Her Knight in the Outback. Nikki Logan

not just the random strangers in truck stops and bars across the country. Women. Mothers.

      Brothers.

      At least the women in the bars knew where they stood. No one was getting used. And there was no one to disappoint except himself.

      He powered his body harder, arm over arm, and concentrated on how his muscles felt, cutting his limbs through the surf. Burning from within, icy from without. The familiar, heavy ache of lactic acid building up. And when he’d done all the examination it was possible to do on his muscles, he focused on the water: how the last land it had touched was Antarctica, how it was life support for whales and elephant seals and dugongs and colossal squid and mysterious deep-trench blobs eight kilometres below the surface and thousands of odd-shaped sea creatures in between. How humans were a bunch of nimble-fingered, big-brained primates that really only used the millimetre around the edge of the mapped oceans and had absolutely no idea how much of their planet they knew nothing about.

      Instant Gulliver.

      It reminded him how insignificant he was in the scheme of things. Him and all his human, social problems.

      The sun was low on the horizon when he next paid attention, and the south coast of Australia was littered with sharks who liked to feed at dusk and dawn. And while there had certainly been a day he would have happily taken the risk and forgotten the consequences, he’d managed to find a happy place in the Groundhog Day blur that was the past six months on the road, and could honestly say—hand on heart—that he’d rather not be shark food now.

      He did a final lazy lap parallel with the wide beach back towards his discarded clothes, then stood as soon as the sea floor rose to meet him. His hands squeezed up over his lowered lids and back through his hair, wringing the salt water out of it, then he stood, eyes closed, with his face tipped towards the warmth of the afternoon sun.

      Eventually, he opened them and started, just a little, at Eve standing there, her arms full of towel, her mouth hanging open as if he’d interrupted her mid-sentence.

      * * *

      Eve knew she was gaping horribly but she was no more able to close her trap than rip her eyes from Marshall’s chest and belly.

      His tattooed chest and belly.

      Air sucked into her lungs in choppy little gasps.

      He had some kind of massive bird of prey, wings spread and aloft, across his chest. The lower curve of its majestic wings sat neatly along the ridge of his pectorals and its wing tips followed the line of muscle there up onto his tanned, rounded shoulders. Big enough to accentuate the musculature of his chest, low enough to be invisible when he was wearing a T-shirt. It should have been trashy but it wasn’t; it looked like he’d been born with it.

      His arms were still up, squeezing the sea water from his hair, and that gave her a glimpse of a bunch of inked characters—Japanese, maybe Chinese?—on the underside of one full biceps.

      Add that to the dagger on the other arm and he had a lot of ink for a weatherman.

      ‘Hey.’

      His voice startled her gaze back to his and her tongue into action.

      ‘Wow,’ she croaked, then realised that wasn’t the most dignified of beginnings. ‘You were gone so long...’

      Great. Not even capable of a complete sentence.

      ‘I’ve been missing the ocean. Sorry if I worried you.’

      She grasped around in the memories she’d just spent a couple of hours accumulating, studying the map to make sure they hadn’t missed a caravan park or town. And she improvised some slightly more intelligent conversation.

      ‘Whoever first explored this area really didn’t have the best time doing it.’

      Marshall dripped. And frowned. As he lowered his arms to take the towel from her nerveless fingers, the bird of prey’s feathers shifted with him, just enough to catch her eye. She struggled to look somewhere other than at him, but it wasn’t easy when he filled her field of view so thoroughly. She wanted to step back but then didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing she was affected.

      ‘Cape Arid, Mount Ragged, Poison Creek...’ she listed with an encouraging lack of wobble in her voice, her clarity restored the moment he pressed the towel to his face and disguised most of that unexpectedly firm and decorated torso.

      He stepped over to the rock and hooked up his T-shirt, then swept it on in a smooth, manly shrug. Even with its overstretched neckline, the bird of prey was entirely hidden. The idea of him hanging out in his meteorological workplace in a government-appropriate suit with all of that ink hidden away under it was as secretly pleasing as when she used to wear her best lingerie to section meetings.

      Back when stupid things like that had mattered.

      ‘I guess it’s not so bad when you have supplies and transport,’ he said, totally oblivious to her illicit train of thought, ‘but it must have been a pretty treacherous environment for early explorers. Especially if they were thirsty.’