’m out catching a croc, I work more by night than by day, so I’m often around to see the sun come up,” he said, answering only the question she’d asked. His arm tightened around her. “You’re a big improvement on a team of unshaven, unwashed men.”
Laughter bubbled up. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“It’s meant to be.”
At least they weren’t other women, she thought on a glow of satisfaction she didn’t want to feel but couldn’t seem to dispel. She settled her back more comfortably against him and found herself watching him as much as the sunrise. His head and shoulders were silhouetted against the sky as he leaned against the outcrop, totally at ease.
What was he thinking? she wondered. Of the sunrise or her? Annoyed with herself, she swung her gaze back to the vast plains, distracting herself by trying to identify the birds flying in to feed off the lush grasses and the insect life thronging the waterways. There were parrots and magpie geese and wild ducks, long-legged jabirus and clouds of budgerigars flocking to the water below their vantage point. A lone wedge-tailed eagle soared on thermal currents high above.
Thinking of the concrete canyons where she normally spent her days, she felt an instinctive tug of resistance. How could she be happy shut away indoors when so much beauty and freedom were here for the taking?
She felt rather than saw Blake tense. “What is it?”
He made a shushing sound and pulled her to the ground with him. From his pocket, he took out a pair of compact binoculars and trained them on a distant cluster of paperbark trees.
She dropped her voice to a whisper, although no one could possibly hear them. “What do you see?”
He handed her the glasses. “Movement at twelve o’clock.”
Positioning herself to face the direction he indicated, she adjusted the powerful glasses to her vision. A lone man in khaki clothing jumped into focus. He had a sack slung over his shoulder and was retreating into the trees. “It’s the man I saw watching our camp,” she murmured. If he’d been visiting the creek again, his intentions—whatever they were—had been thwarted because she was up and about instead of sleeping.
Blake nodded confirmation. “Eddy Gilgai. Take a good look so you’ll know him if you see him hanging around again.”
She did so, then lowered the glasses. “You sound as if you expect to see more of him.”
“If Max put him up to this, we will. Max isn’t the type to give up easily.”
“Shouldn’t we try to catch Eddy now?”
“That stand of trees is farther away than it looks. By the time I get there, he’ll have melted into the bush. One of his clan could track him but I doubt that I could. And besides even if we did catch him, we couldn’t prove he was up to no good.”
“Even though Des asked him to leave?”
“Visiting his relatives isn’t a crime, and that’s what he’d claim to be doing.”
“If feeding a wild crocodile isn’t illegal and you can’t arrest him for trespassing, how will you pin anything on him?”
His mouth tightened. “Tom’s the lawman. I have my own methods.”
Not entirely orthodox, she deduced. “I don’t think I want to know.”
“No reason you should. None of this need concern you, provided you stay well clear of the creek.”
A vision of a prehistoric killer rearing out of the water made her shiver. “Don’t worry, I intend to.” She wasn’t sure about taking the rest of his advice.
His dark gaze told her he suspected what she was thinking. “I’ll be around to make sure you do.”
“I don’t need a minder.”
“No? Then show me the direction that takes us back to camp.”
She stood up and looked around. “Should be easy enough. We climbed up here from that side.” A network of creeks bordered their location. And all the clumps of trees looked alike. Surely there should be a glimpse of the tent from here? A faint track gave her more confidence. “That way,” she said, pointing.
He looked amused. “The trail does lead to a camp, but it’s about three times as far away as yours and only used at cattle mustering time.”