A Kiss to Seal the Deal Read Free Page B

closest she’d ever get to being a seal, albeit twenty kilos too light. No wonder sharks sometimes mistook surfers for their favourite blubbery food-source when they were in full wetsuit. She’d relied on the same confusion to get closer to the Atlas colony the first time.
    On a usual working day she ditched the wetsuit for serviceable, smelly overalls, about the most comfortable thing ever invented—warm, dry and snug. But also the least attractive.
    Unless you were a male wool-sack.
    Her beat-up old utility gave her the tiniest bit of privacy against the baleful stares of thirty sheep that scattered like freckles across the dry, crunchy paddock. It was not really suitable pasture for sheep grazing, but they had a ready food source in feed stations dotted around the farm. They were more interested in the engagement and social aspects of grazing as a flock than in what little nutrition the salt-stiffened grass afforded.
    The sheep had seen her half-naked plenty of times and were about as uninterested as the rest of her team to whom boundaries, and gender, meant nothing. Sifting through seal vomit for six hours a day had a way of bringing a team closer together. But sift they did, and then they studied it. Such a glamorous life; no wonder gender and modesty came to mean nothing to any of them. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually felt like a woman.
    How about twenty minutes ago?
    Even angry, Grant McMurtrie had made her body resonate in places she hadn’t thought about for years. It was still thrumming now; something about the insolent way he’d sized her up. It had boiled her blood in one heartbeat then sizzled it the next. She’d been insanely pleased to be wearing a skirt and blouse for once, even if she’d been covered in paint. Imagine if his first impression of her had been her usual working attire…
    The sheep turned away, bored, as she tossed her ruined clothes and shoes into the back seat of her car for later and reached back over her shoulder to snag the zip-tether and pull her rubbery wetsuit up tighter against her skin. She picked her way barefoot over the edge of the bluff and down a near-invisible crease of sand in the painfully sharp rocks, their ofttrodden pathway down the cliff face to the rocky cove below. The trail had been worn when they’d found it, hinting at use over generations. A mercy for her poor feet, but trickily narrow, just wide enough for a slight woman.
    Or a small boy.
    Her mind immediately went to one in particular. Grant McMurtrie must have come here a hundred times in his young life, hard as it was to imagine the imposing man as a child. What adventurous little soul wouldn’t find his way to the dangers of open cliff-face, gale-force wind gusts and wildlife galore? Envy as green as his eyes bubbled through her.
    He might have had the seals before her, but she had them now. They’d been hers for the past two years and, if she played her cards right, they’d go on being hers for the next year. Longer, if the Conservation Council ruled in her favour. They were already extremely interested in her research.
    Two-dozen dark heads lifted as she negotiated her way down the crease. These seals were used to the arrival of humans on their beach now. They were not trusting—definitely not—but accustomed. Only a couple of heads remained raised at the unusual sight of just a solitary human; the rest flopped back onto the rocks to continue their lazy sunning. Kate smiled at the typical scene. A gang of rotund pups mucked around by the water’s edge, vocalising and chasing each other and play-fighting, as though they needed to use up all their energy now before they grew up and became biologically sluggish like their mothers, scattered lazing around the rocks.
    Or their older brothers, hanging out in bachelor groups further up the coast. Or their fathers, who did their own thing most of the year but came together with the